Ilya Lozovsky Profile picture
Mar 3 8 tweets 2 min read
Just a few hours after Echo Moskvy, Dozhd is halting its work, "temporarily" for now. They say it's because of the law, about to be passed, criminalizing publication of "fake news" — eg, that there is a war in Ukraine. In one day, two of Russia's top independent outlets close.
they're letting viewers thank them and say goodbye, live on the air
"We are on the right side of history," says Tikhon Dzyadko. "We know what is truth, and what is hypocritical manipulation. However horrible things are now ... we will win. I want to thank everyone."
"I love you all very much. You are all very important to me," Dzyadko, editor-in-chief of Dozdh, says. "Dozhd is an island of normality. It's all of us. And there are a lot of us. So thank you. I embrace you all."
Everyone looks devastated, honestly.
(apologies, I got it wrong in a previous tweet — the people calling in remotely are not viewers, but staffers.)
"Let's be clear about why we're shutting down," says this staffer, nearly in tears. "Because they're not letting us call a war a war ... they're not letting us tell our viewers about the horrors that are taking place. NO TO WAR."

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More from @ichbinilya

Mar 4
A short thread that's very difficult to write.

Those of us with friends, loved ones, or colleagues in Ukraine — or who are simply in love with the country — have been in a state of continual heartbreak for weeks, and especially in the last few days as Russian atrocities mount.
We want to do everything we can to support the people we care about, and the millions of people who we don't know, but for whom our hearts are breaking.

Those of us who are journalists face the additional, somewhat orthogonal role of trying to help people get at the truth.
Broadly speaking, there is no conflict there. Telling the truth about Russia's unjust, criminal, unprovoked assault on a peaceful country is a service to that country. We do this work, in part, because it is an act of love.

But there is a tension.
Read 11 tweets
Mar 3
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.
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.
Read 11 tweets
Mar 3
About to start: the Russian education ministry's Russia-wide "online lesson" about "why the liberation mission in Ukraine was necessary."

The version I'm watching is on the Ministry's page on VKontakte, the Russian Facebook clone. Not sure if it's also streaming elsewhere.
"Today we will talk about what will help us understand what's happening," says this... host?
"The space around us is full of emotions ... it's important not to get lost in all these opinions. It's important to understand that everything is more complicated than it seems."
Read 25 tweets
Mar 2
Very disturbing, if true. Murdering prisoners is, of course, a war crime. Even if they have committed war crimes themselves. Zelensky needs to nip this in the bud.

More practically — the goodwill of the entire world is one of Ukraine's top assets. It cannot be squandered.
for anyone thinking, maybe they're just saying they won't take prisoners? first of all, you can't kill people who are surrendering. secondly, they've made themselves very clear:
"From now on there will not be any more Russian artillerymen prisoners. No mercy, no 'please don't kill me, I give up' anymore. ... Whether it's a commander, a driver, an aimer, or a loader: they will be slaughtered like pigs."
Read 6 tweets
Mar 2
Everyone’s dunking on the “there are no innocent Russians” tweet, but would you dunk on a similar tweet about Germans in Nazi Germany? If not, why not? What’s the difference?

The anti-Nazi White Rose movement distributed pamphlets that said “you are guilty, guilty, guilty!”
The near-universally admired Navalny also uses similar language.

I’ve tweeted before that conditions for protest in Russia are very inauspicious. It’s true. They’re just human beings like anyone anywhere, who want to live their lives and protect their families and be left alone.
But human beings have moral agency.

I wouldn’t have phrased it like McFaul did. But don’t they bear some responsibility? Some?
Read 5 tweets
Mar 1
Every journalist has those stories they never got around to writing, right? One of mine was going to be about the boom of the Ukrainian IT industry after the Euromaidan revolution
I interviewed this young man, an engineer who worked for a company that had developed a device for your pet to play with while you were at work.

He and the other lovely staff in their Kyiv office, on Andriivsky Spusk, told me how excited they were to be building something…
…in their new Ukraine. Talking about finding foreign markets. Attracting talent. Simplified tax procedures.

They didn’t want to talk about Russia or war. They were excited to build stuff.
Read 5 tweets

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