{"id":44922,"date":"2024-08-20T23:18:35","date_gmt":"2024-08-20T15:18:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/russian-pensioners-urge-vladimir-putin-to-rescue-starliner-astronauts\/"},"modified":"2024-08-20T23:18:35","modified_gmt":"2024-08-20T15:18:35","slug":"russian-pensioners-urge-vladimir-putin-to-rescue-starliner-astronauts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/russian-pensioners-urge-vladimir-putin-to-rescue-starliner-astronauts\/","title":{"rendered":"Russian pensioners urge Vladimir Putin to rescue Starliner astronauts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the odder propaganda phenomena in Russia, of late, is seemingly spontaneous groups of elderly Russian pensioners gathering outdoors and espousing some random bit of agitprop.<\/p>\n<p style=\"\">From a Western perspective, these are obviously staged and hilarious to behold. For example, last year a very earnest-looking group of elderly women and a few men urged Russia to \u201ctake back Alaska\u201d in an attempt to preserve the United States from fascism. One of the women in the video also advocated for a military alliance with Mexico, saying, \u201cIn order to effectively fight fascism, we must establish military relations with Mexico to prevent the fascism from spreading further. We must form a military alliance with Mexico.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe allow=\"autoplay; attribution-reporting 'src' https:\/\/cm.teads.tv\" scrolling=\"no\" title=\"native\" id=\"teads-native-iframe\" sandbox=\"allow-same-origin allow-scripts\" style=\"margin: 0px; padding: 0px; width: 100% !important; height: 385px; border: none; overflow: hidden; display: block; float: none;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>There are entire Telegram channels devoted to these \u201cPutin\u2019s squads\u201d videos, and you can find them on YouTube as well.&nbsp;It is not clear whether these \u201cman on the street\u201d videos are having any impact on Russian opinion, but evidently someone in the Kremlin believes they are helping to shape domestic opinions.<\/p>\n<p>They would probably be invisible to audiences outside Russia, except that a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament, and adviser to the government, named Anton Gerashchenko has been sharing these videos on his X and Telegram social media accounts with translations. His intent is to highlight the ridiculous lengths to which Russian propagandists will go.<\/p>\n<h2>Yes, there\u2019s a space angle<\/h2>\n<p>All of this is pretty banal as propaganda goes, except for the fact that on Monday, Gerashchenko shared a video on Telegram of senior citizens imploring Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2014or in their words, dear \u201cVladimir Vladimirovich\u201d\u2014to rescue NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who are presently residing on the International Space Station.<\/p>\n<p>,<\/p>\n<p>These <em>concerned<\/em> citizens from Krasnodar, a city in southern Russia, are apparently really emotionally invested in the fates of the two American astronauts. (And they definitely aren\u2019t reading off cue cards.)<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere are two American astronauts in space right now,\u201d one man says. \u201cThey have been in trouble for two months. Their Boeing broke down on the way. The engines failed, they somehow made it to the International Space Station. And now they don\u2019t know how to get back. We ask you to help them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>These Putin squad members assert that only Russia can help to bring Wilmore and Williams home. One theme of the video is that the two astronauts should not be treated as hostages, as they \u201care not to blame for Biden\u2019s aggression.\u201d Another woman adds that time is of the essence because Wilmore and Williams \u201chave been in space for a long time at their advanced age.\u201d Wilmore is 61 years old, and Williams is 58.<\/p>\n<p>There are a lot of things wrong here, but let\u2019s start with age. How old Wilmore and Williams are is inconsequential, as they\u2019re both healthy. Moreover, one of the three Russians in orbit, Oleg Kononenko, is 60 years old and has spent nearly 1,100 days in space, accumulating far more time in orbit than either of the Americans. Where is the concern for Kononenko\u2019s age and radiation exposure?<\/p>\n<h2>What was once true no longer is<\/h2>\n<p>Perhaps most amusingly, the Kremlin continues to peddle the lie that Americans are reliant on the Soyuz rocket and spacecraft to get to and from the International Space Station.<\/p>\n<p>,<\/p>\n<p>For a long time, this <em>was<\/em> true. In the aftermath of the space shuttle <em>Columbia<\/em> tragedy in 2003, two NASA astronauts in orbit who were scheduled to return to Earth on a future space shuttle flight, Ken Bowersox and Don Pettit, instead came back to Earth on a Soyuz spacecraft. For a couple of years after <em>Columbia<\/em>, the Soyuz was NASA\u2019s only ride to space for crew, and this happened again for nearly a decade after the space shuttle\u2019s retirement in 2011. If you ask NASA, they\u2019ll say the Russians were essential and reliable partners.<\/p>\n<p>This gap in US spaceflight capability was also a potent tool for Russian propaganda. In 2014, amid tensions over Russia\u2019s takeover of the Crimea peninsula, a Russian defense official named Dmitry Rogozin said that if the Americans did not like what Russia was doing in Crimea, they could use a \u201ctrampoline\u201d to get their astronauts to the space station. Even a decade later, this remains one of the best space trolling posts of all time.<\/p>\n<p>Since then, however, Rogozin and the Russians who seek to leverage the Soyuz spacecraft for propaganda purposes have gone back to this well too many times. As recently as 2022, Rogozin was criticizing US launch vehicles by calling them \u201cbroomsticks.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This was just dumb and conveniently ignores the rise of SpaceX. With its primary \u201cbroomstick,\u201d the Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX has launched more than 80 missions so far in 2024. By contrast, the entirety of the Russian space enterprise has a total of nine orbital launches.<\/p>\n<p>SpaceX and the Falcon 9 have also&nbsp;been launching NASA astronauts (as well as some Russians) to the International Space Station since 2020. Because of this, and contrary to the views of Putin\u2019s squad in Krasnodar, NASA has a viable means of getting Wilmore and Williams home. If necessary, they will ride home on the Crew-9 mission that is due to launch next month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the odder propaganda phenomena in Russia, of late, is seemingly spontaneous groups of elderly Russian pensioners gathering outdoors and espousing some random bit of agitprop. From a Western perspective, these are obviously staged and hilarious to behold. For example, last year a very earnest-looking group of elderly women and a few men urged [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9654,1302,21,1306],"class_list":["post-44922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-rogozin","tag-soyuz","tag-space","tag-starliner"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44922"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}