I'd agree if it was almost any other country
meanwhile the Russian state has complete control of the media and 99% of the country's area is essentially empty
meanwhile the Russian state has complete control of the media and 99% of the country's area is essentially empty
There are myriad of reasons why this is not realistic, but if I were to pick the most obvious, that would be
1. No, there is no "complete control of the media", IDK why people assume it to be the case. Broadcast federal tv has to be politically correct, but not too much beyond that.
2. Planes are tracked and people usually have relatives or something.
3. Planes fly through established routes and air corridors - they have a specific destination and don't fly over random wilderness all over the map.
This is why recent prigozhin roadtrip to moscow completely didn't happen at all according to russian media ? or is it just a case of been "politically correct" ? and tv station absolutely not given talking points by kremlin ?
Some details could have been hidden, like shot down helicopters or killed soldiers. But claiming that it didn't happen is just lies.
Now explaining those events is another matter. And that's where propaganda will kick in, for sure.
How exactly did it come to existance though? It honestly feels like some kind of gaslighting. Putin did a whole speach on TV and this was a hot topic for weeks. Popular Z-bloggers were all over this matter even longer.
Prigozhins hairwigs meme didnt come to existence by accident either, you know.
I really feel like you might want to reconsider interactig with Russian media through what I assume are 3rd-party reports.
zbloggers aren't media. i am talking about official media
just FYI i saw live feed of special news edition in 2am moscow time on ort and live feeds of putin speeches.
prigozhin owns me a bucket of popcorn
Who exactly told you this? I assume you don't personally interact with Russian media? You can check that what you claim is not true with just a few keystorkes. Do you need a list of popular media outlets in case you can't find on your own?
I am honestly curious why are you so sure of this, because I see these kinds of extremely confident claims about "did not happen according to Russian media" on the other side of the language barrier way more often than you would expect from random assumptions.
There must be someone who feeds you this idea.
> and tv station absolutely not given talking points by kremlin ?
I am not sure I completely understand you here. They report from the perspective and the angle of Russia, just as their western counterparts (e.g. NY Times, Washingtonpost, BBC) report from their geopolitical angle and perspective. Please elaborate.
after those two days it went to "on june 23-24 absolutely nothing happened in russia"
>There must be someone who feeds you this idea.
i am native russian speaker (not russian. never lived in russia). nobody feeds me anything. i been tracking russian media for past two and a half decades. after prigozhin voyage reporting was about attorney general ending criminal investigation "because it was inproperly started" and few pr shows with putin about his unity with people and stuff.
in any other "normative" country there will be non-stop discussion in all media for weeks about what happened.
>I am not sure I completely understand you here. They report from the perspective and the angle of Russia, just as their western counterparts (e.g. NY Times, Washingtonpost, BBC) report from their geopolitical angle and perspective. Please elaborate.
In Russia media is controlled by kremlin. It's "widely" reported what are the general talking points are delivered by kremlin to media and what topics should be suppressed.
You want to say that white house and american media companies have same relationship ?
It was a hot topic and it is still discussed from time to time (though more hot topics have appeared since). I'll try to get you some links when I have enough time and if I won't forget. Damn, I should really implement that media tracking and cross-referencing project concept I've been fiddling with - that's just a perfect usecase for it.
> In Russia media is controlled by kremlin. It's "widely" reported what are the general talking points are delivered by kremlin to media and what topics should be suppressed. You want to say that white house and american media companies have same relationship ?
What I want to say is that journalists employed in "big" influential media have a VERY good sence of what optics and points are appropriate and politically correct to report or not, without any explicit control.
A perfect example of this would be the matter of neo-nazi militias influence in Ukraine that was rather extensively discussed and reported on in western media (that's how I personally figured there is a certain ground truth to it, first taking it seriously after BBC and Radio Free Europe reports), until it suddenly became a no-no-hush-hush topic and "Russian propaganda".
It's called "post-truth" and sometimes even semi-officially acknowledged as "editorial policy". And it's EXACTLY the same in Russia.
EDIT: That was easier than I assumed. Thanks to google for "<topic> site:<website.tld>" query format, and thanks to the fact that news-sites have tags:
https://iz.ru/story/miatezh-evgeniia-prigozhina
https://ria.ru/person_Evgenijj_Prigozhin/
https://www.kommersant.ru/theme/3482
https://www.rbc.ru/tags/?tag=%D0%95%D0%B2%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%BD%...
How do you recocile that with the journalists assassinated, arrested, and/or driven from the country?
Of course the ultimate goal would be total control, so they counter similar situation (or putaine giving some speech live in tv) with ie 1 minute delay to counter any 'mishaps'. So they are going there, but slowly, ineffectively, at least for now.
Russian state can't unroll all freedoms immediately, their main goal was to paint war as "nothing is happening, just minor security cleanup". Putaine's clique is, just like any dictator, scared shitless of people revolting en masse, there is nothing more important for them than keeping the power and stealing all those juicy billions in resources and services flowing. But for majority of russians to revolt, they would have to go quite a bit beyond FUBAR, population is trained with patriotic spin to suffer incompetence of its leaders for generations.
Traditional mass media, sure, but there are a lot of people that have to know about a plane crash, and containing that information, even in Russia, is nontrivial.
That said, few weeks ago major internet providers in Russia started to roll out VPN blocks with DPI. There are other obvious signs that Russia prepares for the external Internet cut off. So I wouldn't bet for this situation to continue for much longer.
I feel like it's hard to hide a plane that's designed for international travel in a highly regulated industry.
In the context of the Russian war, the Russian government stole a bunch of planes being leased to Russian airlines by foreign companies and assigned them Russian tail numbers. With that paucity of transparency I'd say it's even easier to hide a plane wreck over there.