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God I hate celebrity gossip. Imagine not knowing how tell your kids you have cancer while your 10-year-old reads rumors that his dad is having an affair, that his parents are getting divorced, and that his mom has an eating disorder.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility and US intelligence confirmed it.
The Russians just confirmed they had contacts on the Ukrainian side. They were caught trying to escape to Ukraine.
Both you and the parent comment keep using this word. I am not a native speaker, but for me, 'to confirm' has somewhat of a connotation of "to establish a claim as a truth by a trustworthy authority".
Given that this the actors in question are notoriously unreliable, I would prefer to use the verb 'to claim' instead.
There's nothing wrong with claiming that the Russian government is notoriously unreliable, but not in the context of competing claims between them and the US government. If I listed out all the fraudulent and fake news stories that had members of the US intelligence community as sources I'd be here all week.
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Kind of indicative they didn't have meaningful contacts in Ukraine.
If you're on the run from Russian authorities, trying to flee across the most militarized part of the Russian border with the most civilian control points, an occupation state apparatus tailored to identifying and mitigating dissident mobilization and ability to move, entire deployed military formations with contiguous trench fortifications, a country-wide mine field, and then rushing the armed defenders with standing 'shoot on sight' orders is...
...well it's a bold strategy, but not a particularly intelligent one when the country in question has demonstrated the ability to covertly operate well within Russian territory for extended periods of time.
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If you’d just killed hundred of Russian civilians, where would you go?
Finland? If we're limited to countries sharing land borders with Russia
Aside from the border being closed, I would assume that Finland takes a dim attitude towards mass murderers, even if they're mass murderers of Russians. Ukraine, on the other hand, is a barely-functional society for which "hating Russia" is a number one priority, and trying to lay low in Ukraine for long enough to figure out how to get to IS controlled territory in some shithole in the caucuses or central asia is a plan that's at least a plausible level of dumb.
Finland has one of the largest unmonitored borders in the region, as only the SE-most is actually populated and monitored. You could literally walk across most of it and the only thing to notice would be if your vehicle was obviously abandoned near the road. The first the Finns would really be aware of is if you walked into their cities... which might get you turned over, or maybe not, but if you can stage the weapons and such to conduct a major terrorist attack, you can stash the hiking gear and supplies to go cross-country.
To get to Ukraine from Russia, you have to go through mutliple no-civilian zones, drive through a papers-please occupational region, and go through two generally parallel trench systems with a minefield inbetween.
The far, far simpler option than either of these is, of course, to go through the caucuses or central asia, or just hide in rural russia for awhile.
Yeah but a lot of those countries are on pretty good terms with Russia and would actively aid in a manhunt if pressured. I imagine Finland would if they knew you were in their country, but I picked Finland because if you keep your head down and avoid notice you can easily slip away to anywhere else in the EU.
That the country governments are on good terms with Russia and would actively aid in a manhunt is less relevant than the fact that those countries- and borders- have less state capacity to launch an effective manhunt in a time-relevant manner.
If you're willing to walk for a few days, most borders in the world remain largely unmonitored and easy to bypass. Border crossings are (relatively) heavily monitored, but going 10 miles away where there are no roads will generally be lucky to have a fence, if that. After that, basic identity-tied document swap faciltiation (new IDs, credit cards, cell phones, and someone with a truck waiting for you) and you can generally drop off the net more effectively than in Europe.
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The Finnish-Russian land border is completely closed at the moment.
The border crossings are completely closed. The border is a completely different question, especially for the sort of people who might not want to go through the publicly monitored entrance/exit.
Well, yes, if you're motivated enough then you can go just about anywhere, I guess, but the border closure makes Finland a particularly pointless choice.
Actually, the Finnish government might have considered such an attempt a jackpot, since it would have meant that their plan for formalizing pushbacks as policy would have received a major boost and it would have been very difficult for the opposition to block it from being passed in expedited bill processing.
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