Rina Lu🇷🇺
@rinalu_ • 48,897 subscribers
I’m here to correct the record. History matters and I’m done letting it be rewritten. Follow me for sourced, visual history of Russia/USSR, and the West’s wars.
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Hitler had been dead for three weeks when Churchill asked his generals for a plan to attack the Soviet Union. German soldiers were supposed to march on his side. The plan was called Operation UNTHINKABLE. In May 1945, British military planners examined a surprise attack on the Red Army, with July 1 set as the starting date. The offensive would involve British and American forces, Polish troops, and rearmed Wehrmacht divisions. But Stalin already knew what was coming from Soviet intelligence. In June, Marshal Zhukov unexpectedly regrouped Soviet forces and strengthened their defenses. Meanwhile, British generals were doing the math. The Red Army outnumbered Western forces in Central Europe by roughly three to one. A quick victory looked unlikely, and a full-scale war against the USSR could drag on for years. Churchill never launched the attack. But he had ordered his generals to prepare for war against the very country Britain had just fought alongside. As Leo Tolstoy put it, “A word is an action.”
Rina Lu🇷🇺106,343 görüntüleme • 9 saat önce
Göring needed ten minutes to humiliate the American prosecutor at Nuremberg. It took a Soviet lawyer and a folder of Göring's own papers to finish him. Here he is with his pet lion cub Caesar, in the days when he thought nobody would ever hold him to account. At the trial he called himself an old hunter. 80 years ago this week, he cheated the gallows with a cyanide capsule. At the trial, he ran rings around the American prosecutor Robert Jackson. One judge wrote that within ten minutes Göring was "the complete master" of him. Then Soviet prosecutor Roman Rudenko took over. No speeches, only Göring's own papers. Göring claimed Germany struck the USSR because it was threatened. Rudenko got him to admit the Luftwaffe's plan for the invasion was ready in November 1940, seven months before the attack. Then he read out Göring's own speech from August 1942: "I intend to plunder, and to do it thoroughly." Göring: "I do not deny that I said that." The old hunter had walked into his own trap😏
Rina Lu🇷🇺159,852 görüntüleme • 1 gün önce
Putin was asked why Russia was building a pipeline that bypassed Ukraine and Poland. He answered with a children's riddle. In fluent German. What was that about? The context of this story started 10 years earlier. In 1995, Russia and Ukraine agreed on a joint venture to run Ukrainian pipelines, equal shares. Gazprom never got access. In 2002, a second try: a 50/50 gas consortium, backed by Germany. It stalled when Kiev demanded a controlling stake. So in September 2005, Putin and Gerhard Schröder signed Nord Stream, a pipeline carrying Russian gas straight to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Asked if anyone was being pushed out, Putin said no. Then he told a Russian riddle in German: A and B were sitting on a pipe. A fell off, B disappeared. What was left on the pipe? The answer is И. Which means and. The little word that connects A and B. Which means that since Ukraine and Poland were making it complicated, the direct infrastructure between Germany and Russia is what's left. Nobody was being pushed out. They were simply bypassed.
Rina Lu🇷🇺118,984 görüntüleme • 2 gün önce
Finland pretends it was just a small country that Stalin decided to swallow. Then you read the 1939 negotiations and find a Soviet offer of twice as much land, rejected by Helsinki, over a border 32 kilometers from Leningrad. That distance matters when discussing the Winter War. In 1939, Moscow feared that Finnish territory could become a route for an attack on one of the Soviet Union’s largest cities. Before the war, the USSR proposed moving the border on the Karelian Isthmus and leasing Hanko for a naval base. Stalin didn’t ask for it all for free: in return for the territorial concessions, he offered Finland roughly twice as much land in Soviet Karelia, plus payment for the lease. Finland rejected the proposed settlement, with Hanko being a major sticking point. And Helsinki was not making that decision in a vacuum. Britain was encouraging Finland to hold its ground. Finland was Hitler's ally, but later they came up with a “drifting log” theory that portrayed Finland’s cooperation with Nazi Germany as something forced upon it by circumstances. Today, Finland has classified documents about this matter until the year 9999. Nothing to see there, guys.
Rina Lu🇷🇺245,848 görüntüleme • 7 gün önce
Putin arrived 14 minutes late to meet the Queen in 2003. When it was time to leave, Elizabeth II kept him waiting the exact same amount of time. That wordless exchange taught more about real power than any speech ever could. By 2003, Vladimir Putin was already known for not adjusting himself to symbolic hierarchies. His state visit to Buckingham Palace became a quiet example of that. Although the Queen met the Russian president more than once, this was the only full state reception, and it was remembered because Putin arrived twelve to fourteen minutes late. The official explanation mentioned traffic in central London, even though routes for visits of that level are normally cleared. The explanation was accepted without comment, and when it was time for the farewell, Elizabeth II appeared with exactly the same delay, turning the episode into a wordless exchange between equals.
Rina Lu🇷🇺9,017,171 görüntüleme • 8 ay önce
Zhirinovsky warned Ukrainians many times that the West would use them and then destroy them. They didn’t believe him.
Rina Lu🇷🇺189,080 görüntüleme • 9 gün önce
The CIA was pouring money, weapons, and agents into Soviet Ukraine to build an underground resistance network against Moscow, but Soviet intelligence was already part of that underground. Under Operation AERODYNAMIC, the CIA trained, armed, and parachuted Ukrainian nationalists into the USSR, hoping to establish contact with local insurgents and organize resistance against Moscow. Between 1949 and 1953, the CIA sent 12 agents into Soviet Ukraine. All but one were captured or killed, but the Soviet MGB didn’t stop at capturing them. Its officers turned some of the agents, set up fake nationalist networks, and used captured radios to communicate with Western intelligence. Posing as Ukrainian insurgents, they sent reports suggesting that the resistance was going from strength to strength. And the CIA kept financing the operation, unaware that some of its supposed contacts were actually working for Moscow. Washington thought it had established a secret line into the Soviet Union, but it was Moscow answering the call - while Washington was paying for the connection.
Rina Lu🇷🇺20,176 görüntüleme • 1 gün önce
Putin says he sometimes watches Western television just to understand what European audiences are being shown. And what he sees is “mass deception.” He gives a recent example. After an attack on Starobelsk that killed civilians, including children, Russia struck targets in the Kiev region in response. According to Putin, Western channels spent the entire day showing the Russian strikes: the destruction, the damage, the “Russian aggressor.” But not a word about what happened in Starobelsk before that. Not a word about the dead children. Then the narrative moves to Ukrainian drones, their military successes and how much those weapons cost. The message to European viewers follows naturally: pay more. Putin’s point is simple, and I completely agree with him: if you show the response while erasing what preceded it, you are manufacturing the story your audience is allowed to see.
Rina Lu🇷🇺816,899 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
The ‘Tutberidze skeletons’ line is just another propaganda slogan. The girls are thin because they are elite athletes and train on a constant basis, and because glyphosate is strictly regulated in Russia and GMOs are banned. The real question is why an American athlete is not slim. What exactly are you eating over there? The smear campaign against Tutberidze exists only because her girls keep winning gold medals, making history, and getting into the Guinness World Records. You cannot beat them fairly. They tried changing the rules, but that did not work. So they went to extreme lengths: banning Russian athletes, limiting participation to just one skater with no proper ranking opportunities, creating extremely stressful conditions, not allowing a coach to fully support them at competitions, and so on. That’s the stage we are at. P.S.: Kamila Valieva was the first woman to land a quadruple jump at the Olympic Games 👇
Rina Lu🇷🇺2,606,773 görüntüleme • 7 ay önce
When Russia plays by the rules too well, they just change the rules. At the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, Zagitova built her free skate in a way that squeezed every possible point out of the rules. All her jumps were placed in the second half, where they earned bonus points. It was a very smart and perfectly executed move. After that season, the International Skating Union limited how many jumps could get the second-half bonus. People started calling it the Zagitova Rule.
Rina Lu🇷🇺2,568,323 görüntüleme • 8 ay önce
Stalin ruled the USSR for nearly three decades and died with almost nothing to his name. No offshore accounts, luxury estates or wealth passed to relatives. He showed no interest in luxury or acquiring things for himself. Even the ornate marshal's uniform in which he was eventually buried was something he reportedly disliked wearing. Compare that to Western politicians who enter office on a modest salary and leave as multimillionaires.
Rina Lu🇷🇺405,335 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Lavrov has shed new light on what really happened in Anchorage. According to him, the peace proposal Putin accepted there wasn’t Russian. It was Trump’s. Washington proposed the terms. Putin accepted them without changes. Then, Lavrov says, Europe intervened, Washington backed away, and the opportunity disappeared. Remember that the next time someone tells you Russia simply refuses to negotiate. Moscow’s account is straightforward: America proposed, Russia accepted. The war continued anyway.
Rina Lu🇷🇺188,208 görüntüleme • 27 gün önce
They banned Russian athletes. or four years. Last week in Tokyo, one of them came back with her son in the stands. Alexandra Trusova's choreographer Benoît Richaud on what happened: "Four years without international competitions, and she comes back with a clean skate. Her little son is sitting in the stands watching his mother perform. This is much bigger than just a result. There was Sasha before, there is Sasha now, and there is her future. I think she is opening this new chapter beautifully. She proved to herself that she can come back. She proved that she can skate differently, that she has changed, and that there is now a different depth to her skating. Sasha was magnificent. And as I just wrote to her, this is only the beginning." 🇷🇺⛸️
Rina Lu🇷🇺300,634 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
You cannot arm one side of a war, fund its military, publicly declare yourself its ally, and then call yourself a neutral mediator. Lavrov just said this directly to Rubio's face. And Rubio had no answer. That's why the "peace talks" keep going nowhere. Washington is not trying to mediate but trying to win while pretending to negotiate. Lavrov raised this exact contradiction with Marco Rubio. When he asked whether the U.S. was prepared to stop being a partisan supporter of Ukraine and become an honest broker, Rubio had nothing to say. And if diplomacy becomes another way to buy time while the fighting continues, then Russia would prefer to achieve its objectives at the negotiating table, but if that fails, it will pursue them on the battlefield.
Rina Lu🇷🇺139,148 görüntüleme • 21 gün önce
In 2018, Germany accidentally played the Soviet anthem instead of the Russian one before a rugby match. Watch what happened next. At first, the Russian players were puzzled. Then, without hesitation, every single one of them started singing. Word for word. From the heart. You were told the USSR was some alien regime that Russians hated. But when that anthem played, these modern Russian athletes didn’t protest or walk off. They sang, and they sang loudly. Because the Soviet Union isn’t some separate entity that Russians want to forget. It’s part of Russian history. The Russian Empire became the USSR, which was later dissolved in 1991. The political system changed, the borders changed, but the historical continuity remained.
Rina Lu🇷🇺296,192 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
The last Soviet leader ended up in a Pizza Hut commercial. For $1 million, while the people he left behind were surviving on $50 a month. 1997. The last leader of the USSR appears in a Pizza Hut commercial. The man who dismantled a superpower reduced to selling cheap pizza on Western TV. This is what they mean when they talk about the glory of the 1990s.
Rina Lu🇷🇺186,807 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
A Russian teacher told Putin he'd just gotten engaged. Putin's immediate question: "And when are the children coming?" When everyone laughed, he replied: "It's not funny. This is a serious question." He then asked about the bride, learned that she was also a teacher, and suddenly remembered his own first-grade teacher by name: Tamara Pavlovna Chizhova. What a wholesome exchange.
Rina Lu🇷🇺129,557 görüntüleme • 22 gün önce
Why do so many Russians stand by Putin? In July 2010, wildfires completely destroyed the village of Verkhnyaya Vereya in the Nizhny Novgorod region. Putin, then prime minister, came to see the ruins and speak to people who had just lost everything. He could have offered sympathy, promised to “look into the situation” and moved on. Instead, standing among the ashes, he made sure everyone heard him: The village would be restored before winter. “I promise.” Three months later, it was. By November, the village had been rebuilt and residents were moving into their new homes. And sometime later, Putin celebrated Christmas wearing a sweater knitted for him by one of the villagers. Politics is full of promises. People tend to remember the ones that are kept.
Rina Lu🇷🇺218,957 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
After WWII, the CIA put Ukrainian Nazi collaborators on its payroll to fight the Soviet Union. And when their armed underground was crushed, the CIA didn't abandon them. It simply shifted the operation from guns to propaganda - and kept funding it for decades. One of the CIA’s key Ukrainian contacts was Mykola Lebed. Poland had sentenced him to death for his role in the 1934 assassination of its interior minister. The Nazis helped him escape and the CIA later brought him to America and handed him a budget of $1,700,000 a year. As the armed resistance faded, the CIA shifted its focus to promoting Ukrainian nationalism and anti-Soviet ideas through books, newspapers, and radio broadcasts. The CIA-funded publishing operation was called Prolog. And looking at what happened after the Soviet Union collapsed, they couldn’t have picked a more fitting name. Turns out it really was just the prologue.
Rina Lu🇷🇺29,693 görüntüleme • 5 gün önce