Dear Readers:
It is official now that members of the French Foreign Legion have arrived in the Ukraine to fight on behalf of the Kiev regime. The reporter is Olga Nikitina.
The arrival of these Legionnaires was confirmed by pro-Russian sources on the ground: military correspondents, bloggers (including Tsargrad), and members of the Resistance. According to them, these Frenchies belong to the Third Infantry Regiment of the Foreign Legion and have been assigned to support Ukraine’s 54th Separate Mechanized Brigade, which has been deployed to defend Slavyansk.
According to Russian military expert Vladislav Shurygin, the Frenchies already tasted first blood, in a forest patch near Chasov Yar, where Russian scouts clashed with both German and French mercenaries. Sources note that these new foreign soldiers are more professional and look more “NATO” than many of the earlier, ragtag freelancers. Shurygin claims that these first clashes took place on May 5, and that the Frenchies lost around 7 men on that day.
Meanwhile, Military Correspondent Evgeny Lisitsyn alleges a much larger number, claiming that around 100 Frenchies were “nulled out” (аннулированы). But it is not clear exactly whom he is talking about.
Former American Under-Secretary of Defense, Stephen Bryen, has confirmed (in an article in Asia Times) that French Foreign Legionnaires have indeed been dispatched to the Donbass.
Awful Avalanche 
I find it instructive to browse the Tass.com website every few days. It is hellishly disorganized and repetitive, but the posts themselves are well translated into English.
There’s not a whole lot on actual or rumoured French troop deployment to Ukraine. Zakharova is saying that both the UK and Germany are constantly asking Micron exactly what he means by his handwaving sratements. She also comments on his new close advisers, green novice young people. Micron is so off the rails, nobody else can figure out what he means, is her message.
The coverage of Xi’s visit to Paris is slightly more instructive. As per usual, Xi is on his current “can’t we all just be friends?” routine, no doubt having written off the Americans as dolts. Xi wants the EU to accept Chinese investment (and exports) there, and welcomes European investment in China in the tech sector. Plus he wants to partner with France in Ukraine peace negotiations, based on the Chinese model! Boy, now there’s an eternal optimist!
Macron, with Chief unelected Eurobitch Usula VdL literally by his side, bitterly complains that both China and the US do not trade properly on world markets, and that means the EU cannot equally compete. So maybe Tinkerbell can rescue the EU, because nobody else is going to.
US coverage of Xi’s trip does NOT mention Micron’s conflation of the US trade policies being as bad as China’s. Of course not, the Empire keeps its citizens ignorant of criticism of the US by simple omission. Anyway, Micron’s complaints are not much different from Yellen and Blinken travelling to Beijing to tell Xi to back off manufacturing so much, voluntarily impoverish China, and follow US orders to the letter, promptly and without complaint. Or no KFC for you!
I had sort of forgotten that Xi was on a charm trip to Europe to attempt to quell their fears of being economically swamped, and that his visit coincides with Putin’s inauguration and Victory Day celebrations. Probably not a good time for Zelensky in his new choirboy top to attack Moscow with missiles and drones. Xi might be a bit put out not being centre of attention, and become closer to Russia, if the West did not take his trip seriously and instead tried to be idiotic during his visit.
So, unless Budanov has a brain fade and attacks Moscow anyway in the next few days, the threat of spoiling Russia’s celebrations seems low for a while. Mea culpa for my overlooking this in my comments yesterday.
However, the Russian military advance, mass death of Ukie troops and winkling out of foreign soldiers for special extermination will continue full bore. As will the bashing in the heads of protesting US college students by hired thugs, and bombing and starving Palestinians to death. So things aren’t exactly wonderful.
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What is Zelensky’s “choirboy top”, did he change out of his stinky green tee-shirt?
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Is it the fake pristine ur-Ukrainian peasant shirt given to Z by God with His Holy Trinity Trident crest on it?
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Oh right! His Easter shirt! How could I forget…
In Russian (and Ukrainian) these shirts are called Vyshyvanka.
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Yalensis, is this story about the French Foreign Legion flying from Niger to Ukraine and being unwanted in either place true or just BS? Micron won’t return my calls, and I only get my news from teevee, so I’m confused.
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I dunno. Didn’t the Frenchies just get kicked out of Niger? And then the Americans got kicked out too. I read that the Americans were really ticked when the Russkies moved into their old base. I bet they had everything set up just perfectly too.
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Does the shirt’s name in Russian and ancient Mesopotamian have some sort of meaning like “dress shirt” or “ethnic shirt” or something like that? By the way, what percentage of the Ukrainian public do you think is secretly cursing Russia for screwing up the alleged plot against Z?
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The ancient Mesopotamian language was one and the same with Ukrainian.
vy-shyv-anka: The root here (this part is not a joke) is the root /shiy/ which means “to sew” or “to stitch” in Slavic. So, the shirt name basically means “something that was stitched” or something like that. /vy/ is a prefix meaning “out of”. I think “stitching out of” refers to the specific type of stitching, namely embroidery.
The infinitive form (“to sew”), unfortunately, sounds a lot like English “shit”.
Etymology. Inherited from Proto-Slavic *šiti, from Proto-Balto-Slavic *sjū́ˀtei, from Proto-Indo-European *syewh₁-. Cognate to Lithuanian siūti, English sew, Latin suō.
In other words, it is one and the same word as English “sew”.
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And when _Elensky puts them on, he’s a fyshy wanka. Or is he a fashy skanka?
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Vicious Wanker?
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A fishy wanker or a fascist skanker…
Meanwhile, in this metropolitan area, there’s a record shop that I go to sometimes named “Vicious Sloth”:
https://www.vicioussloth.com.au/
It’s just down the road from the Harold Holt Swim Centre, named with intentional irony after an Australian Prime Minister who disappeared in 1967 while taking a dip in the Southern Ocean. His body was never found. Kinda like naming a Lincoln convertible automobile “The JFK Limited Edition.” One of the reasons I enjoy Oz is becoz of their twisted sense of humour. I fit right in!
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That’s funny! I bet $$$ that Holt was consumed by a great white shark.
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Either that, or he was consumed by cannibals, like Prez Biden said happened to his uncle in WWII.
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Nah — the fun rumour (which anybody with a sense of history mentions but does not believe) is that Holt was secretly spying for the North Koreans and they picked him up on a submarine.
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You’ve seen the viseo of the dead soldier with the French flag patch? The Macronistani regime is obviously rattled.
What about Russian legionnaires? What happens to them?
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Ritter had a nice gambling analysis/rant of Macron yesterday:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nr6pwQ3Bk04&t=343s]
The gambling analogue doesn’t only apply to the West’s military adventures. The Western economy follows the same track. ”We’ll just print a few more trillions, then everything will be fine.”
All over the West, as well as in Ukraine, everything is about quick solutions. Quick money, quick wars, quick everything. As I like to say: Russia looks 100 years ahead, China looks 1000 years ahead, while the West looks no further than the next quarterly earnings report.
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While the West’s myopic view certainly applies its political establishment, the elite subclass on whose teat the establishment feeds certainly CAN look much further ahead.
And what they see terrifies them into utter rejection of that future. There is no one else whom they won’t sacrifice on the altar of their own power to stave off that future. Including each other.
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To Raghead’s point, the first thing that crossed my mind when I heard about the French Legionnaires’ purported arrival was, ‘If it’s true, they’re probably Russian- and/or Ukrainian-born.’ You run into these folks from time to time: Childhood emigres who left with their parents back in the awful 1990s, all grown up now, steeped in a couple decades of easy livin’ and corporate-media disinformation … and by 2024 all too willing to serve in the armed forces of the countries bent on destroying their rodnuyu zemlyu.
I don’t think it’s all that common, though. One young Russian-American emigre I got to know in Moscow as a student in 2018 told me, with a sneaky giggle, that her parents were huge Putin fans. I made it very clear I thought they were on the right track. We even had a little discussion about all the stuff – in my own personal experience – that parents turn out to be right about. At that point, I was checking in with Awful Avalanche only a couple times a month. So regrettably I lacked the insight to point out that Putin is a pro-Western softie, and that maybe she should nudge her parents toward the Nat Bols or others a bit less inclined to compromise.
The French foreign ministry’s denial enhances the report’s credibility. It’s a big part of a diplomats’ job to lie to cover up executive malfeasance. Have we heard from the French MoD?
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Yeah, I had the opposite thought when I heard about it. I think my first thought was that Macron would be sending Africans and Algerians into Ukraine to do the heavy fighting. Not some pampered refugees…
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Again…OT,
Some of the well meaning people I respect on this blog consul patience and temperance in my criticism of Russia’s attrition/slow-march east to west.
I understand their POV but, I see it bit differently, please read this story* and see if you are as complacent after reading about how Galicia’s-goosestepan-goons are ethnically cleansing all the non-Galician/non-Nazi Ukrainia of their menfolk. Which, in more traditional cultures means, women will be forced to sell her husband/father/brothers assets at a pittance** and leave their traditional homes…often ending up as sex workers and/or domestics servants for the worlds wealthy globalist elite.
For the record, I am of Irish decent, ethnologically, I do not have a horse in this contest but, for reasons that must be obvious to those who know Irish history, my sympathies lie with those being oppressed by DC/London/Brussels’s attempt to revive Nazism/pogroms in the lands of formerly belonging to the Soviet Union.
*https://magyarnemzet.hu/english/2024/05/manhunt-in-transcarpathia-angry-relatives-attack-recruitment-center
**Please see my comments in previous postings on the need for the Russian to “pre-assemble” a committee/court to adjudicate all land transfer claims since the dissolution of the USSR in the lands of Ukrainia. Justice delayed is, more often than not, justice denied.
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Isn’t this all rather bad news? Actual NATO troops openly deployed in combat roles on the Ukrainian frontline? Doesn’t that push things closer to full-on Apocalypse, or am I just channeling my inner St John the Divine?
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Well, if you hear 16 thundering hoofbeats coming closer, don’t think zebras. Think 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse!
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or should be that be “four horsepersons…”
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I’ll see that bid and raise you:
“Four persons of appropriately undefined gender and their animal companions, accompanied by Famine, Pestilence, War and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation”
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Haha! the 4 horsepersons need to define their pronouns more accurately. Especially Pestilence.
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