Hacker News Reader

Comment by iammjm | Hacker News Reader

Are you suggesting the Ukrainian postal service pulled it off? This was months in the making; I bet they already have projects for the liberation of Crimea ready.

View on HN

You can never trust a postman. My dog has been suspicious of them for years.

“Minuteman-II: 30 minutes World-wide delivery, or your next one is free!”

(stolen from someone's .signature)

I think the suggestion was that this was a planned Ukrainian covert operation, and the postal service was told in advance as a propaganda play.

Zelensky is a former actor who clearly understands PR, so it is not unlikely that he would plan something of that sort.

Why would they risk a leak that threatened the operation just to promote a stamp?

It doesn’t seem like it would take hours to grab a screenshot off of a TV broadcast and photoshop it onto a stamp, without advanced knowledge.

The stamp shows fires on the high part of the bridge: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/08/putin-dealt-bi...

I expect the Ukranian post office has many similar stamps designed and ready. They make good material to promote Ukraine.

They don't have to be told about the attack as part of the promotion. A group of stamp artists gets told "we want to make stamps of 50 different Russian monuments getting blown up to support national unity." Then, they produce some art - Lenin's tomb, this bridge, the Kremlin, some sort of iconic skyscraper, etc. One of the 50 gets blown up, and a stamp line gets released. For bonus points, if one of those artists actually is a Russian asset, the Russians now waste resources guarding all the other monuments expecting future attacks.

The screenshot-the-TV approach also works, and there are ML filters that can stylize that art, so we wouldn't know how the stamps were actually created.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor trained attack dolphins stay these couriers from the swift completion of their secret bridge demolitions?

We'll know it was the Ukrainian postal service when someone asks Putin to sign to confirm delivery of a whole parcel of humiliation.

There’s a reason for the saying "going postal"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com