Apparently Sokolov was only a face on the screen (haven’t seen the video), so prerecorded footage, deepfake or even simple video editing are all possibilities. The rest of Shoiqus quotes are pretty much what you’d expect from him.
Regardless of Sokolov the situation in Crimea seems to be in Ukrainian control, I hope they can close the bridge soon.
The cardboard-cutout-on-a-stick was judged a success by reuters I guess.
Since when did reuters start giving lip service to russian propaganda? They showed an undated, unverifiable video chat.
To be fair, the Ukrainian claim is also unverified.
It’s about level of believability though.
Ukraine has blown up the naval headquarters so the claim that that they killed the naval commander is not particularly unrealistic.
Meanwhile Russia claims they didn’t kill him, and he’s still alive, and the evidence for this is a video.
So we have to ask ourselves what is the likelihood that the naval military commander would be in the naval command base. And compare that to what the probability that Russia had a recorded video of him.
True, in this case one side is notorious liars.
Here’s a link to the actual clip: https://twitter.com/kucukmoskovali/status/1706622934234607737
The part showing Sokolov is very brief, a couple of seconds at the end of the twitter video.
He doesn’t move, his eyes are closed behind his glasses, and he’s propped up against a pillow.
It could be a video of a photo.
Not very convincing that he’s healthy, if not dead.
On the other hand, if he’s dead Russia can’t keep pretending he’s not forever. What are they going to say? He survived a bombing and then died by falling down the stairs 48 hours later?
That’s really not any kind of problem for Russia. They can just announce that due to his failure on preventing missile strikes against Black Sea fleet Sokolov resigned in shame and retired to become a sheep herder in southern siberia or something.
Oh, yes, the “the admiral went to a farm upstate” is always a classical.
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Your guess is as good as mine. On our local news today was an article how Lavrov was upset that Finland is moving towards the front of the opposition against Russia without any reason (a bit caricature, but not that much). That circus is running for the average russian citicens, not for us, and in those stories facts don’t matter much.
News media doesn’t last that long.
Lol he literally didn’t move an inch, blink… nothing. Dubious even if the Kremlin wasn’t known for lying.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
MOSCOW, Sept 26 (Reuters) - Viktor Sokolov, the commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and one of Russia’s most senior navy officers, was shown on Tuesday attending a video conference, a day after Ukrainian special forces said they had killed him.
In video and photographs released by the Russian defence ministry, Sokolov was shown apparently taking part in a video conference with Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and other top admirals and army chiefs.
Ukraine’s special forces said on Monday they had killed Sokolov, Moscow’s top admiral in Crimea, along with 33 other officers in a missile attack last week on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in the port of Sevastopol.
Earlier on Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had declined to comment on the Ukrainian claim, referring reporters to the defence ministry.
In the video released by the ministry, Shoigu said that more than 17,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in September and that more than 2,700 weapons, including seven American Bradley fighting vehicles, had been destroyed.
According to a Sept. 19 scorecard by the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Russia has gained 35 square miles of territory from Ukraine in the past month while Ukrainian forces have taken 16 square miles from Russian forces.
The original article contains 293 words, the summary contains 207 words. Saved 29%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
