The website stays white second after second. Then the message “connection failed” will click on the screen.
You will get used to this experience when you try to search Russia online for information about the Ukrainian war.
Right now you’re somewhere east of Moscow. You are about to leave the restaurant to meet your friends. Some of them think that something more than a small military operation is going on in Ukraine. You decide to take a look at what is happening in Ukraine.
You go online and open a Google page. In the search field, type “украинская военная операция” or “Ukrainian military operation”. As such, the president Vladimir PutinTV presenters and Russian authorities are calling for an offensive war.
The first search results will take you to various media pages that will follow the situation in Ukraine moment by moment.
For example, you see news like this.
All Google search results on the first page will take you to the pages of the Russian media.
Two Google search results lead to the pages of the state-owned Tass news agency. It is used directly by the Russian administration as its own information channel.
The following links will take you to the DP website in St. Petersburg, which says it will focus on financial news. It is owned by the national media company NMG, whose directors include Vladimir Putin’s mistress Alina Kabajeva.
Google’s pro-Kremlin RBC news site is also at the top of Google’s results. Youtube, for example, no longer shows RBC videos because of propaganda.
The main content of all the news you click open is the same: Ukrainian fighters are a great danger to civilians and Russia’s military power is great. The West throws sticks at Russia’s stroller, but it doesn’t matter much.
“Temporarily, there are fewer brands in the Russian Federation market than before, but this does not mean that the Russians will get into trouble. The main grocery producers are friendly countries that are not interested in stopping their imports,” the Ministry of Trade and Industry reports.
So according to Google search, everything is fine on the surface.
Next, you decide to search for information on another search engine, the Russian Yandex.
One of your friends thinks that there is a war in Ukraine, not just a military operation. For fun, you decide to see what it says.
You write “Украина война” or “Ukraine War” in Yandex. You usually use Yandex often. It is the most popular web search service in Russia after Google.
This is what the first hit looks like.
Another article in the top of the search results interviews a military expert, a member of the Security Council Alexander Mihailovia. The story wonders why Ukrainians want to resist. Mikhailov claims in the story that the Russian army would not be dangerous to the common people.
In fact, Russian troops have tortured, raped and executed people across Ukraine. Evidence of the killings of a total of at least hundreds of civilians has been found in the cities of Bushan, Borodyanka and Trostynets, for example.
Yet several news stories provided by Yandex claim that Ukrainians use civilians as human shields. In one story, a blatantly false story about the children of the city of Mariupol is clearly told.
According to the story, the “Ukrainian guerrillas” killed the parents of two small children and then tried to hide behind these children. The “guerrillas” stole the family’s car and tried to drive it out of the city along a humanitarian corridor, but Russian soldiers caught them.
In reality, tens of thousands of civilians are trapped in catastrophic conditions in Mariupol as Russia has repeatedly fired on humanitarian corridors along which attempts have been made to evacuate people.
Allegations of the actions of “Ukrainian guerrillas” in Mariupol have been published by a Russian military history site called Voenhronika, which tells an enthusiastic tone about Russia’s past and present wars around the world.
The same site presents a video of the Syrian war that, according to the author, testifies to the Syrians’ “love” of Russian troops.
Surprisingly, a lot of blogs and hobby group content are at the top of Yandex’s search results. They reiterate the same claim that the civilian casualties in Ukraine are the fault of the Ukrainians themselves.
Click on another link on the Yandex homepage. It takes you to the fishki.net site that by demo (switch to another service) contains only user-generated text. So the site has no delivery at all, only Moderators.
The link you open takes Fishk to a user story about the war in Ukraine just beginning.
You still decide to try to find the answers to “Google War” in Russian on Google.
If you were somewhere other than in Russia, you would find out that the title of the link continues: “100,000 people without food, water and medicine in the besieged Mariupol” Now you can’t get to the page because the BBC is blocked in Russia. For the same reason, you will not be able to read Deutsche Welle’s news either.
You will try each link. Soon your browser will be full of tabs that read “problem loading page”, the page failed to load.
Of the first ten Google search results, only two can be accessed. Both lead to a Russian-language Wikipedia article about the war in Ukraine.
A few Russian-language websites critical of the Russian government are also at the top of Google’s search results. These include the Svoboda website of the US-funded Radio Free Europe, Crimean news and the popular Meduza website from Latvia.
According to the headlines, the stories in these media will consider, among other things, when and how the war in Ukraine could end. One news story presents a satirical animated series about the Russian invasion by a Russian-Israeli artist.
You can’t open this stuff either.
The same goes for the news in the Ukrainian magazine Pravda, which is headed “Petition for Readers”. When you click the link, the following message will appear on the screen:
From the west, one can see that Pravda is asking readers living in Dubai to tell the magazine about their observations of Russian oligarchs ’villas, yachts and private planes in Dubai. Photos and videos would be welcome, subject to delivery.
Opening this link from Russia will give you a notification: This page has been blocked by the Russian Federation.
‘s test is one indication that the information about the war provided by Russian channels is largely misleading, false and propagandistic.
In Russian media, civilian casualties are often denied. In fact, for example, the UN has confirmed (you are switching to another service)that more than 1,600 civilians have died in Ukraine, more than a hundred of whom are children. However, according to the organization, the actual figures are significantly higher. According to the UN, most civilians have died in airstrikes, explosions and gunfire.
Data from the city of Bushan, among others, also show how civilians have been brutally killed by Russian forces.
Starting image: AOP, Google.com
Screenshots in order of publication: mk.ru, interfax.ru, realnoevremya.ru, tass.ru, e-news.su, svpressa.ru, fishki.net, Google.com (video), pravda.com.ua