On October 14, Russian Foreign Ministry envoy Rodion Miroshnik told UN rights chief Volker Turk that Ukrainian forces had killed 9,141 civilians since 2022. TASS headlined the deaths as the work of “Ukrainian militants”. Read the TASS line as a sentence. Ukrainian militants did the killing; a diplomat vouches for it. “Militants” is a verdict noun, a word for armed outlaws, set on a state’s army before any fact arrives. The same agency’s Russian headline, on the same quote, says ВСУ, the plain abbreviation for Ukraine’s Armed Forces. Its second English story that day has the envoy say “Ukrainian troops” and “Ukrainian militants” in one quote. The speaker used both words; the English headline kept the harder one. The source is the other half. The headline’s only proof is a job title, and the title does the proving: a reader hears “diplomat” and files the count as official. Rodion Miroshnik is the Russian Foreign Ministry’s ambassador-at-large, so the count belongs to one side of the war. The two-paragraph story never says which land the 9,141 deaths cover, who compiled them or how they were checked. Kommersant says Russian territory, border regions included. Daily Beirut says his earlier figure took in the “new regions”, the Ukrainian areas Moscow claims to have annexed. The tell: a death count whose only source is the side doing the counting, with no territory and no checker. Hours before TASS ran it, Al Jazeera and Meduza named the doer of the day’s killings in Ukraine: a Russian attack, at least 9 dead, and Meduza put the Lutsk toll at 6 by Governor Roman Romaniuk’s count. Those figures come from Ukrainian officials, and they name a place. The last UN figure in the coverage dates from August 28, 2023: 9,511 civilians killed in Ukraine, 2,115 of them in Russian-occupied areas.
