How is the journalistic coverage of a war inside the country that started it, even more so in a nation where dissenting voices are often targets of poisoning attempts, criminal actions and labels of “foreign agents”?
In the Russian media, where most of the mainstream press is state-owned and/or obedient to President Vladimir Putin, the war in Ukraine, which completed one month on Thursday (24), is portrayed in the Kremlin’s view: an “operation special military” (the word war is prohibited) to “demilitarize and denazify” a neighboring country that threatens ethnic Russians.
In this war of narratives, everything the enemy reports is false. State-owned Channel 1, one of Russia’s most popular broadcasters, dismissed Ukrainian reports of the destruction of Russian military equipment as a ruse to “deceive inexperienced viewers”.
“Images that cannot be described as anything but fake continue to circulate on the internet,” said one presenter, who described photographs of the damage as “unsophisticated virtual manipulations.”
Russian media reports also portray the invaded country’s forces, often described as “Ukrainian nationalists”, as responsible for acts of extreme cowardice. The state-owned Rossiya 1 channel reported that Ukraine’s military “use civilians as a human shield” and attack residential areas in the Donbass region.
Russian government-linked Sputnik news agency reported this week that “nationalist battalion militants” in Sumy (northeastern Ukraine) fired an anti-tank grenade at an ambulance, killing health workers, and that in that city and two others, Chernigov and Zaporizhzhia, “Nationalist battalion commanders are looting residential buildings and public and private organizations” and humanitarian corridors are not being established because “Kiev once again refused” to negotiate.
Sputnik said nothing about the damage and suffering inflicted by the Russian army in Mariupol, the Ukrainian city hardest hit by the war, but it highlighted allegations by the Russian Defense Ministry that “Ukrainian neo-Nazis” were imposing “relentless terror on the of Mariupol they still control, where they kill between 80 and 235 citizens daily”.
number of dead
On Wednesday (23), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) estimated that between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian soldiers were killed in the first four weeks of the war in Ukraine, but the triumphalist, white-faced tone of its coverage local media does not let any threat to the country’s morale stand out.
“They [a população russa] have heard of these numbers but just don’t believe them. They believe the official Russian numbers, which speak of a few hundred [de mortos],” Stanislav Kucher, a former Russian television presenter and former member of the country’s Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, told CNN.
After Kucher’s interview, Russia reported that 1,351 of its soldiers had died so far in the conflict in Ukraine.
Interfax, which is privately owned, is often cited as a source of information by Western media, but while it avoids the sycophantic tone of most Russian media, it does not usually publish anything that might upset the Putin government.
She even published reports this week about the transfer of more than 300 Ukrainian children for cancer treatment abroad and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky’s conversation with Pope Francis.
But in the first article, he did not mention that the war was the reason for the forced transfer, and in the second, despite mentioning the “search for peace”, he omitted that Francis had defined the conflict as “sacrilegious” and “inhumane” and that Zelensky mentioned in the conversation the blockade of humanitarian corridors by Russia – topics covered in the report of the official Vatican media.
Likewise, in reporting the reopening of the Moscow Stock Exchange, Interfax did not mention that its closure “for almost a month” was due to sanctions that are hurting the Russian economy.
New law closes siege on independent press
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Russia 150th out of 180 countries in its 2021 World Press Freedom Index.
“With draconian laws, website blocking, internet cuts, and mainstream media controlled or stifled, pressure on independent media has been steadily growing since the massive anti-government protests of 2011 and 2012,” RSF said.
In early March, a law came into effect in Russia that stipulates up to 15 years in prison for anyone who publishes “false” information about the Russian armed forces – in this case, “false” can be understood as anything that contradicts the official narrative of the Russian military. Kremlin. “This leaves little hope for the future of the few independent media outlets left in the country,” lamented RSF.
On Friday (25), another law extended these punishments to anyone who publishes information deemed false about any action by the Russian government (and not just the military) abroad.
Russia announced on Tuesday (22) the opening of a criminal case against journalist Alexander Nevzorov, for alleging that the Russian army deliberately bombed a maternity hospital in Mariupol. Nevzorov, who works primarily on social media and YouTube, is the first prominent political reporter and commentator to be investigated under the country’s new fake news legislation.
Because of Putin’s record of clamping down on the press and fears of the new legislation, other independent journalists have also taken precautions. Novaya Gazeta, whose editor, Dmitri Muratov, was one of the Nobel Peace Prize winners last year, has used ellipses and the phrase “a word prohibited by Russian authorities” when interviewees mention the word “war”.
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