Journalists from the pro-Kremlin Lenta website made this Monday (9) an act against the war waged by Russian President Vladimir Putin, by publishing about 40 texts against the invasion of Ukraine on the portal.
In the messages, reporters wrote phrases such as “Putin has turned into a paranoid dictator”, “Russia abandons the corpses of its soldiers in Ukraine”, “Putin unleashed one of the bloodiest wars of the 21st century” and “War makes it easier cover up economic failures”.
The texts were promptly deleted, but they are saved in some records on the internet and were also captured by the independent vehicle Meduza and confirmed by the British The Guardian.
Egor Poliakov confirmed to Meduza that he and his colleague Alexandra Mirochnikova, who would now be out of Russia, were responsible for the texts. “We had to do this today because we wanted to remember what our grandparents fought for on this beautiful Victory Day: for peace,” the journalist told the Guardian.
Russia celebrated this Monday, May 9, the 77th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, one of the most important milestones in the Moscow calendar. At the celebration, Putin delivered a speech in which he defended his claims to have started the conflict, citing the need to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, the Western military alliance, and an alleged “denazification of the neighboring country”.
“That’s not what Victory Day is about,” Poliakov said. “Ordinary people are dying in Ukraine. And given the rhetoric we’ve seen, it’s not going to stop. That was the only right thing we could do.”
All posts were accompanied by a disclaimer that read “this material is not agreed with the leadership [do jornal]i.e. URGENTLY MAKE A SCREEN RECORD before it is deleted”.
In one of the texts, about the fact that Russian authorities have banned media professionals from reporting stories considered negative, the authors say that Putin “forced journalists from the government-controlled media to abandon words that could cause ‘social unrest'”.
“Russian media cannot call a war a war that claimed tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians’ lives, destroyed cities, killed civilians, bombed residential areas and led to the genocide of the Ukrainian people – all this, for the Russian media under pressure from the Kremlin, it became a ‘special operation’.”
​In mid-2014, the NGO Reporters Without Borders, which monitors press freedom around the world, published a note repudiating what it described as Moscow’s advance towards Lenta, until then a rare independent publication. The text claimed that editor-in-chief Galina Timtchenko had been fired after interviewing a leader of the Ukrainian Pravi Sektor (right sector) group, an ultra-right organization, and that Alexei Goreslaski, “widely considered pro-Kremlin”, was put in his place. .
“Lenta has been one of the few independent journalistic sources in an ocean of propaganda,” said Johann Bihr, then head of the NGO’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia bureau. “Given the site’s influence, the move represents a major blow to independent journalism in Russia.”
The NGO’s latest report ranks Russia 155th in a ranking of 180 nations that assess press freedom — five places behind where it was a year earlier, testament to the deteriorating environment of independent media. Brazil is in 110th place.
The situation has worsened since the February 24 invasion of Ukraine, when Moscow implemented military censorship of the press, with a law that provides up to 15 years in prison for journalists who spread what the government considers fake news about the war. RSF says that since the beginning of the conflict, almost all independent media outlets have been banned, blocked or declared “foreign agents”.
