Kremlin Says that War is About Toilets

LGBTQIA people, and other minority groups including Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, anarchists, punks, heavy metal fans and any opposition political group, need no instruction on how the Russian state has removed their civil rights and given the green light to bullying, state intimidation and harassment.  Some analysts, remarking on various media across Europe,  even claim that the Russian government is even trying to position itself as some kind of moral force against what they see as an immoral and decadent West - perhaps even with a view to future military intervention in other Eastern European countries.  It might seem preposterous to suggest that President Putin would risk nuclear war against NATO countries over moral convictions.  And indeed we all hope it is.  But as the autocrat prepares for a new Presidential election where his victory is assured, so it becomes important to justify the conventional war in the Ukraine, which despite state control, is described by many reports coming out of Russia, as not terribly popular with the public.  And so it is that in a bizarre series of posts to social media, the Kremlin suggested that the war was over gender neutral toilets.  Yes, really.  In several rants, both the President himself and senior generals said that Russian troops were deploring the presence of gender neutral loos in occupied territories. But there is hope that, despite the dearth of free media in Russia, the majority can see a false publicity stunt.  According to Radio Free Europe, which beams pro-democracy programming to Russia, "Such pronouncements produced a wave of ridicule on Russian social media, with some Russians speculating that the third bathrooms in Ukrainian schools -- if indeed they exist at all -- were for teachers and others noting that such complaints seem strange considering that according to government figures, more than one-fifth of Russian households lack indoor toilets.   If I were the government, I would 'shed blood' for something completely different," wrote journalist and blogger Aleksandr Khots on Facebook. "In Russia, at least 20 percent of the population still visits outhouses, which often exist in the singular. But the guardians of empire prefer to teach their neighbors how to go to the toilet rather than mastering toilets themselves instead of a hole in the ground."