BSoon after President Vladimir Putin ordered the “special operation”, Dmitry Muratov published a video message on the Novaya Gazeta website. “Our country has started a war with Ukraine on the orders of President Putin. And nobody can stop him. That’s why we feel shame as well as sorrow,” says the sixty-year-old. “As if it were a key fob for an expensive car, the Commander-in-Chief turns the nuclear button in his hands. Is the next step a nuclear salvo? How else are you supposed to understand Putin’s words about a retaliatory weapon.”
Muratov, editor-in-chief of the independent Novaya since 1995 with a break in 2017-2019, announced Friday’s edition will be published in Russian and Ukrainian “because we never recognize Ukraine as an enemy and the Ukrainian language as the enemy’s language .”
The government does not talk about casualties
The output could appear. However, the newspaper had to block Muratov’s appeal online under pressure from the Prosecutor General’s Office and media regulator Roskomnadzor. “The editors consider this to be an act of military censorship, but will continue to inform their readers about what is happening,” it says. The “Novaya” and other media are already supposed to remove further materials that describe the “special operation” as an attack, invasion, war. Roskomnadzor demands that only “official Russian information” be used.
These amount to a rapid, almost bloodless “liberation” of the neighboring country from “Nazism”. By contrasting this account with Ukrainian reports and their own research, the “Novaya” and others punish the regime with lies. The Ministry of Defense complained that independent media reported “fakes”, “especially” the “Nowaja”. The newspaper responded that in order to publish information it had to be obtained, citing a request about Russian casualties to which no response had been received.
The “Nowaya” knows that. Several of their employees have been murdered. Muratov’s people do research, but judgments were made, lower ranks were hit, no clients. Muratov dedicated the Nobel Peace Prize, which he received last year together with the Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, to the murdered colleagues. Muratow comes from Kujbyschew, today’s Saratov, on the Volga, is the father of three adult children. He knows the war, as a reporter in Chechnya in the mid-1990s. At the end of the appeal, which can still be viewed on YouTube, he says: “In my opinion, only an anti-war movement by Russians can save life on the planet.”
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