laughing in the background about "what will RT say", "they must be using dummy ammunition, it's truce now". Russian media have widely reported that and, as result, RT and TASS agencies who worked with Saponkov previously both publicly condemned his comments. Novaya Gazeta, Slon.ru, and Ekho Moskvy published criticism of Russia's policy in Crimea and then Donbas. Some such as Grani.ru, were blacklisted as a result. Journalists who wrote commentary critical of the Russian government's actions usually experienced ostracism and were accused of treachery or fascism by mainstream media. Some experienced violence. In March 2014, Vedomosti published an article by a Moscow university professor, Andrey Zubov, who was subsequently fired, comparing Russia's military intervention in Crimea with Nazi Germany's Anschluss. Russian historians Alexandr Skobov and Andrey Piontkovski commented on the ideology of the self-declared Federal State of Novorossiya and concluded that its basic features (nationalism, imperialism) bore strong similarities to 20th century fascist movements. On 28 July, Skobov was assaulted by unknown perpetrators and received several stab wounds in St. Petersburg. Journalists In May 2014, Cathy Young of The Daily Beast reported that journalists were being abducted and "subjected to bizarre propaganda rituals on Russian television". Irma Krat, a journalist and Euromaidan activist who was held prisoner from April to July 2014 by pro-Russian militants, said that the pro-Kremlin LifeNews interrogated her after she had been injected with a drug and that NTV (Russia) had manipulated the footage: "The interview was cut and spliced so that it makes me appear to have almost admitted to being a killer, a sadist, and as if I was renouncing the Maidan." In June 2015 an NTV journalist, Konstantin Goldenzweig, left his position after 12 years of work, apologizing publicly for "taking part in a collective propaganda madness". In Russia, opponents of the war frequently face discrimination and coordinated hate campaigns. The most extreme example was the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, which his daughter Zhanna Nemtsova blamed on Putin and Russian media. Writing for Vedomosti, she stated that "Russian propaganda kills. It kills reason and common sense but it also kills human beings." She said that Putin's "information machine" "employs criminal propaganda techniques to sow hatred, which in turn spawns violence and terror. Its modus operandi? To dehumanize the target." In June 2015 Alexandr Byvshev, a poet whose anti-war works were banned as "extremist" earlier, was added to an official "list of terrorists and