When the corpse of a Wagner mercenary fighter arrived in his small Russian village in late February after he was killed fighting in Ukraine, some residents wanted to give him a hero’s burial. Others could not forget that the former prisoner had stabbed his father to death. The ruckus prompted a stream of acrimonious comments […]
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Her feet stuck in muddy soil on a pitch black October night, Marina Ovsyannikova stopped in despair. For four hours, she and her 11-year-old daughter had been trudging through plowed fields leading to Russia’s border, trying to escape the country. With no phone signal, they had been navigating by the stars, diving to the ground […]
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For months, Yevgeny Prigozhin has been Russia’s most public and provocative military leader in Ukraine. When he is not lauding the heroics of his private fighting force from the front lines, he is castigating the Russian generals for starving him of the supplies he needs to finish the work they could not. Yet now, as […]
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This is how China’s ruling Communist Party wants people to remember how it handled the Covid-19 pandemic: It was a “miracle in human history.” Every measure the government imposed was rooted in science, supported by the masses — and, ultimately, “completely correct.” The party is waging an ambitious propaganda campaign to rewrite the public’s memory […]
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A nationwide campaign urging children to make candles for soldiers has become so popular, he said, that anyone questioning it in a school chat group might be called a “Nazi and an accomplice of the West.” At the same time, he argued, daily life has changed little for Russians without a family member fighting in […]
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On Chinese social media, jokes about the suspected spy balloon have been making the rounds. People quipped that the vessel was a misunderstood attempt at wishing Americans a happy Lantern Festival, the Chinese holiday this past Sunday. Others compared it to a glutinous rice ball, a traditional food eaten during the celebrations. The wisecracking was, […]
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