Facts about Crimea’s annexation now taboo in Russia

When the Russian version of Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari’s book “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” was published in Moscow earlier this summer, references to the invasion of Crimea and the disinformation campaign around it had to be replaced with examples that were unrelated to Russia and Ukraine. 

The facts about Crimea’s annexation are now a taboo in Russia and subject to censorship.

Trump instead of Putin

As first reported by the Russian independent outlet The Insider, and later by Newsweek and other international media, a passage about the Kremlin’s “little green men” in Crimea reads as follows in the book’s original:

The Russian government and President Putin personally denied several times that these were Russian troops and described them as spontaneous ‘self-defense units’ who acquired a uniform similar to the Russian [one] in local stores.

In the Russian edition, that passage was taken out and replaced with a completely different sentence:

According to estimates of the Washington Post newspaper, President Trump made more than 6,000 false public statements in the time after his inauguration.

The need to protect the official Crimean narrative with censorship makes Russian authorities look desperate and no less awkward and it exposes how vulnerable the disinformation campaign can sometimes be.

Source: http://euromaidanpress.com/2019/09/05/facts-about-crimeas-annexation-now-taboo-in-russia/