On Oct. 4, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad said on national TV that if it were not for Russia’s air strikes, the entire Middle East would suffer.

On Sunday, Russia’s defense ministry stated that over the past 24 hours, its aircraft targeted 10 IS targets in Syria “including command posts, a training camp, ammunition stores and a workshop making explosive devices including suicide belts,” according to an article by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

The air campaign began on Wednesday, and the Russian defense has claimed that “As a result of our air strikes on Isil [IS] targets, we have managed to disrupt their control system, the terrorist organization’s supply lines, and also caused significant damage to the infrastructure used to prepare acts of terror.”

Certain Syrian activists have claimed that these attacks have killed two children and a shepherd and wounded 15 others.

Turkey, Britain and the U.S. have very openly condemned the airstrikes from the East, and this seems to be yet another stain on President Putin’s charming front.

In the West, Putin is being condemned for these intolerable acts of foreign intervention without the approval of the U.N.

Putin stated at an annual U.N. conference this September that Assad’s forces are the only ones “truly fighting the IS and other terrorist groups in Syria.”

Why is it that the current and previous presidents of the U.S. and other major world powers have not received the same criticism from the media for involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts as Putin is receiving now?

There is always some justification for the West storming into a country and everyone simply nods their heads in agreement?

Yes, the Russian media is distorting the activities in Ukraine and the rest of the world to their advantage and the West is doing the same thing.

Western media is working to make sure that the West continues to despise Putin.

Putin is undoubtedly a flawed leader, and many of his actions cannot be justified, but how is it that when it turns out that Putin might have done some good, our media viciously tears his actions apart and condemns him for any attempt of involvement that contradicts the agenda of the U.S. and other major powers?

After all, Putin did receive a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.

The justification for this award was that if President Obama received a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize for initiating armed conflict in Syria, then Putin – who prevented more armed conflict in Syria that year – should be more qualified.

The way our media has presented the conflict is that one is either on the side of the U.S. and the U.N., or one is supporting the terrorists in the Middle East.

We strongly condemn the Russian media for distorting the news and the propaganda that is controlling Russia. But we are also creating propaganda – no better than Russia’s – to polarize the situation so that there are only two sides to the conflict.

I am not denying that Assad has done the atrocities he has committed in his own country, nor am I denying that the actions of Putin are in any way justifiable.

Western countries have created, for their own benefit, a miniature cold war.

As such, they are in no way better than Eastern countries are if we are using the same propaganda strategy to polarize any major conflict.

Instead of using diplomacy as a method to solve conflict, the West – especially America – has almost exclusively used force.

An important function of free speech is to ensure that there is diversity in discourse and that any side of a story has a right to be heard by all. Assad needs to be dealt with, but making these issues one-sided is undermining an important part of democracy.

If we are strongly polarizing the issues today in the Middle East, we are no better than the media of Russia.

Bogdan (Theo) Mynka is a freshman studying music from Kharkiv, Ukraine. He can be contacted at 335-2290 or by [email protected]. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of the Office of Student Media.