There are things that we tend to leave unsaid or hidden among relatives, and finance is too often one of them.Īli Katz is the founder of Personal Family Lawyer and host of the free masterclass series, “ How to Talk ‘Money’ With the People You Love … and Why It’s a MUST DO This Holiday Season.” She says that w hile it can feel uncomfortable to discuss financial assets with family members, when the time comes, everyone should be pre pared. ![]() One could be forgiven for assuming he was lining up scapegoats in case things go wrong.Family business can sometimes be a thing of mystery. Is enough being done to promote new blood in the military? He’s certainly told the minister to expedite this, but there’s a complex bureaucracy to get round. Incursions into the Belgorod region? Lessons should be learned by those responsible for border security. Whatever might be going wrong was, of course, always someone else’s responsibility. At times, Putin seemed unaware of the details of the war he so notoriously tries to micromanage, and at times keen to distance himself from it. The 70-year-old Putin’s efforts to be chummy with the young voenkory not only failed to land, but very much made it seem that he needed them rather than vice versa. They could be counted on to stick to the script and not embarrass the president, but it still proved an awkward conversation. Instead, these were ‘war bloggers’ still depending on the authorities’ good will for access to the front line or hoping to parlay their informal profile into official positions. Noticeably absent were partisans of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the increasingly-outspoken figure behind the Wagner mercenary group, or the so-called ‘turbopatriots’ like Igor ‘Strelkov’ Girkin – nationalists who supported the invasion but have become vociferously critical of the clumsy and amateurish way they believe it has been fought. Hence his carefully-choreographed sit-down with a group hand-picked from both the official war correspondents and the online voenkory. Even Putin has come to realise that to spin his message, he can no longer stick to the official media. ![]() They have thus become powerful not just in shaping the domestic narrative, but also in the Kremlin’s wider information war. Western news media and organizations often draw on them for information or, indeed, report on their opinions as news in their own right. ![]() Indeed, it is not just Russians who turn to the voenkory for some sense of the situation. Opinion: How prepared is Russia for the counteroffensive? The Russian Ministry of Defense released video showing Russian forces rolling their armored vehicles up to the northeastern edge of Kyiv. Pro-Kremlin Ukrainian blogger Yury Podolyaka, who moved to Crimea after the Russian annexation, has 2.7 million followers. The informal, online contingent of the so-called “ voenkory” or “military correspondents” – although many are more commentators than reporters – have emerged as significant and distinctive in shaping understandings of the war.įormer journalist Semyon Pegov, behind the WarGonzo Telegram channel, for example, has over 1.3 million subscribers. Now, though, Russians who want news about the war – and many, in fairness, would rather remain ignorant as much because it is depressing as because they would rather not be faced with tough moral choices – turn to the internet. Even before the war, almost half got their news from social media, with the proportion having risen since the invasion. Meanwhile the viewership of TV news has declined. One mother of a Russian soldier recounted to me how she had been told by authorities at the time that her son had died in a training accident. Eventually, the grandmother of one of his squad mates got word to her that he had actually been killed when his truck hit a mine on the treacherous Salang Highway. They have developed an ingrained cynicism and habitually look for alternative voices.ĭuring the 1979-89 Soviet war in Afghanistan, for example, it was the grapevine. ![]() However, in Russia there is a particular issue: Russians have long become used to being lied to by their state. Of course, all political leaders are having to adapt to an increasingly fragmented media space – tweeting more often than putting out press releases, and wooing online influencers as assiduously as newspaper editors.
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