‘The locals told us that MH17 had either been shot down by a Ukrainian jet or it was a set-up by Kyiv and all the bodies were already dead and loaded onto the plane before take-off.’ This is how Sabra Ayres, an American reporter covering the conflict in eastern Ukraine, remembers talking to locals in the aftermath of the plane crash last July.
Indeed, Sabra was struck by how quickly the villagers picked up the lead coming from Russian TV broadcasts, which pinned the blame for the disaster squarely on the Ukrainian armed forces. ‘We heard almost every crazy theory being presented by the Russian media immediately after the crash. The weirder the theory, the more it stuck. Ukraine’s voice has not been heard at all, at least not on the ground,’ she tells me.
Sabra’s experience illustrates all too well the information bubble surrounding the inhabitants of the so-called ‘People’s Republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, the separatist states set up on the territory of the Donbas. Many people here buy into the narrative of ‘Kyiv fascists’ and ‘civil war in the east of Ukraine’ spun by the Russian 'propaganda machine.'
