reported speech in russian

Direct and reported speech in Russian

Subject: Russian

Age range: 14 - 18

Resource type: Lesson (complete)

Last updated

20 December 2016

• Share through email
• Share through twitter
• Share through linkedin
• Share through facebook
• Share through pinterest

Tes paid licence How can I reuse this?

Your rating is required to reflect your happiness.

It's good to leave some feedback.

Something went wrong, please try again later.

This resource hasn't been reviewed yet

To ensure quality for our reviews, only customers who have purchased this resource can review it

Report this resource to let us know if it violates our terms and conditions. Our customer service team will review your report and will be in touch.

Not quite what you were looking for? Search by keyword to find the right resource:

Programs submenu

Regions submenu, topics submenu, launch of the united states guidance for online platforms on protecting human rights defenders online, defending democracy: ensuring election integrity in 2024, a conversation with u.s. ambassador to the united nations linda thomas-greenfield on u.s. diplomacy in the pacific islands, press briefing: japanese state visit and trilateral leaders’ summit.

• Abshire-Inamori Leadership Academy
• Aerospace Security Project
• Africa Program
• Americas Program
• Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy
• Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative
• Asia Program
• Australia Chair
• Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy
• Brzezinski Institute on Geostrategy
• Chair in U.S.-India Policy Studies
• China Power Project
• Chinese Business and Economics
• Defending Democratic Institutions
• Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group
• Defense 360
• Defense Budget Analysis
• Diversity and Leadership in International Affairs Project
• Economics Program
• Emeritus Chair in Strategy
• Energy Security and Climate Change Program
• Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program
• Freeman Chair in China Studies
• Futures Lab
• Geoeconomic Council of Advisers
• Global Food and Water Security Program
• Global Health Policy Center
• Hess Center for New Frontiers
• Human Rights Initiative
• Humanitarian Agenda
• Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program
• International Security Program
• Japan Chair
• Kissinger Chair
• Korea Chair
• Langone Chair in American Leadership
• Middle East Program
• Missile Defense Project
• Project on Fragility and Mobility
• Project on Nuclear Issues
• Project on Prosperity and Development
• Project on Trade and Technology
• Renewing American Innovation Project
• Scholl Chair in International Business
• Smart Women, Smart Power
• Southeast Asia Program
• Stephenson Ocean Security Project
• Strategic Technologies Program
• Transnational Threats Project
• Wadhwani Center for AI and Advanced Technologies
• All Regions
• Australia, New Zealand & Pacific
• Middle East
• Russia and Eurasia
• American Innovation
• Civic Education
• Climate Change
• Cybersecurity
• Defense Budget and Acquisition
• Defense and Security
• Energy and Sustainability
• Food Security
• Gender and International Security
• Geopolitics
• Global Health
• Human Rights
• Humanitarian Assistance
• Intelligence
• International Development
• Maritime Issues and Oceans
• Missile Defense
• Nuclear Issues
• Transnational Threats
• Water Security

Russia’s Crackdown on Independent Media and Access to Information Online

Photo: -/AFP/Getty Images

Transcript — March 30, 2022

Available Downloads

• Download Transcript 316kb

Marti Flacks: Good morning and welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I’m Marti Flacks, director of the Human Rights Initiative and Khosravi Chair in Principled Internationalism. We are delighted to be co-hosting today’s program with the CSIS Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program.

The crackdown on independent media taking place in Russia right now is both symptomatic of a serious deterioration in the human rights and political situations inside Russia as well as a manifestation of a broader pattern of abuse that’s taking place against journalists all over the world. In Russia, government repression of independent media has steadily worsened over the course of the pandemic, the return of Alexei Navalny, and the September 2021 Duma elections. The government has abused public health laws to shut down protests, labeled independent media as foreign agents, and targeted individual journalists for – and outlets for harassment and prosecution. But with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the situation has now become dire.

On March 4th, Putin signed into law a media bill that criminalizes objective reporting about the war in Ukraine; even the use of the word war in describing the situation is prohibited. And those who violate the law face up to 15 years in prison. In response, many independent media outlets have been forced to shut down, more than 150 local journalists are reported to have gone into exile. In an especially heartbreaking development yesterday, Novaya Gazeta, the independent paper founded and led by 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov, announced it would cease publication until the war ended, after receiving a warning about its reporting from the authorities. Even access to outside media sources have been blocked, with Russians unable to directly access the BBC, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and other U.S. and European news sources.

The situation in Russia is emblematic of the types of attacks facing independent media all over the world. Freedom House has documented a significant global deterioration in media freedom over the past decade, with new avenues of repression deployed in both authoritarian and some democratic states. And this repression doesn’t just manifest itself in laws and regulations that shut down newspapers and threaten journalists’ jobs, livelihoods, or even freedom. The Committee to Protect Journalists documented the killing of 45 journalists in 2021 and 18 already in 2022, including five this month in Ukraine. But the demonization of independent media and the labeling of journalists as foreign agents or enemies does something more subtle and far more insidious: It undermines trust both in the messenger and in the information. The 2021 Global Edelman Trust Barometer found that trust in all sources of news is at an all-time low around the world, with just half of respondents indicating they believe they can trust traditional media.

Freedom of expression is not just a fundamental human right, it’s the backbone of democracy. An independent media is absolutely critical to the creation and the strengthening of democratic institutions, which is exactly why journalists are targeted by authoritarian regimes. If Russians are to have any chance of having a government thaat is accountable to their needs and their interests, it starts with access to information and to independent media. That’s why I’m so glad that we’re having this discussion today to help us understand what these recent developments mean for the future of independent media in Russia, how citizens will respond to these new restrictions on access to information, and how the crackdown will affect the country’s political direction. And I’m also looking forward to hearing about what the United States and its partners and allies can do to support civil society and freedom of speech in Russia going forward.

So let me briefly introduce our fantastic lineup for today’s event.

Jamie Fly is president and chief executive officer of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Jamie previously served as a senior fellow and co-director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and director of the Future of Geopolitics and Asia programs at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He also served as Counselor for Foreign and National Security Affairs to Senator Marco Rubio, and in the Bush administration at the National Security Council and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Maria Snegovaya is an adjunct senior fellow in the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for New American Security, a postdoctoral fellow in Political Science at Virginia Tech University, and a visiting scholar in the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, where she researches Russia’s domestic and foreign policy as well as democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe. She has a long history of collaboration and publication with too many think tanks and media outlets to name.

Daniel Baer is acting director of the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He previously served as a diplomatic fellow at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies and served in Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper’s cabinet as executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education. Under President Obama he was U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the State Department.

And Vera Zakem is a senior associate with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program here at CSIS and a senior technology and policy adviser at the Institute for Security and Technology. She’s also the founder of Zakem Global Strategies. She recently served as a member of the bipartisan Task Force on U.S. Strategy to Support Democracy and Counter Authoritarianism, formed by Freedom House, CSIS and the McCain Institute. She also previously led strategy and research at Twitter, leading in scaling initiatives to understand the impact of technology globally.

This is a fantastic lineup with so much insight. And with that introduction, I am so pleased to turn this discussion moderation over to Andrew Lohsen, a fellow in our CSIS Europe, Russia and Eurasia Program.

Andrew, over to you.

Andrew Lohsen: Thank you very much for the introduction, Marti.

At this point I’d like to turn to each of our speakers for some introductory remarks and how they view this unfolding situation.

And as a quick note to the audience, I’d also just like to point out, please feel free to submit any questions via the webpage. There should be a button that says Ask Live Questions Here on the CSIS.org event webpage. And we’ll do our best to answer your questions at the end of the event.

Let’s start with Jamie Fly at RFE/RL. Jamie, can you tell us about some of the restrictions that have been posed on the media – imposed on the media since the start of the war in Ukraine? How do they fit into the Kremlin’s longstanding campaign against free speech and independent journalism? And what is your organization doing in response to these latest attempts to muzzle independent media?

Jamie Fly: Sure. Thanks, Andrew. And it’s great to be with all of you.

So we’ve been dealing with these sorts of restrictions for quite some time inside Russia. We’ve been operating with a formal presence in Moscow for 30 years. We were invited in by Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, at a very different time, obviously, in Russia’s history. But even before the end of the Cold War, we were able to operate on the ground, working with freelancers. By some accounts, by the late ‘80s we had more than a hundred freelancers working with us, despite some of the legal restrictions.

And I just mention that because I think it shows the rather bleak situation that Russia is facing now when it comes to independent media, where I think we’re even going back to a time before the period at the end of the Cold War where there are even more severe restrictions being imposed on independent media outlets.

We’ve been a target of the Kremlin pretty much since Vladimir Putin came to office. Over the years he’s stripped us of our ability to broadcast via traditional radio inside Russia. We lost access to TV relatively early on. And for many years, we were limited to providing news and information using digital means, which has been a growing area for us in recent years. We’ve had great success with digital audiences. And that was the final step that the Kremlin took, starting about a year and a half ago, was to try to impose restrictions on independent outlets operating in the digital space.

That culminated obviously in recent weeks with the blocking of websites, ours and many others, with the effort to block Western social-media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, prevent people from accessing Instagram. So it’s a slow closing of the information space over many years, with the final step playing out in quick succession because of the geopolitics related to the war and the Kremlin’s desire to retain control over any public conversation about the war inside Russia.

So we’re now facing a situation where we’ve had to suspend our physical operations at our bureau in Moscow because of the Kremlin starting bankruptcy proceedings against our Russian entity for our refusal to go along with some previous labeling that they were trying to impose on our content, especially our digital content, and then also the greater risk that any serious journalist faces trying to honestly report inside Russia right now where any real coverage of the war, unfortunately, any potential coverage of political issues, could lead you towards a treason charge and, possibly, 15 years in prison. And so, given that landscape, we had to make that tough decision to suspend our physical operations at our bureau. But what we’re doing is we’re still finding ways to engage with Russian audiences. We’ve relocated some of our journalists outside of the country to our other offices. We still have some contributors inside Russia who are finding ways to share news and information with us that we can then repackage and provide back to our Russian audiences.

And then on the technological front, we’re using advanced circumvention tools – VPNs, mirror websites – and the great thing is despite this blocking, at least in our case in recent weeks, our audiences inside Russia are still at record levels because there is extreme interest in what is going on in Ukraine and because, I think, Russians understand that they’re only getting a small sliver of the true picture.

And so we’ve seen significant adaptation of these circumvention technologies and more people putting in the extra work required now to still access our content online. But that’s going to be an ongoing challenge, I think, for us and any other outlet that is still trying to operate and wants to be able to maintain those ties to our Russian audiences.

Mr. Lohsen: Thanks so much, Jamie. I think that’s a really strong point about the importance of circumvention technologies and I’d like to come back to that at a point later in the discussion.

Let’s speak now to Maria Snegovaya. Maria, it seems that the latest crackdown on independent media and digital freedoms was meant not just to help the Kremlin control the narrative but also to help suppress expressions of dissent as Putin launched a war that seems to, potentially, be quite divisive among Russian citizens.

So, you know, as Putin continues to state that this special military operation is going to plan, we see that his offensive has stalled on several fronts. Casualties are rising. So how long can the Kremlin keep up this narrative before the general population starts to openly question it, and then what happens afterward? Would love to hear your remarks.

Maria Snegovaya: Political scientists are horrible with predicting anything – thank you very much for having me as part of this conversation – so whatever we’re going to be hypothesizing about the future, unfortunately, is likely not to be true.

The whole illustration is quite unprecedented, frankly, and to the extent that we have not faced such a large country ever for the last 80 years, right, committing such an overstep on the international stage but also facing such a serious rebuttal with the sanctions coming from the West so there’s a lot of unknowns here, and right now is not the best moment to forecast what’s going to happen since, for example, even economists – even serious economists are unable to predict all of the economic effects that are going to follow.

So, first of all, what we’re going to say is it’s true that in Russia there are some groups that protested against the war. Those, however, are found among the so-called usual suspects. That is, they’re a sort of smaller share of the Russian society, 15 (percent) to 20 percent that’s usually in opposition to Putin, and many of them supported Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who’s currently in jail after the regime tried to kill him and poisoned him.

These groups are disproportionately younger, more educated, but they’re also a minority in the Russian society, unfortunately. So those were protesting in the streets of Russia when the war started, and even numbers of those arrested – approximately 20,000 people, according to the estimates – those are quite similar to the numbers that we’ve seen in January 2021 when Navalny was on his hunger strike in jail and people came out to protest. So it’s the same old in a lot of ways. Not much has changed, despite the atrocities that the regime has committed in Ukraine.

Now, what about the majority? The majority are probably 50 to 60 percent of the population in passive, not active – not actively mobilized, but, nonetheless, embrace of the war. You know, trust in polls is a highly debatable issue in Russia, another contested issue among the Russian liberals. They really don’t like – (laughs) – those issues for – to debate. But we’ve, first of all, written about the measures of this state of the Russian society. Second, multiple methodologies, multiple ways to poll the Russian population, different independent pollsters all returning more or less similar results.

Now is 50-60 percent big or not? That’s the question. And it appears while it’s still a majority of the Russian population, right? And that you can – 20 percent maximum, probably, actively disagree and protesting against the war, 50-60 percent in the subtle kind of interact embrace of the war, and then there is also about 20 percent of the population who are uncertain.

So it looks by the look at the Russian TV – Russian propaganda, everything that the previous presenters have already described. But also, almost nonstop propaganda brainwashing that’s coming from the government-funded TV channels. It appears that the Kremlin does not think that the current numbers are sufficient to sustain long-term support for this war. Since the war started, and especially since the regime has realized that the war is going to last must longer than expected, we actually see almost nonstop propaganda coverage on TV channels. All the entertainment content on major TV channels – I’m talking first TV channel and RTR, the second one – they almost nonstop are covering Ukraine situation.

There’s notorious talk shows where essentially state propagandists actually try to explain why Russia is doing everything right in Ukraine. And the interesting change that happened is that in the past, first of all, those shows would usually appear in late afternoon or in the evening. Right now, they start at 9:00 a.m. or 10:00 a.m. in the morning and continue nonstop, with small interruptions for news shows. Again, the news are, again, covering Ukraine all the way until after midnight. Now the interesting development is that we do not really see any opposition whatsoever. In the past, there used to be some liberal Russian speakers, some even Ukraine representatives occasionally appearing on those shows.

That’s no longer the case. It’s just nonstop propaganda. And that’s an indication that the regime probably does not believe things are going as well in Ukraine on the ground. Probably it also feels like there needs to be a stronger embrace of the war, or the so-called special operation in Ukraine, as the Kremlin once has to call it, among the Russian society. This brainwashing has spread beyond TV channels. We’ve already discussed that the main social networks have been banned, like Facebook or Twitter. There’s repressive laws against dissenters. You can no longer even support – even call for peace. Even that at this point is considered to be in violation of the state laws.

But interestingly, the new development is a very intensified propaganda in schools, where one of the latest developments is that Maria Zakharova from the MFA and the editor in chief of RT Margarita Simonyan met with schoolteachers in Moscow over Zoom to explain to them how important it is to promote patriotism at this difficult political moment. So overall we see that the propaganda is reaching really, really high levels, probably not because of the regime feels very secure.

The problems, the downsides, right, the possible limitations in the future, to answer Andrew’s question, is, first of all, there is a lack of very well-developed ideology, where a lot of this sort of propaganda would have fit, right? The Kremlin doesn’t really have – offer to the Russian population a vision of the future. It’s mostly a past-based ideology and revanchist ideology. Essentially, we’re defending Russia against outside aggression, and we also sort of recollecting the USSR – although, that’s not directly told, that’s sort of implied. But that, of course, will create limitations in the future because there’s nothing to offer to the Russian population here.

The second of all – the second point I wanted to make when it comes to limitations is that the regime actually fails to mobilize the society around this pro-war narratives. Russian society is generally passive. It’s a characteristic of the society. It’s hard to mobilize around any issues. But we don’t really even see something that was during the Crimea campaign, when a lot of the society rallied around the flag and there were even volunteers willing to go to fight in Donbas. That’s no longer the case. Instead, we see that general mobilization of people is extremely unpopular in Russia, and that will serve as a limitation for the regime. It will not be able to mobilize the Russian society to fight in this war, which will put another constraint.

And last but not the least, the economic well-being so far has been the strongest prediction of support for war. The better off people are and the less they think they will suffer from the war, the more supportive of the war – of the special operation – they appear to be in the polls. Sanctions are targeting this particular vulnerability of the regime. And so as sanctions essentially come into full effect, we are likely to see even this 50 to 60 percent of the Russian society starts doubting the war or the Russian participation in the war.

And I’ll stop here. Thank you.

Mr. Lohsen: Thank you, Maria. There’s certainly a lot of challenges ahead.

And I think at this point let’s see if we can go to Vera Zakem to tell us a little bit more about what’s happening with the digital space. Vera, I mean, as broadcasts and print media are closing up shop and suspending operations – they’re no longer covering the war due to some of the latest repressive measures – it seems like being able to access information online is becoming ever more critical for Russians who really want to know what’s happening in the world. So could you walk us through some of the changes that we’re seeing in the digital space, both in terms of some of the new limitations that are set up by the government but also more efforts that are being undertaken by Russian citizens to assess – to access objective information or critical coverage?

Vera Zakem: Absolutely, and thank you so much for having me.

You know, the first thing I actually want to just point out is – and other folks already have touched on this – is that one of the core cornerstones of a free and open society is the ability to have access to free, independent media and have access to credible information. Now, according to Freedom of the Net, as Marti mentioned earlier, Russia has already had very low scores regarding that. But I think what has happened with Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, the ability to access information both in mainstream and on digital platforms and on social media has become extraordinarily really, really challenging.

So, you know, I like to view it as when we – when we talk about countering disinformation and providing folks credible access to information and freedom of expression. It really is the opposite – the different side of the same coin – which is digital authoritarianism, because what we’re actually seeing in Russia is – by Kremlin, by the Russian government – is a form of digital authoritarianism on its citizens to really censor citizens to the type of information that they have and the type of information that they have – that they can consume.

So what has happened, you’ve seen this on multiple fronts, right? Of course, on mainstream you have, as an example, like Novaya Gazeta, they just, you know, decided to close down because of multiple warnings by the Russian government. And what we have seen literally since the start of Russian invasion in Ukraine is a number of platforms, digital platforms – be it Meta/Facebook and Instagram, as well as Twitter and other platforms as well – that they’ve actually stopped, cut down service in Russia, or they have been forced to cut down service because of, for example, in recent weeks there’s been this fake news law that the Russian government has passed to really censor the information that Russian citizens have, and that is really, really troubling and, you know, some folks are really almost dubbing this as a digital Iron Curtain. And what it – what it really shows is the potential for a couple of things.

One is, as these laws are passed and folks in Russia have a very sort of narrow window into the type of information that they consume and they are completely surrounded by the propaganda inside Russia, is this kind of digital sovereignty and digital isolationism. And that is some of the trends that we have to be thinking about right now that may actually go beyond the war itself.

So what are – the Russian citizens are doing? We’ve seen already over the last number of years there have been a number of other platforms within Russia that have arose. Certainly, VKontakte is one example. Most recently since Instagram there’s – Instagram is very, very popular in Russia, and one of the ones that is kind of emerging right now is their version of – they’re calling it Rossgram, right, so it’s kind of a version of their Instagram.

Because there was kind of a vibrant – or there has been a vibrant community that wanted to just – not just share information, just be on social media. But the idea here is that, if you think about where folks get their information, they get it from mainstream news, they get it from social media, and they get it from their friends and family.

So, the filter bubbles are really forming and that kind of free and open space is really, really closing as a result of this war and Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, and the information the Kremlin really wants Russian citizens to see.

So, I think there’s – what I think right now what we’re seeing is a really dangerous precedent for the years ahead that I think the impact of this will be long – much further than the current conflict.

Mr. Lohsen: Thank you. Very well noted about the challenge of closing spaces in Russia.

And I’d like to turn to Dan Baer, who can tell us a little bit more about some of the policy options that are available to the United States and to international organizations, the international community broadly, to, you know, contend with this new challenge. Dan is a former deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Human Rights, Democracy and Labor, a former ambassador from the United States to OSCE. What do you think of as a potential policy response that can be undertaken to help promote these free and open spaces and to support freedom of speech and digital freedoms in Russia?

Dan Baer: Thanks, Andrew. It’s always challenging to come at the end of a such a distinguished panel, and it’s great to be here with Maria, Vera, and Jamie, and to see you all. You always get in the position of saying everything’s been said already, but not by me. But I’m glad to be here.

You know, I was thinking about the policy responses, and unfortunately – I was saying before we got on air – this is a really difficult moment. We’re kind of in between the immediate and the kind of near-term policy responses, and so, I find myself stuck at, kind of, the urgent and the long-term horizon. And I thought I would just frame up kind of five questions that I’ve been thinking on – and I don’t pretend to have the wisest answers to them – but things that I’ve been trying to figure out as I sort through the situation in my mind.

And the first is, kind of, how we think about the problem, and I think thinking about the problem that we’re discussing today it can be important to separate out free media and media freedom from free expression because they are actually separate problems, although deeply linked, of course. And I actually think the prospects for free media are pretty dire in the near-term. But I think free expression, there may be opportunities for creative tapping into expression in Russia in the coming months, and time will tell.

I think it’s also important to point out that freedom of expression is not just about government accountability or criticizing or protesting government, it’s also about telling people that they’re not alone. And in losing so much of the intelligentsia in the last few weeks, as people have fled Moscow and St. Petersburg and elsewhere in Russia, you know, a country has lost its conscience, and that is a deep and profound and lasting loss that I think we’ll be seeing the effects of for quite a long time to come.

Which leads me to how we think about the future – and here I mean long-term future. I guess the bad news is I don’t see any real prospect. As others have highlighted, this is the continuation of a trend – a huge exacerbation – but the continuation of a trend that has been ongoing, and I don’t see any prospect for improvements – real improvements in media freedom in Russia until a post-Putin perestroika. And that doesn’t mean immediately post-Putin – or I’m not naïve in thinking what comes after Putin is necessarily better. But I think it’s hard to imagine progress under the tenure of this leader, and so, I think we have to acknowledge that.

But I think we should look forward to that progress because I think life and history are long, and we should expect that Russia will be part of the international community. We should want that day, and we should be preparing for that day. And we should recognize that that is going to – between where we are now and where we want to be there, there’s a huge psychological challenge.

You know, Maria’s account of kind of where the Russian people are – one of the things that repression does is protect the psychological well-being of people who have bought into a regime that is now committing war crimes, that is now killing people who just a few weeks ago the president was saying were a fraternal people. You know, to move from supporting to condemning that regime is to admit one’s own complicity. And I think we should recognize that there’s quite a long psychological journey for a lot of people to make between here and some kind of freer society in the future.

The third question is kind of how do we get creative in the near term? And all of the stuff that Jamie and Vera have mentioned in terms of opportunities to use technology. I think here too Masha Gessen’s wonderful book, titled “The Future is History,” it’s time to get creative in kind of some old-fashioned ways. And I don’t think the Russians are going to shut – I don’t think Putin’s going to shut down email, for example. I think we should be using email lists. We should be compiling them – particularly of people who have left the country. We should be compiling them from people who are fleeing Ukraine who know people in Russia and sending information about what’s happening on the ground in via email.

I think exploring how we can – how we can support any kinds of campaigns – you know, one of the challenges with freedom of expression, protesting in Russia requires an extraordinary amount of courage. I think it’s worth thinking about whether there are other ways for people to tell each other that they’re not alone that don’t require going out into the streets and holding a sign. Looking for micro-expressions and opportunities to build campaigns around micro-expressions. And we should be supporting the journalists who have fled and making sure that they can continue to tell – to speak with an authoritarian – authoritative voice about what’s happening on the ground in Ukraine, and to comment on what they see and hear from inside Russia.

The fourth question is kind of how we think about the U.S. role, or the role of the – and I think it is important for the U.S. to work through international organizations wherever possible. But I think it’s really important that while we be conscious of the fact that Putin has a special neuralgia, a paranoia – a paranoia and neuralgia about the United States, we shouldn’t let that stop us from doing what’s right. We should be attentive to it and not purposefully provoke, but we should do what’s right in terms of supporting freedom of expression and the free media.

And the last question – the last thing I’ve been thinking about is how we frame the problem. And one of the things that I think we should do is make sure that we’re not only framing this as a human rights problem. The costs that companies are incurring because of the sanctions are directly tied to this long-term trajectory of repression in Russia. It is the internal repression that Putin had cultivated overt the last two decades is directly linked to his external aggression. It is a reason for it.

And we should point out – we should make sure that as we describe the economic costs that responding to Putin’s aggression has imposed not only on people inside Russia but also in Europe and in the United States, that those costs are connected to long-term unaddressed failures of governance, including violations of human rights, including restrictions on freedom of expression and freedom of the media. And so we should point out that in other places, where we do take a stand on freedom of expression and free media, we are actually protecting the international order, which is also the order that international commerce depends upon. So those are a few thoughts to finish out the tour de table.

Mr. Lohsen: Thank you so much, Dan. I think you raised some really excellent points there. And as we turn more to the moderated discussion, a bit more engagement among the panelists, I’d just like to remind the folks who are tuning in to please feel free to use the “ask a question” button and let us know what you’re thinking of, what you’d like to have the panelists discuss further.

Dan, I really appreciated what you had to say about folks having to acknowledge their own complicity in a regime. And I think there’s a – you know, there’s anecdotal evidence about this cognitive dissonance that you find with a lot of Russians who are consuming the news, who simply cannot believe what’s being reported in Ukraine. And sometimes they’ll even receive phone calls from relatives who are being shelled or bombed, and there’s still this refusal to believe what’s going on.

And so I think that’s a really excellent question to pose. And I’d like to hear some other panelists’ comments on that, is, you know, how do we grapple with this hardening of views? How do we grapple with the cognitive dissonance? And maybe, Jamie, we could turn to you here, how to essentially engage with these passive consumers of the news and try to increase that demand, and engaging skeptical audiences as well?

Mr. Fly: Sure. I mean, that’s something that we’re debating here at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on a daily basis across all of our various platforms that are engaging Russian audiences.

I’ll just say, from our experience – I mean, I think Maria noted the issues with the surveys, and I think there probably is a majority of citizens inside Russia that are at least passively supporting the Kremlin narrative. We have seen, through a diversity of opinions in the street interviews that we’re still able to do. This was easier, obviously, before the recent developments.

But if you look even – and we’ve published a lot of these, including with English subtitles – the natural response from most Russians we talk to, not just in cities but as we surveyed people across the country as the military buildup was occurring and as there was the talk of possible war against Ukraine, more often than not. the response was almost astonishment at the prospect of war with Ukraine. People repeatedly would say similar things like why would we go to war against Ukraine? My cousin lives in Ukraine. My aunt or uncle live in Ukraine. I have this personal connection to Ukraine.

So I just – I mention that – that was just striking to us across Russia as we surveyed people in the early phase of this. We got a lot of that response. Now, we’ve also done a lot of other so-called vox pops where, even when presented with evidence of what is happening in Ukraine, people are just in absolute denial. They don’t want to engage. They don’t want to hear it.

And so I think there has been a hardening of public opinion amongst a certain segment of society. And then we’re also now dealing with that challenge which Dan highlighted, where we do have – we don’t have the exact estimates, but we have significant numbers of Russians just voting with their feet and leaving. And so that – many people who may have been open to a certain message may actually have just decided that it’s not worth it and they’re going to at least live out the next several months, if not the next few years, somewhere else, in a better situation for their families.

And so that, I think, requires all of us who do want to engage those who remain to rethink what our programming looks like, what messages that we are sharing with them. We can’t necessarily just do the same things that we’ve been doing in recent years. And so we’re taking a significant relook at what types of programming we make available to Russians inside Russia and trying to connect with them on a variety of levels.

The one thing I’ll highlight that has been successful for us in recent years is that there are always – in every society, even in democracies, there’s a certain segment of the public that don’t care about politics. They just want to live their lives. They do, though, care about topics that touch them on a daily basis, that interact with their families – the environment, health care, sometimes social policy, education policy. And we’ve had great success doing journalism related to those topics, which are not just involving a certain message about Vladimir Putin every day or Kremlin policy, but focusing on things that people care about in their day-to-day lives.

Now, some of that, I think, has been set aside just by the focus on the war in recent weeks. But I think we and others will likely need to return to that, because I think there are still ways that you can highlight the broader impacts of the war on Russia’s economy, the broader governance issues, which the Putin regime has struggled with for years in terms of actually resolving problems for people at a local level. And so that’s one area that we’ve had great success that I think we’ll want to do more of going forward.

Mr. Lohsen: Maria, maybe I could turn to you for a comment here. I’m curious. I mean, it seems that quite often the Russian government has depended on setting an example of those who violate the law. I mean, we see this 15-year prison term that’s been introduced for those who may violate the law against so-called fake news about the Russian military operation, about the Russian defense sector.

I mean, should we be expecting some sort of example to be set, some criminal penalties to be levied against journalists who still dare to just talk about the situation in Ukraine objectively? Or has that – are we seeing a new shift in the way that Russia is approaching enforcement?

Dr. Snegovaya: I mean, we – it’s always left to selective impressions, right, the way the state government approaches this issue – the government approaches these issues. We’ve seen that back in 2014-15, that’s not fundamentally. We do not see a wider, like, scale of repression. That’s not a terror yet, but the dynamic is extremely unfavorable. But it’s also quite predictable, right, given everything that we’ve known about how this regime operates during these times.

I just wanted to add to something that’s been said before about the general state of the Russian society since I’ve written specifically recently about that and the cognitive dissonance that Russians have, even when presented with direct evidence. I think that Jamie has mentioned that. They refuse to believe it, even when that evidence comes from trusted sources like, for example, a father is presented this evidence from his daughters who live in Ukraine. And here, unfortunately, we’re facing a much more problematic situation. It’s not the lack of knowledge, like was the situation back in the Soviet times, for example; it’s active resistance to know because knowledge has too many implications that are unpleasant, that are painful, that take you out of your comfort zone, and also, to some extent, challenge your identity.

Right said, if you know that your country has committed atrocities in Ukraine, first of all, you are no longer the good, liberating Soviet soldier – like, representative of the Soviet, less Russian population that’s always right and always does the right deed, never questions of what it does. But it also puts some of the responsibility on you to act in some way, and that’s what the Russian society has been deliberately trying to avoid for many years. It’s a passive acceptance for a regime’s actions especially when it comes to something abstract, something that does not concern them personally, which came to be – primarily be associated to the realm of foreign policy.

In Russia, Putin is not really credited with combating corruption or even achieving economic progress anymore, unlike what used to be the case in 2000s. Where he’s still given credit is in the realm of foreign policy, that he is able to make the Russia great again – make Russia great again and achieve all these great things on the international stage. There, ordinary Russians sort of delegate all of the responsibility for foreign policy realm to the president and does not really concern him or herself much with that. The state tends to be right in that regard. That’s also where Russians get the sense of unity, unlike Ukrainians, for example, where the nation comes from similar values shared by individuals, each and every individual. In Russia, it’s more that the state tends to unite the Russian society over this framework of the great Russia, and that’s where essentially Russia’s version of, if you will, post-imperial nationalism comes from.

So there’s a lot of deep problems sociologically and psychologically, serious deep issues associated to the way Russians view their – what the country does in the international stage, which makes it very hard to fight it by just trying to tell them the truth. They know the truth. They can access the truth. They just don’t want to know it.

And here, coming back to what has been said by Jamie, it really – where I think we have a chance to change the views is where the issues concern them personally. I already mentioned that the embrace for war tends to decrease dramatically among people who feel that they’re economically affected in an active way by war consequences. And I think there will be chance to specifically demonstrate to them how they’re personally affected by the bad decisions made by the government. That opportunity will come when they really feel the effect of the sanctions. Right now the sanctions work but – and the prices have been skyrocketed – have skyrocketed, but not fully, not to a large extent. It’s not really felt like a deep, serious crisis.

And this is where I have to agree: They will have to connect everything that’s going on to the matters that concern them personally. It’s the society that does not – is not going to – concern with some abstract sufferings of some, I don’t know, people somewhere, especially when this knowledge challenges their integrity, based on, as I said, these beliefs in Putin restoring Russia’s great-power status. So in a lot of ways this is a much, much more serious challenge and it might require some engagement with cognitive psychological approaches in order to be able to effectively reach to ordinary Russians and finally make them realize what is going on in Ukraine.

Mr. Lohsen: Maria, I think you raise a really, really strong point there, and I think that, you know, one thing that’s really striking to me is that it – we’re seeing this increase in harsh rhetoric from Putin himself about essentially splitting society into those who support the war and those who are “scum” or “traitors” or fifth columnists, and I’d really be curious to hear some of the panelists’ thoughts on, you know, what this means not only for the operating environment for journalists but also just kind of giving that cognitive space for Russians to start to think about politics in a different way.

Are we seeing this, you know, kind of enforcement of a closed space where we’re now having a certain opinion on the war is starting to come with very significant and, potentially, dangerous political baggage just for the ordinary Russian citizen?

Dan or Vera, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, if you’d like to jump in.

Ms. Zakem: Yeah. I’ll jump in just real quickly. You know, I think it’s extraordinarily dangerous for the Russian citizens and I think some of what Jamie and, you know, Maria also commented of the fact that there’s real fear. So even if folks, you know, do not agree with what Kremlin is doing there’s real fear in speaking up. So is the decision made to just kind of, like, ride out this period? Because, as you have mentioned, you know, there’s, potentially, if you’re a journalist or, quite frankly, it could be also a human rights defender or a dissident or anyone who speaks up someone can go to jail.

And so – and I think we do have, you know, this now opportunity to really try to reach – two things, to reach people in a creative way and to show them, try to get sort of the truth out to them but show them also – relate it to matters that really impact them, as folks have already said, right, whether it’s the health issues, it is the economy, and I think, over time, sanctions will definitely have its effect as well.

So I think it is trying to reach out, you know, sort of the creative way as well. So that is why I think that when we think about engagement, whether – you know, Dan, you rightly mentioned email, and then also other forms and mediums, different kind of strategic campaigns that we can do to show, you know, that what the Kremlin regime is doing, what the Kremlin is doing, this is – it’s not just a matter of this is not right but this is not really what’s going on, and what you’ve seen now is the international community is really, really strongly behind Ukraine.

So I think it’s really about a strategic engagement and very creative engagement to show people the truths and see the impact that this, potentially, already has and may have in the long run for the Russian citizens.

Dr. Baer: Andrew, I just want to – two points there. On your point about kind of the change in rhetoric, I mean, I think that was, to me, the most striking thing about the speech that Putin gave on the eve of the war. Just – you know, I’m used to the Russian kind of foreign policy speeches that pervert and twist U.N. language to construct some kind of cynical legal justification for various things and, frankly, the complaints about NATO and stuff like that, and I think one of the things that that speech revealed is just how much of – that it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that NATO is a red herring in all of this and how much of this is much deeper.

The speech that he gave on the eve of the war was, clearly, directed at an older Russian audience. It was, clearly, rooted in history, and when I say history I don’t mean the 1990s. I mean the 1920s. And it was filled with deep loathing and derision for Ukraine and its right to exist and it was a different tone. I’m not saying that he’s never appealed to history before but it was just – it was seething, and I think that is very terrifying and it goes to, you know, part of what Maria was saying about the identity piece of this as well. And you know, if you’re rooted in that history and there’s some claim made and you’re – you’ve been told that an action is a validation of that history, then to give up support for that action is to invalidate your own history and, you know, that challenges people’s sense of identity. By the way, we see that in our own country in some of the debates around, say, CRT right now.

But the other piece about this is, I think, one of the things we haven’t mentioned so far – we’ve alluded to it – is that one of the things that we can do is continue to strengthen the sanctions. There has to be – the initial shock of the sanctions is starting to wear off. Markets are starting to price them in. They are going to have less effect over – sanctions always have less effect over – the effect of sanctions lessens over time as people figure out workarounds and substitutions, et cetera. And so it’s really important that the international community – and here it’s the United States, Europe, as well as other G-7 countries – that they continue to impose more sanctions. There should be more banks that are banned from SWIFT. There should be more consequences that are delivered that make the sanctions pinch in the lives of middle-class Russians so that they are spurred to rethink their support for this war.

Mr. Lohsen: Thanks, Dan. I think those are all excellent points.

And at this point, I would like to turn to some audience questions since we’re at about the 10-minute mark and we have a couple that have come in that are really excellent. One of the – I really like this one, which is from Joe Morley , asking essentially how – should we be focusing the messaging? Should the West, in its attempts to try to establish more objective information about what’s happening, should we also be focusing our messaging more on nonaligned countries or countries that are, you know, other than Russia – so, for example, India, African states – to try to correct some of the narratives that Russia has been propagating, fueling external support for the war?

Ms. Zakem: I can just jump in here for a second and then if –

Mr. Lohsen: Sure.

Ms. Zakem: You know, absolutely. I mean, we see the Kremlin playbook being used extensively all over the world, certainly in emerging markets, including, you know, Africa, including Latin America, including India to try to influence targeted populations both internally within those countries and externally as part of, if you will, the alliance and geopolitical alliance. So I think this is – as part of Dan was so rightly to point out how, you know, in terms of the importance of sanctions in part of building this broader and expanding that coalition, if you will, and this broader international community coalition. It’s sort of antiwar and supporting Ukraine. And in thinking about the messaging I think it’s really, really important that we also, the broader international community, engages with those countries as well, just because Russian government reach is far and wide and it goes much beyond Ukraine or Europe or the former Soviet Union states.

Mr. Lohsen: Maybe I’ll switch to another audience question now, which is from Sofia Hayes. She’s asking about the corporate role, noting that Twitter had announced in early March that they would comply with EU sanctions and restrict Russian state media in Europe. The question is: To what extent have these actions been effective at limiting disinformation in Europe? And what more could Twitter be doing to curb disinformation elsewhere?

Would also love to hear some additional thoughts on, you know, the future of these social media companies in Russia. Is there – is there a potential way for them to go back in a way that is responsible and not selling out the Russians’ right to free speech?

Jamie or Dan, maybe you guys could tackle this one.

Mr. Fly: I’m happy to start.

So I think from our perspective the social media platforms play an important role. You know, during the Cold War we used radio transmitters to access our audience, and I always say now that the social media platforms are essentially our modern radio transmitters. The problem is, with our radio transmitters for the most part we owned them, maintained them. We could adjust them as necessary to reach the audience in different ways. And with the social media platforms, yes, we can have great digital teams that have the right strategies, but the reality is we have very little control over the nuts and bolts of how we’re accessing and interacting with the audience because the social media platforms have such immense power as they design the algorithms and make policy decisions, then, in different markets.

So one challenge we have across the board – and Russia has been one of those countries where we occasionally have had concerns that the Kremlin has gamed the system to a certain extent. When all of the platforms were accessible inside Russia, they often would respond to various requests from people inside Russia or complaints about our accounts. We’d occasionally get our accounts locked out, so that was a running challenge that we’ve had, and not just in Russia but in other countries as well.

I think it’s good that the platforms that were blocked took a stand. They, obviously, did not go along with the censorship. And the one that we’re all now watching is YouTube, which is the last major remaining Western platform that has yet to be blocked, although I think people have been predicting in the last couple weeks that it will be blocked at any moment. YouTube is a vital lifeline for us and many other news outlets to reach our audiences. It’s also wildly popular inside Russia, not just for news and information. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens there.

But I think the companies in general have taken the right stand in the last several weeks, and so given the broader environment that we’ve been discussing, I really don’t know how they will be able to return to the market anytime soon without fundamentally compromising the principles that they’ve now put out in response to these censorship demands. But they do play an important role. And I think anything they can do, as well as other tech companies in general, to support circumvention efforts, to make sure that circumvention tools work well with their platforms, that will be incredibly useful.

And I think the one good note I’d end on there is we’ve still seen with Facebook, Instagram – we’ve seen a lot of use continuing from Russia, even from those affiliated with the Kremlin who are still posting on their Instagram accounts despite the fact that it’s supposedly banned. And so I think anything that companies can do to further those efforts at circumvention and raise more awareness in Russian society about how to access blocked content, that would help us all.

Mr. Lohsen: All right. And then the final question that I’ll – that I’ll ask among the audience questions is from Adam Hilchesky (ph). He wants to know: Is there an effort to organize the Russian diaspora in a way that was done in Poland last year with – to support the continuing broadcast of the TVN channel? You know, is there – is that consolidating – are we seeing a move among – a movement among the Russians who have left and voted with their feet, and also long-standing diaspora communities to support the continued independence of free media, and to support in general the exchange of ideas?

Maria, perhaps I could turn to you here for this one.

Dr. Sengovaya: Yes, thank you. That’s an important question. Definitely there is such an effort. So Russian society suffers from lack of uniting values. I mentioned that in the past. And it’s actually just to haunt Russian diaspora abroad as well. It was very hard to organize, because the people just really very much disagreed in their vision of political social future for Russia. That’s no longer the case. If there’s anything positive to say about this current wave of immigration it’s that people who are fleeing they tend to be this pro-Western, liberal-minded pro-democracy Russians, who just don’t find that they have any future in Russia in the current situations anymore.

So in that regard, it’s easier to unite them. And there were a number of initiatives, including organizing some, I don’t know, media – some platforms where they could all connect. Or think tanks, like Free Russia Foundation, for example, that operate in the United States, but also Georgia, also Ukraine, attempted to do that. There is also an attempt by Navalny’s colleagues who have left the country and currently trying to create the – again, unite Russian diaspora. Many of them have met – they visited D.C., New York, and met with many people there.

It's not very clear what’s going to come out of it, because it’s also important to have some vision for the future, right? Right, so you have all these people, but what it is that they can do, right? Can they outreach to their relatives in Russia? Can they try and influence them? That’s, I think, the bigger challenge. So far we’ve got this antiwar committee where some of the Navalny’s team members, but also other opposition leaders like Garry Kasparov have joined and signed this antiwar statement. So this is all in development. And I think that’s one of the ways in which Russian civil society can move further.

Unfortunately, like, previous experience, it’s not very encouraging in this regard. But as I said, there’s also policy signs when it comes to at least the unity of values among these people that many of the previous waves of immigration lacked. Thank you.

Mr. Lohsen: Thanks, Maria. We’re running right up against the end of our time here, so maybe what I’ll do is just ask all the speakers to give a brief 20 to 30 seconds on what you’re watching next when it comes to the future of media and freedom of speech in Russia.

Dr. Baer: I’ll jump in. (Laughs.) I mean, I think I’m watching the future of the platforms in the very near term. And one of the things – I agree very much with what Jamie said. One of the things that I think we should think about from this experience is that the platforms themselves actually don’t want to be judge and jury on how to make these decisions. And we need better agreed principles about what they can use as external reference to make good, decent decisions about what to do in hard cases. This won’t be the last one. And I think a lot of them were flying by the seat of their pants looking for references in international law and stuff like that. And, you know, I think they have made good decisions, broadly speaking. But I think we should try to learn from this experience.

And then, you know, the second thing is, looking at whether or not those who have fled are able to become – those who have fled, the brain drain, are able to become – to maintain a role outside of their homeland as the conscience of a country, because I think it’s really important that that happens, because at some point the brain is going to have to go back. And we should all want that for Russia’s future.

Mr. Lohsen: Thank you, Dan.

I’ll leave this one as a jump ball if anybody else wants to jump in real quick and let us know what you’re watching next.

Ms. Zakem: Yeah, just a 10-second echo. I totally agree with Dan. I am very much watching – Jamie, also what you said – what’s going to happen with YouTube and how digital platforms are going to be dealing with this, first and foremost, because they have been a voice to provide, whether we think about, broadly speaking, sort of their – whether they’re countering disinformation or not. But they have been a voice in Russia and a lot of other states in the former Soviet Union and Europe.

So how that gets handled, whether they’re going to – for example, YouTube, in this case, is going to be shut down, how they’re going to be operating inside the country. It really, really remains to be seen; and then how, ultimately, at the end of the day, how we, as the international community, as the United States, also how can we really provide these kinds of creative campaigns and really foster these creative voices and creative campaigns to get the truth and to get credible information to the population.

Dr. Snegovaya: I think that it’s very important to see how the dynamic of the approval for the government actions change when the sanctions hit. So we’ve discussed the policies – people are afraid to answer maybe about the war at this point. But they – there will be subtle signs, indications, for example, of whether the country is moving in the right direction. And so far you see that the polls – the – first, the perceptions are improving so far.

The opening, as I said before, for outreach to the Russian population will come when they see decline starting to happen. And that’s probably unavoidable, given the scale of sanctions. Despite all the adjustments, right, there is a big blow that the Russian economy has suffered. And there will be this moment. At that time, it’s important to watch that situation.

And I have to say that despite all of the blockings of the social media that we’ve discussed here, the demand for knowledge is big. And you can see, like – like I say, they’ve locked Echo of Moscow, so now Echo of Moscow, every journalist – former Echo of Moscow journalist has his or her own show on YouTube, which has very large following. And, for example, Venediktov, the editor in chief of Echo of Moscow, had to block his Telegram account when he left Echo of Moscow, but he had to create new – a new Telegram account, which now has twice as many followers as his old account had.

So from that perspective there are current trends in the Russian society, not all of them necessarily negative. That’s a matter of really watching for these openings when they emerge and trying to sort of use them.

Mr. Lohsen: Thank you, Maria.

Jamie, any last words from you?

Mr. Fly: Yeah, just to echo Maria there. I mean, our experience over more than 70 years of broadcasting, including into the Russian audiences in the Soviet Union, is exactly what Maria said, that people are always hungry for information. Yes, they’re susceptible to propaganda, but only to a certain extent. And over time, I think people eventually start to realize that something is off. They start to seek out other sources. And I think that’s the challenge the Kremlin is going to face, not just related to the messaging about the war, but also now the economic consequences of the war.

And so what I’m watching is will we be able to extend beyond the early adopters, especially of circumvention technology, the people who are already familiar with VPNs and how to access outside information that was blocked, and will we be able to reach broader segments of society over time who need to be educated about those tools and actually put in the effort now to seek out information? The early trends are very positive from that perspective, but I think that’s going to be the big challenge going forward for those of us who are committed to still providing the truth to the Russian people.

Mr. Lohsen: Thank you very much.

Jamie Fly, Dan Baer, Vera Zakem, Maria Snegovaya, all amazing comments. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your thoughts on this very important issue. That brings us to the end of our time, a little bit over it. Thank you very much for staying with us for an extra couple of minutes as we rounded off the discussion.

Always happy to see you here at CSIS. And for those of you who are still watching, on April the 12th CSIS will host another event on the implications of the war in Ukraine for the Caucasus and Central Asia. That’ll be hosted by Jeff Mankoff, senior associate here with CSIS Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program. Thank you so much for joining us, everybody, and have a nice day.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Russia-Ukraine war: Putin warns Nato of risk of nuclear war in major speech to Russian parliament – as it happened

Russian president says west is seeking to ‘contain our development’ in Moscow address

• 29 Feb 2024 Summary
• 29 Feb 2024 European defence and foreign ministers to meet in Paris in coming days to discuss Ukraine and Moldova
• 29 Feb 2024 More than 500 identified as war crimes suspects, says Ukraine
• 29 Feb 2024 Ukraine says it shot down three Russian planes
• 29 Feb 2024 Putin warns Nato of risk of nuclear war in major speech to Russian parliament
• 29 Feb 2024 Opening Summary

Putin warns Nato of risk of nuclear war in major speech to Russian parliament

Putin also said Russia will fight back and “defeat” Nato on their own territory against the threat of expansion, which he warned could trigger a nuclear war.

They are preparing to strike our territory and using the best possible forces most effective forces to do so. But we remember the fate of those who tried to invade our territory and of course their fate will be much more tragic than anything that we could face. They have to understand that we also have weapons. Weapons that can defeat them on their own territory and of course all this is very dangerous because it could actually trigger the use of nuclear weapons. Do they not understand that? These people are people who have not been through arduous experiences. They’ve forgotten about it, but we did through the Caucasian war, for example, and now in the conflict in Ukraine.

We are now closing this blog but you can read all our Ukraine coverage here .

It is now approaching 6pm in Kyiv. Here is a summary of the main developments from today:

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has said the west are attempting to “destroy us” and to “contain our development” in his annual address to parliament. He said: “The so called West with its so colonialist tendencies is striving not only to contain our development but they are intent on destroying us and using our space for whatever their purposes are including Ukraine .

Putin also said Russia will fight back and “defeat” Nato on their own territory against the threat of expansion, which he warned could trigger a nuclear war. He said: “They are preparing to strike our territory and using the best possible forces most effective forces to do so. But we remember the fate of those who tried to invade our territory and of course their fate will be much more tragic than anything that we could face.”

European defence and foreign ministers will meet in Paris in coming days to discuss further support for Ukraine and Moldova , a French foreign ministry spokesperson said on Thursday.

Russian authorities on Thursday detained journalist Sergei Sokolov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, on charges of discrediting the army, the newspaper and Russian state media reported. Novaya Gazeta said in an online report that Sokolov’s detention was over coverage of the Russian army in an article, but did not provide more details, according to Reuters.

The European parliament said on Thursday Russian president Vladimir Putin bore the “criminal and political responsibility” for opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death and should be held to account. AFP reports that in a resolution passed with 506 votes in the 705-seat assembly, the parliament said “The Russian government and Vladimir Putin personally bear criminal and political responsibility for the death of their most prominent opponent, Alexei Navalny.”

Ukraine has identified 511 people suspected of war crimes since Russia’s Feb. 2022 invasion and has already handed down 81 convictions, its prosecutor general said in Kyiv on Thursday. Andriy Kostin was speaking at a war crimes conference alongside the chief prosecutors of Poland, Lithuania, Romania and the President of the EU justice arm, Eurojust.

Ukraine’s military said on Thursday it had shot down three more Russian Su-34 fighter-bombers, the latest successes it has reported against Moscow’s air force. On Telegram, army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said: “After successful combat operations against an enemy aircraft in the night on Feb. 29, two more Russian aircraft were destroyed: Su-34 fighter-bombers in the Avdiivka and Mariupol sectors.”

A Russian court on Thursday rejected an appeal by a Russian-American woman against her detention on a treason charge. The FSB Security Service said last week that Ksenia Karelina had been detained on suspicion of raising funds for Ukraine’s armed forces. The Los Angeles resident had been collecting funds for a Ukrainian organisation whose ultimate beneficiary was the Ukrainian army, the FSB said.

Sri Lanka has decided to stop issuing free long-term visas to Russian and Ukrainian nationals who have lived in the Indian Ocean island nation for the past two years, a government official said on Thursday.

Russian president Vladimir Putin said he believes it is important for Russia to strengthen ties with Arab countries and Latin American countries during his annual address to the nation.

Ukrainian forces have pushed back Russian troops from the village of Orlivka, west of Avdiivka, but the situation on the eastern front remains difficult, Ukrainian army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said on Thursday. Orlivka is less than 2 kilometres northwest of Lastochkyne, which was recently occupied by Russian forces.

Ukraine plans to export a high volume of electricity on Thursday, taking advantage of lower domestic consumption during a spell of mild weather, the energy ministry said. The country’s electricity exports, which began shortly before it was invaded by Russian troops in 2022, were halted after numerous Russian attacks on power infrastructure and the seizure of the largest nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia.

Russian authorities on Thursday detained journalist Sergei Sokolov , the editor of Novaya Gazeta, on charges of discrediting the army, the newspaper and Russian state media reported.

Novaya Gazeta said in an online report that Sokolov’s detention was over coverage of the Russian army in an article, but did not provide more details, according to Reuters.

Russian news agency Tass reported that Sokolov had “posted material on the Novaya Gazeta Telegram channel” which showed “signs of verbal discrediting the actions” of the army.

Sokolov faces a fine of up to 50,000 roubles ($550), Tass and Novaya Gazeta both reported.

Novaya Gazeta is known for its investigations which have sometimes taken aim at the Kremlin, government policy and top officials.

Its former editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov , a Nobel prize winning journalist, stepped aside in September to challenge his designation by authorities as a “foreign agent”, a label Moscow uses to stigmatise and complicate the life of people it deems to be working against Russian state interests.

The European parliament said on Thursday Russian president Vladimir Putin bore the “criminal and political responsibility” for opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death and should be held to account.

AFP reports that in a resolution passed with 506 votes in the 705-seat assembly, the parliament said “The Russian government and Vladimir Putin personally bear criminal and political responsibility for the death of their most prominent opponent, Alexei Navalny.”

Lawmakers called for an “independent and transparent international investigation” into the circumstances of Navalny’s death and asked the EU’s 27 members states to “intensify” support for Russian political prisoners.

Nine lawmakers voted against the resolution.

In a separate development, allies of Navalny said attempts to hire a hearse to take his body to his funeral service on Friday had been blocked. Reuters reports that Kira Yarmysh, a spokesperson for Navalny, said on social that unknown individuals had been threatening hearse providers by phone.

European defence and foreign ministers to meet in Paris in coming days to discuss Ukraine and Moldova

Reuters reports they added that European states would discuss further concrete measures for Ukraine and how to defend countries being destabilised by Russia , notably Moldova.

More than 500 identified as war crimes suspects, says Ukraine

Ukraine has identified 511 people suspected of war crimes since Russia’s Feb. 2022 invasion and has already handed down 81 convictions, its prosecutor general said in Kyiv on Thursday.

Andriy Kostin was speaking at a war crimes conference alongside the chief prosecutors of Poland, Lithuania, Romania and the President of the EU justice arm, Eurojust.

At a press conference after their meeting, the prosecutors announced the signing of a two-year extension to the work of the Joint Investigation Team, an initiative by five European Union countries to probe war crimes in the conflict, Reuters reports.

Russia has denied its troops commit war crimes, despite the conflict having killed thousands of Ukrainian civilians.

The JIT is conducting what Eurojust chief Ladislav Harman called the “biggest investigation of war crimes in history.”

Lithuanian Prosecutor Gen Nida Grunskiene said the JIT had so far spoken to over 5,000 Ukrainians as part of their investigations.

Commenting on the 81 convictions, Kostin acknowledged that most had been conducted without the suspects in custody.

He said Ukraine wanted to get justice as quickly as possible instead of waiting until the end of the war.

“Most of these convictions are in absentia, but it speaks to the fact that we are securing justice right now,” he said.

Kostin added that discussions were taking place with more than 40 countries about the possibility of forming a war crimes tribunal. He indicated that a decision on the format of the panel this year would be “a powerful signal”, but did not say more about when it could start.

He said such a tribunal was likely to last several years once it began.

Kostin and Grunskiene said investigators had managed to establish the identities of three people, all pro-Russian militants from the Donetsk region, suspected of killing Lithuanian film director Mantas Kvedaravicius in the city of Mariupol.

Kvedaravicius’ death was announced by Ukraine’s defence ministry in April 2022. Kostin on Thursday said the film director had died as a result of torture inflicted by the three suspects, including broken bones, knife wounds and a mock execution.

The director was filming a documentary showing the suffering of Mariupol’s residents during a brutal, months-long siege of the city by advancing Russian forces. The documentary, Mariupolis 2, was released several months after his death.

February is the shortest month of the year, but our sky defenders have achieved the greatest results in downing russian jets since October 2022. The Ukrainian Air Force destroyed: ◾️ten Su-34 fighter-bombers ◾️two Su-35 fighters ◾️one A-50 long-range radar detection and control… pic.twitter.com/kctW7wDWK9 — Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) February 29, 2024

Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, met some well-known British faces during her visit to the UK.

The Polish prime minister said the country won’t rule out introducing a ban on agricultural products from Russia during a visit to Warsaw.

Like much of Europe, Poland has been gripped by protests in recent weeks as farmers demonstrate against EU environmental regulations and what they say is unfair competition from Ukraine since the bloc waived duties on imports in 2022.

However, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said agricultural products from Russia and Belarus were also causing market distortions.

Tusk told a news conference:

Latvia decided to implement an embargo on the import of [agricultural] products from Russia. We will analyse the case of Latvia, and I do not rule out that Poland will take an appropriate initiative.

Tusk said the EU needed to “seriously focus on better regulations when it comes to the import of cereals and food products from the east”.

Tusk is due to meet the farmers’ leaders later on Thursday.

Ukraine says it shot down three Russian planes

Ukraine’s military said on Thursday it had shot down three more Russian Su-34 fighter-bombers, the latest successes it has reported against Moscow’s air force.

On Telegram, army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said:

After successful combat operations against an enemy aircraft in the night on Feb. 29, two more Russian aircraft were destroyed: Su-34 fighter-bombers in the Avdiivka and Mariupol sectors.

Russia, which began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago, did not immediately comment on Syrskyi’s remarks. Reuters could not immediately verify his comments.

Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine fell to Russian forces this month after a long battle. Russia took full control of the south-eastern port city of Mariupol in May 2022.

The Ukrainian military said last week that Russia had lost six warplanes in three days, Reuters reports.

Russian business people should invest in Russia and their assets and property rights should be protected, president Vladimir Putin said on Thursday during his annual address.

He said that taxes for small and medium-sized businesses in Russia should be reduced, Reuters reports.

• Ukraine war live

Most viewed

Advertisement

news analysis

Deadly Moscow Attack Shatters Putin’s Security Promise to Russians

The tragedy outside Moscow is a blow to a leader riding an aura of confidence only days after a stage-managed election victory.

• Share full article

By Anton Troianovski

• March 23, 2024

Less than a week ago, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claimed a fifth term with his highest-ever share of the vote, using a stage-managed election to show the nation and the world that he was firmly in control.

Just days later came a searing counterpoint: His vaunted security apparatus failed to prevent Russia’s deadliest terrorist attack in 20 years.

The assault on Friday, which killed at least 133 people at a concert hall in suburban Moscow, was a blow to Mr. Putin’s aura as a leader for whom national security is paramount. That is especially true after two years of a war in Ukraine that he describes as key to Russia’s survival — and which he cast as his top priority after the election last Sunday.

“The election demonstrated a seemingly confident victory,” Aleksandr Kynev, a Russian political scientist, said in a phone interview from Moscow. “And suddenly, against the backdrop of a confident victory, there’s this demonstrative humiliation.”

Mr. Putin seemed blindsided by the assault. It took him more than 19 hours to address the nation about the attack, the deadliest in Russia since the 2004 school siege in Beslan, in the country’s south, which claimed 334 lives. When he did, the Russian leader said nothing about the mounting evidence that a branch of the Islamic State committed the attack.

Instead, Mr. Putin hinted that Ukraine was behind the tragedy and said the assailants had acted “just like the Nazis,” who “once carried out massacres in the occupied territories” — evoking his frequent, false description of present-day Ukraine as being run by neo-Nazis.

“Our common duty now — our comrades at the front, all citizens of the country — is to be together in one formation,” Mr. Putin said at the end of a five-minute speech, trying to conflate the fight against terrorism with his invasion of Ukraine.

The question is how much of the Russian public will buy into his argument. They might ask whether Mr. Putin, with the invasion and his conflict with the West, truly has the country’s security interests at heart — or whether he is woefully forsaking them, as many of his opponents say he is.

The fact that Mr. Putin apparently ignored a warning from the United States about a potential terrorist attack is likely to deepen the skepticism. Instead of acting on the warnings and tightening security, he dismissed them as “provocative statements.”

“All this resembles outright blackmail and an intention to intimidate and destabilize our society,” Mr. Putin said on Tuesday in a speech to the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, referring to the Western warnings. After the attack on Friday, some of his exiled critics have cited his response as evidence of the president’s detachment from Russia’s true security concerns.

Rather than keeping society safe from actual, violent terrorists, those critics say, Mr. Putin has directed his sprawling security services to pursue dissidents, journalists and anyone deemed a threat to the Kremlin’s definition of “traditional values.”

A case in point: Just hours before the attack, state media reported that the Russian authorities had added “the L.G.B.T. movement” to an official list of “terrorists and extremists”; Russia had already outlawed the gay rights movement last year. Terrorism was also among the many charges prosecutors leveled against Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader who died last month .

“In a country in which counterterrorism special forces chase after online commenters,” Ruslan Leviev, an exiled Russian military analyst, wrote in a social media post on Saturday, “terrorists will always feel free.”

Even as the Islamic State repeatedly claimed responsibility for the attack and Ukraine denied any involvement, the Kremlin’s messengers pushed into overdrive to try to persuade the Russian public that this was merely a ruse.

Olga Skabeyeva, a state television host, wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian military intelligence had found assailants “who would look like ISIS. But this is no ISIS.” Margarita Simonyan, the editor of the state-run RT television network, wrote that reports of Islamic State responsibility amounted to a “basic sleight of hand” by the American news media.

On a prime-time television talk show on the state-run Channel 1, Russia’s best-known ultraconservative ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, declared that Ukraine’s leadership and “their puppet masters in the Western intelligence services” had surely organized the attack.

It was an effort to “undermine trust in the president,” Mr. Dugin said, and it showed regular Russians that they had no choice but to unite behind Mr. Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Mr. Dugin’s daughter was killed in a car bombing near Moscow in 2022 that U.S. officials said was indeed authorized by parts of the Ukrainian government , but without American involvement.

U.S. officials have said there is no evidence of Ukrainian involvement in the concert hall attack, and Ukrainian officials ridiculed the Russian accusations. Andriy Yusov, a representative of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, said Mr. Putin’s claim that the attackers had fled toward Ukraine and intended to cross into it, with the help of the Ukrainian authorities, made no sense.

In recent months, Mr. Putin has appeared more confident than at any other point since he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian forces have retaken the initiative on the front line, while Ukraine is struggling amid flagging Western support and a shortage of troops.

Inside Russia, the election — and its predetermined outcome — underscored Mr. Putin’s dominance over the nation’s politics.

Mr. Kynev, the political scientist, said he believed many Russians were now in “shock,” because “restoring order has always been Vladimir Putin’s calling card.”

Mr. Putin’s early years in power were marked by terrorist attacks, culminating in the Beslan school siege in 2004; he used those violent episodes to justify his rollback of political freedoms. Before Friday, the most recent mass-casualty terrorist attack in the capital region was a suicide bombing at an airport in Moscow in 2011 that killed 37 people.

Still, given the Kremlin’s efficacy in cracking down on dissent and the news media, Mr. Kynev predicted that the political consequences of the concert hall attack would be limited, as long as the violence was not repeated.

“To be honest,” he said, “our society has gotten used to keeping quiet about inconvenient topics.”

Constant Méheut contributed reporting.

Anton Troianovski is the Moscow bureau chief for The Times. He writes about Russia, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. More about Anton Troianovski

Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine

News and Analysis

Ahead of the U.S. elections, Russia is intensifying efforts to elevate candidates  who oppose aid for Ukraine and support isolationism, disinformation experts say.

President Vladimir Putin said that claims Russia planned to invade other countries were “nonsense,” but warned them against hosting  warplanes meant for Ukraine.

A large-scale Russian missile and drone attack damaged power plants  and caused blackouts for more than a million Ukrainians in what Ukrainian officials said was one of the war’s largest assaults on energy infrastructure.

Symbolism or Strategy?: Ukrainians say that defending places with little strategic value is worth the cost in casualties and weapons , because the attacking Russians pay an even higher price. American officials aren’t so sure.

Elaborate Tales: As the Ukraine war grinds on, the Kremlin has created increasingly complex fabrications online  to discredit Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, and undermine the country’s support in the West.

Targeting Russia’s Oil Industry: With its army short of ammunition and troops to break the deadlock on the battlefield, Kyiv has increasingly taken the fight beyond the Ukrainian border, attacking oil infrastructure deep in Russian territory .

How We Verify Our Reporting

Our team of visual journalists analyzes satellite images, photographs , videos and radio transmissions  to independently confirm troop movements and other details.

We monitor and authenticate reports on social media, corroborating these with eyewitness accounts and interviews. Read more about our reporting efforts .

• Election 2024
• Entertainment
• Newsletters
• Photography
• Personal Finance
• AP Buyline Personal Finance
• Press Releases
• Israel-Hamas War
• Russia-Ukraine War
• Global elections
• Asia Pacific
• Latin America
• Middle East
• March Madness
• AP Top 25 Poll
• Movie reviews
• Book reviews
• Personal finance
• Financial Markets
• Business Highlights
• Financial wellness
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social Media

Easter 2024

Putin says gunmen who raided Moscow concert hall tried to escape to Ukraine. Kyiv denies involvement

Russia’s Federal Security Service says at least 60 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded in an attack at a Moscow concert hall. The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Putin suggests Ukraine was linked to deadly attack on Moscow-area concert hall

At least 133 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded in an attack on a suburban Moscow concert hall. Russian President Vladimir Putin says authorities have arrested four men suspected of carrying out the attack.

In this photo taken from video released by the Investigative Committee of Russia on Saturday, March 23, 2024, firefighter work in the burned concert hall after an attack on the building of the Crocus City Hall on the western edge of Moscow, Russia. (Investigative Committee of Russia via AP)

• Copy Link copied

People place flowers and toys by the fence next to the Crocus City Hall, on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024. Russia’s top state investigative agency says the death toll in the Moscow concert hall attack has risen to over 133. The attack Friday on Crocus City Hall, a sprawling mall and concert venue on Moscow’s western edge, also left many wounded and left the building a smoldering ruin. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

A woman reacts as she place flowers by the fence next to the Crocus City Hall, on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024, following an attack Friday, for which the Islamic State group claimed responsibility. Russian officials say more than 90 people have been killed by assailants who burst into a concert hall and sprayed the crowd with gunfire. (AP Photo/Vitaly Smolnikov)

Bodies of victims are loaded into vehicles at the Crocus City Hall on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024, following an attack Friday, for which the Islamic State group claimed responsibility. Russian officials say more than 60 people have been killed and over 100 injured by assailants who burst into a concert hall and sprayed the crowd with gunfire. (AP Photo)

A massive blaze is seen over the Crocus City Hall on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Friday, March 22, 2024. Several gunmen have burst into a big concert hall in Moscow and fired automatic weapons at the crowd, injuring an unspecified number of people and setting a massive blaze in an attack days after President Vladimir Putin cemented his grip on the country in a highly orchestrated electoral landslide. (Sergei Vedyashkin/Moscow News Agency via AP)

A view of the burnt Crocus City Hall after an attack, on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024. Russia’s top state investigative agency says the death toll in the Moscow concert hall attack has risen to over 133. The attack Friday on Crocus City Hall, a sprawling mall and concert venue on Moscow’s western edge, also left many wounded and left the building a smoldering ruin. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

People place flowers by the fence next to the Crocus City Hall, on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024. Russia’s top state investigative agency says the death toll in the Moscow concert hall attack has risen to over 133. The attack Friday on Crocus City Hall, a sprawling mall and concert venue on Moscow’s western edge, also left many wounded and left the building a smoldering ruin. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks on the photo in Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024. Russian President Vladimir Putin said Saturday that authorities have detained 11 people in the attack on a suburban Moscow concert hall that killed at least 115 people and left the sprawling venue a smoldering ruin. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

People react next to the Crocus City Hall, on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024. Russia’s top state investigative agency says the death toll in the Moscow concert hall attack has risen to over 133. The attack Friday on Crocus City Hall, a sprawling mall and concert venue on Moscow’s western edge, also left many wounded and left the building a smoldering ruin. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

In this photo taken from video released by Investigative Committee of Russia on Saturday, March 23, 2024, a Kalashnikov assault rifle lies on the ground as Investigators from the Investigative Committee of Russia together with the operational units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB, work the scene after an attack on the building of the Crocus City Hall on the western edge of Moscow, Russia. Several gunmen burst into a big concert hall in Moscow and fired automatic weapons at the crowd, injuring an unspecified number of people and setting a massive blaze in an apparent terror attack days after President Vladimir Putin cemented his grip on the country in a highly orchestrated electoral landslide. (Investigative Committee of Russia via AP)

People stand at a body of a victim near the burning building of the Crocus City Hall on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Friday, March 22, 2024. Several gunmen burst into a big concert hall in Moscow and fired automatic weapons at the crowd, injuring an unspecified number of people and setting a massive blaze in an apparent terror attack days after President Vladimir Putin cemented his grip on the country in a highly orchestrated electoral landslide. (AP Photo)

People lineup to donate blood to help victims of the attack in Crocus City Hall, near the Blood Center of the Federal Medical and Biological Agency, in Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024. Over 90 people were killed, including three children, authorities said. (Denis Voronin/Moscow News Agency via AP)

A man places flowers on the fence near the Crocus City Hall on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024, following an attack Friday, for which the Islamic State group claimed responsibility. Over 90 people were killed, including at least three children, authorities said. (AP Photo/Vitaly Smolnikov)

A view of the Crocus City Hall burned after an attack is seen on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024. Assailants burst into a large concert hall in Moscow on Friday and sprayed the crowd with gunfire, killing and injuring multiple people and setting fire to the venue in a brazen attack just days after President Vladimir Putin cemented his grip on power in a highly orchestrated electoral landslide. (AP Photo/Vitaly Smolnikov)

Bodies of victims are loaded into vehicles at the Crocus City Hall on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024, following an attack Friday, for which the Islamic State group claimed responsibility. Over 90 people were killed authorities said. (AP Photo)

A woman reacts as she comes to place flowers at the fence next to the Crocus City Hall, on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024, following an attack Friday, for which the Islamic State group claimed responsibility. Russian officials say more than 90 people have been killed by assailants who burst into a concert hall and sprayed the crowd with gunfire. (AP Photo/Vitaly Smolnikov)

Traffic on the highway passes a message displayed on a billboard that reads: “We Mourn 03.22.2024" in Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024, following an attack Friday, for which the Islamic State group claimed responsibility. Russian officials say more than 90 people have been killed by assailants who burst into a concert hall and sprayed the crowd with gunfire. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

In this photo released by Russian Emergency Ministry Press Service on Saturday, March 23, 2024, firefighters work in the burned concert hall after an attack on the building of the Crocus City Hall on the western edge of Moscow, Russia. (Russian Emergency Ministry Press Service via AP)

A woman lights candles at the fence next to the Crocus City Hall, on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024. Russia’s top state investigative agency says the death toll in the Moscow concert hall attack has risen to over 133. The attack Friday on Crocus City Hall, a sprawling mall and concert venue on Moscow’s western edge, also left many wounded and left the building a smoldering ruin. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

People lay flowers tributes outside of the Russian embassy in Paris, Saturday, March 23, 2024, following an attack Friday on the Crocus City Hall on the western edge of Moscow for which the Islamic State group claimed responsibility. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A Russian Rosguardia (National Guard) servicemen secures an area as a massive blaze seen over the Crocus City Hall on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Friday, March 22, 2024. Several gunmen have burst into a big concert hall in Moscow and fired automatic weapons at the crowd, injuring an unspecified number of people and setting a massive blaze in an apparent terror attack days after President Vladimir Putin cemented his grip on the country in a highly orchestrated electoral landslide. (AP Photo)

MOSCOW (AP) — The suburban Moscow music hall where gunmen opened fire on concertgoers was a blackened, smoldering ruin Saturday as the death toll in the attack surpassed 130 and Russian authorities arrested four suspects. President Vladimir Putin claimed they were captured while fleeing to Ukraine.

Kyiv strongly denied any involvement in Friday’s assault on the Crocus City Hall music venue in Krasnogorsk, and the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate claimed responsibility.

Putin did not mention IS in his speech to the nation, and Kyiv accused him and other Russian politicians of falsely linking Ukraine to the assault to stoke fervor for Russia’s war in Ukraine, which recently entered its third year .

U.S. intelligence officials confirmed the claim by the IS affiliate.

“ISIS bears sole responsibility for this attack. There was no Ukrainian involvement whatsoever,” National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement.

The U.S. shared information with Russia in early March about a planned terrorist attack in Moscow and issued a public warning to Americans in Russia, Watson said.

Putin said authorities detained a total of 11 people in the attack, which also wounded more than 100. He called it “a bloody, barbaric terrorist act” and said Russian authorities captured the four suspects as they were trying to escape to Ukraine through a “window” prepared for them on the Ukrainian side of the border.

Russian media broadcast videos that apparently showed the detention and interrogation of the suspects, including one who told the cameras he was approached by an unidentified assistant to an Islamic preacher via a messaging app and paid to take part in the raid.

Russian news reports identified the gunmen as citizens of Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia that is predominantly Muslim and borders Afghanistan. Up to 1.5 million Tajiks have worked in Russia and many have Russian citizenship.

Tajikistan’s foreign ministry, which denied initial Russian media reports that mentioned several other Tajiks allegedly involved in the raid, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the arrests.

Many Russian hard-liners called for a crackdown on Tajik migrants, but Putin appeared to reject the idea, saying “no force will be able to sow the poisonous seeds of discord, panic or disunity in our multi-ethnic society.”

He declared Sunday a day of mourning and said additional security measures were imposed throughout Russia.

The number of dead stood at 133, making the attack the deadliest in Russia in years. Authorities said the toll could still rise.

The raid was a major embarrassment for the Russian leader and happened just days after he cemented his grip on the country for another six years in a vote that followed the harshest crackdown on dissent since the Soviet times.

Some commentators on Russian social media questioned how authorities, who have relentlessly suppressed any opposition activities and muzzled independent media, failed to prevent the attack despite the U.S. warnings.

The assault came two weeks after the U.S. Embassy in Moscow issued a notice urging Americans to avoid crowded places in view of “imminent” plans by extremists to target large Moscow gatherings, including concerts. Several other Western embassies repeated the warning. Earlier this week, Putin denounced the warning as an attempt to intimidate Russians.

Investigators on Saturday combed through the charred wreckage of the hall for more victims. Hundreds of people stood in line in Moscow to donate blood and plasma, Russia’s health ministry said.

Putin’s claim that the attackers tried to flee to Ukraine followed comments by Russian lawmakers who pointed the finger at Ukraine immediately after the attack.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy angrily rejected Moscow’s accusations as an attempt by Putin and his lieutenants to shift the blame to Ukraine while treating their own people as “expendables.”

“They are burning our cities — and they are trying to blame Ukraine,” he said in a statement on his messaging app channel. “They torture and rape our people — and they blame them. They drove hundreds of thousands of their terrorists here to fight us on our Ukrainian soil, and they don’t care what happens inside their own country.”

A massive blaze is seen over the Crocus City Hall on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Friday, March 22, 2024. (Sergei Vedyashkin/Moscow News Agency via AP)

Images shared by Russian state media showed emergency vehicles still gathered outside the ruins of the concert hall, which could hold more than 6,000 people and hosted many big events, including the 2013 Miss Universe beauty pageant that featured Donald Trump .

On Friday, crowds were at the venue for a concert by the Russian rock band Picnic.

Videos posted online showed gunmen in the venue shooting civilians at point-blank range. Russian news reports cited authorities and witnesses as saying the attackers threw explosive devices that started the fire, which eventually consumed the building and caused its roof to collapse.

Dave Primov, who survived the attack, told the AP that the gunmen were “shooting directly into the crowd” in the front rows. He described the chaos in the hall as concertgoers raced to escape: “People began to panic, started to run and collided with each other. Some fell down and others trampled on them.”

After he and others crawled out of the hall into nearby utility rooms, he said he heard pops from small explosives and smelled burning as the attackers set the building ablaze. By the time they got out of the massive building 25 minutes later, it was engulfed in flames.

“Had it been just a little longer, we could simply get stuck there in the fire,” Primov said.

Messages of outrage, shock and support for the victims and their families streamed in from around the world.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement that the U.S. condemned the attack and noted that the Islamic State group is a “common terrorist enemy that must be defeated everywhere.”

IS, which lost much of its ground after Russia’s military action in Syria, has long targeted Russia. In a statement posted by the group’s Aamaq news agency, IS’s Afghanistan affiliate said it had attacked a large gathering of “Christians” in Krasnogorsk.

The group issued a new statement Saturday on Aamaq saying the attack was carried out by four men who used automatic rifles, a pistol, knives and firebombs. It said the assailants fired at the crowd and used knives to kill some concertgoers, casting the raid as part of IS’s ongoing war with countries that it says are fighting Islam.

In October 2015, a bomb planted by IS downed a Russian passenger plane over Sinai, killing all 224 people on board, most of them Russian vacation-goers returning from Egypt.

The group, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Africa, also has claimed several attacks in Russia’s volatile Caucasus and other regions in the past years. It recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.

Russian Rosguardia (National Guard) servicemen secure an area at the Crocus City Hall on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, on Saturday, March 23, 2024. (Alexander Avilov/Moscow News Agency via AP)

The group’s Afghanistan affiliate is known variously as ISIS-K or IS-K, taking its name from Khorasan Province, a region that covered much of Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia in the Middle Ages.

The affiliate has thousands of fighters who have repeatedly carried out attacks in Afghanistan since the country was seized in 2021 by the Taliban, a group with which they are at bitter odds.

ISIS-K was behind the August 2021 suicide bombing at Kabul airport that left 13 American troops and about 170 Afghans dead during the chaotic U.S. withdrawal. They also claimed responsibility for a bomb attack in Kerman, Iran, in January that killed 95 people at a memorial procession.

On March 7, just hours before the U.S. Embassy warned about imminent attacks, Russia’s top security agency said it had thwarted an attack on a synagogue in Moscow by an IS cell and killed several of its members in the Kaluga region near the Russian capital. A few days before that, Russian authorities said six alleged IS members were killed in a shootout in Ingushetia, in Russia’s Caucasus region.

Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo in Washington and Colleen Long in Wilmington, Delaware, contributed to this report.

Moscow shooting poses awkward questions for Russia's intelligence agencies

• Security services appear to have been caught off guard
• Kremlin says no country immune from terrorism
• Ex-spies say Russia too busy with Ukraine/internal dissent
• Warning signs appear to have been missed

MISSED WARNINGS?

Islamic state.

The Reuters Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day. Sign up here.

Editing by Alison Williams

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. , opens new tab

Dutch police arrest man exiting nightclub, last hostage released

Three people were released from a nightclub after several were taken hostage. It was unclear how many people were still being held. There was no indication of a terrorist motive, police said.

Three United Nations observers and a translator were wounded on Saturday when a shell exploded near them as they were carrying out a foot patrol in south Lebanon, the U.N. peacekeeping mission said, adding it was still investigating the origin of the blast.

• B1-B2 grammar

Reported speech: questions

Do you know how to report a question that somebody asked? Test what you know with interactive exercises and read the explanation to help you.

Look at these examples to see how we can tell someone what another person asked.

direct speech: 'Do you work from home?' he said. indirect speech: He asked me if I worked from home. direct speech: 'Who did you see?' she asked. indirect speech: She asked me who I'd seen. direct speech: 'Could you write that down for me?' she asked. indirect speech: She asked me to write it down.

Try this exercise to test your grammar.

Grammar B1-B2: Reported speech 2: 1

Read the explanation to learn more.

Grammar explanation

A reported question is when we tell someone what another person asked. To do this, we can use direct speech or indirect speech.

direct speech: 'Do you like working in sales?' he asked. indirect speech: He asked me if I liked working in sales.

In indirect speech, we change the question structure (e.g. Do you like ) to a statement structure (e.g. I like ).

We also often make changes to the tenses and other words in the same way as for reported statements (e.g. have done → had done , today → that day ). You can learn about these changes on the Reported speech 1 – statements page.

Yes / no questions

In yes / no questions, we use if or whether to report the question. If is more common.

'Are you going to the Helsinki conference?' He asked me if I was going to the Helsinki conference. 'Have you finished the project yet?' She asked us whether we'd finished the project yet.

Questions with a question word

In what , where , why , who , when or how questions, we use the question word to report the question.

'What time does the train leave?' He asked me what time the train left. 'Where did he go?' She asked where he went.

Reporting verbs

The most common reporting verb for questions is ask , but we can also use verbs like enquire , want to know or wonder .

'Did you bring your passports?' She wanted to know if they'd brought their passports. 'When could you get this done by?' He wondered when we could get it done by.

Offers, requests and suggestions

If the question is making an offer, request or suggestion, we can use a specific verb pattern instead, for example offer + infinitive, ask + infinitive or suggest + ing.

'Would you like me to help you?' He offered to help me. 'Can you hold this for me, please?' She asked me to hold it. 'Why don't we check with Joel?' She suggested checking with Joel.

Do this exercise to test your grammar again.

Grammar B1-B2: Reported speech 2: 2

Language level

She offered me to encourage studying English. She asked us if we could give her a hand.

• Log in or register to post comments

He said, "I wished she had gone."

How to change this sentence into indirect speech?

Hello bhutuljee,

'He said that he wished she had gone.'

Best wishes, Kirk LearnEnglish team

He said, "I wish she went."

How to change the above sentence into indirect speech?

Hi bhutuljee,

It would be: "He said that he wished she had gone."

LearnEnglish team

He said , "She wished John would succeed."

This is the third sentence you've asked us to transform in this way. While we try to offer as much help as we can, we are not a service for giving answers to questions which may be from tests or homework so we do limit these kinds of answers. Perhaps having read the information on the page above you can try to transform the sentence yourself and we will tell you if you have done it correctly or not.

The LearnEnglish Team

Hi, I hope my comment finds you well and fine. 1- reported question of "where did he go?"

Isn't it: She asked where he had gone?

https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/b1-b2-grammar/reported-…

2- how can I report poilte questions with( can I, May I) For example: She asked me" Can I borrow some money?"

Your reply will be highly appreciated.

Hello alrufai,

1) The version of the sentence you suggest is also correct. In informal situations, we often don't change the past simple into the past perfect, but in formal situations we do so more often.

2) 'can', 'may' and 'might' all become 'could' in reported questions like these: 'She asked if she could borrow some money.'

I wonder if there are any occasions we can't use "Why" for reported speech? I'm not sure for this one. Thank you

Online courses

Group and one-to-one classes with expert teachers.

Learn English in your own time, at your own pace.

One-to-one sessions focused on a personal plan.

Get the score you need with private and group classes.  

• Cambridge Dictionary +Plus

Reported speech: indirect speech

Indirect speech focuses more on the content of what someone said rather than their exact words. In indirect speech , the structure of the reported clause depends on whether the speaker is reporting a statement, a question or a command.

Indirect speech: reporting statements

Indirect reports of statements consist of a reporting clause and a that -clause. We often omit that , especially in informal situations:

The pilot commented that the weather had been extremely bad as the plane came in to land. (The pilot’s words were: ‘The weather was extremely bad as the plane came in to land.’ )

I told my wife I didn’t want a party on my 50th birthday. ( that -clause without that ) (or I told my wife that I didn’t want a party on my 50th birthday .)

Indirect speech: reporting questions

Reporting yes-no questions and alternative questions.

Indirect reports of yes-no questions and questions with or consist of a reporting clause and a reported clause introduced by if or whether . If is more common than whether . The reported clause is in statement form (subject + verb), not question form:

She asked if [S] [V] I was Scottish. (original yes-no question: ‘Are you Scottish?’ )

The waiter asked whether [S] we [V] wanted a table near the window. (original yes-no question: ‘Do you want a table near the window? )

He asked me if [S] [V] I had come by train or by bus. (original alternative question: ‘Did you come by train or by bus?’ )

Questions: yes-no questions ( Are you feeling cold? )

Reporting wh -questions

Indirect reports of wh -questions consist of a reporting clause, and a reported clause beginning with a wh -word ( who, what, when, where, why, how ). We don’t use a question mark:

He asked me what I wanted.

Not: He asked me what I wanted?

The reported clause is in statement form (subject + verb), not question form:

She wanted to know who [S] we [V] had invited to the party.

Not: … who had we invited …

Who , whom and what

In indirect questions with who, whom and what , the wh- word may be the subject or the object of the reported clause:

I asked them who came to meet them at the airport. ( who is the subject of came ; original question: ‘Who came to meet you at the airport?’ )

He wondered what the repairs would cost. ( what is the object of cost ; original question: ‘What will the repairs cost?’ )

She asked us what [S] we [V] were doing . (original question: ‘What are you doing?’ )

Not: She asked us what were we doing?

When , where , why and how

We also use statement word order (subject + verb) with when , where, why and how :

I asked her when [S] it [V] had happened (original question: ‘When did it happen?’ ).

Not: I asked her when had it happened?

I asked her where [S] the bus station [V] was . (original question: ‘Where is the bus station?’ )

Not: I asked her where was the bus station?

The teacher asked them how [S] they [V] wanted to do the activity . (original question: ‘How do you want to do the activity?’ )

Not: The teacher asked them how did they want to do the activity?

Questions: wh- questions

Indirect speech: reporting commands

Indirect reports of commands consist of a reporting clause, and a reported clause beginning with a to -infinitive:

The General ordered the troops to advance . (original command: ‘Advance!’ )

The chairperson told him to sit down and to stop interrupting . (original command: ‘Sit down and stop interrupting!’ )

We also use a to -infinitive clause in indirect reports with other verbs that mean wanting or getting people to do something, for example, advise, encourage, warn :

They advised me to wait till the following day. (original statement: ‘You should wait till the following day.’ )

The guard warned us not to enter the area. (original statement: ‘You must not enter the area.’ )

Verbs followed by a to -infinitive

Indirect speech: present simple reporting verb

We can use the reporting verb in the present simple in indirect speech if the original words are still true or relevant at the time of reporting, or if the report is of something someone often says or repeats:

Sheila says they’re closing the motorway tomorrow for repairs.

Henry tells me he’s thinking of getting married next year.

Rupert says dogs shouldn’t be allowed on the beach. (Rupert probably often repeats this statement.)

Newspaper headlines

We often use the present simple in newspaper headlines. It makes the reported speech more dramatic:

JUDGE TELLS REPORTER TO LEAVE COURTROOM

PRIME MINISTER SAYS FAMILIES ARE TOP PRIORITY IN TAX REFORM

Present simple ( I work )

Reported speech

Reported speech: direct speech

Indirect speech: past continuous reporting verb

In indirect speech, we can use the past continuous form of the reporting verb (usually say or tell ). This happens mostly in conversation, when the speaker wants to focus on the content of the report, usually because it is interesting news or important information, or because it is a new topic in the conversation:

Rory was telling me the big cinema in James Street is going to close down. Is that true?

Alex was saying that book sales have gone up a lot this year thanks to the Internet.

‘Backshift’ refers to the changes we make to the original verbs in indirect speech because time has passed between the moment of speaking and the time of the report.

In these examples, the present ( am ) has become the past ( was ), the future ( will ) has become the future-in-the-past ( would ) and the past ( happened ) has become the past perfect ( had happened ). The tenses have ‘shifted’ or ‘moved back’ in time.

The past perfect does not shift back; it stays the same:

Modal verbs

Some, but not all, modal verbs ‘shift back’ in time and change in indirect speech.

We can use a perfect form with have + - ed form after modal verbs, especially where the report looks back to a hypothetical event in the past:

He said the noise might have been the postman delivering letters. (original statement: ‘The noise might be the postman delivering letters.’ )

He said he would have helped us if we’d needed a volunteer. (original statement: ‘I’ll help you if you need a volunteer’ or ‘I’d help you if you needed a volunteer.’ )

Used to and ought to do not change in indirect speech:

She said she used to live in Oxford. (original statement: ‘I used to live in Oxford.’ )

The guard warned us that we ought to leave immediately. (original statement: ‘You ought to leave immediately.’ )

No backshift

We don’t need to change the tense in indirect speech if what a person said is still true or relevant or has not happened yet. This often happens when someone talks about the future, or when someone uses the present simple, present continuous or present perfect in their original words:

He told me his brother works for an Italian company. (It is still true that his brother works for an Italian company.)

She said she ’s getting married next year. (For the speakers, the time at the moment of speaking is ‘this year’.)

He said he ’s finished painting the door. (He probably said it just a short time ago.)

She promised she ’ll help us. (The promise applies to the future.)

Indirect speech: changes to pronouns

Changes to personal pronouns in indirect reports depend on whether the person reporting the speech and the person(s) who said the original words are the same or different.

Indirect speech: changes to adverbs and demonstratives

We often change demonstratives ( this, that ) and adverbs of time and place ( now, here, today , etc.) because indirect speech happens at a later time than the original speech, and perhaps in a different place.

Typical changes to demonstratives, adverbs and adverbial expressions

Indirect speech: typical errors.

The word order in indirect reports of wh- questions is the same as statement word order (subject + verb), not question word order:

She always asks me where [S] [V] I am going .

Not: She always asks me where am I going .

We don’t use a question mark when reporting wh- questions:

I asked him what he was doing.

Not: I asked him what he was doing?

Word of the Day

Hippocratic oath

Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio

a promise made by people when they become doctors to do everything possible to help their patients and to have high moral standards in their work

Sitting on the fence (Newspaper idioms)

Learn more with +Plus

• Recent and Recommended {{#preferredDictionaries}} {{name}} {{/preferredDictionaries}}
• Definitions Clear explanations of natural written and spoken English English Learner’s Dictionary Essential British English Essential American English
• Grammar and thesaurus Usage explanations of natural written and spoken English Grammar Thesaurus
• Pronunciation British and American pronunciations with audio English Pronunciation
• English–Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Simplified)–English
• English–Chinese (Traditional) Chinese (Traditional)–English
• English–Dutch Dutch–English
• English–French French–English
• English–German German–English
• English–Indonesian Indonesian–English
• English–Italian Italian–English
• English–Japanese Japanese–English
• English–Norwegian Norwegian–English
• English–Polish Polish–English
• English–Portuguese Portuguese–English
• English–Spanish Spanish–English
• English–Swedish Swedish–English
• Dictionary +Plus Word Lists

Add ${headword} to one of your lists below, or create a new one.

{{message}}

Something went wrong.

There was a problem sending your report.