AIn the interview that four Russian journalists conducted with the Ukrainian President via Zoom on Sunday, everything is remarkable: form, content, the appearance of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the panicked Moscow reaction to it. Because the media regulator, Roskomnadzor, asked the media involved not to publish the interview. An “examination has been started to determine the levels of responsibility and response measures”. The Attorney General threatened to take action against the journalists. But only the newspaper Kommersant, which belongs to billionaire Alisher Usmanov, who is loyal to the Kremlin and provided one of the interviewers, followed the request.
The Kremlin has no access to the other parties involved: the editors-in-chief of the Latvian news portal Medusa and the online channel TV Doschd – both media outlets were recently blocked by Roskomnadzor – are not in Russia, nor is the fourth interviewer, the publicist Mikhail Sygar. Zelenskyy himself commented on the censorship attempts in his nightly message published on social media: The push by the “censorship board” would be “funny if it weren’t so tragic,” he said.
Novaya Gazeta stops work for the time being
The Russian rulers are “destroying freedom of speech in their country. Trying to destroy the neighboring country. Presenting themselves as global players. But they themselves are afraid of a rather brief conversation with some journalists.” As if to bring Zelenskyy’s words to life, threats from Roskomnadzor on Monday caused the independent “Novaya Gazeta” to stop its work “until at the end of the ‘special operation’”, as the war in Russia has to be called.
“Medusa” published the interview with Zelenskyj and put a one and a half hour video of the conversation on YouTube. The video portal has so far been accessible in Russia, despite various blockade violations; “Medusa’s” website requires a detour via a VPN service. Hundreds of thousands watched the interview on Sunday. They saw a President exhausted after more than four weeks of war, but focused and determined. In his speeches, Zelenskyi repeatedly addressed the Russians in Russian; but the interview is the first he has given to Russian journalists since the beginning of the war. Russian is the mother tongue of the forty-four-year-old, but sometimes he asks a member of staff in the room how a certain Ukrainian word is said in Russian – something that is inherent in the distancing from the language of the attackers, which is also the subject of the interview and which the war is driving forward Example to illustrated.
At the beginning it is about how Zelenskyj, who ventured into politics as a humorist, was a thorn in the side of the Kremlin right from the start. Moscow has relied in vain on various political forces, says Zelenskyj and describes the basic problem: Moscow’s rejection of an independent Ukraine, “that is our common tragedy”. Referring to the besieged city of Mariupol, Zelenskyy says Russian soldiers are shelling aid convoys and forcibly taking residents to Russia, including more than 2,000 children.
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