Russian Authorities Trying to Obliterate All Mention of Its Troops Fighting and Dying in the Ukraine

Mark Krutov

April 10, 2015

Russia’s Missing Article: Censorship, Prudence, Or A Win For Moscow’s Troll Army?

MOSCOW – For three straight days last weekend, the employees of the Novaya Buryatia newspaper in southern Siberia used scissors to remove an article from 50,000 copies of the weekly before it could be distributed.

The same article, which had been posted a few days earlier on the paper’s website, was pulled down. (It can be seen in an archived file here.)

As a result, an article that was intended to clear up some mysteries involving alleged Russian military participation in the fighting in eastern Ukraine has itself become the center of a mystery: Is this a case of Soviet-style censorship? Or was it an example of the successful functioning of the Kremlin’s notorious “troll army”?

“I think this is a case of censorship on the part of the security services because I have felt pressure from them myself,” says Arkady Zarubin, a journalist with the Buryat newspaper Arshan. “They have tried in many ways to influence my publications and have even directly told me which ones shouldn’t be published.”