Doomscrolling the Ukrainian news train this afternoon. A shitload of shit on the InterWebs, easily outperforming everything else. Especially poping news stories in the unique placement of the Ukrainian event as a social media platform all its own, and Vlad Putin being shown as an asshole who will eventually lose his misbegotten shit.
All captured for Twitter distribution.

An example of sight: Contrast images of youth — which one of this pair is the young, nice guy, and which one the nasty thug/tool?
Duh!

??? > ??? pic.twitter.com/IYSjmKcA45

— Max Fras (@maxfras) March 5, 2022

Hence, in the eye of the world, Putin is a villain everyone recognizes.
Apparently, he’s losing the social-media war, too. Ian Garner is a historian of Russian war propaganda and the author of “Stalingrad Lives: Stories of Combat and Survival.” in an op/ed at The Washington Post yesterday concluded:

Perhaps the military plan is to brutalize Ukraine into submission, tearing into the population with thermobaric bombs and indiscriminate missile launches, as the Russian army did in Syria. That might end the immediate military conflict, but it would be a propaganda disaster.
Civilian casualties would be enormous. Unlike in Syria, where Russians and their army’s victims had little in common, Ukrainians and Russians share languages, families, and a dense web of history and culture.
As the past few days have shown, news and footage of such attacks will seep through Instagram and Telegram into Russia, further undermining the official line.

If the war drags on, Ukrainian forces continue to mount attacks on an occupying Russian army, Russian troops begin to die in substantial numbers, and sanctions begin to bite at home, Putin’s government will have to act to regain control over its information sphere.
It may excommunicate celebrities like Urgant. It may, as it has attempted in the past, try to block access to independent social media. But doing so would come at a high political price among a skeptical, social-media-addicted younger generation. And a younger, antiwar generation increasingly opposed to an aging, isolated leadership may — as the Soviets discovered after their disastrous adventure in Afghanistan — cause unexpected problems for Vladimir Putin.

Putin being a ‘personalist dictator,’ he’s attempting to create a vacuum of truth inside Russia, which in this era of the InterWebs, is near-about impossible — via Wired yesterday afternoon:

But the Russian government’s decision to block Facebook and Twitter revealed the cost of those measures. It will also be read as a warning shot to other social networks planning similar crackdowns on Russian propaganda.
US social media sites operating in Russia have spent years shaping a presence that maintains just enough of their American identity to be considered a liberal alternative to heavily censored domestic platforms but not enough to prompt Russian regulators to kick them out of the country.
The crisis in Ukraine has upended that delicate equilibrium. As Ukraine’s government pressures the platforms to block Russian state media altogether, concerns have been raised that if the platforms do that, Russia will retaliate—cutting off ordinary Russians behind a digital iron curtain.

Meanwhile, in America T-Rump pulls a Putin disaster in starting his own Twitter 2.0 — and it sucks:

Trump’s much-hyped Truth Social social media platform is a huge failure on every level other than grifting https://t.co/K9jtUAXQGH

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 5, 2022

Read the Politico story — Senior staff writer Ruby Cramer joined the platform and found an empty, ‘purple shaded’
warehouse, concluding:

Around 10 a.m., I Truthed my first Truth.
“Anybody out there?” I wrote.
By the end of the day, no one had responded.

Putin hated T-Rump losing the election — he had him set up for an easy Ukraine ride, but instead, he’s up to his ass in shit.
He wants to return to the good, old days:

Even now here we are, once again…

(Illustration out front found here)