Ukraine invasion: Radio station taken off air amid Russian crackdown on media

#UPDATE Ekho Moskvy radio station – symbol of new-found media freedom in post-Soviet Russia – is to shut down after being taken off air over its coverage of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Russian media have been instructed to only publish information provided by official sources pic.twitter.com/fdjEySQBlS

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) March 3, 2022

Earlier, it was reported that Russian media have been instructed to only publish information provided by official sources. Media houses have also been banned from using words like attack, invasion or war to describe the Ukraine crisis, said a Guardian report citing Latvian-based Russian news website Meduza. It added that Kremlin has curtailed access to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and threatened to shut down independent media platforms like TV Rain and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper headed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov, had published an edition of its paper in both Russian and Ukrainian with a page one headline “Russia is bombing Ukraine” in national colours.

From today’s Russian-Ukrainian cover of Russian @novaya_gazeta , who condemn the war as ‘madness’: ‘We don’t recognise people of Ukraine as enemies, and Ukrainian language as enemy language. All important stories in this issue are published in Russian and Ukrainian languages’ pic.twitter.com/imdWIqnz6a

— The Siberian Times (@siberian_times) February 25, 2022

Viewers of Russian television last week might think their country was only involved in a small operation in south-east Ukraine, and that the Ukrainian government was seeking to provoke a larger war, said the report.

As Russia began its “military operation” in Ukraine on February 24, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Moscow to demonstrate against war. Images on social media showed police dragging away civilians, with protest-monitoring group OVD-Info putting the number of detainees at 7,000, reported AFP.

Dozens of anti-war demonstrators were detained in Moscow and Saint Petersburg Wednesday after jailed Kremlin critic Navalny called on Russians to protest Putin’s invasion of Ukraine

OVD-Info says over 7,000 people in total in Russia have been detainedhttps://t.co/JssJePk0VV pic.twitter.com/AHC6Z2k1vG

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) March 3, 2022

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has called on Russians to stage daily protests against Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, depicting President Vladimir Putin as an “obviously insane tsar.”

“We cannot wait even a day longer. Wherever you are. In Russia, Belarus or on the other side of the planet. Go out onto the main square of your city every weekday at 19.00 and at 14.00 at weekends and on holidays,” he said in a statement published on Twitter by his spokesperson.