Thanks

The link you sent titles the video “Zelenskiy threatens to come for the children of Crimea”. What he says is that they’re going to retake the Crimea, and while the video starts mid-sentence he seems to be saying that children who have grown up in occupied Crimea have been exposed to Russian propaganda, which I’m sure is true. The International Criminal Court has been issuing arrest warrants for people involved in a Russian program to abduct Ukrainian children, FYI. So getting the minds of the next generation is demonstrable part of the Russian war strategy. In this clip, it seems like he’s responding to a direct question from a journalist. While I doubt Ukraine will ever retake Crimea (and tbh I think Russia has a pretty solid claim to it), I understand why he’s saying they’ll retake it, and none of this seems like strange thing for a wartime president to say. Overall this seems like a pretty clear case of disinformation promoted on an app run by a fascist.

For the Azov point, you can just read the Wikipedia article on the Battle of Mariupol, or there’s a Kyiv Post piece here. It does seem that components of Azov have reformed but they’re far from what they were.

Thanks, I hadn’t heard of Baxi before. Do you have any links where I can read some more about any of this?

I’m surprised that this article doesn’t engage more with the current war. Given that Russia has been accusing Ukraine of being a ‘nazi state’ since day one, I’d be surprised if that hadn’t changed the level of support for this kind of politics. I can imagine how it could go either way: increasing because of the threat to Ukraine’s national identity, or decreasing to not prove the Russians right and to rally around Zelenskyy, who is overall a moderate. I do notice that all of the pictures in this article are from before the war. It’s also weird they don’t mention that Azov were more-or-less wiped out in the opening stages of the invasion at Mariupol.