Its fact-checkers called the Moscow blackout fake forty minutes after its own news agency confirmed it. Plus, PepsiCo’s $237 million Russian tax bill!
AUG 19, 2026
Record for Bullshit in Twenty-Four Hours
The Russian Ministry of Defense announced an all-time record on Tuesday: 1,671 fixed-wing drones shot down in twenty-four hours. Add the 791 claimed the previous night, ten guided bombs, and two HIMARS rockets.
A Ukrainian open-source channel published its entire response in six words.
Record for bullshit in twenty-four hours.
The war correspondent Alexander Kots went the other way, writing four hundred words on how the number proves Russian air defense works, before arriving somewhere he probably did not intend: that Russia will very likely enter direct conflict with NATO by the end of the 2020s, and that this war is ideal training for it.
Two Mayors, a mainstream pro-war channel with no reputation for restraint, took the number at face value and asked whether 1,671 drones in a day is already a massed enough launch to apply the Nuclear Deterrence Doctrine.
That is what an invented number is for.
Elsewhere on the same platform, a Russian channel published a clean, confident frontline summary saying fighting continues in Krasnyi Lyman. Two hours later it published a correction.
“We state that there are no regular units of ours in the town, so judge for yourself the full extent of the lying by our propaganda.”
Butlerova 7
There is a building in Moscow that most Russians have never heard of, and all of them use. MMTS-9, one of the largest internet exchange points in the country. On Tuesday, it lost power.
Rostelecom went down. Megafon went down. Beeline went down. Telegram, YouTube, VKontakte, and Rutube went down. Steam and Discord went down, which is how a certain demographic found out. Gosuslugi, the portal Russians use to renew a passport or register a car, went down. So did VTB, which is a bank.
Power failed across four central Moscow districts. A shopping mall was evacuated. Trains on the orange metro line stretched their intervals, the polite phrase for standing in a tunnel.
At 17:59, the state news agency reported that the internet failure was caused by a loss of power at a major communications hub. At 18:25, an exile outlet reported a blackout in southwest Moscow. At 18:35, a channel reported an explosion at the substation on Vavilov Street. At 18:39, War on Fakes, the government’s own debunking operation, declared the whole thing a fake: there were no pops and no accidents at the substation.
Forty minutes.
The debunkers then addressed a photograph of a man on the street in a respirator, explaining that he was actually wearing an ordinary raincoat and an FFP-1 mask, which gives no protection against chemicals and is useless without goggles. This is offered as reassurance.
Meanwhile, Tsargrad, an Orthodox nationalist outlet on the state’s own side of the argument, published an explainer of what had happened. Dzen, the Russian platform hosting it, blocked the piece as shocking content.
A Ukrainian monitoring channel also posted the exchange point’s street address, Butlerova 7, with a note recommending it for future attention.
Unit 1488
The governor of St. Petersburg spent Tuesday reviewing an anti-aircraft unit defending the city.
Fontanka reported the visit in the ordinary register, including the unit’s number, which is 1488.
That is the two most common neo-Nazi numerical codes stacked together, and it is legible at a glance to anyone from Idaho to Rostov. Russia is in year five of a war it calls denazification. Its air defense battery is numbered 1488, and the local paper printed it without comment.
He Should Have Called the Emergencies Ministry
On the night of July 7, a pensioner in Yelan, in Volgograd oblast, could not sleep for the roar of drones over his own yard. So he took his TOZ-34 shotgun and fired at one.
Then he did everything a citizen of a country at war is supposed to do. He called 112. He waited for the police. He walked them to the crash site. He handed over the gun voluntarily.
He was fined 40,000 rubles, and the shotgun was confiscated. He appealed. On Tuesday, the appellate court upheld it, on the grounds that there had been no real and otherwise unavoidable danger, and that the correct procedure would have been to contact the Emergencies Ministry.
The drone was overhead. The Emergencies Ministry was not.
Russians on the war’s own side circulated the case, and one of them supplied the kicker.
“‘Absurd’ is the word that will perhaps in future be used to describe our time.”
Beloved Cola
PepsiCo announced in March 2022 that it was suspending production and sales in Russia.
Last year it paid 237 million dollars in income tax to the Russian state.
It remains Russia’s fourth-largest foreign business, with sixty thousand employees and nineteen factories, and it is still making Pepsi Cola for Russian shelves, now sold as Lyubimaya Cola and Evervess Cola. Lyubimaya translates as Beloved. Original blue cans arrive by parallel import through Kazakhstan and Georgia, without the trademark owner’s permission, which is a company smuggling its own product into a country it left.
Russia is PepsiCo’s third-largest market, after the United States and Mexico. Net revenue there rose 22.9 percent last year, to 4.77 billion dollars. In 2024 it opened a new factory near Novosibirsk. In 2023 it instructed its communications staff not to mention the war in Ukraine.
Donald Kendall, PepsiCo’s chief executive from 1963 to 1986, is the man who got Nikita Khrushchev to drink a cup of Pepsi in front of Richard Nixon at the 1959 American exhibition in Moscow, the one with the model kitchen. Putin gave Kendall the Order of Friendship in 2004. Kendall celebrated his ninetieth birthday at the Russian embassy in Washington.
And here is the current chief executive, Ramon Laguarta, a year before the full-scale invasion, explaining the philosophy of the house:
“We are the largest consumer goods company in the U.S., for example, or in Russia or South Africa. Big markets where we’re very large, and the governments always pay attention to us. And we have a responsibility to improve society along with those governments.”
PepsiCo did not respond to requests for comment.
The Clown Emoji
Somebody has been reading the comment sections.
A Russian research project monitors around a thousand regional Telegram and VKontakte groups, the kind of places where people argue about the price of milk and the incompetence of the water utility. This month they counted reactions. Under posts about ordinary Ukrainian strikes, 1,174,336 of them. Under posts about the strikes on Wildberries warehouses, 223,793.
The mix is not the same. Praying hands account for 17.6 percent of reactions to ordinary strikes. Under the warehouse posts they collapse to 4.4. The clown face goes the other way, from 9.6 to 15.3.
On VKontakte, Russians watching Russian warehouses burn were angrier at their own side than at the people who lit the fire.
Top-voted comment under a Krasnodar post, 339 likes:
“I wonder, will Wildberries employees and sellers go and vote for United Russia after this?”
From occupied Crimea, 199 likes:
“Why pay taxes at all if your state cannot protect you?”
And somebody in Tambov worked out the commercial angle unassisted:
“The owner of Wildberries knew that sanctioned components for unmanned aerial vehicles were going through her company. That’s why she wrote in that force majeure clause.”
He is describing a real document. On July 7, eleven days before the first warehouse was hit, an updated Wildberries seller agreement took effect. It excludes compensation for goods destroyed by the fall of an unmanned aerial vehicle.
The Most Effective Sanctions
Dmitry Larin, deputy chairman of the board of Genbank, a Crimea-linked institution under Western sanctions, was killed in Moscow on Tuesday when an ambulance traveling in the oncoming lane ran over his motorcycle.
The Ukrainian commentator Denys Kazansky filed the only summary the item requires.
“The most effective sanctions were the ones imposed by the ambulance.”
Nine Oh One
Zelensky sent the Rada two names: Yevhen Khmara for defense minister, Andriy Sybiha for foreign minister. Two hours before the papers arrived, the speaker of parliament told the chamber they had not arrived. Ukrainian law says the defense minister must be a civilian. The proposed fix: transfer a serving major general to the reserve, at which point he becomes, on paper, a civilian. One lawmaker noted the snag. A serving general is not in the habit of signing his own discharge.
The vacancy exists because Mykhailo Fedorov was fired last month, and on Tuesday night Fedorov posted nine minutes of video that did not sound like a man going quietly.
“We must not let Putin decide when Ukrainians can choose their government. Democracy is not a peacetime luxury. Democracy is part of what we are fighting for today.”
Then the line aimed at the man who fired him: it is particularly dangerous, he said, when society comes to feel that the main criterion for an appointment is not professionalism but personal loyalty to the system.
Yaroslav Zheleznyak, an MP, explained why Fedorov will not go away.
“He really did believe in the president, unlike many others. For him this is a story of personal betrayal.”
The protest has been running for over a month. The organizers called the next rally for 9:01 in the morning.
Not nine. Nine oh one. It is the sort of detail decided in a group chat at two in the morning by people who want to be precise about something in a situation where nothing else is.
The Question Is Realization
Moscow spent Tuesday furious at Britain, which it reported had supplied drones now being used against Russian refineries. Lavrov said Russia “has the right to perceive” British involvement as participation in the war, then added a note of pity.
“You know, I feel sorry for Britain, if it’s going to be with Ukraine to the very end.”
The demolition came from Moscow. A Russian commentator, reading Lavrov’s line about rights, wrote what a certain kind of pro-war Russian has been thinking for two years.
“‘Has the right’ is clear. We’ve had the right for years to turn Ukraine into a glowing patch. The question is realization.”
Dmitry Peskov delivered the Kremlin’s assessment of European diplomacy.
“The Europeans have a very big misconception. They assume that negotiations with Russia should be conducted from a position of strength. This is their biggest mistake, whether it stems from their incompetence, their misinformation or their stupidity.”
He said this while announcing that Russia remains open to dialogue.
Not For War
Near Kronstadt, a site holds Bastion anti-ship missiles. On Yandex satellite maps it is not there. In its place somebody has drawn trees.
The forest is a drawing. The battery is plainly visible on Google, Apple, and Microsoft, all of which are also available in Russia, and a former Finnish intelligence officer who noticed described it as absurd. The problem being solved was not the satellite. It was the map.
In Minsk, in the same spirit, Lukashenko was presented with the first assault rifle designed and built entirely in Belarus. It came with a plaque. The plaque reads:
“Not for war. For confidence in peace!”
The above is extended from a longer post. The original can be seen in full here :
https://professorbonk.substack.com/p/russia-spent-tuesday-debunking-itself?r=17e8q4&utm_medium=ios
The Pepsikuntz own many other brands :
https://www.pepsico.com/brands
And I drink or eat none of their junk.