Television viewers in Russia were treated to anti-war messages as they checked on TV schedules, as a result of anti-war hackers, as Russian thug and war criminal Vladimir Putin was holding a "Victory Day" orgy of military hardware and Soviet symbolism today in Red Square to celebrate the end of WW 2 in Europe:
"Russian television schedules were hacked to display an anti-war message as the country celebrated a national military festival on Monday, BBC Monitoring reported.
On-screen program descriptions were replaced with the hackers' text when viewed on smart TVs, the outlet reported.
The message read, per the BBC's translation: 'On your hands is the blood of thousands of Ukrainians and their hundreds of murdered children. TV and the authorities are lying. No to war.'
Major channels such as Russia-1, Channel 1, and NTV-Plus were all changed, BBC reported."
With Putin's tight grip on Russian state media, the anti-war messages conveyed on the TV channel guides across Russia are rare for Russians to see.
There was speculation that Putin would use the occasion to formally declare war on Ukraine, but he limited his lying bluster to equating Russia's war against Nazi Germany with his current illegal war of aggression against Ukraine:
"In his reverence for Soviet war heroes who helped defeat Nazi Germany in World War II – the reason Russia celebrates Victory Day – Putin referred to new Nazi threats in Ukraine, repeating his baseless justification for the invasion as an operation to 'denazify' the nation.
In reference to the threat of NATO troops in Europe, Putin said: 'Everything indicated that a clash with neo-Nazis, Banderites [Ukrainian nationalists], on whom the United States and their younger partners counted on, would be inevitable.'”
He has nothing to celebrate about his butchery in Ukraine and his armed forces' inept performance against strong and competent Ukrainian resistance, so his recourse is to keep lying shamelessly and doubling down on his catastrophic misjudgment.
BONUS: Here's an interesting view by a British defense expert on what Putin faces.
(photo: Putin at "Victory Day" observation. Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik via Getty)
