The Kremlin told media outlets not to publish the aftermath of Ukrainian Armed Forces attacks and to ‘show more successes’ of Russian strikes on Ukraine

The Kremlin told media outlets not to publish the aftermath of Ukrainian Armed Forces attacks and to ‘show more successes’ of Russian strikes on Ukraine

The presidential administration demanded that major state-controlled media not publish images and videos showing the aftermath of Ukrainian Armed Forces strikes on Russian territory, Verstka was told by three sources in pro-government media.

According to them, they were “strongly advised to show more of the successes” of Russian strikes on Ukraine. A source at one major media outlet claims that the order to change the information policy “came from the presidential administration” in the second half of June.

“They insisted that we stop publishing videos and photos of the aftermath of Ukrainian strikes on our territory. And show more of the results of our attacks,” he said.

As Verstka found, the largest Telegram channels cooperating with the presidential administration or the Defense Ministry, such as Mash, Baza, and Shot, either did not mention at all, or published only brief messages about the latest major Ukrainian Armed Forces attacks.

In particular, this concerns the attacks on the oil refinery in Slavyansk-on-Kuban, the defense plant in Penza, and the strike on Lukoil’s oil refinery in Kstovo in Nizhny Novgorod Region that took place on the night of July 2.

A top manager at an NGO that works with the Kremlin pointed Verstka to another reason for such demands.

“We have ‘hawks’ here who are demanding the introduction at the federal level of criminal punishment with serious prison terms for publications like these. The handlers [from the presidential administration] do not want to take it that far into repression,” he explained.

Read the full article on the website. If the link does not open, read here.

😘 Subscribe to @svobodnieslova and support Verstka — it matters