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Disinfo: French Documentary about Russia is nearly Russophobic: distorts facts about Ukraine

Summary

Sensationalist, alarmist and nearly Russophobic documentary “Russia, the new cold war” on Channel M6 in France is simplistic, biased and full of historical inaccuracies. RT France corrected a few points about Eastern Ukraine and Crimea :

1.The film never mentions that after the Maidan coup, the Russian-speaking Eastern part of Ukraine was to be denied the right to speak its own language.

2.There was a referendum in which the citizens of Crimea overwhelmingly approved the attachment to the Russian Federation.

3.There are many polls on this subject, including that of the very serious GFK (German social research organization) which, in 2015, confirmed that 82% of the inhabitants of Crimea favoured attachment to Russia. We have known more brutal annexation.

4.Two Ukrainian soldiers interviewed by documentarists speak Russian. However, the Ukrainian government is doing everything to ban the Russian language in eastern Ukraine, where the vast majority is Russian speaking.

Disproof

Recurrent disinformation messages about eastern Ukraine and the 2014 annexation of Crimea.

There was no coup in Ukraine in 2014. The demonstrations which began in Kyiv in November 2013 – called "Maidan"– were a result of the Ukrainian people's frustration with former President Yanukovych's last-minute U-turn when, after seven years of negotiation, he refused to sign the EU–Ukraine Association Agreement and halted progress towards Ukraine's closer relationship with the EU.

The Ukrainian government, which came into power after the Euromaidan, did not use force to suppress the dissenters. The war in eastern Ukraine, which is often regarded as an outcome of this, is actually a well-documented case of Russian armed aggression.

Ukraine did not ban the Russian language, closed parties, NGOs, or oppositional media. The Russian language remains one of the minority languages in Ukraine; it can be used in private communication and religious ceremonies, in book publishing and the press, including radio and television, in education, the service sector, the healthcare system, and in law enforcement. New parties as well as new media came into existence after 2014.

Concerning Crimea, no international body recognises the so-called referendum, announced on 27 February 2014 and held on 16 March 2014. A year after the illegal annexation, Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted that the plan to annex Crimea was ordered weeks before the so-called referendum.

Read also: The coup in 2013-2014 is the root cause of the war and other problems in Ukraine, Euromaidan and pro-European politics led to the collapse of Ukraine, or After the coup in Kiev in 2014, Crimea reunited with Russia following a referendum .

The disinformation claim appeared in the same video clip, as the allegation that Russia did not invade Georgian territory in 2008.

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publication/media

Facebook resource [from 03:20 to 06:38] (Archived)
RT France - YouTube (Archived)
Twitter Resource (Archived)
  • Reported in: Issue 218
  • DATE OF PUBLICATION: 25/10/2020
  • Language/target audience: Arabic, French
  • Country: Russia, Ukraine
  • Keywords: Russian language, Coup, Euromaidan, Crimea

Disclaimer

Cases in the EUvsDisinfo database focus on messages in the international information space that are identified as providing a partial, distorted, or false depiction of reality and spread key pro-Kremlin messages. This does not necessarily imply, however, that a given outlet is linked to the Kremlin or editorially pro-Kremlin, or that it has intentionally sought to disinform. EUvsDisinfo publications do not represent an official EU position, as the information and opinions expressed are based on media reporting and analysis of the East Stratcom Task Force.

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