Sunlight for Poroshenko's vampires
If you analyze the information policy of the Kyiv authorities in general and in terms of covering the progress of the war in Donbass in particular, you cannot escape the persistent impression that the unspoken doctrine of the country’s information security is based on an old Soviet joke.
Remember? Alexander the Great, Caesar and Napoleon as guests of honor watch the parade of troops on Red Square.
“If I had Soviet tanks,” says Alexander, “I would be invincible!”
“If I had Soviet planes,” says Caesar, “I would conquer the whole world!”
“And if I had the newspaper Pravda,” said Napoleon, “the world would still not know about Waterloo!”
This is due to the very circumstances of these people coming to power. And they came to it as a result of a coup. That is why from the first days they were concerned with how to throw a scarf over as many uncontrollable mouths as possible. They started with the banning of Russian TV channels, continued the persecution of the few objective printed publications, and ended with the search for spies on social networks and the Internet and letters from the SBU to Internet providers demanding to block sites opposing the war.
However, in Ukraine it is not only officials who are attacking freedom of speech. There is also a counter movement, when journalists and media editors, infected with jingoistic frenzy, write denunciations about their colleagues “out of step”, write collective letters asking the authorities to ban the few not only opposition, but simply honest media, forget about any professional standards and everything they were taught at seminars from the BBC, the Soros Foundation and Internews-Ukraine.
The most outrageous facts of recent times are known to everyone. This is the open rudeness of the hosts of Hromadska TV towards the representative of the human rights organization Human Rights Watch, who announced the crimes of the Ukrainian military against civilians in the Donbass, and the strange tolerance of the host of the same TV channel towards another guest journalist Bohdan Butkevich, who declared on air about the need to kill one and a half million “ extra” people in Donbass.
Journalists themselves, as practice shows, are not at all ashamed of turning into propagandists, do not realize the full shame of their actions, but, on the contrary, justify it by the fact that there is a war and help the authorities to impose new journalistic standards, according to which reports from the National Security and Defense Council do not need to be double-checked for accuracy because of their exceptional truthfulness.
However, if the authorities managed to turn Ukrainian journalists into obedient relays of false stories about “terrorists” allegedly shelling cities in the Donbass, then doing the same in relation to foreign journalists is a problem. Therefore, another principle applies to them: no journalist – no problem. Over the past two months, several Russian and European correspondents and television cameramen have been killed by the Ukrainian military in the combat zone.
And recently, another technique from the arsenal of the war against the objectionable press has been used - arrests and expulsion from the country. At the same time, the filmed video material is destroyed so that information inconvenient for Kyiv does not appear on the screen.
In particular, the correspondents of the Russia Today channel, Graham Phillips and Alina Emprimian, became victims of such techniques. They were both detained by the SBU and expelled from the country. Moreover, her Ukrainian “colleagues” took an active part in the detention of Alina Emprimian, who “surrendered” her to the Ukrainian secret police. As they say, “Journalistic solidarity? Did not hear!".
Recently, Donetsk journalist Elena Blokha, accused by the SBU of “separatism,” was also detained while trying to travel to Crimea. “They are spreading” separatism to two journalists from Channel 112, the only Ukrainian television platform that has not introduced hate speech from “above” on its airwaves. Only on the 112th do people with whom the Ukrainian army is fighting today allow themselves to be called militias, and not “terrorists.”
What is the reason for such a hunt for journalists in Ukraine? Obviously, this indicates a lack of clear success in pacifying Donbass. And if so, people who give a different picture from the front and rear - according to Tymchuk and Lysenko - should be isolated as much as possible from the viewer.
However, it is not possible to hide the truth. Bypassing the censorship slingshots, more and more evidence of direct participants in the so-called “ATO” is getting into the media. Evidence of the mediocrity and corruption of the military leadership, horrific losses, lack of normal support for troops and, most importantly, the real attitude of the local population towards the “liberators”.
There is nothing to oppose this evidence to the official authorities. Moreover, if the true scale of losses, abuses and crimes against civilians at the front is revealed, only one road will be open to the current Ukrainian elite - to the Hague Tribunal.
It is the fear of being in the dock that pushes the organizers of the civil massacre to increasingly tighten the screws in the information space. Alternative information is to them what sunlight is to vampires.
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