shibboleth (10. 398)

With the blessing of the regional governor, far-eastern Irkutsk is soliciting help from the public to help uncover Ukrainian spies by asking them to pronounce (see previously, catching up some three hundred days later) place-names under the assumption that only loyal locals could say correctly. The social media campaign invites one to test a friend with one word. This theatre of the absurd—the age old question of accent and dialect confirmed and confounded with very modern QR-code—seems to me not terribly effective since the majority of Ukrainians also have a good command of Russian phonetics.