Things in Ukraine started out ugly, and they’ve only gotten worse. Thus, it’s no surprise Putin is cracking down on his troops, looking for traitors within his ranks.
Now, one of Putin’s top generals was not only fired, but also detained.
Fox New explains:
Russian Gen. Roman Gavrilov, of Rosgvardia, the internal military force of the Russian Federation that reports directly to the president of the Russian Federation, was detained by the Russian security and counterintelligence agency, Federal Security Service (FSB), according to Christo Grozev, CEO of the Netherlands-based investigative journalism group Bellingcat.
The reason for Gavrilov’s detention wasn’t immediately clear. Grozev said one of his sources told him that Gavrilov was detained by the FSB’s military counter-intelligence department over “leaks of military info that led to loss of life,” while two other sources said the reason was for “wasteful squandering of fuel.”
Rosgvardia is a unit of the Russian Federation’s internal army that reportedly suffered heavy losses in Ukraine during the three weeks since the invasion began on Feb. 24.
Gavrilov previously worked for the Federal Protective Service (FSO) tasked with Putin’s security.
Russian state-run media reported on Thursday that Gavrilov had been fired.
In a message to Telegram, senior United Russia official Alexander Khinshtein said despite his dismissal, reports that Gavrilov had been arrested were “totally untrue.”
This comes as Putin said in an address on Wednesday that his country will undergo a “self-purification” of “traitors” as Russian troops continue to bombard Ukrainian civilians and advance toward Kyiv.
“The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths,” Putin said on Wednesday. “I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges.”
True patriots. Now those are words Americans are far too familiar with these days.
But I can’t help but notice Putin’s patriots seem to be engaging in Hitleresque actions.
After the speech, flight trackers purportedly detected a mass exodus of private jets flying out of Moscow and toward Dubai, suggesting that Russian oligarchs may have fled anticipating Putin’s crackdown.
At least 14,980 people have been detained across Russia since the war in Ukraine began on Feb. 24, according to OVD Info, an independent organization monitoring political persecutions.
Anti-war protests broke out in several Russian cities last month. Russian journalist Marina Ovsyannikova, who was arrested and released after protesting the war in Ukraine live during a Russian state-run media broadcast, told the BBC that the Russian people have been “zombified” by propaganda.
The German news outlet BILD reported on Thursday that Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Viktorovich Lavrov was halfway to Beijing Wednesday night when his plane turned around abruptly and returned to Moscow. The outlet said it was unclear if Putin called him back or if the Chinese canceled any planned meeting.
Bellingcat also tracked a Russian government plane that turned around over Novosibirsk had landed in Moscow after spending eight hours airborne.
Ironically, Putin compared the West to Nazi Germany.
But a fresh crackdown on anti-war sentiment – including a criminal case against a popular lifestyle blogger – pales in comparison to the horrors in Mariupol, where the Russian military has appeared to overcome any hesitation about pulling its punches.
Russia on Thursday bombed a theater in which thousands had taken refuge, even though satellite footage shows that the word for “children” in Russian was written on the ground near the theater, according to Ukrainian officials in the city. Ukraine’s foreign affairs minister, Dmytro Kuleba, called the attack “another horrendous war crime in Mariupol.”
The bodies of children piled up in a narrow trench hastily dug into the ground in the city. Mass graves now litter the outskirts, with citizens working fast in order to bury the dead and minimize the risk of danger to themselves.
“The only thing (I want) is for this to be finished,” raged worker Volodymyr Bykovskyi, pulling crinkling, black body bags from a truck. “Damn them all, those people who started this!”
Bodies, buried in trenches. Children dead. Who among us thought we’d never live to see WWIII? I know I didn’t. I thought the lessons of WWII were still alive and well. But I was wrong. We’ve forgotten everything we were taught about humanity. Not to mention our responsibility to our fellow man.
I’ll concede, President Zelensky is a leftist. As such, he’s not my chosen ally. But when he stood in the streets to fight next to his countrymen, I stopped seeing Zelensky as a political opposite. Instead, I saw a leader. Trying to protect his country. Even if it took his life. And instead of putting a stop to this conflict, Biden sat in his depends while children were piled into mass graves. Think about that next time you hear someone say Trump was America’s problem.
