NEW DELHI, March 3: A Russian radio station was taken off air over its coverage of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, media reports said on Thursday. This is the latest in a series of measures taken by the Vladimir Putin government to control the narrative by banning the use of certain words like ‘attack, invasion, war’ and curtailing access to social media platforms.
“Ekho Moskvy radio station – a symbol of new-found media freedom in post-Soviet Russia – is to shut down after being taken off air over its coverage of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine,” the media report said.
Earlier, it was reported that Russian media have been instructed to only publish information provided by official sources. Media houses have also been banned from using words like attack, invasion or war to describe the Ukraine crisis, a Latvian-based Russian news website said. It added that Kremlin has curtailed access to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and threatened to shut down independent media platforms like TV Rain and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper headed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov. It had published an edition of its paper in both Russian and Ukrainian with a page one headline “Russia is bombing Ukraine” in national colours.
Viewers of Russian television last week might think their country was only involved in a small operation in south-east Ukraine, and that the Ukrainian government was seeking to provoke a larger war, said the report. As Russia began its “military operation” in Ukraine on February 24, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Moscow to demonstrate against war. Images on social media showed police dragging away civilians, with protest-monitoring group OVD-Info putting the number of detainees at 7,000.
The jailed Putin critic Alexei Navalny had given a call to the Russians to stage strong protests against Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine depicting Putin as an “obviously insane tsar.” “We cannot wait even a day longer. Wherever you are. In Russia, Belarus or on the other side of the planet. Go out onto the main square of your city every weekday at 19.00 and at 14.00 at weekends and on holidays,” he said in a statement published on Twitter by his spokesperson.
(Manas Dasgupta)