An interview with an official in Kherson was conducted by a Russian radio station last week.
Radio Rossii follows a rule of hewing to the Kremlin's line about the "special military operation" launched in February. It is taboo in Russia to say that the spetzoperatsiya is a full-blown war.
What happened next was even more remarkable. In the midst of the interview with the pro-Russian official in Kherson, one of the hosts asked in a hopeful tone if the situation was okay. He didn't get the response he was expecting.
The administrator acknowledged that the situation was difficult.
The phone line stopped working. The interviewer was done. The moment was revealing because of how little dissent is allowed in Russian media outlets.
The next segment was about a resident of Dagestan who was cooking for Russian soldiers and was praised for his patriotism. There was no mention of the anti-mobilization protests that rattled the region.
However fleeting, reality has found a way to sneak through a Kremlin firewall that has been in place for two decades, not to mention the legacy of soviet propaganda, which hid the Kremlin's failures and corruption. The Kremlin has complete control over the country's major outlets. Journalists have been murdered and dissident outlets have been closed. Reporting on the war with the kind of critical scrutiny Western audiences expect is out of the question in Russia.
It is nearly eight months into a faltering war effort and difficult truths are becoming more difficult to ignore. The efforts of top media outlets and celebrities to explain away deflating developments have been unconvincing.
The Institute for the Study of War argued that Putin relied on controlling the information space in Russia to protect his regime more than the Soviet Union did.
Many of Russia's top media figures and outlets have struggled to stick to a coherent narrative that has some connection to reality but is not upsetting the Kremlin.
The Russian war effort is getting worse. Generals are at fault if troops perform poorly. The West hates Russia so much that it will do everything in its power to destroy it. Russian outlets say that Russia will triumph despite that.
The destruction of the Kerch Bridge was not a military setback or a failure by the Russian security services. It was described as a terrorist act by the special forces of the Ukrainians.
Russia retaliated by firing rockets at the population centers. The morning news segment about roof repairs to apartment buildings in areas of Ukraine controlled by Russia was not aired on Russia 1. There were at least two promotional segments in the span of just a few minutes.
There was no sense that the war was getting worse, that the Kremlin was getting desperate, and that the shelling of civilians was out of bounds. A viewer might have concluded that it was just an ordinary day in Moscow.
Ian Garner, a Russia scholar who closely observes the nation's media outlets, said that the war is still going in the right direction. There are many references to World War II, including the idea that there was a catastrophic retreat for the first year of the war, but eventually the tide was turned and Russians had to go through it.
The Kremlin's top propagandists continue to offer rousing defenses of the war even as they allow a bit of frustration into their broadcasts. They believe they have won. They don't understand that nothing has started.
He assured his audience that there would be no surrender from the Kremlin.
While the information firewalls ringing Russia may not be cracking, it is looking more and more perilous with each new setback for an invasion that was supposed to conclude with a quick capitulation in Ukraine. Russian forces have been pushed back by the Ukrainian defense since the beginning of the year. The protests that have led to confrontations with police across Russia are a result of the Kremlin's order to mobilize hundreds of thousands of young men.
Even though Ukrainian forces continued to advance, one commentator on the show suggested that Zelensky should order his troops to surrender. The Pravda website said that the armed forces of Ukraine have no chance.
Even though their scope is almost always kept hidden from public view, these losses have been hard to digest for a Russian nation that defeated both Hitler and Napoleon. It's always the headline that things are worse for another person. Even if Russian losses are worse, Ukrainian losses are always in the news. Russia's advances are overstated. The British MI6 and American CIA are often accused of directing the Ukrainian resistance.
Yevgeny Prighozhin, who runs a paramilitary outfit known as theWagner Group, and Ramzan Kadyrov, a fanatical Kremlin ally, are among those who have criticized Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his generals. The Russian public is aware that the special operation is faltering despite the fact that ultimate responsibility for the invasion doesn't reside with Shoigu.
Some of the disasters are accepted, but then you say that the initial errors are being fixed by Putin. Given his low tolerance for public dissent, it's understandable that criticism of Putin himself isn't happening. If Stalin knew the rhetoric of Soviet propaganda, he would have no tolerance for disasters that low-level Kremlin functionaries were responsible for.
The responsibility now lies with the highest levels of official power.
When Stalin dispatched millions to death or imprisonment in the 1930s and when Gorbachev kept silent about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, social media platforms were not available. Since many of Russia's best-known traditional media figures are on Telegram, it's hard for traditional media to keep to a constant optimism.
Russian militarybloggers, who are ardent supporters of the war but are unafraid to say it is not going well, are emerging as another challenge to the Kremlin. It was the milbloggers who showed how disorganized Putin had become.
Images of poorly prepared, sometimes drunk recruits with rusty rifles made their way onto social media, making reality impossible to ignore. Needing a scapegoat, outlets focused on local recruitment officers.
According to an analysis of Russia's media landscape, the regime seems unable or unwilling to control milbloggers.
Evidently aware that bad news was flowing through, pundit Armen Gasparyan recently advised Russians to exercise self-censorship. He said to stop reading opponents who are trying to make Russians panic.
The scope of recent losses against a Ukraine aided by the West was not going to be kept under wraps.
He said that the retreat by Russian forces from a strategic Ukrainian city was very painful. He said that this is how it is with them. Don't get crazy. We have everything in our hands.
Despite the fact that some milbloggers came to his defense, Gen. Lapin was blamed for the retreat from Lyman. The military correspondent said that blaming Lapin is incorrect. The sorry state of the Russian military was blamed by him. It is sad that truth about the real state of affairs does not reach the top.
There are only a few instances of flirting with honesty. Alexander Kotz, a military correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda, argued in a Monday column that the attack on the Kerch Bridge should inspire the Russian military to do similar things. There is no excuse for the impossibility of blowing up the bridge on which weapons are coming from the West. The Ukrainians have shown that anything is possible.
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