Drones. Crutches. Potatoes. Russians Crowdfund Their Army. NYT

Across Russia, grass-roots movements, led in large part by women, have sprung up to crowdsource aid for Russian soldiers. They are evidence of some public backing for President Vladimir V. Putin’s war effort — but also of the growing recognition among Russians that their military, vaunted before the invasion as a world-class fighting force, turned out to be woefully underprepared for a major conflict.

The aid often includes sweets and inspirational messages, but it goes far beyond the care packages familiar to Americans from the Iraq war. The most sought-after items include imported drones and night vision scopes, a sign that Russia’s $66 billion defense budget has not managed to produce essential gear for modern warfare.

“No one expected there to be such a war,” Tatyana Plotnikova, a business owner in the city of Novokuybyshevsk on the Volga, said in a phone interview. “I think no one was ready for this.”

Ms. Plotnikova, 47, has already made the 1,000-mile drive to the Ukrainian border twice, ferrying a total of three tons of aid, she says. Last week, she posted a new list of urgently needed items on her page on VKontakte, the Russian social network: bandages, anesthetics, antibiotics, crutches and wheelchairs.

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Ukraine’s military, tapping into Western support for its cause, is benefiting from a far more extensive crowdfunding campaign that is delivering millions of dollars worth of donations in items like drones, night vision scopes, rifles and consumer technology.

Crowdfunding means that your army is unprepared and failing and bad, and that your government has left the soldiers behind and the common citizenry needs to fill in the gap, except if you're on our side, then you're a plucky underdog and the aid you're getting from your citizens and other countries is inspiring and represents a wider battle of democracy vs autocracy. The citizens of a country pitching in to provide extra material in a total war sense has been a thing since at least WW2, if not earlier. Nobody says that the movement in Britain to convert gardens into farms was indicative of the weakness of the British regime in their opposition to the forces of Germany such that the common people instead had to supply goods for the war effort - it was sold as an inspiring movement and an example of British patriotism. It's virtually a case study in the kind of media manipulation and propaganda Parenti was talking about in Blackshirts and Reds.

Anyway, this article does the classic thing of taking a tiny or minor part of the war and then making it seem representative of the entire affair. Even if we assume that it's true, and that the pro-Russian forces aren't getting enough aid from the Russian government, I'm curious about what the split is between supplying aid to the Russian Armed Forces vs the Donbass militia, because the latter probably is very undersupplied and needs support, and the western media virtually never makes a distinction between those two forces.