A friend told me today that Russia started this war. Very specifically on 24 February 2022. I answered that NATO and the USA started the war in 2014 by propelling extremist xenophobe nationalists to power in federated Ukraine. Russia had spent eight years in negotiations (Minsk I, Minsk II) to seek a political solution.1 The truth is that the Anglosphere prepped this war for decades.
Here’s Tony Blair talking about lighting fires all around Russia in its neighbours in 2008.
There’s so much other evidence, including the infamous 2019 Rand Report Overexteneding and Unbalancing Russia, where US analysts recommend sanctions, sabotage and civil war. But all that takes time to digest and requires substantial additional reading to fully understand. My friend is busy.
What I promised my friend instead was a video from Stanislav Filin who runs the YouTube chanel, S Filinom (сФилином literally translated as “With Filin”). The video was released in early March 2021 to explain the Russian side of the start of the Ukraine conflict. Stanislav is a straightforward ordinary young guy with a talent to connect with people, not a long-winded intellectual like Professor John Mearsheimer. Plus if you want to know the Russian perspective, ask a Russian.
I went to Stanislav’s channel expecting to find the video in less than five minutes and just drop a link to it in Signal to my friend. With ten minutes of hard searching, I couldn’t find it. Not by searching for “American”, not by searching for “Ukraine”, not by searching for “Donbass” in both English and Russian. I found something about Stanislav’s Buchta video being taken down, which made me suspicious that this video was lost. It turned out to be the case. Here’s where it should be on YouTube.
YouTube placeholder page for censored video
The video in question was called something like “How to explain to Americans why Russians moved to protect the Donbass on February 24”.
Next step – I had to find Stanislav’s other channels, which happily enough, are also called sFilinom. There’s Telegram (fairly complete though inconsistent), there’s Dzen, there’s VK.com. On Dzen, one can even find his entire Bucha video in good quality and in English but there’s only 8 videos there, out of the . VK.com only starts on 1 January 2022 so of course no video.
But still no sign of the mystery video.2
In a search on VK in Russian for sFilinom and Bucha, I managed to find a compendium of Filin’s political English language videos. It starts with the mystery video and included the Bucha video, the Arnold Schwarzeneger video.
Here’s the full table of contents with original titles:
- What you don’t know about the war in Ukraine (video banned)
- A response to Arnold Schwarzenegger (video still on YouTube)
- Must See!! Advisor to Zelensky said WHAT??!! (video banned)
- What Ukraine is HIDING from YOU (video banned)
- What you must know about BUCHA (video banned)
Don’t bother clicking those YouTube links. Only the “Response to Arnold Schwarzenegger” is still online.
Now that I knew that the video did exist and I wasn’t imagining it and knew the exact title, I’ve managed to find another copy on Bitchute. It turns out there are thirteen copies.3
And another copy of just What you don’t know about the war in Ukraine on VK.com. Don’t expect to be able to easily find this material via US search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, Kagi or Bing, even with an exact search like +sfilinom What you don’t know about the war in Ukraine. DuckDuckGo at least includes some VK.com results which will get you close, and in turn uncovered a well-stocked sfilinom TikTok channel.4
Anyone who wants to better understand the Russian perspective on the Ukraine conflict and why Russians consider the US the aggressor owes it to him or herself to watch What you don’t know about the war in Ukraine. The video is only five minutes long. To listen to the other side is the basics we are taught at high school debating. Or which all mediators or even competent businessperson learn. Anyone who doesn’t have five minutes to listen to the Russian perspective about what looks like it will develop into World War III and nuclear armageddon loses the right to have an opinion on Russia, Vladimir Putin and the Ukraine conflict.
Lead image of Odessa Trade Union Massacre by Aleksandr Polischyuk
Go ahead, learn what the other side thinks, in their own words, in plain English. It will only take five minutes.5
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In December 2021, the Russian sent the US and NATO a letter asking to revisit the security environment in Eastern Europe to avoid conflict. The US and NATO scoffed at the Russians. When the Russian still refused to move their forces in January and then most of February, on 16 February the US gave the Ukrainians the order to increase shelling seven fold on the Donbass cities and prepare an all-out assault. Donetsk politicians were bussing out all the children in anticipation of a Ukrainian nationalist assault. ↩
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For people who’d like more of Filin in English, there’s a wordy video about the 9th May, Why the 9th of May the Most Important Holiday in Russia. ↩
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Just don’t include “sfilinom” in your Bitchute search as where it’s added, it’s added in Cyrillic. With сФилином included in the search three copies turn up. сФилином alone turns up four videos including the prior three copies. Odyssey search turns up about twenty five videos, half of which are What you don’t know about the war in Ukraine. If you know what you are looking for and go straight to the video sites, you can find what you seek. We’ve covered in depth how very poor video search is on Foliovision.com. There’s an opportunity for a serious video search engine. With exactly the right search, YouTube yields up five reaction videos where you can hear Filin’s original video, albeit in only a corner of the screen. ↩
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Lightweight videos which are just 50 seconds instead of 50 minutes. For a moment, I thought I’d have to get myself a TikTok channel. But not for short form video quarrelling and silliness. ↩
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This isn’t the time for a long description of alternative media and what channels you should be reading. It partly depends where you live and what languages you command. But for a basic European alternative perspective on geopolitics, along with an often interesting comment section, try MoonofAlabama.org for a couple of weeks. Don’t worry about information overload, as there are posts most days but usually only one. Bernard’s great weak spot, as far as alternative media goes, is Covid-19. He’s an older worrywart German gentleman and excessively excited about masks and injections. ↩