At 8:10PM Moscow time on December 6th, Russian channel Russia 24 introduced what ordinarily would be a major story in the Russian news cycle: claims that newly released drone footage showed Ukrainian soldiers executing their own in a war crime. Such a story would typically have become a major staple of the Russian news cycle of the following days, tapping as it does into a number of key themes of Russia's domestic war narrative: Russia as liberator saving the world from evil, Ukraine and its allies committing war crimes that Russia must investigate and, most importantly of all, a disorganized and demoralized Ukrainian army on the verge of defeat and collapsing in realtime. Yet, after airing a few times throughout that evening, the story appears to have abruptly disappeared as quickly as it arrived. It is unclear why the Russian media pivoted so quickly away from a story that fit so strongly with its core narratives of the war. The transcript below shows the crux of the story:
Artyomovsk, the direction of the special operation Russian Observers drone captured a group of militants of the Kiev regime, who you might think are just leisurely patrolling the surroundings. However, if you look a little more closely, it is not difficult to notice an important nuance that several hands are tied behind their backs, and the rest accompany their own colleagues. As convoys, the end point of this route is the nearest forest belt, where the execution takes place. Well, that is actually war crimes. By the way, the drone itself was eventually noticed and tried to shoot down. However, they did not succeed in this way, the video was in the public domain. Well, for that reason, the punishers staged this Bloody Tribunal is still unclear. Although it can be assumed with a certain degree of certainty that the soldiers were punished for failure to comply with this or that order, all the more such cases in the ranks are not uncommon and have been recorded many times, Georgy Podgorny Georgy Greetings Well, apparently there is no point in asking, where different international ones look. Humanitarian organizations, that is, Hello. If there were these questions, that is, we cannot have them because there is no reaction from these organizations. The dollar-machine guns were presented to the back and retreated behind the nearest trees. We are being clarified in the case of the application of the above penalties, fixed in the area of Artyomovsk-Severskoye-Kremennaya and matchmaker. That is , what the quadcopter recorded and what this The video has become public. It's not uncommon that this happens all the time. It's just that the drone does not always fly over the desired position. Or many may simply not be published for obvious reasons. And now, in principle, the commander has allowed everything absolutely, up to the enforcement of an exceptional measure of punishment on the line of contact, What, in principle, and e are the Ukrainian so-called living doing , there is no conscience left in the chest, where and at whom to shoot, Yes, and notorious radicals they don’t need their own and they themselves will shoot. They sent me today video sequence. I suspect it was the Ukrainian servicemen who sent this primary source, who show the real state of affairs at the front, where they are simply brought down by the command, where they have nothing. And all this forces us to toughen punitive measures precisely in relation to our own comrades-in-arms, because mass facts of desertion are fleeing their positions. It is not clear how then they qualify those who fell under the firing squad, perhaps they write it down in the Missing Persons column, in order to avoid uncomfortable questions. By the way, this graph is very popular.
This analysis is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Internet Archive and its TV News Archive, the multi-party Media-Data Research Consortium and GDELT.