Russian propagandists should be on trial together with war criminals - Matviychuk

Russian propagandists - both those who work in the media and those who work in the Russian church - should be on trial together with war criminals.

Oleksandra Matviychuk, Head of the Center for Civil Liberties, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, said this in an interview with Ukrinform.

"Russian propagandists, both those who work in the mass media and those who work in the Russian church, should be there. Because this is not journalism. Talking of the so-called Russian mass media, it has been obvious to me over these years that it is part of Russia’s military and industrial complex. They work exclusively for military purposes, they incite hatred, they program people to kill, they create an image of the enemy," she said.

Matviychuk cited as an example the case of political prisoner Serhii Lytvynov, an unemployed man from the Luhansk region's village of Komyshne, who came to Russia for dental treatment. "They decided that the man was perfect for their television image and accused him of raping and killing about 30 women there, at the instruction of the head of the region, with the aim of 'genocide of the Russian-speaking population of the Donbas,' although he himself spoke Russian. Thus, this is simply beyond the bounds, these are not journalists, this is not freedom of speech, this is a legitimized lie that is used as a weapon. Even before 2014, Shoigu openly wrote that we live at a time when information, words and videos become the weapons of mass destruction, and this is exactly how they see it," she said.

"Therefore, I know that Russian propagandists will be on trial, and I am already waiting for Skabeeva, Solovyov and others to claim, like Nazi propagandists did, that 'our words should not be taken literally', 'in fact, we meant not what you heard but something completely different'," the human rights activist said.