Putin’s War in Ukraine Leads Kremlin to End Two-Track Media Arrangements, Irisova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 4 – Even after Vladimir Putin took control of most Russian television channels at the start of his reign, the Kremlin leader allowed some alternative outlets to function, confident that they would never attract the kind of audience that would lead Russians to take action against him.

            Many in both Russia and the West have argued that the existence of these alternative and independent outlets meant that it was wrong to denounce Putin for returning totalitarianism to Russia; but now, Putin is doing just that in the media sphere in order to limit the growth of anti-war and increasingly anti-Putin protests.

            But given declining living standards and now his war in Ukraine, Putin has decided that what worked for him up to now was insufficient and has been using various means to shutter independent outlets given that ever more Russians are looking to them for information his media don’t supply, Olga Irisova, editor of the Riddle portal says (ridl.io/mir-krivyh-zerkal/).

            Putin’s moves to criminalize accurate reporting about the war – indeed, a journalist could get 15 years behind bars for calling it that – has prompted some independent media outlets to close shop lest they and their journalists fall victim to that kind of repression. And his blocking of the sites of BBC, Radio Liberty and Deutsche Welle has restricted.

            As a result of the Kremlin leader’s actions, there are fewer and fewer sources of information that are prepared to challenge Putin’s five basic lies about Ukraine and the war there, the notion that the West “provoked” Russia, another that Russian forces are liberators up against “treacherous nationalists, a third that a genocide against ethnic Russians is going on in Ukraine, a fourth that the Ukrainian army is surrendering rather than fighting back, and a fifth that the West has launched an information war against Russia.

            As the growing wave of protests of various kinds show, many Russians know these are lies and are prepared to take the increasing risks of protesting. But most Russians still rely on state media, a reliance that the destruction of alternatives is likely to make even stronger in the coming days and weeks.

            Consequently, Irisova says, no one should expect the anti-war movement to expand exponentially anytime soon because the use of “fear and lies” by the Kremlin remains “an effective instrument of deterrence” of such a possibility.