Western mainstream media are “afraid to see the truth” about the Ukrainian attack on the Starobelsk college dorm, Russia’s newly appointed human rights commissioner, Yana Lantratova, has said, slamming the incident as a “deliberate murder of children.”
The attack on the dorm, staged overnight from Thursday to Friday, left at least 21 people dead, mainly teenage girls. The massacre has been largely ignored by the Western media and politicians, and Moscow has urged foreign reporters to come to the site.
The Russian Foreign Ministry arranged the media trip to Starobelsk on Sunday, with more than 50 reporters from 19 nations accepting the invitation. Speaking to the journalists at the location of the attack, Lantratova slammed those Western outlets that ignored the opportunity to report first-hand from the site.
“It was a deliberate murder of children. That’s what it’s called. And what are we seeing now? What’s happening on foreign platforms? Representatives from various countries are saying it is staged, that it’s a lie from the Russian media, and that ‘independent’ media could not confirm it because they could not come here,” she said, adding that some outlets did not even offer a “plausible explanation” for skipping the opportunity.
Where’s the BBC? Where’s CNN? Where are the Tokyo representatives? Where are their journalists? … They’re simply afraid to see the truth. They don’t want to see it and they don’t want to hear it.
On Saturday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that both the BBC and CNN rejected the invitation to visit Starobelsk, while the Japanese government explicitly banned reporters from making the trip.
The attack on Starobelsk prompted a large-scale retaliatory strike on the Ukrainian capital city of Kiev, which was conducted overnight. The strike featured the intermediate-range hypersonic Oreshnik system, as well as other ballistic and cruise missiles. The command centers of the Ukrainian ground forces and military intelligence were targeted, as well as air bases and defense industry sites, according to the Russian military.