This video is under 10 minutes long and, at the time of writing, has been viewed 1.4 million times. It is packed with detailed reporting, compelling footage, and CNN’s signature pace and professionalism.
Bringing a segment like this to life takes the work of hundreds of people: field reporters, producers, writers, fact-checkers, editors, lawyers, camera crews, and technical staff. It is journalism, supposedly, at its best.
Except for one small thing.
Hardly noticeable, but ruinous.
Less than a minute in, viewers hear the following:
This video, apparently, showing the moment a [Ukrainian] drone impacted near where Russian officials said a six-month-old baby was among the two Russian dead that night.
The anchor moves on. No verification. And more importantly, no context.
By the end of the segment, millions of people have learned that Ukraine is striking refineries, oil depots, and military communication networks deep inside russia. They have also learned that one of those strikes, allegedly, killed a six-month-old Russian baby.
Whether the claim is true is beside the point. Human beings are pretty bad at grasping caveats. They won’t remember that CNN hedged with “Russian officials said.” They’ll remember the baby.
There is no image in war more powerful than a dead child. No statistic can compete with it, and no later clarification can unring that bell.
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission reported that in 2025, 97% of verified civilian casualties occurred in Ukrainian government-controlled territory, from attacks launched by Russian forces.
The UN Commission of Inquiry has found that moscow’s attacks on Ukrainian civilians amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes.
CNN’s Chief International Security Correspondent, Nick Paton Walsh, narrates the footage and mentions a Russian strike on Zaporizhzhia before turning to Dubna.
Hell is still nightly for Ukrainians. Here a drone slamming into Zaporizhzhia where strikes killed one, injured five.
But the Ukrainians murdered in that opening scene receive no age, no family, no lingering image.
Specificity changes things. The Russian dead became intimate, particular, human. But the viewer is never asked to sit with the names and ages of Ukrainian children killed night after night, or reminded that this war exists because russia invaded, occupies Ukrainian land, deliberately targets civilians, and continues to reject a ceasefire.
putin won’t stop russia's criminal war. Here’s why.
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November 28, 2025
“In general, we have achieved our goals.” That’s how Vladimir Putin described Russia’s Syria debacle in December 2024, after Bashar Assad – a dictator the Kremlin had propped up for decades – was thrown out of power. The “in general” clause was doing a lot of heavy lifting for Putin, who, in the age-old tradition of tsars and commissars, was spinning de…
That is how false equivalence, accidental as it may have been, enters the discourse.
Not via some sophisticated kremlin script or overt malice, but through one sentence: technically attributed, emotionally explosive, and left hanging in the air. That is how American People who know just enough to feel informed give themselves permission to stop caring.
I am no investigative journalist of OSINT analyst, but a quick google search returned this for russian strikes on Zaporizhzhia in June of 2026
Supermarket building — hit on June 6; the strike also caused a fire in an apartment building opposite the impact site
Nova Poshta logistics terminal — attacked on June 12, causing a large fire with no casualties reported
Shopping center / mall — damaged in the June 16 strike, alongside a residential building fire and an educational facility
Transport workshop at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant — hit in a June 18–19 drone attack, with at least 14 strikes and a fire in one section.
Apartment / high-rise residential building — damaged by a June 21–22 strike; windows and facade were blown out, and one man was injured
Office building in the city center — set ablaze in a June 26 strike by missiles and drones.
maksym eristavi. posted this on July 4th
This is the context that the reporter is surely familiar with, but what if the audience is not? What if the a subset of million and a half viewers don’t know that Russia’s aims in Ukraine are genocidal, whereas Ukraine’s aims are to defend themselves and to not be murdered by Russia “in peace.”
Kyiv does everything in its power to spare civilians. Moscow’s aims are the opposite. The 10-minute segment packed in a lot of information, but failed to land the one thing without which the rest becomes morally unstable: the difference between aggressor and victim.
Let us also interrogate the insidious “a Russian official said” phrase, the media’s version of a get-out-of-jail-free card. Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that “russian officials” lie as they breathe.
putin. LIES. ALWAYS.
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Feb 5
In chess, there’s a move called a fork. You attack two pieces at once, forcing the hand of your counterpart. Vladimir Putin relishes opportunities to fork his enemies. When ceasefire talks long dismissed as a cruel and pointless circus suddenly threatened to matter, he called Donald Trump and claimed that his Valdai residence, some 400 miles from the Uk…
In 2014, Putin told the world the troops in unmarked uniforms appearing in Crimea were not Russian. He lied. In early 2022, Russian officials insisted Moscow had no intention of invading Ukraine. They lied. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov still never tires of insisting that Russia does not target civilians. A venal, blatant lie. An unending stream of half truths, falsehoods and fabrications, recited with a straight face, counting on the diligence of the free press to report what “russian officials said” and thus become an accessory in the Kremlin’s efforts to manipulate our reality.
In December of 2023, the media frenzy went into overdrive. “Kremlin says 20 dead after attack on Russian city” was the virtuoso headline BBC went with. “The Russian defence ministry said 13 missiles had been destroyed over the wider Belgorod region.” Until then and since, Ukraine used its very scarce missiles to strike high profile military targets, not city centers, which is where the the 20 death occurred.
Ukrainian media, citing security-service sources, reported that the targets were Russian military facilities in Belgorod region. According to that account, the civilian deaths in central Belgorod were caused by Russian air defenses intercepting missiles over residential neighborhoods.
In the fog of war, definitive attribution may well be impossible. But the 97-to-3 ratio of civilian death, where 3 describes casualties on the Russian side and 97 stands for Ukrainians knowingly and deliberately massacred by the aggressor’s army of war criminals, provides the necessary context. So does the well-documented propensity of Russian officials to lie about everything, all the time.
I do not believe CNN is secretly pro-russian or callous. The segment as a whole is informative and in many ways fair to Ukraine. It shows the war coming home to russia: Crimea isolated, fuel scarce, Putin’s aura of control cracking.
That’s what makes the whole thing so infuriating! A major Western newsroom, with all its resources, speed, and authority, and one sentence poisons the well. So decisively. So spectacularly. So devastatingly.
Moscow does not need Western audiences to believe russia is innocent. That ship sailed long ago. Ask Peter Pomeranzev if you don’t believe me. He has written brilliantly about this for years.
The kremlin needs you to feel that everyone is guilty, everyone lies, everyone bombs civilians, and every war comes down to exactly the same damn thing: savages fighting each other in some godforsaken places.
This is how Americans and Europeans “tired of this war” find an emotional escape valve. They never have to say out loud that Ukraine should be abandoned. They don’t have to admit that the United States, which promised to help keep Ukraine safe after Washington stripped Kyiv of its nuclear deterrent, has not merely failed Ukraine, but betrayed it.
And no one has to confront the fact that our collective complacency in the so-called Free World has long since mutated into complicity.
Those are hard things to live with. But when CNN has just told you that Ukraine killed a baby, you can breathe a little easier. Both sides kill children, after all. Sad, even tragic, immensely complicated, not really your problem.
Except that it is!
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor
- Desmond Tutu
That is not a call to abandon facts. It is a call to bring them forward.
The fact is that russia is waging a criminal war of aggression and Ukraine is defending the right of its people to not be murdered. The fact is that Moscow chose this terrible war, sustains it, and escalates it instead of ending it.
When journalism fails to anchor evocative detail in the basic reality of russian aggression, it fails the society the media exists to serve. Even if by accident, even through benign neglect. I ask the hundreds of professionals who make the news to weigh the consequences of small, loaded details. Get that wrong, and the larger truth drowns in the name of false balance.
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