3.01 Vranyo

0:00Love this podcast? Support this show through the A-Cask supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The podcast industry has spent years arguing about formats. The thing is, the podcast's audience has never cared. 88% of them now consume audio and video. Not only that, 63% of them have started an episode in one format and finished it in another format.

1:00And then 3-4 of those have switched app mid-story to do it. They're not picking a format. They're picking whatever best fits the moment they're in. A-Cask latest research in podcast post 2026 maps 4 of these moments and what each one gives back to a brand. Get the full report at acast.com slashpulse. Greetings comrades and welcome to the Eastern border. Today I would like to focus on something that I mentioned last week. Well, last episode. I presume that was last week's tell. But it struck me that I really need to explain this to you in detail. So let's go back to one specific event that I talked about last time and that I think illustrates all subject matter of today's episode. And again with a bit of a carleness introduction for a more personal thing. But don't worry, we're not focusing on that throughout, not on this one. But again, just for the beginning of this episode I want you to put yourself in the mod on the Lima and Axis.

2:00What on the Eastern Bank of the Jerebetsu River? It's of course autumn as you know and the physical of reality of your existence is called Wet and Relentlessly Violent. You had a Russian battalion commander sitting in a reinforced dugout that smells like diesel fumes and washed bodies and chieftabacco. You're looking through a cracked optic at a ruined village right in the middle of the grey zone. And as you watch well the grey zone stops being so grey. Through the optics you can see movement of Ukrainian and infrared mechanized infantry. You see the silhouette of Bradley fighting vehicles grinding through the mod, deploying troops into the shadow remains of the village's eastern edge. They apparently are digging in. They're setting up heavy weapons, that establishing a lethal foothold less than 3 kilometers from your defensive line. And any functioning military on the planet the next 10 seconds are purely mechanical. It's a textbook target. You know the exact grid coordinates of that village. You have a battery of 152 mm howitzers idling on the radio net. You have drones, well sometimes you have ammunition, well again sometimes. Let's presume that all these things exist. All you have to do technically is to pick up the hand mic, read the string of numbers and call down a fire mission that will erase that position from the physical plane.

3:03And you reach for the radio but then your hand stops. Because you see, like I have been telling you for a lot of time at this point in the Russian Federation the physical plane, well it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet says that calling in this artillery strike is a suicide mission. Not for the Ukrainians but to you. You see three weeks ago this sector was a bloodbath. Your brigade was ordered to take that village. You sent wave after wave of expendable infantry, dead tourists, convicts, kids from the regions straight into the Ukrainian drones warms. Now meet assaults, meet assaults failed completely but back at the brigade headquarters your commanding officer was standing at deadline. The general staff in Moscow demanded progress. The commander knew that if he reported another failure he will be relieved of duty. Best case scenario who's expansion. Worst case scenario he gets dragged into a basement beaten half to death by his own military police and thrown into a storm-z-pino unit. So the brigade commander did the only logical thing a Russian officer can do. He completely abandoned his military duty and sold his own men for the sake of expansion.

4:05He authored a fiction. He sent a code that dispatched the Moscow claiming the village was successfully liberated. And Moscow loved it. The Ministry of Defense immediately painted the digital map red. The press officers issued a triumph and bulletin, legitimacy of the good and evening television show and screamed until his face turned purple about the glorious and unstoppable triumph of Russian arms in the demand direction. Metals were requested. bonuses were signed off. The lie was uploaded to the Kremlin's nervous system. The lie became the map. And the black zone, the map overrides physical reality. Which brings us back to your trench. If you pick up the trade you will call the fire mission on those coordinates. Fire control center is going to look at their screens. They're going to see that you're requesting a massive artillery barrage. What I have eluded at the Russian Ministry of Defense officially liberated three weeks ago. If you confirmed the strike, you're confessing to the general staff that the regional report was a total fabrication. They're exposing the brigade commander's life. They're humiliating the generals who signed off on it. They're telling the bizarre that this map is fake.

5:06The Russian military justice system does not punish the enemy. It punishes the man who exposes the system. So you do the brutal cynical math for coward. You take your hand off of the radio because your own skin is worth more to you than the lives of the men pleading in the trench beside you. You sit in the mud. You watch the Ukrainian infantry fortify their positions with absolute impunity. And tomorrow when those Ukrainian dudes that village is staging ground slaughter your battalion, you will not say a word. You will let your own soldiers bleed into the dirt because you are politically forbidden from shooting at an enemy that officially does not exist. The Ukrainian army is no longer just fighting the Russian military. They have hacked the Kremlin's psychological operating system. They're eating the fake Russian maps, walking into the phantom red zones and using Russian states own bit of credit cowardice as a physical shield. They have weaponized lie. So for this is where I want to introduce you and give a proper longer explanation to the concept of Rengio. For once I believe that this time is the one where we can do it properly. Welcome to the Eastern border.

6:09Now to understand why a dying nuclear power is currently spending $126,000 a head systematically feed its own shrinking population into a meat grinder, you have to understand the specific type of lie that holds the entire roasted machine together. I've been talking about this a lot but an in-depth explanation is in order. When a lot of Western analysts look at the Kremlin they fail to diagnose the disease because they're using the wrong medical dictionary. In the West a lot of people think of deception and binary terms, you tell the truth or you tell a lie. A Western lie is a Losh. It's a falsehood designed specifically to deceive. If I tell you a Western lie I'm hoping you will believe it and try to override your reality with my fiction. And if you catch me in that lie if you find the paper trail or the missing money or the satellite photos, well my lie has failed. The deception is over and I face the consequences. That is not how the Russian bureaucratic nervous system operates. The Russian state does not run on Losh, it runs on the Rengio. And Rengio is not a lie, it's a mutual hostage situation. But Rengio is a statement where, and I've been saying this a lot on this show, but we get into details of this.

7:10Well I know perfectly well that I'm lying. I know that you know I'm lying and we both know that you know that I know that you know all this nice little circle there. But we both stand there, look each other dead in the eye and perform the fiction anyway. Because in a hypercentralized vertical hierarchy acknowledging the physical truth means the entire structure collapses. Truth is lethal you see. Bok's sake. If a subordinate tells the truth about a failure he gets purged for incompetent. If the superior acknowledges the truth, he gets to report it up the chain to the czar, which means he gets purged for allowing the failure to happen under his watch. So instead they sign a blood pact of mutual delusion. If the subordinate fakes the report, the superior enthusiastically stamps it as a success. They both get medals, they both keep their pensions and the physical reality of the failure is... ignore them. Vranjoin is an Henriton mandatory survival mechanism. It is performative showmanship driven by the absolute paralyzing terror of the state apparatus. It isn't designed to trick anyone, it's designed to give everyone in the room a plausible excuse to keep their jobs and stay out of a penal colony. One Vladimir Putin stands on the stage in an economic forum and claims with a straight face that the Russian economy is thriving, he isn't trying to trick the Western intelligence agencies.

8:14He isn't even trying to trick his own economists, he's simply demanding that the apparatus performs the ritual. He speaks the Vranjo and the audience is required to nod. And when a cultural path again in effect a society deeply enough, it doesn't just change behavior, it changes the language. You can track the severity of the institutional disease by looking at the slang required to survive it. If you want to understand the modern Russian state, you have to read the cynical and filtered bastards on the Russian internet subculture. The digital inheritors of the Soviet underground hanging out on archives like Lurkmore and Neow, or other places. These guys have categorized the sociological route with scientific precision, breaking the Vranjoin Umbra as I would like to put it down into highly evolved razor sharp concepts. Let's look at the definitions first, the holy Trinity of the Russian bureaucratic survival mechanism. The first one is Pakazucha, literally doing things purely for show. Pakazucha is the physical theatrical manifestation of the institutional fiction. It is the art of building a facade so thick that the inspector doesn't bother checking if there is a building behind it.

9:15In the Soviet and post-Soviet military Pakazucha is an art form. It's the frantic panic theater before the general arrives from Moscow. It's the legendary, I don't know if that's 100% real, it must have happened somewhere. Practice of cons could literally spraypating dead grass green so the parade ground looks healthy. I have seen videos of this, I don't know about the megawise, but it's not even I think they could be this dumb, but you know, I can be really mistaking them and attributing too much logic to them. That's a famous study circulating on the runet about the strategic missile base preparing for a high level review. The conscript realized they didn't have a ladder tall enough to paint at the top of the ballistic missile to make it look fresh. So they hold the bucket of white paint up to a catch walk and just dump it over the warhead. The missile ended up looking like a half melted candle completely non aerodynamic, but the inspection box was checked. And here's the cons of truth of Pakazucha. The inspecting general knows the grass is painted. He knows the missile has a bucket of paint dumped on it, but he doesn't care because in this system, the paint doesn't signify military readiness.

10:15The paint, you see, signifies obedience. It proves the commander is terrified enough of the hierarchy to perform the required theater. The military doesn't like this to fight, it exists to pass the inspection. But Pakazucha requires a mechanism to sell it up the chain. This brings us to the second word. Očkuvićirajtistvo. If you run this through Google Translate, it'll tell you it means window dressing or eyewash. That is fundamentally wrong. The actual etymology is much darker and much more fitting for the Kremlin. Ački, in this specific 19th century slang doesn't mean eyeglasses. It means the pips or the points on playing cards. The term comes straight from Pinyatija, of course. Kremlin, Alander ground, rules everything and are under the planet. Well, at least in the Russian circles. Card troopers would rob a fine chalk or powder into the printed points of the cards so they could smudge and alter the mid-game. Turning a losing hand into a winning one without the mark noticing. Očkuvićirajtistvo literally means robbing the points. Think about the sheer recursive irony of that. The exact word the Russian state uses to describe its own institutional deception derives from a literal 19th century cards.

11:19The hidden history of the lie is a criminal hustle. And finally, the surviving environment you have to master the modern digital iteration. Jebolo Targovje, face trading directly. It's the crude slang for showing your mug to the bosses. It's the act of being physically present, visibly enthusiastic and nodding at the exact right moment during a united Russia party meeting. It's performing your loyalty so the algorithm of the state recognizes you as a team player. You aren't doing the work, you're trading your face for survival. This isn't just modern internet snark. This is linguistic pathology and it has deep, deep roots. Due to the Soviet era when speaking of physical truth could yet you shot in the back of the head, the population deflated the defense mechanism. Vyanyik Dut, political joke. The Soviet joke wasn't just comedy, it was the intellectual handshake. It was a covered sonar ping, a way to safely test the waters to see if the person you were talking to was a true believer. An informant or a fellow cynic surviving in the madness. There's a classic joke that perfectly captures how pakazuch an Očki Vityritesv, forced a system to dilute reality until there is nothing left but the spreadsheet.

12:26A collective farm chairman asks his daily workers together. A comrades, he says, are farm currently yields 2000 liters of milk per month. The regional bosses just landed the quarter of 2500. Can we do it? Of course the workers reply. What about 3000? If we release train, yes, yes we can. And 3500? The workers look at each other. Well, we could come red, but then it will be pure water. That is the absolute essence of randia. The quota is met, the paperwork is filed, the points are rubbed, and the state drinks water while proudly pretending that it's milk. See, one of westerners, here's about the Soviet Union and modern Russia they have a very specific cinematic image in their head. You assume that to maintain a society built entirely on lies, there must be a man with a gun in the room. You often preach at a literals on Pallit, a political commissar of the tailored KGB leather jackets standing over the milkmaids, policing their loyalty and threatening them with a one-way ticket to Vorkuta if they don't water down the milk and sign the quota sheet.

13:27But that, that is a misunderstanding on how the disease actually works in this mature stage. The true suffocating horror of modern randia is that it doesn't require a man with a gun and operates on the centralized, self-enforcing compliance. Nobody is actively watching you. You build the cage, you walk inside and you look at yourself. And if you're sitting there thinking that your enlightened democratic braid is immune to this kind of psychological subjugation, I want you to open a new tab on your browser and log into LinkedIn. Consider the modern corporate ecosystem. It's Tuesday morning, you're drinking lukewarm coffee, scrolling down your feet and you see a post from middle manager. Well, let's call him Dave. Dave has just published a sprawling 500-word essay about how laying off 10% of his department taught him a valuable lesson in B2B empathy, synergistic realignment and dynamic leadership. Dave knows he's lying. He fired those people to protect his Q3 bonus in a piece of private equity board. You rating the post know the Dave's lying. And he's a corporate sociopath attempting to longer his own cruelty into a TED talk. And Dave knows perfectly well that you know he's lying. But what happens next? If you drop down into the comments and reply with a physical truth, if you type, Dave, your sociopath and you just threw in 10 families for a boat payment, you have committed the ultimate sin, you have exposed institutional fiction.

14:39The system will instantly treat you as the pathogen. There is no KGB commissar, but there is an HR department. Your comment gets flagged, the algorithm buries your profile, your boss calls you into a window with conference rooms to discuss your toxic lack of alignment with company culture. Your career trajectory takes a sudden violent nose dive and suddenly your health insurance is at risk. So you sit at your desk and you do the exact same city call cowardly math as the Russian artillery commander standing at the Grey Zone. You calculate the cost of the fiction. You realize your mortgage is online. So you click the little clapping hands icon. You could celebrate and you type, so inspiring Dave, great leadership and tough times, always learning. That is not all that pissed all the prestige and the back of the corporate head. Well, you as the Dave performed the, you ball of targov, you voluntarily, you rub the points, you painted the grass green for the algorithm. You did it because the alternative was bureaucratic suicide. When you look at it under the microscope, the sentence, today I'll turn out to my new journey as a synergistic thought leader is the exact same grammatical physiological and spiritual structure as how tractor factory exceeded the five year plan by 140%.

15:44It is to fta. It is the fake timber count to get the bread ration. Now by this point, you obviously already know how to speak this language. You already know how to participate in a mutual hostage situation to survive a vertical hierarchy. Now imagine taking that exact same corporate survival instinct, equipping it with a massive nuclear arsenal, stripping away all the guardrails and backing it up with a penal calling in Siberia. That's how an entire empire learned to think. Let's look at where this disease actually started and let's dig up the roots of the rock. At first, well congratulations you're one of us now, you just found out you speak flu and fron yo. See, once again, this shot doesn't have a sponsor. Nobody's paying me to tell you that your empire's neighbor is running on false-filed paperwork and painted grass and nobody's going to. That's the point. This is funded by you people who listen to this page. You're on YouTube membership is fourth wall or I'll stray through the eastern board on LV if you're rather caught out the middleman entirely. Crypto works there too, but for the pattern lines among you, you know, you should be probably very about giving it your day to so appreciate the crypto donations as well.

16:52And by the way, you should be paranoid. That's why you're here after all. Langston's description act and act to his where gets historical and all boy considerably, considerably worse. To understand how systemic life and rot of super power from the inside out, we have to rewind the clock. We're not starting with the Soviets. The Bolsheviks were brutal, but they were just industrializing a sickness that was already in the Imperial bloodstream. We're going back to the 1850s, the reign of Zad Nikolas I, yeah, Nikki I, the first. Well, he was the ultimate autocrat. He had spent 30 years meticulously constructing an empire based entirely on aesthetics and total control. He built with historians referred to as a parade army. That officers wasn't selected for tactical brilliance or battlefield initiative. They were selected for the loyalty to the Zad, the exact cut of their uniforms and their ability to march in perfect hypnotic lockstep against the, across the parable of the squares of St. Petersburg. It was the 19th century prototype of Pakazucho. The military was a theatrical performance designed to project terrifying and invincible strength. And to protect that performance, the Zad instituted a total, suffocating information quarantine. The censorship was absolute.

17:57Persons were legally forbidden from reading anything except orthodox religious texts and agricultural manuals. If a bridge collapsed or a harvest failed, or a governor emptied the treasuring to his own pockets, it did not exist in a public record. Even the mildest, most ruthless criticism of the state was grounds for one way to trip to Siberian penal colony. You cannot fix a problem if acknowledging the problem is a state crime. So the rot metasties into dark. By 1853, Niki, completely high on his own supply of imperial vrindio, decided it was time to flex. He launched a war of choice against the Ottoman Empire using the classic timeless excuse of needing to protect fellow Christians across the border. He intended to swallow two principalities and take control of the Black Sea's treads. And at first, the Russian patriotic elite, the Slava files, as they were known back then, in opposition to Zapadniki, who were like more western-oriented. While the Slava files, they were absolutely euphoric. These were the Z Patriots of the 19th century. Men like Mikhail Pogodkin, a leading imperial intellectual, who looked at the conflict and saw a holy crusade.

18:57Pogodkin wrote glowing essays declaring that the west was a decrepit decaying corpse, while Russia, while Russia was a young, awakening giant. He dreamed out loud of Russian troops marching triumphantly into Constantinople. The propaganda disproved a short glorious war and would humiliate the decadent Europeans forever. But then the Europeans actually showed up to the war. Great Dutinian frauds refusing to let Russia dominate the Black Sea deployed an expeditionary force to the Kremlin peninsula. And the moment the British and French boots hid the dirt, the majestic terrifying Russian parade army slammed headfirst into the brutal unforgiving reality of the industrial revolution. The collusion was catastrophic. The Russian infantry marched into battle carrying smooth-bore muskets that were effective up to about 300 paces. The British and French infantry leveled rifleed muskets that could actually kill a mad at thousand paces. The Russian generals were watching their pristine marching columns get systematically butchered before they could even see the enemy through the gunsmok. Out on the water, the pride of the Tsar's Black Sea fleet, magnificent towering wooden sailing ships, found themselves outmaneuvered by modern steam-powered Allied gunboats.

20:04The Russian admirals realized their fleet was utterly useless. To prevent allies from sailing straight into the harbour of Sevastopol, the Russians hit the scottal their own ships. They literally sank their own majestic fleet, turning the pride of the empire into a submerged wooden fence. And the logistics? Well, by now you should understand that logistics were a humiliating joke. The British and French could supply their troops in Crimea by shipping food, ammunition, and winter coats all the way from London across the Mediterranean. Faster and more efficiently, the Russian Empire could supply its own troops operating on its own soil. The Allies were coordinating logistics with the telegraph. The Russian staff was still relying on exhausted men riding horses through the mud. The system was collapsing. And this time because a foreign army was standing on their shores, blowing holes in their fortresses, the state could not censor it away. The Vranjo-Lub had been shattered by high explosive artillery. The cognitive dissonance inside the Russian elite at that point was staggering. You can read it in the liaries. Take Anna Chuchiva. She was a lady in waiting at the Imperial Court. She was deeply loyal to the Tsar and the Empire.

21:07At the start of the war, she brought into, like, fully bought into the crusade. But by 1855, watching the reports bleed back to St. Petersburg, her diary entries turned into a horrifying autopsy. She writes that the army was left with nothing but the raw animal courage of its dying soldiers. She notes that the military had been completely plundered by the extortion and bribery of the she of the chiefs, and led by, quote, generals with neither initiative nor knowledge. And then she glimmers the killing blow. Chuchiva writes that under the pressure of a real war, the majestic phantom, as she puts it, of the Russian Empire, simply vanished in smoke. The majestic phantom, you see, a hallucination wrapped in a tailored uniform. The realization is that the state was a hollow fraud. It broke the Slava file patriots. Mikhail Pogodion, the same intellectual who had demanded the conquest of Constantinople a year earlier, completely inverted. He started desperately begging the Tsar to leave the censorship to stop the lies and to face the bitter, humiliating truth. The atmosphere in St. Petersburg grew so toxic, so suffocating that the true patriots of the empire began actively praying for a military defeat.

22:10They realized that the Russian victory would just validate the Tsar's corrupt lying system. The only way to save Russia was to watch the Russian army burn. There is a documented moment from the streets of the capital in 1855. A Russian revolutionary named Nikolai Shogunov is walking down the street when he runs into Pyotr Pekarsky, a prominent academic. Pekarsky grabs his hand, leans in close and delivers a conspirational, delighted whisper. We have been defeated. It was not a lament. It was a relief. The cage can finally broken. In February 1855, Tsar Niki I caught a severe case of pneumonium. As he led dying, he looked to the smoking ruin of his majestic phantom, and he realized that his entire 30-year reign had been a bureaucratic fiction. He reportedly turned to his son, the future Alexander II, and said, I am handing command over to you not in good order. He handed him an empire in disarray. But here is the crucial takeaway. The one glimmer of hope in this entire miserable pathology that we are going to go through, the humiliation of the Kremlin war was so absolute, so physically undeniable that it forced the system to reboot.

23:18Alexander II took the throne and enacted the greater forms. He abolished, served and freeing 23 million people from slavery. He instituted independent courts, local self-government and modernized the economy. The Kremlin in Epiphany proves a fundamental law of Russian history, the state only ever reforms when a foreign military physically beats the Vranjo out of it. But as the 19th century went into the 20th, the empire collapsed and a new regime took power. The Bolsheviks didn't cure the disease. They just gave it an industrial quota. See, the Crimean War proved that the Russian state could be shocked into the form, but that window of lucidity did not last. The empire eventually collapsed in the blood and mud of the First World War, and then, as you know, the Bolsheviks dragged themselves to power over the ruins. Now, the Bolsheviks claimed that they were building a new, scientifically perfect society. They claimed that they were completely erasing the old cropped imperial mindset. But in reality, they didn't cure the Vranjo. They just stripped away the gold braid, handed the clipboard and industrialized that whole process.

24:21To understand how modern Kremlin operates, let's look at the primary engine of Stalin's economy, and to those of you who listened to my earlier episodes, this won't be anything new to you. But to rest of you, let's talk about the Gulags. The Gulag wasn't just a prison system. It was a massive continental-scale corporate conglomerate built on slave labor, and like any corporation that turned on spreadsheets, targets, and quotas. But the quotas stood by Moscow, well, they were physically impossible. The five-year plans were political fiction, cooked up by bureaucrats who had never swung an axe in the frozen tiger. So what happens when an unstoppable political fiction collides with the immobile physical reality of a freezing, starving human body? Well, you get tofta. See, if you want a single word to explain the entire operational history, the entire operational history of the Soviet Union, then it's tofta. Originally, it was 1920's Kremlin slang. It referred to a rigged card game or passing off fake cloth as the real thing. It was a con. But when the criminals were swept into the Gulag system alongside the politicals, the word mutated.

25:24In the camps, especially during the brutal construction of the White Sea Baltic Canal in the early 1930's, the prisoners, the Zex, turned the word into a dark cynical background. They joke that tuft stood for the technique of accounting for fictitious labor. Now, let me explain the mechanics of this important technique. Now, imagine the prisoner in logging camp in Kolyma. It's 40 below zero. In Celsius. Actually, the fire in the heat is well 40 below zero is where the both systems meet up. His quota is to cut and stack a massive mathematically impossible volume of timber by nightfall. If he meets the quota, well, this prisoner gets a full ration of bread. If he fails his ration is cut. In the Gulag, a cot ration is a death sentence. It just takes a few weeks to execute. The prisoner is forced to author a fiction just to keep his heart beating. He and his brigade used to fta. They build the stack of timber, but they only build the outer walls. The entire inside of the stack is empty air, maybe propped up with some useless branches and snow.

26:27Visually, from the outside, it looks like a massive solid cube of harvested wood. Then the camp commander arrives with his clipboard. Now, the camp commander is not an idiot. He has eyes. He knows the prisoners are starving, exhausted and incapable of cutting that much wood. He knows the stack is hollow. But the commander is also a hostage to the vertical hierarchy. If he looks at the hollow stack and writes down the truth, the quota was missed, he gets to report a failure to his superiors in the NKVD. The check, I see. An install and system missing an economic quota isn't just incompetence. It is categorized as deliberate anti-Soviet sabotage. If the commander reports the truth, he doesn't just lose his job. He gets a bullet in the back of his neck in the basement. So, the prisoner stands in the freezing snow and lives to the commander. The commander looks the prisoner in the eye, knowing it's a lie, and writes down the fake number on the official manifest. The regional boss takes the fake manifest, adds his own padded numbers to it, and sends it to Moscow. And Moscow takes the totally fabricated spreadsheet, declared that the five-year plan has been exceeded by 140% and prints it on the front page of Pravda.

27:29That wasn't a rare glitch in the system, this was the system. There was a literal proverb with pretty many prisoners. Beos Tufti, Imonala, Nipostroids, Bukanala. Without Tuft and explosives, they wouldn't have built the canal. State literally paid for phantom work with real bread. And that's the whole issue here with this Tuft system and how it all functions. This is why, for example, when I was quote at the one point, Brezhnev Zedra, a constitutionist, some sort of literal truth about freedoms in the USSR, you know, I automatically noticed that these people clearly haven't listened to this show at all, or just sometimes do not want to admit that, you know, I'm talking about some tankies here that the reality might not be as clean as they had imagined. And that here is the most important part of this history, the model anchor of everything we're actually talking about today. In 1933, Tuft was a model imperative. It was a starving man lying to a tyrannical homicidal state just to get 400 grams about a pound of bread and survive the winter.

28:32We can understand that, we can forgive that. But the tragedy is that the DNA of that lie, it survived the gulag. The mechanism outlier would live the terror. This but a survival tactic of the starving slave mutated and crawled its way up the hierarchy. Fast forward to 2026 and that exact same mechanism is being used by a well fed Russian brigade commander sitting in a warm bunker. He's not lying to get a piece of bread to survive the winter. He's filing a fake report about capturing a Ukrainian village because he wants a medal in promotion to protect his pension. The desperate vrangel of the victim became the standard operating procedure of the butcher. And as the Soviet Union marched out of the Stalin era, this culture of fake numbers and mutual complicity, of course it didn't disappear. It just took off its prison uniform, put on a cheap suit and infected the entire civilian economy. See, by the 1950s Stalin was dead and the physical terror of the gulag had largely subsided. You were no longer garantitably in the back of the neck for failing a meat to meat at Humberquada. The system had the relaxed but the psychological path again of Tuft or faking the numbers to appease the vertical hierarchy was already permanently hardwired into the Soviet nervous system.

29:40It just changed shape. It stopped being about physical survival and started being about the Abal Targovya, face trading, careerism. To see exactly how this mutated while we need to look at the Raza Neoblast in 1959 and I think I've met an episode about this in 2020? Yeah, it was the peak COVID era. But we talk about Raza in 1959 now. Two years earlier Nikita Khrushchev had stood up in front of the empire in the Glorious New Objective. Soviet Union was going to catch up and overtake America as the per capita production of meat and milk. Now, this was a mathematical and biological impossibility. But in the Soviet system, Comrade, the arithmetic is the enemy of the state, Kremlin, the matter of the medical. And in the Raza region, I first secretary of the party named Alexei Laryonov decided to give them one. Laryonov stepped up to the microphone and publicly pledged that the Raza region would not just meet the technological core. It would ripple its state meat procurement, not in three years, not in five, in one single year.

30:43Instead, the central committee there were still a few sane economists left. I mean, our friend Igor Lipsits comes from that school there, for much later, but still there were always some sane economists. But these guys, they took out their pencils, calculated the biological growth rates of livestock and realized that tripling meat production in 12 months was physically impossible, unless you invented a cow that gave birth to fully grown calves every three weeks. Let's try to stop the publication of the pledge. But Khrushchev personally intervened. Personally, he dismissed the economists. He declared that the pencil pusher simply didn't understand the Soviet reality, because this wasn't a agricultural question. It was in his exact words, quote, a political phenomenon, the result of the party's long years of war, end quote. Political well overrides physical reality. That is the core action of Rhenio. The pledge was printed on the front page of Pravda on January 9, 1959, and you can check me on that one. And immediately, the Kremlin deployed the exact same mechanism we see today with Russian general staff in Ukraine. And deployed the credit capture.

31:44In February 1959, before Riazada had delivered a single extra ounce of actual beef, the region was awarded the Order of Leningen. Laryona was promised the title of the hero of the socialist labor, that it received the medals for a fictional victory that hadn't even happened yet. But by the summer, the bill came to. Laryona had actually delivered the meat. So how do you triple the meat out of a region in a single year? Why, you do what any loyal ambitious Soviet bureaucrat does. You destroy the future, to satisfy the spreadsheet of the present. Laryona ordered the slaughter of the entire 1959 livestock increase, every single calf. Then, he ordered the slaughter of the dairy herd. Then, he ordered the slaughter of the breeding bulls. He was literally liquidating the biological foundation of his own region. But it wasn't still enough to hit the magical number. So Laryona deployed the party thugs. They went to the villages and temporarily confiscated the private livestock of the collective farmers, promising to pay them back later. And when that, still was not enough. Laryona did something so purely psychotically absurd that it belongs in a dark comedy.

32:46He took the state funds allocated to his region, drove across the border into neighboring oblasts, and secretly brought meat at retail prices just to ship it back to Moscow as Riazada's surplus production. He bankrupted his own region to buy meat to give the state that it had just given him the money. But December 1959, the Pakazucho was complete. Riazada reported 150,000 tons of meat sold to the state, a 3.8 times increase. The Kremlin celebrated. Laryona was officially minted as a hero of the socialist labor. Drank on the adrenaline of his own vrindjo, he immediately doubled down and promised to deliver 180,000 tons for 1960. But in 1960, the physical reality caught out with the spreadsheet. There were no cows left. The herds were down by 65%. The collective farmers, furious that their livestock had been stolen to win Laryona of a medal, simply used to work the fields. Grand production, the region collapsed by 50%. The entire agricultural ecosystem of Riazada was completely annihilated. By the end of 1960, meat per Kuremen didn't even reach 30,000 tons.

33:49The catastrophe was so massive that it could no longer be covered up by fake paperwork. The illusion broke. On September 22, 1960, Alexey Laryona locked himself in his office and put a bullet into his own head. The Gulag, for his inner, figured a timber account because the alternative was starving to death of the snow. Laryona liquidated his own region's food supply and drove himself to suicide, simply to satisfy a fake number that he volunteered for. That is the trajectory of this disease, and if you think this kind of better-cratic-cell destruction is just a relic of the 1950s, yeah, again, look at the Russian generals today burning through mechanized brigades in the Donbass to hold the village they already claimed they captured on the spreadsheet three weeks ago. The lie kills the liar. It always does, but as the Soviet Union marched into the 1960s, a few smart men figured out how to use the state-fliens against this. And this is where, you know, I have to bring you some positive examples. See, Alexey Laryona, he looked at the sewage system of flies believing that he used it to butcher his own region. But the beauty of a blind, lumbering, bureaucratic monster is the two understand exactly how it is blind and you can walk Christ past it.

34:50See how Ranyob could be weaponized defensively, while we have to leave the Russian heartland and look at the occupied Baltics. Well, my own Latvia, specifically the town of Liyolvar. See, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Soviets began violently collectivizing Latvia and agriculture. And the man who ended up running the local collective farm, the Koho's Lajsplases, or Bear Slayer, our national hero from the Opus, was a guy named Edgar's College. College was a completely different breed of Soviet official. He was a man who understood the fundamental structural flaw of the Kremlin's psychology. The state does not care about the physical truth, the state only cares about the aesthetic of compliance. It only cares about the spreadsheet and what the inspector can see from the window of his car. The college proved this at least twice, I, those are the most noticeable cases which we have in our archives here and which I have heard from the people themselves personally who experience this. First time was in March 1949. In 1949 Moscow ordered the mass deportation of Baltic Kulaks. Well, the farmers and the anti-Suit elements. Tens of thousands of Latvians were packed into cattle cars and shipped to Siberia in operation pre-boy.

35:53Then KVD operated on Khorus. Every regional party bus was required to draw up lists of locals to be liquidated or deported to meet Moscow's numbers. Tall and chryfruist. He basically stated that he had no Kulaks in the region. He aggressively pulled the locals of his parish into the Kulaks, stamping their paperwork and legally reclassifying them as viral Soviet agricultural workers before the Soviet police could tag them. He flat out refused to hand over a single name to death squads. And because he got the paperwork filed and insisted that everyone in Lillevarde is a solid 100% loyal Soviet citizen. And the Kulaks was actually hitting its early baseline targets. The bureaucratic machine simply grounded its gears and moved on to easier targets. No one was deported. During the darkest period of the era, the number of people deported to Siberia from Lillevarde's parish was exactly zero. Which is enough to have him remembered with a good name. But the case master of bureaucratic judo came a few years later during the russians.

36:55Remember Nikita Kruschev's obsession with catching up to America? Well after taking a trip to the United States, Kruschev fell completely in love with American corn. I think it's called maize, I presume. He decided that corn was the magic bullet for a Soviet agriculture. And he showed a blanket mandate across the empire. A very collective farm must plant corn. Now if you know anything about the Baltic climate, you know that mandating the mass cultivation of maize in Latvia is agricultural lunacy. It's too cold. The growing season is too short, and the soil is just wrong. If a Kolkhoz actually followed Moscow's orders and planted all its fields with corn, the crowd would fail, livestock would starve, and the people would freeze. Which happened in a lot of places when this was ordered. But if you publicly refuse the order you were an enemy of the state, you'll defend I saw its sabotage. Now, Kaolin taps as he's very well known there. The ploy of tactic that I can only describe is defensive pokazuch. He took the mandatory Soviet corn seed, and he planted exactly where he knew the party inspectors would look. He planted a dense perimeter of corn right along the outer most edges of his fields. Defensive one, directly lining the state highways.

37:57When the party bosses drove out from Riga in their black vulgar cars to peg the large places Kolkhoz, the rail down the windows looked out to the fields and saw glorious towering stocks of hrushchev's beloved maize stretching along the road. They enthusiastically checked the box in the clipboard, the overrun was in full compliance, the quarter was met. But behind that thick visual wall of corn out of sight of the highway, Kaolin-Kolensh had planted the rest of the massive fields with traditional Latvian wheat ryan barley. Krops had actually grew here. Krops had actually fed the population. Krops had eventually allowed large places to become so prosperous that it started some village of the rebruary. Still alive today, by the way, and one of my favorite beers. If you visited me in Latvia, you know that, well, that's not a very exquisite beer, but that's my default go-to beer when I drink it. And a lot of Latvians might be yelling at me that large places is bad. Well, you know, large places is good enough. And not just for the historical reason. This is the ultimate indictment to the vrandjomathriks, but the owner of the straight-up resign because he tried to make physical reality match the fake spreadsheet. Kaolin-Kolensh saved the Elvar because he realized you just have to fake the spreadsheet to protect the physical reality.

38:59He painted the grass green to keep the state away. But Kaolin-Kolensh was an exception, an anomaly, an evased continental machine of fraud. And as the Soviet Union dragged itself in the 1970s, the lives scaled up. It stopped being about survival and it stopped being about the pleasing dictator. The lie became the economy and the empty freight cars, as you can see in today's thumbnail, while they started drawing. But the time here in the British knew it took power in the late 1960s. The Soviet Union was exhausted. The ideological terror was dead. Nobody seriously believed they were going to catch up and overtake America anymore. The physical terror of Stalin was gone, and the frantic chaotic micromanagement of Khushchev was over. What replaced it was an era of profound suffocating cynicism. The state and the population entered into a silent and spoken agreement. They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. And in this environment where I knew involved again, it stopped being a desperate survival tactic like it was in the gulag, and it stopped being a suicidal loyalty test like it was in Reza. It became a business model. The Russian language has a specific bureaucratic term for this, prepisky. It literally means write-ups or additions, statistical padding.

40:05In the mature Soviet economy, prepisky was not considered a crime by the men running the system. It was the standard operating procedure. It was how you got promoted. It was how you secured the state issued Volga Automobile, a dodging the country and access to imported French conjak. You simply wrote down that your factory produced 10,000 tractors in 3,000. Moscow pretended to believe you. Moscow paid the region for 10,000 tractors and everyone took a cut of the phantom surplus. But truly understand the sheer continent spanning scale of this route. You have to look at the greatest heist, greatest heist in the history of the Soviet Empire. The Koton affair. In the 1970s and 80s, the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was the Koton engine of the empire. The Kremlin demanded white gold, and year after year Moscow steadily increased the quota. Sharov Rashidov, and I'm not sure if I'm sorry about that, the first secretary of Uzbekistan, essentially ran their public like a mafia thief. He knew that the soil was completely exhausted. He knew that draining the rivers to irrigate the desert was literally destroying the RLC. He knew that pulling children out of school to pick cotton by hand wasn't yielding enough crop. The physical reality of Uzbekistan could not meet the demands of the Kremlin's spreadsheet.

41:14So Rashidov and his network did exactly what Alexei Rionov did in Riazany, but with one crucial difference. They didn't destroy their own region to meet the quota. They just fake the paperwork on a scale that defies human comprehension. They built a supply chain out of nothing. Here is how the physical mechanics of the Uzbek Koton affair actually worked. The local collective farm chairman would report a harvest of 1,000 tons of cotton, even though he only grew 500. To make the numbers match, he paid a massive cash bribe to the manager of the low original waiting station. The managers stemmed the official manifest where he found that 1,000 tons of cotton had been loaded onto a freight train. They then paid off the railway dispatchers. The dispatchers hooked up empty freight cars to the locomotives, bolted the doors shut, slapped the forged manifest on the side and sent the trains rolling north towards Russia. But over a decade, over a decade, literal ghost trains. Like you're going to see in today's thumbnail, thousands of completely empty freight cars rolled across the Soviet Union, guarded by state security, traveling thousands of kilometers to textile mills and places like Ivanov.

42:17When an empty train arrived at the Russian textile factory, the factory director was already in on the scam. He would accept the empty cars, sign the delivery you've seen and receive his cut to the bribe money. To explain why his factory wasn't producing any shirts from the cotton he just signed for, the director would report that the cotton had spoiled in transit or was lost to natural shrinkage. If the discrepancy got too big to hide in the accounting margins, they used a simpler method. They just set out a set the empty warehouse on fire and blamed the tons spontaneous combustion. It was a perfectly closed-virtantial loop. Moscow paid out real physical money from the state budget for millions of tons of cotton that did not exist. The estimates of the theft exceed 3 billion rubles. In the Soviet economy of the 1980s, there was a staggering apocalyptic sum of money. But here is why this matters to the study we're telling today. Cotton was not just used to make shirts and bench sheets for the Soviet citizens. Cotton is a vital strategic military resource. It is the core ingredient required to synthesize nitrocellalose, gun cotton. It's the best component for artillery propellant and military explosives.

43:19The party bosses in Uzbekistan were not just stealing money from the Ministry of Flight Industry. They were actively categorizing the Soviet military industrial complex. The artillery units of the Red Army were running logistics calculations based on stockpiles of gunpowder components that literally did not exist because the raw material was a fake number written on a clipboard in Tashka. By the early 1980s, the entire Soviet state was flying blind. The economics were fake. The agricultural yields were fake. The military readiness reports were fake. And when the entire society runs out of falsified operating system, it's only a matter of time before... ...let's system encounters a physical anomaly that cannot bribe fake or silence. It's only a matter of time before the reactor core overheats. See, if you can find your lies to a textile factory, you can just get the shortage of shirts. And, well, artillery stuff. But what happens when you apply the exact same culture of pre-piscuit pakazucha to the Ministry of Media and Machine Building, the most highly classified, completely unaccountable sector of the state? What happens when you run a nuclear power plant the exact same way you run a collective farm? No, not the Chernobyl.

44:25In the West people still think Chernobyl sometimes is a physics accident. It wasn't. It was a biobotocratic explosion. And, you know, that's the part that the Chernobyl TV shock actually got right. I think I'd have viewed it when it came out. And, well, truly, truly it was accurate to the best degree that the movie makers could make it. See, the RMBK, the RBMK reactor didn't blow up because the atoms became unpredictable. The decay blew up because the Soviet state was physically incapable of processing negative feedback. Years before the explosion of the reactor number four, Soviet nuclear physicists knew that the RBMK design had a fatal flaw. They knew about a positive void coefficient. They knew that the granite tips, graphite tips, sorry, of the control rods, were, would cause a massive instantaneous power spike when inserted into the core. But they couldn't fix it. Because in the Soviet system, fixing a fatal design flaw requires officially admitting that the Soviet state made a mistake in the first place. And, in the Ministry of Media and Machine Building, admitting a mistake was a career suicide. So they classified the flaw. They hit the manuals. They kept it the secret from the very operators who were running the plants. The entire culture of the nuclear industry was built on the exact same Jabbalo Targovd, face trading that we can see in the Russian military today.

45:34Listen to the actual declassified transcripts of the Secret Politburo meeting from July 3, 1986, a few months after the disaster. The Soviet leadership is sitting in the sealed room in the Kremlin panicking. Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary, started screaming at his own ministers. He wanted to read the exact word for word quotes from this meeting because it was at the stone of this entire episode. Quote, he says, in the whole system, it rained the spirit of psychopathy, groveling, fake-factionism, but it's a use of dissidents, but kazuka, personal connections, the various clans. And then, you know, he, the only then, he gets the lethal core of it. He admitted in the nuclear industry, the only thing that matters is, quote, fulfilling the plan at any cost to the detriment of safety, just like a regular factory of ours. Just like regular factory. Reactor number four was rushed into operation to meet a political deadline. They signed off of the safety list before they were even completed, just to get metal and a bonus, exactly like Leonov getting the order of Lienin for a phantom meet in Reza. But Fragio didn't stop when the reactor exploded 123 a year on April 26th. That is when the real homicidal Pakazuka began.

46:38On the court detonated the local directors, literally looked at Changsafrae's active graphite burning in the parking lots and reported to Moscow that the reactor was intact. Why? Because you never give boss the bad news. And then, five days later, we get the 1986 equivalent of the falling debris protocol. It's made the first. The reactive cloud has already triggered alarms that are nuclear-planned in Sweden, over a thousand kilometers away. The radiation levels in Kiev. Just one hundred kilometers south of Chernobyl are spiking between 150 and 1200 micro-rongans per hour. So a leadership knows exactly how lethal the situation is. But May the first is International Workers Day. And canceling the May Day parade in Kiev, well you see what would mean publicly admitting to the west that something actually had gone wrong. So Gorbachev gets on the phone with Volodymyr Cherbitsky, the first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, and threatens to fire him if he can sell the parade. He demands that the pokazuch continue to prevent panic. So does the state do? Cherbitsky, the party elite, quietly pack up their own children and grandchildren and reactiv and evacuate them from the city.

47:40And then they order 120,000 ordinary citizens of Kiev, including thousands of schoolchildren, to march down the chrischatic, the central street in Kiev under a radioactive sky. They send girls into additional embroidered dresses and flower crowns to march through nuclear fallouts, smiling and waving red flags for the cameras, just to prove the way to the west that everything was totally fine. The state would rather poison its own children that had a bit of failure. When you understand that the May Day parade in Kiev, you understand exactly when the modern Russian Ministry of Defense will let it drown blow up a theater in Dagestan, order to finally invite the Uren Goi and just calmly tell the population to ignore the fire and look at the falling debris. The aesthetic of control is always more important than the physical survival of the population. But Chernobyl was just a civilian collapse, but the actor was burning in Ukraine. The exact same bureaucratic rot was annihilating the Soviet military in the mountains of Afghanistan.

48:49Beech events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings and non-stop action. The light of reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at bkfsea.com Quick question. When was the last time a display ad changed your mind? Now think about the last time a friend told you about something they loved. Different feeling, right? That's how podcast advertising works. A host who's built real trust with their audience talks about your brand and their own words and their own voice. It doesn't interrupt the experience. It's part of it. With Acast, you can access the world's largest podcast marketplace. Choose the right shows, the right audiences, the right format. Then watch the data tell you it worked. You're not buying impressions. You're buying influence. Learn more by visiting Acast.com slash advertise. See, in 1979, the Red Army was completely high on its own supply. They believed them just identifying Phantom of their own Pacazucho.

49:53The general staff in Moscow was structured to fight a massive apocalyptic heavily scripted tank war on the plains of western Europe. They were completely rigid, top down vertical hierarchy. Everything was centralized. Every order, every artillery strike, every helicopter authority had to be requested, signed, stamped and approved through a massive chain of command that ran all the way back to the Kremlin. But when they rolled into Afghanistan, the vertical hierarchy in the physical reality of a decentralized asymmetric guerrilla war. And the swift command structure immediately suffered a catastrophic paralyzing stroke. The Vranjolupo in Afghanistan was lethal. The generals in Kabul would report to Moscow that a highway was secure because the meeting it wasn't secure, meant a motion. So a Soviet supply convoy would drive down that secure, secure highway and immediately get ambushed by the Mujahideen. The lieutenant on the ground under heavy fire would radio his battalion commander for helicopter support. The battalion commander would radio the regimental headquarters. The regiment would radio the regional command. The regional command would radio the air base. Then we'd shake the map, consult the spreadsheets, time the paperwork and dispatch the hind ganships.

50:56By the time the helicopters arrived, it had been three hours. The convoy was burning, soldiers were dead and the Mujahideen were already drinking tea in a cave five miles away. The physical reality of the war was moving faster than the bit of a crack speed of the lie. So the functional soldiers of the Red Army, at that point the Vedeve-Para Troopers, the Spitznaz, the guys who actually wanted to survive their tour, realized that their own general staff was a bigger threat to them than the Afghans. Stay alive they had to bypass the vertical hierarchy completely. They invented the horizontal workaround. The veteran forums on the runet are full of these stories. Sh They had to commit structural insubordination, justified the war. The military had devolved into a series of disconnected, localized, feudal fiefdoms operating on personal favors.

52:05And if you think that sounds familiar it is because it is the exact same thing happening in the Russian army in 2026. When you hear that the Russian generals today are using WhatsApp and Telegram to coordinate strikes, you're looking at the direct descendent of those illegal Afghan radio networks. The vertical hierarchy today is so corrupt, so slow and so compromised by leaks that Russian colonels have to negotiate artillery strikes with each other while commercial messaging gaps. They're fighting around their own general staff. Afghanistan was the final nail in the coffin of the Soy Toulusion, the myth of the invincible Red Army, blood to death in the Pynesir Valley. When you say that alab the ghost dreams of the cotton of fair back-up in the economy Chernobyl proving the state would casually poison some people and Afghanistan proving the military was fundamentally broken, well you see the empire simply reach the structural limit. Sony Tune did not collapse because of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program. It collapsed because of state built on Vranjo, eventually just runs out of physical reality.

53:05You can only fake the timber count of the cotton trains the reactor tests and the combat reports for so long before the entire structure just rots the powder and blows away in the wind. Now, we just spent nearly an hour, 15 minutes I presume, on people who died because a number of the forum had to stay pretty. Prisoners stacking hollow logs. Origins and diary deady heard slot heard so one man could keep a metal. Children marching throughout radioactive parade because counseling gets we have meant admitting something. This is the part where I stopped describing the problem until you're about the one thing on this show that isn't analysis. God for your crane. Autumn Harvest 2026. Number six. See like I said before I've helped send again I think five vehicles to the front so far who've been working with them for a long time. Not through an intermediary who forward your money to a fund that reports the board for a project what I can tell you the unit in the road driving on with my show my own shows name and my own regions code of arms on the side of the thing before it goes east.

54:08The patch on this one is little castle. I really didn't mind this trick 22 kilometers in the Russian border left the the way it is by the same empire who we've been discussing in the last about an hour or so. Tracks not a statement either either starts or doesn't it either gets someone out of a position under fire or it doesn't let us know for any available vehicle donation nobody can paint the grass green on whether it arrives. So go and help out these guys very important. Godfittercraned.com the autumn harvest campaign link in the description you know six isn't the number I get to stop at because it sounds tidy. Let's let's go let's focus on the scent please help out the Ukrainian guys. That is extremely important and that helps them deal with this vrindjo we've been covering all over this episode this is something you can do you can make a difference and this really matters to the people in the front lines so please if you have a you know spare dollar or euro send them that way that would be extremely important in this day and age.

55:11And now back three the present tense where all of this is still happening. Now one not before I go further because this episode is about to get overtaken by its own subject matter as I was finishing the script Ukraine's third army core confirmed an offensive on this exact axis that I'm going to cover. Colony and Vivaldi that had apparently been running in total silence for some time before the announcement early claims are substantial dozens of square kilometers we take and real losses inflicted on two Russian combined arms armies. Now I'm not going to pretend I can verify wartime numbers from either side in the you know same day that they're announced what I can tell you is that this is almost certainly why the Z-Sphere went quiet right as I was recording because the maximum collusion call for example just posted two posts on telegram instead of his usual 50. And that I will come back to operation to Vivaldi proper properly with actual data once there is enough you know distance and data to verify and tell you what actually happened instead of you know what anyone wants to to be believe happened right now.

56:11That's the important part. Now let's get back on the show proper because you see in 1981 the Soviet Union died but the Z-Sphere didn't die with it. The men who ran the ghost trains of the cotton affair the men who signed the fake casualty reports in Kabul the apparatus who guarded the reactive secrets of Chernobyl they did not disappear. They just took off their red lair for pins put on tailor Italian suits hoisted the tricolor flag and went tried back to work. They took the vranjama matrix injected it with billions of petriot dollars and spend the next 30 years building a brand new parade army. And in February 2022 they drove that parade army straight into Ukraine. We all know what happened next the majestic phantom of the Russian military evaporated just exactly as it did in the Crimea in 1854. But it was truly horrifying however is how the Russian state reacted to the physical collision did not reform they did not adapt they simply simply double down on the spreadsheet. Now if you want to see the absolute terminal stage of this route again you have to look at the Z Patriots the mill bloggers.

57:13These are the men who actively want Russia to win this war. And right now they're having a collective psychological breakdown because they realize their own general staff is fighting a war of accounting not a war of artillery. Let us look at the Liemann direction in September 2026. For weeks the Russian military defense had been painting the map red that reported that the Russian army was advancing that the towns of Seticolskensk and Kupians were taken that Ukrainian forces were being encircled and destroyed. That was just a one little problem there. While the Russian generals were pinning hero of Russian medals to their chess and Moscow the commander of the Ukrainian third assault brigade was casually recording selfie videos from the exact center of the cities that Russians lived in control. Oh and well that's a famous commander who ran who was exchanged and ran the defense of Maria Upov one of the other guys mind you just saying. This isn't just an intelligence failure it's a completely new operational doctrine. Siala Slogolikov whom we mentioned previously here in this episode as well a prominent Russian military commander a commentator give it a name.

58:15He called it Kreditny Ivzatiyya. Kredit Captures. A Kredit Capture is the 2026 equivalent of the Ryazan Miracle. A Russian general looks at his spreadsheet he knows he needs victory to get his promotion and protect his pension. So he reports that the general staff that his brigade has successfully captured the village. He accepts the morally generality. He gets his medal today hoping that his infantry can eventually assault the village and retroactively make his life true. But when the infantry fails the map stays red the fiction becomes official state policy and the consequences for soldiers in the ground are lethal. Because the general staff believed the fake map they ordered their columns whatever they have from them to drive down the roads that are actually controlled by Ukrainian and titan teams. They ordered their artillery to support positions that don't belong to them. The Z Telegram channels are screaming about this into the void. The massive channel two majors recently posted a furious autopsy of the demand front. They pointed out that the unofficial motto of the Russian army used to be you can make mistakes but you can't lie. But what happens when the lies the only thing keeping the system running.

59:17The two majors another said channel realized that the commanders were reporting the front is stabilized while the Ukrainians were actively tearing through their flanks. And the Ukrainians have figured out exactly how to weaponize this bureaucratic mindless. Oyek, Sadev, a traitor of Ukraine and a pro-Russian politician right now recently pointed out a terrifying new Ukrainian tactic, the silent defensive. You see the Ukrainian army in the demand stop posting PR videos. They stop posting photos of themselves raising flags over captured buildings. And because the Ukrainians went quiet the Russian command literally stopped reacting. Sadev spelled out the trap perfectly. He noted that Ukraine is advancing in total information silence at the exact moment they're asking the West for more funding. Precisely when they have every incentive to publicly brag about their success. But they don't. Because they know that if they post a viral video, it'll end up on the screen in the Kremlin and the Russian leadership will be forced to react. The silence? Silence means the bad news never makes it up the trade of command. The Russian war correspondents keep their mouths shut because nobody wants trouble. The colonels keep their mouths shut to protect their pensions. The Russian vertical hierarchy only transmits what is loud enough to be politically honest.

1:00:21The Ukrainians realize that a system running on Vrindyok can be starved to death simply by not giving it anything to react to. They aren't deceiving the Russian general staff that it is declining to correct them. The Russian army is bleeding out in the dark because their own generals refuse to turn on the lights. So how does the Russian Ministry of Defense fix this collapsing frontline? Do they fix their logistics? Do they court martial line commanders? Well, nope. In September 2036, the Russian Ministry of Defense dispatched a special convoy to the collapsing Kupyansk-Limon Axis. They didn't bring a counter-battery radar. They brought a reliquity, holding the relics of a medieval saint. We've been covering this a bit in the previous episodes too. The prince Mithridanskoy. They parade the day box through the trenches, having the soldiers kiss the reliquity with the regimental priest declaring that the fear of drones would vanish because God is on our side as they climb. They're treating a 21st century drone war with, you know, not even Niky the first, but four three century mysticism. Because once again, Russia's religious experience and the physical reality of the 21st century is legally forbidden to exist.

1:01:26And the Ymanosin trap that we've covered in the previous episode of this one was brutal, but it's just a symptom. To understand the actual state of the Russian military. Well, let's look at what vertical hierarchy does, even further on, to the competent candidate actually has left. And we've talked about Yugyevkin and Murz and Nevronelz. But right now, right now Vladimir Putin is appearing on television, proudly declaring that the Russian army is advancing everywhere. And because he says it, the general staff has to make it look true. They dilute their forces across the entire map, launching a dozen disconnected suicidal assaults every week, just to generate positive paperwork. Shia the Slavgorikov quoted a dead comrade who described this doctrine perfectly. The strategy of a thousand cuts is actually the strategy of getting your ass kicked in a thousand different places. The tactical regression is absolute. Maxim Kalashnikov, whom we covered here intently, recently sat on his broadcast and pointed out that in 1944, Allied Air Force has executed a transport plan that systematically obliterated 17 rail junctions in France, effectively isolating Normandy and cutting German transport down to 20% in three months.

1:02:3182 years later, the Russian military is looking at the Slovjansk Ramatork Theater, a sector one-tenth, the size of Normandy, and they literally can not isolated. They don't have the logistics, they don't have the coordination, and their command structure is so rigid, it has paralyzed them. The Russian management culture has fallen so far that they can not replicate an 82-year-old military operation. So how did the functional soldiers survive? Well, of course, they did what exactly they did in Afghanistan. They become telegram generals. Russian colonels know that the vertical chain of command is too slow to corrupt and completely leaked. If they had a question that the artillery strikes through official channels, the Ukrainians will evacuate an hour before the shells land. So they bypass it. Then they go and shape strikes with other units horizontally, often using telegram, basically. They're literally committing structural insubordination, again, just to stay alive. And here is the dark spot of this pathology. The system just doesn't fail to reward the competence, it actively assassinates it. Look at the mortar of Dmitry Yusovsky, Kolesan Goodwin and his partner Ernest.

1:03:31Again, spoken about this previously, and I think when it happened in 23-4, these were two of the best most experienced drone operators in the Russian military. But they made a fail mistake. They uncovered that their commander, a man named Puzik, Kolesan's lawyer, was running a massive corruption and drug trafficking ring. Again, in any functional army, Puzik would be court-martial. In the Russian army, Puzik simply disbanded the drone unit, confiscated their equipment, and ordered Goodwin and Ernest into a suicidal frontal assault with no gear and no mission. He literally executed them by bureaucracy to protect his grip. When the Z-Channel exploded in outrage, the Ministry of Defense sent Andrei Belusovs inspectors. The investigation lasted a few days, was purely formal, and ended up blaming the dead men. Puzik wasn't even self-suspended. A leading federal propagandaist, Soloviov, went on state television and called the murdered heroes Skaam, and nobody made him apologize. As one few days Z-Channel put it, the system killed them. A system that does not tolerate honor, decency, initiative. They openly admitted that one corrupt commander did more damage to Russia's mobilization potential, than, you know, all of the great efforts combined.

1:04:35The system hates competence because competence requires recognizing physical reality. And physical reality, you see, is a threat to the spreadsheet. Even Igor Girkin, the man who literally pulled the trigger to start the swar in 2014, can see it from his prison cell. He, just now, days ago, wrote a letter recalling his time fighting in Bosnia in 1992. He noted how modern wars are full of secret arrangements, and then delivered the devastating admission against his own side. He pointed out that during the Russian Civil War, both the Reds and the White's managed to flip and tie to enemy units to their cause. In this war, the Russian Federation has flipped essentially nobody. Nobody wants to join a system that eats its own. Which brings us to the perfect, bleak punchline to the modern Russian military. There is an imprisoned Zed blogger named Ajik Seizim Tsub, who owns the channel Voya Vodavish Shayet, or Warlord is reporting. He tried to sign a military contract from prison to go fight at the front. The system rejected him, although they would take barely anything. He called his friends from his cell laughing aesthetically.

1:05:35Thanks, motherland, he said. We ran out of epithets a long time ago. The Lampas-Werters have enough hurt feelings saved up for 2000 years. Because, you know, he would be too dangerous because he runs a telegram channel. This, here at Comrade, is the Russian military in 2026. A dying machine runs by generals with hurt feelings who would rather execute their drone operators in the rest of their biggest supporters that admitted the maps are fake. But, you know, the military command takes the maps to protect their pensions. But how does the Kremlin handle the physical reality of the war when it bleeds across the border and into the living rooms of ordinary Russians? How do you maintain the illusion of an invincible superpower when Ukrainian drones are flying a thousand kilometers deep into your airspace? Ha! Well then, now we get to the falling debris protocol. This is the domestic civilian mutation of Frenjo. Over the last two years, Ukrainian and Kamikaze drones have been systematically dismantling Russian infrastructure. They hit gas or find the reason nobbyur and goi. They hit the military industrial complex in Volkograd. They even struck a critical theater in Dagestan. But if you read the official press releases from the Russian Ministry of Defense, Ukrainian drones never actually hit their targets.

1:06:38According to the Russian state, their air defense grid is a flawless, impenetrable shield of steel. Seriously, even now, every single drone is miraculously intercepted or suppressed by electronic warfare. All the massive towering and ferranos of the oil refineries, you know, we've been covering. The obliterated buildings, the wild berries, everything. Yeah, the official line is always, always the same. Up until this point, not nothing has changed. Every single time the fire was caused by nothing but falling debris. Falling debris at all times. According to Russia, no drones have hit anything. Still. Think about the psychological pathology required to sustain the slide. And their own words to their audience. The problem is, you just haven't been introduced yet. We're Acast where that introduction happens. As the world's largest podcast marketplace, we let you rouse shows, see who's listening, and book host-read sponsorships or run your own ads all from one platform.

1:07:50Transparent pricing, real-time data, complete control. Start advertising on podcasts by visiting Acast.com slash advertise. In Tagastan, a Ukrainian drone on an accident stuck a striker's civil and theater building. I know for sure they weren't aiming at that. It just that, you know, the civilian buildings are often near where Russia puts a building infrastructure. In any normal authoritarian state, the propaganda industry would instantly plaster the imagery across every television screen in the Empire. They would scream, look at the enemies bombing our culture, the terrorists mobilized unless defend the motherland. At that point, that would be a free massive propaganda victory handed to them in the silver platter, because well, you know, accidents do happen in this war. And, you know, they could actually post it somewhere out and show this and talk about the evil Ukrainians. But the Kremlin deliberately forfeited that when they covered it up, they classified it as falling fragments. Why? Because weaponizing the attack was required admitting that the Ukrainians were on bypass Russian air defenses.

1:08:55It requires admitting a hole in the sky and they still go on denying this. And to the men in Kremlin, the aesthetic of total control, the illusion that the bizarre shield is perfect, is infinitely more important than rallying the population. The state is so addicted to its own pakazooja. So it's actually fully built, holy Russia ideals, this religious experience, and this makes it in with this massive lie that it will willingly lobotomize its own self-interest just to keep the spreadsheet clean. But the pakazooja is not just in the press releases. It has manifested in the physical world and it has reached the level of absurdity that borders on performance art. Let me read you a recent interest from the massive telegram channel Military Informant, or Vyenniyasvi Dmityevich. Don't mix it with the Voyevoda, don't do different channels, this is a big one. This is regarding the Russian Baltic fleet. On the channel, they wrote quote, the Baltic fleet continues to delight with the unique camouflage of its ships. This time, a pair of MPK Project 1331-M anti-submarine ships based in Kronstadt were painted in something resembling a mix of a house and a bankmen and their artillery mounts were made completely tiger striped.

1:10:05Apparently, this is assumed that such coloring would somehow confuse AI-based drone targeting systems. End quote. Yeah, the Russian Navy is taking resting 40-year-olds of its ships and painting their guns with tiger stripes to trick machine learning algorithms. 170 years apart is the same instinct, nothing has changed. Zadist conscripts painting the dead grass screen for a visiting general in 19th century and a 2026 Baltic fleet crew painting gun mounts and tiger stripes holding to confuse a drone. Neither one changes what is actually underneath, you just paint the surface of the inspection passes. But here is the most devastating part of the falling debris protocol. The people who support the state will most, they actually know how hollow it is. While the Ministry of Defense assures the public that the sky is made of iron, the nationalists are now preparing for the collapse of their civilization. Again, we have to look at Maxim Kalashnikov and this time, this time Yuri Goroshkov. You might know him as Tava. He is poetry has been read here by Evita.

1:11:05He is the commander of Russian People's Drugina or R&D, Ruska-Henorodna Drugina. These are hardcore Russian imperialists. And by this point, do you know where these R&D guys are spending their weekends in September 2026? They are out in the woods outside Moscow, in tactical gear, training their followers how to chop down dead trees. They are not doing this for exercise. In this broadcast, Goroshkov laid out the terrifying math. They know the Ukrainians' drones are already hitting the Yamal energy crossroads. They know the ballistic missiles are coming. And they know the Russian defense grid cannot stop them. So Goroshkov looks right into the camera and warns the residents of Moscow who are still sipping lattes and pretending the war doesn't exist. Quote, one day hit the Moscow energy ring. You will be left in your multi-historia apartment without light, without heat, without water. You will be going to the bathroom in a plastic bag. End quote. He tells his followers to prepare to progress to the Stone Age. He is ordering his militiamen to stockpile access, coal, firewood, podbillies, stoves and generators.

1:12:06He openly mocks the complacency of the average Russian, quoting a dark, twisted, phony old proverb. Quote, my heart is on the edge. Which means it burns first, he adds. End quote. This is the ultimate paradox of the terminal stage. The state propaganda screams that the empire isn't invincible, but the empire is most fanatical loyalists and literally stockpiling firewood in the forests of the capital, because they know they will freeze to death in the winter if they trust the government. And if you think Goroshkov is just a petal at Lumberjack, look at what his co-host, the Kalashnikov guy, is saying. And we know Kalashnikov, oh he's going down, since you know, again, I've finally got into the book bar. But since you seem to be enjoying long episodes, I have to cover this here as well. See, Kalashnikov knows exactly why the island is these buying generators. He went on broadcast in September 2026, just again, a few days ago, and pointed to the most vulnerable geographic coordinate in the entire Russian Federation, the Yamal Cross. See, this is the central intersection of Western Siberia, where 17 high pressure gas pipelines converge. It's the absolute beating heart of the Russian energy economy.

1:13:07And Kalashnikov openly admitted that the Ukrainian drones have already hit a gaspapration plant in Novoryr and Goy, as we mentioned previously, meaning that the Yamal Cross is fully within range. Kalashnikov is, of course, furious. He had pointed out that back in 1987, when Mathias Rastlandin and Sesslin and the Red Square, the raw thing collapsing Soviet Union, the one whose vranjovi covered throughout the episode, actually managed to instantly form helicopter interceptor units to protect the sky. But in 2026, on the 50th of a total war, the Putin regime has not bothered to build a functional airborne radar or a light interceptor network at all. The Russian air defense grid is a complete pakazoocha, and the Kremlin knows it. Kalashnikov highlighted that the mid-trip has come, suddenly started floating the idea of a trilateral negotiations right now between Trump's and Yanukin Putin. He just did it today, literally. Kalashnikov said it was brutal. You do not beg for negotiations before your capture of military objectives unless you're terrified. The Kremlin is looking at the Kremlin's coming winter. They're looking at the incoming Ukrainian FP9 ballistic missiles, and they know their grid is completely undefended.

1:14:12They're terrified because the defending the grid and fighting this war is finally breaking the bank. And if you think the physical infrastructure is rotting, well now, now we're getting back to the economy. Could you see the state is gaslighting its own people with a physical damage, calling and exploding refineries falling debris? But again, the one place where the vranyom matrix structurally cannot function is the balance sheet. Let's start with the cost of human life. Earlier in this war, the Kremlin could mobilize a man for a patriotic slogan in the Russian-Kalashnikov. By 2026, the state is still terrified of a general mobilization that they have turned the war into a mercenary by bidding war against their own civilian economy. Currently, to get a Russian man into a trench, the total first-year cost of putting one man over there, the signing bonus monthly pay and debt forgiveness combined, has spiked at roughly 11 million rubles. When you factor in the exchange rate of 80 cent rubles to the dollar, the Kremlin is staggering $126,000 ahead just to put an infantry man in a tree line in the Donbass.

1:15:13Why is a dying empire paying this much for its own citizens to die? Because physical infantry is the only currency the Kremlin has left to buy time for the vranyom to become true. They are literally liquidating their own demographic future, obviously just to subsidize these fake maps of the general staff. We talk about this state, paying $11 million rubles to remain a living meat-drander, but what happens to the financial spreadsheet if that man actually survives? Well, the state actually extracts the money back, and they do it using the most vicious bureaucratic vranyom imaginable. There is a video circulating on Telegram right now among the Z-Pedriy channels, who have been because of Operation Nivaldi, silently got in very quiet these days, but this one they published. It features a Russian soldier sitting in his apartment in a sleeveless shirt. His left arm is amputated above the elbow. His right leg is heavily bandaged and mangled. He is a group one invalid, as they are called in Russia, as he called themselves disabled person to be the proper term by presume. But in Russia it's still an invalid, pirated group, just saying it's a linguistic translation, a choice here.

1:16:16And he's recording a video message directly to put it, begging the, quote, supreme commander in chief, end quote, for help. Why? Well, because this soldier tried to claim his official injury payouts. He went to the heavily televised state sponsor Defenders of the Fatherland Fund in Donetsk. They literally told him to go away, stating that they don't deal with such questions. He went to the branch in Makivka. They told him the exact same thing. The entire state veterans support system, splashed across federal television, is a complete pakazochum, another spreadsheet fiction. But while the state's support system is fake, its extraction system is entirely real. See, the soldier had alimony debt. The state bailiffs in Horylivka immediately targeted the, this his military insurance payouts, ceasing massive chunks of 350,000 and 270,000 rubles. Then he moved to Makivka and the new bailiff opened the new case against him, but the bank never closed the old one. Because of this bureaucratic error for four consecutive months, the state has seized exactly 100% of his 42,000 rubles military disability pension. They're leaving him with absolute zero. Not even the legally guaranteed minimum for food.

1:17:20In the video, this man, who's missing an arm and a leg literally looks into the camera and says he's, quote, tired of the frowning from one place to another, beating on thresholds. Between the bank, the military, and the Lisbon office, and the insurance company. This is the ultimate terminal manifestation of the Russian economy over there. The state will pay you a fortune in printed money to die, but if you live, the veranyomath that exwill legally starve you to death, while you record a video on your smartphone begging the czar to save you from his own boyars. And this colossal cannibalist expending has said this will be an economy on fire. In September 2036, the head of the Russian central bank, Elvira Nebubina, just held a press conference. For a year and a half, the central bank has been desperately trying to lower the interest rates to revive a frozen civilian economy. But at this meeting, she abruptly slammed on the brakes. She froze the key rate, remaining at 14%. And during the press conference, the mask finally slipped. Nebubina, actually, again, said the quiet part out loud. She looked at the cameras and explicitly admitted, every additional rule of government demand distances asked from lowering the key rate.

1:18:23Afraid the enslavement of historic proportions. The head of the central bank openly admitted that the Kremlin's war budget is actively destroying the civilian economy. The state is printing money to buy tanks and pay, while these 126,000 signing bonuses plus other benefits which they promise, which they really don't pay out, but you know, it is what it is, at least on paper. Flattening the system with unsecured cash and jokking the money supply by up by 13% of the actual GDP growth is flat-lining at 0. And because the state is burning cash in the Donbass, it has to violently extract that cash from the home front. We're seeing the return of the absolute worst days of the 1990s. The federal tax service has now unleashed the campaign of pure fiscal terror, shaking down-sealed businesses for surplus taxes just to plug the massive hole in the war budget. The pressure is so severe that Russian businesses are actively abandoning digital transactions and fleeing back into the shadow cash economy just to survive the extortion. But most devastating final receipt of all of this is the insurance hole. I remember the falling debris protocol. The state claims that the Ukrainian drones aren't doing any real damage to Russia, but right in the middle of the same press conference, the Bui and the Quietly announced that the central bank was injecting 165 billion rubles to recapitalize the Russian national insurance company.

1:19:34You can call it obliterated oil or fire or even falling fragments on telegram, but you cannot write falling fragments on 165 billion rubles of emergency bailout for the state insurance backstop. The defiantries are burning, logistics hubs are burning, and the central bank is quietly paying the bail while the propaganda ministry looks the other way. So, you know, how does the Russian bureaucratic apparatus deal with this apocalyptic financial reality? Of course, they purged the competence and promote the vranya. Let's look at the web, the massive state investment bank. As you probably know, recently fired the chief economist Andrei Klippatch, because, you know, as I mentioned in the show, Klippatch had the audacity to publicly state that Russia would, you know, lose the war economically. And who did the Weber play scheme with? Well, now we know. A man named Alexander Isakov. Isakov spent 2022 to 2024 sitting at Bloomberg, generating fair-eater reports about the miraculous resilience of the Russian economy. And he isn't even giving up his old desk. He keeps running his bare-banks macarachnomic research center. While moonlighting as Bebs chief economist.

1:20:35As the opposition economist Vladimir Milov joked, the Kremlin should just fire the entire government in the point Isakov to run everything, since his only job is to write fictional spreadsheets that the boy's boss enjoys reading. It's the 2026 equivalent of the so-it-party boss replacing the agronomist with a man who promises a million tons of ghost cotton. But the tragedy for Kremlin is that the Russian people already know the truth. The ultra-nationalist Batalion Vostok channel published a brutally honest assessment. They pointed out that the Russian society goes into a blind panic every time the world mobilization is mentioned. Not because they're listening to Western propaganda, but because the censorship has failed. After five years of war, society's picture of the frontline is already permanently formed. And no amount of radio can inform it. The Russian people want to win the war, yes, but they haven't stopped thinking about the price. They know exactly what a $126,000 meat grinder looks like. And they want absolutely nothing to do with it. The Russian state, you see, his leading cash is leading men. But the most fatal hemorrhage of this entire war isn't happening in the front line, it's happening in the server room.

1:21:37When the invasion kicked in off in 2022, hundreds of thousands of Russia's best IT specialists, subset engineers and AI developers, pack their bags and fled across the border to places like the Blyce, Dubai and Amsterdam. How did the Russian state react? The propaganda in the Ministry went on federal television and openly mocked them. The state called them cowards, traders, and quote, useless blue-haired liberals, end quote, writing scooters, obviously. The criminal assured the population that Russia did not need these soilata drinking and exiles because the Russian engineering was naturally superior, obviously. Now, years later, the physical reality of that lie has come crashing down on their heads. And it's entirely encapsulated in what I call the Yandex paradox. Archadyevo Lodz, the founder of Yandex, the Russian Google, led the country. He stripped out the absolute core of his AI and cloud computing talent, took it to Europe and founded a new company called Nebius. And in 2026, Nebius announced a strategic partnership with Palantir. The American data made mining giant is actually building AI drones warms and targeting software for the created military.

1:22:37Zaid Patriots on Telegram, of course, had a collective agonizing realization. Volion Kor Astrahayn, and Yuri Paranchik, looked at the headlines and melted down. They realized that the states, Vranjo, about cowardly exiles, was actually a smokescreen, masking the greatest intelligence hemorrhage in Russian history. The fleeting IT workers did not just leave, they took the central nervous system of the Russian tech sector with them, and handed it directly to Lockheed Martin and the Ukrainian general staff. But what about the engineers who stayed? What happens with the patriotic developers trying to build technology to save Russian lives? Why? They are actively crushed by the system. Because in the Russian Federation, innovation is a direct threat to the spreadsheet. Just look at the Russian Navy. Recently, the first ever encountered recorded combat between two unmanned drone boats took place in the Black Sea. A Ukrainian drone boat armed with a turret completely shredded a Russian drone boat called the Zephyr. Now, the Zephyr was the pride of the Russian drone fleet. But as once the general developer pointed out, it was a bloated, corrupt disaster. It cost ten times more than any other Russian prototype, and six times more than the Ukrainian boat that killed it.

1:23:40The Ukrainians are buying highly effective Maguro drone boats for about $200,000 a piece. The Russian state is buying overpriced vanity projects. But it gets worse. For the last three years, Russian engineers have been begging the Black Sea fleet to adopt coastal drone boats and mesh modems to defend their shores against the Ukrainian attacks. And for three years, the admittals furiously rejected the idea. The insisted that the proper doctrine was to shoot as Ukrainian drones from the beach with machine guns or drapped unguided iron bombs on them from SU-35 fighters. Why would the Navy reject cheap effective drone boats? Well, a former Black Sea fleet marine explained the exact mechanism of the Z-developer channel. He wrote, quote, if drone boats go on combat duty, half of the rusty tubs can be written off immediately and the other half shortly after. And you have to understand, every hull is a budget. Every tubs will be justified until it falls apart on its own. And, quote, he pointed out that if you decommission the rusting Soviet ships, you lose the massive multi-million-rubal budget allocated depending those ships every year for the naval parades. Even worse, if you switch to high-tech drone boats, you have to fire the WUDDEN, the term they use for double oil officers, and hire the smart competent civilians to pilot them.

1:24:47And if you hire smart civilians, they will eventually expose the grip to the remaining admittals. The Russian Navy actively suppress technology, and allow its own ships to be sung by Ukraine just to protect the paid budget and the jobs of idiots. And if you look at the sky, the exact same grief is playing out with the Yolk interceptor drone. The Ministry of Defense tells the Yolk has their great drone killer, but the actual engineers on telegram are tearing their hair out. The drone has no night vision capacity. Nothing. It can't fly in bad weather. The payload capacity is so pathetic, 30 to 50 grams of plastic explosive that it literally cannot even lift off and strike like a standard VW25 grenade. And then, in fact, she didn't. The electronic technician named Fox recently went on telegram and confessed that he could to service the Yolk drones being shipped to the front. They were arriving with dead, unchangeable batteries, built by Aske put it, the left-hined leg of Uncle Liao in China, and quote, the batteries were dying in storage because before they even reached the trenches. The technicians had to literally saw open the glued plastic housings just to rip out the dead batteries and rebuild the drones from scratch.

1:25:48And yet, yet the purchasing price of Ministry of Defense pays for the Yolk, is astronomically insanely higher than the cost to produce it. The General's pocket, the margin, and the Russian infantry gets a drone that dies in the box. This is what happens in the state is run entirely on Vranjia. Innovation requires acknowledging the flaw and fixing it. But in Russia, and Russia, well, acknowledging the flaw is a crime, and fixing it ruins the grift. So the system will aggressively defend the lie right up until the moment it physically collapses. And now, a quick one, because what's coming needs a bit of room. See, again, this show exists because people, you know, you guys, help support directly and nobody in the tween gets a veto. Pay attention on memberships forthwall, least on board at LV. If you've made it this far into, you know, all this long episode about the institutional Vranjia, well, at this point you're not a casual listener of your stuff. Then please, help us out if you can. And of course, donate to Carp for your crane. These guys really need your help, all the links are in the description. Now, back to it.

1:26:48We have tracked the path again from the Zadis Parade grounds to the exploding reactors of Chernobyl, and stray dead into the dead batteries of the Russian drone fleet in 2026. State is blind, military is paralyzed, the economy is a hostage. So how does the system built entirely on Vranjia know it's about if it's about to die? It will be upside private thermometer. The last true thermometer. In mid-September, 2026, you know, right now again, something impossible happened in Russian politics. Maxim Katz, a politician whom I follow quite closely on YouTube, and using the violence of big, ebacati, announced the joint voting strategy for the federal elections. To understand how desperate this is, you have to understand that these two factions absolutely despise each other. For years, well, you know, these, as I like to call them, colon aristocrates, 1799, right, have traded vicious public accusations of corruption, doctor of evidence, and complicity with fugitive bankers. Maria Pavikicic, literally used criminal ganglionks' slang to diffuse a meeting with Kats. Navine came himself called Kats stupid when he was alive.

1:27:48But suddenly the blood feud was suspended. Why? Well, because of the ballot box. Kats went on camera and articulated the ultimate paradox of the Russian system. He openly admitted that the final digital election results will be completely fake. The Kremlin will invent millions of electronic votes from the ruins of Bachmuth, who guarantee a supermajority. Madraszim desperately needs a physical ballot. The actual paper dropped into the physical boxes is the only un-fulsified sociology, a sociological survey the Kremlin has left. The state knows it's on propaganda's lie. It needs the physical ballots to answer one terrifying question. If we escalate, will society actively resist? Kats and Navine call the truth because they realize that if the physical boxes show genuine apathy, if the opposition says home, the men upstairs will look at true data and conclude that society is entirely broken. And if the society is broken, the Kremlin will trigger the terminal policies. And we know exactly what those terminal policies look like, because the Ukrainian military is already setting their watches by them. Just days before the Russian election, Denis Prokopenko,

1:28:49the commander of Azov First Corps delivered the grim forecast. He laid out the absolute scale of the Donbas meat grinder. A 1-6 Russian force advantage at Dobropilium. 1,200 Russian drone crews operating on the Prokrovs' axis and Russian daily losses climbing from 123 in July to 135 to August. But then he delivered the ticking clock. Azov is actively preparing for a massive Russian mobilization immediately following the September elections. After 600,000 men hitting the front lines by the end of the year. The ballot box isn't a democratic exercise. It is a stress test to see how many men the state can forcibly feed into the meat grinder before the domestic grid snaps. And now, well, if you want to know what it looks like when the society actually fights the Vranjo matrix, at this point you have to look across the border at Kiev. Just this month, you create independent anti-corruption bureaus, Naboo and SAP launch a massive raid on the Prosecutor General's Office, dismantling a multi-million-hriven protection racket run through fraudulent call centers. The Prosecutor General himself, under the cost-in-successor Kravchenko,

1:29:50literally fled the country in the service car at 2.38 in the morning. Nikol Naki, whose university thesis was on counter-conruption inside large systems, pointed out this paradox perfectly. To a nantai-dai, a Prosecutor General fleeing into the night looks like a state collapsing in on itself. And to be clear, Naki admits we don't know if Kravchenko by the border guard or if Zelensky quietly let him go. The riot is real, but silence is not health. Silence is gangrene. When a country generally starts fighting corruption, its perceived corruption index actually rises, because the rot is finally being dragged into the sunlight. Ukraine looks more chaotic because it is because it's screaming in pain while publicly amputating its own infected limbs. Russia looks stable because the gangrene is completely silent. Ukraine can still see itself, and the system that can see itself will survive. But let us not fool ourselves and make the fatal mistake of thinking that Vranjo as it is, is just a Russian-generated defect or something. That would be the religious experience. But Vranjo, it's a structural condition. It happens with it whenever the political cost of the truth outweighs the cost of the lie.

1:30:50And here I have to talk about the United States, which I normally don't. However, right now in September 2026, right before the midterm elections, where the GOP, risk-closing both chambers of Congress, a medical diesel prices hit a record $6.20 at a gallon. Trump went on camera and explicitly blamed Ukraine, and they stopped bombing Russian oil refineries because it was causing a global shortage. And this is what I have to step in. This is not about American politics. This is about just debunking this statement because it was a complete structural lie. Russia, you see, had banned the export of diesel months earlier. I've been talking about this on the show multiple times. Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries could not possibly constrain the global supply. The price spike was a direct result on Iran and Houthi attacks in the Red Sea. But, for a politician facing an election admitting that the American consumers were paying the price for a chaotic Middle Eastern policy, seems to be too expensive, blaming a foreign analyzed Trump's strikes as cheaper. This is the structural equivalence, not moral equivalence. The mechanism is identical.

1:31:50Fiction is cheaper than owning the math. But the stakes are radically different. When an American president runs the Rangia playbook to save his midterms, he naysk is getting voted out of the office. When a Russian general staff runs at the same their pensions, they send thousands of men to die for a map that doesn't exist. And if you want more proof that the French is universal political pathogen, look at what happens just days after Trump blamed Ukraine for the price of diesel. Because you see, he also went on his social media platform, just a couple of days later, and proudly announced that he could successfully negotiate an energy ceasefire, as he puts it, between Russia and Ukraine. He told the world that both sides could officially agree to stop bombing each other's energy infrastructure. It was a massive headline grabbing diplomatic victory, the problem being that the very next night, the Russian military bombed the electrical grid on the left bank of Kiev, plunging the metro into darkness. And the following morning, Ukrainian and Kamikaze drones blew up the Caesar and Euler fighter in Russia, Samar region, lighting up the sky with three massive fires. The financial types quickly confirmed what the physical explosions had already proved. The ceasefire was a complete impromptu hallucination,

1:32:51neither Puren nor Zelensky can agree anything. Trump had just pulled off a credit capture. Just like the Russian generals in the Yemen, who claimed that they captured the city while the Ukrainians were still recording TikToks in the town square, Trump claimed he could capture the peace treaty that didn't actually exist. He needed a diplomatic when for his domestic spreadsheet, the upcoming midterm elections, so, you know, he just printed one out of thin air. And that should be a bit of a problem, because he took out a mortgage on physical reality, and exactly 24 hours later, the reality foreclosed on him with a drone strike on a rationala finery. The mechanism is identical across all borders. When a system is under existential pressure, it's always cheaper to end the fictional success than to do the agonizing physical work of achieving a real one. Which brings us to the final autopsy geopolitical one of the Russian Federation. Maxim Kalashnikov sitting in his studio did the brutal math of the last five years. He realized that the China one, the United States one, Turkey one, India one, the only losers of the war are Ukraine, European Union, and the Russian state that has committed demographic and economic suicide just to avoid making a mistake.

1:33:53The Empire burned its tech sector empty, its prisons hollowed out its economy and painted tiger stripes on its rusting shapes just to keep the spreadsheet clean. And they're perfectly, cynically aware of it. On September 9, 2026, the Russian parent office officially approved a new trademark for Aftovas, the manufacturer of Lada. The company had filed for the rights to print a specific phrase on their clothing, their merchandise, and their advertising. The phrase originated when the NAVTOVAS director was asked if the Russian auto industry could ever build the rival to the BMW X5. His answer was trademarked as the epitaph of the anti-Russian state. Morzny, as a chimp. We could. But why? And that's the episode. Everything you heard was assembled from primary sources, Russian language transcripts, mill blogger channels that were very much like me to stop reading them, and you know, a lot of information from the laughing archives. If that's worth something to you, well then please help out. Pay to your YouTube memberships forthwall, which is also where the merch lives if you want something physical from a show about a country that can't tell the difference between the map and the territory.

1:34:54On Eastern board and on the lead for direct donations and crypto and all this stuff, and of course, caught for your crane. Autumn harvest. You know, please, if you can, you know, give us some support. You could support this or you could not. As the manufacturer of the Lada and then put it in the legally trademarked, Morzny was a chimp. I'd like to thank you for that better answer than they did. This was Eastern boarder. Happiness. This usual is mandatory. This January, Bear Nuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Bruce Crew sells for Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel, three straight days with pool deck bear nuckle fights in the Caribbean, massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, to kill the tastings and non-stop action. The Lada reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Preserve your spot with just $200 down at BKF-SEA.com. Most media plans treat frequency as a risk,

1:35:56something to cap, but in podcasting, that costs performance. Hearing a brand advertised repeatedly makes 50% of fans more likely to remember it against 17% who say less likely. And that positive impact is true against every outcome we tested. Podcasting is where repetition builds, not where wears out. Get more insights like this from Acars latest podcast post report, which is out now. Download for free at acars.com slash pulse. It's important to repeat this, but thank you for supporting the fellow creators. As always, remember, happiness is mandatory.