Putin has a MRGA rally

MORE ON PUTIN’S ‘MAGA’ STYLE RALLY..



This is how the official AP news alert on the event reads


Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared at a huge flag-waving rally at a packed Moscow stadium Friday and lavished praise on his troops fighting in Ukraine, three weeks into the invasion that has led to heavier-than-expected Russian losses on the battlefield and increasingly authoritarian rule at home.

But Will Vernon has some more information on Twitter in a thread.. the reporter actually tweets that he interviewed dozens of people who attended the rally.. Many of them said they were public sector and school teacher employees and were forced to attend by their employer.. One other man told Vernon he didn’t support the war but was forced to attend..

Vernon wrote,

Students told us they had been given the option of a day off from lectures if they attended ‘a concert.’ Some of them didn’t even know that the event was dedicated, in part, to support for Russian forces in Ukraine.

During the rally, the turtleneck wearing Vladimir Putin said Russia took military action to stop “neo-Nazis and extreme nationalists” in Ukraine committing “genocide.” He has frequently repeated these claims to try to justify the invasion — and the Kremlin has used the same phrases as cornerstones of its propaganda against Ukraine.

War games seem to be taking place during the speech.. the video feed of Putin’s speech abruptly cut off mid-sentence, an interruption that was later described by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as a technical problem.“Well, or sabotage,” tweeted the exiled Anti-Corruption Foundation of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Russian state television replayed the speech in full.

A few even noticed that some of the footage from yesterday’s TV broadcast of the Luzhniki concert strikingly matched a video from a year ago..