Vladimir Putin’s regime hunts down the truth and celebrates lies. It threatens to jail those who describe honestly what is happening in Ukraine – a war. It brazenly denies documented attacks upon civilians. It concocts claims that the US and Ukraine plot to spread pathogens using migratory birds. It accuses others of its own sins: known for its willingness to fake events, it claimed that a heavily pregnant, visibly injured woman photographed leaving the bombed maternity ward in Mariupol was an actor.
Those images, and her story, were captured by a photographer and a reporter from the Associated Press. The absence of information in a blockade has two goals, noted the reporter, Mstyslav Chernov: chaos, as people panic, but also impunity. “With no information coming out of a city, no pictures of demolished buildings and dying children, the Russian forces could do whatever they wanted.” Chernov has revealed that Ukrainian soldiers had risked their lives to extract him and his colleague from the city because Russians were hunting for them – hoping to force them to retract their work on camera and say that everything they had filmed was a lie.
