The largest German daily Bild / Bild.de writes about journalist Viktoriya Roshchyna, tortured in September 2024 and who died in Russian captivity.

Reactions?

You can see them yourselves. By the way, although not as numerous, a fairly large troupe of merry trolls accompanied the same paper’s coverage of the searches for missing U.S. servicemen in Lithuania.

Trolls gonna troll.

We spoke with an artilleryman bluntly, without courtesies or euphemisms - he was ripping bandages off wounds and showing how things will go if we ignore the important processes already happening in our space and are inclined to dismiss them:

“ah, that’s just bots, factories of bots, what are we supposed to do?” Later, when the conversation turned to democracy in our Baltic states, the man sharply cut in, that there

must be moderation and limits in everything.

“Democracy must have restraint, otherwise you will start just to “play” with it,” he smiles. “After all, the enemy is watching closely how we are weakening ourselves. Watching, observing and counting moments convenient for a strike. He is a master of very nasty and cunning operations; we are far from him. The enemy thinks and plans non-stop. A huge number of people there do exactly that: provocations, operations, staged events, building them. They calculate everything - when is the best time to attack, and how best to do it. They rethink dozens of options: if not A, then B. If not B, then C, and so on. It’s extremely sticky business. They’re slippery. They confuse people’s minds with their words so easily, that we then look at what is white and say: ‘maybe it’s not so white after all, maybe you are right, maybe it’s gray.’ And suddenly you realize that half your country’s people are already beginning to doubt something.

They perfectly understand that Europeans do not want wars,” the soldier continues to deconstruct the enemy’s mentality and modus operandi. “That’s normal, war is horribly awful. So the enemy uses that and exerts pressure: bots, social media posts. They spread the message that fighting is unnecessary. They also add posts like: “There was no occupation, we only saved you from the Germans”. And fed on such lies, a person, as if in a hot bath, falls asleep. And then…

Then those warm ones – the enemy will come  and put them under a cold shower. Sorry, but I speak as it is. Indeed, once in a ‘warm bath,’ you don’t want to climb out. And the awakening will be very painful and very unpleasant for everybody, for every country. Then you’ll start thinking: Lord, for what? We are living in the twenty-first century, how is such barbarity even possible?! And they will just continue.

And believe me - they really don’t care about anything!

I thank the Media Support Fund for supporting the post series “War in Ukraine: The Gap Between the Military and Society”