Russia is succeeding in further promoting its narratives in the Western media, changing topics and distorting the perception of its aggressive war to blame Ukraine itself, Western experts say.
Source: Voice of America
Details: Experts demonstrated the promotion of Russian narratives using the example of events in Crimea: Western media picked up on the Kremlin’s quotes instead of covering the essence of the events in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The strike, confirmed by Ukraine’s Defence Ministry, allowed the Ukrainian Armed Forces to neutralise an important military component of the satellite communications and navigation system that helped the Russians target civilian targets in peaceful cities.
Instead, several leading Western media outlets quoted the Russian side, which emphasised the injured, who were holidaying on the beaches of the Russian-occupied Ukrainian peninsula at the time of the attack.
The publications which reported the incident in such a light were the BBC, The Guardian, and CNN.
At the same time, German columnist Jürgen Nauditt noted that Russia is changing its messages, refuting itself.
At first, Russia claimed to have shot down the ATACMS missile (by its air defence system right over the Crimean beach), but then it retracted this version and accused Ukraine of a deliberate attack.
He says “One rule always applies – Russians always lie”.
Fabian Hoffmann, a researcher at the University of Oslo in Norway and an expert on combat missiles, drew journalists’ attention to the fact that the footage in the video “looks nothing like a purposeful attack, and very clearly is the result of … interception”.
“Tourists were lucky,” Hoffmann writes, “that only a few M74 bomblets ended up detonating in the vicinity of the beach and most in the water. Otherwise, this could have been a blood bath.”
Joe Lindsley, a journalist for Chicago’s WGN Radio, who broadcasts daily from Ukraine, showed in his video on Twitter (X) how English-language media, copying Russian headlines, focused on the loss of life of people who were holidaying on sovereign Ukrainian territory seized by Russia.
Instead of showing the essence of the event: the neutralisation of a strategic military facility that allowed Russians to kill Ukrainian civilians on a daily basis.
“A different, negative story dominated the headlines. Here’s how Russia steers an unthinking media,” Lindsley writes.
He emphasises that the people were killed by the remnants of Russian air defence systems, not by American weapons launched by Ukrainians. At the same time, the American journalist says, these media do not mention the Ukrainians whom Russians deliberately killed in peaceful Kharkiv.
Quote from Lindsley: “And where are the headlines about the civilians Russia killed in Kharkiv just a few days before? [..] Where are the headlines about Ukraine’s great success, using precise American weapons to hit the places from which Russia attacks free people?”
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