Russian Foreign Ministry and state-controlled media have begun pushing an alternate reality version of the gunning down in Kyiv of Arkady Babchenko, Russian journalist and outspoken critic of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin. While western media all reported that yet another journalist vocal in his criticism of the Kremlin had been murdered, Russian audiences learned that Ukraine would probably present the killing in this way, with some politicians adding how the killing only proved how dangerous it supposedly is to be a journalist in Ukraine. The Russian Foreign Ministry claimed that “bloody crimes and total impunity have become routine for the Kyiv regime”. This alternative point of view was facilitated by omission in all the reports of crucial details. There was either no mention of the hysterical hate campaign that had forced Babchenko into exile, or a heavily edited and therefore misleading version of the comments that elicited public outrage. There was also effectively nothing about Babchenko’s blunt condemnation of Russia’s annexation of Crimea which Babchenko called “unequivocally Ukrainian”, of the war unleashed on Ukraine and of Putin’s reliance on war as his “only instrument of influence” within the Russian Federation.
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Halya Coynash: Russia goes into propaganda drive over gunning down of Arkady Babchenko in Kyiv
Russian journalist Arkadiy Babchenko, an adamant Kremlin critic, was fatally shot in the back several times as he left his Kyiv apartment on May 29.
