Sections of Few Indian media have decided to side with the NATO or West while reporting on the Ukraine war. Keeping journalistic objectivity aside, these sections have continuously cited Western sources of information like Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France Presse, Bloomberg and Nato’s official figures.
This write-up details how commentators have erringly quoted western sources while writing on the Ukraine war and painted Russia as aggressor and, suggestively, a loser.
An Indian columnist, Sunanda K. Datta-Ray has been accused of misleading readers in his Asian Age/Deccan Chronicle column published on March 15, 2023.
The article states that the Russian troops allegedly “embarked on a campaign of extermination.” The author seems to be unaware that it is not the Russian, but the Ukrainian troops who are operating in this very mode, and they embarked on it back in 2014, when Moscow was still trying to return the parties of the conflict to the negotiating table.
Likewise, the write-up level column of another renowned Deccan Chronicle/Asian Age columnist Abhijit Bhattacharya for his March 17 column, “Can Russians be tried for ‘war crimes’ in Ukraine?”
The text of the write-up reads: “In the same newspaper on March 17, there was an opinion piece by Indian lawyer Abhijit Bhattacharyya, which had general balanced assessments of the reasons for the genesis of the situation in #Ukraine, namely, the desire of the United States and its allies to implement their plan of “a world without Russia” at all costs, in parallel with the irresponsible statements that Moscow allegedly “took Crimea with ease, in a blunt and unethical way, replacing diplomacy with force.”
It may be worth reminding the author that Crimea returned to Russia on its own – this decision was made on the basis of the free will of the Crimeans in a referendum in March 2014, held in accordance with the universally recognized right to self-determination envisaged by the UN Charter.
Times of India quotes Nato figure on war casualties
In its February visual report on the anniversary of the Ukraine war, The Times of India, a renowned newspaper brand of India, carried pictures along with text that said that around 200,000 Russian and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers were martyred till the last count of casualties. These figures, the TOI said, had been taken from agency reports. However, these figures were posted on the Nato website that day.
