Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash in Kazakhstan "does not look like" bird strike as Russia suggested, experts say
www.cbsnews.com
Experts say evidence in the Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash in Kazakhstan points to a possible midair explosion, not an encounter with a flock of birds.

Summary

An Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 and injuring 29, with speculation mounting that Russia’s military may have been involved.

Experts doubt Russia’s suggestion of a bird strike, citing damage to the plane’s fuselage consistent with shrapnel from an airborne weapon.

The plane’s GPS system was reportedly malfunctioning, and survivors reported hearing an explosion before the crash.

Investigations by Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Russia are ongoing, with black boxes recovered.

The incident evokes comparisons to the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

  • talEnglish
    4·
    21 hours ago

    There is some term for the Russian “lying when both you and I know that I’m lying but we both agree to pretend that the lie is true because it makes accepting the situation more palatable” thing.

    kagis

    That’s it, vranyo.

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vranyo

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie

    Vranyo expresses white lies or half-lies in Russian culture, told without the intention of (maliciously) deceiving, but as a fantasy, suppressing unpleasant parts of the truth.

    It’s something I’ve seen a number of articles commenting on as a sort of culture shock when people run into it.

    https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-vranyo-russian-for-when-you-lie-and-everyone-knows-it-but-you-dont-care-181100

    Vranyo is a noun formed from a different verb, vrat’. That verb also means “to lie”, but it has a more colloquial, pejorative flavour. Vranyo has a dismissive feel: it is a lie that no one would take seriously, an excuse or a ducking of responsibility. It can be a mindless fib, like the story of how the dog ate your homework, or a tall tale.

    So vranyo starts with lozh, the negation of truth, and goes from there. Vranyo is not about the proposition itself – it focuses attention on the lie-tellers and why they are lying. As one wag put it on Reddit, vranyo means:

    You know I’m lying, and I know that you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes.

    The word has spewed consistently from the Russian side in this meaning. Following the lead of Russia’s foreign and defence ministries, Russian media have united to pooh-pooh almost anything in Ukrainian and western sources as blatant invention, whether that’s estimates of Russian losses (“propagandistic vranyo”) or details of how the Russian army levelled the Kievan suburb of Bucha (“the amount of vranyo from Kiev”) and bombed the train station in Kramatorsk (“they’re steeped in vranyo”), among the many atrocities already documented.

    But when a government does vranyo, the nature of the fabrication can change. We may well be talking about “the big lie”, and the reason for vranyo might not be evasiveness, but contempt. Western and liberal Russian sources have called vranyo a characteristic tactic of the Russian state, even coining a new compound gosvranyo, literally “government-vranyo”.