women-journalists-from-russia

"I am exactly the type of person Putin had in mind when he launched his speech last night. He wants to frame people like me as traitors, the fifth column,”"

"But this is exactly the same. How can one judge me and say what, I was too smart for my age? I think that is what is praised in America. When a young person takes his or her destiny in his own hands and fights."

"That's a great question to ask here in America. Because there were times when people didn't believe that women are capable to be leaders at all."

"Look, this is-- I think it's an American, very old saying that suggests that wolves have teeth, but not all animals with teeth are wolves. You cannot judge a person based on appearance."

"“The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouth"

"To find out I was the first one to be charged was both amusing and shocking. I joked that I was officially declared a decent person"

"I live a good life, post pretty pictures online about food. They now want to portray me as the face of the ‘decadent west’.”"

"Although Alawis are overrepresented in the ruling elite, this does not translate into any alleviation of their generally deprived circumstances. Those with ties to the ruling family, whether through tribal or business dealings, are rich, while most Alawis live in underdeveloped villages. Unlike the Sunni underclass, which largely resided in rebel-held territory, Alawis—who cannot afford to emigrate, enroll in university to defer their service, or bribe their way out of military service (or into noncombat posts)—reside entirely in regime-held territory, where the draft is imposed and enforced through routine raids and at checkpoints."

"Liza went to Iraq for similar reasons. She intended to research the way Iraqis, and women in particular, were living after ISIS and in the shadow of sectarianism — not, as some online critics have said, to spy for the Israeli government."

"Liza believed from early adulthood that caring about the citizens of Israel also meant caring about the rights of Palestinians in Israel. Later, she turned her attention both professionally and personally to our Arab neighbors in their fight for freedom during the Arab Spring. But she didn’t want to merely view them vis-à-vis their relationship with Israel; she believed that the right thing to do was to try to understand our neighbors from inside their own societies, the way they experienced and understood themselves. She became fluent in Arabic, and she visited many countries most Israelis will never enter."

"The recruitment to Azerbaijan and Libya reveal the desperate pragmatism of Syrians who have been reduced to subsistence in a country ruined by war—a war whose end is nowhere in sight, and which will, in any case, be determined by outside powers that helped destroy the country. The two countries that intervened most decisively in Syria to advance their interests, Turkey and Russia, as well as those that stood by as Syria drowned in blood, place virtually no value on Syrian lives, but see them instead as pawns in their own geopolitical chess game. Syrians—former rebels, militia members, and ordinary civilians—are simply leaning into the part they’ve been assigned: as pawns. Refusing to accept this logic means they and their families go hungry."

"The [[w:Syrian civil war|[Syrian civil] war]] has transformed the Alawi community in numerous ways. The most profound and obvious one for a community numbering about two million people is the scale of loss of men of military age. The Syrian regime stopped releasing statistics regarding casualties in its ranks early in the war, but Gregory P. Waters, a researcher at Berkeley School of Law's Human Rights Center, estimates that tens of thousands of Alawi men have been killed fighting for the regime. Tens of thousands more have been gravely injured, sustaining disabilities that preclude them from participating in the labor force."

"Everything on Russian state TV is such a terrible hypocrisy, like they don't remember that Russia has started this invasion, and of course they don't say anything about dead children. Maybe they don't care, I don't know."

"What is happening to us right now is a catastrophe. How did we end up in this hell? One person flashing nuclear weapons like keys to an expensive car took it upon himself to determine the future of my children, our children. He decided that the future of children in Russia is poverty, isolation and war."

"Personally, I see the path of a third world war as the most realistic. Knowing us, knowing our leader, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, knowing how things work around here . . . I think that the most improbable outcome—that it will all end in a nuclear strike—is still more probable than defeat. This horrifies me, on the one hand, but on the other I understand that this is how it is."

"But also, this is not Ukraine, it's NATO. It's all their power being used against us now. All of their arms, all of their weapons, all of their equipment, all of their trainers, their mercenaries."

"We should be helping our army and our commander-in-chief to win instead of complaining that they're yet to win in so-and-so days."

"We're all going to die someday."

"The Anglo-Saxons publicly encourage Ukraine to take their hostilities into Russian territory. And they give them means to carry that plan out. What choice do you leave us, idiots? The total annihilation of what remains of Ukraine? A nuclear strike?"

"They [Americans] are like little children, they don't believe anything they don't want to believe, like little children. They're trapped in the world of their own fantasies. Recently, I was re-reading old letters that I sent to my parents when I was studying in America. I wrote to my parents: "I have a feeling that [America] is not a country, but a kindergarten for mentally disabled children." Even at 15, I already understood that."

"We should be building our future with culture, with heating and without Ukraine."

"There'll not be the Ukraine we have known for many years. It won't be a Ukraine."

"A cynical joke or perhaps an exclamation has appeared, I’ve already heard it from several people in Moscow. "All hope is pinned on famine". What is meant is that famine will begin and they [in the West] will come to their senses, will remove sanctions and will be friends with us because it's impossible to not be friends."

"There are nuclear power plants there, a lot of infrastructure which can be disabled … very quickly and easily, and for a long time. People ask me, why don’t we do that? I have no answer. Perhaps now is the time to do this."

"Our main enemy is certainly the United States. What does the U.S. react to? They react to two things: the threat of physical annihilation and the liquidation of a certain number of military personnel. What we know based on wars in Vietnam and Korea is that several tens of thousands of annihilated American servicemen will cause the public opinion in the U.S. to be severely strained. I will repeat: not several thousand, like in Afghanistan or Iraq, but a certain number of tens of thousands. Who will liquidate them, where they will be liquidated and in what way is completely irrelevant, but this is one of the objectives if we want to influence the American leadership. We have absolutely nothing to lose."

"This can only end with an immediate threat that is voiced and presented, a threat of a nuclear confrontation."

"Guys, there will be a big war, for sure. By the end of winter, something very big will happen!"

"It’s true that no one will win in a nuclear war, but who needs the world if Russia isn’t in it? It was voiced out loud, it was said by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin!"

"I don't see any other outcome… It will be a wrecking ball! It will be all-in! It will be like two planes, flying head-on into one another. Someone will have to back down and something tells me that it won’t be us."

"I didn't think it would be easy, but of course I didn't think we'd have to fight the entire Western world, that it would be World War III."

"World War III is already underway."

"I've been waiting eight years for this... it finally happened. This is true happiness."

"If Lindsey Graham really said that the money for the killing of Russians is the best money the US ever spent . . . I hope that in our country, the sons or grandchildren of Sudoplatov are alive, his pupils, or the descendants of his pupils [...] It’s not even hard. We have his address."

"It is the most difficult and the toughest because it is the first war in our history in which we have no allies at all."

"If we were to conduct a thermonuclear explosion, a nuclear explosion, hundreds of kilometers above our own territory, someplace in Siberia, nothing scary would happen on the land."

"There will be no nuclear winter where everyone is afraid. There won't be horrific radiation that will kill everyone … None of that will happen"

"We will return to the year 1993."

"The West never got over the Cold War stereotype. One thing that only few journalists understand is that Russia started dissolving the Soviet Union of its own accord. We were the ones to realize that Communism was a failure. We understood that it was wrong to impose our will on other nations. We released the Eastern bloc into freedom. We are a different country today, one with a different mentality -- which is something that Western journalists sometimes find difficult to comprehend. You, for example, stated earlier that Russia was acting aggressively without backing it up with facts."

"Everything you say will be used against you."

"We are far less critical of western policy than western media are critical of Russia. When was the last time you read anything good about Russia? Anywhere? Name me one publication. That’s why this cliché that Russia Today is an anti-western channel brings a smile to my face."

"I don’t see why you have the nerve to think that you know better than anyone how to run the world, and who’s marginal in the world and who isn’t. You’ve made so many mistakes, you’ve started so many wars in the last few years, destroyed so many lives, killed so many people, created so many problems."

"I noticed that mainstream western TV channels, especially CNN and ABC, show the same thing. It really ate me up inside. I realised that there are quite a lot of people in the world who don’t think that’s how it should be, so it probably makes sense to make something for them. Obviously if our audience is [only] Kremlinologists and Russia watchers, then that’s very few people."

"Actually, I also like America in a lot of ways. I have friends and family there, the food is good, at the end of the day. I really love American culture . . . In the 1990s we looked at America like a saviour. We proudly wore American flag T-shirts and caps. I learnt the Declaration of Independence by heart."

"Believe me, I’ve categorically forbidden everyone from inviting people who says nonsense or promote some unhealthy strange theories on air. But at the same time, if we only give airtime to the same people as the mainstream media does, it means it wouldn’t at all be clear why we’re doing this."

"A war is completely unavoidable."

"In our time, I don't believe there can be a full-scale hot war like the Second World War, nor a long Cold War, but a war of a third type. It will be a cyberwar."

"A button is pushed, and suddenly the lights go out in Voronezh. The pipes freeze and there is no heating. Then, from the other side, a button is pushed, and the lights go out in Harlem, or in Florida."

"It will be a war of infrastructure, and in this sphere, we have many vulnerabilities."

"We need to be ready for this war, which is inevitable, and which, of course, will start from Ukraine. For this, we need a Stalinist program of mobilization in order to sew up, sew up, sew up these vulnerabilities quickly, quickly. Because I don't want us to be too enamored of our capabilities."

"So that it is understood, yes, in a hot war, we would defeat Ukraine in two days. What is there to defeat? My god, it's Ukraine. We suppress their firing points, as we discussed during the commercial, and then we won't even have to bomb their unfortunate cities. God forbid that it ever come to that."