Russians abroad try to get Ukraine news to relatives in their homeland
From his home in the US city of Seattle, Andrey Nokhrin sent his mother in Moscow a clip of a television editor interrupting a live Russian state-run news bulletin to hold up a sign and shout slogans protesting the Ukraine invasion. The editor, Marina Ovsyannikova, said earlier this month that she hoped her protest would open Russians’ eyes to propaganda.
But his mother said the protest looked fake, as if it had been staged with a green screen, according to Nokhrin.
The propaganda there works very well, said Nokhrin, a 37-year-old IT entrepreneur. “They’ve been told that this is a peacemaking operation and they truly, honestly believe it.”
State TV, the main source of news for many millions of Russians, closely follows the Kremlin line that Russia was forced to act in Ukraine to demilitarise and denazify the country, and to defend Russian speakers there against what the Kremlin calls “genocide”.
Russia passed a law earlier this month banning the “public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation”. Offenders face up to 15 years in jail.
Russian state TV did not respond to a request for comment. The Kremlin declined to comment.
Russian Americans said they were engaging in conversations with family over WhatsApp and Telegram, sharing material they collect from social media and international news sites.
Nokhrin has sent his relatives pictures of injured Ukrainian children, dead Russian soldiers, and bombed-out blocks of flats and hospitals. He sent his mother the link to a news site that aggregates content about Ukraine from international news sites and translates them into Russian. He used WhatsApp to message his mother a YouTube clip of Russia’s independent news broadcaster, TV Rain, signing off with “No to war”.
She would bring up the war with her colleagues, and they’d say, ‘You think this way because your son is in America and has brainwashed you. That’s why you’re not supporting President Putin,’ ” Vitaly said. Vitaly’s mother, he said, was open to the idea of seeing the invasion of Ukraine as an atrocity.
However, since Russia passed the law on information dissemination, Vitaly said his mother, at his request, has stopped talking to colleagues about the war, for fear she could be accused of spreading lies.
Source: IOL
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