Central Asian state media remains largely silent on Russia’s war in Ukraine

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — There was a popular joke in the Soviet Union that reflected the government’s ability to filter out any information it did not want the population to see or hear.

It looked like this: If the Soviet newspaper Pravda (Truth) had existed during Napoleon’s time, no one would have heard about the defeat of the French army at the Battle of Waterloo.

In today’s Central Asia, the closest thing to Pravda’s ability to willfully ignore bad news is Turkmenistan’s state media, which has not significantly mentioned the Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine since the start of the conflict.

But to varying degrees, all government-controlled media in the Russia-linked region have managed to keep mentions of the devastating conflict to a bare minimum, despite its repercussions clearly felt by local populations – including the return of corpses from young people. soldiers in Central Asia.

For many independent media, on the other hand, the war that has raged for more than two and a half years constitutes an essential part of their coverage.

But this media coverage, while very popular with local audiences, often risked angering Russia, which explains why most state media that have referred to Ukraine have now stopped doing so.

Bolivia or not…

While caution has been the watchword of official Central Asian positions towards Ukraine, some of the boldest official statements – notably the non-recognition of territories acquired by Russia during the war – come from of Kazakhstan.

Central Asia’s largest country is the only one in the region to share a land border with Russia – a border that happens to be the longest continuous border in the world.

More than 200,000 Russian citizens have crossed the border into Kazakhstan to escape Moscow’s military mobilization in 2022, as war and sanctions imposed on Russia by a broad coalition of countries have tormented the Kazakh economy.

But according to state television reports, one might assume that the ongoing conflict has nothing to do with Kazakhstan.

In the past few weeks alone, viewers of state broadcaster Qazaqstan have seen reports on wildfires in Bolivia, located about 14,000 kilometers from Kazakhstan, power outages in Puerto Rico and the spread mpox in Congo.

Yet they would not have seen the reports of Ukraine’s shock military incursion into Russia’s Kursk oblast in August, nor of the regular deadly Russian drone and missile attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, which ‘she invaded.

In fact, Kazakh state media have said very little about the war since the early months of 2023, when some state channels rather surprisingly covered the initiative of Kazakh businessmen to install yurts in Ukraine as part of a humanitarian aid campaign.

These yurts – located in at least four Ukrainian cities – seemed to hurt Russia’s feelings.

After a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman publicly demanded an explanation, its counterpart in Kazakhstan said he saw “nothing to explain,” calling the yurts a “private initiative.”

This resulted in a sharp decline in media coverage of Ukrainian events.

Asked by RFE/RL’s Kazakh service whether state channels had been asked to cut coverage of Ukraine, a representative for state media outlet Khabar denied the suggestion, arguing that “it is difficult to verify the authenticity of information from the conflict zone. »

In neighboring Uzbekistan, state television completely ignored the conflict, with searches for “Ukraine” yielding virtually no results on state media websites outside of the first year of the war. Same in Tajikistan.

The Kyrgyz state television channel KTRK is an exception to the rule, regularly broadcasting extracts of BBC reports on the war.

But as for the channel’s own coverage, “it mainly only covers when there is something war-related that is too important to ignore, and in those cases the coverage is very sparse, rigid and neutral,” said Kyrgyz media expert Adil Turdukulov. told RFE/RL.

“The wording is very important for Russia”

Coverage of Ukraine by private Central Asian media, however, is quite varied, ranging from terse coverage of purely geopolitical developments by websites close to national governments, to reporting close to the army’s front lines. Ukrainian through publicly funded programs or donor-supported reporting projects.

Mahinur Niyazova, who was an editor at the private Kyrgyz news agency 24.kg at the time of the large-scale invasion, said the news agency’s policy was to quote both Russian and Western media as well. than the official sources in the summaries initially updated by 24.kg. several times a day.

This sparked criticism from activists who were unhappy that the website had used Moscow’s phrase “special military operation” when presenting the summaries. But there were also “calls from the Russian embassy, ​​which complained that our coverage was too pro-Ukrainian,” Niyazova explained.

24.kg’s offices in Bishkek were raided in January and sealed after the outlet was under criminal investigation for “war propaganda” in connection with an August 2023 interview the outlet conducted with Almaz Kudabek-uulu, a Kyrgyz national and commander of the Turkish Turan Battalion fighting with the Ukrainian army.

It is unclear what role Russia played in the affair, if any, as it coincided with a broader crackdown on Kyrgyz media outlets critical of President Sadyr Japarov.

But Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media regulator, blocked 24 kg from Russian territory shortly after the interview was published, explaining its decision by referring to summaries from the first year of war.

After 24.kg changed ownership and staff — including Niyazova — resigned, Kyrgyz prosecutors announced the case was no longer under investigation.

Roskomnadzor also blocked the websites of private media outlets based in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan over their refusal to remove war-related information.

So far, Uzbekistan’s media do not seem to have suffered the same fate, despite the fact that several large private sites are covering the war there, and not from Moscow’s point of view.

“Russia is extremely sensitive to war and very sensitive to wording – everyone knows that,” said Ruslan Myatiev, editor-in-chief of the Netherlands-based Turkmen.News newspaper.

But when it comes to Turkmenistan’s super-authoritarian information space, Roskomnadzor censors can rest easy, Myatiev said.

As a state positioning itself as diplomatically neutral, official Turkmen media tend to be silent on international conflicts, including those closer to home, such as Ukraine, where several thousand Turkmen students have found trapped at the start of the war.

The only Turkmen-language reports even mentioning the war come from sources outside the country like Myatiev’s Turkmen.News, RFE/RL’s Turkmen service and the Vienna-based Chronicles of Turkmenistan.

“In many authoritarian countries, (non-state) media can be somewhat dependent on the state. But in Turkmenistan this dependence is complete,” Myatiev said. “From this point of view, Turkmenistan remains largely the Soviet Union.”