A Journalist in Crimea

Robin Koskas is a freelance French journalist volunteering at the Independent Journalism Center in Moldova. He's been living in Chisinau a few months and has become familiarized with the events and conflicts of the neighboring Eastern Partnership states. Two weeks ago, he visited Crimea and took note of the confusing and dangerous circumstances that journalists put themselves in to report the news from the scene.

I spent four days in Crimea two weeks ago. I travelled by train from Chisinau to Odessa, then to Simferopol, and finally to Sevastopol.

Two hours before arriving in Simferopol, I met this man on the train and he told me he was from Azerbaidjan. When he realised I was a foreigner he asked me "You go to Crimea? Where do you come from?". I replied "I am from France, do you think I will encounter any problems?". He looked me in the eyes while smoking a cigarette and said: "France is ok, good country. But America and England, no good countries, no good people". Nationality is very important if you're a journalist travelling to Crimea these days.

In Simferopol, near a Ukrainian military base in the city center, just ten minutes away from the train station, Russian "unidentified" soldiers with assault weapons and pro-Russian militia displaying the flag of Crimea were standing in the street. A few journalists of different nationalities were filming the sight. Three freelance war photographers were waiting for some "action" to happen, while some local teenagers were taking pictures of the Russian troops with their smartphones. Nothing happened.
 
A French TV journalist asked me "What is this orange and black ribbon that these guys are wearing?" He came directly from Paris the day before to cover the political situation in Crimea, but he doesn’t know anything about the significance of the Russian military order of St. George (ed. highest military distinction during the Russian Empire, subsequently discontinued by the communists). Ten meters away, a British cameraman was filming the face of a militia officer at a very close distance. The man, holding a gun and wearing a bulletproof vest, started insulting the journalist in Russian, calling him an "instigator", but the journalist couldn't understand him. A Ukrainian policeman stopped the altercation.
 
This mess is representative of what happened in Crimea these past weeks. Media outlet correspondents are in the midst of something they can't understand. Russian TV channels are talking about the "Nazi" government of Kiev trying to exterminate Russian ethnics from Crimea, and Western newspapers are describing the terrible Russian military invasion of Ukraine against the beautiful and democratic revolution of Maidan. The only thing we can be sure of in this particular situation is that the truth is the first casualty.
 
The work of journalists in Crimea is more and more difficult. How can this little "Russian" peninsula be covered in an objective way?

Each week, phones and cameras are seized by local authorities and some of the journalists are briefly arrested. Last week, three journalists from the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK were stopped at a checkpoint in Crimea and militia men confiscated their reporting equipment. The other day, a French journalist, David Geoffroy, working on a documentary, was detained several hours by pro-Russian forces in Simferopol. Intimidation and propaganda are in the air we breathe in Crimea.
 
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) estimated that these actions of the pro-Russian forces "reflect a deliberate attempt to transform the region into a black hole for information". And if it’s not completely a black hole, it’s already a smoke screen.
 
In Crimea, almost everybody is reading and watching Russian media outlets. And these medias are more and more dependant on the Kremlin government, which is more and more involved in Crimea's destiny. In December, Vladimir Putin ordered the “restructuring” of the state-owned news agency and historically independent RIA Novosti by installing Dmitry Kiselyov, a TV anchorman notorious for saying, on his weekly current affairs show, that "Russia is the only country in the world that is realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash". If John Lennon, famous for his peace-encouraging song “Imagine”, were still alive, he would die a second time hearing that.
 
But propaganda is not only a Russian privilege. Western and Ukrainian medias are playing with the same instruments. When i was walking the streets of Simferopol, I met these Ukrainian journalists from Kiev who were convinced that Crimea was under siege. “The McDonald next to the train station is open and full of kids eating Big Macs and Big Tastie - this is not what I expected from a civil war,” one of them told me.

The next day, I met a Spanish photographer who was disappointed because he didn’t see any gunfire. This is what the situation was like. When you read everyday that Crimea is “invaded”, “occupied”, “raped”, “annexed” and can become a slaughterhouse like Syria, you get a big surprise the first time walk the streets of Simferopol. You wonder why those locals continue to go to their jobs every day and are spending a decent amount of time in bars and restaurants.
 
The so-called war in Crimea is, first and foremost, a war of disinformation. Media outlets all over the world have the responsibility to deliver objective information, but fail to do so. They should quickly understand that the destiny of Eastern Europe is not a propaganda game.