Russia-Ukraine War: Since the start of the bloody war on the soil of Ukraine, the media in Russia has acted according to the instructions of the Kremlin and the President, Vladimir Putin, and refused to condemn the invasion. At the same time, independent media outlets that dared to criticize were immediately shut down, and journalists were even imprisoned in the country’s prisons. Now, for the first time, a prominent state media outlet in Russia has taken a bold step.
The Russian news agency RIA Novosti, one of the most prominent in the country, broadcast last Tuesday an article under the title “We did not expect this”, which included interviews with soldiers who were injured during the war, and who expressed frustration that, among other things, they did not receive the compensation that President Putin had promised. The news agency Since the outbreak of the war in February 2022, the Russian has stuck to the Kremlin’s line, and this after the parliament passed a new law, which imposes 15 years in prison for spreading false news on the Russian military.
Fresh recruits to the Russian army (Photo: Reuters)
In the meantime, the state authorities forbade the media to call the invasion a “war”, but only with the term “special operation”, as did the RIA news agency in the article it broadcast. However, apparently the Kremlin did not like to watch the rest of the article and the testimonies of the soldiers. In the special article, the news agency referred to the fact that Putin pledged that the state would pay compensation in the amount of three million rubles for each soldier who is injured, and stated that “it is our duty to support the families of the wounded soldiers.” However, last April, the Russian Ministry of Defense published a list of criteria that the wounded soldiers must meet , in order to receive the required compensation.
Meanwhile, Sergey Abramov, a resident of the city of Krasnoyarsk, was sent to fight in the Donetsk region towards the end of 2022, after three months of training. Sergey bravely gave an interview to the RIA news agency and said that he was hospitalized after being hit by a shell. He said that despite his injury, the Russian Ministry of Defense explained to pay him compensation, and therefore filed an appeal with the military prosecutor’s office. RIA even noted in the article that human rights activists voiced criticism of So Putin’s presidential order differs from the statement issued by the Ministry of Defense a few weeks later.
The war in Ukraine: a lot of destruction from an attack by the Russian army (Photo: Anastasia Vlasova/Getty Images)
Another soldier said that he was injured in the head after fighting in the Zaporizhia region in the summer of 2022. Later, he received a letter from the Russian military prosecutor’s office, which concluded that “this is not an injury but an illness”, and therefore, he is not entitled to receive compensation from the state. At the same time, RA cited additional soldiers who expressed criticism of the state’s conduct in the war, and declared that they had been “exploited”.
As mentioned, the media in Russia do not usually criticize the war in Ukraine. In March of last year, a bizarre incident occurred during a broadcast of Channel One in Russia, when Maria Obsyannikova, an employee of the channel, burst into the news broadcast with a banner calling for an end to the fighting on Ukrainian soil. “Stop the war! No war! Don’t believe the propaganda. They are lying to you here,” it said. Immediately after that the broadcast was interrupted and according to the reports she was arrested.