Former director of television broadcasting company NTV Yevgeniy Kiseliov talks about Maidan, the presidential elections in Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s TV propaganda

by Dmitriy Volchek

The Russian state TV channels present the Ukrainian revolution as a criminal coup and the Maidan protesters as Nazis. They claim the new government is illegal and talk endlessly about the suffering of the Russian-speaking population, as if it’s languishing under a fifth column of ‘Banderites.’

One can figure out how this propaganda works from the recently published guidelines for journalists. These so-called ‘gag orders’ instruct the mass media to talk about the ‘rule of crime’ in Ukraine, ‘growing squabbles over power’ and the ‘criminality disguised as Maidan.’ And then the journalists are encouraged to promote vacations in Crimea.

Prominent Russian journalist and political analyst Yevgeniy Kiseliov, former director of the television broadcasting company NTV, former chief editor of Moskovskiye Novosti, and who currently…