MOSCOW, July 31. /ITAR-TASS/. Appeal of Ukraine's State Committee for Radio and Television broadcasting (Gostel) to citizens of the country to refrain from making comments with and giving interviews to Russian reporters puts Ukraine into one category with totalitarian regimes, notable Russian mass media professionals said Thursday.
Gostel said Russia was trying to misuse Ukrainian citizens for the purposes of discrediting the Ukrainian Armed Forces, other armed units taking part in combat operations in the east of the country and the Ukrainian state power in general. Somewhat earlier, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov proposed to set up a ministry of propaganda.
"There's a strong impression that the Kiev-based rulers are trying to use Gostel's initiative as an instrument for concealing the true picture of harsh suppression of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics from the world community's eyes, for hushing up the data on destruction of residential areas and the deaths of innocent people," Vsevolod Bogdanov, the president of the Union of Russian Journalists told ITAR-TASS. "When state institutes make out calls for silencing information, this testifies to the striving to conceal the traces of crimes."
"Politicians, businessmen, public associations stand in need of openness, preparedness to answer any questions, and search for a formula of trust rather than a yet another series of volleys of the information war," he said.
Re-transmission of programs of a number of Russian TV channels was banned in Ukraine earlier.
"In any case we can't feed the people with Russian propaganda because this creates a big problem," the incumbent President, Petro Poroshenko said in public while still in the capacity of a candidate for presidency.
"Gostel's appeal to the Ukrainian citizens to refrain from personal contacts with Russian reporters is bewildering, since Ukraine declares itself to be a democratic European nation but it uses the methods of totalitarian regimes," Sergei Brilyov, the anchorman of the highly popular News on Saturday news and analysis program, and simultaneously a deputy director of Rossiya television channel told ITAR-TASS.
"The best method of keeping the world community abreast of your country's position is to make your country open to the maximum," Briolyov said. "On the contrary, the calls for silence have a medieval smell."
"What I can recommend to the Ukrainians is to bring their initiatives to a logical completion and to call on the Ukrainian citizens and then to call on the rank-and-file people to stop speaking, going to the cinema, watching TV, or listening to the radio," he said.
Experts call attention to an overt distortion of events unfolding in the country by Ukrainian politicians. For instance, Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin gave assurances to Reuters that the Ukrainian army was not bombing the houses of innocent civilians or erasing whole streets in Eastern townships from the face of the earth by air raids or using the Grad salvo systems or killing people.
On the face of Klimkin's words, television footage from the spots of clashes and eyewitness evidence given by refugees point to the death of thousands of people in the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics.
"Declarations made by politicians in Kiev could provoke a smile if the events in Eastern Ukraine were not so tragic," Vitaly Tretyakov, the dean of Moscow Lomonosov State University's Supreme School of Television said. "The protagonists of the Kiev political theater are lying incessantly about their willingness to bring peace to Donbass the way that President Poroshenko lied for months he was not bombing peaceful cities."
"Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said not a single word of truth came from Kiev over the past month," Tretyakov recalled.
"It for the purpose of covering up a great lie that Kiev is voicing the recommendations of political spin doctors from the U.S. to stay away from communications with Russian journalists," he said.
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