🎙 Russia's Ambassador to Thailand Evgeny Tomikhin's remarks at Session 3 "Enhancing media and information literacy to strengthen interregional security in the digital era," during the 2026 OSCE Asian Conference (Bangkok, May 29, 2026)

💬 Sustainability and integrity of media environment as well as level of information literacy of population directly depends on real situation in free access to information. Have to say that on this track we see sustainable regression because countries representing so-called "collective West" choose policy of suppressing any opposite points of view, repressions against media and imposition of political censorship.

Western countries imposed illegitimate collective and personal restrictions against Russian media, using diversified instruments of pressuring, including IT companies in digital environment.

At the same time #OSCE relevant institutions prefer to ignore violations of basic obligations in media freedom, in full accordance of controversial paradigm of so-called "rules-based international order", or double standards. New standard for them is to keep silence or no-meaningful reaction after targeted killings and attacks of journalists in zones of conflicts.

❗️ Inaction and inertia are particularly noticeable in relation of #KievRegimeCrimes against civilians. We are recording an increasing flow of disinformation, mass production of fakes using Al, targeted distribution of fakes in global information space. The counteraction should go in several directions.

First. Continue efforts focused on developing universal rules on international platforms aiming identification and labeling of Al-content. The problem is that some countries — including regime in Kiev and its western sponsors — are the main producers of deep fakes and disinformation. Lie is scaling and replicating without any verifying, and create distorted worldview and events.

Second. It is necessary to increase exchange of experience and practices in fighting disinformation, to manage properly neural networks between MFAs.

Third. Support initiatives from civic society exposing fakes, to support education initiatives for upgrading digital and media literacy. Today diplomats and journalists need advanced skills in Open Source Intelligence. Search of sources, crosscheck and data verifying, identifying fakes in neural network. Good example of such initiatives is independent Global Fact-Checking Network launched in 2024 and up to now consists more than 100 experts from more than 50 countries.