Renowned actor Arnold Schwarzenegger posted a video on social media on Thursday telling Russians that they are being lied to about the war in Ukraine and accusing President Vladimir Putin of sacrificing the lives of Russian soldiers to fulfill their own ambitions.
Schwarzenegger is extremely popular in Russia, and apparently also with Putin. The Russian president's Twitter account follows only 22 accounts, and one of them is that of the actor.
In the nine-minute video, Schwarzenegger points out that Russian soldiers were told that they would fight Nazis in Ukraine, or that they would protect ethnic Russians there, or that they would conduct military exercises and be welcomed as heroes. He said that many of those soldiers now know that those claims were false.
“This is an illegal war,” said Schwarzenegger, who was sitting on a desk and looking straight into the camera. “Their lives, their limbs and their futures are being sacrificed by an absurd war condemned by the whole world.”
Schwarzenegger posted the emotional video on Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. While some of these platforms are blocked in Russia, he also posted it on the Telegram messaging app, which is not and where it received more than half a million views. The video is subtitled in Russian.
The former governor of California spoke of painful memories of how his own father was lied to while fighting in Adolf Hitler's forces during World War II, and how he returned to Austria physically and mentally broken after being injured in Leningrad.
He asked the Russians to let their compatriots know “the human catastrophe that is happening in Ukraine.” The video shows destroyed buildings in that country and people trying to protect themselves from Russian bombing.
He then addressed Putin directly: “You started this war. You're leading this war. You can stop this war.”
Schwarzenegger described his long-standing ties with Russia, having traveled there as a bodybuilder and hero of action films. In 2010, as governor of California, he led a delegation of Silicon Valley business leaders and investors on a trip to Moscow.
He referred to all Russians who have taken to the streets to protest against the invasion of Ukraine, and who have been arrested and repressed, as “my new heroes”.
An adviser to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine working to disseminate information about the course of the war called on Ukrainians to share the video with friends and family in Russia.
“Putin and his propagandists call us Ukrainians fascists and Nazis,” said the adviser, Anton Gerashchenko, on Telegram. “But their propaganda is torn to pieces when super-famous people from all over the world join their voices to say, 'No to war! '”
Gerashchenko has more than 385,000 subscribers on his Telegram channel. He included a league leading to a Russian-dubbed version of Schwarzenegger's video that he posted to his YouTube channel.
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Associated Press journalist Lynn Berry contributed to this firm from Washington.
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