Thread by @rafsanchez

I've just come back from three weeks in Moscow. I spent a lot of that time in our bureau, where the TVs are tuned to Russian state television.

A couple observations on what ordinary Russians are being told - and aren't being told - about the war in Ukraine:

The Kremlin is showcasing individual Russian soldiers it says fell heroically in battle. And it’s showing senior officials pinning medals on lightly-wounded troops in hospital.

But it isn’t saying how many Russian troops in total have been killed.

The last update was on March 2, when the government said 498 troops had been killed. The Russian public has had no new numbers since then. (See our MSNBC coverage of that below.)

Putin condemned the West this week for “speculating on the combat losses”.

Russian state TV spent a lot of time talking about high gas prices in the US – saying they were a sign of American sanctions backfiring.

And a lot of clips of Fox’s Tucker Carlson criticising the US or Ukraine. Like several times a day.

Russian state TV also jumped on comments by Republican congressman Madison Cawthorn, who called Zelenskyy “a thug”. That got played over and over.

Endless claims that Ukraine is led by neo-Nazis.

Sometimes cloaked as a history lesson (a lot of talk about Bandera, a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist who died in 1959).

But often it’d more blatant, like this clip claiming to show a Nazi flag in a captured Ukrainian base.