I live-tweeted the Russian Propag--- excuse me, Education Ministry's "Russia-wide online lesson" about the situation today. You can read that thread here. In this thread, a few thoughts.
https://twitter.com/ichbinilya/status/1499308474563534849
Speaking as an editor, I thought it was pretty shambolic. They didn't set the context, there was no narrative arc. It was very haphazard. By *far* the most effective part was when they interviewed residents of the self-proclaimed eastern Ukrainian republics.
Some genuinely moving moments there. Mothers talking about their children killed in Ukrainian shelling, etc. They hammered this home again and again— peaceful civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk were being shelled for years. They said 14k civilians had been killed.
In this video, at least, this was their main and most convincing argument. Not NATO, not anything else: Ukrainian shelling of Donetsk and Luhansk. Now, given how outrageously this video lies about everything else, their claims here should be treated skeptically, to put it mildly.
It's actually surprisingly hard to get good numbers. This UN report lists a total of 3,106 civilian deaths in eastern Ukraine, on both sides. There is no information about who is responsible. ukraine.un.org/sites/default/… 
But in general, there is little good explanatory journalism on this. Want to find a simple summary — how many civilian deaths have there been in eastern Ukraine since 2014, and how many were caused by Ukraine and how many were caused by Russia/separatists — you can't do it.
At least I haven't been able to. Maybe someone can point me to a good resource. The OSCE reports are difficult to read and only cover individual short periods. I haven't found a summary, though I am NOT a specialist on this, and I'm sure someone can educate me.
Leaving that aside, the segment on "fake news" was interesting. They picked a few genuinely fake videos, exposed them, and used that to discredit everything. It's a standard propaganda technique. Unfortunately, if you're not well versed, it's convincing and effective.
The rest of it was a mess. The little girl looked like they had drugged her first. The interlude about the hypocrisy of western values was laughable. The whole thing was creepy and incoherent.
And of course, the Big Lie at the heart of it: It completely avoids what's really happening today: A brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine that's leading to massive civilian casualties, and to the ruin of Russia's economy.
That's it. I need some brain bleach.
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