"Putin’s Media Struggle to Deal With HBO’s ChernobylThe fact that an American, not a Russian, TV channel told the story about our own heroes is a source of shame for pro-Kremlin media".(...)Russia, however, does not honor these individuals as heroes who saved Europe.Just go to the official Kremlin website to see how often President Vladimir Putin mentions the Chernobyl survivors — many of whom are still alive and suffer from a variety of radiation-induced illnesses.Putin’s sole references to them occur on the major anniversaries of the Chernobyl accident. He last mentioned them in 2016, on the 30th anniversary of the disaster, and again in 2011, on the 25th anniversary.As odd as it might sound, the clean-up effort after the Chernobyl accident was almost as important to Europe as the Allied victory in World War II.What began as a day of solemnity and sorrow, Victory Day has since turned into a noisy holiday with military parades.Russia will never celebrate the Chernobyl events as a holiday — and if leaders cannot turn it into a fete of national pride and greatness, then better to forget that it ever happened at all.Still, an attempt will be made to put an entirely different spin on those events. Russia’s NTV channel has already announced that it is shooting its own “Chernobyl” series based on the premise that the CIA sent an agent to the Chernobyl zone to carry out acts of sabotage.As justification for the story, the film’s director, Alexei Muradov, cited fringe conspiracy theorists: “One theory holds that Americans had infiltrated the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and many historians do not deny that, on the day of the explosion, an agent of the enemy’s intelligence services was present at the station.”In place of a moving tribute to the heroic men and women who sacrificed everything to overcome the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster, Moscow gives us a thrilling detective film based on a conspiracy theory in which a KGB officer struggles to thwart American spies — the new villains in this national tragedy.The fact that an American, not a Russian, TV channel tells us about our own heroes is a source of shame that the pro-Kremlin media apparently cannot live down. And this is the real reason they find fault with HBO’s “Chernobyl” series.https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/06/04/putins-media-struggle-to-deal-with-hbos-chernobyl-a65866