Kiriyenko Article about Costs of Ukrainian War Russians will Have to Bear Quickly Taken Down

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 14 – The Izvestiya website featured an article by Sergey Kiriyenko on June 12 declaring that “all of Russia will restore the Donbass which has been destroyed by the fascists” and this effort will result in at least a temporary decline in the Russian standard of living.

            Very quickly, the article was taken down, although it remains available in the cache. The paper’s information center released a statement in which it “officially” denied even the existence of the Kiriyenko article and suggested that the paper had been the victim of a hacker attack (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=62A81D9F542E3).

            Not surprisingly, this chain of events has sparked widespread discussion in the Russian blogosphere. Anatoly Nesmiyan, who writes under the pen name El Murid, sums it up this way. He says it is “hard to say” whether the officials are telling the truth or whether someone in the Kremlin was concerned about Kiriyenko’s message (t.me/anatoly_nesmiyan/3151).

            What the original article said is an open secret, and so it is hard to be sure which version of events is true. All Russians know that they will be bearing the costs of the Kremlin’s actions – that is inevitably the case – but apparently some at the top are very much afraid that being open about that will cause problems.