Vkusno I Tochka, the fast food chain established following the exit of McDonald’s from the Russian market, is already outperforming the American chain after just a year of operations, the company has revealed.
McDonald’s made the decision to exit Russia in March 2022 due to significant pressure exerted on the company following President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By June 2022, all of the company’s restaurants had been sold to local licensee Alexander Govor, who renamed the chain “Vkusno I Tochka” (Tasty, period). One year later, Vkusno I Tochka has successfully rebranded over 860 outlets throughout the country and has served more than 400mn burgers and 200mn servings of fries to its customers. The company claims to have approximately 1.8mn people come through its doors daily.
Speaking at a press conference commemorating the anniversary, Govor explained that Vkusno I Tochka had received over 500mn visits in the past year. He further revealed plans not only to reopen and rebrand all former McDonald’s restaurants, but also expand into new, remote cities that had previously been out of reach of the iconic American fast food brand.
“At the end of May 2023, our share among the three major fast-food players was 58%,” Govor said. “This exceeds the best performance of our predecessor [McDonald’s] and the combined share of our two main competitors. These results have been achieved thanks to the rapid refurbishment of the menu and key services.”
The best performance of McDonald’s in Russia, in terms of both sales and operating income, occurred in 2021. In 2023, Vkusno I Tochka’s sales have consistently surpassed the sales of the corresponding months in 2021.
In an interview with the Russian state-run media RIA Novosti, Oleg Paroev, the CEO of Vkusno I Tochka, disclosed that the company achieved its break-even point in autumn 2022, despite incurring various expenses, including rent and salaries, during the three-month period following McDonald’s departure and the subsequent rebranding and reopening of the outlets.
“When we started operating as Vkusno I Tochka on 12 June last year, the businesses opened gradually, and the entire chain was fully operational only by the end of September,” Paroev explained. “At that time we were working with a limited menu and set of services. But for all that, from autumn onwards, we reached the break-even point, and as far as plans for this year are concerned, we plan to run it at a profit.”
According to Paroev, the company’s biggest difficulties have been replacing popular menu items from McDonald’s, such as the Big Mac and Happy Meal, and managing increased costs while striving to maintain a low-cost business model and generate profits.
“The ruble exchange rate has risen, we are no longer part of a large corporation so we no longer receive the substantial discounts for volumes, and logistics are now becoming a very significant factor in production costs,” he explained. “The average increase in the cost of our products for the whole year has not exceeded 4%. It is very important for us to remain affordable.”
Despite experiencing initial growing pains when the chain first opened, Vkusno I Tochka’s popularity has continued to rise. Concerns about a potential decline in quality control and the standard of produce, in comparison to McDonald’s renowned consistency across different locations worldwide, have proved unfounded. Furthermore, after months of struggling to develop the sauce, Vkusno I Tochka has successfully introduced its own copy of the iconic Big Mac, named the Big Hit. The restaurant now even offers seasonal promotional items, such as the current Spanish-themed ‘Barcelona Burger’ that includes beef, bacon and Emmental cheese.
However, despite a nationwide advertising campaign, constant TV commercials and collaborations with high-profile actors Yulia Peresild and Miloš Biković, most Russians still continue to refer to Vkusno I Tochka by its old name.
“It tastes the same, it looks the same and all the menu items I like are still on sale,” one student in Vkusno I Tochka in Moscow’s Bauman Region told bne IntelliNews. “So I still call it MakDak.”
bne IntelliNews’ correspondent in Moscow also had the opportunity to try the Big Hit and verified that it tastes identical to McDonald’s classic Big Mac.
Vkusno I Tochka is not the only Western fast-food brand to have undergone a rebranding and name change in the past year. In April, former KFC restaurants in Russia began reopening under the new name Rostic’s. This change took place after Yum! Brands, the US owner, completed its exit from Russia and transferred the rights to a local company named Smart Service. Despite the rebranding, Smart Service has chosen to retain its employees, suppliers and the KFC menu, with only a few dishes receiving new names. The distinct red-white colour scheme and the iconic KFC buckets, which have become synonymous with the brand, will also remain unchanged. Over the next 18 months, the company plans to convert all KFC locations in the country to Rostic’s.
Other changes include Stars Coffee (Starbucks) and Pizza N (Pizza Hut).
The St Petersburg International Economic Forum got underway on the 14th and today was the culmination point for the broad public in Russia and worldwide: the time on stage of Vladimir Putin in the traditional format of questions presented to him and to a featured visiting head of state by a moderator.
The visiting head of state was President of Algeria Tebboune. His presence at the Forum was all by itself newsworthy, and surely must have shocked France and other Europeans. But then again they might be beside themselves that another top foreign dignitary with whom Putin met privately on the sidelines of the Forum was the President of the United Arab Emirates.
The moderator was for the first time in many years not some pretty woman from MSNBC prepped to ask aggressive and unfriendly questions again and again or some smart Alec from another Western television channel but Russia’s “own” Dmitry Simes. This was the first time in many years that the moderator was not just reading questions but had written them himself.
This is Simes, the former Russian-Jewish emigrant to the United States, former adviser and traveling companion of Richard Nixon on his visits to Russia after leaving the presidency, former decades-long head of the Nixon Center, later renamed the Center for the National Interest.
I have recently written about Simes, describing this born-again Russian patriot. He left Washington to resettle in Moscow and has returned to Russian state television as host of The Great Game and interviewer of some of the country’s leading politicians with whom he clearly has very good personal relations. From his exchanges with the Boss on stage this afternoon, it is also obvious that he is ‘close to Putin,’ as our Western experts so often say without justification about others.
What I propose to offer here is some of the questions and answers that I heard on the fly. I will set them out by relative importance, not necessarily by their sequence in the on stage discussion.
Among the most memorable was the following, which answers directly the panic and confusion in the heads of our Western foreign policy community following the publication a few days ago in the bilingual Russian-English magazine Russia in Global Affairs of an article entitled “A Difficult but Necessary Decision” by Sergei Karaganov, professor and honorary chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Russia.
I had planned to publish today an essay critiquing Karaganov’s piece and dealing with commentary by several prominent personalities in the West, including Seymour Hersh and Rose Gottemoeller. I will now defer completion and publication of that essay till tomorrow, because the answer to all the controversy was given this afternoon by Vladimir Putin in response to a question pitched to him by Simes: “Some people are talking about Russia perhaps using tactical nuclear weapons now to re-instill in the minds of people in the West what nuclear deterrence is all about. Will Russia use these weapons?”
Putin : “The answer is No. We do not plan to use nuclear weapons in this conflict. As I have said, their use is theoretically possible only when the existence of our statehood is threatened. As for tactical weapons, I do not want to lower the threshold for use of any nuclear arms. For purposes of deterrence, there is no need to remind the West that we have a significantly bigger stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons than they do. This is, so to speak, our competitive advantage. We have made our statement by positioning nuclear weapons in Belarus. That is a clear message. We have no need to frighten the whole world.”
Probably the single most important question and answer in the entire session was the following, for which Putin and his assistants were very well prepared:
Question: Russia has spoken about the Ukraine as controlled by neo-Nazis. This is a position which confuses many in the West. How can this be so when the country’s elected president, Zelensky, is himself a Jew?
Answer: And what kind of a Jew is Zelensky? He has made the most vicious leader of the pro-Hitler Ukrainian collaborationists, Bandera, and his military units into the great heroes of the Ukrainian nation. They killed 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during the war, as well as Russians, Poles and other civilians.
[at this point Putin calls for the screening of a 10-minute documentary showing the mass murders committed by these units, showing their declaring allegiance to Hitler in the annihilation of Jews and purification of the Ukrainian nation
To this, Simes makes his own contribution, saying that in the Soviet Union the head of the domestic security services Kaganovich was also a Jew, and he carried out a program of systematic anti-Semitic repressions. The origins of a given state authority tell us little about the policies he will enforce.]
Question: According to Purchasing Power Equivalence calculations, the Russian economy is now the 6th biggest in the world, coming just after Germany. In present conditions do you think Russia will continue to hold this position?
Answer: “Developing countries are moving ahead very quickly, as for example, Indonesia. At the same time a country like Germany is slipping into recession. Perhaps in a year we will take their place as 5th largest economy in the world.”
Question: As regards the need for skilled workers in Russia, we note that many people, especially in the IT field left Russia after the start of the Special Military Operation. Are they returning?
Answer: “People can live wherever they wish. There are many Russians who left for the United Arab Emirates, for neighboring Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and so forth. However, it is not easy to leave behind Moscow, which is one of the top cities in the world. It is not easy to leave behind your language and your family and friends. The latest information is that 50% have already returned. And those who do stay abroad provide Russia with liaison for our developing relations with these countries.”
Question: Some in the West say that Russia is promoting de-dollarization. What is the future of this movement?
Answer: “De-dollarization is part of the changing economic relations and was accelerated by the United States itself when it abused its privileged position and weaponized the dollar for political objectives. Now we see many countries starting to trade in their national currencies. Some sale of oil to China is now being conducted in yuan. If oil exchanges are set up quoting barrels in yuan or in currencies of the Middle East, then the beginning of the end of the dollar will arrive. And we have nothing to do with that.”
Question: Do you consider NATO to be a party in the war in Ukraine? Is there still room for diplomacy if that is so?
Answer: “NATO is getting drawn into the war with Ukraine. They have supplied a lot of heavy equipment. Now there is talk of providing F-16s. As you see in the past week during the Ukrainian counter-offensive, we have destroyed many tanks, including the German Leopards, and also NATO-supplied armored personnel carriers. If F-16s are sent, they will also be destroyed.”
Question: We think back in the past of Western leaders and some outstanding people come to mind, like Gerhard Schroder, Jacques Chirac, Silvio Berlusconi. What can you say about the quality of the present-day European leadership?
Answer: “I never express my thoughts about the merits of leaders today. What I will say is that Jacques Chirac was a man of encyclopedic knowledge. I remember asking him why the Americans were doing something unpleasant and he said, in Russian: ‘because they are uncultured’ [потому, что они некультурные] Today many people in power have had poor educations. As for Silvio Berlusconi, he was a world class leader who tried very hard to bring Russia into rapprochement with the countries of the European Union. He died this past week, and I ask you all to honor his memory in a minute of silence.” [the audience rises as one]
Question: How will Russia respond to the terror attacks from Ukraine, as for example the incursions in Belgorod,, the murder of Dugina and other provocations?
Answer: “They would like for us also to attack civilians, but we will not do so. However, by our missile attack which destroyed the American Patriot air defense system in Kiev we demonstrated that we have the ability to destroy any building in Kiev at our choosing. We have not done this yet, though we reserve the possibility. We have not done so, because we have no need to do so. We have used air and sea launched missiles to destroy Ukrainian military targets very effectively.”
Question: There are those in the West who say that the sanctions have forced Russia to become very dependent on Chinese markets, Are you afraid of falling under Chinese influence?
Answer: “And those same countries in the West who say this have themselves become very dependent on China. And are they any the worse for that?”
Question to Tebboune: Algeria is surely under very strong pressure from the West to join the sanctions against Russia. So far you have resisted that. What do you tell them?
Answer: “I say that we Algerians were born free and will remain free!”
Question: What final words do you have for the world?
Answer: (Putin) – “Be healthy and wealthy”
(Tebboune) “Live in peace, prosperity, security”
Final question to Putin: If this gathering took place in the United States, one would necessarily ask Biden as the closing question what message he wanted to give to President Putin. And so I ask, what is your message to Joe Biden?
Answer: “Mr. Biden has long experience in government and I would not propose to offer him any advice. I would only say to him that all actions you may take have consequences.”
*****
In past years, I reported on the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in broader terms of the business being done there, the big names from international corporations who were on panels, and so forth. This year I received an official invitation to attend and gave it some thought…until I read through the list of 150 or more panels and understood that a lot has changed in the nature of the event. The panels themselves were mainly directed at issues of great importance to Russia as it reorganizes to face the new challenges of reindustrialization and reorientation of its export-import channels away from Europe and towards Asia, Africa and Latin America. I saw virtually no Western firms mentioned in the program. And even the contingents of Chinese and Indian firms and government officials which were very large in the past were not reflected in the composition of panelists. One obvious reason is that in the past couple of months there have been very big visits of Russian business delegations to both countries and little was left for discussion in the Petersburg Forum.
And yet, the presence of large delegations from Algeria and the United Arab Emirates was noteworthy and points to where Russia’s future is developing. It also underlines the West’s loss of the Global South and self-marginalization.
This very reorientation of Russia and its growing popularity in what used to be called the developing countries brings to mind a comment from the leading Russian film director Karen Shakhnazarov on last night’s Vladimir Solovyov talk show. Shakhnazarov said that Russia is now reassuming the role of global champion of a new world order that the Soviet Union assumed at the start of the 1920s. In this context, the enmity of the Collective West today is an expression of its frustration that it has “lost” Russia, which it would rather have kept on its side.
That comment was allowed to stand unchallenged, although Solovyov himself is a believer that the West is out to destroy and break up Russia, rather than to bring it back under its control.
More than two-thirds of the residents of 11 EU countries polled by ECFR view Russia as an adversary or rival, but also an average of more than two-thirds of the April poll’s respondents think their country should enter into a partnership with Russia if its war with Ukraine ends in a negotiated peace. The poll, which was conducted in Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden, also revealed 26% of respondents viewed Russia and China as equal partners, while 13% viewed them as unequal partners and 9% did not see Moscow and Beijing as partners at all. (This week alone has seen Russian and Chinese militaries conduct joint strategic air patrols and announce the participation of Russian troops in the PLA’s North. Interaction-2023 exercises.)
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday met with African leaders in St. Petersburg and displayed a document that he said was a draft treaty on Ukrainian neutrality that was drawn up during negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022.
“As you know, a string of talks between Russia and Ukraine took place in Turkey so as to work out both the confidence-building measures you mentioned and to draw up the text of the agreement,” Putin told the African delegation, according to TASS.
“We did not discuss with the Ukrainian side that this treaty would be classified, but we have never presented it, nor commented on it. This draft agreement was initialed by the head of the Kiev negotiation team. He put his signature there. Here it is,” he added.
According to RT, the treaty, titled “Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine,” required Ukraine to enshrine “permanent neutrality” in its constitution. The US, Britain, Russia, China, and France are listed as guarantors. Since the treaty was a draft, it indicates that it wasn’t finalized and more details needed to be worked out.
Putin’s claim reflects an article published in Foreign Affairs last year that cited multiple former senior US officials who said Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed on a peace deal in April 2022. They said the agreement would have involved a Ukrainian promise not to join NATO in exchange for a Russian withdrawal to the pre-invasion lines, and Ukraine would have received security guarantees from several countries.
Russian and Ukrainian officials met face-to-face in Istanbul on March 29, 2022, which was followed up with virtual consultations. After the meeting, Russia’s lead negotiator described the talks as “constructive,” and the Russian Defense Ministry announced it would “drastically” reduce military activity near the northern cities of Kyiv and Chernihiv, which led to a full Russian withdrawal from the north.
Putin said after the Russian withdrawal, Ukraine abandoned the treaty. “After we pulled our troops away from Kiev — as we had promised to do — the Kiev authorities … tossed [their commitments] into the dustbin of history,” he said. “They abandoned everything.”
Ukraine accused Russian troops of intentionally killing civilians in the northern areas it withdrew from, most notably in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. But if Putin’s account is true, Western pressure could have also led to Ukraine scuttling the treaty.
Then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited Kyiv on April 9, 2022, a few days after Russia completed its withdrawal from the north. According to a report from Ukrainska Pravda, Johnson urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky not to negotiate with Russia and that even if Ukraine was ready to sign a deal with Putin, Kyiv’s Western backers were not.
The Ukrainska Pravda report said at the time, Russia was ready for a Putin-Zelensky meeting, but two factors stopped it from happening: the discovery of dead Ukrainian civilians and Johnson’s visit.
Then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet was trying to mediate between Putin and Zelensky in March 2022 and gave a similar account of the West’s position. He said the US and its allies “blocked” his mediation effort and that he thought there was a “legitimate decision by the West to keep striking Putin” and not negotiate.
After peace talks were scuttled in April 2022, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said he expected the conflict to end after the Istanbul talks but then realized some countries in NATO wanted to prolong the war to “weaken” Russia. A few days after Cavusoglu’s comments, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin admitted that one of the US’s goals in supporting Ukraine is to see Russia “weakened.”
As the war has dragged on, the Biden administration has come out explicitly against a ceasefire. Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined the position earlier this month and said the US would continue building up Ukraine’s military rather than push for peace.
The African leaders who met with Putin on Saturday traveled to Russia and Ukraine to push for peace talks and an end to the war, but the chances of new negotiations between the warring sides are slim. The delegation included the presidents of Comoros, Senegal, South Africa, and Zambia, the prime minister of Egypt, and the foreign ministers of the Republic of Congo and Uganda.
The African delegation was in Ukraine on Friday, but Zelensky did not seem open to their proposals and reiterated his position that peace talks can’t happen until a full Russian withdrawal. In Moscow, the Kremlin said that the peace initiative presented by the African delegation “is very difficult to implement, difficult to compare positions.”
A Russian football hooligan leading cross-border raids from Ukraine taught at a neo-Nazi camp in Wales where organisers dreamed of recreating Hitler’s SS.
The leader of an anti-Putin militia has disturbing links to an extreme-right wing movement banned in Britain, Declassified has found.
Denis Kapustin, who also uses the names Denis Nikitin and ‘White Rex’, was an instructor at a far-right camp in Wales in 2014.
His presence was noted by a Sunday Mirror investigation that year.
More recently, the White Rex has been in the news for leading the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK).
They are a group of armed dissidents launching raids into Russia from their base in Ukraine since March.
At least two civilians and a child have been killed in their attacks so far, with another 13 wounded.
While the RDK’s far-right ideology was belatedly noted in media reports, the fact its leader spent time teaching neo-Nazis in Britain has so far been forgotten.
He taught at the Sigurd Culture Camp in the Brecon Beacons in August 2014, which was designed to “enthuse them with a sense of racial pride, and to awaken the ‘Spirit Warrior’ within”.
Camp organiser Craig Fraser wanted to recreate Hitler’s SS by drilling his men into shape – and even planned to show footage from ISIS training in Syria at the next session.
The Sunday Mirrorsaid a “key trainer at the event…was Denis Nitikin [sic], the owner and organiser of White Rex, a Russian martial arts and cage fighting club.”
Yesterday immigration minister Robert Jenrick refused to tell parliament what information the Home Office holds on Kapustin’s visit to the UK in 2014 or whether he had since been banned from entering the country, claiming not to comment on individual cases.
‘Go kick some immigrants’
In Wales, Kapustin taught over 30 participants how to deal with “attackers armed with knives” in “gruelling full contact practice fighting from which participants often emerged bruised but undaunted”.
When not fighting, organisers “spoke at length about the virtues of…our Pagan spiritual heritage”.
Anti-fascist research group Hope Not Hate found the Sigurd camp was a front for National Action, a neo-Nazi group later banned in the UK under the Terrorism Act for praising the murder of MP Jo Cox.
Two National Action figures who attended the training camp, Christopher Lythgoe and Matthew Hankinson, were later jailed for a total of 14 years for their involvement with the group.
German authorities reportedly banned Kapustin from entering Europe in 2019. He once had a framed photo of Joseph Goebbels in his bedroom and has been heavily engaged in football hooliganism across the continent.
When living in Moscow, he enjoyed hosting forest fights between hooligans after which they would “go kick some immigrants”.
The enemy of my enemy…
Despite Kapustin’s links to a banned British neo-Nazi group and violent racism, he has obtained Western arms in Ukraine for his rebellion against Russia – and appears to receive support from Ukrainian military intelligence (the GUR).
A GUR spokesman called RDK members “one of those forces that will be shaping the future configuration of post-Putin Russia.”
Yet in one Telegram message from May, Kapustin called for Russians to support him by praising the: “Glory of the Great Russian Empire!”
Journalist Leonid Ragozin has said that after the RDK attacked Bryansk region of Russia in March, Kapustin mocked a Muslim boy wounded in the attack over his mixed Tajik/Tartar heritage.
He placed swastikas over photos of his family and wrote: “Russia will be Aryan or lifeless”.
Mark Galeotti, author of the book Putin’s Wars, told Declassified: “I imagine Ukraine will use any weapon at its disposal against Russia, and if this means arming and supporting a neo-Nazi well, so long as he proves a capable leader and can attract like-minded fighters to the cause of challenging the Putin regime, so be it.
“Churchill’s famous quote that ‘If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons’ springs to mind.
“This is, after all, only a very small element of the overall war effort and Ukrainian military intelligence, GUR – which seems largely behind these pro-Kyiv Russian forces – is trying to distract and torment the Kremlin, and neo-Nazis certainly fit that bill.”
Maxim Solopov, a journalist who has investigated Russian neo-Nazis, said on his Telegram channel that a White Rex social media account had almost 45,000 subscribers by 2020.
He estimated that even if only 1% of them remained active, it would give Kapustin around 500 supporters – some of who could be in Moscow, where pro-RDK graffiti has recently appeared.
Western weaponry
Photos from Kapustin’s recent raid in the Belgorod region of Russia show US-made armoured vehicles in his group’s convoy.
Earlier footage posted on the RDK’s Telegram channel indicates they have operated US-made rocket launchers – known as High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) – which cost around $5m each.
For small arms, Kapustin’s men do not all have to rely on rusty kalashnikovs, with some wielding sophisticated Belgian-made FN SCAR assault rifles. This has triggered concern from Belgium’s prime minister, Alexander de Croo, as to how weapons meant for Ukraine have ended up in the group’s hands.
Swedish Pansarskott rocket launchers are also in Kapustin’s arsenal. And some of his men can be seen wearing camouflage smocks embroidered with union jacks, suggesting their uniforms might come from British army stocks.
The RDK’s activities have not been limited to cross-border raids. They were responsible in December for guarding Snake Island, Ukraine’s famous outpost in the Black Sea. When a CNN reporter met them there, he omitted to mention the group’s neo-Nazi associations.
Their maritime capabilities often feature in Telegram posts, with members showing off amphibious landings from inflatable boats.
They even claim to have landed in Zaporizhzhia, where Russian troops are occupying Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.
Russian friends
Kapustin moved to Ukraine in 2017 following an invitation from Sergei Korotkikh, who founded Russia’s National Socialist Society and is accused of beheading a migrant beneath a swastika flag.
Declassified has previously revealed how Korotkikh obtained five rocket launchers Britain supplied to Ukraine, on whose side he now fights.
Prominent Russian neo-Nazis flocking to join the RDK include Aleksey Levkin, from the band Hitler’s Hammer. He organised the annual National-Socialist Black Metal festival in Kyiv.
He is heavily involved with the Wotanjugend Telegram channel, which promoted the manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 Muslims at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
A few weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, Levkin posted a photo of a British-made NLAW rocket launcher with the caption “mastering NLAW”, suggesting he was learning to use the UK-supplied anti-tank weapon.
Freedom of Russia Legion
Another anti-Putin militia fighting alongside White Rex is the Freedom of Russia Legion, which also has far-right figures involved in its Ukraine-based leadership.
The Legion’s commander, Maximillian ‘Caesar’ Andronnikov, is a former member of the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), which was designated as a global terrorist group by the US State Department in 2020.
The then Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said RIM “has provided paramilitary-style training to white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Europe”, linking their alumni to the bombing of refugee shelters in Sweden.
Vladimir Putin says his illegal invasion of Ukraine is needed to “de-nazify” the country, a claim which has been widely derided, partly owing to President Zelensky’s Jewish heritage.
Increasing evidence of the role played by neo-Nazis in attacking Russian soil from Ukraine will only fuel the Kremlin’s narrative.
This week the New York Times said some journalists asked Ukrainian soldiers to remove Nazi emblems on their uniforms before photographing them.
They expressed concern that the use of such patches “risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate.”
