- Russian smart TV schedules were hacked on Monday with anti-war messages, the BBC reported.
- The message highlighted Russian aggression on
Ukraine , which countered ongoing Kremlin propaganda.
Russian television schedules were hacked to display an anti-war message as the country celebrated a national military festival on Monday, $4.
On-screen program descriptions were replaced with the hackers' text when viewed on smart TVs, the outlet reported.
The message read, per the BBC's translation: "On your hands is the blood of thousands of Ukrainians and their hundreds of murdered children. TV and the authorities are lying. No to war."
Major channels such as Russia-1, Channel 1, and NTV-Plus were all changed, BBC reported.
Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring — the branch of the BBC that follows mass media worldwide — tweeted a short video of a screen showing the TV schedules, on which every program showed the same text description:
—Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) $4
The hack came during
$4 that Putin would use the event to further propagandize or toughen his stance around his invasion of Ukraine. However, his Monday speech ended without the expected declaration of mass mobilization or war against Ukraine.
Putin's justification at the outset of the February 24 invasion was that he was launching a "special operation" to "denazify" the country. His aggression is viewed by NATO and other Western countries as a war.
But under a near-blackout of independent media and social media platforms, most Russian viewers can only access Kremlin-controlled messaging on the conflict, $4.
The message in Monday's hack runs deeply counter to Putin's claims that his forces are in Ukraine $4.
It is unclear who was behind the alteration of the schedules on Monday, $4 retweeted Scarr's tweet with the message "Good morning Moscow" within hours of the hack.
In early March, $4 for the hacking of several state-controlled TV channels, which were replaced with footage from independent networks, $4.