ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- There was a popular joke in the Soviet Union that reflected the government’s ability to filter any information that it didn’t want the population to see or hear.
It went something like this: If the Soviet newspaper Pravda (Truth) had existed in the time of Napoleon, then nobody would have heard of the French army’s defeat in the battle of Waterloo.
In modern-day Central Asia, the closest thing to Pravda’s capacity to willfully ignore bad news is Turkmenistan’s state media, which has not mentioned Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in any meaningful way since the conflict began.
But to various extents, all government-controlled media across the Russia-tied region has managed to keep mentions of the devastating conflict to a bare minimum, despite its knock-on effects being clearly felt by local populations – including the return of corpses of young soldiers to Central Asia.
For many independent media outlets, by contrast, the war that has raged for more than two-and-a-half years has been a staple of coverage.
But that coverage, while very popular with local audiences, has often risked the wrath of Russia, which explains why most of those state-run outlets that dabbled in references to Ukraine have now stopped doing so.
Bolivia Or Not…
While caution has been the watchword of Central Asian official positions on Ukraine, some of the bolder official statements -- including not recognizing territory acquired by Russia during the war -- have come from Kazakhstan.
Central Asia’s largest country is the only one in the region to share a land border with Russia -- one that just happens to be the longest continuous border in the world.
More than 200,000 Russian citizens crossed into Kazakhstan to escape Moscow’s military mobilization in 2022, while both the war and the sanctions placed on Russia by a broad coalition of countries have bedeviled the Kazakh economy.
But according to state TV reports, you would assume the ongoing conflict had no relevance to Kazakhstan whatsoever.
In recent weeks alone, viewers of the state-run television channel Qazaqstan have seen reports about forest fires in Bolivia -- which is some 14,000 kilometers from Kazakhstan -- power outages in Puerto Rico, and the spread of Mpox in Congo.
Yet they would not have seen reports about Ukraine’s shock military incursion into Russia’s Kursk Oblast in August, or Russia’s regular deadly drone and missile attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, which it invaded.
In fact, Kazakh state media has said very little about the war since the early months of 2023, when some state broadcasters rather surprisingly covered the initiative of Kazakh businessmen to set up yurts in Ukraine as part of a humanitarian-aid drive.
Those yurts -- placed in at least four Ukrainian cities -- appeared to hurt Russia’s feelings.
After a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman publicly demanded an explanation, her opposite number in Kazakhstan said he saw "nothing to explain," calling the yurts a “private initiative.”
A sharp drop off in coverage of Ukraine events followed.
When asked by RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service if state channels had been asked to cut Ukraine coverage, a representative of the state media outlet Khabar denied the suggestion, arguing instead that “it is difficult to verify the authenticity of reports coming from the conflict zone.”
In neighboring Uzbekistan, state television has completely ignored the conflict, with searches for “Ukraine” returning virtually no results on state media websites outside of the first year of the war. Ditto Tajikistan.
Kyrgyz state broadcaster KTRK provides the exception to the rule, airing regular snippets of BBC reporting on the war.
But in terms of the broadcaster’s own coverage, “they mostly cover only when there is something related to the war that is too big to ignore, and in those cases the coverage is very sparse, rigid, and neutral,” Kyrgyz media expert Adil Turdukulov told RFE/RL.
‘Wording Is Very Important To Russia’
Coverage of Ukraine by Central Asia’s privately owned media, however, is fairly varied, ranging from the terse coverage of purely geopolitical developments on the part of websites close to national governments, to stories from close to the Ukrainian army’s frontlines as part of crowdfunded or donor-backed reporting projects.
Mahinur Niyazova, who was an editor with the private Kyrgyz news agency 24.kg when the full-scale invasion occurred, said the news agency's policy was to cite both Russian and Western media as well as official sources in digests that 24.kg initially updated several times a day.
This led to criticism from activists, who were unhappy that the website used Moscow’s “Special Military Operation” formula when introducing the digests. But there were also “calls from the Russian Embassy, who complained that our coverage was too pro-Ukrainian,” Niyazova said.
24.kg’s offices in Bishkek were raided in January and sealed after the outlet came under criminal investigation for “propaganda of war” in relation to an August 2023 interview that the outlet conducted with Almaz Kudabek-uulu, a Kyrgyz national and the commander of the Turkic Turan battalion fighting with the Ukrainian army.
It is unclear what role Russia had in this case, if any, since it coincided with a broader crackdown on Kyrgyz media outlets critical of President Sadyr Japarov.
But Roskomnadzor, the Russian media regulator, blocked 24.kg on Russian territory shortly after the interview was published, explaining its decision with reference to digests from the war’s first year.
After 24.kg came under new ownership and staff -- including Niyazova -- resigned, Kyrgyz prosecutors announced that the case was no longer being investigated.
Roskomnadzor has also blocked the websites of private news outlets based in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan over their refusal to take down war-related coverage.
So far media outlets in Uzbekistan are not known to have suffered the same fate, despite several major private websites there covering the war, and not from Moscow’s position.
“Russia is extremely sensitive about the war and very sensitive about wording -- everyone knows this,” said Ruslan Myatiev, editor in chief of the Dutch-based Turkmen.News.
But when it comes to super-authoritarian Turkmenistan's information space, Roskomnadzor’s censors can rest easy, Myatiev said.
As a state that positions itself as diplomatically neutral, Turkmen state media tends to say nothing about any international conflict, including those closer to home, like Ukraine, where several thousand Turkmen students found themselves trapped in the early days of the war.
The only Turkmen-language reports even mentioning the war come from sources outside the country like Myatiev’s Turkmen.News, RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service, and the Vienna-based Chronicles of Turkmenistan.
“In many authoritarian countries, [nonstate] media can be somewhat dependent on the state. But in Turkmenistan, that dependence is a total dependence. In this respect, Turkmenistan is still very much the Soviet Union.”
