(CNN) – The heartbreaking video looks just like the pictures western TV viewers are getting from the war in Ukraine: a grandmother, bundled up in a thick jacket against the cold, stands weeping in front of her wooden house, now smoldering from a rocket that hit her village. “They destroyed everything!” she cries. “Nothing is left.”
But this is the Russian government-controlled TV channel Rossiya24 and, in this report, the soldiers attacking her village are Ukrainian, not Russian. The Russian correspondent calls them “nationalists.” Other reports on the channel call them “neo-Nazis,” “fascists,” or “drug addicts” who use civilians as “human shields.”
Almost all reports of the conflict are from the breakaway Donbas region in Ukraine’s east, specifically the two self-proclaimed “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, primarily Russian-speaking entities that Russia recognized as independent statelets on February 21.
That was the trigger for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, providing Moscow the pretext to invade, claiming it had no choice but to “protect” them from imminent attack by Ukraine, an allegation Ukraine strongly denies. As one news report put it: “De-nazification was possible only with a military operation.”
On Russian broadcasts, the war in the rest of Ukraine, the war most people around the world are witnessing, is largely ignored — the wreckage of Mariupol left in the wake of Russian bombing; the charred skeletons of houses and buildings in Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Kherson, Zhytomyr and other towns decimated by Russian airstrikes; residential neighborhoods in the capital Kyiv, along with their shellshocked, bleeding residents fleeing Russian shelling — almost none of this is shown on Russian TV. When it is, it’s blamed of course on Ukrainian forces. There is also no accurate coverage of the recent military setbacks suffered by the Russian military.
The reports are emotional, often filled with angry accusations and threats. On one of Russia’s most popular talk shows the host, Vladimir Solovyov, rails against Europe and the United States, at one point taunting American media reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin, allegedly, is not being informed by his aides about what really is happening in Ukraine.
“You don’t know yet what answers we are preparing for you, you don’t know where this is going, and you really won’t like it, our American comrades!”
