I’m not talking about Fox News and Breitbart in this case. We all know about that problem. This is about how that plays out in a time of war:
“When I heard the first explosions, I ran out of the house to get my dogs from their enclosures outside. People were panicking, abandoning their cars. I was so scared,” she says.
The 25-year-old has been speaking regularly to her mother, who lives in Moscow. But in these conversations, and even after sending videos from her heavily bombarded hometown, Oleksandra is unable to convince her mother about the danger she is in.
“I didn’t want to scare my parents, but I started telling them directly that civilians and children are dying,” she says.
“But even though they worry about me, they still say it probably happens only by accident, that the Russian army would never target civilians. That it’s Ukrainians who’re killing their own people.”
It’s common for Ukrainians to have family across the border in Russia. But for some, like Oleksandra, their Russian relatives have a contrasting understanding of the conflict. She believes it’s down to the stories they are told by the tightly-controlled Russian media.
Oleksandra says her mother just repeats the narratives of what she hears on Russian state TV channels.
“It really scared me when my mum exactly quoted Russian TV. They are just brainwashing people. And people trust them,” says Oleksandra.
“My parents understand that some military action is happening here. But they say: ‘Russians came to liberate you. They won’t ruin anything, they won’t touch you. They’re only targeting military bases’.”
While we were interviewing Oleksandra, the shelling went on. The internet connection was weak, so we had to exchange voice messages.
“I’ve almost forgotten what silence sounds like. They’re shelling non-stop,” she said.
But on Russian state TV channels on the same day, there was no mention of the missiles striking Kharkiv’s residential districts, of civilian deaths, or of four people killed while queuing for water.
Russian media say the threat to Ukrainian civilians doesn’t come from the Russian armed forces, it comes from Ukrainian nationalists using civilians as human shields.
Russian state TV channels justify the war by blaming Ukrainian aggression, and continue to call it “a special operation of liberation”. Any Russian outlet using the words “war”, “invasion” or “attack” faces being blocked by the country’s media regulator for spreading “deliberately false information about the actions of Russian military personnel” in Ukraine.
Some Russians have taken to the streets to protest against the war – but these demonstrations were not shown on the main state television channels.
Mykhailo, a well-known Kyiv restauranteur, didn’t have the time or inclination to watch Russian TV coverage of the invasion.
When shelling of Ukraine’s capital started, he and his wife were concentrating on how to protect their six-year-old daughter and baby son.
At night their children woke up at the sound of explosions and couldn’t stop crying. The family made the decision to move to the outskirts of Kyiv and then flee abroad.
They travelled to Hungary, where Mykhailo left his wife and children and came back to Western Ukraine to help the war effort.
He was surprised not to have heard from his father, who works at a monastery near Nizhny Novgorod in Russia. He called his father and described what was happening. His father replied that this wasn’t true; there was no war and – in fact – Russians were saving Ukraine from Nazis.
Mykhailo said he felt he knew the power of Russian propaganda, but when he heard it from his father, he was devastated.
It’s one thing to simply believe what you see on TV. It’s quite another to believe what you see on TV over the first hand testimony from their own kids. People believe what they want to believe.
From what I gather, most older people believe the government propaganda but a lot of young people, who are conversant with alternate means of communication and are more skeptical of the government are getting the real story, hence the big protests. Unfortunately, the television isn’t showing them so most people don’t know they are happening.
Propaganda has been around forever in one form or another. In the 20th century it was systematized by authoritarian governments (and used to good effect by non-authoritarian governments as well.) Russia has always been quite adept at it although in recent years with the advent of social media and some liberalization of the press it has been less restrictive. Now the government has once more shut down the alternative sources of info, especially TV, which just shows how fragile it was in the first place.