By Gillian Schutte
On 5 June 2025, I attended the Russian-hosted international online press symposium titled “Liberation of Kursk Region”, a teleconference convened to present first-hand accounts, evidence, and legal testimony on the attacks carried out by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) and foreign mercenaries during incursions into the Kursk Region. It was a sobering exercise in counter-memory — one that exposed the ideological filters through which Western media interprets war, and how it strategically erases certain kinds of suffering.
The event brought together a panel of experts, eyewitnesses, and officials to report on the nature of these violations. Each presentation revealed both the physical damage inflicted on the Russian civilian population, as well as the deeper injury of denial — a refusal by the Western bloc to recognise the legitimacy of Russian civilian grief.
The eyewitness accounts shared by three Kurskites were harrowing. One described watching elderly neighbours die when their home was shelled. Another spoke of civilians being shot at close range. A third, fighting tears, recounted the rape of women during the brief occupation of their village. These testimonies were the lived memories of war and trauma, delivered with quiet devastation.
Rodion Miroshnik, Ambassador-at-Large of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, provided a comprehensive briefing on what Russia identifies as crimes committed by the Kiev regime. He detailed the shelling of border villages, destruction of non-military infrastructure, use of foreign mercenaries, and the discovery of banned Western-supplied munitions, including cluster bombs and white phosphorus, in civilian zones. Miroshnik cited ongoing investigations by the Russian Investigative Committee into violations of international humanitarian law — all allegedly ignored by the institutions tasked with upholding these laws.
According to Miroshnik, several communities in the Kursk Region suffered not only bombardment but were also subject to brief occupations by AFU-aligned forces. During these episodes, civilians were reportedly displaced, forcibly taken into Ukrainian territory, and subjected to psychological trauma. Families returning to liberated areas faced destroyed homes, contaminated land, and unexploded ordnance, with little to no humanitarian intervention from the international community.
Igor Kashin, Head of the Special Projects Department in the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation, presented a legal analysis of these findings. His tone was forensic. He itemised the breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other international protocols, explaining how evidence had been submitted to various global institutions — including the UN and the ICC — yet no meaningful action had followed.
Olga Kiriy, a Russian filmmaker and documentarian, delivered a visual account of the devastation. Her footage showed razed schools, burning residential blocks, and civilians returning to ghost towns, still wearing the shock of war on their faces. In one of her documentaries she shows a Ukranian soldier admitting to the rape of women by himself and his unit. Her presentation conveyed what words could not: the raw aftermath of military violence on people who remain unseen and unspoken in the official Western narrative of the conflict.
Ivan Konovalov, military analyst and historian, contextualised the attacks on Kursk within a broader framework. He explained that the AFU operations were tactical provocations — designed to destabilise border regions and provoke retaliation, which could then be framed by NATO-aligned media as further proof of Russian aggression. He pointed out that these attacks coincided with deliveries of new Western weaponry to Ukraine, raising serious questions about the complicity of foreign governments and arms manufacturers.
The testimonies shared during the teleconference dismantled the binary framework imposed by Western media, where Ukraine is valorised as a struggling democracy and Russia is reduced to a caricature. The reality conveyed by the speakers was more complex and far more disturbing. Russia, too, has civilians. Its towns and villages are not abstract zones on a geopolitical map but home to people who have suffered death, displacement, and the terror of war.
Yet these accounts are absent from global headlines. They are not debated in parliaments, nor dissected on primetime panels. Instead, they are swiftly relegated to the realm of “disinformation” — a catch-all term used by liberal institutions to shut down inconvenient truths.
This is the machinery of narrative warfare — where facts are not weighed for their truth, but for their utility to power. The West’s information order sustains itself through omission, selective moral outrage, and the assumption that some lives matter more than others.
As a South African journalist who has long documented structural injustice, I recognise this silencing. It follows a pattern familiar to the Global South — where international law is invoked as a weapon rather than a principle; where invasions by Western powers are called interventions, but defensive operations by others are framed as crimes; and where victims must pass ideological litmus tests before they are deemed worthy of empathy.
The suffering in the Kursk Region demands recognition. The use of banned munitions against civilians, the forced displacement of families, and the destruction of non-military infrastructure all constitute grave breaches of international law. That these acts are committed using Western weapons, under the cover of Western media silence, reveals a moral crisis at the heart of the liberal order.
The conference was more than a forum for Russian voices. It was a reminder that truth is not owned by the powerful. It must be spoken even when it is buried. The people of Kursk have lived through war. They have returned to broken homes and haunted fields. Their testimonies exist. Their pain is real. And their silence is manufactured by design.
If the term “liberation” is to have meaning, it must include liberation from the monopolies that determine whose pain is legitimate. It must disrupt the asymmetry of grief that defines the West’s geopolitical posture.
We owe that to the people of Kursk. We owe it to all communities whose trauma is edited out of history to suit imperial narratives. And we owe it to ourselves, if we are to resist becoming complicit in the global machinery of selective justice.
*Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and critical-race scholar known for her radical critiques of neoliberalism, whiteness, and donor-driven media. Her work centres African liberation, social justice, and revolutionary thought.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of or Independent Media.
