Russian state television talkshows are describing videos of missiles striking Ukrainian cities and reports of Russian soldiers killed in action as “fakes”, as the country’s media try to account for photos and video emerging from Ukraine that contradict official reports of the invasion.
The “mythbusting” is one of the adjustments that TV propaganda shows have had to make as evidence of the growing destruction in cities such as Kharkiv and Kyiv makes it increasingly difficult for the government to present the fiction of a concentrated offensive in the Donbas region.
On Channel One’s Vremya Pokazhet (Time Will Tell), pundits and officials took on the reports that hundreds of Russian soldiers had died, in a sign that the information about casualties could no longer be kept from the public.
That followed stories over the weekend of Russian relatives describing shock and anger at finding out that their husbands, brothers and sons had been sent to fight in Ukraine.
“There’s an enormous wave of information,” said the Russian MP Boris Chernyshev. “People are showing fakes, they’re showing what are allegedly our dead soldiers. All of that needs to be stopped.”
For the first time on Tuesday, the Russian defence ministry said it planned to strike targets in Kyiv, days after its missiles rained down around the city as part of the beginning of the invasion. Soon, Russian missiles struck a TV tower in Kyiv, a sign that bombardments of Ukrainian cities are soon going to become far more widespread.
Indiscriminate attacks are growing after early Russian failures to take the cities. Earlier on Tuesday a rocket aimed at the centre of Kharkiv killed at least seven people. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, called it an act of terrorism.
On TV debate shows, guests have begun to speak openly about the government’s desire to take Kyiv. “It’s just a question of time before they surrender or they are destroyed,” said Igor Korotchenko, a hawkish military journalist who featured prominently on one of the marathon sessions of 60 Minutes, a talkshow. “The fall of Kyiv is also a question of the coming three, four, five days, I don’t know exactly.”
Russian news channels originally followed Vladimir Putin’s lead in calling the war a “special operation in the Donbas”, but on some state-run channels there have been references now to the beginning of a war.
“It hasn’t changed that much but they’re having to admit now that it is a full-scale war and before it almost seemed like a surgical operation with no resistance,” said Francis Scarr, a journalist for BBC Monitoring who has closely followed how Russian state television has presented the war.
The shows have come to dominate state television programming. “It’s very unusual. On Channel One they don’t have any entertainment shows throughout the whole day. Right from nine o’clock in the morning until 9pm, it’s just nonstop Vremya Pokazhet and Bolshaya Igra [The Great Game], you know, that one where they think they’re sort of dividing up the world.”
Scarr said the shows had gone all-in on promoting “denazification”, a propaganda term that Putin has used to signify that Russian authorities plan to hold some kind of purge if they achieve their goals.
It has also become a kind of informal slogan for the war. Alexander Kots, a pro-Kremlin journalist, used the term as he described Tuesday evening’s missile strike as part of the “denazification of Ukrainian television” on his Telegram channel.
And a former diplomat who sent a Guardian journalist a long report on alleged Ukrainian war crimes as Russian forces bombed Kharkiv appeared to make reference to the term as justification for strikes against residential districts. “And what if Nazis have hidden in the population centres?” he wrote.
