![]() ![]() There will also be heated questioning over whether Mr Biden and other Western leaders could have done more to assuage Mr Putin’, admitted the New York Times. ‘Analysts and historians will long debate whether Mr Putin’s grievances had bases in fact, whether the United States and its allies were too cavalier in expanding nato, whether Russia was justified in believing that its security was compromised. Sustaining the argument that nato expansionism played no part in the crisis required some casuistic contortions on the part of the broadsheet press. ‘He has come to believe that nato threatens Russia and its people’-‘he is obsessed with the defensive alliance to his west.’ footnote 2 ‘Russia’s president has launched an unprovoked assault on his neighbour’, agreed the Economist. For the New York Times, it is ‘an unprovoked invasion’, for the Financial Times, a case of ‘naked and unprovoked aggression’, for the Guardian, ‘an unprovoked assault’. This is an unprovoked Russian attack in which, contrary to Putin’s declarations, nato’s eastward enlargement played no part. The bodies on Bucha’s streets remain imprinted on the screen.Ī single narrative, implicit in news reports and explicit in editorial comment, drives the media coverage. Few in the West can summon up the image, engraved in local memory, of an Afghan wedding blasted to carnage by us bombs, or picture the gruesome reprisals by Anglo-American troops in their siege and subjugation of Fallujah. ![]() It provides a global platform for Zelensky as their leader, an eloquent emblem of the Ukrainian resistance. For the first time since the 1990s, the Western media is embedded on the side of the victims, the defenders. For once, this is not a nato war, but-metonymically speaking-a Russian war against nato. footnote 1 Density of coverage has combined with empathy of viewpoint. This compared to 306 minutes for the first month of the us invasion of Afghanistan, 414 minutes for the us– uk invasion of Iraq and 345 minutes for the us exit from Kabul in August 2021. In the Ukraine war’s first month, the major us networks devoted 562 minutes of airtime to the conflict, over a third of their news coverage. If Russia’s invasion looms larger in Western consciousness, one reason is the scale of media coverage. Yemen gets hand-wringing un reports, the odd inside-page headline of a short-lived ceasefire Tigray and its surrounding regions are cast in outer darkness. That world responses have been in inverse proportion to fatalities scarcely needs saying. Casualties are estimated at around 260,000 direct and indirect deaths. So, too, in Yemen, children are dying of cholera in ruined towns after seven years of near-perpetual air strikes and shelling by the Saudi– uae coalition, with us– uk support. ![]() Even as Russian forces bombard Ukrainian cities, the Ethiopian Army is shelling Tigray, under military blockade for a year, cut off from electricity, food and medical supplies, with an estimated 50,000–100,000 deaths from direct killings, plus 150,000–200,000 more from starvation. It’s worth pausing here to register the proportionality of scale and response. Hundreds of millions in charitable donations are flowing to help the refugees, matched by the unending columns of trucks heading east with fresh munitions. Twitter is alight with blue and yellow flags. The horrors of the Russian invasion have dominated the news for weeks, galvanizing an international upsurge of solidarity, at once anti-war-to halt and reverse Moscow’s murderous advance-and pro-escalation: calls to quicken the stream of Javelins, drones and Stinger missiles into a torrent of bombers and fighter jets at the limit, for the us Air Force to bomb Russian airfields and impose a no-fly zone. T he remorseless shelling of the cities the bodies unburied in the streets the terrified refugees, atrocities, grief the blackened, smouldering ruins in Ukraine, the un reports nearly 2,000 verified civilian deaths so far, a number certain to rise, perhaps tenfold or more. ![]()
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