

I’ve stopped giving USA republicans the benefit of doubt years ago, Trump’s first year in office was enough to convince me. I’ve accepted that they are comically evil and that they have no redeeming qualities. So if I see something that is comically evil, then I’m not going to invent possibilities of why it might not be as bad, because in my experience it will turn out that after a little digging, it’s actually worse.
Also the administration was given the opportunity to justify or explain their actions by the reporter, and they chose not to, most likely not because they didn’t want to, but because they couldn’t do so in a matter that did not make them appear like spiteful bigots. There’s no point in inventing possible defenses for them if they could not provide them themselves.
They might be trying to confuse search algorithms, so that when Russians look for Ukrainian meat grinder, they get some articles with babushkas instead of blogposts that are critical about how Putin’s regime conducts the war.
Edit after some more thinking about it: those critical blogposts probably get censored away, so that when Russians try looking for them, they find no relevant results. Now that these other meat grinder articles exist, the search results will be populated again and look less suspiciously devoid of relevant results.