Jared Malsin

You know, when you have a currency that loses 84% of its value in one year, your ability to go buy groceries is going to collapse.

I mean, one example that someone gave me is that the restaurants and shops, people had no idea how to put prices on their menus.

Because when you have a currency that's declining every single day and every single hour, people don't even know how much to charge for things.

It's cheaper not to even open your shop if you're just going to lose money on the energy and on the stocking your shelves and so on.

The government, led by President Zelensky, introduced this budget at the end of December that was essentially going to remove subsidies on bread, for example, on gasoline, and it pointed to the fact that the government was out of money.

When you're talking about cuts on subsidies to bread and gasoline, those are things that are going to really hit ordinary people hard.

— That was really the immediate trigger of these protests, because the government had to come out and say in numbers, OK, we have to cut back, we have no other choice.

But it's sort of too little, too late.

They're trying to fight a fire that has already consumed them.

Right.

So they have spiraled to pull in a wide cross-section of Iranian society.

You had protests in cities across the periphery, in all kinds of regions, in Balochistan, in the Kurdish areas, in Tehran itself.

Very importantly, these protests in the city of Mashhad, which is more religious, more conservative, which shows that

Some of the core constituents that would normally support the system as a whole, support the Islamic Republic, that those people are protesting.

That is why it is a situation that is challenging the system as a whole.

they have also launched a crackdown.

There's been this very deadly, very concerning crackdown on protesters where you've had hundreds if not thousands of people killed, and you've seen the videos circulating that we've reported also of the bodies piling up in morgues.

And that's what our newsroom is focused on now, is trying to figure out how many people were killed, how many people died,

We're going to get the story out eventually, and we're going to find out just how many people are dead in what looks to be one of the worst, most lethal acts of political mass killing in recent years.

That's a great question.