Footage of smoke billowing around Kyiv’s main television tower reminds us that every war brings with it an assault on information that takes place both in parallel to the movements of tanks and troops and to facilitate their advance.
Graphic photographs issued by news wire AFP show Kyiv police recovering charred bodies after the March 1st airstrike on the tower and the nearby Holocaust memorial site Babyn Yar. The most graphic, taken before the victims were covered in sheeting, will have gone unused by news media mindful not to desensitise their audience. They exist on the wires as numb testimony to the horrors that Ukrainians confront daily and anybody who has not lived in a warzone can only imagine.
Among those killed was the first confirmed media fatality of the war, Ukrainian journalist Yevhenii Sakun, a camera operator covering the Russian invasion for television station LIVE. A devastated former colleague posted an image of his press card as she announced his loss.
The Ukrainian channels taken off air as a result of the damage to the tower and its control room, meanwhile, were soon broadcasting again.
That war is dangerous for journalists, we know. Before Sakun's death, two journalists working for the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet – reporter Stefan Weichert and photographer Emil Filtenborg Mikkelsen – were shot near the eastern Ukrainian city of Ohtyrka, their shouts of "press!" doing nothing to stop the rounds.
And it has since emerged that Sky News chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay and four colleagues came under fire on February 28th when their car was ambushed near the Ukrainian capital. As they made their escape, a bullet hit Ramsay in his lower back, while camera operator Richie Mockler took two rounds to his body armour.
Like the Danish pair, the Sky team were evacuated and are recovering. But attacks on journalism are not limited to bullets and shells, and this is especially and dramatically true of this particular war, this invasion, this attack on Ukraine. One sinister turn of events proves as much. In Russia, merely using the words "war", "invasion" or "attack" in relation to what is happening here is now punishable by arrest and jailing.
Anti-media law
On Friday, the Duma passed a law imposing a prison term of up to 15 years on anybody found to have intentionally spread "fake" news about its military. The Kremlin has repeatedly claimed to its own people that its enemies distribute false information to create discord within Russia. But this assertion of lying is itself a lie, and the reason Putin's regime is so readily familiar with the scourge of disinformation is that it practices it itself.
Even before the law was passed, independent reporting by Russian media outlets was collapsing into silence. Instructions not to use the banned words – “special operation” is the preferred Kremlin term for what his happening in Ukraine – were followed by blocks of independent and international websites.
On Thursday, hours after the board of the Ekho Moskvy radio station opted to liquidate itself rather than adhere to the Putin line, Russian television channel Dozhd (TV Rain) suspended broadcasting, its editor having already left Russia after death threats.
"It was the last news bulletin. Let's say, the last in this season," said Dozhd's founder and chief executive Natalya Sindeyeva, "no to war" her final words before walking off set with her heavy-hearted staff.
Reporting on Ukraine within Russia with any degree of truth is now not only an act of immense bravery, it is illegal. Friday's law has effectively halted "this season" for several international media organisations, including the BBC. Its director-general Tim Davie said the Kremlin's move appeared "to criminalise the process of independent journalism", while interim news director Jonathan Munro describing it as "a depressing day".
The BBC has a long institutional memory of war, technology platforms a much shorter one. Those that are banned in China understand how totalitarianism is bad for business. But when it comes to active conflicts, they have in recent years seemed both unwilling to explore what their role is and unsure of what that role should be.
This time, however, there is no not picking sides. Facebook was completely blocked by Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor on Friday, in an apparent response to parent company Meta's removal of a disinformation network targeting Ukrainians and its blocking of Russian state news organs RT and Sputnik across the EU in compliance with Europe's new sanctions on Putin's chief propaganda wings.
Twitter had the pull plugged soon after, while the Chinese-owned TikTok has since reluctantly suspended livestreaming and the uploading of new content to its video app in Russia, citing a need to "review the safety implications" of Russia's "fake news" law for its employees and users.
Like Meta and Twitter, TikTok is learning in real time the challenge of how to respond when your platform is both used to promote disinformation and misinformation and as a vital means by which people can share reliable news and communicate with friends and family.
‘Doubt all info’
Mass-messaging service Telegram, founded by the exiled Russian Durov brothers, has also been deep in the thick of this dilemma, with chief executive Pavel Durov publicly considering a closure of the app in Ukraine and Russia, in case it exacerbated conflict and incited ethnic hatred, before reversing course with the advice that users "doubt all info" they see.
Putin’s chilling actions can and will be viewed as retaliation for the actions of the EU and governments worldwide. That doesn’t make everybody equally wrong here. It is important to remember that even if this was purely a tit-for-tat, and not about quashing dissent, the tit and the tat are not equivalent. There is simply no requirement to “both-sides” the steps taken by western allies to curtail disinformation with the steps taken by Russia to strengthen it.
Whataboutery is rife. But the imperfections of non-Russian media organisations are irrelevant to the tragedy of the Kremlin’s twin-tracked war on journalistic and democratic freedoms as it bids to seal its borders with an information iron curtain.
Its efforts to do so, amid economic ruin, are astonishing all the more for the fact that in the long run, as protesters find ways to circumvent censors and soldiers report back from Ukraine, such control of the message cannot hope to last.
