OPINION:
Last week, Russian state TV Channel One editor Marina Ovsyannikova bravely protested President Vladimir Putin’s barbaric war against Ukraine.
Holding a hand-written sign that read, “Don’t believe the propaganda” behind the unsuspecting anchor, Ms. Ovsyannikova shouted “Stop the war! No to war!” Prior to her on-air protest, Ms. Ovsyannikova had recorded a video in which she expressed shame as a journalist for “doing Kremlin propaganda.” Encouraging others to protest, Ms. Ovsyannikova emphasized, “They can’t arrest us all.”
The upshot of her act of public defiance: Russian police immediately detained, arrested and fined Ms. Ovsyannikova.
Ms. Ovsyannikova was in direct violation of a law Mr. Putin signed on March 4 which criminalized protests against the war and any news broadcasts counter to the Kremlin narrative that Russia is engaged only in a “special military operation” in its invasion of Ukraine. Journalists like Ms. Ovsyannikova who attempt to expose Mr. Putin’s propaganda lies face up to 15 years in jail.
Having served in the Soviet Union’s KGB and as director of its successor service the FSB, Mr. Putin is an experienced purveyor of lies, which he uses to deceive voters at home and influence public opinion abroad.
Mr. Putin specializes in “disinformation,” a translation from the Russian word “dezinformatsia,” which Josef Stalin invented in the 1920s on his way to ruthless, absolute power. During the Cold War, the KGB agents wrote covert influence newspaper articles, placed false stories in the press and even disseminated fake documents claiming, among other things, that the U.S. government invented AIDS.
Mr. Putin has now trained his Orwellian propaganda machine on his cataclysmic war of aggression against Ukraine. Fortunately, the machine is racking up the same record of misfires as Russia’s invading forces.
The Kremlin preposterously sought to justify the invasion with claims Ukraine’s democratically elected Jewish President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who lost relatives in the Holocaust, was a “neo-Nazi” standard-bearer. Russia also made false claims about “secret,” U.S.-funded biological warfare labs in Ukraine. Ukraine does have biological labs dedicated to research into pathogens, but they are neither secret nor are they being used for biowarfare. They are part of the Pentagon’s Biological Threat Reduction Program.
Mr. Putin also spread disinformation about Ukraine having a nuclear weapons program.
Truth is so often the first casualty of war. But intrepid journalists risking their lives on the battlefield have exposed these and Russia’s other flagrant lies, prime among them the Kremlin’s denials that it was deliberately targeting Ukrainian civilians and nonmilitary sites in its murderous bombing campaign.
Consider the Mariupol maternity hospital bombing, which Associated Press photographers captured on film in graphic detail. Those photos immediately debunked the Russian Foreign Ministry’s insidious claims that the videos and images of injured and dead pregnant women and children were fakes.
The overwhelming evidence independent journalists have compiled of Russia’s attacks on hospitals, schools and residential neighborhoods has most certainly strengthened the case that Russian forces have committed war crimes and that the International Criminal Court should start up an investigation before the evidence is lost for good.
The press has been extraordinarily valuable considering the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv closed and its small number of remaining diplomatic personnel relocated first to Lviv and then across the border into Poland as the war ground on.
Mr. Putin has tried to build an information “Iron Curtain” in the press and in cyberspace modeled after China’s Web-censoring “Great Firewall.” But in spite of the Kremlin’s muzzling of liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy and TV station Dozhd, Russians are not impervious to the truth. Ms. Ovsyannikova dramatically demonstrated there are cracks in Mr. Putin’s propaganda wall, which will only grow amid a deluge of press reporting on the way about rising Russian casualties and the hell Russian forces are raining down on innocent Ukrainian women and children.
When I deployed to overseas war zones with my CIA colleagues, our mission was to uncover the truth so policymakers could make better decisions. But we carried weapons and had a quick reaction force available to help up in extremis.
War-zone journalists, by contrast, must often take far greater risks, especially because so much of their reporting requires them to be where the attacks are taking place. Earlier this month, American documentary filmmaker and journalist Brent Renaud was killed when Russian gunfire hit his vehicle near Kyiv. Two days later, my Fox News colleague cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian journalist Oleksandra Kurshinova were killed after coming under fire in Horenka. Fox News reporter Benjamin Hall was gravely injured in that attack.
Russia’s savage attack on Ukraine has produced many heroes, especially the brave Ukrainian military and the civilians who pick up whatever arms they can find to defend their country. Mr. Zelenskyy is leading from the front in Kyiv, all while Russian mercenaries ruthlessly hunt for him.
But just as heroic has been the free press, which has excelled in its sacred responsibility of chronicling Ukraine’s fight for freedom and exposing the Kremlin’s duplicitous efforts to distort or extinguish the truth.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. Follow him on Twitter @DanielHoffmanDC.
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