The horror of it remains hard to process. A Moscow nanny, native to Uzbekistan but an on-again, off-again resident of the Russian capital for a number of years, murdered her four-year-old charge, cut off the little girl’s head, and brandished it outside a metro station before finally being tackled and subdued by police.
Even more shocking — at least at first — was the decision by Russian state TV to avoid mentioning the incident.
Avoiding any mention of the nanny in a country where the majority of citizens still get their news first and foremost from state TV was an obvious act of censorship. Too many critics than one can count have pointed out that if this horrific crime had taken place in Ukraine, or, even better, in Europe or in the United States, Russian TV journalists would be all over the story like locusts.
