
The “fog of war,” or, why Slate needs to hire a fact-checker:
On Feb. 24, the day the fighting in Ukraine began, more than 130,000 protesters were arrested; about 30 of them now face criminal charges, with maximum prison sentence of up to five years, according to OVD-Info, a protest-monitoring group.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/03/russia-protesters-arrests.html
According to the real (not imaginary) OVD Info, 1,965 protesters were detained by Russian police on February 24 — not 130,000!
https://ovdinfo.org/articles/2022/02/25/net-voyne-itogi-akcii-protiv-voyny-s-ukrainoy-24-fevralya
The emphasis is mine. Photo by the Russian Reader
How can the world help support the anti-war movement in Russia?
There is no anti-war movement in Russia, and there never has been one in the sense of something massive, coordinated and organized. If there had been one, it would have protested, in the recent past, Putin’s destruction of Chechnya, his attack on Georgia, his annexation of Crimea and parts of Donbas, and his criminal military intervention in Syria. So now there are only brave individuals risking a lot by protesting this war — not a “movement.” Since Russia is fairly cut off from the rest of the world at this point, the best way to support Russian anti-war protesters is to publicize what they’re doing. But one should do this by citing credible reporting. Slate’s report is not credible, alas, because it either deliberately or accidentally exaggerates the number of protesters detained on a single day, a number that is many times in excess of the real number of protesters detained nationwide since the war began.