I was on the Perspective With Jesse Zurawell show on TNT Radio. You can give it a listen here:
The first half is general Ukraine stuff, eg the Ukrainian strike on the Engels-2 airbase.
In the second half, we talked about Yevgeny Nuzhin whom Wagner snuffed out on video with a sledgehammer and then bragged about it.
And whom Ukraine had given up to Wagner, against his will, knowing they were delivering him to his death. — After they had used him for propaganda videos they knew would make his safe return impossible.
It’s a story so ugly that nobody has an interest in delving into it, precisely because it makes everyone involved — that is both sides — look so incredibly bad.
And that’s why I thought it was important to cover it, and I thank Jesse for helping with that.
Nuzhin was a trooper of the interior ministry, a cop, who became a criminal. Then he was a convict who went to war but become a traitor. He claimed he couldn’t fight Ukraine because he had relatives in Lviv, but then claimed willingness to fight Russia albeit he had even closer family in Moscow. He was a strange character, a convicted murderer, and a manipulator who couldn’t tell truth from a lie. And yet he was treated with so much cynicism, betrayed so ruthlessly and coldly to Wagner by both Ukraine and Russia, by people who were supposed to be better than him, that he ends up looking sympathetic by comparison.
Perhaps this is a lesson and illustration of where war takes people. Whether we are talking about his Ukrainian handlers or the Russian government that places convicts with Wagner, we are presumably talking about normal, socially-adjusted people, not damaged minds like Nuzhin’s. Yet here they felt justified to act as monsters. I bet they don’t lose a second of sleep over it.
In a different century, Dostoyevski would have written a novel about it, but in this one all you get is me. Even Western MSM won’t touch it because what at first glance looks like such a dunk on Russia at the pull of a first thread incriminates Ukraine just as much.
In the middle of a war between them, their joint crime against Nuzhin continues to unite the Ukrainians, the Russians, and even the Americans, in a conspiracy of silence.
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Reminds me of the George Floyd story in some ways. You might want to track down and interview the family for more information.