Television is urging Russians to support their president, or as he is more commonly known now, the “supreme general.” Celebrities who oppose the war are described as “traitors”. Viewers are unaware of the violence perpetrated by their sons, brothers and spouses in Ukraine, but such a process does not happen overnight. While claims that Ukrainians are Nazis are new to most outside Russia, for about 70% of Russians polled by state pollsters say it is the main source of news, it is a well-founded fact. Since Ukraine’s pro-European revolution in 2014 and the subsequent annexation of Crimea by Russia, state television has gradually challenged people to see Ukrainians as inferior. I have seen this game with people I love. I recently received a call from a Russian friend. As part of my degree, I spent a year in the city of Yekaterinburg, a two-hour flight east of Moscow. There I met Victor, around fifty, who welcomed me to his family. I spent many weekends in Dhaka sharpening my colloquial Russian and I loved his simplest way of life, cutting firewood and looking for mushrooms in the nearby forest. We always avoided politics, but now he inevitably asks me how I find my job. I try to answer abruptly “okay, thank you”, but he insists. “We are stuck on our television. Our boys are fighting the Nazis in Ukraine. But here things are good. “We do not feel your sanctions yet,” he smiles. How do I feel at the end of a day spent watching such a vitriol? It is pedagogical to hear about nuclear war almost daily. But when I hear such war rhetoric, I fall into a state of emotional distraction. Only when I walk away from my screen do I face the horror of suffering in Ukraine. I recently worked as an interpreter for a BBC radio interview with a wedding photographer who had successfully escaped from the besieged city of Mariupol. He talked about people who drank from puddles and about rotten bodies that were left unburied due to the bombing. This is a war of bullets and artillery. But it started years ago, on Russian television. Francis Scarr is a journalist at BBC Monitoring, which reports and analyzes news from around the world.
