> You know, let’s not breach anyone’s privacy. We came to you for protection, but this is turning into some kind of an interrogation. You are going too far. We came to you for protection. You’re not interrogating us.
And you can almost see through the logic - "Hmm, the West sympathizes with gays so why don't we insinuate you are gay and then they'll feel sorry for you and forget about you being GRU agents assassinating people".
As I read (forget the source) the purpose of insinuating they were gay had to do with convincing Russians they weren't military officers. Because apparently in Russian society it is unthinkable that a military officer would be gay, so if they convince Russian citizens they are gay that also convinces them that they can't be GRU officers.
In decades past, being homosexual was considered a risk factor for intelligence agents. An adversary who knew they were gay could threaten exposure, thereby gaining a lever to potentially turn the agent. So they tried very hard to keep gays out of the intelligence services.
I don't know if the US still does this. I'd be a bit surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if Russia still did, though.
I expect the US still does do this, but only for gay people in the closet since an openly gay person is immune to that sort of blackmail. Same goes for infidelity etc.
Part of the reason they are slow-walking Trump's pronouncements on trans people in the military, is that after getting rid of 'don't ask don't tell', the military will have wanted to know about people's sexual preferences, especially in key roles, so as to guard against cases of blackmail.
I guarantee that they will have key people who have told them all their kinks, that they are really trying hard not to get rid of.
Interesting, yeah I can see it. I bet they thought it would work from both angles. Westerners will feel sorry for exposing the gay tourists and Russians will feel convinced they can't be GRU officers.
>Russians will feel convinced they can't be GRU officers
Russian internet has a field day(or a month already really) of jokes that the GRU officers, which all are undoubtedly, in the Russian mythos, true patriots and heterosexual macho made in the image of the Putin himself, would carry out every order for the Motherland - to kill a traitor, to die for the Motherland, and even to truly practice homosexuality, all in the name of Motherland on the orders of "the comrade General".
The guys in the interview are obviously very bad at impersonating gays, and that follows pretty much the same outrageous "signature" style (the Russian saying is "sewn together using white thread" as it is very noticeable on any garments except white) as using "Novichok" and polonium (or assassinating major opposition leader right in front of the Putin's office windows) - all that is to make sure that there are no doubts about who really did it while of course officially denying any responsibility. Just like the signature killings by Mafia (which the Russian government in its nature really is) - everybody has to clearly understand who did it without the perpetrators and their bosses explicitly claiming it.
To the "the_grue" below - sorry, man, no offense, you just don't understand what you're talking about. Most probably you're just not a Russian.
Edit: you added that you speak Russian. Being a Russian and speak Russian are 2 very different things. That ridicule you see on the Internet is real, no doubts. What you don't get is that it doesn't make Putin ridiculous [deep] in the eyes of the populace and that it wasn't a failure [deep] in the eyes of that populace - and that is the main tragedy of Russia.
Please reply to the comment you're replying to by clicking 'reply'. It's not fair to continue the conversation from a perch at the top of the thread. How is the other person supposed to respond, or the reader to follow? Threaded comments solve this problem; please use them.
It's a little weird to keep talking to your edits. How come Putin is being ridiculed and it doesn't make him ridiculous in the eyes of the populace? I mean of course not all the populace is on the Internet and not all of them are reading the same stuff I'm reading, but still, many, many people are exposed to the ridicule, which means that Putin has lost this battle of hearts and minds as far as those people exposed are concerned.
Just like any other country, Russia has several distinct information silos. The older population (like the vast majority of my family) are largely still stuck to the TV and old media for their news, which is tightly controlled by the state. The younger population is on the internet and until recently, the government had been largely hands off with online censorship.
We see the loud online group that grew up after the 90s shitshow but not the rest of the population, which has far more influence and institutional power (for what it's worth). They are far more likely to support Putin for getting the country through that ordeal.
I don't buy it. This whole story makes GRU and, by extension, Putin himself look ridiculous in the eyes of their own populace. Russian-speaking Internet communities are savoring this failure in every conceivable way right now, ridiculing Putin and the Russian propaganda. And that's a major failure for Putin's regime, which is built on nationalism, on a promise of greatness, on claiming that Russia is a major world power, etc.
It makes them look like they do not care about putting on a good show, because they do not feel they need to and they find it funnier to present an obvious circus.
It also might be doubling as a public punishment for the spies for being sloppy. Putting them on TV like that is directly telling them that their careers are over.
If lucky, they might be transformed into celebrities, just for the annoyance value to the UK.
Is the international politics equivalent of telling someone to stop hitting themselves, after grabbing their wrist and whacking them in the face with their own hand.
That would be way too subtle for the common folk. Whatever GRU's plan was, in reality most Russian people just take it at face value: Russian spies got exposed, Putin's lie got exposed, the spies put on a miserable show on TV, and now even their true identities have been exposed (only one so far, but I expect the other one to be exposed soon, too). That's a failure.
I'm pretty sure you're reading way too much into it because you've been told Putin (and, by extension, his subordinates) was a great tactician one step ahead of everyone else. I never believed it and I don't believe it now.
>That would be way too subtle for the common folk.
Are you channeling H. L. Menken?
I think Putin is a comedian and two things I have noticed about Russian humour are firstly, always be deadpanning, and secondly, it isn't really funny unless someone ends up nearly dead.
I also think he is a good tactician but a lousy strategist and I don't think he is in charge of as much of the CCCP as is made out. He is the front man for a conglomerate of interests, many of which operate largely autonomously, and would cause him no end of internal problems should he try and reign them in.
This explains the sharp disconnect between the relative professionalism in the seizing of Crimea, while at the same time lending out SAM systems to idiots.
I'd also say there is a very good chance that Putin did not order this operation in the first place and is playing cleanup.
---
edit - I think there could also be a lot of "Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?" going on.
It not being directly ordered is an alternative reason why someone so high up was doing this rather than a subordinate.
This could well have been showing off to curry favour, knowing that the target was in the regime's bad books already.
Being paraded on TV in the manner that they were after being uncovered, I think lends weight to this hypothesis.
I don't know who that is. But if I am channeling anyone, that would be R.J. Hanlon, who said "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." [1]
That does not work very well in politics, or indeed many other areas of life.
People are very good at acting dumb to avoid blame.
Hanlon's razor is a method of being polite, rather than a robust logical position.
Malicious compliance, being one example of this behaviour, even has it's own popular group on reddit.
Edit - for anything that consists of an established bureaucracy, you would actually do better to invert Hanlon's razor in most cases.
Edit2 - also, the entire premise is logically inconsistent, as it places idiocy and maliciousness as being mutually exclusive options, which they clearly are not.
In the first place, Robert J. Hanlon submitted the aphorism for the joke book collection "Murphy's Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong". And, according to wikipedia, probably stole it from a Heinlein short story, so I suspect you might be taking it a little more seriously than Hanlon did.
> People are very good at acting dumb to avoid blame.
That clearly didn't work in that case, did it?
> Hanlon's razor is a method of being polite, rather than a robust logical position.
Hanlon's razor is related to Occam's razor: in case there are two competing theories about the world, one of which is complicated and the other simple, always prefer the simple one. Neither is a logical argument, both are abductive heuristics [1] intended to produce the most likely explanation. Can it be played? It can, but it's even more unlikely, as that would further increase the level of sophistication. You can't rely on Hanlon's razor in a game of chess between two grandmasters, but the real world has a few crucial differences from chess, for example the fact that no player can realistically contain every possible interaction of their actions with other forces' actions. Which is why nobody is willing to bet on making such stupid and dangerous mistakes on purpose as exposing your agents, exposing your leader's lies and making your country suffer retribution for assassination on foreign soil. And for what? To laugh the whole world in the face? That's insane.
If you don't think that they were actually putting forward a tale to be believed in the first place, but were signalling that they don't have to bother, then it just doesn't even apply.
>Neither is a logical argument, both are abductive heuristics
Occam's razor is a logical position to take in an absence of further information, although sometimes wrong, especially in biology. Hanlon setting up malice and stupidity as an exclusive or gate, is not. Nor was it ever meant to be taken as such.
>Which is why nobody is willing to bet on making such stupid and dangerous mistakes on purpose as exposing your agents, exposing your leader's lies and making your country suffer retribution for assassination on foreign soil. And for what? To laugh the whole world in the face? That's insane.
Putin has been exposing his own lies for years on TV, usually with a smile. This is the guy who goes on his third ever scuba dive on the news and brings back museum quality amphorae. Lying barefacedly, with the audience knowing it is all lies, is a large part of his public persona. It is meant to both be funny and set an example that he doesn't need to bother with little things such as truth.
>The PM put on a diving suit and dived deep into the Taman Bay where, to everyone’s utter surprise, he managed to find two ancient amphorae dating back to the 6th century AD.
>Putin also told journalists that the Taman dive was his third-ever attempt at scuba diving.
Then you don't seem to have an argument against Hanlon's razor?
> Hanlon setting up malice and stupidity as an exclusive or gate, is not
In this case, clearly, the two explanations are incompatible: either Putin planned the world to discover that he was lying about the assassination, etc., etc., or he did not.
> brings back museum quality amphorae
That's a completely different class of lies. That one is a bravado that shows the level of intelligence he assumes in his fans, nothing more. He certainly didn't risk getting himself into another cold war by fishing out those amphorae!
To anyone who has paid attention to any of the history of Russian/UK spy scandals, the idea that homosexuality would prevent someone from being a GRU officer, is frankly almost as hilarious as some of the Russian buzzfeed style sites posting articles about how Salisbury is the center of UK gay nightlife.
I admit ignorance in this regard - simply restating a theory that seemed to make sense to me. I suppose being a parrot is bad, but it makes more sense to me than what the GP posted.
The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive. There is then the audience that knows it is all bollocks from the start, many of whom treat it as a massive in-joke that they can take part in, rather than an actual attempt at lying, which wouldn't be the case if the lying was any good.
I found it surprising RT aired that interview. The suspects acted extremely evasive and had a very weak cover story. The host also seemed dubious. There was one part where she said, "you all are sweating, let me turn on the AC," and another part where she said, "people won't believe you if you don't provide more information about your background." If their goal was to convince viewers that the suspects were innocent, they failed miserably.
There is probably no particular goal. It's just how they do things, how they exert power. Active measures [1] and all that. Fear of being poisoned keeps people loyal. Disinformation and propaganda don't let dissent spread, influence politics, etc.
None of this requires the weird song and dance with the Putin interview 'suggestion', the interview on RT hours afterwards, etc. It's probably not particularly fruitful to treat and try to interpret this as some kind of deeply subtle hyperdimensional chess.
Now it is interesting to go back and look at the PR campaign and all the disinformation pushed to deflect and cover it up.
The RT channel's interview with the "gay Russian tourists" was precious.
https://www.rt.com/news/438356-rt-petrov-boshirov-full-inter...
> You know, let’s not breach anyone’s privacy. We came to you for protection, but this is turning into some kind of an interrogation. You are going too far. We came to you for protection. You’re not interrogating us.
And you can almost see through the logic - "Hmm, the West sympathizes with gays so why don't we insinuate you are gay and then they'll feel sorry for you and forget about you being GRU agents assassinating people".