When people think of Russia’s independent media, their minds don’t often turn to Yakutsk, the capital of the Sakha Republic, located 450 kilometers (about 300 miles) south of the Arctic Circle. But it was a newspaper in Yakutsk and its criticism of the pro-Kremlin media that produced one of this weekend’s most viral images on the Russian Internet, Kevin Rothrock wrote for Global Voices. On May 27, an economics professor named…
A prominent Tatar journalist says she was warned by Crimean prosecutors over “extremist” views for writing about the plight of Tatar children whose parents were arrested. Lilia Budzhurova, deputy director of the Crimean Tatar channel ATR and a contributor to AFP, posted the warning from the Russia-annexed peninsula’s authorities on Facebook on May 31. Budzhurova spoke out against the increasing arrests of Crimean Tatars and wrote an appeal for children…
Download: PDF The future of Europe’s relations with Russia looks bleak. The Kremlin is pursuing an increasingly aggressive foreign policy to assert itself as a great power and distract from economic woes at home. Europe can’t fix Russia, but it can influence it and lower the risk of major conflict. Behind this growing assertiveness is Moscow’s desire to establish itself as a great power – and, increasingly, to win legitimacy…
Russian officials at the Communications Ministry are preparing the groundwork for a Russian Internet that would be fully controlled by the state. A new draft bill, tentatively titled “On the Autonomous Internet System,” would enable government agencies to have exclusive rights for contracting the national domain administrator and Internet providers to keep the RuNet running, among other things. Vedomosti reports that the bill, which is in its preliminary stages and…
The latest edition of StopFake News with Brian Mefford. This week’s fakes include Russian claims that Ukrainian military pilot Nadiya Savchenko recently released from Russian detention vowed to “kill Russians”, Russia’s UN Representative claims Ukraine will turn into a nuclear waste dumping zone, the Procurator General will not investigate the Maydan killings and Ukrainians are forgetting about returning Crimea.
On May 27, citing an unnamed source Russian media reported that Ukraine was amassing troops on the demarcation line with Crimea. RIA Novosti first ran this story without providing any evidence of the claim, it was soon followed by Lenta.ru, Mk.ru, gazeta.ru, TVC.ru, sobytiya.info, govoritmoskva.ru and others. There is no confirmation of this claim available anywhere. The only comment came from the Deputy Prime Minister Ruslan Balbec of the Russian…
Russian military channel Zvezda broadcast a news item claiming that recently released Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko has written a Ukrainian „Mein Kampf“. No sooner had Nadiya Savchenko returned to Kyiv from Russia, then her memoirs appeared in Ukrainian bookshops entitled “My struggle”. Word for word, her memoirs are the same as Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” claims Zvezda. Savchenko has in fact written a book, but it is called something completely different …
Russian media are disseminating stories claiming that Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko, who returned home after nearly two years of imprisonment in Russia, vowed to “continue killing Russians”. Komsomolskaya Pravda, the site RenTV, Baltnews and other marginal publications carried this information, claiming that the primary source for the story is a tweet by Savchenko herself. According to Savchenko’s sister Vira, the @NadiyaSavchenko Twitter account is completely fake, Nadiya has never had…
Russia’s official government publication Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports that Ukraine can potentially become a “nuclear dump” because of increased international financing for the construction of a spent nuclear fuel storage facility in the country. This concern was apparently expressed by Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin in a letter to UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon. “After a coup in February 2014, the process of building an infrastructure for…
Weekly update on Kremlin disinformation efforts in Europe Three senior editors at the Russian RBC media group controlled by Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov announced that they were resigning, allegedly due to a disagreement with the management. According to the New York Times, they were under pressure from the Kremlin for reporting details about the family and friends of President Vladimir Putin. In an opinion article about Russian efforts to harm…
