By Mirko Casale  –  May 27, 2026

In the early hours of May 21-22, a Ukrainian drone attack struck the student dormitory of the Starobelsk Professional College, part of the Lugansk Pedagogical University. Inside, 86 students aged between 14 and 22 were sleeping. At the time of writing this, 21 students had lost their lives, and several dozen remained hospitalized, many of them with serious and life-threatening injuries.

Some of the images that emerged hours after the attack resemble Israeli crimes against Gaza, with children crying amid rubble and dust, while others try to rescue them.

It is important to underscore that the aggression, which was carried out in several waves, targeted a purely civilian facility that, in addition to being located far from any military objective, is also well known. In fact, one of the buildings affected by the drone strikes is the cover of the Wikipedia article on Starobelsk in English, Spanish, and even in Ukrainian.

In other words, this case does not even allow for the classic Washington cynicism. “We did not know it was an educational facility; we will investigate what happened,” as the West had stammered in the case of the school in Minab, Iran, which the US bombed several months ago while hundreds of girls were inside. “We did not have updated maps,” like when NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and “justified” it by claiming that its military used an outdated street guide.

Unequal treatment
Normally, in the hegemonic press, a dozen teenagers murdered while they slept would occupy a prominent space in the headlines. This is not the case if those teenagers were Russians attacked by a proxy of the Global North, of course. In this kind of situation, the manual dictates that, in the event that the news is even mentioned, it should be filled with phrases like “Russia accuses,” “the Kremlin says,” or “according to Russian media,” so that readers doubt whether there is any truth to what happened.

This formula is not new. In fact, it has been used not just since 2022, but since 2014. In the Western narrative, Russian civilian victims are always merely “alleged” or “presumed.” The Russian population, far from being alleged or presumed, is not immune to this phenomenon, which is increasingly generating repudiation among its members.

Debris being removed from the student dormitory of the Starobelsk Professional College after Ukrainian drone strikes, May 22, 2026. Photo: Evgeny Biyatov/Sputnik.

For example, precisely in the wake of the Starobelsk massacre, Russian Human Rights Commissioner Yana Lantratova asked, “Where is the BBC? Where is CNN?” These questions were rhetorical, of course, because deep down she knew the answer perfectly well.

In fact, it was not an issue of lack of transportation or fear for media crews’ safety either, as the Russian authorities invited several foreign correspondents to visit the site and see what happened firsthand. The vast majority of those who accepted were from Global South media outlets. The BBC officially declined the invitation, and CNN feigned ignorance.

However, that apparent media lethargy magically vanished a couple of days later when Russia carried out a retaliatory attack against military targets in Kiev and its surroundings using weaponry that Moscow does not frequently employ, including the Oreshnik ballistic missile.

After the attack, the hegemonic press immediately abandoned discretion and jumped into overreacting with big headlines, without providing context for why the attack occurred, without specifying the military nature of the targets, and, of course, without any “Kiev accuses,” “Zelensky says,” or anything similar in the headlines. Purely blunt and affirmative statements to present the facts incontrovertibly as a savage and unjustified bombing by Russia, something that they never did when young people were murdered two days earlier in Starobelsk.

Moreover, this pronounced double standard was not just the work of the mainstream press of the collective West. The political leaders were at the same level (or rather, the same low level): they went from almost complete silence to loud lamentations in a matter of hours.

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A failed inhuman strategy
What happened in this Lugansk town summarizes what the Russo-Ukrainian conflict has led to since Zelensky’s team realzied that the outcome had been decided a long time ago. However, they refuse to admit it not only in public but also in private.

Since then, their tactic has consisted of attacks against civilians in Russia, with the idea of generating a sense of panic, insecurity, and discomfort in Russian society, and consequently, forcing the Kremlin to negotiate from a disadvantageous position. Of course, the “problem” is that these indiscriminate attacks have not divided the population of the Russian Federation, but rather united them even more.

Today, with heavy hearts, tributes are pouring in across the country to bid farewell to these 21 young people (the vast majority of whom are women, by the way). Their names will never make the headlines in the Western mainstream press, which always subjects any news that could humanize Russian citizens to strict censorship or self-censorship. Some of those 18 girls, victims of the massacre, will be buried in a white wedding dress, as is customary in various Russian regions and communities when a young single woman dies.

In this way, Russia, far from being intimidated or forgetting its people. Today, it remembers Oksana, 22; Alisa, Alexandra, Sofia, Anastasia, Alina, and Alexander, 21; Alexandra, Anastasia, Victoria, Artyom, Alexandra, and Maxim, 20; Anna, Daria, Yana, Irina, Elena, Veronica, and Tatiana, 19; and Taisia, who had turned 18 just a few days before being killed.

Kiev thinks that it can damage Russia’s unity by killing its civilians. Mainstream Western media that believes that it contributes to Kiev’s objective by ignoring these murders. Both should realize that, with this silence and dehumanization, they achieve precisely the opposite.

(RT)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

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