'Russia denies': The Kremlin's strategy of lies and the complicity of some media

@ElentirENG ES 6·07·2023 · 7:05 0

Years ago the term "denialism" was coined to qualify those who denied nazi crimes despite abundant evidence.

One year of Russian terrorism in Ukraine: more than 9,600 civilians killed, including 461 children
Katyn: the gross lies and communist denial of the massacre of 22,000 Poles

Russian denialism and the cold indifference of some media

Today the vast majority of Western society views with scandal and indignation the attempts of some miserable people to deny the atrocities committed by the criminal regime of Adolf Hitler's. However, history repeats itself and this time the deniers, those who systematically lie to cover up the atrocities of another mass criminal, Vladimir Putin, see with satisfaction how their denials are uncritically repeated by numerous media.

Yesterday, in a new war crime, Russia blew up the Nova Kakhovka dam, on the Dnieper River, causing mass floods in 80 Ukrainian localities. That dam was in an area occupied by the Russians, and everything points to a desperate attempt by Russia to hinder the announced Ukrainian counteroffensive.

As has already happened in the face of other Russian crimes in Ukraine, some Western media rushed yesterday to announce in headlines that Russia denied being behind the explosion and that it blamed Ukraine for what happened. We are talking about information that is published with a clear indifference to the facts, uncritically offering the denial of a regime that has been using lies as a weapon of war. A regime that has denied over and over again every crime it has been committing in Ukraine since the start of this invasion.

Moscow has been systematically denying all its crimes in Ukraine

It is enough to review the newspaper archives to see how this tactic of lying is repeated without ceasing:

• In April 2022, Russia denied the Russian massacre of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha, a town that had been occupied by Russian forces.
• In August, Moscow also denied the massacre Russian civilians in Chaplyne.
• In September, Moscow also denied the Russian massacre in Izyum, saying it was a "lie".
• In April 2023, Moscow also denied the deportation of Ukrainian children by the Russians.
• Similarly, Russia has been denying its attacks on residential buildings in Ukraine.
• Russia's denials go so far as to deny that they have unleashed a war against Ukraine, as Moscow classifies its invasion as a "special military operation" and in Russia the mere fact of classifying that invasion as a "war" is punished with the prison.

The purpose of the Kremlin with that strategy of lies

All these denials are directed against facts with abundant evidence of Russian crimes, but the Putin regime doesn't care. With their lies they seek two very different effects depending on the audience they are addressing. In the case of Russia, the Kremlin's lies seek to keep a Russian people blinded by censorship anesthetized and intoxicated by official propaganda that has little to envy to that of dictatorships like China and North Korea.

In turn, in the West, Russia tries to sow doubt to prevent the victims of its crimes from receiving support, thus facilitating the work of its propagandists, many of whom disguise their alignment with Russia behind a infamous moral equidistance that equates aggressors and attacked, murderers and victims, Russia and Ukraine. On this side of the new Iron Curtain, Moscow's lies are only swallowed by a few fanatics who believe that NATO and the US are evil and that Russia deserves all the applause for its crimes in Ukraine.

A strategy that the USSR already used with the Katyn massacre

Certainly, this commitment by Moscow to lies is not new: the Soviet regime already did the same with the Katyn massacre, in which NKVD agents on Stalin's orders they murdered 22,000 Polish prisoners of war. The USSR did not recognize the truth about Katyn until 1990, a few months before the disappearance of that communist dictatorship. It is worth wondering if some of the media that now aseptically repeat the phrase "Moscow denies" or "Russia denies" also used it then to help the perpetrators of that massacre bury their crime under a cloak of doubt. History will eventually put everyone in their place, and what will fall to Russia and its propagandists will be the same moral quagmire as the nazis.