Arnie's message to the Russian people.

[Harnser]

 

[Ken]

I spoke to a friend in Moscow yesterday. She is a professional person and her salary has just been cut in half! She said , as 'diplomatically' as possible that things are getting difficult and people have to be very careful!!! I didn't push her with delicate questions as quite obviously she was being careful with her words. We were on the telephone but she said the vast majority of Russians can only get state sponsored news, again without being too critical or elaborating!!! In other words messages like Arnie's are not getting through because of censorship.

My impression given her understandable reluctance to speak openly is that Russia is hurting and hurting quite badly. Whether that hurt will transpose to a removal of Putin or a withdrawal from Ukraine remains to be seen and I daren't ask her what she thought about that! I didn't want to see her marched off the the local 'nick' because I was indiscreet!

[ssomon]

On CNN, the banner below the re-broadcasting of parts of Arnie's speech covered half of his face and most of the subtitled translation, but (yet another) banner running below the other banners said that over 700,000 people had watched it.

Presumably that figure was meant to impress, but as it was probably the worldwide number, only about 0.2% of the US population, the percentage of people in Russia who saw it is probably infinitesimal.