Ever More Moscow TV Figures Calling for Jailing or Even Shooting Those who Seek to Avoid Service in Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 2 – There is a dangerous trend on Russian state television: many of the leading figures who have their own shows or appear regularly on those of others are now equating efforts by Russians to avoid being sent to fight in Ukraine with treason and demanding that such people be jailed or even shot.

            Irina Petrovskaya, a journalist for Novaya Gazeta, documents several such cases in recent days, cases that most observers are likely to dismiss as nothing more than the overheated rhetoric of television talk shows that has become all too typical not only in Russia but in other countries as well (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2022/12/02/my-seichas-prochistim-vsio).

            But precisely the experience of other countries with such rhetoric shows why that is a mistake. Repeated impassioned statements of this kind normalize such thinking and open the way for private individuals to think that they have official sanction to attack, often violently, those these speakers don’t like. 

            And when that happens, some officials may even welcome it, seeing such popular “activism” as justifying even harsher actions by the state itself. In that event, such calls on television represent the thing edge of a very dangerous trend, one that can lead from overheated language to the cold of prisons and cemeteries.