Irish Examiner view: Staying on the side of truth

Russia’s ambassador to Ireland Yuri Filatov says the Irish public is hostile to 'Russia and everything Russian'

Russian Ambassador to Ireland Yuri Filatov said that the prospect of war was “insane” — just before the tanks rolled forward. Picture: Sasko Lazarov/RollingNews.ie

According to Russia’s ambassador to Ireland, Yuri Filatov, the Irish media has portrayed an “absolutely tendentious picture” of the Ukraine invasion. 

He said this a month ago and he had no reason to change his mind this weekend when he attended the consecration of festive Easter food at Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, Dublin’s only Russian Orthodox church, in Harold’s Cross.

The adjective tendentious means to display a definite tendency, bias, or purpose. So, in some respects, we are guilty as charged. 

We have a definite tendency to tell readers, as best we can, what is happening to Ukraine and the vast pain which is being inflicted upon that country and its people.

We have a bias against professional and mercenary soldiers committing mass murder and rape and using what Winston Churchill once described as the “lights of perverted science” to plunge Europe into the abyss of a new Dark Age. 

And our purpose is to continue to tell the world what Vladimir Putin’s war machine is doing unless it crawls to a halt and then withdraws.

It was Mr Filatov who told us that the prospect of war was “insane” — just before the tanks rolled forward.

He says the Irish public is hostile to “Russia and everything Russian”. In this he is quite wrong. We are capable of distinguishing between ordinary citizens and war criminals. 

In the meantime, it must be comforting for those Ukrainian refugees now arriving in Ireland that Mr Filatov is “for Ukrainians as well”. As Mr Filatov himself pointed out, the first casualty of war is truth.