Moscow Residents Can't Understand Why City Being Targeted by Drones

Others are outraged that Ukrainians are attacking at night

Courtesy of PBS

The reaction of Moscow residents to the drone attacks, which now take place almost daily, demonstrates two things: The Kremlin’s strategy for isolating Russians from the truth has been off-the-charts successful, and it makes clear to us how completely delusional the average Russia is.

Consider these two comments:

“It’s very scary. What if it [the drone] hits the house next time?” another [Moscow] resident told DW, noting that she has a young child in the home. “Who would have declared such a war on us in Moscow?” she asked unironically.

In a video that went viral, a well-known blogger complained about how rude it is for drones to be launched “when people are sleeping.”

“Ukraine is going crazy. Drones at three in the morning. Have you lost your mind?” Hilmi Forks said. “I got scared and jumped off the couch from this explosion… If even one more drone crashes anywhere here in Moscow… I’ll pick up a rifle and go to the front. You got that? (Russians Are Strangely Stumped)”

The young mother is clearly focused on raising her child. It would be unrealistic to expect that day she will browse the internet, which would require a VPN connection, to learn the truth. She is most likely sufficiently apolitical to the point where she can’t even imagine that the hysterical lies on Russian TV could be anything but the truth. Nonetheless, it does show us how deep down in the Kremlin’s rabbit hole she lives. The war has been raging for 18 months; by just being alive, you would think she’d understand that such an attack was possible.

I can tell you, though, that when you live in Russia, the effects of the Kremlin’s buffer were always so powerful that it was almost like living in a house made of sound-absorbing cork. Almost nothing from the West, even before the war, trickles into Russia until it has been repackaged to align with a Kremlin narrative.

There was always access to the internet, and CNN could be seen in hotels and maybe on some cable packages. Still, everything shown in Russia has first been cut and edited not to offer too much of a different opinion. Most Russians in Moscow and St. Petersburg are not following the Kremlin’s slanted version of the war on TV, which means this woman is even more out of the loop.

In the West, there is white noise created by world events, and the narratives align because what is being reported is the details of an actual event. Russia never reports an event but shapes and molds it first. Still, though, the absolute cluelessness of this woman is astounding.

The blogger whining about being woken up and scared at 3 a.m. just further speaks to the belief that the world revolves around Moscow. This freak making the video almost cries about being so startled that he lept off the couch and ran to the window. His complete lack of concern that entire apartment blocks are being reduced to rubble while Ukrainians sleep is proof we will all use in the future when Russia crawls back to the West for forgiveness. We will show them such videos.

Some residents of Moscow think that the Russian government organizes the drone attacks. They are harkening back to when Putin’s FSB blew up apartments in Russia, killing hundreds of sleeping Russians to justify a second invasion of Chechnya. The increased drone attacks, they say, will justify another mass mobilization. It must be nice to think your government is so protective of you, right?

As Russia Today’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, said recently about the drone attacks: “If you think this will make us stop, you are wrong. We will instead hit the gas.”

I hope they all rot in hell.