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Turning on those reporters who have covered the war in the Donbass first-hand right now is hardly going to help this situation.

With the upcoming broadcast of a BBC documentary on the conspiracy theories surrounding the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 on July 17, 2014, several media outlets, both Western and Russian, have revived some old and debunked claims. This morning, Britain’s Daily Express ran, in a break from its usual staples of Princess Diana stories and […]

Russian “private military contractors” (PMCs) are leading major battles, first in Ukraine and now in Syria, reports Fontanka, an independent Saint Petersburg newspaper

This month has seen President Vladimir Putin announcing the withdrawal of the “main part” of the Russian military deployment in Syria and confirming the deaths of five servicemen during the campaign that began on September 30, with the death of another reported independently. But while the Kremlin is presenting this as “mission accomplished,” the military operation is […]

A Ukrainian prisoner of war is now on the fifth day of a dry hunger strike, accepting neither food nor water, and nearing the end of a show trial in the Russian border town of Donetsk. With her health deteriorating and the outcome of this much-publicized and highly political case certain to be a guilty […]

This morning saw Russian-backed fighters in the city of Donetsk once again firing salvos of Grad rockets at Ukrainian positions. Both sides in the conflict are reporting high numbers of daily ceasefire violations, with Kiev claiming 63 over the last 24 hours and the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) accusing Ukrainian forces of firing more than […]

With the publication of The Interpreter‘s report – An Invasion By Any Other Name: The Kremlin’s Dirty War in Ukraine – today, we present an example of how five tanks that could only have come from Russia can be identified in one small area south of Ilovaisk. At the end of August last year, Ukrainian […]

Graham Phillips, a British freelance video journalist who has been operating for most of the last year in eastern Ukraine, and produces propaganda videos for Russian state-owned media including RT and the Ministry of Defence-owned Zvezda channel, is now back in London. This morning it was announced that Phillips’ “fundraising event,” heralded with fanfare from the […]

Johnson’s Russia List, or JRL, run by David Johnson, is a widely-read and influential email newsletter and website, also referred to as a listserv, which publishes a regular compilation of English-language news on Russia from a variety of sources. On February 10, an interesting article with a rather shocking headline was included on that day’s list: […]

Russia’s well-regarded Ekho Moskvy radio station, which has long attempted to maintain political independence despite the increasingly hypoxic climate for dissenting media and pressure from shareholders (the station is owned by Gazprom-Media), has today, facing an acute crisis since last month when the station received a warning from Roskomnadzor (the Russian media regulator) and an intervention […]