Mariupol: Destroy the memory with prison sentences and verbal attacks
This week, on 16 March, it will be a year since the horrific attack by Russian forces on the Mariupol theatre which killed more than 600 people who had sought protection in the cellar of the Regional Academic Theatre. The theatre was among the first in a long series of what would become iconic locations where Russia’s deliberate targeting of civilians was well documented to the world.
Faced with such a reality, propagandists usually resort to counter-attacking: Delegitimise the enemy (‘they are soldiers in hiding’/‘they are Nazis anyway’), or smear the outlets carrying the news (‘Soros/Washington/the EU /Anglo-Saxon media lie about this or that’). Or jail the journalists with multi-year sentences – see our overview here. Or shift the focus by accusing the enemy of exactly the atrocities you perpetrated yourself, just turn up the volume: The enemy commits genocide across Donbas is a claim frequently made in the state TV shows hosted by one of the main propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov. The victims in Mariupol were dismissed as ‘actors’, ‘Nazi-Azov soldiers’, ‘pictures photo-shopped’, etc. (see examples here).
As the horrors of Mariupol became known and the fighting around the city’s giant steelworks ‘Azovstal’ intensified, so did the Kremlin campaign to flood the information space through a group of Moscow-affiliated outlets and social platform accounts. Each time the Kremlin spokespersons or military leaders repeat such accusations, the dehumanising effect of disinformation increases. As we examined here, there is a correlation between talk of genocide becoming mainstream and battlefield brutality.
By now, the endless claims by Moscow of ‘precision strikes on Ukrainian cities in response to Kyiv terror’ sugar-coat the fact that Russia keeps attacking the civilian population. Waves of missiles come with intervals of some weeks, which might suggest that Russia fires the weapons it has at the same speed as it produces them.
Georgia – Classic Kremlin criticism
Kremlin platforms proclaimed ‘another Western-inspired attempt to forcibly change power’ across all outlets – state TV, state print outlets, Kremlin-affiliated platforms. Demonstrators in Tbilisi, waving an EU flag while being hosed down by water cannon, carried such a powerful message that it triggered the usual Kremlin reflex: ‘It must be a covert operation by Western secret services’ and ‘It is orchestrated by the US. It is a “new Maidan” and the Anglo-Saxons being reluctant to give up influence in Georgia’. The magnitude, participation and drive of these protests illustrate a locally-owned political feeling.
We have seen this reflex before in recent years when political changes driven by popular movements have occurred in Russia’s neighbouring, independent countries. See our account ‘Colour revolutions everywhere’.
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