As noted, I spend a good deal of time doing things I shouldn't (trawling TASS, Moscow Times) articles, and not doing things I should (thesis). I came across something interesting most recently - an article headlined "Russia Would See U.S. Moves to Arm Ukraine as Declaration of War" on Moscow Times.
The article goes on to make a number of assertions - that Russia would probably escalate any conflict if the U.S. did so, such as persuading Iran to go to war with Saudi Arabia, or selling defense equipment to China. This from a variety of analysts with the Russian Defense Ministry - who remain anonymous, of course.
The article is interesting for a couple different reasons. For one, when it first appeared, instead of war, it was "proxy war."
Yet, in order to be a proxy war, Russia would have to agree that it was supplying arms to Ukrainian separatists - which they have thus far vigorously denied. An escalation of said war would therefore break the narrative that Russia has so far stuck to - which would be bad from the Kremlin's perspective in that they would then have to admit back home that they are in fact, in Ukraine.
The second reason this article is interesting is because it vanished. It is still on the Moscow Times site (as you can see above), but all links to it have apparently vanished - it is not in the News section, nor is it listed under the Author's articles.
Additionally, it has been the only article on any Russian site to make this assertion, so far that I've seen. My guess is that someone really messed up over there. You can't mess with the narrative - otherwise the farce crumbles.
I'm wondering if that's what we're seeing here.
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