Why would they want to hide it? Perfect opportunity to agitate a little more against "the west". From the perspective of someone who blows up apartment buildings to get a unifying war it's not really a risk, it's potential upside.
It's hard to hide a crash, but it's easy to downplay one. Threaten a few witnesses, pay off a few bereaved families and you can turn a catastrophe into a minor incident.
Russian warships in the Black Sea have been "catching fire" at a suspiciously high rate since February 2022. Same for petroleum facilities and ammo dumps near the Ukrainian border. We all know what really happened, but the Kremlin can spin a line and nobody who saw what actually happened is brave or foolish enough to contradict that line.
There are myriad of reasons why this is not realistic, but if I were to pick the most obvious, that would be
1. No, there is no "complete control of the media", IDK why people assume it to be the case. Broadcast federal tv has to be politically correct, but not too much beyond that.
2. Planes are tracked and people usually have relatives or something.
3. Planes fly through established routes and air corridors - they have a specific destination and don't fly over random wilderness all over the map.
> No, there is no "complete control of the media", IDK why people assume it to be the case. Broadcast federal tv has to be politically correct, but not too much beyond that.
How do you recocile that with the journalists assassinated, arrested, and/or driven from the country?
That's some control. One example - last year one brave lady from TV staff protesting IIRC via banners against the war in state TV. I hope she is still alive and well (for that part probably outside of russia).
Of course the ultimate goal would be total control, so they counter similar situation (or putaine giving some speech live in tv) with ie 1 minute delay to counter any 'mishaps'. So they are going there, but slowly, ineffectively, at least for now.
Russian state can't unroll all freedoms immediately, their main goal was to paint war as "nothing is happening, just minor security cleanup". Putaine's clique is, just like any dictator, scared shitless of people revolting en masse, there is nothing more important for them than keeping the power and stealing all those juicy billions in resources and services flowing. But for majority of russians to revolt, they would have to go quite a bit beyond FUBAR, population is trained with patriotic spin to suffer incompetence of its leaders for generations.
>No, there is no "complete control of the media", IDK why people assume it to be the case. Broadcast federal tv has to be politically correct, but not too much beyond that.
This is why recent prigozhin roadtrip to moscow completely didn't happen at all according to russian media ? or is it just a case of been "politically correct" ? and tv station absolutely not given talking points by kremlin ?
> This is why recent prigozhin roadtrip to moscow completely didn't happen at all according to russian media ?
Who exactly told you this? I assume you don't personally interact with Russian media? You can check that what you claim is not true with just a few keystorkes. Do you need a list of popular media outlets in case you can't find on your own?
I am honestly curious why are you so sure of this, because I see these kinds of extremely confident claims about "did not happen according to Russian media" on the other side of the language barrier way more often than you would expect from random assumptions.
There must be someone who feeds you this idea.
> and tv station absolutely not given talking points by kremlin ?
I am not sure I completely understand you here. They report from the perspective and the angle of Russia, just as their western counterparts (e.g. NY Times, Washingtonpost, BBC) report from their geopolitical angle and perspective. Please elaborate.
>Who exactly told you this? I assume you don't personally interact with Russian media? You can check that what you claim is not true with just a few keystorkes. Do you need a list of popular media outlets in case you can't find on your own?
after those two days it went to "on june 23-24 absolutely nothing happened in russia"
>There must be someone who feeds you this idea.
i am native russian speaker (not russian. never lived in russia). nobody feeds me anything. i been tracking russian media for past two and a half decades. after prigozhin voyage reporting was about attorney general ending criminal investigation "because it was inproperly started" and few pr shows with putin about his unity with people and stuff.
in any other "normative" country there will be non-stop discussion in all media for weeks about what happened.
>I am not sure I completely understand you here. They report from the perspective and the angle of Russia, just as their western counterparts (e.g. NY Times, Washingtonpost, BBC) report from their geopolitical angle and perspective. Please elaborate.
In Russia media is controlled by kremlin. It's "widely" reported what are the general talking points are delivered by kremlin to media and what topics should be suppressed.
You want to say that white house and american media companies have same relationship ?
Now you are just moving goalposts (even up to claimig that bloggers arent media in the neighbouring thread) and base your argument on the fact that something does not fit your personal expectations.
It was a hot topic and it is still discussed from time to time (though more hot topics have appeared since). I'll try to get you some links when I have enough time and if I won't forget. Damn, I should really implement that media tracking and cross-referencing project concept I've been fiddling with - that's just a perfect usecase for it.
> In Russia media is controlled by kremlin. It's "widely" reported what are the general talking points are delivered by kremlin to media and what topics should be suppressed. You want to say that white house and american media companies have same relationship ?
What I want to say is that journalists employed in "big" influential media have a VERY good sence of what optics and points are appropriate and politically correct to report or not, without any explicit control.
A perfect example of this would be the matter of neo-nazi militias influence in Ukraine that was rather extensively discussed and reported on in western media (that's how I personally figured there is a certain ground truth to it, first taking it seriously after BBC and Radio Free Europe reports), until it suddenly became a no-no-hush-hush topic and "Russian propaganda".
It's called "post-truth" and sometimes even semi-officially acknowledged as "editorial policy". And it's EXACTLY the same in Russia.
EDIT: That was easier than I assumed. Thanks to google for "<topic> site:<website.tld>" query format, and thanks to the fact that news-sites have tags:
This is just lies. I tracked this situation and watched official TV. There was interruption at night with breaking news which informed about Prigozhin mutiny. Few hours later there was Putin interruption where he condemned this action and publicly called them a traitors. I don't think that there were many Russians who were not aware of this situation in this day.
Some details could have been hidden, like shot down helicopters or killed soldiers. But claiming that it didn't happen is just lies.
and after those 2 glorious day ? how much discussion on television ? "on june 23-24 absolutely nothing happened in russia" didn't came to existence by accident
I'm not a vivid official TV watcher, so I can't comment about it, sorry. My point is that every russian citizen is perfectly aware of what's happened that day, so hiding very important events is not possible, at least today. Hiding plane crash with hundred of passengers is not possible.
Now explaining those events is another matter. And that's where propaganda will kick in, for sure.
> "on june 23-24 absolutely nothing happened in russia" didn't came to existence by accident
How exactly did it come to existance though? It honestly feels like some kind of gaslighting. Putin did a whole speach on TV and this was a hot topic for weeks. Popular Z-bloggers were all over this matter even longer.
Prigozhins hairwigs meme didnt come to existence by accident either, you know.
I really feel like you might want to reconsider interactig with Russian media through what I assume are 3rd-party reports.
yeah, he made a speech when shit went down, and another one later about "we all are brothers" or whatever. after this media discussion stopped hence the meme "on june 23-24 absolutely nothing happened in russia" that was widely circulating in russian circles in the beginning of july.
zbloggers aren't media. i am talking about official media
just FYI i saw live feed of special news edition in 2am moscow time on ort and live feeds of putin speeches.
The way regular people take videos of destroyed bridges, damaged warships.. I wouldn't say so.
The videos regular folks filmed on incident locations were perfect for damage assessment to us western folks. Russian government may control media in general but social media and messengers are full of uncontrollable stuff (for now)
> meanwhile the Russian state has complete control of the media
Traditional mass media, sure, but there are a lot of people that have to know about a plane crash, and containing that information, even in Russia, is nontrivial.
It is trivial. Official news will report that it was shot down or sabotaged by Ukrainian spies. I'm sure that the scripts and some stock footage are already prepared for when it happens.
That could happen 60 years ago, I guess. Nowadays everyone uses Telegram, everyone possesses smartphone with camera, there are bloggers with millions of subscribers who are outside of political control.
That said, few weeks ago major internet providers in Russia started to roll out VPN blocks with DPI. There are other obvious signs that Russia prepares for the external Internet cut off. So I wouldn't bet for this situation to continue for much longer.
I feel like the planespotting community will eventually ask "hey what happened to that registration number ABC123" or "didn't Aeroflot used to have 80 777s, but only 79 have been seen in the last year"?
I feel like it's hard to hide a plane that's designed for international travel in a highly regulated industry.
Like the Malaysian 777, we know it's missing. No idea what happened to it or where it is. Even in the twenty-first century it's not impossible.
In the context of the Russian war, the Russian government stole a bunch of planes being leased to Russian airlines by foreign companies and assigned them Russian tail numbers. With that paucity of transparency I'd say it's even easier to hide a plane wreck over there.
