This essay examines how the Ukrainian and Russian government-owned newspapers, Uriadovyi Kurier and Rossiiskaya Gazeta, represent people displaced by the war in Donbas, analysing the political goals revealed by these publications' attitudes towards the displaced. While the Ukrainian publication delimits the nation by distinguishing 'real' internally displaced people (IDPs) deserving help and 'fake' IDPs guilty of siphoning Ukrainian taxpayers' money to rebel-held areas, the Russian paper foregrounds the Russian state's competence in managing displacement while silencing the displaced themselves. 'A WHOLE SCHEME OF FRAUDSTERS POSING AS INTERNALLY displaced people and receiving millions of hryvnias from the state budget has been revealed', claimed Arsenii Yatseniuk in February 2016, at that time the prime minister of Ukraine, justifying the halting of the payment of social benefits to 150,000 people. 1 In the same month, in a meeting held in Minsk, the secretary of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Nikolai Bordyuzha, stated: the 1.5 million refugees from Ukraine in Russia, and the thousands of refugees from Ukraine in Belarus, are employed, do not organise demonstrations, do not ask for social guarantees or excessive attention to themselves …. This is the result of the work of the authorities, who have done everything possible to prevent tensions. (Bogdanov 2016
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