Russian state media Media freedom in Russia is highly restricted, and Russian state media presents the official viewpoint of the
Russian government. , chief of Russia's main state-controlled TV station
Channel One In May 2015, the Slovak monitoring group MEMO 98, Internews Ukraine, and the Yerevan Press Club of Armenia completed a report on Russian TV channels for the Civil Society Forum of the
Eastern Partnership. MEMO 98's Rasťo Kužel observed that Russian media "diverted attention from important domestic issues and scared the population with the possibility of a war and the need for Russia to protect itself against an external enemy." and selectively quoted materials, omitting anything critical of Russia. Accusations of Russophobia (
anti-Russian sentiment) are often levied at critics.
Euromaidan State
Russian media consistently portray the fighting in Ukraine as instigated by successive Ukrainian governments following the 2014 ouster of
Viktor Yanukovych, the fourth president of Ukraine, during the
pro-European Euromaidan protest movement. and that Ukrainian nationalists from western Ukraine and Kyiv were assaulting and killing Russians in Crimea. They claimed that a bus in
Simferopol carried members of
Right Sector who attacked Crimean residents, although footage showed a bus with Crimean license plates transporting men armed with Russian weapons after roads to Crimea had been blocked by Russian soldiers. In March 2015,
TASS published a false report that the Carpatho-
Rusyns had held a congress in which they decided to seek autonomy. Potupchik reported to her supervisors about alleged irregularities in
Alexei Navalny's passport application form, attaching its scans to the email. As noted by
The Insider, she had no legal way to obtain these forms, as they are considered sensitive documents, and a few days later
LifeNews reported exactly these irregularities as part of campaign against Navalny. In September 2015, Alexandr Bastrykin, head of the
Investigative Committee of Russia, presented a version of the arrest of
Nadia Savchenko that said she "voluntarily crossing the Russian border" and was "living for 4 days in hotels" in Russia before her arrest, and that completely contradicted previous reports by
Donetsk People's Republic militia of taking her prisoner, including videos of her interrogation. In the same interview Bastrykin also accused
Arseniy Yatsenyuk of taking part in the
First Chechen War which, due to its surreal character was widely ridiculed in Ukrainian and Russian media, including a number of
memes portraying Yatseniuk as a Chechen warlord. These accusations were based on testimony from
Mykola Karpyuk and Stanislav Klykh, Ukrainian citizens held, tortured and extorted in Russia since 2014. Another Ukrainian citizen, Serhiy Litvinov, is also held in Russia and his forced statements were used by Russian media as 'proof' of 'genocide of Russian nationals' as Litvinov was also charged with murdering twenty 'unidentified people' and a rape. By the end of 2014, most of the charges against him were dropped, leaving one robbery charge. According to Alexander Cherkasov, the prosecution statement in Karpyuk and Klykh contains errors and inconsistencies suggesting that it was written based on the Russian Wikipedia article on
Salman Raduyev rather than any actual evidence.
Information war In July 2014,
The New Yorker reported that "nearly all Russians derive their news and their sense of what is going on in the world" from Russian state television, whose broadcasts were described as "feverish, anti-Ukrainian, anti-American, and generally
xenophobic" and "full of wild exaggeration about Ukrainian "fascists"". Russian state television has described the
Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the
Prague Spring of 1968, both stopped by Soviet-led invasions, as orchestrated by the United States and Western European countries. Russian TV presented the invasion of Czechoslovakia "as brotherly help aimed to prevent an invasion by NATO and fascism", provoking outrage in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Social media Social media are used in a coordinated way to influence public opinion in Russia and elsewhere. Leaked emails of Kristina Potupchik, a former
Nashi spokeswoman, and later an employee of the Putin administration, revealed wide-scale monitoring of any critical articles in Russia opposition media, paid commenting and
trolling by
web brigades, coordinated by Potupchik. Writing in March 2014 for
Gazeta.ru, Yekaterina Bolotovskaya said the Russian media presented an "apocalyptic" image of Ukraine. He tweeted that "warmongers" among Russian state media personalities "should be treated as war criminals. From the editors-in-chief to the talk show hosts to the news editors, [they] should be sanctioned now and tried someday."
Independent Russian media Roskomnadzor issued a warning to Ekho Moskvy after two journalists, Sergei Loiko and Timur Olevskiy, discussed the
battle for Donetsk Airport. Russian politician
Leonid Gozman, commenting on
Ekho Moskvy's blog, said that the only way to save Russia from the generals covertly sending soldiers to die in Ukraine is to "give Ukraine advanced arms". On 14 February 2015 Russian journalist Roman Saponkov published video of separatist artillery shelling Ukrainian positions from
Debaltseve, laughing in the background about "what will RT say", "they must be using dummy ammunition, it's truce now". Russian media have widely reported that and, as result,
RT and
TASS agencies who worked with Saponkov previously both publicly condemned his comments.
Novaya Gazeta, Slon.ru, and
Ekho Moskvy published criticism of Russia's policy in
Crimea and then
Donbas. Some such as Grani.ru, were
blacklisted as a result. Journalists who wrote commentary critical of the Russian government's actions usually experienced
ostracism and were accused of treachery or fascism by mainstream media. Some experienced violence. On 28 July, Skobov was assaulted by unknown perpetrators and received several stab wounds in St. Petersburg.
Journalists In May 2014, Cathy Young of
The Daily Beast reported that journalists were being abducted and "subjected to bizarre propaganda rituals on Russian television". In Russia, opponents of the war frequently face discrimination and coordinated hate campaigns. The most extreme example was the
assassination of Boris Nemtsov, which his daughter Zhanna Nemtsova blamed on Putin and Russian media. Writing for
Vedomosti, she stated that "Russian propaganda kills. It kills reason and common sense but it also kills human beings."
International reactions Russian media portrayals of the 2014 unrest in Ukraine received widespread criticism from Asian, European, Ukrainian, and North American media and governments, and were often described as "propaganda", and "filled with omissions and inaccuracies". Halya Coynash of the
Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group said that the Russian state media coverage disregarded the evidence and a
United Nations report ;RT English-language television channel
RT, owned by the Russian government, has been called the "primary hub of Russian propaganda in the West", According to Ben Nimmo of the Central European Policy Institute, the Russian media was "distorting Western perceptions of the conflict. Claims that NATO promised not to expand into Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) after German reunification, and that Russia's fear of that enlargement is justifiable, have entered the mainstream media, creating the impression that the West is to blame for Russia's direct assault on Ukraine." In December 2014, Latvia's foreign minister,
Edgars Rinkēvičs, said that Russian news channels had become "very aggressive in what can no longer be considered normal news or normal journalism, but is more information warfare and propaganda" and said the EU was discussing whether "to invest jointly in alternative sources of information — not alternative propaganda sources, but an alternative normal European TV channel, with entertainment, with news, but with very factually accurate news." According to the
Centre for Eastern Studies, "information campaigns using the stereotype of Russophobia are leading to a consolidation of political nationalism" in Russia; "attacking 'Russophobes' is a way of protecting Russian society itself from having any doubts about the Kremlin's policy", "mobilising them in the face of real or alleged threats", and "restoring psychological comfort" after a failure. In April 2015, former Russian minister of finance
Alexey Kudrin noted that the citizens are now victims of an information war started by the Russian government "against its own citizens", commenting on the process of pushing some independent media stations (
TV Rain,
Tomsk TV-2) out of the public sphere. The head of
Rossiya Segodnya,
Dmitry Kiselyov, said, "Information war is now the main type of war, preparing the way for military action"
Reactions Russia has frequently claimed that Western media ignore right-wing nationalist groups like
Right Sector and the
right to self-determination of those in eastern and southern Ukraine and
Salome Samadashvili, then at the
Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies stated that the West's "view of the realities in the former captive nations of the USSR is often clouded by years of exposure to the Russian point of view." James Bloodworth of
The Daily Beast criticized British newspapers, saying a perception of Russia as mistreated "extends deep into the Conservative press" and added that "the left has its own share of
useful idiots."
Jade McGlynn has analysed that, since Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, the
Kremlin has put the
so-called "
Great Patriotic War", the 1941–1945 fight of the
Soviet Union (reduced to "Russia" in this narrative) against
Nazism (conveniently leaving out the 1939
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with
Nazi Germany), at the centre of Russian identity and politics, thereby arguing that the Russian Federation was entitled to dominate all the lands occupied or essentially controlled by the
Red Army at the end of
World War II. The conflict's portrayal in Russian state-controlled media was best understood as a propaganda strategy that used historical framing to create a flattering narrative that the Russo-Ukrainian War was a restaging of the Great Patriotic War.
2022 systematically downplays both civilian and military losses, denouncing reports of attacks on civilians as "fake" or blaming Ukrainian forces.
Roskomnadzor investigated several independent
Russian media outlets for publishing information about the war or civilian casualties.
Russia-1, and
Channel One mostly follow the government narrative on the war. On 28 February,
RIA Novosti published, then took down, an incorrect report that Russia had won the Russo-Ukrainian War and "Ukraine has returned to Russia". On 14 March 2022,
Marina Ovsyannikova, an editor at Channel One, interrupted a live broadcast to protest the Russian invasion of Ukraine, carrying a poster that said in Russian and English: "Stop the war, don't believe the propaganda, here you are being lied to." claiming that they were spreading false information on the Russian military and calling for violence.
Novaya Gazeta, an independent newspaper critical of the Russian government, suspended publication after it received warnings from
Roskomnadzor.{{cite news |script-title=ru:Мы приостанавливаем работу ==Media in Ukraine==