The lost tablet and secret documents: Clues pointing to a shadowy Russian army | Hacker News Reader

The lost tablet and secret documents: Clues pointing to a shadowy Russian army

bbc.co.uk

102 pointsrobocat36 comments

There is no shortage of poor and desperate Russians that are willing to become Mercenaries. When the Russians use these forces against Slavic people like Ukrainians, they typically draw on men from far off regions (around the Stans or Siberia or Chechens) that have little in common with the local population they are attacking. Many of these types fought along Russians living in Ukraine and provided support while the Russian Military called the shots and directed traffic and weapons into the war zone. I was over joyed when the US killed about 200 + of them in Syria when they thought they could attack US Military positions without consequences. 200 hundred less to return to Russia and kill Ukrainians in Donbas.

There is no shortage of poor, desperate, and morally flexible (to put it mildly) Russians, period. There is no need to bring racism into it. In the particular case of Ukraine it's actually counterproductive--this "diversity" was overblown by both sides: Russians wanted to represent the whole affair as "Soviet men of all kinds defending against Ukrainian nazis", and Ukrainians wanted to see it as "an attack of an Asian horde". I understand it's hard for Ukrainians to accept that people attacking them cannot care less for their common Slavic roots, but the sooner you do the better your chances of survival.

I think propaganda on both sides is “dehumanizing the enemy” as much as it can and the average Ivan/Dmytro is on the receiving end.

There's also the (I think mostly emergent) truth bending too, beyond morale i.e. hyper normalisation, but slightly less glamorous than usually depicted.

> Mr Utkin, a former paratrooper in the Russian special forces, is reportedly the founder and overall commander of the Wagner group. He himself was formerly known as “Wagner” because of his alleged interest in Nazi Germany, which promoted the music of composer Richard Wagner.

The photo of him shows what looks like an "SS" rune tattoo on his collar.

How prevalent is Nazism in Russia? It kinda boggles my mind, since they had a very low opinion of Slavs and treated Russian soldiers very badly.

Yeah, the Soviet Union had 20-27M deaths in WWII, the most of any country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

> Yeah, the Soviet Union had 20-27M deaths in WWII, the most of any country.

That's another reason for a Russian to not be a fan of Nazism, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable one. The thing that boggles my mind is the Nazis thought Slavs like Russians were subhuman and planned to exterminate them [1]. "Russian Nazi" seems like it would be almost the same level of contradiction as "Nazi Jew."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Slavic_sentiment#Nazi_Ger...

I don't know what you are downvoted for, because all you said is exactly he history.

POV camps for Wester Allies and Soviets were like haven and hell. Soviets were considered a half-human by nazi regime.

Some niggles:

'Only' about half of those were in Russia itself. Breaking things out by Soviet 'provinces', which are now independent countries: Belarus had 2.3M and Ukraine had 6.9M.

Absolute numbers also don't tell the whole story: 25% of Belarus' population was killed, while 'only' 12.7% of Russia's was. Ukraine, 16.3%; Latvia, 13.7%; Armenia, 13.7%; Poland, 17%.

> How prevalent is Nazism in Russia?

There were Nazi groups in 1990s and 2010s, then government policies stopped them mostly. It all started with forbidding nazis, then were atheists insulting religious people, now it came to forbidding to insult government.

In a short, I wouldn't be surprised if some people made Nazi's tattoos at 1990s. Though not now, especially because after 2014 Russia's propaganda paints Ukraine as a Nazi's lair, and shows a lot of examples how it is bad. Nazi's symbols are associated with Ukrainians in a public unconsciousness, and one might get hurt showing them in a public. Or, more likely, imprisoned because "Nazi's propaganda" is punishable by the law.

> It kinda boggles my mind, since they had a very low opinion of Slavs and treated Russian soldiers very badly.

Russian Nazis promote superiority not of Aryan race, but of some other. Slavs race, I believe. Or may be they are just promote Russian's superiority. Never bothered to learn their beliefs in detail.

I think, that their minds works like "our grandfathers kicked our arses, so they were strong; Nazi kicked arses of our grandfathers hard so they were strong also; so if we copied them, we would be strong also". Grandfather's ideas failed with USSR, they needed some new ideas, so they chose Nazi's.

Pretty prevalent, and they're supporting far-right parties in Europe and US as well.

How is this different than former black water or other numerous military contractors supported by their respective governments. These outfits should be generally banned.

The article explicitly contrasts them against Blackwater. Especially by comparing the relationship to the host country.

Blackwater doesn't get supplied with tanks, Predator drones, etc by the US Army. AFAIK they're also open about where they're operating, and the US admits that they have contracts. I think there would be hell to pay if Blackwater got caught planting landmines in residential areas

Semantics if a mercenary company is allowed to operate as a business it’s implicitly condoned by a government. https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/Article/2031922/mercenar...

They should all be banned no matter if they are called black water or Wagner.

Can you elaborate? The article seems to make a distinction between companies like Blackwater and "illegal mercenaries" like Wagner.

Whether it's "illegal" or not depends on which side you're looking at it from.

This article may contrast with Academi/Blackwater, but several others (including Erik Prince himself) acknowledge the similarities.

References:

[0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/0nlt5lmbTd8q9tlW26zJbT?si=C...

[1] https://theintercept.com/2020/04/13/erik-prince-russia-merce...

[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/10/the-world-first-jihadi-...

[3] https://www.deepstateblog.org/2019/01/30/inside-wagner-the-r...

They are not. Erik Prince tried to hook up with them 2 years back.[0]

[0] https://theintercept.com/2020/04/13/erik-prince-russia-merce...

Does anyone know what mapping application is being shown in that article? It looks like Google Maps or something but I didn't think it supported a waypoint/POI layer like the ones shown. They certainly appear to be screenshots of an app actually running on the tablet (Samsung Galaxy Tab it looks like).

I won't be surprised if it's a custom app made for the wider company / Russian military. Or even a simple Map viewer (based on OSM maybe). I think it's weird that the Waypoint/POI layer is actually baked into the map (perspective shift + pixellation). Maybe it's a map viewer of a custom map/imagery (distributed from command).

Yeah that's why I'm curious. It looks similar to some commercial mapping applications as it has some georeference display and map related controls but then it's just displaying what looks like a pre-baked map. I couldn't find any Android apps with a similar UI. I hope someone has some more information about it.

There are definitely mapping apps out there that let you put custom layers on a map or annotate a base map and then project it in perspective like that.

The UI looked familiar to me (I have some experience with custom mapping apps) but they copyright in the upper right corner appears to be in Cyrillic. [1]

[1] https://imgur.com/a/cyHGFoB

Oh man good eye. I wonder if that's a copyright for the app or the base map. I'm guessing the base map as I doubt some custom military app is going to put a copyright on the image.

On some of the other photos, there's a Google watermark on the map right above the controls in the lower left corner.

Don't understand the first word, the second looks like "Microsoft", the third is definitely Yandex.

It’s probably a Russian equivalent of the Tactical Assault Kit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Team_Awareness_Kit

Thanks for the link, I'd never seen that app before.

Not so shadowy at all. Their job ads are on TV.

Where? Could you share a link to one?

I don't believe that such a secret organization does not use basic security measures like password, device encryption, etc. Even unmodified iPad is more secure than that. And you would expect some security investments if they cared to build custom map software.

So probably fake.

I don't think it is fake. People from PMC are not managed so well, they are like freelancers.

Update: especially Wagner

Seeing the awfully bad spelling mistakes makes me feel like it's real. One can hardly fake these without being from the same background.

Given the fact that journalist Clarissa Ward was easily able to find one of the assassin's that attempted to kill Navalny, convince him on a unsecure phone line that she was a KGB official and they needed to immediately meet, and then show up to his apartment, that was an outright slum ( yes - their state assassin's live in slums )

It's not incredibly hard to believe that they don't exactly have their shit together for whatever levels of operations

I don't believe that story either.

It was actually Navalny who did that, not Ms. Ward

"I don't believe that such a secret organization does not use basic security measures..."

I'm sure it does. Yet every day people leave secrets on buses and leave their devices unlocked and write the password on post-it notes and on and on and on and on.

Your argument seems circular. People that don't make mistakes don't make mistakes, therefore they didn't make this mistake. Great. What about people that do make mistakes? Which is basically all people.

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