When tanks started rolling into Ukraine last week, President Putin held a meeting with the country’s oligarchs:
The Russian president, seated about 20ft away in a conspicuous social-distancing measure, told them he had “no other choice” but to invade Ukraine — and, if they wanted to keep their businesses, neither did they, according to people briefed on the meeting.
This morning it appears that same message was being aimed at Russia’s children. Russia’s education ministry put out a 30 minute special hosted by a girl who looks about 11 years old. The point was to explain in very sympathetic terms what is now happening in the country. A writer for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project live tweeted the show:
"The space around us is full of emotions … it's important not to get lost in all these opinions. It's important to understand that everything is more complicated than it seems."
— Ilya Lozovsky (@ichbinilya) March 3, 2022
— Ilya Lozovsky (@ichbinilya) March 3, 2022
It sounds like everyone was trying very hard not to say the word “invasion” in reference to Ukraine.
This is totally incoherent. The guy says it's "not about Ukraine." She says how? He's talking about "divide and conquer." I guess this is about NATO. Except no specifics mentioned yet! Not about NATO, not the US. Just generalities. "Is this about the Soviet Union?" she asks.
— Ilya Lozovsky (@ichbinilya) March 3, 2022
They're saying Ukrainians are brainwashed. That Ukrainians are not allowed to speak Russian. "The Russian language is being exiled."
Girl: "It's hard for me to believe this is all happening! Now will we talk about what's happening today?"
Guy: "No." Now talking about Maidan.— Ilya Lozovsky (@ichbinilya) March 3, 2022
War in Donetsk and Luhansk. The poor locals are under attack by the West. "And no one in the West talked about this." pic.twitter.com/MReVzXxkvC
— Ilya Lozovsky (@ichbinilya) March 3, 2022
"Everyone in the media is saying 'save Ukraine, save Ukraine!' But no one sees how we suffer. … they only hear what they want to hear" pic.twitter.com/mr6wii6xBm
— Ilya Lozovsky (@ichbinilya) March 3, 2022
Finally we get to the invasion last week and, of course, the message is that Russia had no other choice.
"We always tried to solve this problem without violence. But now the recognition of LNR/DNR was an unavoidable decision" pic.twitter.com/cglb5lwiLC
— Ilya Lozovsky (@ichbinilya) March 3, 2022
Boogeyman alert:
A brief mention of sanctions. The little girl delivers a little lecture: "We all have to be together and help each other!"
— Ilya Lozovsky (@ichbinilya) March 3, 2022
Random thought: Did they try to pick a girl who looked a bit like Greta Thunberg?
Back to LNR/DNR. 14,000 people died. "Why did no one in the world talk about this?!" says the little girl in outrage. "The world is very strange." pic.twitter.com/oyHbsoCnYn
— Ilya Lozovsky (@ichbinilya) March 3, 2022
I think it's trying to show broadly that Western values are hypocritical. Mentions US wars all over the world. Says you should be careful sharing emotional things on social media. pic.twitter.com/bYFezPufkL
— Ilya Lozovsky (@ichbinilya) March 3, 2022
Definitely don’t believe any video of Russian’s shelling civilians, kids.
"Our soldiers are NOT touching peaceful citizens," he says. Now they're showing this rocket that struck a building in Kyiv.
"Everyone said it was a Russian rocket. It was not." (They picked a good example, I'm not sure it's proven but it may have been a Ukr anti-air rocket) pic.twitter.com/jVfwh5rHL2
— Ilya Lozovsky (@ichbinilya) March 3, 2022
And that’s where it ended. After it was over Lozovsky wrote another thread with a few thoughts.
The rest of it was a mess. The little girl looked like they had drugged her first. The interlude about the hypocrisy of western values was laughable. The whole thing was creepy and incoherent.
— Ilya Lozovsky (@ichbinilya) March 3, 2022
That's it. I need some brain bleach.
— Ilya Lozovsky (@ichbinilya) March 3, 2022
On a related note, a professor of finance from the University of Illinois published a letter she received from a fellow academic inside Russia. Tatyana Deryugina explained she’d spend several days emailing Russian academics and was given permission to publish an English translation of one response.
Spent the last few days emailing thousands of academics in Russia. Today, I'm publishing one of the replies I've gotten as a blog post (in English and in Russian, with the author's permission). Please read it to understand what's going on inside Russia. https://t.co/KFYrzOf5qe
— Tatyana Deryugina 🇺🇦 (@TDeryugina) March 2, 2022
Here’s a portion of that response. He listed four reasons why more people aren’t protesting and two of those reasons involved propaganda.
Here is also my view as to why the Russian people are not protesting en masse:
- Negative influence of the USSR: beginning with the immigration after 1917 and Stalinist purges and ending with the destruction of the will to live freely to the falling apart of the country. People didn’t live normally and so don’t want to live normally now, those who protest are mostly very young.
- A non-trivial share of the people are idiots. They can’t or, for many reasons, don’t want to absorb non-one-sided information and just want to be “outside of politics”. And the most accessible information is, sadly, propaganda.
- Propaganda is literally EVERYWHERE. On TV it reaches absurd proportions, and besides that special bot farms write a huge number of online comments, forming a false public opinion and swaying those who are uncertain to their side.
So I guess the point is that as silly as the propaganda may seem to those of us outside Russia, inside Russia it works.
Finally, have to note that it was not a good day from Russian propaganda here in the US. RT America has laid off its entire staff and won’t be coming back.
RT America will cease productions and lay off most of its staff, according to a memo from T&R Productions, the production company behind the Russian state-funded network, which CNN obtained.
Misha Solodovnikov, the general manager of T&R Productions, told staff in the memo that it will be “ceasing production” at all of its locations “as a result of unforeseen business interruption events.”
“Unfortunately, we anticipate this layoff will be permanent, meaning that this will result in the permanent separation from employment of most T&R employees at all locations,” Solodovnikov wrote.
Last week Reuters reported that Russia’s Ruptly channel based in Berlin has also been seeing a staff exodus after employees were told not to use the word “invasion” to describe what Russia was doing in Ukraine. You love to see Putin’s propaganda network go poof.
Update: Sadly also ending today, the last vestiges of free media in Russia.
On Thursday, the pillars of Russia’s independent broadcast media collapsed under pressure from the state. Echo of Moscow, the freewheeling radio station founded by Soviet dissidents in 1990 and that symbolized Russia’s new freedoms, was “liquidated” by its board. TV Rain, the youthful independent television station that calls itself “the optimistic channel” said it would suspend operations indefinitely.
And Dmitri Muratov, the journalist who shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year, said that his newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which survived the murders of six of its journalists, could be on the verge of shutting down as well.
“Everything that’s not propaganda is being eliminated,” Mr. Muratov said.
Also…
Russia blocks Twitter, Facebook, BBC, Deutsche Welle, App Stores
— Mathieu von Rohr (@mathieuvonrohr) March 3, 2022
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