Russia’s all-out assault on the truth intensified this week, with the country’s leading independent radio station, Echo of Moscow, silenced, and the website of TV Rain, an independent streaming television channel, blocked for reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which the authorities ban broadcasters from even calling a war.
Meanwhile, Russian television continued to downplay or ignore the bombardment of major Ukrainian cities by their military, and officials warned the Russian public not to believe any of the visceral evidence of death and destruction that reaches them through social networks that are increasingly hard to access.
While most Russians still rely on television channels either directly or indirectly controlled by the government for news, the authorities are clearly aware that images of the conflict that show civilian casualties, and Russian troops being greeted not as liberators but as occupiers, threaten to undermine the official fiction that Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine is limited to protecting Russian-speaking enclaves.
So dramatic, viral images of rocket attacks on Ukraine’s cities, destroyed Russian vehicles, Ukrainians blocking Russian tanks with their bodies, insulting Russian President Vladimir Putin, jeering the occupying army, and even hurling Molotov cocktails at Russian vehicles are nowhere to be found on Russian television news shows.
On NTV, for instance — a channel owned by Russia’s state-controlled energy firm,...
Image: Facebook/SAPS The IDAC has rubbished rumours that it has a J50 warrant of arrest for KZN provincial police commissioner Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi as “false”. This comes after re...