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The Tribunal for Putin (T4P) global initiative was set up in response to the all-out war launched by Russia against Ukraine in February 2022.

Kremlin-backed militants block all roads except to Russia

04.08.2014   
Halya Coynash 
Militants from the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic are preventing people from fleeing the fighting into Ukraine, leaving only the road towards the Russian border open, They are also deliberately causing huge queues in order to create the impression that people are fleeing in their masses to Russia

Militants from the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic are preventing people from fleeing the fighting into Ukraine, leaving only the road towards the Russian border open.  Pastor Sergey Kosyak who is actively involved in evacuating people reports that the militants are also deliberately holding up the flow of refugees at the checkpoint causing a queue extending many kilometres at the border crossing.  “All of this creates the false impression that people in their masses do not want to remain in Ukraine and are fleeing to Russia.”

Pastor Sergey asks believers to pray, and the public as a whole and the media to provide coverage of this.  They need humanitarian corridors, he stresses, into Ukraine.  The already small corridors are being blocked and their drivers are beaten and have their vehicles taken from them.  “Because of politicians’ dirty games, ordinary people are dying”.

The Russian media are very actively pushing the theme of refugees and either implying or downright claiming that the Ukrainian military are not providing humanitarian corridors.  Pastor Sergey and many others are working flat out to evacuate people.  As we see here, their troubles are created by the Kremlin-backed militants who – not for the first time – are working to provide Russian television with their propaganda. 

Imam Said Ismagilov, Mufti of the Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of Ukraine, who is also in Donetsk, reports that Sunday morning dispersed any euphoria.  At 7 a.m. a neighbour’s television began blasting the news from the Russian channel Rossiya 24 which he calls Zombie-TV.  They restored it (after a brief respite) “so quickly that the zombies didn’t have time to cool down.  According to witnesses, the repair services scurried like ants through the night to reinstate the work of the most important Russian export.”

As reported here, this has been the pattern both in the Crimea and in eastern Ukraine.  As soon as the militants gain control of any city, their first act is to cut off Ukrainian channels and replace them with Russian.  The following are just three particularly grotesque examples of what is basically the everyday fare on most Russian television channels (all the channels available to the majority of Russians who do not have cable or satellite television).

New low in Russia’s propaganda war  where viewers heard graphic, and entirely fictitious, claims that the three-year-old son of a militant had been crucified and his mother tortured.  Check your sources, Mr Lavrov where viewers were shown video footage from Fallujah (Iraq) in 2004 and told that this ‘proved’ that the Ukrainian military were using prohibited phosphorous bombs to destroy Semenivka near Slovyansk in eastern Ukraine.  Russia Today’s “Genocide in Eastern Ukraine”: Sick, distorted and deleted  The lies in this purported ‘documentary’ were so gross that the film was removed from the RT

Worth noting too that Latvia which has a large number of Russian speakers has taken active measures against certain Russian media, including a fine over biased and warmongering reporting on Ukraine.

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