a number of reports by Rossiya 24 from France, verifying them with the assistance of people who were interviewed by Russian journalists, and finding out that their opinions were severely misrepresented by the Russian channel, either by manipulative editing or by intentionally distorted translations. After the Canal+ program was aired, Rossiya 24 silently removed some of the most offensive parts of it from the on-line version of its program. In April 2015, former Russian minister of finance Alexey Kudrin noted that the citizens are now victims of an information war started by the Russian government "against its own citizens", commenting on the process of pushing some independent media stations (TV Rain, Tomsk TV-2) out of the public sphere. The head of Rossiya Segodnya, Dmitry Kiselyov, said, "Information war is now the main type of war, preparing the way for military action" and the Russian Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, described the media as an arm of the Russian military. In 2015, European Union External Action started a periodic publication called "Disinformation Review" documenting such articles by Russian media accompanied by debunking information. Reactions Russia has frequently claimed that Western media ignore right-wing nationalist groups like Right Sector and the right to self-determination of those in eastern and southern Ukraine and misrepresented Euromaidan as "peaceful". In Left Foot Forward, Pierre Vaux described Milne's article as "the distorted apologia of a Kremlin advocate, one who performs front-of-house PR duties with the president himself" and questioned The Guardian's decision to publish it despite its own editorial criticizing moral relativism and disinformation. In a piece that appeared in The Guardian, former British Ambassador to Russia Tony Brenton wrote that the western media "routinely downplayed the Russian side of the story", and that the "confrontational course" that the British government had taken on Ukraine "had been undoubtedly eased by ministers knowing they are playing a largely anti-Russian press". To counter Russian propaganda, Ukrainian journalists suggested that the European Union support the development of "a new generation of scholars focused on Eastern Europe as opposed to those seeing Eastern Europe through Russian lenses." Salome Samadashvili, then at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies stated that the West's "view of the realities in the former captive nations of the USSR is often clouded by years of exposure to the Russian point of view." Some writers for western newspapers, including Stephen F. Cohen of The Nation and