Yeah, me neither. But the intrepid NY Post says so, so it must be true. Right? Well, follow this logic. The NY Post piece was “reported” by Snejana Farberov and Evan Simko-Bednarski. Snejana speaks Russian and Hebrew, which leads me to suspect she’s not exactly a fan of Putin. And Simko-Bednarski spent 5 years as a producer at CNN before snagging the gig at the NY Post as a bona fide reporter. So what is their source for the stunning news that Putin has the Big C? A guy who blogs in Russian on Telegram.
Farberov and Simko-Bednarski are kind enough to identify their source:
The channel — which is purportedly run by a former Russian Foreign Intelligence Service lieutenant general known by the pseudonym “Viktor Mikhailovich” — reported that Putin has been told by doctors that he must undergo an operation.
Guess what? The United States Intelligence Community also has weighed in and reportedly believes that some dark days lie in store for Vladimir. Their source? Open Source media. In other words, the alleged Russian General posting on Telegram. If you are a U.S. tax payer and wonder what the Intel Community is doing with your hard earned dollars you now have a partial answer–they are reading social media. Unclassified by the way until they slap a TS on a document that they are sending to Dementia Joe passing on the Telegram gossip.
Farberov and Simko-Bednarski did not stop there in doing their bit to build a propaganda narrative. The also reported:
Putin, 70, whose sickly appearance and uncharacteristically fidgety behavior in public have recently raised questions about his health, has been rumored to suffer from cancer and a host of other serious maladies, including Parkinson’s disease. . . .
The video follows reporting from Russian investigative outlet The Project, which — in a sizeable report on the strongman’s vigor — claimed he has been seen by a cancer doctor 35 times in recent years. Putin has become so paranoid about his health, the outlet claimed, he has even turned to unconventional, and barbaric, therapies.
Putin is said to bathe in the blood extracted from deer antlers, which are hacked off while they are growing and still full of fresh blood, the outlet said. The sickening “antler baths” are an alternative therapy in the Altai region of Russia, which borders Khazakstan and Mongolia.
Believers say the baths improve the cardiovascular system and rejuvenate the skin, The Project explained.
The New York Post is not one of the linchpins of the media establishment (it’s story about the Hunter Biden laptop was censored by Facebook and Twitter) but it is still susceptible to being a willing vessel to feed the American public monstrous lies about Putin and Russia.
For what purpose? The propaganda masters in charge of this Covert Action appear to be losing their mojo. They tried and failed to convince the public that Putin is a madman hell bent on conquering the world. They are failing to sustain the lie that Ukraine is prevailing over the dastardly Russians. Looks like the new playbook is to mingle the crazy narrative with the sickly man scenario. What else do you call a President who bathes in the “blood extracted from deer antlers?”
Maybe this is a crafty CIA plot to enlist PETA (you know, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) in the hate Putin club. PETA may not care that Ukrainian soldiers are being ground into dust by the Russian military machine, but by God they give a shit if Putin is cutting antlers from Bambi and draining the blood.
The NY Post reporters also claim that Putin is looking sickly. Really? Does this look like a sick man?
If Putin is battling the cancer plague, it does not seem to keep him from sending more precision missiles to western Ukraine city of Lviv:
Whatever target the Russians hit had materiel at that location that produced secondary explosions and a massive fire. (The folks who shot that video were less than a half mile from ground zero.) We are coming up on 70 days of the “Special Military Operation” and Russian has not run out of precision missiles. Bummer for the Ukrainians and the NATO nations busy sending them outdated military equipment.
Russia also was busy hitting another target–a rail road substation–in Volovets:
Alexander Kamyshin, the Chief Executive Officer JSC Ukrainian Railway (his job is to make the trains run on time) told reporters there were:
6 strikes on railway stations in the center and west of the country. 14 trains are delayed. Infrastructure damage is severe.
The Russian strikes on the rail road infrastructure has one purpose–prevent NATO supplied weapons and vehicles from reaching the remaining Ukrainian forces in the Donbas. I do not know if Putin has cancer, but there is no evidence the Russians are pulling back or husbanding their stockpile of missiles.
U.S. military leaders are still having trouble coming to grips with what Russia is doing in the Donbas and continue to claim that Russia is behind schedule:
so far the progress of the Russian army in the “second phase” of the operation is “minimal at best,” a senior Pentagon official told Axios.
The problems, according to him, are the same as during the attack on Kyiv: “weak” command, low morale and poor logistics lead to the fact that the army is again “behind the schedule.”
Last I checked, Russia did not announce any schedule. Putin simply stated the goal of the military operation is to “de-militarize and de-Nazify” Ukraine. If any one can point out where Putin put a timeline on the operation I welcome your input. I have neither read nor heard any such statement.
I normally trust the NY Post but they’ve been hauling water for Zelensky ever since Russian troops advanced into Ukraine back in February. Like every other American, they were brought up to fear Russia and almost seem like that they’ve forgotten that Russia and the USSR are not one and the same.
I am an American who was brought up to fear the Soviet Union and Communism. In my parochial school, we prayed for the conversion of Russia. That conversion has happened.
since when NYPost or other MSM trustworthy ? if you trust any of them then you should reexamine yourself as you already under kool aid magic spell
I saw in a newspaper while I was buying coffee at the Shell station that Putin is actually a enetically engineered space alien from Venus which is why they are selling so much oil and gas, its a plan to terraform the Earth through runaway greenhouse effect so the rest of his race can invade.
Has to be true. Makes sense, should I notify Langley?
How can you be sure that the CIA is not a bunch of space aliens hell bent on subjecting the human population?
Well… space aliens supposedly can travel intergalactically billions on light years. That suggest they have superior intelligence. That would exclude the CIA from being in the same class.
Haha, you beat me to it!
I do think the real problem can be summed up in the old saying:
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
H.L. Mencken
They are probably not stupid but think we – the public- and I suppose a good case can be made for that generalization.
That’s why we come here.
Watching CNN et al you can feel your IQ points evaporating by the minute.
well , the smearing of UFO groups during the 50s and 60s by intelligence are true story. At the front public face they pooh pooh and humiliate the witnesses of UFO sightings/encounters but behind the scenes they keep a record of sightings particularly the ones with confirmation from radar.
for example the Bethune Gander Navy aircraft sighting , where multiple witnesses saw a giganti red disc accosted the plane and fly formation with it .. when the pilot and passengers debarked they were debriefed by intel officers who have binders full of UFO photographs (some are gunsight camera photos)
yet the whole UFO-logy descended into the absurd with ‘aliens’ and ‘abductions’ totally ignoring the real cases of UFO sightings / flaps that happened all over the world (eg The Colares Flap)
In all seriousness. They better hope not. Putin is actually quite moderate. Russia has their own neocons in the wings itching like ours for total war. Putin is the only thing holding them back.
Russian Orthodoxy, Putin’s religion, teaches that God created all of us in His image and likeness; as a result, we must respect every person’s dignity, even our worst enemy. By Cossack tradition, we must first respect others as free men, before we can have any dealings with them.
The west better pray Putin stays healthy and in charge.
That alleged Russian general’s Telegram account also claimed that Russian troops’ irretrievable loss during the Special Operation amounts for 26k+, and Gazprom executives are dropping like flies and it’s making SVR (Russian Intel org) panick. In other words, it’s either troll account or some Ukrainian agitprop account making up fictional stories.
Exactly. Troll city!!
why look any further than this……… DECEPTION IN OPERATION Z
it satisfies strategic russian objectives, lulls those who want to believe the currency to continue in their delusion and emotionally makes them feel good doing it.
all in all it seems like a sun tzu move to me if you happen to be russian and actually undertstand your enemy.
Yeah! He also has senile dementia… the western media lost all credibility long time ago!
This is one of those Info War things where I do not understand the motive.
I’ve seen this play before. The U.S. Security establishment claims that Kim Jong-un, Ayatollah Khamenei or Putin are either dead or on death’s door. After the story is debunked, the same experts chortle on FOX / CNN, ‘this just shows the lack of transparency in totalitarian regimes’.
YES! That must be it. It’s their fault they are not dead. We made up a story and now we are the victims of the lies we told.
Again, I don’t get the motive for saying stuff like this other then a slow news day.
sir, in a narcissistic society only today matters, if you mess up yesterday its forgotten, deemed irrelevant or you attack those who mention the inconvienent fact you got it wrong.
this is why west seamlessly moves from one failure to the next without ever reflecting how it got there and why it continues to screw up at all levels.
It is just incredible how Western leaders (political, media and intellectual) come to have such contempt for their own people. What exactly do they feed the people in the Collective West to reduce them to such gullible sheepies?
I agree totally. The West is committing suicide. In a modern society, propaganda is very effective at leading the sheeple in any direction. Need a war feed them hate. Need to win an election invent a crazy conspiracy (Russiagate). There is no whopper too big for the masses to swallow.
I wish the US had leadership on the caliber of Mr. Putin. Instead we have cartoon characters.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-will-not-pause-military-operation-ukraine-peace-talks-2022-04-11/
Lavrov has made it clear that the “clock will not go before the horse”…
Il suffit de demander aux Africains, qui ont deja tout subis aux mains sanglants des Occidentaux: Il ne s’agit pas d’une “operation militaire” en Ukraine, mais d’une “operation humanitaire”….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5q1P-8kttA
Afrique Média live 24h/24
It is clear that many Ukrainians agree with that
Thanks, Larry, Given how much of my taxes go to pay for this propaganda, I do feel the quality (like Rocky 5) is embarrassingly low. I dream of a return to higher quality propaganda.
Part of The Problem is the US personalization of the enemy as a single person (to equate to Hitler), which leads to a rather childish (and dysfunctional) foreign policy. VVP is the head (albeit a very popular head and very skilled bureaucratic fighter) of a massive bureaucracy and cultural imperatives whose Foreign Policy will endure with or without (and as C. CHuba notes likely more aggressively) VVP.
cognitively dissonantly, this reasoning says the US is its are our current doddering president…… What must the rookies think of the US who put such a leader in power?
So, our spies claim detailed knowledge of Putin’s personal health issues that could only have come from high-level Kremlin sources. Yet every time Russia acts militarily, we’re caught flat-footed. Most recently, US officials spent 3 months hollering from the rooftops that ‘invasion is imminent,’ but when the Russians actually moved, they appear stunned. Their excuse? ‘Putin’s crazy!’ (and thus unpredictable).
My theories:
[1] CIA et al have no high-level Russian political, military or intel ‘assets.’ None. They haven’t for a decade or longer. Their ONLY ‘intel’ (aside from sig-int and aerial/satellite imaging) is open source. Kremlin decision-making is a big black box to them. But our spies don’t even seem to care: Today they see their mission not as collecting actionable intelligence, but running psy-ops to manipulate public opinion.
[2] The ‘imminent invasion’ shouts from DC that began last November were meant strictly to discourage Putin from interfering with Pentagon/Kiev plans to reconquer Donbass this spring, by ginning up pre-emptive bad press. This is a well-worn domestic political tactic: For example, whenever GOP hacks start mumbling about ‘fiscal responsibility,’ the Left replies with overwrought accusations, like that 2016 ad with the Paul Ryan lookalike pushing Granny’s wheelchair off a cliff. Unfortunately for the administration, Putin is not a GOP hack.
[3] CIA does a poor job even of evaluating open-source intelligence – like Putin’s speeches. ‘Denazification and demilitarization,’ from the start, implied an almost open-ended, methodical, time-, labor- and firepower-intensive campaign. Yet as LJ already noted, the spooks continue trying to gaslight everyone that they’re privy to some Russian timetable.
I suspect that (reality based) analysis that goes against the current zeitgeist is not seen as the pathway of career advancement.
tell the politico – idiots what they want to hear and get a cherry – its not as if they are listening – just nodding and drooling – or get banished to the basement.
They must think that Brandon is a feature, not a bug!
I just hope our Congress prevents Biden’s latest proposed $33 billion bullshit aid package to Ukraine – and BTW it’s not just for the benefit of Ukraine but other EU countries as well. The fine print revealed some vague and very questionable appropriations, no doubt with plenty left over for kickbacks and other graft.
With record inflation continuously eroding working Americans’ wealth and wages – inflation caused by policies set forth by Church of Climatology zealots – only totally clueless and/or corrupt pols would vote to send that kind of money abroad in this economic environment as people struggle here at home. Talk of RECESSION and STAGFLATION is in the air. Ukrainian leaders need to make peace sooner than their American puppet masters propose – the goodwill of many people supporting this war isn’t infinite. I almost puked seeing Pelosi and Schiff in Kiev the other day. SMFH…
it boggles the mind how the sheeple in the west believed all these lies / fake news , are they that stupid to think otherwise ? for example the incredibly sloppy job of russia-gate was believed by many , and the manufactured hatred toward Trump was incredibly blatant and visible for all yet all the sheeples are blind..
Just like how weak minded sheeples put ukraine flags on their twitter handle and yell ‘slava ukraini’ without understanding anything..
If MSM publish data that real putin already deceased and what everyone saw today was a puppet animated by strings and cables , most of the sheep will believe this absurd tale