Television

Russia’s national television channels largely ignored the Ukrainian drone strike on Moscow. Neither Channel One, Rossiya 1, nor NTV included the topic in their morning newscasts.

None of the three channels aired a dedicated segment on the strike. Anchors briefly quoted official statements from Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin and Moscow region Governor Andrey Vorobyov; Channel One also displayed photographs of the damage from a post Vorobyov had published on social media.

By the afternoon, NTV and Channel One had dropped the story entirely. Rossiya 1, as in the morning, quoted statements from Sobyanin and Vorobyov, including the Moscow region governor’s figures on the number of wounded.

Propagandists

The leading propagandists focused mainly on the need to punish people who film and share footage of the strikes and their aftermath.

“Last night we hit somewhere around Kyiv with ballistic missiles. The Spanish blogger [Ukrainian pro-Kremlin Anatoly Shariy], who claims to be objective, has almost no photos on that topic. Almost none. But when it comes to strikes on the Moscow region, everything is packed. His whole feed is packed with it. So everyone who posts this stuff needs to be thrown in prison. And publicly,” Vladimir Solovyov said on his morning broadcast.

The Telegram channel Solovyov Live host Armen Gasparyan called on security forces to identify people posting videos using facial recognition technology, arrest them, and “break” them during interrogations. He called the people making the recordings “worthless bastards” and “voluntary helpers” of the Ukrainian military.

VGTRK Deputy Director General Andrey Medvedev said footage of strikes on targets in Moscow was “now being spread across the entire Ukrainian segment of the internet.” “Here, of course, one again wants to ask: where are the criminal cases under Article 275 for those who filmed the strikes?” he wrote.

Medvedev also said there was no point in “harboring illusions — we are not fighting Ukraine, it is the West as a whole that is fighting us,” and argued that the attack had “absolutely not coincidentally” taken place the day after the G7 summit concluded.

Z-bloggers

Many pro-war Telegram bloggers expressed frustration at the volume of strike footage circulating online while acknowledging that fighting it was pointless.

“We need to come to terms with the footage of strikes online and learn to work with it properly,” wrote the Telegram channel Zapiski Veterana (“Notes of a Veteran”) (295,000 subscribers), noting that NATO currently “has satellites with extremely high resolution” whose data the Ukrainian military receives regardless. The Telegram channel Rybar (1.56 million subscribers) wrote that given the volume of video, “it is no surprise that security services and agencies are trying to cut off all communications during raids.”

Some Z-bloggers blamed the videos on foreign workers employed at the Sadovod market and other markets in southwestern Moscow. The blogger Colonelcassad (750,000 subscribers) suggested “packing them up on camera,” fining them, and deporting them with a permanent entry ban.

Other pro-war bloggers praised Russia’s air defenses, which, according to official figures, shot down 180 drones over the Moscow region — even as the oil refinery in Kapotnya was still struck. “I take my hat off to the air defenses […]. The air defenses shot down more than 180 targets on approach — a figure that would have been unthinkable even a month ago. The anti-aircraft crews and electronic warfare units worked at the maximum pace possible in the capital sector,” wrote war blogger Alexander Kots (480,000 subscribers). “No air defense system in the world can withstand a massive overload and still deliver 100% results. It’s time to fight the root causes of drone launches, not just the drones themselves,” wrote the Telegram channel Belorusskii Silovik (“Belarusian Silovik”) (439,000 subscribers).