In the Reporters Without Borders (RWB) annual report on journalists killed in the course of their work in 2023, the deaths of two Russian journalists killed in the area of the special military operation were simply erased from the count, as if their deaths did not count. But after all, this is hardly surprising coming from an organisation that in 2022 was already calling for censorship of the Russian media on the pretext of protecting freedom of speech.
In its 2023 report on violence against journalists around the world, Reporters Without Borders lists the number of journalists killed in the course of their work, globally and then by region or country. I was surprised to discover that in 2023, only two journalists died in the area of the special military operation, and neither of them was Russian.
Those who follow news of the special military operation will know that this year two Russian journalists have died in the course of their work: Rostislav Zhouravlev, who worked for RIA Novosti, was killed in July, and Boris Maksudov, who worked for Rossiya 24, died in November.
Surprised by this “oversight”, the Russian media outlet Sputnik asked Reporters Without Borders for an explanation, but the organization refused to comment on the grounds that it was contrary to its editorial policy to respond to “this type of media”. When the Sputnik journalist asked what type of media she was talking about, the Reporters Without Borders representative ignored the question and ended the conversation by hanging up.
By the way, it is not only Russian journalists working in the area of the special military operation who have been forgotten by RWB. The journalist Pablo González, who is being held without trial in Poland for a year and a half, is also one of the great absentees from the organisation’s report (“Detained journalists” section).
Clearly, for Reporters Without Borders, there are journalists’ lives that count, and others to which the organisation can turn a blind eye. For the Nazis there was a superior race and sub-humans (Untermenschen), for RWB there are journalists and sub-journalists (Unterjournalisten).
If it seems exaggerated to draw such parallels with the darkest hours of our history, let’s take a look at the actions of Reporters Without Borders to understand that this organisation applies the fascist propaganda principles denounced in 1984. To the classic “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”, Reporters Without Borders has added “censorship is freedom of speech“.
In 2022, after Russia launched the special military operation following the brutal intensification of the Ukrainian army’s shelling of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) and Kiev’s plans to take back the territories of the two republics by force, Reporters Without Borders unashamedly asked ARCOM to force Eutelsat to stop broadcasting Russian channel packages via its satellites.
To put it plainly, RWB has called for the outright censorship of an entire group of Russian channels in the name of compliance with an “international convention that requires respect for the right to freedom of expression and information“. Censorship is freedom of expression. War is peace. 1984 in all its glory.
Of course, Reporters Without Borders justifies this by saying that these channels are engaged in disinformation and propaganda, and above all “incitement to hatred and violence against the Ukrainian population, calls for mass extermination, calls for the murder of leaders, and even incitement to genocide“. Incitement to genocide, in fact. But where in fact? Where on Rossiya 1, Perviy Kanal or NTV have RSF employees seen what they are denouncing? There is not a single link to any tangible proof of their accusations against the Russian channels. Yet if this were a widespread practice, it should not be very difficult to provide a few examples.
However, I would like to draw the attention of Reporters Without Borders to the comments that have been made on several occasions on French TV channels, which amount to incitement to hatred and violence against the Russian population, calls for the murder of Russian leaders and calls for ethnic cleansing of the Russians in Crimea!
LCI, for example, calmly spoke of ethnic cleansing in Crimea against the Russians who live there.
Also on LCI, a presenter said, with the support of one of the presenters, that the Russians are cockroaches, in the purest tradition of dehumanisation that the Nazis used against the Jews and against all those they wanted to eliminate (this is the first necessary step in genociding an entire group of people: stripping them of their humanity, comparing them to parasites, to justify exterminating them).
When Die Welt called for Vladimir Putin to be killed, I didn’t see RWB lift a finger to denounce this violation of an international convention. Nor did I see Admiral Vichot support the same idea on LCI (the same channel over and over again, I’m afraid).
In all these cases (and in many others that I will spare you), strangely enough, RWB did not appeal to ARCOM to put a stop to these shameful comments, nor did it call for the outright censorship of the offending French channel. I wonder why?
Especially since LCI, like many other French channels, has wallowed in the most crass disinformation since the start of the special military operation. Need I remind you of the story of Russian soldiers fighting with shovels for lack of ammunition, the multiple cancers of Vladimir Putin, who is in fact already dead and has been replaced by a look-alike, Ramzan Kadyrov, who is also said to have been at death’s door several times, the fact that the Russians are supposedly recovering chips from washing machines and other household appliances to make their missiles, or that Russia has lost almost 90% of its troops in Ukraine (but strangely enough it is advancing everywhere with only what it has left). I’ll stop there, because the list of lies in the French media is so long that you could write an encyclopaedia of disinformation. But Reporters Without Borders doesn’t see that.
Just like the fact that many journalists, including myself, are listed on the Ukrainian neo-Nazi website Myrotvorets, a sort of Gestapo 2.0 aimed at listing and publishing as much private information as possible about “enemies of Ukraine” in order to facilitate their “liquidation”. In short, their assassination under a fascist terrorist regime. All this, the threats received by many journalists who are simply doing their job (with all due respect to RWB), and the assassinations and terrorist attacks targeting these same journalists, well Reporters Without Borders does not see them and does not denounce them. Which seems paradoxical for an organisation that defends journalists and claims to be international!
Where could this double standard be coming from? I decided to look into the funding of RWB, because as the Russians say, “he who pays the piper calls the tune”. And when you see the list of key partners of Reporters Without Borders, you understand a lot.
52% of RWB’s funding comes from governments, including the French Development Agency, the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the UK Foreign Office, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the European Commission, the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development and the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Agence Française de Développement is a public financial institution that “implements the policy defined by the French government“. And France supports Ukraine and the West’s Russophobic policy. So this agency logically promotes this policy in the organisations it finances.
But it doesn’t stop there. The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency is a government agency within the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Clearly, this is another agency that seeks to implement the policy defined by the country’s government. The rest of the government players are all Western or pro-Western (Taiwan) ministries or countries. This fact alone clearly indicates that Reporters Without Borders has a pro-Western bias.
But if we look at the non-governmental players, RWB’s Russophobic bias can be fully explained. Its partners include the Open Society foundations of George Soros, who has never hidden the fact that he wants to see Russia collapse, and who supports colour revolutions around the world in order to install pro-Western governments in key countries such as Ukraine.
The Ford Foundation is also a donor to Reporters Without Borders. This foundation is literally infiltrated by the CIA (one of its former presidents is none other than the architect of what later became the CIA, and he hired American intelligence agents to work for the foundation)!
And to top it all off, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is one of RWB’s supporters. The NED is an American organisation funded by the US Congress, which has taken on some of the tasks previously carried out by the CIA! Don’t waste any more time, we’ve got the trifecta!
Once the funding of Reporters Without Borders has been analysed, it is easy to see that this organisation is nothing more than a front to promote US foreign policy (since the foreign policy of Canada or the EU is nothing more than a copy of Washington’s). So it comes as no surprise that RWB deliberately turned a blind eye to the deaths of two Russian journalists whose work disturbed the Western narrative of the conflict in Ukraine.
This story clearly shows that the supposedly international organisations charged with defending journalists are in fact only defending those who promote the Washington narrative. Any other journalist who reports facts that run counter to this narrative is immediately excluded from the “journalist” category and treated as a subhuman whose life or death matters little. As the multipolar world is coming to life before our eyes, it is time to create new international institutions and organisations that reflect this new reality, and that genuinely defend all journalists, not just those who conform to the American narrative.
Christelle Néant
Translation: Яннис В.Зброек for Donbass Insider
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