Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israeli civilians, Hinkle has devoted himself to posting anti-Israel content on social media, particularly X. Nearly all of his posts are blatant falsehoods and manipulations. Recently, for instance, he claimed that Israeli authorities staged a scene for Elon Musk, who recently visited the country, with unfired bullets in a crib. It was soon pointed out, however, that the bullets had indeed been fired. Nevertheless, the tweet is still up. Hinkle doesn’t bother with deleting posts or taking them back after errors have been exposed. He just continues to post more — and it works. His audience impressions over the last month alone run into the billions.  

Before the Hamas attacks, Hinkle spread Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine. “Putin has God on his side in his quest to defeat NATO satanists,” Hinkle posted on X back in July. While Hinkle no longer posts about Ukraine, he is still serving Russia’s interests. On Nov. 27, for instance, Hinkle faithfully reported that “Hamas has released a Russian-Israeli citizen as a ‘thank you’ to President Putin for supporting Palestine!” More generally, though, the war in Gaza is an opportunity for Hinkle to do what the Kremlin most wants — focus online attention on the West’s seemingly unreflecting and hypocritical support for Israel. 

Hinkle has become a leading figure in that strange, social media-based netherworld of conspiracy theorists who have moved seamlessly from raging (or rather fomenting rage) about Covid vaccines, to raging about U.S. support for Ukraine, to now raging about the war in Gaza.

According to Pekka Kallioniemi, a propaganda researcher from Finland, these issues are “part of the same disinformation package.” In 2022, Kallioniemi began Vatnik Soup, a website and series of tweets in which he exposed, often sardonically, people and organizations he saw as “vatniks,” or useful idiots who would parrot Kremlin talking points online.  

Often, he told me, it is the same people who spread disinformation about Covid and vaccines and then about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, who are now spreading pro-Hamas disinformation. “Their style is distinctive,” Kallioniemi said, because they have so successfully adopted the Russian propaganda technique of “high volume and multichannel disinformation.”

Posting on X, Kallioniemi recently noted the rapid proliferation on TikTok of videos purporting to show that Russian troops had been dispatched to “help” Palestinians defend themselves. “This is of course not true,” he wrote. But it didn’t matter. The larger narrative purpose was served — Russia is an ally and friend to those bullied by the West. “October 7,” he said, “was a big win for the Kremlin. It took the attention completely off the invasion of Ukraine. You began almost immediately to hear about an unwillingness to fund Ukraine’s defense indefinitely and about the need for peace talks.”

It is to Russia’s benefit, he added, that deliberate disinformation about Israel be allowed to infect the global conversation. “There has been a coordinated effort,” Kallioniemi told me, “to lower people’s trust in the authorities and to weaken democratic functioning.” A low-trust society, as the U.S. has gradually become, is “very vulnerable to disinformation and deep-state conspiracies,” he said. The pandemic proved to be particularly fertile ground for conspiracy theories, giving fresh impetus to a narrative about a globalist elite plotting to take over the world. Globalist narratives tend to be antisemitic, with Jewish people accused of being loyal to supranational entities that enhance control over, say, international banking or the media. In 2020, a study commissioned in the U.K. revealed that antisemitic content was rife in 79% of 27 leading anti-vaccine forums. 

The only long-term fix, Kallioniemi said, is education. “What Finland gets right,” he told me, “is that media literacy, critical thinking and checking sources are introduced very early. Even in pre-school, there is some understanding of the concept of disinformation and its impact.”        

Sometimes, though, education and critical thinking are not strong enough to withstand emotion and ideology. Jewish groups have long claimed that antisemitic disinformation is rampant on American university campuses. Some of these groups have just filed a lawsuit against the University of California, Berkeley for enabling “unchecked” antisemitism. If Russian propaganda about Gaza, spread by the likes of Hinkle, is finding an audience, it is because it cleverly exploits existing tensions.  

Dublin’s disinformation riots

Even broad educational achievements and moderate politics can fail to make societies immune to disinformation, as Ireland discovered last week. On Nov. 23, three young children and their teacher were stabbed in Dublin. Far-right groups called for young men to descend onto the scene of the crime, claiming that the stabbings had been committed by an illegal immigrant. The crowd quickly became violent, smashing storefronts and setting police vehicles and buses on fire. It took the police by surprise and hours elapsed before the riot was brought under control. The authorities quickly assigned blame to a far-right faction that they said had been “radicalized” online. It turned out that the attacker was an immigrant, an Algerian who had lived in Ireland for 20 years and was an Irish citizen. For what it’s worth, he was prevented from doing further damage by a much more recent immigrant, a Brazilian delivery driver who knocked him to the ground with his motorcycle helmet. 

If the rioting was shocking, disinformation experts argue that it could have been anticipated. Eileen Culloty, a professor in the communications department at Dublin City University, has written that “the COVID-19 pandemic marked a major turning point for disinformation in Ireland as various conspiracy theorists, anti-establishment actors, and, in particular, right-wing and far-right extremists mobilized online and offline.” Anger over lockdowns and vaccines curdled into anger over immigration, as Ireland took in a disproportionate number of refugees from Ukraine in addition to record numbers of asylum seekers. Contributing to the anger were a housing crisis, a cost-of-living crisis and the belief that local people were being cut off from benefits and forced to compete for scarce resources. Over the last year, there have been a number of protests. Inevitably, the social frustration has been amplified by deliberate and targeted disinformation on social media, including from X owner Elon Musk. As Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar called after the riots for new legislation to deal with hate speech, Musk weighed in. “Ironically,” he posted, “the Irish PM hates the Irish people.” Not the first time Musk has aligned himself with right-wing xenophobes. Varadkar’s father, incidentally, was an Indian-born doctor.

Rise of the trolls

And speaking of right-wing xenophobes: Dutch politician Geert Wilders is poised to form a coalition government in the Netherlands, after his party’s surprising success in snap elections earlier this month. If he can persuade anyone to work with him, that is. It is likely to prove challenging because in his public comments about Muslims in particular, Wilders can sound like an internet troll. He says his leadership style will be less confrontational, that he will be a prime minister for all Dutch people. Though he has yet to get the top job, his election success has already been celebrated by his far-right counterparts across Europe, including Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and France’s Marine Le Pen. He has also received acclaim from fellow Islamophobes in India. Last year, Wilders became a hero for Hindu nationalists when he defended Nupur Sharma, at the time a confident, abrasive spokesperson for the governing Bharatiya Janata Party. Sharma had appeared on a television debate show and made unprintably offensive remarks about the Prophet Muhammad and his third wife, a child bride, which provoked violent demonstrations in India and a diplomatic backlash from important trading partners such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE. The BJP ultimately suspended Sharma, but Wilders described her as a “hero who spoke nothing but the truth.” He added that “Hindus should be safe in India. It is their country, their homeland, it’s theirs! India is no Islamic nation.” It’s a sentiment that has won Wilders friends for life among Hindu nationalists in India, however rooted his words are in disinformation and conspiracy theory. 

WHAT WE’RE READING:

• Foreign-born media owners are not unheard of in the U.K., including Rupert Murdoch and Evgeny Lebedev, the son of a former KGB spy. So why is it causing such consternation that a consortium led by former CNN boss Jeff Zucker and funded largely by the vice president of the UAE, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is seeking to buy conservative broadsheet The Telegraph? Surely there is something concerning when a senior member of the autocratic government of a country not known for encouraging the free press finances the takeover of a national newspaper in another country? The soft power benefits to the UAE seem obvious, but what will the consequences be for The Telegraph?
• “Across Ukraine at least two dozen Pushkin statues have been removed from their pedestals since the war began,” writes Thomas de Waal in Englesberg Ideas. Given that the 19th-century poet, novelist and dramatist is considered to be Russia’s “national writer,” de Waal adds, “take down Pushkin’s statue and you are challenging Russia as a whole.” This excellent essay makes a compelling case for the need to emancipate rather than fetishize Russian literature.

The post Russian propagandists turn their attention to Gaza appeared first on Coda Story.

Nearly anyone can be silenced. On Nov. 9, the leading German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung denounced Indian art critic Ranjit Hoskote for signing an open letter in 2019 that described Zionism as a “racist ideology calling for a settler-colonial, apartheid state where non-Jews have unequal rights.” 

Hoskote was of interest to the German media because he sat on a search committee tasked with appointing the next art director for Documenta. Founded in 1955, Documenta is an internationally significant exhibition of contemporary art held every five years in the historic city of Kassel in central Germany. Within days of the newspaper’s article, Hoskote resigned. Documenta had precipitated his resignation by publicly declaring that his conduct in signing the letter four years ago “was not remotely acceptable” because of its “explicitly anti-Semitic content.”

Even before Hoskote resigned, the Israeli artist Bracha L. Ettinger stepped down from the search committee, citing her inability to continue to participate, describing the feeling of being “paralyzed under rockets, with the details of the massacre committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians, women, and babies, and of the kidnapping of children and babies and civilians, being streamed on my screen during our lunch and coffee breaks.” Though the allegations against Hoskote were public by the time Ettinger resigned, she said they had nothing to do with her decision.

In the wake of both resignations, the remaining four members of the search committee stepped down last week. “In the current circumstances,” they wrote, “we do not believe that there is a space in Germany for an open exchange of ideas.” Intellectual discourse in Germany, they argued, was falling prey to “over-simplification and prejudgments.” Hoskote defended himself in his own lengthy resignation letter. “I feel, strongly,” he said, “that I have been subjected to the proceedings of a kangaroo court.”

Documenta is particularly sensitive to any association with antisemitism because the 2022 edition, intended to foreground perspectives from the Global South, was mired in controversy before the exhibition even opened. An Indonesian collective included caricatures on a 60-foot-long painted banner that the Israeli embassy in Germany said was “Goebbels-style propaganda.” One of the figures on the banner was a soldier with a pig’s head. He wore a Star of David bandana around his neck and a helmet with the word “Mossad” on it, the name of Israel’s intelligence service. In addition, the curators of the exhibition had reportedly not invited any Jewish or Israeli artists to participate. Seven academics conducted an inquiry into events at Documenta, concluding that the exhibition was “an echo chamber for Israel-related antisemitism, and sometimes for pure antisemitism.” 

Keen to avoid a repeat of the 2022 scandal, Documenta urged Hoskote to distance himself from the letter. Instead, he chose to resign, claiming he was “being asked to accept a sweeping and untenable definition of anti-Semitism that conflates the Jewish people with the Israeli state.”

What happened at Documenta mirrors similarly anguished resignations around the world, including within the media. The question we seem unable to answer collectively is this: When does free speech curdle into unacceptable, even hateful speech?

The open letter that Hoskote signed in 2019 condemned an event being held at the Israeli consulate in Mumbai that celebrated the shared purpose of Zionism and Hindutva, the aggressive Hindu nationalist ideology embraced by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Hindutva is usually traced back to the early 1920s and the ideas of V.D. Savarkar, an admirer of Nazi Germany.  Just as Savarkar saw Germany as an example of how to deal with minorities, so his Hindutva descendants now see Israel.

Modi’s Hindu nationalist supporters identify closely with Israel, believing that they share a common enemy in Islamist terrorism. Israel, in their view, is a model for a future Hindu nation in which minorities, particularly Muslims, will have to know their place. This attitude has turned India’s traditional support for Palestine on its head. On social media, Hindutva supporters have been at the forefront of spreading Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian disinformation. Police in India have also been quick to arrest pro-Palestinian protestors, with as many as 200 students detained at a single protest in Delhi last month. In the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, the government banned all expressions of pro-Palestinian protest.

Free speech, and the right to offer your opinion, however contested, did not apply to either Hoskote or the pro-Palestinian protesters arrested in Delhi. Instead, they were silenced by a narrative that brooks no departures from the ruling party line — whether in Germany or in India.  

Argentina’s AI election

With elections in the United States and India scheduled next year, Argentina’s recently concluded two-part presidential election offers a dire prognosis — expect artificial intelligence to feature prominently. Both candidates in the run-off, Javier Milei (the eventual winner) and Sergio Massa, used AI technology to generate campaign propaganda. Some of this material was satirical, mocking and stylized, but plenty of it was also misleading. The potential is there to fabricate entirely convincing deep fakes in which a person’s image and voice can be manipulated to say and do things they have never said or done.

Should all AI-generated images now carry a disclaimer? Meta, whose social media sites Facebook and Instagram are major platforms for digital advertising, says that from next year it will require advertisers to declare if and how they’ve used AI. Meta also said it would bar political campaigns and advertisers from using Meta’s generative AI technologies.

Massa’s communications team told The New York Times that their use of AI was strictly intended as entertainment and was clearly labeled. But is the point of AI-generated content not to persuade voters that particular images are real? I’m not sure. I think what draws political campaigns to AI is the volume and variety of messages that can be created. The ease with which images are proliferated at scale means that voters will be provided with a carefully constructed picture of candidates and their rivals — one in which fiction is impossible to separate from fact.

Russia jails yet more critics

With so much of the media’s focus on Gaza, the Kremlin can get on with the business of jailing its critics in relative obscurity. Too little attention was paid to the conviction of Sasha Skolichenko, an artist who was arrested last year for swapping out price tags in supermarkets with anti-war messages. She was arrested just a month after Russia passed a law criminalizing any public comment on the war that contradicted the official narrative. On Nov. 16, Skolichenko was sentenced to seven years in prison. “Everyone sees and knows that it’s not a terrorist you’re trying,” she told the judge. “You’re trying a pacifist.” Since the new law came into effect, nearly 20,000 Russians have been arrested for protesting against war in Ukraine.

Just yesterday, a court in Moscow issued a warrant for the arrest of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a founding member of Pussy Riot, the feminist punk rock protest group. She is reportedly not in Russia right now and at least temporarily safe from the long arm of the Kremlin. Tolokonnikova spent nearly two years in a Russian prison back in 2012 for breaking into a Moscow cathedral as part of an anti-Putin protest. The crime Tolokonnikova is now accused of committing seems practically invented for Pussy Riot — “insulting believers’ religious feelings.” 

WHAT WE’RE READING:

• The Washington Post has been doing some terrific reporting out of India, shedding light on the contours of India’s increasingly undemocratic shape. In this recent dispatch, Gerry Shih and Anant Gupta ask industry insiders about Netflix and Amazon preferring to self-censor and pull out of politically and religiously sensitive projects rather than risk annoying the Hindu nationalist government and their fervent online troll army.

• There’s one more resignation letter that merits mention this week, and that comes from Anne Boyer. The now-former poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine writes that she would rather resign than continue to work alongside “those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering.” “No more ghoulish euphemisms,” she writes about the coverage of Gaza. “No more warmongering lies.” 

The post Stamping out hate speech or stifling free speech? appeared first on Coda Story.

Inevitably now, these stories are about death and displacement. Last month, Mahmoud al-Naouq, the 25-year-old brother of “We Are Not Numbers” co-founder Ahmed al-Naouq, was killed, along with several other members of his family. Mahmoud had just received a scholarship to go to graduate school in Australia. Al-Naouq is hardly the only local journalist in mourning. A correspondent for Al Jazeera was on the air when he heard that his wife, 7-year-old daughter, teenage son and baby grandson had all been killed in an Israeli airstrike. He is filmed, in tears, standing over his dead son’s body. “I suppose I should thank God,” he says, “that at least some of my family survived.”

Among the thousands of people who have been killed in Gaza are dozens of journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists says 42 journalists and media workers have been killed (as of Tuesday, November 14) during this conflict, 37 of them Palestinian. The CPJ says these numbers are unprecedented since it began keeping such records in 1992. Just as Israel is paying little heed to civilian casualties in Gaza in the course of its stated mission to obliterate Hamas, it refuses to take responsibility for killing journalists. The Israeli Defense Forces told major news wires including Reuters and Agence France-Presse that it could not guarantee the safety of their employees in Gaza. In fact, not only are authorities in Israel not guaranteeing the safety of journalists, they have been conflating journalists with terrorists.

Israeli government officials have openly claimed that Gazan journalists are siding with Hamas and are therefore legitimate targets. On X, Benny Gantz, a former defense minister of Israel and currently part of the country’s wartime cabinet, posted that journalists who knew “about the massacre, and still chose to stand as idle bystanders while children were slaughtered — are no different than terrorists and should be treated as such.” 

Based on scanty and circumstantial evidence, a pro-Israel media watchdog accused photojournalists who have worked for the wire services, as well as The New York Times and CNN among others, of having prior knowledge of the October 7 attacks. One of these journalists, Hassan Eslaiah, has found himself singled out. In 2020, he posted a photograph of him being kissed by a Hamas leader believed to have masterminded the October 7 attacks. Eslaiah also took some of the earliest photographs of the Hamas attacks. Both the Associated Press and CNN had used Eslaiah’s photographs but now said they would no longer work with him. “While we have not at this time found reason to doubt the journalistic accuracy of the work he has done for us, we have decided to suspend all ties with him,” said CNN in a statement. 

What evidence Israel has to denigrate and doubt the integrity of the journalists they threaten may be unclear. But what is clear is that it will be left to the consciences of individual journalists to stick up for their Gazan colleagues. 

About 900 journalists have signed an open letter dated November 9 that declares their support for journalists in Gaza. “Without them, many of the horrors on the ground would remain invisible.” The letter writers, “a group of U.S.-based reporters at both local and national newsrooms,” note that “taken with a decades-long pattern of lethally targeting journalists, Israel’s actions show wide scale suppression of speech.” This suppression is abetted, the writers contend, by “Western newsrooms accountable for dehumanizing rhetoric that has served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”  

In 1982, Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said wrote about “those who go on sanctimoniously about terrorism and are silent when it comes to Israel’s almost apocalyptic state terrorism.” Over 40 years later, almost nothing has changed when it comes to the mainstream Western media’s coverage of the conflict. As Israel flattens Gaza, the Western media ties itself in semantic knots — insisting, for instance, on using phrases such as “Hamas-run health ministry” to shroud casualty figures in doubt or worse, to do Israel’s job for it by associating all residents of Gaza with terrorism. It is, as the letter writers put it, “journalistic malpractice” to fail or refuse to tell the whole story. The people who are best able to tell the story and whose voices are so rarely prioritized are in Gaza, silenced by both Israeli brutality and Western media outlets still unable to shake their biases and narrative tropes.

Ukraine’s forgotten children

Russia’s notorious children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, has been inviting foreign journalists from the United States, Finland and Japan to visit camps in which thousands — possibly hundreds of thousands — of abducted Ukrainian children are held. In March, the International Criminal Court put a warrant out for Lvova-Belova’s arrest, alongside that of her boss, Vladimir Putin, for unlawful deportation of children, a war crime. But this has yet to stop them. And now they’re putting the children on display. A documentary that recently aired on British television showed how the children were often duped into thinking they were being taken to a holiday camp and then subjected to “re-education,” including being told to speak only Russian and singing patriotic Russian songs in front of inspectors. 

Attempts to portray life at these camps as idyllic will strike most viewers as obvious propaganda, but Lvova-Belova is not giving up trying to persuade us otherwise. In social media posts — which my colleague Ivan Makridin translated for me — she recently described the meeting between the journalists and the children as a “mentorship” opportunity. The young Ukrainians apparently asked their foreign visitors what they thought of the camp. “I like it very much,” Lvova-Belova quotes a Japanese journalist as saying. “I think your faces are all beautiful, cheerful and happy.”

When you know you are meeting children who are being held captive and who are not speaking freely while the press officer is in the room, why go through with it? While I understand the journalistic impulse of wanting to see the camps and meet the children, I find the ethics of agreeing to go on a guided tour dubious. Especially when Lvova-Belova is going to twist your presence into “proof” that these children are somehow better off at a camp in Russia than with their families. Back in May, Coda’s editor-in-chief Natalia Antelava criticized Vice for agreeing to interview Lvova-Belova and failing to hold her to account. Instead, Antelava wrote, Vice gave Lvova-Belova and the Kremlin “a platform to spin and legitimize their narrative.” This latest invitation to foreign journalists looks like more of the same.

India’s creepy deep fakes

Last week, a Bollywood film star’s face was attached to another woman’s body in a salacious deep fake that went viral. It caused outrage, at least in part because of how convincing the video was and how easy it now seemed to use generative artificial intelligence to spread mischievous misinformation. Celebrities, the government and national newspaper editors made public calls for draft legislation that would punish the creators of fake videos. But that’s easier said than done — defining “fakeness” under the law is harder than it sounds — and any law attempting to rein in this kind of material could pave the way for government overreach. It could also add fuel to the Indian government’s case against end-to-end encryption, since this kind of technology could help mask the identities of people creating deep fakes. If this should come to pass, the pitfalls for privacy and opportunities for mass surveillance will be significant, and could have much more profound effect on many more millions of people than a handful of salacious videos have had.

WHAT WE’RE READING:

• I enjoyed this lengthy meander through the origins of machine-generated text by the academic Richard Hughes Gibson. In the 1960s, Gibson reveals, the author Italo Calvino was already prepared to concede that the “literature machine” might match or outdo the human writer. What the machine couldn’t do, though, was replicate the reader and the particularity the reader brings to the text — the sudden associations and minor epiphanies. “Calvino,” writes Gibson, “anticipated the urgent question of our time: Who will attend to the machines’ writing?”
• The International Olympic Committee is hopping mad. A slick four-part Netflix documentary, narrated by Tom Cruise no less, reveals that corruption within the IOC is destroying the Olympics. Except, the “documentary” is fake: Cruise’s voiceover is AI generated and no such program can be found on Netflix. The nine-minute episodes were uploaded onto a largely Russian language-dominated Telegram channel, which unlike YouTube has not taken the videos down. Is it a coincidence that they started emerging after the IOC banned the Russian Olympic Committee for its decision last month to recognize regional federations in occupied regions such as Kherson and Donetsk? This inquiring mind wants to know.

The post Gaza’s journalists, caught between bombs and disinformation appeared first on Coda Story.

In the last incarnation of this newsletter, Coda’s editor-in-chief Natalia Antelava worked each week to examine the disinformation being generated around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Deliberate distortion of the truth had long been a weapon in Vladimir Putin’s arsenal, but the war laid bare just how ineffective we were at countering it. Fact-checking alone is of little use in the face of targeted lies intended to sow division and advance particular narratives. 

We relaunch now as the war in Gaza appears to have destroyed any lingering optimism about citizen journalism, open-source intelligence and the free flow of information helping to dispel disinformation rather than be hijacked by bad actors. In this newsletter, we will continue to scrutinize narratives and the way information is deployed by people in power.

I’m based in New Delhi, which is fast becoming one of the disinformation capitals of the world. We will be watching India closely, but the Coda team is scattered around the globe — in Rome, Istanbul, London, Washington, D.C. and beyond. The patterns of misinformation we will examine here are global as are their impacts.

The online discourse is dominated by unreliable narrators as never before. 2024 is an election year in India and the United States, and sophisticated disinformation is likely to play major roles in both. Understanding and shedding light on how narrative is manipulated and why is work we all have to be prepared to do.

Why India is awash with anti-Palestine disinformation

Talk of unreliable narrators brings us with a sad inevitability to India’s Hindu nationalist troll army. On Sunday, October 29, near the coastal city of Kochi in the southern state of Kerala, a meeting of Jehovah’s Witnesses was bombed. Three people died and more than 50 were injured. 

Almost immediately, Hindu nationalists — including those within India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party — went online to cast blame. At the time the bomb went off in Kerala, the state’s chief minister was in Delhi at a protest to express solidarity with Palestine — India’s traditional position, albeit one that is now contrarian because the BJP stands firmly with Israel. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet, wrote on X that the Kerala chief minister’s “shameless appeasement politics” meant he was “sitting in Delhi and protesting against Israel, when in Kerala open calls by Terrorist Hamas for Jihad is causing attacks and bomb blasts on innocent Christians.” Chandrashekhar, despite his important role as a government minister, seemed to have no qualms speculating about the Kochi bombing and assigning guilt. 

Kerala is governed by a left-wing coalition, making it a favorite target of Hindu nationalist scorn. Amit Malviya, head of the BJP’s National Information and Technology department, followed his party colleague’s lead. The Kerala chief minister “seems more worried about Israel defending itself against Hamas, a terrorist group,” wrote Malviya, than Christians being attacked in Kochi. Alongside the BJP bigwigs, a chorus of Hindu nationalists made their feelings clear.  

The day before the bombings, in another part of Kerala, a pro-Palestine rally had been held. Khaled Mashal, the former head of Hamas, addressed the crowd virtually from his home in Qatar. “Together,” he said, “we will defeat the Zionists.” Posting a video of the rally on X, a popular Hindu nationalist account drew a link with the bombing of the Jehovah’s Witness meeting. “Jews are targeted,” the account claimed falsely. “Do we even need an inquiry to know who did it???” Of course, Jehovah’s Witnesses are not Jewish and, as it turned out, the Kochi bombing had nothing to do with Muslims, much less Hamas. 

A former Jehovah’s Witness confessed on Facebook and then to the Kerala police that he was behind the bombings. The police are currently verifying his claims. But Chandrasekhar, the cabinet minister, doubled down. Quoting former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he wrote on X: “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors. You know, eventually those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in the backyard.” In 2011, Clinton warned the Pakistani government about harboring terrorist networks. Chandrasekhar used her words to argue that “appeasement politics” – shorthand for the supposed liberties extended to minorities, particularly Muslims, at the expense of Hindus – had somehow led to the Kochi blast. 

Blaming Muslims for the Kochi bombing, regardless of the facts, is in keeping with the disinformation techniques frequently used by Hindu nationalists. Hindu nationalist trolls have been prolific and persistent spreaders of false anti-Palestinian information about the war in Gaza. It advances their narrative that Islam and terror are synonymous and that India, with its large Muslim minority, is in the same boat as Israel. 

This is a new, specifically Hindu nationalist position, and it has never been the official Indian position. In fact, India, with its long standing desire to be a leading voice of the decolonized Global South, has always supported the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. India  was first among non-Arab countries to forge diplomatic relationships with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (as far back as 1975) and promptly recognized Palestinian statehood in 1988, after Arafat’s declaration of independence. 

It wasn’t until 1992 that India formally established diplomatic relations with Israel. In 2017, Modi became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel, signaling his desire to forge a deep friendship between countries that he said had much in common. Modi’s warmth towards Israel reflected both India’s relatively recent reliance on Israeli defense and cybersecurity products — spyware among them — as well as the admiration that Hindu nationalists have for what they see as a muscular state unafraid of militarily asserting its interests. Israel, Hindu nationalists say, is a model for their own dream of establishing India as a Hindu nation.

It’s an ideological position that helps explain why on October 27, India chose to abstain rather than vote, like most other countries, to pass a non-binding resolution to seek a “humanitarian truce” in Gaza. Sharad Pawar, a veteran politician, criticized India’s abstention as “the result of total confusion in the Indian government’s policy.” 

The Modi government’s official line is that it has suffered intensely from terrorism and now takes a “zero-tolerance approach to terrorism.” But Islamophobia is at the heart of Hindu nationalist support for Israel’s war in Gaza. And India’s Hindu nationalist trolls appear to be willing to tell whatever lie is necessary to advance their single-point agenda. “What Israel is facing today,” posted the official BJP account on X on October 7, “India suffered between 2004-2014. Never forgive, never forget.” 

This is politicized misinformation by the governing party of India. The years referred to span the two terms of Modi’s predecessor Manmohan Singh, the message being that without the BJP India is vulnerable to Islamic terror. Not surprisingly, a BJP member later argued that “Hindu nationalists see Israel’s war on Gaza as their own.” 

Past Indian governments have labeled insurgents of all religions (and none) as terrorists at one time or another, and terrorist activity in India far predates 2004. But it suits the BJP to act as if it alone can protect Indians from terror. By claiming that Indian Hindus are in the same existential struggle as Israeli Jews — both facing down Islamic terrorism — Hindu nationalists, including those in government, are advancing their narrative that India must abandon its constitution and become a Hindu nation. War in Gaza gives them the opportunity to use misinformation tactics that have been perfected in domestic politics on the global stage.

The BJP’s chokehold on information

Last month, the X account belonging to the Indian American Muslim Council was censored in India after a request from the Indian government. This effectively means that users in India will be barred from seeing any IAMC tweets, as well as those of the IAMC’s ally, the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Hindus for Human Rights. Both organizations have been critical of Indian government policies and drawn attention to minority rights and caste issues that Modi sweeps under the carpet on his visits to Western capitals. “We were not expecting it,” IAMC’s Executive Director Rasheed Ahmed told my colleague Avi Ackermann about being booted off X in India. “But we were not surprised.” By “complying with these censorship requests,” Ahmed wrote in an email, “X and Elon Musk have effectively abetted the Indian Government’s effort to expand its authoritarian censorship campaign overseas.” 

The Indian government is trigger happy when it comes to depriving people of access to information, shutting down the internet a world-leading 84 times in 2022. It has blocked the social media accounts of credible if critical sources, including journalists, on the grounds of national security. At the same time, the government ignores trolling and the spreading of disinformation by its Hindu nationalist supporters. And — in the words of Apar Gupta, founder of the Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation — has framed digital data laws to “enable unchecked state surveillance.” The Modi government is a disinformation triple threat. 

WHAT WE’RE READING:

• This piece by Nilesh Christopher in Rest of World is simultaneously funny and scary, though by the end more scary than funny. In India, Instagram reels are being made with voice cloning tools powered by artificial intelligence that show Modi singing hit songs in numerous Indian languages from Punjabi to Tamil. As Christopher points out, “the videos, though lighthearted, serve a larger political purpose.” By cloning his voice, Modi can be made accessible to parts of the country where most people don’t speak Hindi, the language in which Modi gives most of his speeches. With elections coming up next year, this could be a boon for him in south India, where Modi has little support.   

• “Taking a side in a war does not require taking positions on a work of fiction,” wrote Pamela Paul in The New York Times about the decision to not publicly honorthe Palestinian author Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair for having won a German literary prize. In a different life, I edited a couple of short stories by Shibli for a little magazine. When I reached out to her, Shibli was gracious enough to thank me (twice!) for my concern. As for the cancellation of the ceremony — we truly live in morally vacuous times.

The post Why India is awash with anti-Palestine disinformation appeared first on Coda Story.

An interview with Lvova-Belova is a legitimate journalistic enterprise but there should have been red flags the moment the Russian government agreed to make her available to Vice. The Russian government has massively cracked down on independent journalists, recently jailing Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal correspondent. Why was it so willing to allow Vice to speak to Lvova-Belova? Did the Kremlin anticipate that she would be allowed to make her case to a Western audience? What could have been a unique opportunity for Vice to challenge Lvova-Belova became instead a platform for an alleged war criminal and an example of how journalism can be used as a tool of disinformation.

“Are you a war criminal?” is the opening question of the interview. Lvova-Belova laughs. “That’s very funny,” she says. “I am a mother.” Dressed in white, 38-year-old Lvova-Belova is given the space she needs to dismiss every allegation against her. She comes across as polite, reasonable and driven, first and foremost, by her motherly instincts. She is after all a mother to 23 children, 18 of them adopted, including a teenage boy from Mariupol who she adopted in November 2022. 

In keeping with her self-image, her voice is steely as she talks about how little Ukraine did to safeguard Ukrainian children. And she smiles as she talks about her own “love” for Ukrainian children, including the boy she adopted. Throughout the interview, she is permitted to position herself exactly as the Kremlin state media portrays her — a passionate humanitarian concerned about children’s rights. When Lvova-Belova tells Vice that Ukraine did not arrange humanitarian corridors from Mariupol, the reporter replies that “Ukraine disputes this claim,” missing an opportunity to remind Lvova-Belova — and Vice viewers — that Ukraine couldn’t establish any humanitarian corridors because Russia was relentlessly bombing civilian targets.

In another example, footage is shown of Ukrainian children being wheeled out onto a stage to thank Russian soldiers for “saving hundreds of thousands of children in Mariupol” in front of a crowd of cheering Putin supporters in Moscow’s vast Luzhniki stadium. The Vice reporter asks: “Are these children being used as propaganda tools by the Russian state?” Employing her most reasonable tone, Lvova-Belova says the children were thanking the soldiers for “evacuating” them from a war zone. “Since when,” she asks unchallenged, “do words of gratitude constitute propaganda?” 

The interview is an extraordinary example of how the right mix of naivety and complacency can turn a well-intentioned journalist into a messenger for an authoritarian state. Good journalism challenges lies with facts, presents information in context and, yes, listens to all sides but not uncritically. The Vice report fails on all of these fronts. Lvova-Belova’s lies go largely uncontested. Context is scarce. And the Ukrainian side is gestured at but isn’t called on to speak for itself. Vice was also loose with the facts. In a throwaway line in the text that accompanied the video interview, Vice accepted that Crimea was a part of Russia. It later issued a correction, acknowledging that “Crimea is internationally recognised as part of Ukraine.” 

Isobel Yeung, the Vice interviewer, in a tweet promoting the interview with Lvova-Belova, wrote: “We feel it’s important to hold the powerful to account.” It is. Yeung did well to secure the interview. But even making allowances for the fact that Russia is not a comfortable place right now to visit as a journalist, what Yeung failed to do was to hold Lvova-Belova to account. Instead, Vice, which coincidentally is also headed for bankruptcy after years of mismanagement and scandals, gave her and the Kremlin a platform to spin and legitimize their narrative. 

WHAT WE ARE WATCHING: 

• Dmitry Kiselyov, Putin’s propaganda tsar, is very upset about the fate of Tucker Carlson. In his latest show, watched by millions across Russia, he asked who would “clean up America’s transgender garbage now?” Carlson has been a darling of Russian state media and his firing, according to Kiselyov, was “an example of cancel culture.” According to Kiselyov, Tucker was canceled for his attempts to save the United States from cruelty, greed and cowardice.
  
• As Sudan enters its third week of fighting, there is increasing evidence that the Russian mercenary group Wagner has been supplying Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces with missiles to aid their fight against the country’s army, according to CNN. But this nuanced discussion from the International Crisis Group on the situation in Sudan injects some healthy skepticism about Wagner’s possible role in the conflict.
  
• South Africa is pushing for a “virtual” Putin visit to solve the International Criminal Court arrest warrant dilemma. Moscow and Pretoria are engaged in high-level talks that could see Putin avoid traveling to South Africa to avert a diplomatic fallout over the warrant.
  
• Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and China’s President Xi Jinping finally had their long-awaited telephone call. China will be sending a special envoy to Ukraine in an effort to step up Beijing’s role as a “peace broker.” We covered Xi’s visit to Moscow earlier in the spring and explained why so many Ukraine watchers are skeptical about Beijing’s vague 12-point peace plan. This Global Times editorial, though, argues that China can provide a path to peace “full of Eastern wisdom.” 

And before we wrap up for today, make sure to read and tweet:

• Coda’s Amanda Coakley, reporting from Ukraine, as she explores how the LGBTQ rights debate is testing the country’s commitment to Europe.
  
• This thought-provoking piece by Alexander Wells on Australia’s search for national identity in the trenches of WWI and the warning Australian memory culture offers for the United States.
  
• This poignant letter by Financial Times journalist Polina Ivanova to her friend Evan Gershkovich in a Russian jail. 

The post How not to interview a war criminal appeared first on Coda Story.

From Nigeria to Kenya, news outlets across the African continent celebrated Russia’s decision to cancel Africa’s $20 billion dollar debt. The news was announced by Vladimir Putin himself at an international parliamentary conference in Moscow titled “Russia-Africa in a multipolar world.” Putin also spoke about doubling trade with the continent and increasing the number of scholarships for African students to study in Russia. But it was the debt write off that grabbed the headlines. And that story is fake news, a classic piece of spin and disinformation piled upon a tiny kernel of truth from the distant past. Many of the African newsrooms that ran the story missed the fact that this debt has been written off many times before. The debt was owed to the Soviet Union when it collapsed in the 1990s. Since then, Russia, the self-appointed successor of the USSR on the global stage, has regularly relieved Africa of the burden of the debt it owes to a country that no longer exists. This piece by a Nigerian analyst puts together examples dating back over 20 years of Russian officials generously forgiving Africa’s debt. The number cited is always $20 billion and the fact that it is owed to the Soviet Union is never mentioned. 

Russia’s charm offensive in Africa taps into the continent’s genuine disillusionment with the West, but it is based on false narratives and half-truths. Surprisingly, one person willing to call out the Kremlin on its duplicity is Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group, a notorious private militia that is closely tied to the Russian state. The Wagner Group has an extensive presence in Africa, particularly in the Sahel region, which stretches west to east across the continent. While Putin has been promising a bright new dawn in Russia-Africa relations, Prigozhin has criticized Russian officials for being all talk and no action. “French and other players on the African continent are many times, ten times, hundreds of times more active than we are,” Prigozhin wrote on Telegram. Some suggest that Prigozhin, increasingly outspoken about the Kremlin’s failings, has political aspirations and wants to project himself as a statesman and potential leader of Russia. 

PRIGOZHIN PLOTS POWER GRAB 

By: Frankie Vetch

Last week, Yevgeny Prigozhin was reported to have been trying to secure control of a political party in Russia as part of his long-standing desire to acquire political power and presence in Moscow. The question is, will the Kremlin further enable the erratic, unpredictable owner of the Wagner Group of mercenaries?

Prigozhin doesn’t lack chutzpah. Last month, he wrote magnanimously to the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, inviting him to “support Wagner PMC’s efforts in ensuring safety and security in Africa by sponsoring a new project named Wagner Safe Africa (WSA), in which you can invest, thereby saving American taxpayer money.” Yes, you read that correctly. The leader of an organization the U.S. has designated as a “significant transnational criminal organization” for its role in conducting mass executions, rape and child abductions in the Central African Republic and Mali has sent a request offering Washington the opportunity to invest in those very same operations.

Certainly, Prigozhin has been more successful in Africa than in Ukraine where the Wagner Group is fighting a long, bloody and costly battle over the eastern town of Bakhmut. A recent Bloomberg article indicated that he may be considering shifting his attention, and troops, away from Ukraine and toward Africa. Two confusing recent statements may be further evidence of his intentions. On April 7, he wrote about how Russia was far less active than the U.S. and France in Africa, arguing there was a need to change this. A week later, Prigozhin said the ideal option would be for Russia to end its invasion of Ukraine, claiming Russia had already achieved its goals.

In Africa, the Wagner Group functions as the Kremlin’s sword, providing military assistance where necessary, but also as the vanguard of Russian disinformation and propaganda. In December, my colleague Amanda Coakley and I wrote about how French-Beninese influencer Kemi Seba was helping to spread the Kremlin’s line on the war in Ukraine. A recent investigation conducted by several organizations, including the news outlet Jeune Afrique, uncovered just how deep the relationship between Prigozhin and Seba runs. The investigation reads like a script for a spy movie, with Seba assigned a designated handler, provided with lavish trips to Russia and paid thousands of dollars in return for spreading disinformation to his followers on social media, much of it designed to reinforce anti-French sentiments.

It is easy to see why many believe Russia’s approach is working. In October 2022, civilians and troops took to the streets waving Russian flags in Burkina Faso. By February, French troops were forced to leave Burkina Faso, after years of providing security, raising fears that, as had previously happened in Mali, Wagner mercenaries would fill the void. Anti-Western sentiments are growing. Last month, Burkina Faso suspended France’s state-owned international news channel, France 24.  

“Russia has won in Africa,” one senior European diplomat, who did not want to be named, told my colleague Natalia Antelava. But Rida Lyammouri, from the Policy Center for the New South, a Morocco-based think tank, disagrees. He told me that despite the Wagner Group’s presence in Mali and Burkina Faso, its overall influence in the Sahel region is limited. 

On a visit to Africa last month, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris announced a $100 million investment in West African security. Many countries know that if they work with Wagner, they risk losing funding from the U.S., which recently tried to force Sudan and Libya to expel Wagner mercenaries. But, as conflict erupts in Sudan, it might have been too little too late. The Wagner Group has been in Sudan for years, allegedly mining Sudanese gold, which now helps to pay for the war in Ukraine. And, down the road, may help Prigozhin finance a bid for power in Moscow.

DON’T MISS:

• This piece from Meduza that looks at the life of Vladimir Kara-Muza, a Russian opposition politician who fought the Russian elite, survived two attempts on his life and has now been found guilty of treason and “spreading fake news” (read: condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine). Kara-Muza has been sentenced to 25 years in prison.
  
• This piece from Reuters on a new proposed government-backed fact checking unit in India that promises not to silence journalists.

WRITING TO EVAN GERSHKOVICH

Evan Gershkovich, our colleague from the Wall Street Journal, faces up to 20 years in prison on absurd espionage charges. Evan’s friends and colleagues are encouraging people from around the world to write to him in prison. Thank you to all the Disinfo Matters readers who have already done so. If you haven’t, please consider it. Evan is allowed to receive letters, although only in Russian. But you can email your message to FreeGershkovich@gmail.com and it will be translated, printed out and mailed to the Moscow prison where Evan is spending two months in pre-trial detention. 

The post Wagner boss Prigozhin bids for more power in Moscow appeared first on Coda Story.

I’ll describe it to you so that you don’t have to watch it: One of the students in the audience asked the Dalai Lama if he could hug him. The octogenarian invited the boy to come up to the stage. As the boy leaned in toward the Dalai Lama to pay his respects, the Dalai Lama planted a kiss on the boy’s lips, then put his forehead against the boy’s, stuck his tongue out and said: “Suck my tongue.” The boy moved away while the Dalai Lama giggled and pulled him in for another hug. 

The Dalai Lama’s office issued an apology, and media outlets around the world were quick to resurface the 2014 BBC article that explained how sticking your tongue out, while rude in most cultures, is a greeting in Tibet. Lhagyari Namgyal Dolkar, a Tibetan activist and member of the Tibetan parliament in exile, stretched the bounds of credulity to “argue” that the Dalai Lama’s bizarre behavior could not be interpreted through a “vividly westernized” lens. 

At a time when the United States has been demanding that China restart talks over Tibetan self-determination with the Dalai Lama, this video is proving to be a gift to Chinese propaganda. The state-funded Global Times almost immediately argued that the video “raises concerns about the Dalai Lama’s private life” and that the only reason we don’t know of other occasions when he must have “asked someone to kiss his tongue publicly” is because of his “carefully crafted” image in the Western media.

“After decades of channeling funds to the Dalai Lama (via the CIA and associated organizations) as part of an ongoing campaign to weaken and destabilize China, will Western liberals finally feel a bit of buyers’ remorse?” asked a Western influencer who runs a pro-China platform called Friends of Socialist China.

But it’s not just Chinese propagandists who seized on the video to promote their political agendas. In the United States, right-wing conspiracy theorists have been pushing a dark fantasy about a pedophilic global elite, mostly comprising Democrats and Hollywood stars. Vladimir Putin echoed some of these themes in his rambling state of the nation speech in February, when he said that in the West “the perversion that is child abuse all the way up to pedophilia, are advertised as the norm.”

Unsurprisingly, on Twitter, if you search for “Dalai Lama,” among the top entries are tweets from accounts with names like “End Wokeness” and close to a million followers that compare Joe Biden to the Dalai Lama and use the video to encourage you to draw the conclusion that Biden, like the Dalai Lama, a celebrity darling, touches children inappropriately.

In Kyiv, A Spring Offensive is in the Air

By: Amanda Coakley

I recently returned from Ukraine following an assignment that took me across the country. At the dawn of spring, it was an interesting time to be there. The pride of having successfully made it through the winter, despite Russia’s targeting of key energy infrastructure was palpable among the people I met. In Kyiv, the spring air had returned the city’s coffee crowd to the pavements, the restaurants were buzzing, and at times it seemed the capital had returned to normal. 

But signs of the war were everywhere. The air siren continued to cry intermittently across the city, soliciting nods of indifference from residents unless there was additional evidence of a Russian attack. And talk was always there about the frontline. 

Two issues dominated my discussions with sources and friends. The first: Would Bakhmut, a city in eastern Donbas, hold in the face of mounting losses? The second: Theories on how the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive would manifest. On this, everyone had an opinion. It would focus on Melitopol, a colleague told me. The southern city has been under Russian occupation since February 2022 and is a strategic hub. Another source told me earnestly that they believed an amphibious counteroffensive could be on the table. “It might be like D-Day!” they claimed.

This environment of snap analysis points to a serious obstacle when covering the military side of the war in Ukraine — everyone is suddenly an expert. Strategic disinformation is a part of every war and Ukraine is no exception. When a major leak of classified Pentagon documents, which included intelligence on the war in Ukraine, made the headlines earlier this month, a senior Ukrainian official claimed they were inauthentic, had “nothing to do with Ukraine’s real plans” and were based on “fictitious information” spread by the Russians. 

The war is stress-testing journalists’ relationships with even the most trusted official sources, as a push-and-pull between protecting the war effort and documenting history plays out. Everyone knows the enemy religiously monitors international and national media, but it is still the reporter’s job to write the first draft of history. While being fed strategic disinformation is one thing, being steered to cover the need of the day is another. For journalists often starved of official information and, at times, military access being told to “stay quiet about any counter-offensives” one minute and being given access to report on ammunition shortages the next throws up the question of how the Ukrainian authorities see the role of journalists in this war. 

One example of this is the traffic light system on access to the frontline, which was announced in March. According to the guidelines, reporters would be prohibited from reporting in red zones, require the presence of press officers in yellow zones and work freely in green zones. Reporters without Borders pushed back. “Journalists are denied access to certain areas on a discretionary decision, while one of the major issues since the start of the war has been the dissemination of reliable information obtained thanks to journalists being able to work freely,” they said in a statement. 

On the ground there is still confusion around the traffic light system, and it has been removed from some official resources. The relationship reporters have with individual military press officers remains key.

Ukrainians have made a huge effort to keep the war on the international agenda. Overnight desk reporters have become war reporters, covering a war that is threatening their lives and the existence of their country. Combating the relentless tide of Russian disinformation has added to the complexity of this task. But the fog of war hangs heavy in Ukraine.

DON’T MISS:

• This fantastic op-ed by Maria Ressa and Nishant Lalwani that not only explains that “tyranny’s propagandists are winning” but also offers a solution on how to counter them.
  
• This scoop from RFE/RL about the leaked files that show how China and Russia trade tricks and collaborate on internet censorship.
  
• And this deeply awkward (and rather amusing) video of Vladimir Putin asking for, waiting for and failing to get a round of applause at a meeting with ambassadors in Moscow. It was so embarrassing that state media had to explain the silence, saying that “at protocol meetings such as this people don’t usually clap at all.” But that’s just not true. You don’t have to understand Russian to read the room.

WRITING TO EVAN GERSHKOVICH

Many thanks to all Disinfo Matters readers who have written to Evan Gershkovich, our Wall Street Journal colleague who is in a Moscow jail, facing up to 20 years in prison on absurd espionage charges. Evan’s friends and colleagues are encouraging people from around the world to write to him in prison. Evan is allowed to receive letters, although only in Russian. But you can email your message to FreeGershkovich@gmail.com and it will be translated, printed out and mailed to the Moscow prison where Evan is spending two months in pre-trial detention.

The post The Dalai Lama video is a gift to propagandists appeared first on Coda Story.

Memes and AI-generated images of Trump retiring happily in China are going wild on Chinese social media. People on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, are calling the former president a “Comrade Nation Builder” and say his indictment made the U.S. look so bad — and China so good — that he might as well just hang up his MAGA hat and join the Communist Party of China. 

On Sunday, the Ukraine war came to St. Petersburg when a bomb exploded in a cafe. Vladlen Tatarsky (real name: Maxim Fomin) was a middle-aged, pro-war blogger. A seemingly unlikely target for assassination, he was caught on video accepting a small statue as a gift at a meeting of pro-war conservatives. It was a bomb. A woman has since been arrested for apparently bringing the statue into the cafe. Tatarsky was one of the many obscure bloggers who rose to fame after the full scale invasion of Ukraine, turning Telegram into a major platform for war disinformation. 

TELEGRAMMING WAR PROPAGANDA 

By: Ivan Makridin

The recently assassinated blogger Vladlen Tatarsky liked to criticize President Vladimir Putin. On his fiercely anti-Ukrainian, pro-war channel on Telegram, he bashed the Russian president and other Kremlin officials for not being tough enough in what he described as a “Holy War against the Antichrist.” 

Before the full scale invasion of Ukraine, Telegram, run by the reclusive Russian billionaire Pavel Durov, was seen as a platform for Russian liberals — a “hotbed of liberalism,” in the words of the Russian state media. Next door, in Belarus, Telegram played a crucial role three years ago in the uprising against the country’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, Putin’s closest ally. And then the Belarusian government figured out how to turn the platform into a weapon against the opposition. 

Telegram has followed a similar path in Russia, transforming from an alternative platform into a platform for war-mongering and propaganda. 

Vladlen Tatarsky, who had nearly 600,000 followers on Telegram, was part of a new wave of bloggers who became popular for their gung-ho coverage of the war. They signposted their supposed independence by fiercely criticizing the Kremlin’s management of the war, although always from the position that Russia was not being forceful enough. But Tatarsky was definitely a tool of Russian propaganda, used to fan the hatred and misplaced patriotism driving the popular support for the war.

It is a strategy that proved to be remarkably effective. A recent investigation by the Riga-based Russian and English-language website Meduza revealed that the Russian authorities set up a front organization, a non-profit called “Dialogue,” and tasked it with sending instructions to individual bloggers and media groups on how to cover the war. These individuals — supposedly offering their unfettered, patriotic views on the war — were actually mere mouthpieces. Tatarsky’s channel was just one example. 

Another is a channel run by Readovka. Just a few years ago, Readovka was a small, regional and independent media outlet. It was hard to pin down politically but, as the journalist Irina Pankratova wrote, “never considered a pro-government outlet.” Since the invasion of Ukraine, Readovka has rebranded itself as ultra patriotic and is now enjoying more success, renown and reach than it ever has. Currently, Readovka has more than 1.5 million subscribers on Telegram.

Now, the Readovka feed, like many other pro-war Telegram channels, includes propaganda posts about the secret biological weapons allegedly developed and stored in Ukraine and about the White House forcing TikTokers to blame Putin for the rise of gas prices in the U.S. 

In exchange for their loyalty, Readovka’s creators were given the contract to supply winter coats from China to the Russian Defense Ministry and the Wagner PMC group. Individual bloggers like Tatarsky also received perks, including funded opportunities to embed themselves with the Russian military or the mercenaries of the Wagner Group. In fact, Tatarsky, like other bloggers, grew close enough to the Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin to start parroting the more radical sentiment that a timid Kremlin was holding back certain Russian military success with its tactics. 

Pankratova, an investigative reporter with The Bell, told me these pro-war Telegram channels are not homogenous. While they all have in common a blind faith and belief in the rightness of the invasion of Ukraine, they often disagree about how the war is being conducted. Some of the channels, she added, also employ credible journalists and produce accurate work. “But then,” she said, “the next piece will be blatant disinformation.”

As an observer of these channels myself, I am often surprised by the vigor with which they express disagreement with and disapproval of the Kremlin. These bloggers bicker and argue about battlefield tactics and about government funds being misspent and criticize both the Kremlin and Putin so harshly that I’ve sometimes wondered how they don’t get into trouble.

Perhaps it’s because they never disapprove of the decision to invade Ukraine, they never wonder if the war is wrong. Not surprisingly, a day after Tatarsky was murdered in that St. Petersburg cafe, Putin posthumously awarded him with the Medal for Courage, for valor displayed on the field of battle, even if that battle was being fought from behind a keyboard.

WHAT WE ARE WATCHING

• In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni’s son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who is a general in the army, has been causing his father a number of foreign policy issues with his erratic tweets. Last year, for example, he threatened Kenya with invasion. Now he is calling on Uganda to send soldiers to “defend Moscow if it’s ever threatened by the Imperialists!” His father is plenty pro-Russian himself, as we reported last week.
  
• It is quite incredible to see footage of hundreds of Russians being allowed to demonstrate. These rare protests in the Kostino-Ukhtomsky district of Moscow have not been broken up by the police or raided by security services. Of course, this seemingly government-sanctioned protest has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine. These concerned citizens are upset about the plans to build a new mosque in the area. Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov, the Muslim leader of the Chechen Republic, suggested that the protesters be mobilized and sent to the front.
  
• This Vice documentary is about anti-Xinjiang propaganda that hides behind young women influencers posting about puppies, travel and make-up. If you are more of a reader than watcher, here’s a piece from Coda’s archives on the same subject.
  
• This video investigation from our partners at Ukrainskaya Pravda tracked down the wife of Russia’s deputy defense minister spending time in Courchevel, the world’s ski capital, “while her husband orders attacks on Ukrainian cities.”

WRITING TO EVAN GERSHKOVICH

The arrest of the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich in Russia has sent a chill down the spine of all journalists who cover the region. Evan’s friends and colleagues are encouraging people from around the world to write to him in prison. Evan is allowed to receive letters, although only in Russian. But you can email your message to FreeGershkovich@gmail.com and it will be translated, printed out and mailed to the Moscow prison where Evan is spending two months in pre-trial detention. He faces up to 20 years in prison on espionage charges.  

And I also want to encourage you to read this piece that Evan wrote for Coda back in 2019, when he reported on Putin’s then brand new charm offensive on African nations. “To set Russia apart from the pack, Putin is leaning on a unique pitch: that only Russian support can help protect the sovereignty of African countries,” Evan wrote. A remarkably prescient take, given the extent to which Putin’s bid on the African continent has paid off since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

The post Russian keyboard generals turn Telegram into a pro-war propaganda platform appeared first on Coda Story.

“The Western values that reek of Sodom are rejected not only by Russia but by an increasing number of countries,” reads this editorial. It goes on to praise not only Ugandan MPs but also Hungary’s Viktor Orban and governments across the Islamic world which “categorically reject” the West’s “Sodomite agenda.” 

The law is a disaster for people in Uganda and across the continent where many are already pushing to follow suit. In Uganda, homosexuality was already illegal. The new law, though, introduces many new criminal offenses punishable by life imprisonment and the death penalty. In a chilling, Stalinist move, it also obliges friends, family and members of the community to report individuals in same-sex relationships to the authorities. 

Thousands of miles away in Moscow, politicians are celebrating a geopolitical victory, which they see as the direct result of years of their hard, methodical work.

It was about a decade ago that Russia began crafting what would eventually turn into a global anti-LGBTQ hate campaign. It began as a domestic political experiment, when Vladimir Putin, faced with growing dissent, looked for a scapegoat. Gay men and women provided an easy target.

Not necessarily a homophobe himself, Putin turned homophobia into a weapon to strengthen his rule. His government gave an unprecedented platform to Russian traditionalists and Orthodox activists to push for anti-LGBTQ legislation. 

In news bulletins, documentaries, talk shows and feature films, Russian state television was suddenly spending hundreds of hours equating homosexuality to pedophilia, and both to the lapsed values of liberal democracy and the West. Russians, indifferent toward homosexuality in the past, were told to have an opinion. The word “homosexual” or “gay” was replaced with “sodomite,” and experts on Russian television regularly announced that homosexuality inevitably led to incest and pedophilia. As my colleague Katia Patin reported in 2016, a once marginal idea that pedophilia was linked to homosexuality was suddenly presented as a scientific fact across the full spectrum of Russian media. 

Once the state media turned homosexuality into a nationwide emergency, Putin stepped in to save Russia. He positioned himself as the protector of traditional family values, both at home and abroad. 

The false juxtaposition of homosexuality with family values became the single most effective weapon of global Russian disinformation. Because who doesn’t love their family? Who doesn’t want their children protected? The message resonated powerfully among traditional communities in Russia but also beyond, turning people wary of homosexuality into true haters and vigilantes. It also gave Moscow incredible access to the Christian right in the United States, influence that would eventually lead to election interference in 2016. 

By 2016, the “LGBT” acronym became shorthand for anyone representing pro-Western opposition in Russia or neighboring countries. Putin had successfully weaponized homophobia to squash political dissent, exert influence on neighboring nations, bash the West and unleash violence in Ukraine. 

From 2014, pro-Russian fighters in eastern Ukraine would regularly tell me that they were defending Ukraine from “Sodom” and the inevitable invasion by “gay troops.” Europe, they told me, stood for “gender fascism” and homosexuality. “Would you want to be forced into a marriage with a woman?” one man asked in this film for the BBC. Arguing seemed futile. 

Almost 10 years on, these global reactions to Uganda’s horrifying law show that anti-LGBTQ rhetoric continues to be a soft power goldmine for Moscow. And now for Beijing too.

Uganda is among 17 African nations that abstained from a U.N. vote to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine. Of course, their shared anti-gay rhetoric is only a small part of the reason. Russia is a key military partner too. And Moscow didn’t export homophobia to Uganda. Arguably, American evangelicals and Uganda’s colonial past have played a bigger role in paving the way for the passing of this latest law.

But Moscow has played a pivotal role in creating a world in which a country can crack down on basic human rights without worrying about losing face and friends. Days after it was passed, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said he’ll be attending the upcoming Russia-Africa Summit in the summer.

Just like LGBTQ+ people, women make great scapegoats too. In Italy, rafts of accounts spewing hate against women in politics have aligned themselves with Putin, according to new research called “Monetizing Misogyny” by the women’s rights group #ShePersisted. And in Hungary, India, Brazil, Italy and Tunisia, the growing movement to target and delegitimize female politicians is bolstering anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion agendas. In the United States, the overturning of Roe v. Wade has forced abortion ever higher on the agenda. In Texas, for instance, lawmakers are planning to stop even the spreading of information about abortions, as Coda’s Erica Hellerstein reported. Combine such regressive legislation with silencing, trolling and doxxing women leaders, and it means we’re seeing gendered disinformation fly ever higher on our newsfeeds.

Jeffrey Sachs has recently been using his hard-won reputation as an economist to propel some jaw-dropping conspiracy theories. He is now a darling of Russian and Chinese state propaganda outlets. Recently, Sachs has been appearing on the talk show of Russia’s chief propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, who has called for nuclear strikes against NATO countries and suggested wiping Ukrainian cities from the face of the Earth. Sachs’ global renown lends authority to Kremlin sock puppets like Solovyov. A group of prominent economists have tried to bring their famous colleague Sachs back into the fold of reason. They’ve written an open letter to Sachs explaining why he is wrong. The dozens of signatories include many Ukrainian economists. It is a letter worth reading in full. We’ll keep you posted on whether it has any effect. 

China building its influence across Africa is old news. But we now know a bit more about Beijing’s tactics. New research reveals the systematic cajoling and intimidating of African journalists into printing positive stories about China, the training of scores of African media professionals and the filling of African news feeds with “soft,” happy content about China. These reports, says Arthur Kaufman at the China Digital Times, “highlight the CCP’s growing efforts at disseminating external propaganda” and show how China is increasingly recruiting local figures to contribute to the CCP narrative. 

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Beijing is already providing Moscow with crucial propaganda support. Chinese media fuels Putin’s narrative that Ukraine started the war. “Putin states Russia is Invincible” was one of the best performing hashtags across Chinese social media after it was initiated by the state media outlet Global Times following Vladimir Putin’s speech last week. Beijing’s involvement in the war, whatever shape it takes, could seriously alter the course of the conflict. Which is why, Ukraine, clearly aware of the delicate balancing act it needs to play, is downplaying China’s apparent siding with Moscow and U.S. allegations that Beijing is preparing to send weapons. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he plans to meet with Xi Jinping to discuss Beijing’s peace proposal. But Chinese officials have yet to make any public comments about a meeting with Zelenskyy. They have instead invited Putin’s closest ally, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, to visit Beijing. 

Xi Jinping is rolling out the red carpet for Lukashenko. His four-day state visit, starting today, is a big deal, another sign of China’s growing closeness to Russia. Belarus is a party to the war, having allowed Russia to use Belarusian territory to start its initial incursion into Ukraine. Recently leaked documents show that Vladimir Putin aspires to absorb Belarus into a “Union State” by 2030. Details of Lukashenko’s meetings in Beijing and what’s on the agenda are blurry, but the timing of his visit and China’s unveiling of its “peace plan” and its continued support for Russian propaganda show that Beijing is now firmly on Putin’s side.

NATO countries are no longer our opponents, they are our enemies, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state television this week, reflecting on Vladimir Putin’s speech and his decision to end the last nuclear treaty between the United States and Russia, which effectively also ended arms control as we know it. Russia’s global disinformation machine, in the meantime, seems focused on unfounded claims of chemical attacks by Ukrainian forces.  

As Russian artillery pounds eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin is rehashing the old, discredited accusation that Ukrainian forces are preparing to use chemical weapons. Throughout the past year, Russia has repeatedly warned that Ukraine might use non-conventional weapons, including biological weapons or even a radioactive dirty bomb. The claims, labeled a “false flag” operation by Western intelligence, have never materialized. Still, the “news” that Americans have shipped chemical weapons to Ukraine, which apparently arrived in Kramatorsk on February 10, is all over Russian state media and spreading like wildfire across social media. 

WHY DISINFORMATION IS ABOUT ‘SHITTY ENGINEERING’

So much of the disinformation that we track in this newsletter is only potent because of the unprecedented reach that it now enjoys. People, especially those in power, have always lied in pursuit of their agendas. What has changed is that the lies now spread so quickly and so far. 

For instance, the question of whether or not Ukraine is using chemical weapons should never be subject to debate on Twitter. It should be relatively straightforward to establish this truth as a starting point of any discussion. But our inability to agree on even the basic facts is rendering us useless when it comes to producing solutions to crises — be they global warming, the war in Ukraine or vaccine disinformation. 

Is this trend reversible? I spent last week with thousands of people pondering this very question in Paris, at a conference titled “Internet for Trust.” I often find myself at gatherings designed to brainstorm ways out of disinformation rabbit holes but the Paris conference was something else: 4,000 participants from all over the world gathered at UNESCO’s brutalist headquarters. The goal of the conference was to feed into the global guidelines that UNESCO is trying to put together in order to help governments to regulate online platforms and the disinformation that flourishes on them. 

During breaks between sessions, I overheard many delegates questioning the entire exercise.  After all, the guidelines the conference was feeding into were not exactly enforceable. “What good does it do for me, if Facebook can carry on spreading lies in my country,” a government regulator from an African country exclaimed after a session during which a Meta representative used free speech as an argument against regulating Big Tech. 

Much of the discussion felt like going in circles: How do we regulate platforms if regulators don’t understand the tech? How do we do it without affecting free speech? Is content moderation a solution? But how many content moderators does it take to moderate billions of internet users? I have heard all of these questions posed again and again, without much by way of answers. 

It only ever takes one person to say that the emperor has no clothes and in this case it was Christopher Wylie, a data scientist, Cambridge Analyitca whistleblower and author of the fantastic book called “Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America” who stirred up a debate during a panel on content curation and moderation that I chaired. 

“The fact that you need content moderation shows that you are dealing with design failure,” he told the panel that included representatives from TikTok, the Meta Oversight Board, the African Union and a prominent U.S. human rights lawyer. 

Wylie said the key piece missing from all the debates around regulating platforms to counter disinformation is the fact that at the heart of the crisis is “shitty engineering.” 

“I find a lot of these conferences frustrating,” he said, “because so often we talk about things like transparency, content moderation, the role of journalists and it’s all very important but we don’t address the fundamental problem that a lot of these issues flow from the shitty engineering.” 

“If you look at how we regulate every other technological sector,” Wylie argued, “whether it’s aerospace, pharmaceutical or automotive, we regulate through the prism of safety and harm prevention first. That’s how we regulate technology. But when it comes to social media platforms, everyone seems to have moved away from the fundamental line of inquiry: Why are you designing platforms like this? Why is it that there are more safety regulations for the toaster in your kitchen than for platforms that touch the lives of billions of people?”

If, like me, you are obsessed with the subject, I really recommend watching the entire session with Chris Wylie at the UNESCO conference in Paris — you can find it here, starting at around the nine-minute mark from the February 23 recording. And if you want to dig further still, check out Chapter 3, which he authored, of this 2020 report from the Forum on Information and Democracy. 

Why are we going in circles when it comes to countering disinformation on tech platforms? Why aren’t arguments like those made by Wylie cutting through the noise?

One reason: money. Big Tech has invested heavily in lobbying efforts while also announcing major initiatives to support newsrooms, and especially local newsrooms in the United States. Four years after Meta (then Facebook) announced its three-year, $300-million commitment to global “news programs, partnerships, and content,” Tow Center’s Gabby Miller looks at where the money actually went. Spoiler alert: “tracing this funding” was “surprisingly difficult.”

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To sum up: according to the Russian president, despite America’s plans to destroy his country, Russia has emerged victorious, overcoming all the economic troubles of the past year. The future ahead is bright, and it lies with Asia, not with the decadent, rotting West. “Look what they are doing in the West, pedophilia becomes the norm, priests approve same-sex marriage,” the Russian president said. “The West is proposing the idea of a gender-neutral God. Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.” (For context, the pedophilia myth has been cultivated by the Kremlin for a long time.)

Here’s a helpful summary of Putin’s one-hour-and-45-minute long speech, and here’s an alternative, shorter version by the Russian journalist Ilya Krasilschik: “1. He didn’t start this. 2. He started nothing. 3. But he could start something. 4. Everything that’s bad was done by the West, everything good by him. 5. But he did nothing. 6. But he could. 7. Because he does only good things while the West does all the bad things. 8. But he could do bad things too. 9. But he doesn’t.” 

As far as the war in Ukraine is concerned, the top headline is: nothing. The first anniversary just marks the end of its beginning.

BIDEN STEALS THE SHOW

If I had to pick one image to describe the New Cold War, or whatever you want to call the current geopolitical standoff, it would be a snapshot of the Russian state TV from Monday, February 20. On one side of the screen was President Joe Biden strolling through the streets of Kyiv hand in hand with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, air sirens wailing in the background. On the other: a portrait of Vladimir Putin, and directly underneath, a bizarre, red, 24-hour ticker counting down the hours, minutes and seconds until Putin’s much anticipated speech on February 21. 

A year on since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin propaganda machine had been busy enthusiastically promoting Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly. A tsunami of media speculation about the contents of the speech helped the Kremlin spread the word: Would Putin surprise us by ending the war? Would he stage a new assault? Would he freeze the conflict? Would he present the unimpressive showing of his military loss as a victory? For days leading up to the speech, I read as many takes as there are pundits on Twitter.

And then Biden unexpectedly turned up in Kyiv and stole the show. 

“Biden’s visit is an act of political hooliganism,” spat out one outraged pundit on the state-owned Russia-24 news channel. “We could’ve killed Biden off, but what’s the point?” pondered another. “Destroy Biden, and look at who’d replace him. Despite Biden’s dementia (fact check: he does not have dementia), at least he has some sense, you can reason with him, while she (Kamala Harris) has no restraints.” Here’s the link to the latter clip with English subtitles.

RUSSIAN SPIN: A YEAR ON 

No matter what Vladimir Putin says, things could hardly be going worse for the Russian military. They have almost no territorial gains to show for the jaw-dropping and humiliating human losses, and the infighting inside the war machine is now out in the open. Russia is losing the war.  

And yet, globally, the Kremlin has still been able to spin the dysfunctional, self-destructive and violent Russian aggression into a righteous battle for justice. On the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, here are three real stories that are feeding this spin.  

Russia has friends: Take South Africa for example. Just like the Russian tanks that rolled into Ukraine a year ago, the Russian warship, frigate Admiral Gorshkov, that pulled into a port in South Africa this week had “V” and “Z” signs painted along its sides. Having already test-fired hypersonic “Zircon” missiles, the ship is taking part in 10-day naval exercises along with Chinese and South African counterparts. 

China, which distanced itself from Russia at the outset of the full-scale invasion, is now considering supplying Russia with weapons. As Biden got on a train out of Kyiv, China’s top diplomat headed to Moscow after 10 days of meeting with leaders across Europe. China is clearly trying on the new role of international peacemaker, but Beijing’s deepening partnership with Moscow is raising alarms in Western capitals. Meanwhile, Putin’s focus on Asia is resonating. As he spoke in Moscow today, his speech was broadcast live by most major television stations in India. 

The global anti-war movement supports Russia: Russian state TV channels couldn’t get enough of this weekend’s “Rage Against the War Machine” rally that took place in Washington, D.C. The crowd looked thin as representatives of the American left and right marched towards the Lincoln memorial, holding “Drop Acid, not Nukes” slogans. Speakers included former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, Greyzone’s Max Blumenthal and former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, among many others. With the Russian tricolor flying behind them, speakers demanded that the U.S. stop sending weapons to Kyiv, disband NATO and join China and Russia in creating a multipolar world. 

The world has had enough: Growing apathy outside the West works in favor of Russia’s narratives. It is extraordinary how well Ukrainians have told their own story (in part, of course, by being incredibly brave and capable on the battlefield) and managed to hold the West’s attention throughout the past year. At the Munich Security Conference last week, Kyiv’s Western allies pledged continuous support. But it comes at a price. In much of the world, the Ukraine war is seen increasingly as Washington’s war. In Munich, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos warned that the West’s heavy focus on Russia’s invasion risks alienating much of the rest of the world, which is dealing with the consequences of higher energy and food prices. 

“Ukraine is sucking all the energy, when there are more than 100 conflicts currently in the world,” Juan Manuel Santos told the New York Times. “There is a dissonance here [with the global South],” he said. “And if this war prolongs itself, the risk of finding less and less support for it is very real.”

MARKING THE ANNIVERSARY

Moscow authorities have issued directives to regional governments on how to mark the one-year anniversary of the so-called “military operation.” Russian news outlet RBK got hold of the guidelines that include: 

• Lining up participants to shape giant stars, 
• Recording videos in front of war memorials,
• Holding arts-and-crafts workshops including trench candle making, knitting socks and mittens for the Russian troops on the frontline and sewing retro tobacco pouches, embroidered with slogans such as “Onward towards victory,”
• Organizing meetings between schoolchildren and veterans of Russia’s various wars, 
• Holding concerts.  

All of these activities will culminate in a giant planned rally at Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium on February 24 that Vladimir Putin himself is expected to attend. 

WHAT GRABBED OUR ATTENTION THIS WEEK

• This piece from Confidencial, a great newsroom from Nicaragua, on how the Ortega regime is using the Russian SORM system for spying.
• This rather scary read by New York Times’ Anton Trojanovsky and Valerie Hopkins on how Putin is crafting the Russia he craves a year after his invasion of Ukraine.
• This piece from Jon Lee Anderson at the New Yorker, in which he talks to Ukrainians, a year after Russia’s invasion, about the “existential” question of the “need to reassert a Ukrainian identity once and for all.” 
• This wild video of kids assembling Kalashnikovs in a kindergarten in southern Russia.
• Another video of Russians in the city of Blagoveshchensk gathering to show their support for the invasion of Ukraine by pouring cold water on themselves.
• This fascinating, analytical Twitter thread from Mark Owen Jones about disinformation in the wake of the Turkey earthquake. 
• And these memes of Joe Biden hanging out in Kyiv.

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And Seymour Hersh, a well known U.S. investigative journalist who made the claim last week, has managed to ensure that we may never know the truth. Hersh’s story is a case study in modern-day disinformation.

Published on Substack, a newsletter platform, the piece blew up like…well a bomb under a pipeline, claiming that the Americans conducted a secret operation last September to destroy Russia’s primary means of exporting its natural gas to Germany and the rest of Europe. Hersh’s apparently juicy scoop described a military operation that amounted to an act of war against both Russia and Germany, and was conducted with the full knowledge and active cooperation from the Norwegian government.  

Oslo dismissed the accusations, Washington rejected them as “utterly false and complete fiction,” and much of my own journalistic bubble reacted with an equivalent of a collective digital eye-roll. 

A Pulitzer-winning journalist, Hersh has in recent years developed a reputation for questionable reporting. Now he once again produced an exclusive that was full of holes: he made scandalous allegations, but based them on a single source. He told a coherent story, but lacked a smoking gun. The verdict was clear: Hersh’s explosive investigation was self-published, because it would never get past an editor?

But if we just dismiss Hersh’s story as bad journalism, we risk missing its impact. 

The story, tossed aside as not rigorous enough by many in mainstream policy and journalism circles, metastasized elsewhere, spread by Russian propagandists, American leftists and conservatives (“So many details in here, that it is not possible that it’s not true. It is true!” declared Tucker Carlson), Indian and Chinese outlets, Edward Snowden, Sky News Australia and even publications like the Times of London have picked it up. And I am naming only a few. 

Those who didn’t pick up the original story, like Al Jazeera, reported on the Russian reaction to it. (In case you are wondering, Russians agreed with Hersh). We will never know who Hersh’s single, anonymous source on this story was, but in the end, the product bears all the hallmarks of disinformation. 

“This is how disinfo 101 works,” says Emily Bell, director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University in New York. “A piece is published, it triggers a reaction. Media then reports on the reaction, further extending the lifespan of that original piece.”

The result: millions of people around the world now believe that the United States conducted an act of war against Russia. Even though they haven’t seen any actual proof.  

And millions more who will one day hear the allegation and google “Nord Stream pipeline” will find themselves lost in the avalanche of information that will either confirm their pre-existing biases or just confuse them further. Either way, truth and nuance are lost in the noise. Disinformation wins.

It is a poignant sign of the weirdness of our era, that this disinformation tale centers around one of the great legends of American journalism. 

I remember my first, brief meeting with Seymour Hersh in Beirut in 2009. I was based there for the BBC, while he regularly came through the city on his way to Damascus, where he socialized with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his family. I remember being taken aback by how close he seemed to the Assads, but starstruck nevertheless. Hersh was a hero, whose dogged, brave, incredibly smart reporting exposed the My Lai massacre by U.S. troops in Vietnam, a number of Pentagon cover-ups and revelations of U.S. torture in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. 

But by the time the Syrian civil war sent shockwaves through the Middle East, Hersh’s relationship with the Assads seemed to affect his journalism. In Syria’s ugly, bloody civil war, he took the dictator’s side, claiming — against all existing evidence — that it was the rebels and not the regime who used sarin gas in chemical attacks. Unlike Hersh’s investigations into America’s chemical warfare in the 1960s, his Syria reporting seemed to be based on his assumption that the U.S. government lies, rather than witnesses or evidence. 

In 2012, the New Yorker ended its decades-long relationship with Hersh, refusing to publish a piece about the death of Osama Bin Laden that challenged the official narrative. “We tried and tried, but it just doesn’t check out,” a friend, an editor at the New Yorker who was involved, told me at the time. 

A couple of years later, I saw Hersh at a journalism conference in Barcelona. He sounded bitter and disillusioned as he addressed the crowd and there was an awkward moment when he got booed for making a toxic remark about women in journalism. I was surprised — there was never a hint of any sexism in my personal interactions with him. 

Later that day, I watched reporters from Russia Today, Sputnik and some Arabic media outlets line up to interview Hersh in the corridor. It looked like he had found his new crowd. 

THE BIG PICTURE

We may never know all the details that led Hersh down this particular path. What led Hersh from being a hero of American accountability journalism to being a darling of dictators and their propaganda channels. It is a mystery to me how exposing the lies of his own government led Hersh to forget that other governments lie too. 

But, in some ways, the details of Hersh’s journey don’t matter. What matters are the details of how his now self-published stories travel through the digital information network and help create the global mood music. 

Hersh’s story illuminates the extraordinary power that platforms like Substack have when it comes to infecting public opinion with bad information. Tow Center’s Emily Bell believes Substack is particularly problematic because it hosts plenty of credible journalists and is “perceived as a legitimizing platform.” 

Substack prides itself on its hands-off approach to content and it has faced some backlash for refusing to tackle the misinformation and hate speech being published on the platform. But Substack mostly flies completely under the radar of any discussion about platform regulation. It shows why current regulatory efforts focused on particular platforms are a whack-a-mole game that aspiring regulators are bound to lose. The damage being done though is permanent. 

Objectively, the blowing up of the pipelines continues to be a mystery. Questions about the incident have not been answered. Still, different versions of history have already been written, and millions of minds have already been made up. “By the time the truth comes out, whether corroborated or debunked, there is a good chance no one will care,” says Emily Bell.

Before you despair about the state of the world, here’s the good news: this tale of Seymour Hersh’s Substack is also a reminder of, and testimony to, the power of the journalistic process. For all the millions spent on debunking and combating disinformation, one solution is the good, old-fashioned journalistic process — use multiple sources; attribute quotes whenever possible; and question everything. 

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Before jetting over to Africa, Lavrov was in Iraq. The United States’ war in Iraq has long provided fertile ground for the global spread of Russia’s anti-American messaging. The fact that no one has ever been held accountable for the U.S. invasion has fuelled endless whataboutery, lending a degree of legitimacy to Russia’s complex disinformation campaign against the West. This week, as Russian rockets continued to fall on Ukraine, it was striking to listen to Lavrov speaking in Baghdad and using the American invasion that was “based on lies” as a pretext to justify Russia’s military campaign. Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to Lavrov, is a struggle to liberate Russian speakers in Ukraine. While omitting the fact that it was Moscow that launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine, he accused the West of standing in the path of peace by constantly looking for excuses to continue arming Ukraine. 

It’s a foolproof disinformation recipe: select a couple of facts, sprinkle them with lies, add empathy and twist the whole lot into a narrative that sows doubt in the truth. No one can do this more convincingly than Russia’s 72-year-old foreign minister. “Our Western colleagues are determined to squash any sign of dissent in the global arena,” Lavrov said at a press conference in Baghdad. He found an attentive audience in Iraq, as he has in Africa. Lavrov’s relentless soft power campaigning is clearly gaining traction.

RUSSIA’S DIGEST OF MADNESS

This newsletter is a team effort. Every week Coda journalists follow and flag disinformation-related events that are unfolding in different parts of the world. We work hard at trying to offer you some geographical diversity, but the truth is: every week Russia wins. And every week, I am taken aback by the constantly rising levels of absurdity inside Russia.  

My colleague Ivan Makridin — himself a Russian journalist in exile — threw together a (very incomplete) list of a few things that caught his attention just over the past month. He calls it the Digest of Madness:  

• A mother of two in Sochi has been fined after a court found her guilty of “distributing Nazi symbols.” She was arrested at work and taken to the police station, where authorities questioned her about the status of her WhatsApp messenger profile. She had updated it to read “Glory to Ukraine,” written in Korean. 

• Authorities in Volgograd briefly renamed the city Stalingrad to coincide with Putin’s visit there late last week. They also opened a new monument to Joseph Stalin. A couple of hundred people gathered at the monument, only a short distance away from the now neglected monument to victims of Stalin’s political repression. This piece (in Russian) has some great photos of the event. They are straight out of the 1930s. 

• In January, Coda’s Amanda Coakley reported on the Russian “Council of Mothers and Wives,” an anti-war group that has criticized the invasion of Ukraine. On January 24, the Council’s founder Olga Tsukanova was detained at the airport in the city of Samara and banned from boarding her flight to Moscow, where she was going to address law enforcement about violations of the rights of soldiers. After her release, police handed her an administrative lawsuit for “discrediting the Russian army.”
  
• Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin banned Meta, but in reality many continued to use Meta’s platforms, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, without any restrictions. This could now be changing. In January, a university in Siberia banned its students from using Facebook and Instagram because the social networks are “full of Russophobia” and “threaten the constitutional order.” The university administration sent out the official order banning the platforms via WhatsApp. 

• Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, Putin still found time to further his fight against LGBTQ+ groups by tightening laws that restrict what Russian authorities label “LGBT propaganda.” This so-called propaganda effectively includes any material that refers to or discusses LGBTQ+ issues. But one feisty publisher called  “Popcorn Books” found a creative solution. They replaced  covers of their entire LGBTQ+ collection with a quote from the Russian constitution: “Freedom of expression is guaranteed. Censorship is prohibited.” The authorities are investigating and Popcorn Books now faces a legal battle. But it’s not the only lawsuit Popcorn Books is fighting. The publishing house is also behind what is currently one of the most popular novels in Russia, a teen gay romance set in a Soviet Pioneers camp. The book has been removed from stores and burned by Russian regional politicians, all of which only increased the book’s popularity. Last week, the book’s authors were labeled “foreign agents.”

• After a horrible attack on a Dnipro residential building on January 14, people in Moscow brought flowers to the monument of the Ukrainian writer Lesya Ukrainka to honor Ukrainians killed by the Russian airstrike. The Moscow police quickly detained those who attended the makeshift ceremony and banned passers-by from taking photos of the flowers. One of the visitors said the policeman approached her and said: “I know that you have the right to take photos, and I don’t understand what the problem is, but the authorities said not to take pictures, so delete the photo.”

• And the maddest entry in this Digest of Madness belongs to the Russian Supreme Court which upheld the sentencing of 16-year-old Nikita Uvarov to five years in prison for terrorist activities. According to the prosecutors, he tried to blow up a Federal Security Service (FSB) building….in a Minecraft video game. He was also accused of making real-life explosives, which he denied. The teenager said he would serve his sentence “with a clear conscience and dignity.”

What I find most puzzling about the situation in Russia, is how quickly the absurdities described above have become part of daily routine.

Indeed, many Russians, outside the journalistic bubble, tell me that life is “pretty much normal.”

“If you don’t watch the news, you can’t really feel anything is different when you are in Russia,” said an old acquaintance who lives in Moscow. He says that to retain some peace of mind, he has long stopped trying to closely follow events in Ukraine. “We need to protect ourselves from this insanity as far as we can,” he told me. 

The problem is that by protecting themselves, Russians are also protecting the parallel reality that their government has so successfully constructed. 

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“It can always get worse.” The Kremlin makes this point every single week, as it further tightens the screws around any opposition to its war in Ukraine. Last week, Russian officials banned Meduza, the country’s leading independent media from operating in the country. On one hand, the ban is meaningless — the Meduza newsroom has been operating in exile (in Latvia) for years now. But it does mean that anything the Russian authorities choose to see as cooperation with Meduza or its journalists — giving an interview, say, or even sharing a Meduza link on social media — could technically land one in prison. The banning order will make Meduza’s already very difficult job of covering Russia effectively impossible.

The war in Ukraine has sparked a diplomatic onslaught on Africa, as Russia and the West engage in a battle for the hearts and minds of the continent’s people. Regular readers of Disinfo Matters know that we’ve been tracking the topic obsessively. Last week, I wrote about RT’s aggressive expansion across Africa. And this week Coda’s Frankie Vetch caught up with Ukraine’s Ambassador in Pretoria, South Africa to find out what Ukraine is doing to counter Russia’s information offensive.

UPDATE: BATTLE FOR AFRICA

By: Frankie Vetch

Courting African leaders is the latest geopolitical game in town. Delegations from the EU, the U.S., Greece and China flocked to South Africa in January. But it was Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, whose visit got the most attention from the local press. It helped that Lavrov arrived in the wake of an announcement that Russia, China and South Africa would conduct a joint naval exercise in February, a sign of Moscow’s progress in building a global anti-NATO coalition. 

The attention Russia is paying to Africa has been high profile, focused and detailed. Russia even engages African influencers to push Russian talking points. The impact of this strategy has been extraordinary, especially because Moscow doesn’t have much to offer Africa. The EU, China and the U.S. are much more valuable trading partners. And African imports from Russia (mostly weapons and wheat) dwarf the continent’s exports. But the Kremlin has mastered the art of selling itself as the global bulwark against Western hegemony. Russia has monopolized the Soviet Union’s historic legacy of anti-colonial messaging and weaved it into aggressive disinformation and propaganda campaigns. 

Transparent though the Kremlin’s tactics might be, they work. When Volodymyr Zelensky invited 55 African heads of states to a virtual meeting some months ago, only four bothered to turn up.  

“What is Ukraine doing to counter all of this Russian messaging? What can it do?” I asked the Ukrainian ambassador to South Africa, Liubov Abravitova. She says she has put some Ukrainian books on library shelves and participated in film showings, poetry readings and dance festivals. 

Abravitova was keen to stress that Ukraine has been investing in providing humanitarian aid in the form of grain to African countries in need. But even this flagship “Grain from Ukraine” initiative has gone largely unnoticed on the continent, generating far less buzz than Lavrov’s visits, his op-eds decrying Western colonialism in Africa or the upcoming Russia-Africa summit in Saint Petersburg in the summer. 

Ukraine was, at one point, promising to hold a summit for Africa, too. Will this happen? Abravitova did not have any details. It looks like her bosses, under attack in Kyiv, simply do not have the bandwidth to think about Africa. Until they do, Russia will continue to win hearts and minds on the continent.

FOLLOW UP: WHEN PROPAGANDISTS ARE OUT OF COMMISSION

This week Axios had a fascinating scoop on a group of former RT America employees who launched a new venture in their old studio in Washington, D.C. Details are fuzzy, but the news made me wonder about the career trajectories of all the other RT talent the network had scooped up. What happens after the propaganda channel you work for is shut down? 

Take, for example, Lee Camp, an American satirist and host of an RT America show called “Redacted.” Back in 2016, when Coda was just in its pilot phase, we spent a day with Camp, who scoffed at allegations that his show was Kremlin propaganda. We learned that he came from the tradition of Occupy Wall Street and turned his show into a sustained critique of American neoliberalism or, more broadly, the “system.” He thought of “Redacted Tonight” as an activist collective. His audience members told us that unlike American networks RT had “substance.” 

Lee Camp stuck with RT for years and, along with his other colleagues, was laid off on March 1, 2022 when, following the full scale invasion of Ukraine, U.S. authorities ordered RT America to shut down. The archive of his show was taken off Youtube, his podcast was taken off Spotify. 

In an interview with China’s Global Times he talked about his situation as modern-day McCarthyism. He said he was opposed to the invasion of Ukraine, but… and then repeated, with apparent conviction, all of the basic lies that Russian propaganda has deployed to justify the invasion: Ukraine is run by Nazis, who run dangerous bio labs and serve the interests of war-mongering NATO generals. 

A year after he lost his job at RT, Lee Camp can now be found on Locals, a crowdfunding platform that “empowers authentic communities.” There, Camp, who brands himself as “one of the most censored comedians in America,” promises to bring his followers REAL news.

The post Czech James Bond, battle for Africa, Russia’s favorite American comedian appeared first on Coda Story.

RT France, Russia’s last official propaganda stronghold in the West, has shut down. The French arm of the state-sponsored broadcaster was the only one to survive the EU ban on Russian media within Europe, issued shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine last February. But the latest round of European Union sanctions on Russia led to the freezing of RT France’s assets and forced them to shut down. The Russian Foreign Ministry promised retaliation. But the ban doesn’t mean the end of Kremlin disinformation campaigns in Europe. Researchers in France anticipate that at least some of the RT French language content will survive through mirror sites and social media. 

RT may be shutting down in Europe but it’s growing in Africa, where the network is actively recruiting journalists across the continent offering “competitive packages” and an opportunity to join a company that provides a “true alternative to the Western viewpoint.” The quote is from an email that was shared with me by a Kenyan journalist RT is trying to hire. I have also seen WhatsApp messages sent to journalists across the continent from RT’s headquarters in South Africa. It’s an impressive, comprehensive effort. 

RT’s focus on Africa is also deeply strategic. Just look at Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s itinerary. This week, he is back in Africa after enjoying a widely publicized visit to the continent in July, holding what South African officials described as “wonderful” talks in Pretoria. The result of Russia’s intense courtship of the continent: South Africa will hold joint naval drills with Russia and China off its coast next month. South Africa’s foreign minister deflected criticism of the exercises on Monday, saying that hosting such exercises with “friends” was the “natural course of relations.”

Russia’s focus on improving relations with and garnering support from Africa is just one example of the global fallout of the war in Ukraine. There are so many more. We are gathering to discuss them with editors from Asia, Africa and Europe in Coda’s first open Editorial Meeting of the year on January 31. Coda’s members get an exclusive invite to the editorial meeting. Become a Coda member today and get an exclusive invite to Coda’s Editorial meeting.

WE ARE KEEPING AN EYE ON: CHINA AT THE UN

An interesting and possibly consequential conversation is happening in the United Nations. It fuses, in a scary way, two trends we are obsessed with: disinformation and transnational repression.

Here’s Coda’s Isobel Cockerell:  

For the past fortnight in Vienna, a U.N. committee has grappled with the gnarliest of concepts: just what constitutes a cybercrime, and how should countries fight and prosecute the criminals? Each member nation was allowed to contribute to suggestions up for debate. 

Chinese diplomats came up with a zinger, arguing that each country should legislate against and criminalize the distribution of “false information that could result in serious social disorder.” In practice, in China today, that means shutting down any critics of the Chinese Communist Party in the name of outlawing disinformation.  

“A Chinese guest star made its sudden appearance,” wrote Karine Bannelier, Director of the Cyber-Security Institute, who was following the proceedings and posting about them on LinkedIn. “This should be concerning for human rights proponents.”

More than a dozen countries moved against China to scrap the suggestion. Iran and Cape Verde were the only ones to stand by China.

China’s proposal is a huge red flag, showing us that the CCP is trying to bolster its stringent controls on free speech while claiming to be fighting fake news.

“It is another instance where China is trying to shape global governance of digital information to reflect domestic regulations,” said Bryce Barros, a China Affairs analyst at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The proposal, he said, shows how China has ways of trying to “move United Nations organs to model their domestic control of digital information globally.” 

He described how if the proposal was adopted, it could embolden governments with authoritarian tendencies to crack down on freedom of expression — simply by broadly defining it as false information.

DON’T MISS: 

• A jaw-dropping Open Democracy exclusive on how the U.K. government helped Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin mount a targeted legal attack on a journalist in London.
  
• This BBC investigation into the hiring of social media influencers by Nigerian politicians to spread disinformation ahead of elections. Read more on the February elections from Coda. 
  
• And our very own podcast on Audible. “Undercurrents: Tech, Tyrants and Us” brings you stories of people from around the world whose lives were turned upside down when digital technology collided with authoritarians. Give it a listen and tell us what you think.

The post China purges Internet of ‘sexy’ women and ‘overeating’, RT’s Africa plan, and UN debates cyber crime appeared first on Coda Story.

2023 will be a big election year: Turkey, Poland, Ukraine, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Thailand and possibly Pakistan and Myanmar — this is just the start of a long list of countries going to the polls this year. In all of these elections, local rivalries and politics will be played out on global social media platforms which — as Brazil proved — continue to be unable to abide by their own guidelines against violent content and voter fraud allegations. Instead, social media platforms are proving to be a boon for populists, authoritarians and their violent followers. Not even Canada is immune.

So is tech better for dictators than it is for democracy? Our team spent much of 2022 trying to answer this question in a podcast series called Tech, Tyrants and Us. Reported from across the world, it is Coda’s first collaboration with Audible and it’s now out! Check it out and tell us what you think.

And the winner is… Russia. As the Kremlin intensified its bombing of Ukraine through the holiday season, it also made sure to violently crush any internal criticism. The Kremlin’s approach to dissent is typified by its willingness to shut down the internet at severe cost to the country. This fascinating study of every major internet shutdown by a national government calculates their economic impact annually. 

Russia, according to the report, lost $21.5 billion (!) dollars for internet shutdowns in 2022 alone that have lasted 7,407 hours and affected 113 million people.  

This puts Russia way ahead of the other countries on the list. Iran came in second with an estimated $730 million in losses, followed by Kazakhstan with a comparatively modest $410 million. 

Overall, the economic cost of internet shutdowns in 2022 is up a whooping 323% from 2021. 

It’s not just about money. Internet blackouts also cost lives. When Kazakhstan hit the so-called “kill switch” last year, it fueled fear, panic and even deaths. But as Katia Patin reported for Coda at the time, thousands of people were able to get online thanks to a crusading band of expat technologists. As more governments reach reflexively for the kill switch, lessons from Kazakhstan will become ever more relevant as a counter.

WHAT WE’LL BE WATCHING IN EARLY 2023 

In Latin America: the growing popularity of Russian narratives across the region. RT en Español is now the third most shared domain on Twitter for Spanish-language posts about the war in Ukraine, according to an analysis by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Laboratory. There are similar patterns in Africa, too, where RT is aggressively expanding its teams and audiences. Russia’s deliberate policy of focusing its soft power and propaganda efforts on audiences outside the West is bearing fruit. 

In Russia: the continuous crackdown on all forms of dissent and the search for ways to punish those who have left Russia since its invasion of Ukraine last year. The most recent initiative is a draft proposal in the State Duma to confiscate real estate belonging to people who have left since the war began. 

In Nicaragua: the case against a prominent Catholic bishop and critic of the longtime Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega is going to trial after Nicaraguan authorities accused him of spreading fake news. He’s one of dozens of priests who have been arrested in recent years and one of eight priests accused of spreading fake news. 

In the Philippines: the case against Coda’s editorial partner Rappler and its president, Nobel laureate Maria Ressa (full disclosure: Maria also serves on Coda’s Board of Directors). The case against Rappler has dragged on since 2018, when the government, then led by strongman Rodrigo Duterte, attempted to silence Rappler by accusing them of various forms of tax fraud. Now a court in Manila is set to rule in the case against Rappler and Ressa this week, a ruling which is bound to have ramifications for press freedom in the country and beyond.

In Poland: the situation along the Belarusian border, where the migrant crisis continues, fueled by growing Polish authoritarianism, the war in Ukraine and fake news. Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza has put together a running list of disinformation narratives spread by Polish border police on the crisis. The main themes are:

• accusing activists of hiding migrants and not disclosing their whereabouts (which is now illegal),
• lying about the people migrating and
• trying to argue that most of the migrants are men, when in fact many women and children are crossing the border.

Wyborcza’s list includes disturbing accounts of the police assuring activists that migrants who needed medical treatment would be given care, when in reality they were taken to the forest and pushed across the border back into Belarus. 

DON’T MISS 

• “How to stand up to a dictator”: Maria Ressa’s new book, in which she brilliantly captures the real-life effects of invisible disinformation networks that envelop the globe. I am halfway through and love it. 
• “The invention of Russia,” a brilliant podcast by Misha Glenny and his producer Miles Warde. They nail it on Russian imperialism and why so many of us still can’t get our heads around it. (Another full disclosure: I make a cameo appearance.)
• “Undercurrents: Tech, Tyrants and Us”: Coda’s first narrative podcast reported from all around the world.

The post A warning from Brazil; Russia loses billions in internet shutdowns appeared first on Coda Story.

The piece attacked European policies in Africa and Europe’s position on Ukraine. The gist of Ozerov’s piece was sensible: African countries had a “sovereign right to choose partners,” it argued. But the tone of the actual pitch was counterproductive. “Our side requests to publish it in full without any edits, or cuts, at the earliest opportunity,” the email demanded. 

The newsroom turned down Ozerov’s offer, knowing full well that it was a matter of time before another op-ed from a Russian official landed in their inbox. 

“Opinion pieces like this come almost every day,” the Kenyan editor told a group of journalists, myself included, when we visited his newsroom in Nairobi last week. “Some come from the embassy in Nairobi, but also directly from Moscow.” How many Ukrainian op-eds had the newsroom received? I asked. The answer: just one since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine ten months ago.

From op-eds regularly sent to African newsrooms to private Russian militias gaining influence across the continent to high level visits by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to influencers spreading the Kremlin’s message across the continent, Moscow has been working hard on winning the hearts and minds of Africans since February 2022.

I spent the past week in Nairobi, meeting journalists and senior editors from across the continent to understand whether the Kremlin’s soft power and disinformation efforts in Africa are working. Spoiler: they are. 

RUSSIAN MESSAGES “LAND SOFTLY” 

Our relatively small gathering — which brought together a dozen or so senior editors and publishers from across the continent, a Ukrainian journalist, an exiled Russian editor and myself — was hosted by Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, a German foundation affiliated with the country’s center-right Christian Democratic Union. The foundation, which despite its association is independent from CDU, is a big player in media development in Africa. And it was concerned about the growing spread of Russian narratives across the continent, which prompted them to organize the conversation. 

In the room in Nairobi, there was plenty of sympathy towards Ukraine and plenty of concern about clearly malicious disinformation campaigns undertaken by influencers across Africa, but there were also compelling explanations as to why Africa is currently finding Moscow’s messages more persuasive than those being pushed by the West.  

First, it’s history. Russia has successfully positioned itself as the successor to the Soviet Union, and the Soviet legacy of support for anti-colonial movements is soft power currency that the Kremlin finds easy to convert. 

At our gathering in Kenya, Mondli Makhanya, a veteran South African editor, hummed the favorite drinking song of his apartheid-era youth: “Soviet people, lovely people, we are far away from home. We shall love you, we’ll respect you for the things you’ve done for us…”  

Although he says he has long parted with any illusions of a socialist utopia and is deeply sympathetic towards Ukrainians, the way the West advocates for Kyiv has been counterproductive. “There has been a lot of preaching,” Makhanya said.  

The Western push for an international “rules-based order” is meeting resistance because of a lack of reckoning and accountability for NATO wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. “You may call it whataboutism, but it is grounded in real questions that no one has answered,” one African editor said.

Russia’s message, on the other hand, “lands well and softly,” according to Nwabisa Makunga, an editor of the Sowetan in Johannesburg. The challenge for her team is to objectively navigate an overwhelmingly pro-Russian public sentiment and a widespread belief that Ukraine and its Western allies provoked the invasion. 

“There is a real vacuum of analysis and understanding of what the war means, and now our audience is less and less interested,” said Makunga. 

Without resources to send their own correspondents to Ukraine, many African newsrooms rely on Western wire services like Reuters and Associated Press to tell the story of the war in Ukraine to their audiences. But many have noticed a backlash against perceived Western bias of the resulting coverage. Editors from Uganda, Kenya and South Africa all agreed that audiences who are distrustful of pro-Kyiv narratives are looking for alternative sources of news to confirm their bias. These alternatives include Russian-funded channels such as RT and Sputnik.

RT is also popular because, as a channel, it appears to be more present and more invested in covering Africa than most Western newsrooms. “RT is the only one that has a bureau in Addis Ababa,” said the editor of a major Ethiopian newspaper. The editor in Nairobi who turned down Ozerov’s op-ed admitted that for him “RT was the main source of news on the war.” 

In our discussions, it emerged that the reporting of discrimination against African students looking to leave Ukraine in the early weeks of the war had a damaging impact.

“It was a story Africans couldn’t ignore,” said a Kenyan editor. “It really sent all the wrong signals and then the very effective Russian propaganda machine kicked in and built on that initial, anti-Ukrainian sentiment.” 

THE CONNECTIVE TISSUE OF COLONIALISM

Ukraine knows that Africa is important, and Kyiv has tried to counter Moscow’s message on the continent. Zelensky has addressed the leaders of the African Union and sent Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba on an unprecedented tour of the continent. But Ukraine is busy fighting for survival and its bandwidth for diplomacy is limited. Kuleba had to cut the trip short and rush to deal with an emergency back in Ukraine. 

Moscow’s messaging, on the other hand, has been relentless. In another unpublished op-ed that was shared with me, the Russian Ambassador in Nairobi Dmitry Maskimychev wrote: “If you look at the leaders of the Soviet Union, you will find two Russians (Lenin, Gorbachev), a Georgian (Stalin), and three (!) Ukrainians (Brezhnev, Khruschev, Chernenko). Some colonialist empire! Can you imagine a Kenyan sitting on the British throne? Make no mistake, what is currently happening in the Ukraine is not a manifestation of Russian ‘imperialism’ but a ‘hybrid’ clash with NATO.”

It may be an effective message. But it is also a lie. While there were differences in the way the Russians and the Europeans ran their empires, the result was the same: violence, redrawn borders, repression of cultures and languages and annihilation of entire communities. 

Ukraine’s line of argument in Africa can in fact be extremely compelling. Despite Russia’s pretenses to the contrary, Ukraine is fighting an anti-colonial war and, just as African countries have the sovereign right to make their own alliances, Ukraine too has the right to choose its future independently from its historic oppressor. 

But this is a story only Russia’s former colonies can tell Africans because when Africans hear this argument from the West, they instinctively distrust it. Perceptions of Western hypocrisy are a gift to the Kremlin. 

“If Russians are telling people in Africa that they have not colonized them, it is hard for people in the West to make the same argument,” said Daniel Kalinaki, the general manager for Nation Media Group in Uganda. “So the question of whether or not Ukraine is a colonial conflict gets lost.” 

African people, he added, “are sympathetic to the plight of Ukrainians. But this war feels sufficiently removed, sufficiently complex so that no one is really interested in drilling down, in figuring out who is guilty.”

The post The Kremlin is targeting African newsrooms. It’s working appeared first on Coda Story.

Every morning when I open Telegram, my feed is full of Russian propaganda. Unfortunately, when you’re a journalist, especially a Russian journalist in exile, you have to keep up with the talking points of the state-sponsored propagandists. 

Chief among them is Olga Skabeeva, who has almost 200,000 subscribers on her Telegram channel. In one post, just a few days ago, she wrote, and I’m translating literally, “in Ukraine, the sound of generators is the most common after the sound of ‘Geraniums.’” In Russia, the Iranian-made Shahed-136 kamikaze drones that are being deployed in battle are also called “Geranium-2” and are increasingly being used to cripple Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure.

Another example of the crass cheerleading I see is the channel operated by Anton Krasovsky, an openly gay man who sees no contradiction in working for the homophobic Russian government. Last month, Krasovsky called for the burning and drowning of Ukrainian children on Russia Today. He was suspended but I wouldn’t be surprised if he reappears on air sooner rather than later.

Faced with this sort of content on a daily basis, it is fair to ask: how can we hold these propagandists accountable when Putin’s regime ends?

There are historical examples. The most famous is the conviction and execution of Julius Streicher, the publisher of “Der Stürmer” newspaper. In the Nuremberg trials, Streicher’s incitement to hatred and violence was found to have been a crime against humanity. 

A more recent example of such incitement was RTLM from Rwanda, alleged to have been a propaganda mouthpiece for the Hutu, which broadcast such virulent hate speech and incitement that scholars argue the station played a pivotal role in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. The owner of the radio station, Félicien Kabuga, was accused of crimes against humanity. His trial began in the Hague at the end of September.

Anna Neistat, a lawyer at the Clooney Foundation of Justice, told me that the first criminal offense under which courts can prosecute Russian propagandists is incitement to genocide. “It is interesting that we don’t need to prove the act of genocide for this,” she said. “Even if various judges and prosecutors conclude that there is no genocide in Ukraine, the propagandists can still be found guilty of inciting genocide.” 

Another way might be to prosecute journalists for writing and publishing war propaganda. Some criminal codes in Eastern European countries include such provisions — ironically, a residue from Soviet times.

Criminal prosecution of propagandists primarily applies to those with a large audience and influence over the mood of the army and the people of Russia. Charges like these are unlikely to affect editors and support staff who have little option but to carry out the tasks assigned to them on state-backed channels. The knowledge that they are not in immediate danger of prosecution, though, might motivate them to testify.

As Neistat pointed out: “Whoever starts talking first has a better chance of ending up as a witness rather than in the dock.”

The original conversation with Anna Neistat ran as part of Coda’s Russian language podcast by Ivan Makridin. Make sure to check it out.

IN GLOBAL NEWS

Elon Musk looked to cement his position as the crown prince of disinformation this week with the summary dismissal of Twitter’s advisory Trust and Safety Council. The council, made up of several dozen independent organizations, many of them civil and human rights watchdogs, was informed by email before it was supposed to meet on Monday. “Our work to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressively than ever before,” the council members were told, but that the council itself “is not the best structure to do this.” Safeguards against hateful and harmful speech have been removed with no alternative structures, except bluster, put in place. The result has been a measurable rise in violent speech. Musk himself is a participant in that violence. As Jodie Ginsberg, the president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, one of the organizations on the now disbanded Trust and Safety Council, said: “Safety online can mean survival offline.”

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has argued with success in a French court that regulators should not be allowed to plead helplessness when faced with platforms that knowingly purvey disinformation. The French administrative court said that it was legally dubious for regulators to claim that they could not stop a satellite service from carrying Russian channels that spread state propaganda. “This decision is a victory,” said RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire, “for the fight against the Kremlin’s war propaganda.” Just last week, the RSF described the Latvian government’s decision to ban the independent Russian channel Dozhd as “shameful” and “inexplicable.” It’s not contradictory though to call the banning of a channel “disturbing” one week and then call for the banning of channels the next week — it’s about the difference between reporting and intent and deliberate disinformation.

As for deliberate disinformation: Vladimir Putin appears to have passed on an opportunity to present Russia’s worldview in his annual December press conference. Perhaps even Putin feels that now that criticism of the war in Ukraine is punishable with a jail term and that there is no independent media left in Moscow, a press conference would be a farce too far. It’s also likely that Putin doesn’t want to expose himself to uncomfortable questions about a war that is going slowly but inexorably wrong. Instead, as you will see below, it is being left to Putin’s cheerleaders on Telegram to spread Russian disinformation.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• This is an intriguing if sometimes wrongheaded analysis in the Global Times of European “chaos,” particularly the UK’s descent from “perfidious Albion” to an “almost an international laughing stock,” as a byproduct of America’s “pursuit of cold war policies against China.” The writer, John Ross, is an academic based in China.

• Pakistani investigators have released a 600-page report that suggests that the death of journalist Arshad Sharif in Kenya in October was, in fact, a premeditated murder. Kenyan officials had suggested it was a case of mistaken identity. But, said the Pakistani fact-finders, it “is more probable that the firing was done, after taking proper aim, at a stationary vehicle.” Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan has said Sharif was assassinated for his journalistic work.

• And with Croatia playing Argentina in the World Cup semi-final today, this is a reflection by former player Slaven Bilic in The Athletic on the “mentality” and “independent thinking” that has enabled a tiny country to reach three semi-finals (including at least one final) in just six World Cup appearances. 

The post Russian propagandists could be tried in the Hague, Putin ducks annual press meet, and Musk enables abuse appeared first on Coda Story.

Dozhd has been working in exile ever since Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February and effectively banished all journalism in Russia by imposing a blanket ban on the use of the word “war.” Dozhd, already classified in Russia as a “foreign agent” was ordered to shut down. Its team, like many other Russian journalists, moved to the Latvian capital Riga, where they were initially welcomed by the government. 

The honeymoon was short. Soon after re-launching from Latvia, Dozhd was fined over $10,000 for using a map of Russia that included Crimea, annexed from Ukraine. Then, last week, a presenter referred to the Russian armed forces as “our army.”

The presenter, Aleksy Korostelev was asking viewers, and particularly those who are part of the Russian army, to pass on information about conditions in the armed forces. A legitimate request, except for the kicker that he blurted out at the end: “We hope we also helped many military personnel, namely by assisting with equipment and bare essentials on the front line.”

It caused an uproar. The presenter was immediately sacked. The channel’s management issued an apology. 

But the Latvian authorities took the nuclear option and banned the channel. 

CONTEXT: Latvia is a small and nervous nation, its right to exist constantly tested by its aggressive neighbor Russia. It is also home to a large Russian-speaking population that the Kremlin has historically manipulated. 

After the invasion of Ukraine,  international broadcasters, like the BBC and Radio Free Europe set up their Russia operations in Latvia. It made sense for Dozhd to pick Riga, too.  

But, says one global media executive, “choosing Latvia as a base for Russian-speaking media was a mistake that both Russian and international media companies made.”  He says that it was always clear that playing host to a large number of journalists from a hostile country was an imposition on small Latvia that would, inevitably, backfire. “They should have gone to Western Europe,” he told me. 

Latvia was clearly unprepared for the reality of hosting Russian journalists. Officials grew increasingly nervous about possible infiltration of agents under journalistic cover. And they overreacted.

“Dozhd made a horrendous mistake, but the ban is unacceptable and counterproductive,” says the executive I spoke to.

The channel, he argues, has made itself an easy target. Dozhd has a significant audience inside Russia who watch it to get an alternative to the poisonous hatred that is beamed at them from the screens of Russian state TV. 

But Dozhd’s popularity in Russia also means that the channel has been trying to walk an incredibly thin, near-impossible line between being completely opposed to the war in Ukraine and being able to appeal to the average Russian who supports it. 

And then there is the constant stream of complaints about their arrogance. The latest came from the head of Latvia’s regulation authority, who imposed the ban on Dozhd and who is, according to local reports, annoyed that the station’s representatives turned up for their court hearing without an interpreter, “assuming that the hearing would be in Russian.” It had to be postponed. 

REACTIONS TO THE BAN could not have been more polarized:

• Many Ukrainians, who scrutinize all Russian media very closely, are pleased. “Dozhd has always been imperial in its attitudes, they always reflected opinions of the Russian establishment. They did not oppose annexation of Crimea, for example,” a senior Ukrainian media executive in Kyiv told me. 

• Most Russian liberal journalists I speak to, though, are both angry and worried. Unable to practice journalism in Russia, they now find themselves in an extremely vulnerable position, relying almost entirely on the goodwill of the very few countries that are willing to host them. The suspension sets a dangerous precedent. “It makes us wonder who is next, but it also pushes us into self-censorship,” one told me.

• Many Latvians do not agree with the ban and feel it undermines the democratic values they have been working hard to build. “We will not be quiet, we will fight for the rights of journalists and independent media,” one senior Latvian journalist wrote in a chat that was shared with me privately. 

• The Kremlin officials are… thrilled. “They think they are better off there than at home. And they think there is no freedom here but there is freedom there. This is a shiny example of their mistaken illusions,” said (link in Russian) Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.  “No one likes traitors,” posted (link in Russian) Vladimir Solovyov, one of the Kremlin’s chief propagandists, on his Telegram.  

WHY IT MATTERS: This is a huge propaganda win for Russia in the war against Ukraine. And it massively undermines Western attempts to counter the Russian narrative.

“They are an asset,” says a source in a global newsroom devoted to countering Russian propaganda. “Most of their coverage is critical of Putin’s regime and his war. And they have an audience that follows them. Pushing them away means pushing away the audience whom you desperately need to convince that what Putin is doing in Ukraine is criminal. By undermining their operation you are undermining yourself.” 

Banning Dozhd also undermines Russian independent journalism. Today, almost all of it is produced entirely in exile. While its impact on Vladimir Putin and his decisions might be negligible right now, reporters working to tell real stories of what is happening in Ukraine to audiences inside Russia are laying the bricks for the conversation that will have to happen once the war is over. 

IN OTHER GLOBAL NEWS: 

No one is immune from mistakes. “Iran has abolished its morality police,” read a New York Times headline. “No more arrests for flouting dress code,” reported the Associated Press. Both were wrong. Iran hasn’t abolished its notorious morality police. The stories in these and other major outlets were based on the vague remarks of a single official in Tehran, as explained here. Iranian activists are outraged, especially because only recently the media picked up a fake story about alleged death sentences being handed to thousands of activists. Why is Western media falling for disinformation peddled by the Iranian regime, some are asking. Human error and sloppy reporting are likely explanations but not an excuse. A story that sows doubt and distrust adds to the head-spinning disinformation crisis. The result of an accidental lie can be just as damaging as that of an intentional one.  

One billion. That’s how many people have watched TikTok Videos that promote Russian mercenaries, the Wagner Group. Newsguard found that despite platform rules TikTok hosts hundreds of videos that use violence and music that celebrate the Wagner group. 

The post Kremlin thrilled by Latvia’s decision to ban Dozhd TV appeared first on Coda Story.

The protests in China cannot be explained as “just pent up frustration from three years of Covid lockdowns,” writes Politico Europe’s editor-in-Chief Jamil Anderlini. Or as just the fruits of a decade of steadily worsening repression. The protests are “also the result of a propaganda and information control system that has been all too successful until now.” The emphasis on control, Anderlini argues, is working against “Xi and his minions.” Anderlini, who spent two decades reporting on China, writes that by “turning the Chinese internet into a giant, sanitized, intranet, and without the ultimate barometer of public opinion – elections – they deny themselves proper intelligence on the mood of the masses.” 

It’s not just in China, where authoritarians, as Anderlini puts it, “get high on their own supply.”  This year, Russia became a potent example of how a state’s propaganda efforts can lead to self-delusion. For the past decade, much of the Kremlin’s propaganda has been focused on building an image of a state-of-the-art Russian army. It helps sell Russian weapons. But maybe the Kremlin started to believe its own propaganda, the lies that have been shattered in Ukraine. Its response has been to pump out more lies, isolating itself from the public mood and hampering its own ability to acknowledge and learn from failure. 

“Between Iran, China and Russia, I am hoping for a better era,” a friend messaged me this morning from Beirut, looking for signs that the end of authoritarianism in these three countries is nigh. The message came just as I finished reading an opinion piece (link in Russian) that expressed a hopefulness that mirrored my friend’s — except from the polar opposite viewpoint. The author of the piece, a Kremlin-based analyst, saw signs in the protests in China and Iran of an end to “Western hegemony.” 

Worried about the prospects of a Russian victory in Ukraine, the author theorized, the West was playing the “pro-democracy protests” card in Iran and China. The author noted approvingly that Putin’s decision to crack down on dissent inside the country ensured that no foreign meddling would happen in Russia. This myth of protests being caused by outside meddling is a favorite trope of authoritarians because it is potent, playing on people’s innate suspicion of outsiders.  

IRELAND’S HOLODOMOR DILEMMA

By: Amanda Coakley

On November 24, Seanad Eireann, the upper house of Ireland’s parliament, moved to recognize the Holodomor “as a genocide of the Ukrainian people.” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba was quick to link Ireland and Ukraine’s history of famine. “Having survived the Great Hunger in the past, Ireland knows the horror of starvation and shares our pain,” he said. Kuleba was echoing the Irish Taoiseach, or Prime Minister, Micheál Martin. During Martin’s first visit to Kyiv in July, he said Ukraine and Ireland “know the suffering and pain of famine.” Weeks later Martin said that Ireland should take a lead on food security in Europe and the United Nations. 

Earlier, in April, an Irish commentator wrote in the country’s national newspaper that the “Irish and Ukrainian experience of politically motivated famine under imperial rule” was a parallel between the two states almost a century apart. “Should Ukraine recognize the British orchestrated famine in Ireland as a genocide,” one Twitter user asked in a poll. Over 95% of his followers said “Yes.”

But this view omits several key differences. Ireland’s Great Hunger was mainly caused by a blight that gripped the country’s most dependable crop, the potato. In Ukraine, the Holodomor was a strictly man-made famine caused by Stalin’s forced collectivization policies. Across the island of Ireland throughout 1845-1851 forced evictions did occur but throughout 1932-1933 thousands of Ukrainians faced arrest, execution and deportation to the Gulag. 

Another difference put forward by historian Liam Kennedy is that in 19th century Ireland, London tried, if rather unsuccessfully, to fight hunger and provide aid, an approach very different to the Stalinist regime in Ukraine. Finally, although figures like Tim Pat Coogan have called for the Irish Famine to be labeled a genocide, there is no appetite among the Irish population for such a move, mainly due to the amount of rigorous scholarship that exists on the subject. 
For Ukraine though, the Holomodor, long repressed in the public memory, has become a rallying cry. “Once they wanted to destroy us with hunger,” wrote Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky on Telegram, “now with darkness and cold.”

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Chief among the dignitaries at the opening ceremony for the Qatar World Cup was Saudi Arabia’s thuggish crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman. There has been little love lost of late between the Qataris and Saudis and his presence appeared to suggest a reconciliation. U.S. President Joe Biden also appears to have reconciled with MBS and Saudi Arabia, which he once described as a pariah state. MBS, though, has little respect for Joe Biden. Just last month, the Saudi foreign minister had to deny that MBS told his aides that he preferred Trump. But Biden shows no sign of being offended. In a remarkable about-turn, his administration told a U.S. court last week that as a “sitting head of government” MBS should be immune from civil court proceedings over the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. “Jamal died again today,” tweeted Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancee, when the news broke. By shielding MBS from prosecution, Biden has abandoned the U.S. promise to bring the killers to justice. Wonder if he and MBS exchanged another fist bump? 

Both Biden and MBS were at the G-20 summit in Bali this month, though apparently no meeting was planned. Despite Russia’s presence, in the form of foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, leading to some awkwardness, the world’s leaders were able to unite to make a rare joint statement on the war in Ukraine. Signed after Lavrov left the summit early, the joint declaration suggests that Xi Jinping doesn’t want to be left out in the cold with an increasingly isolated Putin. That said, in the talks leading up to the G-20’s final message, China objected to calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “war.” And the statement, while condemning the war, did acknowledge that “there were other views and different assessments of the situation and sanctions.” Still, China did sign off on the united declaration that “today’s era must not be of war.” A line, incidentally, that the People’s Daily left out when it reprinted the joint statement. 

A CHINESE THANKSGIVING 

by Isobel Cockerell

Chairman Mao’s eldest son has been trending on Weibo. It was his 100th birthday in October — and a massive state-led media campaign was launched to celebrate Mao Anying’s heroism. He was famously killed in an American air strike fighting for North Korea in the Korean War. But one story about his death that does not find mention in the official tributes is the urban legend that he died because he was illegally cooking egg fried rice. The smoke apparently alerted the enemy. 

Some people quietly call November 25, the anniversary of Anying’s untimely death, “Chinese Thanksgiving.” Others make egg fried rice to celebrate the occasion as a subversive act of protest. “Mao Anying + Egg Fried Rice” is a censored search term in China. 

Last year, Global Times branded the egg fried rice story an example of “historical nihilism” and declared it a vicious rumor. A Sichuanese viral YouTube chef posted a Yangzhou-style fried rice video around the time of Anying’s birthday and was accused of “humiliating China.” But “I was only sharing delicious food,” the chef wrote. “I didn’t mean anything else by it.” In the name of journalism, we’ve tried his recipe ourselves — and can confirm it’s very tasty.

WHAT WE ARE READING:

• This fascinating dispatch from the Maga “Reawaken America” tour. The writer describes “the movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation” which is “driven by a prophetic certainty that God is commanding them to establish a militant Christian theocracy in the United States.” The movement “is no longer confined to the fringes of American religious and political life.” The tour, he notes, “has already visited 16 US cities, drawing sold-out crowds at every stop, with regularly priced tickets ranging between $250 and $500.” 

• This excellent twitter thread from Marc Owen Jones, one of our go-to disinformation experts, about disinformation and the World Cup in Qatar.
• This piece in the Wired magazine about how disinformation researchers who have spent years asking Twitter to remove toxic and fake posts have no one to talk to.
• This very interesting piece from Meduza about Evgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group, who has recently been speaking out against the Russian elite. Meduza’s reporting suggests that this is part of his covert bid for power in Putin’s increasingly unstable Russia and that he is drawing lessons and inspiration from the jailed Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexey Navalny. 

The post US will not allow MBS to be tried over Khashoggi murder, G20’s joint call for peace and China censors egg fried rice protests appeared first on Coda Story.

Meanwhile the G-20 hosts seem eager to appease the Kremlin. According to this Politico exclusive, the Indonesian authorities have softened their stance towards Russia and have tried to persuade Western countries to tone down theirs to give the summit at least the appearance of global cooperation. The prickly atmosphere of this year’s G-20 is emphasized by the abandonment of the traditional family photo of the leaders together. Instead fake bonhomie is being extended in individual greetings, so that the watching world will not have to wonder how much distance Western leaders will be able to put between themselves and Lavrov. 

Lavrov is unlikely to want to meet Western leaders in any case, with the war going so badly wrong. In Kherson, the billboards still read “Russia is here for good” as crowds of exhausted and jubilant Ukrainians took to the streets to celebrate their liberation. It is a major victory for Ukraine but Russian generals say the withdrawal will help them stabilize their defensive positions. Russian state media is working hard to package the retreat of troops as a change of strategy. The main condition for Russia’s eventual victory, according to one article (in Russian), is for the nation “to unite in its trust in the leadership.” But trust must be hard when the messaging is so confusing. Putin annexed Kherson less than two months ago. And according to the current Russian criminal code, both supporting the retreat from Kherson and not supporting the retreat from Kherson is a punishable criminal offense. 

THE KREMLIN’S NEW SOFT POWER PLANS

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine going badly, the Kremlin has a new plan to resurrect Russia’s global reputation.

For the past few months, we have reported on Vladimir Putin’s increasing focus on blaming the “collective West” rather than “Ukrainian Nazis” for the war. During this year’s speech at Valdai, Russia’s answer to Davos, Putin spoke at length and with passion about multipolarism and the need to end Western hegemony. Now an article published by Meduza, an independent Russian newsroom that operates out of Latvia, adds some useful context to Putin’s speech. 

Sources close to the Kremlin told Meduza that in late spring this year, the Kremlin began to review its global soft power strategy, which until recently included support for opposition parties in the West and the creation of media conglomerates like RT (Russia Today). The result of the review, according to Meduza’s sources, is that Russia will abandon its investment in “Old Europe” and will focus instead on becoming “the leader of the oppressed” nations of the world. 

In other words, Russia will deal with the reputational fallout and consequences of its ultimately colonial war in Ukraine by setting up a new, global “anti-colonial movement.” Meduza’s sources say the plan is for the Kremlin to focus its message on countries in southern Europe, South America, Africa and Asia.

Rossotrudnichestvo, a Russian federal agency that is tasked with promoting “humanitarian operations and a better understanding of Russia abroad,” is reported to be in charge of overseeing and implementing this new anti-colonial movement. 

The agency already runs a series of Russia Houses across the world and will now be given funds to open up more. Unlike the British Council or Institut Français, Russia Houses pride themselves on being flexible and adapting to the local dynamic and culture.  

“We work like a franchise,” said Evgeny Primakov, the head of Rossotrudnichestvo in an interview to the Izvestia newspaper. “We sign agreements with local non-governmental organizations and provide them with resources.”

In September new Russia Houses were inaugurated in Sudan and Mali, and in November Russia signed an agreement to open another one in Algeria. Primakov told Izvestiya that while looking for local partners to open the Houses, his agency also plans to open more representative offices across the African continent. In 2023 the Kremlin also plans to double the quota for African students studying in Russia.

Tens of millions of dollars have also been allocated to the development of the anti-colonial movement in South America, according to Meduza’s sources. 

Only time will tell whether any of this will help the Kremlin to offset the disastrous consequences of its war, but the way the strategy was described to Meduza is strikingly reminiscent of the Soviet approach: “The other side needs to see that we have allies, that we are not alone and that we are also able to influence the global agenda.” 

WHAT WE ARE READING:

• This not very surprising but still depressing new report shows that “women of color running for office in the U.S. are four times more likely than white candidates to be the targets of violent online abuse.” 
• This story from Syria in New Lines magazine explains how a “bizarre alliance of anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers, creationists and atrocity deniers spans — and blurs — left-right boundaries.”

The post Trouble in paradise for G20, Russia’s Kherson confusion, and Putin’s anti-colonial pose appeared first on Coda Story.

On cue, various mainstream news organizations in the U.S. have been reporting on Russian efforts to sow discord before the midterms. Voting day, of course, is today and Russian bots have been reactivated in part to persuade Republican voters to register their anger at the United States’ expensive involvement in Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression.

Since 2016, it has been apparent that U.S. elections are vulnerable to foreign manipulation. New research from the Election Integrity Partnership shows that Twitter recently disrupted five Chinese and Iranian-linked networks that similarly sought to sow disagreement and division online, with bots amplifying talking points on both the right and the left. 

The question in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and his decision to slash staff numbers by half is: Can Twitter continue to effectively disrupt such election-related disinformation? Already Twitter has had to postpone its plans to roll out its “blue tick” verification check marks to anyone willing to pay around $8 a month until after the midterm elections. 

Edward Perez, a former director at Twitter who led its civic integrity efforts, told Wired that it was unclear that “Musk fully understands the degree of social responsibility that rests on his shoulders, and the very real harm, political harm, political violence, and division that can come from social media platforms.”

As the likes of Prigozhin celebrate their ability to manufacture lies and chaos on social media, independent journalism is being shut down around the world. At Coda, we’ve recently reported on how journalism has been destroyed in both Nicaragua and Syria, while propaganda is permitted to flourish. Now the military junta in Myanmar has officially shut down independent news outlet The Irrawaddy for allegedly disturbing “public tranquility.” What the junta might describe as tranquil, others might describe as comatose. Of course, the military is frightened the patient might wake up. As independent newsrooms fall around the world, we are reminded of their value when the alternative appears to be the lies and distortions of social media.

NON-ENGLISH SPEAKERS TARGETED WITH MALICIOUS DISINFORMATION 

Among the easiest targets for misinformation are non-English speaking communities in the U.S., new research from the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C. shows. I spoke to the Center’s Aliya Bhatia about her findings. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

How would you summarize your findings? 

Election disinformation in languages other than English has the potential to micro-target vulnerable audiences. Many of these communities exist within what we call data voids — with a high demand for accurate information but a low supply of information in that specific language. There is high demand for questions like, “Where can I vote?” or “What’s the polling station near my house?” It’s hard to find this information in Spanish or, for example, Bengali. So they go on Facebook or other platforms where information is not fully verified.

The second, compounding effect is that false information is not equally addressed. So examples of untruthful information in languages other than English are not taken down. This means that an individual seeking that information not only has a hard time finding it, but they are more likely to encounter falsehoods that have stayed up or have not been modified with a warning label.

Can you give me an example of such disinformation? 

A lot of the malicious disinformation that’s targeted on these communities is like, “Oh, you can’t vote if you speak a different language” or “Your vote doesn’t matter.” There is a law in the U.S. that if a specific language community makes up 5% of a population, county officials are expected to make information available in those languages. But because more and more communities speak different languages and are less than 5% of the population, they can’t find accurate information about where to vote, on which days to vote and so on. 

How do bad actors manage to “micro-target” such specific groups? 

Research groups working in this space are saying that one way to curb the spread of election disinformation is to stem the tide or limit the availability of mass data collection. Social media companies have levers that you can pull which allow advertisers to target individuals who speak a different language, or target a specific race, or people who like a certain page on Facebook, or are within a particular age range on Twitter. That data availability allows bad actors to share disinformation with an accurate veneer.

CRITICS OF THE QATAR WORLD CUP ARE ‘ORIENTALIST’

The organizers of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which begins later this month in Qatar, have been accusing the media, particularly in Britain, of a disproportionate, maybe even racist focus on human rights abuses in the Gulf emirate. Writing in The New Arab, a London-headquartered website owned by a Qatari media company, Marc Owen Jones argued that all negative coverage of Qatar was linked to its hosting of the World Cup, unlike negative coverage of Russia in the runup to its hosting of the 2018 World Cup, which was treated as separate.

On the same website is another op-ed titled “Qatar World Cup and the weaponization of human rights.” Meanwhile, just last month the chief executive of the Qatar World Cup, Nasser al-Khater told the Qatar-based Al Jazeera that “lazy journalism” was responsible for “bringing Qatar into disrepute.” Even if you accept that the Western press, particularly in the U.K., can be patronizing and Orientalist in its approach to the Qatar World Cup, it would have been nice to hear less whining from the organizers about “unjust” media attention. Maybe Qatar could pay more attention instead to the workers who built the stadiums in unspeakable conditions for paltry wages, thousands of whom have reportedly lost their lives in the process.

The post Foreign bots meddle in US midterms, criticism of the Qatar World Cup is ‘Orientalist,’ and exploiting the data void appeared first on Coda Story.

And just like that, after four years of Bolsonaro’s far-right rule, Brazil swung all the way left again as 77-year-old Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former factory worker, made an astonishing political comeback almost twenty years after he was first elected as president in 2003. At home, Lula promises to reunite the country. But when it comes to global politics, his rhetoric reminds me of…none other than Vladimir Putin. Fun Fact: when Lula traveled to Moscow as president in 2005, he told Russian media that he had “fulfilled his lifelong dream” of visiting Lenin’s tomb. Just like his Russian counterpart, Lula is a major advocate for a multipolar world and it is safe to bet that Russia will milk Lula’s stance on Ukraine. In an interview with Time magazine in May, Lula blamed NATO expansion for Russia’s invasion and said that “Zelensky wanted the war, and is now playing a role in a play.” 

PUTIN’S VALDAI SPEECH WIN

Lula and his supporters are exactly the audience that Putin would have been hoping to appeal to when he spoke last week, at length and with passion, about multipolarism and the need to end Western hegemony at the annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, Russia’s answer to Davos.

In theory, a multipolar world is, of course, a wonderful thing. As I watched Putin’s speech and the Q&A that followed, I was struck by just how attractive the Russian leader’s rhetoric would be if you were listening to it in a vacuum.

If you have little or no context when it comes to Ukraine, Russian colonialism, the hypocrisy and the bloody history of his Soviet predecessors (whom he adores) and Russia’s war crimes, or if your primary context are Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or the ugly legacy of the European colonialism, then what you can hear when you listen to Putin is a description of the world as all of us would like it to be: where international law is sacred and international institutions like the UN function effectively, where countries cooperate and everyone respects each other. In other words, a multipolar utopia. What’s not to like? 

This was the first Valdai conference since Putin launched the full scale invasion of Ukraine, and it felt distinctly different from previous editions. The event has long been a must for Russia-watching Western experts and academics because Putin’s long foreign policy speeches spelled out the party line. This year, the organizers boasted that they had attracted the same number of foreign attendees as always. At least one listed attendee, though, an Oxford academic, told me she didn’t go. “They must put quite a few foreign names on the guest list in the hopes that some people turn up, but I hear Russia is somewhat of a pain to travel to these days,” Tina Jennings wrote in an email.

There was nothing particularly surprising about Putin’s Valdai speech. In a nod to Saudi Arabia’s recent cooperation with Russia, on oil prices among other things, Putin praised Mohammed bin Salman as “a young man, determined, with character.” He was also predictably complimentary about his counterparts in Turkey and Hungary and rude about Western leaders, especially women, describing Liz Truss as a “strange girl” and criticizing Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan: “Why did the grandma have to drag herself there?”

He talked obsessively about cancel culture, and how it supposedly proves that there is a historic cycle in which Western liberalism always descends into dictatorship: “Cicero had his tongue cut off, Copernicus had his eyes poked out, Shakespeare was stoned. This is where our Western opponents end up. What is this but the current Western cancel culture?” he asked.

The Western media gave Putin’s Valdai speech sparse and dismissive coverage, mostly because there was nothing new about Putin’s attacks on the liberal order, Western leaders, LGBTQ people or even his nuclear rhetoric. But what was different about this year’s gathering is that the West was clearly not the audience that Vladimir Putin was trying to address. 

“Putin said the world is living through the most dangerous decade since the end of the Second World War in 1945. Still, he extended a request to NATO countries, the western military alliance: ‘Let’s stop being each other’s enemies,’” read the pages of Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil’s newspaper of record.  

Putin’s warm praise for Narendra Modi “turned heads in India, where Putin himself has many admirers,” wrote Manjeet Kripalani, the executive director of Gateway House, a prestigious Mumbai-based think tank. “What is clear, eight months into the conflict and global hardships, is that Russia is hardly isolated. If Valdai can be used as a barometer, half the world was present to hear President Putin explain his version of the emerging alternate world order,” Kripalani wrote, citing representatives from India, Sri Lanka, China, South Korea, Venezuela, Iraq and Kyrgyzstan among others who were present at Valdai.

The tone of the coverage that Putin’s speech received in the Brazilian, Indian, Spanish and Arab media, is precisely the soft power win that the Kremlin wanted to achieve.

DON’T MISS:

• This amazing investigation by ProPublica’s Craig Silverman and his team into “How Google’s Ad Business Funds Disinformation Around the World.”
• And I didn’t think another conversation podcast was what I needed in my life, but I’ve really been enjoying “People Like Us,” a podcast by Project Brazen hosted by Kim Ghattas. It manages to be fresh, thought-provoking and fun while taking on some pretty serious issues

The post US right wing calls for tanks to be sent to Brazil, Lenin’s Tomb dream for Lula and Putin’s soft power win in Valdai appeared first on Coda Story.

The roll-out of the dirty bomb story felt highly coordinated: the first mention of it appeared on Sunday morning, in an article on the state-run Ria Novosti website that claimed that the government in Kyiv was preparing to provoke Moscow by using a dirty bomb. RIA Novosti cited “credible sources in various countries, including Ukraine.” Almost immediately the story was picked up and spread across the Russian media and tweeted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Russian Embassy accounts across the world. Meanwhile, piggybacking on the coverage, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu got on the phone to discuss the matter with his counterparts in Europe, the United States and China. 

Shoigu’s phone calls gave the dirty bomb story another lifecycle outside of Russia. As global media reported the “dirty bomb” story, compelling U.S. and EU officials to dismiss it as a fake, the drumbeats and smoke signals grew stronger. Until finally, on Wednesday night, Putin himself brought it up. Speaking at a security services meeting of six former Soviet states, Putin described Ukraine as a country that has “practically lost its sovereignty and is directly controlled by the US.” According to Putin, “Ukraine is used as a battering ram against Russia.” 

“The plans to use a dirty bomb for provocations are also known,” Putin added. 

Context: Analysts are scratching their heads: having never mentioned the dirty bomb before, why is Russia making these claims now? The answer varies depending on what you read. Some believe the dirty bomb narrative signals an inevitable escalation on the battlefield; Ukrainians are speculating that Russia is planning a radioactive attack of its own; and the third option being touted is that Russian officials were simply looking for an excuse to establish a conversation with the West.  

“I am sure that the ‘dirty bomb’ is another attempt to come up with an excuse to talk to the West and call everyone. Plan for a dialogue didn’t work out.” tweeted political analyst Fedor Krasheninnikov.

As is the way with stories out of Russia. Putin has us discussing and responding to disinformation as if it were all real when none of us actually believe any of it is real. It sows confusion and doubt, it keeps people guessing and off balance. The disinformation and manufactured panic might have been the Kremlin’s goal all along — the real dirty bomb. 

ARCTIC SPY DRAMA

In Norway, meanwhile, one story dominated headlines this week and it’s like a plotline straight out of “The Americans,” the show about Russian undercover spies in the suburbs of Washington DC. Except in this story, the suspected Russian spy is posing as a Brazilian researcher in the Norwegian Arctic.

Jose Assis Giammaria was on his way to his office at the University of Tromso on Monday,  when he was apprehended by Norwegian police on Monday. “We believe he represents a threat to fundamental national interests,” Hedvig Moe, deputy chief of the Police Security Service, Norway’s domestic intelligence and security agency, told the public broadcaster NRK.

Giammaria, a graduate of Calgary University in Canada, arrived in Tromso in 2021 after securing an unpaid position as a visiting researcher at the University’s well-known center for the study of security risks and hybrid threats. The head of the center, Professor Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv told the Norwegian media that Giammaria was “a little shy” and “very private” and that he came recommended by a colleague in Canada.  He spoke very good English, was starting to pick up Norwegian and told Professor Gjørv that he wanted to stay in Norway. 

Professor Gjørv, who is a leading security studies academic in Norway, doesn’t believe Giammaria had access to any sensitive information but that he was interested in her “work on security in the North” and in the projects on threats and hybrid warfare that she leads. “He participated in seminars that we had as a group, so he mostly just listened to things, ” she said. 

Norwegian authorities, who believe Giammaria is a Russian posing as a Brazilian, are concerned that he may have acquired a network and information about Norway’s policy in the northern regions. 

Deja Vu: This is the latest in a series of arrests of suspected Russian spies in Norway. And a third alleged spy using a South American cover identity this year. Here’s a quick rundown:

• In 2020, a cyber attacker got into the computers of researchers at the University of Tromso. A police investigation concluded that Russians were behind it. 

• In June, the Dutch intelligence service exposed a “Brazilian” who was trying to intern at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. And there was also the case of Maria Adela, a “Peruvian” socialite exposed as a Russian military intelligence agent in Naples by the Bellingcat and the Insider. 

• Last week, Andrey Yakunin, son of Vladimir Yakunin, one of Putin’s closest associates and the former president of Russian Railways, was arrested and held for two weeks for flying a drone over Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Barents Observer reported that in court, Yakunin noted that he should be treated as a British citizen and that his home address was in Italy. But police found his Russian passport onboard a boat that has been sailing around Svalbard and along the coast of Norway for the past several months. His lawyers say he likes nature.  

• Also in October, four other Russians were arrested on suspicion of photographing classified objects in the north of Norway and three others were stopped using or carrying drones in areas described as “sensitive” by Norwegian police.  

Russian response: “We are concerned about the unfolding hysteria in Norway,” posted the Russian embassy on its Facebook page after the arrest of the two Russians on October 17. The victims of the “hysteria”, the post said, were “common tourists who openly brought their recording equipment to Norway and who were openly filming beautiful Norwegian nature, without hiding from anyone. This isn’t very spy-like, don’t you think?” asked the post.

BEFORE YOU GO:

I am often struck by the utter lack of interest shown by my Russian colleagues — liberal, open-minded and engaged journalists — in any conversation about their country’s history of colonialism. For anyone who has been on the receiving end of Russian colonialism, from Georgia to Kazakhstan and Poland, the colonial patterns evident in the war in Ukraine are obvious. But Russians simply don’t see it that way. After some time exploring this issue, I realized that one reason why the debate about colonialism is missing from the Russian liberal discourse is because Russia is missing from the debate about colonialism in the West. Here’s a piece I wrote for CNN Opinion on how self-imposed limits of Western debate about colonialism have given the Kremlin an enormous propaganda advantage on the global stage. 

The post Russia’s disinformation dirty bomb and spy dramas in the Arctic appeared first on Coda Story.

As Iranian kamikaze drones fell on Kyiv this week, Russia stopped pretending that it was going after military installations. The drones are being aimed at residential areas, killing civilians and destroying vital infrastructure. According to Volodymyr Zelensky, a third of Ukraine’s power stations have been destroyed over the past week. 

Meanwhile, Russian-appointed officials in the occupied city of Mariupol have removed a monument to Holodomor, a man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s. “We are not removing a monument, we are removing a symbol of political disinformation,” says a young woman in this video, a simple marble block dedicated to “victims of famine and political terror” visible in the background. As a historian friend recently put it, “the war in Ukraine is really a war about history and the legacy of the Soviet Union, whether the whole Soviet experiment was a good or bad thing.” 

Electric shocks, waterboarding, rape — these are just a few among many findings of torture inflicted by Russian troops on Ukrainian detainees in Izium, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch. In Izium, a town in Kharkiv retaken by Ukrainian forces in September, Human Rights Watch researchers shed light on the horrors perpetrated during the months of Russian occupation. Survivors identified at least seven locations in Izium, including two schools, where they said Russian soldiers had detained and abused them. One woman who was held and repeatedly raped carved her name into the wall of the room in which she was held. She also carved words and phrases into the wall: “electricity, undressed or raped,” “murdered,” “very painful,” and “help.” She considered trying to kill herself in detention. Others did, with two men reported to have hung themselves a few days after their release from detention.

Russia doesn’t export much beyond oil and gas, but one success story has been its “foreign agent law” that has been embraced by authoritarian regimes from Egypt to Belarus. This week, a version of this law claimed more victims all the way across the world in Nicaragua. The country’s interior minister dissolved 100 domestic and international non-profit organizations for failing to register as a “foreign agent.” Daniel Ortega, the authoritarian leader of Nicaragua, borrowed the law from the Kremlin’s playbook back in 2020, and has since used it to strip more than 2,000 non-profit organizations of their legal status, essentially obliterating the country’s civil society. Ortega is not the only one. Here’s Coda’s 2021 piece on how Moscow’s legal toolkit has been implemented around the world.  

RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS FACE STARK CHOICE: JAIL OR EXILE

In hindsight, the passing of the foreign agents law in Russia in 2012 was a pivotal moment in the slow-burn extermination of Russian civil society.  The process reached its climax when Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, banned Russians from calling it a war and used “national security” as an excuse to launch an unprecedented crackdown on dissent using the legal tools that the Kremlin had been sharpening for decades. Russia’s entire liberal intelligentsia, including journalists and civil society activists, are now either in exile, in jail, or dead. And still, the government finds new targets. 

Just last week, the Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza had a high treason charge added to charges he faces over spreading disinformation about the Russian army while speaking to lawmakers in the U.S. Earlier, this month Kara-Murza was awarded the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize. Now he could face 20 years in a Russian prison for treason.  He was initially detained in April for disobeying police and jailed for 15 days. Last month, Ivan Safronov, a former journalist, was sentenced to 22 years in prison on what were widely regarded as trumped-up charges of treason.

And just this week the head of Russia’s security council Oleg Khramov gave an interview to a pro-Kremlin media outlet in which he said that he has information that “the United States and its allies are preparing to apply new approaches in “subversive work to decompose Russian society.” Of course, he added, that America’s hostile actions will not go unanswered.

It’s not clear what the Russian state plans to do against this new Western “plot,” but part of its response might include the further repression of Russian scientists. They are already under attack for their collaborations with foreign colleagues. Until recently, the Russian state had encouraged its scientists to cooperate with fellow researchers from around the world. Since July, though, we’ve noticed that these foreign connections were often cited when scientists were arrested and charged with treason. 

In early September, we reported on the arrest of prominent Russian scientist Alexander Shiplyuk, after he spoke out in support of a colleague he said had been arbitrarily arrested. And in July, a scientist suspected of passing information to China was arrested from a clinic where he was receiving treatment for late-stage cancer. He died after three days in pre-trial detention.

“A couple more years and there will be no world-renowned scientists left in Russia at all,” one well known biochemist told my colleague Ivan Makridin. Those “who will not leave,” the scientist added, “will go to jail.”

WHAT WE ARE READING AND WATCHING: 

• I haven’t been able to find my favorite type of salt in shops recently, and now I know why thanks to this fascinating, albeit sad Twitter thread about the fate of salt mines in the Easter Ukrainian city of Soledar

Since the February invasion of Ukraine, I have been surprised by how few Russian diplomats have resigned in protest. Boris Bondarev, a Russian diplomat in Geneva, is a very rare case and he has written an excellent piece for Foreign Affairs magazine. “The invasion of Ukraine made it impossible” he writes, “to deny just how brutal and repressive Russia had become.” Don’t miss this profoundly self-reflective essay.

The post China censors ‘Beijing’ on Weibo, torture in Izium, and Russia is jailing its elites appeared first on Coda Story.

In the immediate aftermath of Surovikin assuming command, Russia responded to the Kerch Bridge bombing by bombing cities across Ukraine, appearing to deliberately target civilian areas. This might not be a change of tack but it reflected Surovikin’s style: no form of military action, lawful or not, was off limits. 

Surovkin’s appointment follows Putin’s announcement last month that Russia was pulling paratroopers out of Syria to join the war effort in Ukraine. With an estimated 80,000 plus soldiers dead, Russians need all the troops they can get. But does this mean that Russia is giving up on Syria?

Russia for now maintains a vice-like grip in Syria, insists Ammar Yaser Hamou, senior editor at independent media organization Syria Direct. “It’s important to understand,” he says, speaking in Arabic, “that Russia’s control has not changed.” While the assaults by the Syrian regime, supported by the Russians may have slowed, he explains, this has less to do with the war in Ukraine than it does with a ceasefire deal signed with Turkey in 2020. 

As it stands, life for Syrians has not looked all that different: Russian officials continue to exert power over civilians in the south; Russia maintains a presence in north-east Syria, especially in the city of Deir ez-Zor, on the banks of the Euphrates; and the Khmeimim Air Base — a hub of the Kremlin military intervention in the Middle East and Africa — remains readily in use and completely untouched. 

Reports from earlier this month, following an attack on northwest Syria, warned of a returning Russian offensive. Analysts asserted that Russia would use violence in Syria to show that it retained the power to act around the world. Many of these reports, it turns out, were not entirely accurate. Much of the confusion stems from how the Syrian regime has functioned as essentially a puppet for Putin. Its weapons and planes are mostly Russian. Identifying whether these were Russian soldiers carrying out the attack, or if Russia was involved, is both difficult and unhelpful, says Hamou. “Speaking in these general terms hurts the advocacy against the Syrian regime,” he explained. “It doesn’t aid opposition.” 

Instead, Russia’s preoccupation with Ukraine might have revealed how important the Kremlin are to the Syrian regime’s hopes of retaining effective control. Following the invasion of Ukraine, when Russia withdrew a number of its troops from southern Syria, it opened the door for an expansion of Iranian militia into the south. What followed was a significant uptick in the smuggling of drugs, particularly Captagon (an amphetamine), through the southern border and into Jordan. That effect was felt throughout the region.

Last year alone, the value of trading in Captagon in the Middle East, practically the only market for the drug, was estimated at well over $5 billion. In Syria, some reports suggest, the manufacturing and sale of Captagon is literally the business of the state, with high-ranking figures in the regime and their families rumored to be connected.  

“Russia was showing the world, ‘look what happens when I leave the region,’” Hamou said. Perhaps, though, Russia is maintaining only an illusion of control. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf nations voted to condemn Russia’s “attempted illegal annexation” of Ukrainian territories, rather than abstain. The Gulf countries would be wary of increased Iranian influence in Syria in the absence of Russia and might turn to the European Union and the United States for support. Israel too might increase its targeted strikes in Syria were Iranian influence to grow.

“If the Russians were to be tested in the future: by opposition forces, or through the support of the United States, or Saudi Arabia,” Hamou told me. “As it stands, Russia would be unable to support the Syrian regime as it did in 2011. They would be helpless.” The reality is that Russia probably cannot sustain two all-out wars in Ukraine and in Syria. And Russian weakness in Ukraine will weaken its influence in Syria, still of vital geopolitical and strategic importance to the Kremlin. 

No wonder then Putin has turned to Surovikin, reportedly Assad’s favorite general.

PUTIN’S USEFUL IDIOTS IN THE WEST

Russia is finding friends in every nook and cranny of the West, whatever their contrasting politics or influence on the public conversation. 

• Exhibit 1 is of course Elon Musk, whose attempt at an alternative career as a Twitter pollster has won him ardent fans in Moscow. The respected political scientist Ian Bremmer revealed that Musk may not just have been blundering into geopolitics but actually doing Putin’s bidding, even if unconsciously. The questions in Musk’s poll might have been an exact reflection of the options laid out by the Kremlin — essentially a refusal to negotiate unless Crimea is acknowledged as Russian territory. Musk says he’s only spoken to Putin once in 18 months and it was about space. But why would Bremmer be making any of this up?

• Exhibit 2 is Bernie Sanders’s former press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, who interviewed Aaron Maté, a reporter at the fringe website The Grayzone, on her podcast and allowed him to accuse the United States at length of sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines. Criticizing the propagation of conspiracy theories is not the same as calling for no-platforming. Maté has a right to his opinion, but surely Gray could have put up more resistance. 

• Exhibit 3 is Jeffrey Sachs, who is also convinced that the U.S. sabotaged the pipelines. Though at least he does say “probably.” Sachs says he is terrified that the conflict in Ukraine is escalating towards nuclear war. But why talk about escalation and then irresponsibly pick a side when accusations are flying back and forth with little by way of evidence?

Who needs Tucker Carlson or Fox News?

WHAT WE ARE READING: 

• This investigation by the Wire into Meta’s preferential treatment of Amit Malviya, head of the BJP’s infamous IT cell in India, a vast network of trolls dedicated to pushing out Hindutva propaganda and inundating journalists, often women, with abuse, became mired in controversy. The story alleged that Instagram would take down any post flagged by Malviya, as part of the privileges extended to him by Meta. It pointed out examples and claimed that over 700 posts were removed in a single month after Malviya complained. But Meta denied the story aggressively. The Wire responded by publishing an angry internal email from Andy Stone, communications director at Meta, that they said confirmed their story. But the email was written in suspiciously Indian-inflected English. Stone is abrasive and little liked, but seems like that the Wire was hoaxed? The storm in a teacup is detracting from the real and really disturbing story. How cozy is Meta’s relationship with the BJP, as evidence mounts that the party benefits hugely and unfairly from the company’s various platforms. 
• This analysis of Russia’s influence peddling in Burkina Faso from the Conversation makes for fascinating reading. We’ve also reported extensively about the Wagner Group’s operations in the Sahel.

This newsletter is curated by Coda’s senior editor Shougat Dasgupta. Frankie Vetch contributed to this edition.

The post Putin turns to ‘Butcher of Damascus’ for help in Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

Over 12% of Africa’s wheat is imported from Ukraine. Africa imports about 45% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine, and the Russians have blamed Western sanctions for rising prices and a broken supply chain. Now, Kuleba said, it was time to bring “the Ukrainian truth” to Africa, which, perhaps nostalgic for Soviet friendship, has a soft spot for Russia that belies trade numbers that pale into insignificance beside those from Europe, China and the United States.  

This is the first African tour in the history of Ukrainian diplomacy and it is part of a much larger “roadmap” that Volodymyr Zelensky has asked his Foreign Ministry to chart in order to win over African leaders, after many of them either sided with the Kremlin in the United Nations following the February 2022 invasion or stayed neutral. (There were exceptions, of course. This memorable speech by Kenya’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, for instance.)

Another element of the Ukrainian roadmap, according to Ukrainian government websites, is a “large scale Ukraine-Africa conference” that Kyiv is preparing. Food security, trade relations and technology products are among Ukraine’s offerings to the continent. 

Russia is offering much the same. Kuleba’s tour comes shortly after his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov returned from Africa. Russia too is organizing a massive Africa-Russia summit, to be held in Saint Petersburg in 2023, and in July, Lavrov penned a long op-ed (link in Russian) which was carried by major papers in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Congo, Uganda and Egypt. 

In the upbeat letter, Lavrov praised the continent’s “balanced” position on the war in Ukraine, talked about Russia being the guarantor of global food security and reminded audiences that Russia was the only global power fighting for a “truly multipolar” world, free of America’s colonial hegemony.

“I want to emphasize: our country doesn’t force anything upon anyone, we don’t teach others how to live. We have a huge respect for the sovereignty of African countries, for their right to choose their own development path,” Lavrov wrote.

One would think that Russia’s invasion of a sovereign Ukraine would be enough to deprive Lavrov’s words of any legitimacy. Especially since very few of Russia’s many promises of investments in and trade with Africa have actually materialized. 

And yet, South Africans observing sham referendums in occupied Ukraine and Russian flags fluttering in the streets of Ouagadougou and Bamako are among the many signs that in parts of Africa, the Russian narrative is working. The reasons are emotional rather than economic: in Burkina-Faso, in Mali, in Niger and the Central African Republic, people welcome the Russian tricolor simply because it is not the French one.

Both Kyiv and Moscow know Africa could become a lifeline for an otherwise isolated Putin.  But for Ukraine to win the hearts and minds of the African continent, Kyiv will need to convince Africans that Russia is as colonial today as the West once was.

IN OTHER NEWS

Kyiv’s remarkable battlefield successes are dominating the headlines of Western news outlets. But news from elsewhere makes any predictions of Putin’s imminent downfall look premature. Here’s why:

• The oil cartel OPEC+ has delivered a humiliating rebuff to Washington’s plan to squeeze Russia’s energy revenues. Meeting in Vienna for its first in-person consultations in more than two years, the oil cartel essentially sided with the Kremlin. The group, led by Saudi Arabia, agreed to deep oil production cuts, thus raising the price of oil, upsetting the Biden administration and essentially giving Putin more money to invest in his war with Ukraine.
  
• The latest World Bank report shows that early estimates of the effect of sanctions on Russia were misleading and that the impact has been a lot less severe than predicted. Ukraine’s economy in the meantime is expected to shrink by 35%, compared to the 4.5% that the World Bank is now predicting for Russia. Here’s the full report, and a useful summary from Reuters. 

Remember the August car bomb attack in Moscow that killed Darya Dugina, daughter of Russian Neo-Nazi ideologue Alexander Dugin? At the time, the Kremlin blamed Ukrainians for the assassination, which Kyiv denied. Now, all of a sudden, unnamed U.S. intelligence sources have told the New York Times that Kyiv did have a role in the killing. The report has few details, but many are asking why these claims are emerging now and whether it is a U.S. warning to Kyiv. Could it be a sign of incipient tension in the U.S.-Ukraine relationship? This is one to watch. 

Elon Musk gave the Russian state propaganda machine a helping hand with his now notorious “peace plan” for Ukraine. It sent Twitter into a frenzy with thousands of Ukraine supporters trolling Musk and suggesting that he stick to manufacturing cars. But Musk’s geopolitical debut clearly impressed Russian politicians. From Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov and former President Dmitry Medvedev to local parliamentarians, Russian politicians big and small have all praised Musk’s “analysis.” As have the presenters of all state propaganda channels. One politician in annexed Crimea even invited Musk to visit the peninsula “to show the whole world that this is native Russian land.” 

Another bit of propaganda fodder for Russia came from Burkina Faso. Russian flags flew high in the streets of the capital Ouagadougou, after a second coup this year. The outgoing interim president, Colonel Damiba, has been replaced by the interim president Ibrahim Traore. The celebrating crowds pledged their allegiance to Moscow because as in other parts of the Sahel region, Russian assistance, often in the form of Wagner Group mercenaries, is being invited in order to defeat Islamist militants. You might remember that last week we reported on a large South African delegation that monitored Russia’s recent “referendums” in occupied Ukraine and described the support Russia enjoys in South Africa. We’ve also reported at length about Russia’s influence in Mali, with the military-appointed prime minister praising Russia at the UN’s general assembly session in New York when even India, China and Russia’s traditional allies in Central Asia tried to distance themselves from Putin. The Kremlin’s hold on parts of Africa is strong.  But Ukraine is trying to counter it. Keep reading.

WHAT WE’RE READING

 I have two amazing pieces of journalism to recommend to you this week. 

• This deeply thought provoking, poignant piece by Peter Pomeranzev about how the war in Ukraine has been, among other things, about cellars — both physical and mental. 
• And Yaroslav Trofimov’s jaw dropping reporting, from freshly liberated Lyman, for the Wall Street Journal. He and photographer Manu Brabo were the first to get there.  

The post Ukraine takes on Russia in the battle for hearts and minds in Africa appeared first on Coda Story.

One curious tidbit that caught my attention was this IranWire story. Apparently, Revolutionary Guard commanders have moved their families to a “safe place” in Tehran and have been promised safe passage to Georgia “if nationwide protests intensify,” or “if the government is overthrown.” 

Georgia does have relatively friendly relations with Tehran, but my sources say that there are for now no plans to shelter the families of the Revolutionary Guard. 

The country is already overwhelmed trying to deal with a massive influx of Russian men seeking to escape Putin’s draft. So long is the queue at the border, that these men are waiting over 24 hours to get into Georgia.

Already, the backlash is significant. When Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, occupying nearly 20 percent of the country’s territory, one of the excuses that Moscow used was that it was “protecting Russians citizens.” Now there are a lot more Russians in Georgia for Putin to protect. “It’s time to Russify the country. More than 10% of [the] Georgian population is already Russian,” tweeted Fyodor Grudin, a member of the local assembly in Saint Petersburg, as he encouraged Russia to “repeat the 2008 [invasion].”

The fact that many of the new arrivals have not exactly been opposed to the war, even as they now seek to escape it, adds to the tensions. Writing on Telegram, one man trying to cross the border, complained that Georgian guards didn’t let him in because they spotted a “Z,” the symbol of Putin’s war, on his car. “We need to denazify these Georgians,” he posted. 

Georgia’s current government  has been widely criticized for being too soft on Russia in the past, but officials have now begun stopping Russian men from entering the country. And Russian authorities have set up a pop-up military HQ at the border and are issuing would-be draft dodgers notices on the border itself.

Anxious and resentful, many Georgians are drawing comparisons between the Russian men and the Iranian women. “Look at the Iranian women, their regime is just as brutal, but they are not running,” a friend messaged from Tbilisi where every cafe, every restaurant, he said, was packed with Russians. 

Both Russia and Iran have occupied tiny Georgia in the past. Today, once again, the country finds itself in the geopolitical crosshairs, as its neighbors threaten to implode. 

IN OTHER NEWS

Putin’s “partial mobilization” drive is a spectacular propaganda failure. More than a quarter of a million Russians have fled the country since he ordered Russian reserve troops to join the war effort, effectively sending tens of thousands of undertrained, underequipped men to near certain death on the front lines. Across Russia, fires have erupted in dozens of local military headquarters – arson is suspected. Protests are small but it’s significant that people are coming out on streets across Russia to register their anger, with tensions especially apparent in far-flung provinces like Buryatia and Dagestan where people have good reason to believe they are being disproportionately affected and targeted by mobilization and conscription.  Patriarch Kirill, an influential leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, announced that all those who die fighting in Ukraine will be absolved of their sins. But this promise of an unblemished record in the afterlife, didn’t seem to bring much solace to this recruit on his way to Kherson. “We have had no preparation, no training,” he says in this video, his voice trembling. 

She is Russia’s Tucker Carlson and the biggest cheerleader for Putin’s war in Ukraine. But something was off about Margarita Simonyan’s busy social media feeds this week. Russia’s propaganda queen, who heads the country’s international RT (formerly Russia Today) network, switched tack from threatening the West with nuclear war to campaigning against military draft violations. Simonyan has been diligently tweeting about individual cases of men being sent to war despite chronic illnesses, or against draft rules.  She is keeping a public record of draft violations and is demanding that Russian authorities take action and stop rules being broken and ignored. RT has conducted various social justice campaigns in the past, so do not interpret this as a change of heart from either Simonyan or the network about the war in Ukraine. But it is a sure sign of how discomfited even supporters of the war are by the utter chaos since his order. 

Kazakhstan, traditionally a close ally of Russia, is proving to be annoyingly independent-minded. This week, the Kazakh government declared that it wouldn’t recognize the results of the referendums that Russia is conducting in “liberated” regions of Ukraine. This follows last week’s decision to detain Russian trucks to enforce EU sanctions and to suspend the use of Russia’s card payment system, “Mir.” And “Beeline,” Kazakhstan’s cable TV and Internet provider, is now notifying its customers that it will be suspending the broadcasting of a number of Russian govt-controlled channels  starting from October 5, though they mostly appear to be entertainment channels rather than those broadcasting news propaganda. 

Vladimir Putin may be losing friends in his backyard, but it looks like he has found new ones in South Africa. Members of South Africa’s ANC Youth League monitored Russia’s sham referendums this week, in which people have been directed to the voting booth by the barrel of an automatic rifle. The presence of these international observers from South Africa, though, lends the referendums their much needed veneer of legitimacy. “Eighty percent of people in South Africa support the desire of the people of Donbas, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to be united with Russia,” one South African monitor told the Russian state news agency Tass. “We believe that in the struggle for freedom it is impossible to stand aside, it is necessary to really fight,” said another, calling the referendum a project of “historic proportions.” 

Covering sham events with a straight face has long posed a dilemma for mainstream Western outlets. The transparently fake plebiscites in occupied Ukraine are an example.  “Votes counted in first referendum in Donetsk,” read a poker-faced Associated Press headline. “Over 96% said to favor joining Russia in first vote results from occupied Ukraine regions,” reported Reuters. The actual stories contained more context, of course, including the fact that many people were forced to vote at gunpoint. But it’s the headlines that flash across screens, tickers, and on social media that are scanned by us all that create first impressions and lend a kind of legitimacy and seriousness to what is an exercise in Russian state propaganda, critics argue. As Oleksandra Matveiichuk, head of the Ukraine-based Center for Civil Liberties, points out: “Fake referendums are not legal procedure, but informational special operation.” And hamstrung by convention, Western news outlets sometimes find themselves playing the role of Putin’s patsies.  

WHAT WE’RE READING

While I have been pretty obsessed with the situation in Russia and Ukraine (and now Iran), here are a few other stories our team recommends: 

• Giorgia Meloni is the first female Prime Minister of Italy and the first far-right leader of a Western democracy in the postwar era. Here’s a great op-ed by Roberto Saviano, author of “Gomorrah,” in which he warns that “where Italy goes, the rest of Europe will follow.”  
• This story explains why faith in Hong Kong’s press freedom has reached a record low, with 97% of the city’s journalists saying that the city’s reporting environment has gotten much worse.
• This new study debunks pernicious myths that immigrants in South Africa are to blame for the country’s socio-economic problems.
• This big report from Meta that outlines how the company took down what was the first targeted Chinese campaign to interfere in U.S. politics (spoiler: the effort was limited.) 

Frankie Vetch, Rebekah Robinson, Ivan Makridin and Katia Patin contributed to this edition

The post As Russia and Iran threaten to implode, Georgia finds itself in the crosshairs appeared first on Coda Story.

Announcing the mobilization of Russian reserves, Putin said that his army was confronting “the entire military machine of the collective West” in Ukraine and needed to protect the “territorial integrity and sovereignty of Russia” from the “aggressive politics of Western elites who are doing all they can to impose their will and their pseudo-values.” 

It was the West, he said, that was threatening Russia with nuclear weapons. Not the other way around.

Putin’s speech is chilling not only because of the Damoclean nuclear threat he continues to hang over us but because it is all based entirely on a bewildering, alternative narrative, stitched together from years of conspiracy theories and Kremlin-manufactured paranoia.

Now Putin is sending 300,000 more men to war to protect the parallel reality his propaganda machine has created.

And Russians are responding with panic. 

Part of the reason Putin has been embarrassed on the battlefield is the lack of both morale and the numbers necessary to patrol thousands of kilometers of supposedly “liberated” territory in Ukraine. Sending tens of thousands of men to the front with little equipment and little training to face exhausted but motivated and clearly superior Ukrainian forces kitted out with Western equipment means that these Russian reserve troops are quite literally cannon fodder.

As Putin spoke, searches for “how do I leave Russia” and “how do I break a leg” (to avoid the draft) topped Google search trends. Tickets to all destinations that Russians can get to without a visa are booked out. Airfare prices surged. Traffic jams on the border with Finland stretched for nearly 35 kilometers.

“I am scared,” a Saint Petersburg resident told me over Signal. “My son has military training and he will now be drafted.” Rumors are spreading that military commissars will be manning checkpoints to take men eligible for the draft into custody. 

“I can’t go out into the streets. I am afraid I will be forced to go and fight,” a young man from the city of Vladimir, about 200 kilometers east of Moscow, told my colleague. 

Over a thousand people have been arrested in anti-mobilization protests in 38 Russian cities. But will enough Russians rally to force Putin to rethink a war that he began but seems unable to finish?

And if thousands of Russian men are desperate to escape conscription, plenty of others are jubilant about Putin’s expansion of the war effort. Stories filled popular, pro-war Telegram channels of men rushing to sign up or sharing their disappointment at not being qualified for the draft. 

“Damn, I can’t join for health reasons,” reads a typical post. “They wouldn’t accept a bribe to let me join. But then said I could come as a driver or a cook. So I’ll be able to serve the motherland. For the motherland! For Putin! All the way to Kyiv!” 

I asked sociologist Natalia Savelyeva what we should make of the mixed Russian response to Putin’s partial mobilization. The answer: it’s complicated. For months now, we’ve heard that nearly 70 percent of the population supported Putin’s war but Savelyva’s research reveals a much more nuanced picture. 

Together with her colleagues at the Public Sociology Laboratory, an independent research initiative, Savelyeva interviewed 200 Russians, dividing respondents into “opponents” “supporters” and the “doubters.” 

It is the largest group, the doubters, Savelyeva believes, who are likely to be swayed by the mobilization. “This could become a turning point, the point at which the regime will start cracking,” she says.

Savelyeva predicts we will see small-scale protests and large-scale “hidden resistance” in Russia.  

Globally, will this also be the moment some Putin allies change their tune?  One particularly prominent example might be the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

VIEW FROM DELHI: MODI’S ADVICE TO PUTIN IS IGNORED

By Shougat Dasgupta

The gathering a little over a week ago of a set of world leaders in Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, one of the world’s most evocative cities,  was meant to be a showcase for a non-NATO, non-Western sphere of global influence. Here was an alternative world order. 

Except both China and Russia, “eternal friends” and the leaders of this Eurasian axis, seemed bereft of ideas and inspiration.

Instead it was India’s prime minister Narendra Modi who stole the show, playing the wise family counselor to perfection. It was a diplomatic coup. In newspapers such as the Washington Post, Modi’s standard remarks on the war in Ukraine — consistent with India’s position since the beginning (war bad, diplomacy good, cheap Russian oil best) — were a “stunning public rebuke” of Vladimir Putin.

Certainly, Modi will have enjoyed the headlines. While Xi Jinping, droned on about the provocations of Western countries seeking to spark “color revolutions,” a startlingly unoriginal conspiracy theory, Modi was able to please the West, without annoying Russia, and maintain India’s carefully considered non-alignment.

Non-alignment was the much-cherished principle of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and a hate figure for the Hindu right. Nehru couched his realism in lofty, idealistic language, though many non-aligned positions were more expedient than moral.

Modi’s version is expressed as realpolitik rather than idealism. Yet, he appears to have succeeded in making India’s position on the war in Ukraine be understood as both necessary and principled.

“Democracy, diplomacy, dialogue,” Modi declared with an alliterative flourish and the West applauded as if acknowledging Modi as the “vishwa guru,” the world’s teacher.

But Putin — who appeared to be willingly playing the stooge to Modi’s grandstanding as if to show before the world how badly wrong the war with Ukraine was going — turned the tables on Modi by escalating the war effort, preparing to send hundreds of thousands of Russian reservists to the frontline. Modi’s avuncular lecture had clearly fallen on deaf ears.

Can Modi now continue to offer homilies about non-alignment when Putin has upped the ante? With warm praise for Modi’s words coming from the United States and France, the Indian prime minister will feel he has bought himself enough goodwill to continue to avoid picking a side. 

As for the beleaguered opposition in India, they can only look on in wonder as Modi’s statesmanlike moment in the international spotlight garners fawning praise when he should instead have been answering questions about the large stretches of territory India is reported to have ceded along the Himalayan border with China.

And that’s it for this week. Actually, almost. Before you go, check out this amazing graphic of planes departing from Russian airspace and here’s a tragicomic video of a Russian man being dragged away by police for being at the scene of an anti-mobilization rally despite his pro-war views. 

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