[Jan van den Berghe]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Bach

Niet Russisch denk ik maar interessante blogger vanuit Oekraïne:

Wat een dijenkletser. Gonzola Lira...

But his “fair-and-balanced” accounts often involve wild claims about the supposedly obvious “evil” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The comedian-turned-politician is a known “cokehead,” Lira has claimed—a man who uses his people as shields, has provided arms to criminals who have terrorized the streets of Kyiv, and has possibly “deliberately tried to have a nuclear accident” to pin it on Russia and possibly drag America into his war. Meanwhile, Lira has portrayed the Russian assault as provoked—and as “one of the most brilliant invasions in military history.” He has insisted that the invaders don’t want to harm civilians or civilian infrastructure and are in fact taking pains not to, that the Russian advance has not stalled but is in fact right on course, and that Russian domination will likely be good for Ukraine in the end.

He has also shared widely debunked conspiracy theories to support or build out his narratives, many of them revolving around Russian claims that they’ve found evidence of American bioweapons labs and research in Ukraine. He has decried stories about Ukrainian resistance as obvious Western propaganda. And he has accused people who contradict his assessments of being idiots or paid shills.

But he seemed to largely shift over to COVID conspiracy commentary, and the occasional note on a supposed coming geopolitical storm. However, as late as mid-February, he insisted that Russia would never invade Ukraine, and that fears about a coming invasion were all drummed up by Western propaganda, pointed out Alex MacKenzie, an expert on Ukraine and its history of conflict with Russia at the United Kingdom’s University of Liverpool who reviewed a fair amount of Lira’s recent videos and posts. Lira now insists in interviews that he saw the invasion coming well ahead of time—because he’s smart like that.

“I think he watches Russian news shows and then just copies what he sees there,” added the far-right content creator who said Lira basically subjected him to an ideological purity test. He added that if Lira actually listened to what Ukrainian citizens and even Russian soldiers using encrypted messaging apps to speak freely actually say about the conflict, he might reconsider his skewed views.

Whatever his exact location or relation to Russian propagandists, Lira’s pivot has been useful for Putin and his regime, the experts The Daily Beast spoke to for this story agreed. As the West has started to limit the reach of official Russian propaganda channels, people like Lira have offered an organic and resilient pipeline for pro-Russian messages to reach the nation’s far-right ideological allies abroad, argued MacKenzie. He’s also a convenient figure that Russian propagandists can point to as supposed proof that real, independent voices in the West see the merits of their claims, bolstering their efforts to stymie domestic dissent, and galvanize support for the war, Hrycak added.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/gonzal...e-dating-coach