Very good article from FT on Ukraine ... Agree to 90% ft/intl/cms/s/0/0b88656a-a2fb-11e3-9685-00144feab7de.html#axzz2v571PzxH Russia wages propaganda war over Ukraine By Roman Olearchyk in Kiev, Jan Cienski in Kharkiv, and Neil Buckley in London Yevgeny Savchenko, governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, had a worrying message this weekend. Thousands of refugees, he told Rossiya-24 television, were pouring into his region from neighbouring Ukraine, escaping what he called the chaos in the country. As the governor spoke, the speaker of Russia’s upper house said 140,000 Ukrainians had fled to Russia in recent weeks. The Englishlanguage RT television carried an item citing Russia’s Federal Border Guard Service, headlined “675,000 Ukrainians pour into Russia as ‘humanitarian crisis’ looms”. On Ukraine’s border with Belgorod on Sunday, 40km from east Ukraine’s biggest city of Kharkiv, things looked rather different. As occasional cars approached, they were waved through by bored-looking Ukrainian border guards. “Do you see anything at all here?” said a watch commander, swinging his arm towards the quiet border post. “It has been quiet for days.” Analysts say Russian officials and media have been engaged in recent days in what appears a co-ordinated media war to justify Russia’s military intervention in Crimea – but based largely on distorted and sometimes false information. Worryingly, Russian media reports have also appeared to be presenting a narrative to support intervention in mainly Russian-speaking east Ukraine, claiming inhabitants were under threat from what are portrayed as Kiev’s “fascist” new leaders. “It’s important to remember that this is aimed only at saving Russian lives,” said an RT anchor, referring to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine. On Monday, a joint letter signed by six top investment banks and consultancies in Kiev hit back. “We refute the Kremlin’s aggressive statements in recent days regarding the ‘extraordinary’ situation in Ukraine and the ‘threat to the lives of Russian citizens’,” it said. “The situation in Ukraine is no longer extraordinary,” it added. “The domestic political conflict has been resolved . . . the threat to the lives of Russian citizens and citizens of other countries stems solely from the presence and actions of Russian military units” stationed in Ukraine. The Kremlin has been tightening control over Russian media for several months. In December, it folded RIA-Novosti, the state-run news agency, which had attempted to report balanced news, and turned it into a new service run by one of Russia’s most conservative TV pundits, Dmitry Kiselyov. Yevgeny Kiselyov, a former leading Russian TV host who emphasises he is no relation to his newly appointed namesake, says Dmitry Kiselyov has become the “face of a new and bizarre anti-western and anti-US propaganda”. Led by Dmitry Kiselyov, Russian television channels have for months presented the anti-government protests as led by extremists and fomented by the west. They have focused heavily on the presence of radical and rightwing groups among what was a large and broadly based protest movement. Since Viktor Yanukovich, Ukraine’s president, was ousted 10 days ago, a handful of representatives of more radical groups were given senior positions by the new government. But Russian TV reports have claimed “nationalists” in the government were posing a threat to ethnic Russians in Crimea and across the country. Moscow media have also highlighted the fact that an early act of Ukraine’s parliament just a day after Mr Yanukovich was toppled was to repeal a 2012 law promoted by his party that gave enhanced rights to Russian-speakers. Political analysts in Kiev have conceded that move was a mistake. But Russian media have failed to report that the repeal of the law would simply return the country to the status quo for the previous 21 years since the Soviet Union collapsed and that it does not affect Crimea, whose autonomous status enshrines Russian as a state language along with Ukrainian. Russian media reports have highlighted claims, too, that Dmitry Yarosh, leader of the radical Right Sector group, had appealed through social media to a Chechen terrorist leader, Doku Umarov, to support Ukraine. Mr Yarosh’s spokesman said his social media site had been hacked into and out of his control for two days. The so-called appeal was part of a “massive and dirty smear campaign”, the spokesman added. At a press conference on Monday, Mykola Tomenko, a Ukrainian MP, urged privately owned cable and satellite operators to take Russian TV off the air. Some Ukrainians were taking to television and the web to counter the Russian media campaign. Yevhen Komarovsky, a doctor based in east Ukraine who has a TV show giving advice to parents on children’s health, condemned what he called Russia’s smear campaign in an internet address. “What I see on Russian television [about Ukraine] . . . there was never such lies in all the days of the Soviet Union,” he said in Russian. “Nobody is killing us . . . nobody in my Ukraine prevents me from speaking Russian.”
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 10:09:06 +0000