KYIV, Ukraine —
To hear Russian media tell it, the government of Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis waging a genocidal campaign against ethnic Russians in the country’s east, where Moscow-backed authorities regularly uncover mass graves full of the corpses of women and children with bound hands and bludgeoned heads even as they face the hell of constant shelling.
Such false images and narratives have become a daily staple in Russia in the months since an estimated 150,000 Russian troops, armored vehicles, warplanes and naval ships began assembling around Ukraine’s periphery. The Russian media have gone into overdrive with stories depicting a government in Kyiv so cruel that Moscow has no choice but to swoop in and protect the ethnic Russians of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
“It’s a war between the Ukrainian government and its own people. … People are dying there every day. Thousands of civilians died there. Thousands of children lost their limbs there, buried in little coffins,” Margarita Simonyan, head of the state-funded broadcaster RT, said on a talk show on the Russia-1 channel.
“Go there once. … You’ll change your attitude completely. And you’ll understand that Russia can’t help but stop this war. Do we have to wait until they organize concentration camps out there? Until they start poisoning their people with gas?”
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