“Telling the truth about the war”? How Russian Meduza and Novaya Gazeta Europe cover the deadliest terrorist attacks by their own army

In President Putin’s speech on 24 February 2022, he claimed that Ukrainian civilians should not worry about being targeted by the Russian armed forces. However, by now it has become abundantly clear that attacks on civilians are a key strategy of Russia’s war on Ukraine, to terrorize Ukrainians and force them to surrender.

When you see a burning warehouse rom your window, it instills a sense of horror. The sheer indiscriminate nature of the shelling evokes fear that your loved ones, your friends, or you may be next. You also clearly understand who is to blame.

In the modern digital world, there is no shortage of photos and videos. You can easily determine where the missiles came from, their route, type, and even what was written on their shell casings. On missiles that hit my city of Odesa before Easter in 2022, the Russians wrote: “Christ is Risen.” Several missiles targeted a civilian apartment where my former student, her three-month-old daughter, and her mother lived. They were found dead in the aftermath of the attack. Eight people in total were killed in the strike that day.

Another Russian strategy is to deny that such attacks took place and to make the egregious claim that the Ukrainians shelled themselves. In such an environment of misinformation, it is incumbent upon Russian independent media to verify all details in such cases.  

While reading this piece, imagine yourself in our shoes. In the middle of the night, you hear an air raid siren; the Ukrainian Air Force’s Telegram channel informs you that Russian missiles are about to strike your city. You have only several minutes to hide. Still in your pajamas, you run into the corridor and hear explosions and windows shaking. But time is not up for you, only for someone else. For some reason, early in the morning you decide to read the independent Russian media to find out what happened…

Let’s see what they wrote.  

For the purpose of this article, I analyzed texts from the past year of the popular independent Russian media outlets Meduza and Novaya Gazeta Europe. I chose the year 2023, when it became clear that the Russians were deliberately targeting Ukrainian civilians. Numerous high-profile incidents occurred that year in Dnipro city, Uman, Kramatorsk, and Hroza, among other places.

Through keyword searches of the toponyms where the attacks took place, I found 54 texts on Meduza and 70 in the Novaya Gazeta Europe.

Figure 1 (below) shows the number of texts each news outlet produced about the attacks under consideration.

Both news organizations covered the Russian terrorist attack on Dnipro that killed 46 occupants of a residential apartment block. Novaya Gazeta’s second most reported attack was the one on Kramatorsk, where a Russian missile hit the crowded Ria Pizza restaurant, killing 13 people. Meduza paid particular attention to the attack on a café in the village of Hroza when, during a memorial service, 56 people were killed.

What are the news sources?

According to the collected data, official Ukrainian news sources dominated as the Russian media outlets’ primary source of information about the attacks (see Figure 2).

Meduza showed the greatest reliance on Ukrainian media, while Novaya Gazeta Europe preferred to cite Ukrainian investigators (police, secret service, prosecution, etc.). However, both also still quoted official Russian sources, which, of course, denied the Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilian targets and spread various types of disinformation.

In principle, it is important to consider both sides to ensure balanced coverage. But what should journalists do if one side consistently spreads lies? In such cases, verifying information to the greatest extent and presenting a factual account is imperative. Did the independent Russian media properly carry out this task?

Russian troops shelled Lviv, and Ukrainian troops shelled the “annexed DPR”

For some reason, Meduza compares the shelling of Ukraine with the shelling of Ukraine’s occupied territories. While mentioning Russia’s terrorist attacks, Meduza adds information about the alleged Ukrainian shelling of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR)” and “Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR).” It gives the impression that both sides are targeting civilians and that therefore, neither side can be accorded more blame than the other.

Let’s look at an example.

Headline: “Russian military striking Lviv with missiles. Ukrainians shelling Yasynuvata in the annexed DPR. This is what the aftermath of the attacks looks like on day four hundred and ninety-eight of the war.” Photos.

The text compares a Russian war crime in which a residential apartment block was targeted, resulting in ten deaths and forty-two wounded civilians, with the alleged shelling of temporarily occupied Yasynuvata by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In the former case, there were numerous verified reports and evidence of Russian military involvement. By contrast, the attack on Yasynuvata was based on a single “official” source from the unrecognized “DPR,” which can hardly be trusted and is insufficient evidence to confirm the incident. 

Meduza uses the same approach in their reports on Uman and Dnipro.

In the Uman case, Meduza published photos of a residential apartment block that was hit in the Cherkasy region. Twenty-four people were killed, and numerous reports confirmed Russian military involvement. The news block immediately following this report shows the “consequences of shelling in Donetsk.” Once again, Meduza references a DPR source, this time Denys Pushylin, the so-called head of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic.” Why does Meduza treat the “DPR” as a reliable source of information? The “mayor of the annexed city” of Donetsk is also mentioned. The word “mayor” is used without quotation marks, implying that Meduza also considers him a legitimate source despite the “mayor” being a Russian appointee who never won an election and does not represent the people of Donetsk.

In the case of Dnipro, Meduza reported on rescue work in the city after a Russian attack on a high-rise apartment block, followed by a story about a “destroyed shopping center in Donetsk.”

Meduza writes that the Ukrainian military shelled Donetsk. However, once again, they only cite the “pro-Russian city administration” as their source. Of course, such sources will gladly manufacture any “horrible crime by Ukrainian Nazis.”

Novaya Gazeta, on the other hand, takes a different approach than Meduza. They refer to the two sides of an event only at the end of their news reports. It turns out that official Ukrainian sources say one thing, while Russian ones say the exact opposite. However, the newspaper does not try to understand what happened or sort fact from fiction.

The most blatant example is the publication “Those Who Bring Death,” released after the Russian terrorist attack on the village of Hroza. In the lead headline, we read: “Novaya Gazeta Europe has collected a selection of photos of the worst Russian attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine.” The published photos are accompanied by a small description of what happened below them. However, for some reason, in almost every case, the objections of Russian officials are also printed (see the highlighted text below).

The newspaper, thus, repeats the Russian Ministry of Defense’s numerous lies about the most deadly attacks on Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion: 

• the drama theatre in Mariupol was “blown up by ‘Azov;’”
• fictional “hangars of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” were located in the Kremenchuk shopping center, where 21 people were killed;
• and the city center of Vinnytsia, where 28 people were killed, served as a “temporary location for Nazis.” 

Nowhere in the text does Novaya Gazeta indicate that the statements of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation are disinformation. In this manner, the official Russian position is treated as equally credible as the Ukrainian position and international sources. Of course, this is a manipulation of the truth, which only provides terrorists a platform to justify their actions without comment.

Thus, the context of Russian state propaganda is extremely important for the émigré Russian media. While they left Russia due to state policy, they seem to still believe it.

Independent Russian media may claim that they “tell the truth about the war, repression, and everything that the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Kremlin do not like,” but in fact, this type of coverage is precisely what the Kremlin wants. After all, readers of Meduza and Novaya Gazeta Europe will continue to believe that “both sides are to blame” in this war, that Ukraine is “shelling” the Donbas, and therefore the war is “justified,” that the targets were “not civilians”, and so the Russian military “had a right” to strike them.

Ukraine fired at itself?

Unfortunately, independent Russian media actively employs such propagandistic narratives as well. The Russian terrorist attacks on Dnipro and Kostiantynivka were presented in the media in this way thanks to the former advisor to the Office of the President of Ukraine, Oleksiy Arestovych, the Russian “military analyst” Ruslan Leviev, various Russian officials, and some Western publications.

Let us turn to the Dnipro case again. After the attack Arestovych, an extremely popular speaker at the time, stated erroneously that a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile was to blame. Subsequently, he retracted this statement and publicly apologized. The Ukrainian Air Force identified the missile as a Russian Kh-22 with a 950-kilogram warhead designed to destroy aircraft carrier groups at sea. The Armed Forces of Ukraine did not have defence systems capable of intercepting such missiles.

Despite the unchecked statement that cost Arestovych his career (he resigned after the incident), both media outlets repeatedly mentioned him in the texts about the Dnipro attack (37 times in Novaya Gazeta and 23 in Meduza).

Arestovych was one of Meduza’s primary sources. His first statement about a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile was frequently mentioned alongside the Kremlin’s claim that the Kh-22 missile was on its correct trajectory before the Ukrainian anti-aircraft system intervened and caused the incident. Meduza repeated Arestovych’s statement about the “Ukrainian missile” several times, even after he apologized and retracted his statement.

For example, three days after Arestovych corrected his mistake, Meduza reported:

Russian troops shelled the city of Dnipro on January 14. One of the missiles hit a residential [apartment] building, destroying two [wings]. According to the Ukrainian authorities, 45 people died, including six children. A total of 120 residents of Dnipro were injured. Oleksiy Arestovych, an advisor to the office of the President of Ukraine, suggested that the Russian missile was shot down by Ukrainian air defence forces. After a wave of criticism in Ukraine, he apologized for his words and resigned. His version was picked up by Russian officials…

The passage is manipulative. According to the report’s sequence of events, Arestovych made his claim about the Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile, was criticized, and then resigned, and only subsequently did Arestovych’s “version” of the attack appear in the statements of Russian officials. However, it did not happen this way! Arestovych actually retracted his initial claim and stated that a Russian Kh-22 missile had destroyed the residential apartment block. Only after this critical clarification did he resign. Again, Meduza places unsubstantiated claims next to confirmed facts.

For Novaya Gazeta, Arestovych was not only a news source but also a hero in its columns. The newspaper even encouraged him not to resign. The newspaper’s journalists reported his resignation and did not omit the fact that he apologized for disclosing unverified and incorrect information. This is a significant improvement compared to Meduza’s reporting. Nonetheless, Novaya Gazeta unfortunately also refers to the story about the alleged “Ukrainian missile,” quoting Russia’s UN representative V. Nebenzya and Kremlin press secretary D. Peskov several times.

In the case of the Russian attack on the market in Kostyantynivka, both Meduza and Novaya Gazeta repeatedly cite various sources that claim a Ukrainian missile was responsible. Their journalists respond to every objection from the Ukrainian side with references to various “experts” who assert otherwise. It seems that promoting this counter-narrative was more important to these Russian journalists than talking about the attack’s victims and consequences.

Both media outlets followed a similar approach to their reporting:

• Russian analyst Ruslan Leviev is quoted ten times in Meduza and fifteen in Novaya Gazeta Europe. He claims that Ukraine struck itself (the YouTube channel of “Television Toronto” offers an interesting critique of Leviev’s “analytics,” including the case of Kostyantynivka);
• A report about the market attack by the New York Times is cited, which, in our opinion, differs little from Leviev’s “analysis”;
• The columnist Julian Repke from the German tabloid Bild is also cited as stating that the rocket came from the Ukrainian side.

Russian YouTube blogger Yulia Latynina also published a column for Novaya Gazeta. While the above authors at least analyzed some video evidence, this “analyst” claims that she received information from unnamed people “who had a good idea of ​​the situation near the front” and were “close to the front lines on the Ukrainian side.” Based on this “evidence,” she believes that the events in Kostyantynivka were caused by “an accidental missile attack by the Armed Forces of Ukraine on civilians.” Latynina later develops a conspiracy theory, claiming, “I was told that two Ukrainian secret service helicopters from Kyiv hastily collected all the missile’s elements and took them away.” At the end of her “analysis,” the Russian blogger calls on the Ukrainian authorities to admit the incident was a case of friendly fire in order to differentiate themselves from Russian state propaganda.

It is absurd that the Ukrainian authorities should trust such “experts” and their unnamed sources and refuse all data provided by competent investigative bodies!

Tendentiously, the independent Russian media gave preference to sources who were not on the scene and used unnamed sources to insist that Ukraine shelled its own people.

Monument to Ukrainian writer in Russia is “drowning in flowers”

Following some Russian attacks on civilians in Ukraine, Meduza and Novaya Gazeta reported on the reaction of “ordinary Russians.” In these instances, their news coverage presents a narrative that implies the whole of Russian society condemns the war.

Both outlets covered several cases in which Russians placed flowers at various monuments in some way associated with Ukraine, such as a statue dedicated to the Ukrainian writer Lesya Ukrainka or a “Solidarity” monument created to honour the unity of Russians, Ukrainians,  and Belarusians. As a rule, these media reports relied on Telegram channels, where photos of monuments and flowers were published.

In a report about the Russian shelling of a high-rise apartment building in Uman, such Russians with flowers are used as an alleged “third party.” In Novaya Gazeta’s text the journalists first report information about the attack coming from Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Minister Ihor Klymenko. They then describe “spontaneous memorials” in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yoshkar-Ola, Vologda, Kirov, and Izhevsk. The report ends with an exonerating quote by the Russian Ministry of Defense, which states that the strike was “on locations where reserve units of the [Ukrainian] Armed Forces were temporarily deployed.”  

Thus, we are shown that the Russian military is shelling something—a residential apartment block, a Ukrainian military base, what exactly is impossible to say for sure—and ordinary Russian people carry flowers to monuments to honour the victims of this war.

It is not possible to establish whether these were individual cases of sympathy for Ukraine or some kind of mass phenomenon. Regardless, in some reports journalists describe these events as if support for Ukraine in Russian cities is massive.

In Kateryna Berehova’s publication “Muscovites have their memory erased,” published after the Russian shelling of a residential apartment block in Dnipro city, we read the following: “The monument to Lesya Ukrainka on Ukrainskii Boulevard in Moscow has been drowning in flowers for a week now.” The author’s use of the verb “drowning” is questionable in particular. It can mislead readers, since the journalists also reported that people carrying flowers were detained and the flowers thrown away. Berehova writes, “The reaction of Muscovites to the tragedy was not protests and marches, but the silent laying of flowers.” Once again, the author’s generalization is questionable. From the text, it appears that all Muscovites reacted in exactly the same way—which, again, is misleading.

I do not believe such passages reflect the real picture, because they ignore the abundant evidence of Russian society’s support for the full-scale invasion. Of course, we are thankful to those who have not been afraid to speak out against Russia’s brutal war crimes, but it seems that this is more exceptional than typical behaviour.

So what actually happened in Ukraine?

An analysis of Meduza and Novaya Gazeta’s coverage of Russia’s largest attacks on Ukrainian civilians shows that unfortunately, the Russian “opposition” media consistently repeats the Kremlin’s official version of events without comment.

Regrettably, we can read all the Kremlin media propagandists’ talking points about these strikes on the websites of so-called Russian independent media: “funeral of a high-ranking nationalist” in Hroza; “foreign mercenaries” in a Kramatorsk pizzeria; and so-called “locations of temporary deployment” of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Lviv’s residential buildings. Meduza additionally publishes the Kremlin’s narrative about the Ukraine Armed Forces “bombing Donbas,” without sufficient evidence. Some of these phrases appear in the headlines of the Russian opposition publications, adding weight to their false claims. As for Ukraine’s position, it is always presented as one of several possible perspectives.

In addition, Russian journalists repeatedly write about Ukraine targeting itself. These media ignore the fact that some of the commentators pushing this narrative are not competent on the issue, use anonymous sources, and employ manipulative arguments.

Another popular and misleading narrative is that Russian society en masse does not support the war and condemns Russian strikes on civilians.

When covering the largest Russian terrorist attacks, the Russian opposition media does not try to understand what happened and discern truth from lies. Their journalists rely on information from all sides, carefully labelling different narratives as equally plausible versions of an event. In this manner of presentation, the division between terrorists and victims simply does not exist. After all, according to the terrorist’s version, a victim who resists terror is also considered a terrorist…