These seemingly eccentric obsessions with exotic animals reveal a fundamental truth about how power itself works. The zebra collection isn't merely decorative – it's emblematic of a system where the arbitrary whims of the powerful become reality, where resources that could serve many are instead directed toward personal indulgence. Orbán admires Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream party, which has steered the country away from EU integration. Trump openly praises Orbán. These men create a web of mutual admiration, exchanging not just tactics but symbols and sometimes even PR consultants – as we learned when Israeli media revealed that Benjamin Netanyahu’s advisers had orchestrated a covert campaign to counter negative discourse around Qatar. Those same advisers were also tasked with cleaning up Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić's public image.

Years ago as a BBC correspondent in Central Asia, I remember staring with bemusement at a massive golden statue in Turkmenistan of the former president, Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-styled ‘Turkmenbashi’, the ‘father of all Turkmen’. The statue rotated to always face the sun. We journalists used to dismiss it as the eccentricity of a dictator in a little-known corner of the world. These weren't mere quirks, though, but  early warning signs of an authoritarian pattern that would spread globally.

Last weekend, we gathered voices who have witnessed authoritarianism's rise across continents for our event "The Playbook." Their unanimous observation: the patterns emerging in America mirror what they've already witnessed elsewhere.

Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, who has faced multiple criminal charges and arrest warrants in the Philippines for her journalism, described her own sense of déjà vu watching events unfold in the United States. Democracy dies not in one blow but through "death by a thousand cuts"—media capture, then academic institutions, then NGOs, until the entire society bleeds out, Ressa warned.

Bill Browder, the architect of the Magnitsky Act that holds Russian leaders to account for human rights violations – which he lobbied for after his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was murdered in Russian custody – mapped how Vladimir Putin perfected symbolic terrorization through selective targeting. He saw this pattern being repeated in the U.S.: "This attack on law firms, as an example, going after Covington & Burling, Perkins Coie, and Paul Weiss... what's the message to every law firm in America? Don't go after the government." He pointed to judges facing impeachment threats and green card holders being threatened with deportation as classic examples of the Putin playbook unfolding in America – striking fear into entire sectors through selective prosecution.

Many audience questions focused on resistance strategies, with particular frustration directed at the Democratic Party's seeming inability to mount an effective opposition. "Why are they so quiet about this?" Armando Iannucci asked, voicing a common concern about the lack of a coordinated response.

Yet Browder managed to see a bright side in America's chaotic, decentralized resistance: "The Putin model is to find the leader of the opposition and then destroy them," he noted. "But if you don't have a leader and resistance comes from everywhere, there's no way to stop it." He pointed to student-led protests in Serbia and Georgia, where grassroots movements without central leadership proved remarkably resilient.

Few know more about resistance than anti-apartheid era South African activist Kumi Naidoo, who served as head of both Greenpeace and Amnesty International. While he offered practical resistance strategies, Naidoo also emphasized something crucial: "We have demonized people who do not agree with us," he cautioned. "We cannot move forward in this moment where we find ourselves unless we consciously build bridges to the people that are not with us." This doesn't mean compromising on principles, but rather understanding the genuine concerns that drive people to support authoritarian figures.

"The worst disease in the world that we face,” Naidoo said, “is not HIV/AIDS or cancer or influenza—it's a disease we can call affluenza." This pathological obsession with wealth accumulation creates the perfect environment for would-be dictators, as ordinary people mistakenly see oligarchs not as threats to democracy but as aspirational figures. The zebra-collecting billionaire becomes someone to admire rather than fear.

Every speaker at our event expressed a haunting familiarity with America's unfolding crisis – they've all seen this movie before, even though no one, right now, can possibly predict how it ends. Iannucci, creator of “The Death of Stalin” and “Veep – so, someone who has, literally, written the script – said the current reality might put him out of the job. How do you parody something already so absurd? 

“Trump,” he said, “is a self-basting satirist in that he is his own entertainment." Still, Iannucci underscored why humor remains vital in dark times: "Dictators and autocrats hate jokes because laughter is spontaneous, and they hate the idea of a spontaneous reaction that they have no control over."

Far from mere entertainment, Iannucci argued that storytelling itself becomes essential resistance. He challenged us to move beyond speaking only to those who already agree with us: "We must tell authentic stories which are rooted in reality. And understand that to stand a chance to get through this moment we're in, we have to invest equally on the objective side as well as the subjective side."

As authoritarians build their global networks of mutual admiration, from private zoos to public policy, the countering networks of resistance become all the more crucial.

Maria Ressa's powerful assertion that "when it is a battle for facts, journalism becomes activism" particularly resonated with me. As a journalist, I've been trained in objectivity and balance. Yet we now face a moment where the foundations of free thought that my profession relies on are themselves under direct assault. This isn't about choosing political sides – it's about recognizing when factual reality itself is being deliberately undermined as a strategy of control.

I also found myself enthusiastically agreeing with Kumi Naidoo who emphasized that we must genuinely listen to those who support authoritarian figures, not to validate harmful policies but to understand the legitimate grievances that fuel support for them. From Manila to Moscow to Washington, the pattern is clear but not inevitable. The script is familiar, but we still have time to write a different ending – one where free thought and factual discourse prevail over manipulation and fear.

If you would like to become part of conversations like this one, we have news: we have just launched a brand new membership program connecting journalists, artists, thinkers and changemakers across borders. Join today to receive the recording of this event and access to future gatherings where we'll continue connecting dots others miss.

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As we navigate the whiplash-inducing headlines emerging daily from Trump's Washington, I often find myself thinking of Oksana Baulina, who joined our team in 2019 to produce a documentary series about Stalin's Gulag survivors. By then, Russia's state media was actively rehabilitating Stalin's image, recasting the Soviet dictator as an "efficient manager" who had made necessary sacrifices for the motherland. We felt an urgent need to preserve the testimonies of the few remaining survivors—men and women in their eighties and nineties whose first-hand accounts could counter this historical revisionism.

It was no longer safe for me to travel to Moscow to work with Oksana on developing the project, so we met in neighboring Georgia, in Tbilisi, my hometown. She arrived dressed every bit as the fashion magazine editor she had once been at Russian Vogue before pivoting to become an opposition activist and journalist.

Over wine one evening, she described the constant cat-and-mouse game she had experienced working with Alexei Navalny's anti-corruption foundation. She talked about how Navalny's team had to constantly reinvent itself, adapting to each new restriction the Kremlin devised. When the authorities blocked their websites, they migrated to YouTube and social media. When officials raided their offices, they decentralized operations. When the government froze their bank accounts, they found alternative funding methods. The space for dissent was shrinking daily, she explained, and with each new constraint, they needed to innovate, come up with fresh tactics to continue exposing corruption in Russia and holding Putin accountable.

"The walls are closing in," she told me, "and most people don't even notice until they're trapped."

Her words have acquired an unsettling resonance as I watch the American political landscape transform. When I draw these parallels to my American friends, I often see a familiar resistance in their eyes. Some will say comparing America to authoritarian states is alarmist, that the differences between these societies are too vast. "These are apples and oranges," they'll argue. But the anatomy of repression—the methods used by the powerful to dismantle democratic institutions—remains remarkably similar across time and borders.

There's a reason why those who've lived under authoritarian systems recognize the warning signs so clearly. For Americans, this trajectory feels unimaginable – a departure from everything they know. But for people like Oksana, those who've witnessed democracy crumble, it's more like going back to the future – a painfully familiar pattern returning in new forms.

Recently, a friend in Georgia received a summons that captured the essence of life in an authoritarian state: show up to a state commission hearing and risk becoming a target, or don't show up and face jail time. A decade ago, this would have been unthinkable in Georgia, a country that once exemplified the possibilities of post-Soviet democratic transformation. But that's the thing about authoritarianism—it advances by turning the unthinkable into the inevitable.

Authoritarianism often takes a precise, technical approach to dismantling democracy. It's not always about sudden, violent takeovers. Usually, democratic backsliding is a careful process of erosion, where each small step makes the once outrageous appear normal. What makes this process particularly insidious is how it subverts democracy's own tools – elections, parliaments, courts, and media – turning them against the very systems they were designed to uphold.

Since Coda's inception, we've been tracking the changing landscape of power: the expanding geography of authoritarianism, the abuse of technology, the rise of oligarchy, and the weaponization of historical narratives. Our unique editorial approach identifies "currents" – the patterns bubbling beneath the daily headlines – allowing us to detect emerging trends before they become apparent. Through this lens, we've observed that while authoritarian regimes deploy varied tactics, three essential elements of the playbook repeat themselves with remarkable consistency across different contexts and continents.

The first move is always the manipulation of memory and nostalgia. Vladimir Putin understood this better than most. His regime didn't just recast Stalin from tyrant to "efficient manager" – it undermined organizations like Memorial that documented Soviet crimes by branding them as "foreign agents" before shutting them down entirely.

For Oksana, like many others on our team, the Gulag documentary project was deeply personal. Her family had directly experienced political repression under Soviet rule. For the Russian-language version, she chose a different title than "Generation Gulag." She called it: "The Repressions Don't End."

This same pattern is visible in the United States, where the "Make America Great Again" movement taps into a yearning for an imagined past—one in which power structures went unquestioned and concepts like racial equity didn't "complicate" the natural order. This isn't just a political slogan; it's a carefully crafted narrative that creates social conditions that make challenging the mythical past dangerous. 

We've seen this play out in Viktor Orbán's Hungary, where school textbooks have been rewritten to glorify the country's imperial past and minimize its complicity in the Holocaust. In India, where Narendra Modi's government has systematically reshaped history education to center Hindu nationalist narratives and diminish Muslim contributions. And in Florida, where educational restrictions on teaching African American studies and racial history follow the same playbook – controlling how societies understand their past to make it easier to reshape their future. 

But rewriting the past is merely the first act. The next phase is to transform this nostalgia into a weapon that redefines loyalty to the nation. Once the mythical golden age is established, questioning it becomes not just disagreement but betrayal. In Russia, this meant that anyone who questioned the revered myths about Soviet glory suddenly became suspect – a potential traitor or foreign agent.

As Oksana traveled across Russia filming interviews with Gulag survivors, many said how distraught they were to see that at the end of their lives, the narratives they thought had been discredited were gaining traction again. The perpetrators of the crimes against them – their executioners, their prison guards – were being glorified once more in state media and official histories.

It's the ultimate form of injustice, echoing what many of my Black American friends tell me they feel today as they watch decades of hard-won progress toward equity being reversed. After fighting so hard to dismantle statues of Confederate generals and slave owners, they now witness white supremacist narratives being rehabilitated and those who challenge them branded as unpatriotic.

Of course, these aren't direct comparisons. Each country follows its own path. Perhaps America's market economy will prove resilient against authoritarian capture. Perhaps its institutions will withstand the assault better than their counterparts elsewhere. Perhaps the federalized system will provide firewalls that weren't available in more centralized states.

But, thinking back to countless conversations with friends who lived through authoritarian transitions, I'm reminded of how gradually the water heats around us all. Each small capitulation, each moment of silence stems from a perfectly reasonable thought: "Surely it won't affect me personally."

Among the 35 victims of Stalin’s Gulags that Oksana interviewed was Irina Verblovskaya. It was a love story that landed Irina in jail "I never thought they would come for me," she told Oksana, her voice steady but her eyes still showing the pain of decades-old wounds. She never thought she was political enough to be noticed. 

American friends often ask me what to do, how to respond once these patterns of repression become evident. I hesitate to answer with certainty. The cases I know most intimately are cases of failure. Nearly everything my dissident parents fought for in Georgia has been reversed in my lifetime. Yet paradoxically, their fight continues to inspire – precisely because it never truly ended. In Tbilisi today, people have stood in the freezing cold for more than a hundred nights, protesting laws that mirror authoritarian Russian legislation.

After years covering wars and political crises, I've noticed that soldiers on the ground often understand which way a battle is turning before the generals do. A taxi driver frequently has a better grasp of city dynamics than the mayor. My first rule is to always listen to people in the thick of it, to pay attention to those who may be at the margins of power but who are the first to feel its effects. Our failure is rarely in lacking prophets, but in refusing to heed their warnings.

Who are America's prophets today? They're the people routinely dismissed as alarmists – constitutional scholars warning about judicial capture, civil rights leaders identifying voter suppression patterns, journalists documenting the normalization of extremist rhetoric, and immigrants who recognize repressions they became familiar with in the countries they fled. Their warnings aren't political hyperbole – they're based on rigorous research, reporting and lived experience. And just as they are the first to detect the warning signs, they're often the first people to be targeted when the final act of the play unfolds.

The last, game-winning tactic from the authoritarian playbook is the criminalization of dissent. This process begins with words – the increasing use of terms like "enemy of the state", “threat to national security”, or "treason" to describe one’s political opponents. See how these labels proliferate in the far-right media. Note how disagreement is increasingly framed as betrayal. To anyone who has lived through authoritarianism, this language isn't merely rhetoric – it's preparation. Project 2025's blueprint for reshaping the Justice Department follows this pattern – creating systems where political loyalty supersedes institutional independence. 

The mechanisms may have evolved but the fundamental approach remains unchanged. In Russia, no one embodied this three-act progression more clearly than Alexei Navalny. In 2014, he was still able to mobilize hundreds of thousands in Moscow's streets against Putin and the Kremlin’s corruption. His warnings about Russia's growing authoritarianism were largely dismissed in the West as exaggerated. Yet the noose tightened around him – first arrests, then poisoning, imprisonment, and eventually death. He posed too great a threat, and the system couldn't tolerate his existence.

That night in Tbilisi in 2019, Oksana talked a lot about what it was like to work with Navalny's team, to mobilize Russians against Putin. We argued about whether or not Navalny was racist. For all his bravery fighting corruption, Navalny had made derogatory remarks about people from Central Asia and the Caucasus, calling Georgians "rodents" that should be "exterminated." Like her, I had grown up with the Soviet collapse as the backdrop of my youth—we were the same age—but my experiences came from a Georgian movement that fought not just the Soviet system but Russian colonialism too.

Our wine-fueled argument eventually settled into a consensus that Western liberal democracy, for all its flaws, remained the best system available—the fairest and freest option we knew. It's only now that I recognize my own slight condescension toward her because she was proudly an activist. After years working in Western media, I had been almost vaccinated against the idea of being an activist myself—journalism had to be pure, objective, detached.

I was wrong. Oksana understood something I didn't yet grasp: in environments where truth itself is under assault, journalism inevitably becomes a form of resistance. For her, this wasn't theoretical—it was daily reality. The boundary I so carefully maintained was a luxury she couldn't afford, and it is now one I no longer believe in.

The Final Warning

A year later, after we filmed about 30 interviews with survivors of Stalin’s purges all across Russia, Oksana went back to show a few of them the result of our work. We have a video of Oksana visiting Olga Shirokaya, a 96-year-old Gulag survivor who had been arrested when she was 27. They sit down on Olga’s couch to watch the film, Olga's eyes widen as she sees her own story reimagined through animation. 

"I feel like I can breathe again," she tells Oksana, her voice trembling. "I didn't think in such a short piece you could so truthfully find the essence of all the things I told you."

I'm haunted by that footage now. Oksana sits there, bright and elegant, while this survivor of Stalin's terror watches her own testimony. By then, Navalny was already in prison. The full scale invasion of Ukraine  was just weeks away. Did Oksana sense what was coming? Did she know she was documenting not just Olga's past, but her own future?

When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Oksana left Russia. She went to Kyiv to report on the war for an independent Russian outlet – her final act of resistance. On March 23, almost exactly a month since the war had begun, while documenting civilian damage from Russian bombing, Oksana was killed in a Russian missile strike. She was 42.

"The Repressions Don't End" wasn't just the title she chose for the Russian version of our documentary project. It was how she understood history's patterns – patterns that would claim her own life.

We've seen this movie before across different contexts and continents. The script is familiar, the plot mostly predictable. But we don't yet know how it ends – especially in a country with America's democratic traditions, constitutional safeguards, and decentralized power structures.

And so, when friends ask me "what do we do," I tell them: Look to those who've been there before. Democracy isn't saved through grand gestures, but through thousands of small acts of courage. Through showing up, speaking up, and refusing to turn away from what is happening before our eyes. Through recognizing that the authoritarian playbook works precisely because each small tactic seems too minor to resist. 

We've seen this movie before. But we're not just a passive audience—we're also actors. And we still have the power to change the ending.

All illustrations and videos in this article are from Coda Story's Generation Gulag

The post How Democracies Die: The Script for a Three-Act Play appeared first on Coda Story.

For nearly a decade, our team has documented how anti-LGBT legislation and rhetoric has migrated from Russia to Central Asia to Turkey to Georgia, Brazil, and now the United States. 

Trump's speech was instantly recognizable to those who have followed this trail. He took us on a tour of its classic landmarks: presenting anti-transgender policies as "protecting women," framing gender-affirming care as "mutilation," and positioning this politicized language as a return to common sense rather than an attack on civil rights. 

But to understand how we got here, we need to look back more than a decade to when the Kremlin first deployed anti-LGBT rhetoric not as a moral stance, but as a tactical weapon.

A Russian export

In 2012, facing mounting protests over corruption, Vladimir Putin's government desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere. As our contributing editor Peter Pomerantsev later wrote: "Putin faced a mounting wave of protests focusing on bad governance and corruption among the elites. He desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere."

The opportunity came when self-declared feminist provocateurs Pussy Riot performed their "punk prayer" in Moscow's central cathedral. Putin seized the moment. Suddenly Russian state TV shifted their attention from corruption scandals to tabloid rants about witches, God, Satan, and anal sex. Europe, previously a symbol of the rule of law and transparency, was rebranded as "Gayropa."

This wasn't about deeply held religious beliefs. As Pomerantsev noted, "Putin was probably telling the truth when he told a TV interviewer he had no problem with homosexuals. His administration is said to contain several, and some key members of the media elite are themselves discreetly gay." Russia's social culture is, Pomerantsev wrote, "hedonistic and, if anything, somewhat libertine; rates for abortion, divorce and children born out of wedlock are high. Church attendance is low. The US Bible belt it certainly isn't." 

But if Putin had no personal problem with homosexuality, he saw the potential of playing to prejudice. Russia's 2013 "gay propaganda" law banning the "promotion of non-traditional sexual relations" to minors became the template. Soon, nearly identical laws appeared in former Soviet countries—first in Lithuania, then Latvia, then across Central Asia. The language was often copied verbatim, with the same vague prohibitions against "propaganda" that left room to criminalize everything from pride parades to sex education to simply mentioning that LGBT people exist.

The creation of a global axis

What began as a deliberate distraction from Putin’s failure to rein in corruption evolved into a transnational movement. Russian "family values" defenders organized international conferences, bringing together American evangelicals, European far-right politicians, and anti-LGBT activists from Africa.

Those meetings bore fruit. The most powerful connections happened through the World Congress of Families, where links between Russian Orthodox activists and American evangelical groups were forged. These meetings created pathways for rhetoric and policies to travel, often through multiple countries in other continents, before reaching the mainstream in Western democracies.

"Homosexual propaganda is the disease of a modern anti-Christian society."

When Trump spoke about banning "gender ideology," he echoed language first deployed by the Kremlin. When he announced that he had "signed an executive order to ban men from playing in women's sports," he was repeating almost word-for-word the justifications used for Russia's bans on transgender athletes.

From Russia to Brazil to America

By 2020, this Christian-inflected, homophobic, family values playbook had made it to Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro deployed its tactics to appeal to a wide swathe of religious conservatives. In May 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro attempted to divert attention from his mishandling of the crisis by posting on Facebook that the World Health Organization was encouraging masturbation in children as young as four.

The post was bizarre, quickly deleted, and made little sense—but it wasn't the product of some Bolsonaro fever dream. Anyone who had watched Russian state television was already familiar with the crazy conspiracy theory about WHO encouraging childhood masturbation.

It first appeared on Russian state TV channels around 2014, when Putin's traditional values crusade had really picked up momentum. The whole theory was based on a WHO document on sex education that mentioned early childhood masturbation as a normal psychosexual phenomenon that teachers should be prepared to discuss—an obscure, academic point distorted by Russian media into evidence that European children were being forced to masturbate from the age of four.

Bizarre as it was, the story had legs, repeated so often that it migrated from Russian television to the Brazilian president’s social media to Christian conservative talking points in the U.S. and Britain. 

Watching the Edges

What happens on the periphery—both geographical and narrative—eventually moves to the center. Eight years ago, we were documenting anti-LGBT legislation in Kyrgyzstan that seemed fringe, distant, and surely far removed from established democracies. Today, similar laws are being implemented in countries like Hungary, Georgia, and even the United States.

"People [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, you will be killed."

Georgia, my own country, is a fascinating case study in how such rhetoric takes root. Once the most promising democracy among the former Soviet republics, Georgia has regressed. With the Kremlin-friendly Georgian Dream in power, and despite determined and vocal opposition, the ruling party pushed through a "foreign agents" law modeled directly on its Russian counterpart and “family values” legislation that targets LGBT rights, including banning Pride parades and public displays of the rainbow flag.

The pattern is unmistakable and what makes it particularly dangerous is how these policies are laundered through increasingly respectable channels. Phrases that began on Russian state TV like "gender ideology" and protecting children from "propaganda" have become mainstream Republican talking points.

Russia's Blueprint: Unleashing Violence

The consequences of this exported blueprint are devastating. It gives license to religious conservatives everywhere to act on  their prejudices and then point to them as universal. In Indonesia, for instance, which has been mulling changes to its broadcast law that single out investigative journalism and LGBT content, two young men in conservative Aceh were publicly flogged under Shariah law for gay sex. Vigilantes burst into a flat to find the men allegedly mid-embrace.   

In Russia, the gay propaganda law unleashed unprecedented violence against LGBTQ people. As Lyosha Gorshkov, a gay Russian professor who fled to the United States, told us in 2016:  "people [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, but you will be killed. Government keeps targeting LGBT population because it's easiest target.”

Before fleeing Russia, Gorshkov was targeted by the Federal Security Service (the modern version of the KGB). An agent at his university called him into his office and demanded he identify communists and homosexuals. "He would follow me every single week, calling me, looking for me at the university," Gorshkov explained. When a bogus article circulated claiming Gorshkov was "promoting sodomy," he knew he had to leave.

In St. Petersburg, which became the epicenter for Russian homophobia, LGBT people faced increasing danger. Nearly nine years ago, journalist Dmitry Tsilikin was murdered in what police believed was a homophobic attack. Local politicians like Vitaly Milonov, who masterminded the city's gay propaganda law that later went national, routinely used dehumanizing language that inspired vigilante violence.

"We have to face moral dangers,” Milonov told our reporter Amy Mackinnon. Homosexual propaganda, he said, is “the disease of a modern anti-Christian society," Milonov told our reporter Amy MacKinnon.

Coming Full Circle

President Trump's speech this week represents a concerning milestone in this journey of authoritarian rhetoric. When he promised to bring "common sense" back by recognizing only two genders, he was echoing Putin from a decade earlier, though no one acknowledged the source.

Particularly troubling is how within the United States such rhetoric is becoming law. Iowa's legislature recently passed a bill to strip the state's civil rights code of protections based on gender identity—the first state to explicitly revoke such protections. Georgia's state legislature, meanwhile, passed a bill to cut off funding for gender-affirming care for minors and people held in state prisons. Georgia had already passed a bill banning transgender athletes from school sports.

These are the legislative fruits from rhetorical roots planted over a decade ago. I'll never forget the May afternoon in 2016 when I sat in Tbilisi's main concert hall, watching Josiah Trenham, an Eastern Orthodox priest from California, take the stage at the World Congress of Families conference. The hall was packed with hundreds of guests, many of them Americans who had traveled to the Georgian capital to discuss ways to "save the world from homosexuality." What still haunts me is how warmly the audience applauded Trenham’s words.

"I have witnessed my nation disgrace itself before God and men," he thundered. "My counsel to beloved Georgians is this: stand firm in your faith against the LGBT revolution. Do not give in or your cities will become like San Francisco, where there are 80,000 more dogs in the city than there are children. Tell the LGBT tolerance tyrants, this lavender mafia, these homofascists, these rainbow radicals, that they are not welcome to promote their anti-religious anti-civilizational propaganda in your nations."

Later, when I confronted Trenham, he insisted he hadn't encouraged violence, claiming instead that the people "who are for provocation and violence are the LGBTs themselves." Outside, hundreds of Georgian Orthodox activists were gathered with religious icons and signs that quoted Biblical scripture. They were free to express their hate. But when my phone rang, it was an LGBT activist calling in panic because ten of his friends had been arrested for writing "Love is equal" on a sidewalk only a few blocks away.

Cynical Kremlin propaganda coupled with genuine religious fervor had created this monster, and more monsters were being bred everywhere. The success of the Russian playbook lies in its incremental nature. First, you frame the issue as one about protecting children. Then you expand to education. Then to adults. At each step, those opposing the restrictions can be painted as ideologues who don't care about protecting the vulnerable.

Setting Trump's speech alongside those made by others, from political leaders to religious preachers, reveals that the U.S. is just the latest domino to fall. Solid family values as a contrast to the licentiousness of the decadent West  was a campaign that began in the Kremlin's halls of power as a distraction. It has now become a cornerstone of authoritarian governance worldwide.

In Tbilisi, at the World Congress of Families conference, a Polish anti-abortion activist explained: "You have to understand that in the west politicians are thinking in four-year terms... but in Russia they think more like emperors." The Kremlin’s long game has paid off.

For years, we've documented how authoritarianism travels across borders, now that story is becoming America’s story.

The post From Russia with hate appeared first on Coda Story.

Today, that solidarity has been replaced by something no one could have imagined in February, 2022: the United States has refused to back an annual resolution presented to the UN General Assembly that condemns Russian aggression and demands the removal of troops. Instead, the leader of the world's most powerful democracy now repeats the Kremlin's false narrative that Ukraine started the war.

This stunning reversal of the U.S. position represents Vladimir Putin's greatest victory - not in the battlefields of Ukraine but in a war that most of us thought ended over 30 years ago: the Cold War. 

Putin's win is no accident. For decades, he has been explicit about his ultimate goal: to return to the world of 1945, when the leaders of the U.S.S.R., U.S. and Britain sat around a table in Yalta to divide the world between them. The invasion of Ukraine three years ago was never about Ukraine - it was about reclaiming lost power and forcing the West back to the negotiating table. Putin’s success stems from the collective failure of the Western establishment, convinced of its own invincibility, to recognize his systematic dismantling of the order they claimed to defend.

It would be too simple to blame Donald Trump or any single political leader for finally giving Putin his seat at the table. This failure belongs to the entire Western establishment - including media organizations, think tanks, universities, corporations, and civil society institutions.

The values the West claimed for itself - defense of individual rights, rule of law, democratic values - were worth fighting for. But having “won” the Cold War, Western establishments grew complacent. They assumed the moral high ground was unassailable, dismissing those who warned it could be lost.

When Putin called the Soviet collapse "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," Western analysts dismissed it as rhetoric. When he told George W. Bush that Ukraine was "not a country," they treated it as diplomatic bluster. When he used his 2007 Munich speech to declare ideological war on the Western-led world order, they saw a tantrum.

Each subsequent action - from the invasion of Georgia in 2008, to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, from the downing of MH17, also in 2014, to the killing of opponents throughout Putin’s reign - was treated as an isolated incident rather than part of a carefully orchestrated strategy. When Georgian leaders warned that Ukraine would be next, the Obama administration ignored them, dispatching Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Geneva to meet her Russian counterpart and present him with the infamous "reset" button. When Baltic and Polish leaders pleaded for increased NATO deployments and warned about the Nord Stream pipeline's security implications, they were dismissed as paranoid.

"The Western Europeans pooh-poohed and patronized us for these last 30 years," former Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told Politico in 2022. "For years they were patronizing us about our attitude: 'Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.'"

The Lost Victory

Meanwhile, inside Russia, Putin was perfecting the playbook that would eventually transform the West itself. His ideologues, like Alexander Dugin, weren't just discussing Russia's future - they were designing a blueprint for dismantling liberal democracy from within. Dugin, and the influential Izborsky Club think tank, understood that the key to defeating Western values wasn't to challenge them head-on, but to turn their contradictions against themselves.

It wasn't that Dugin had anything particularly compelling to offer. His vision of a post-liberal world order where traditional values trump individual rights was hardly original. But when he sat down with Tucker Carlson in April last year to present Putin as the defender of traditional values against the decadent West, his message resonated with conservatives because too many Westerners felt that liberal values had become hollow promises. 

Many studies, like this from the Pew Research Center, showed that Americans were rapidly losing faith in their institutions. Rather than addressing these grievances, the Western establishment preferred to blame disinformation and foreign interference, dismissing citizens’ concerns and creating resentments that Putin proved masterful at exploiting.

Putin was also methodically building a global coalition that extended far beyond the West. While Western media focused on Russia's influence operations in Europe and America, Moscow was crafting a different narrative for the Global South. In Africa, Russian embassies bombarded newsrooms with op-eds positioning Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union's anti-colonial legacy. The message was simple but effective: Russia was fighting Western imperialism, not waging colonial war.

Engineering the West's Downfall

While Western governments spent billions setting up fact-checking initiatives and disinformation monitoring centers - always reacting, always one step behind - Putin was methodically building loose, agile networks that tapped into genuine popular anger about Western hypocrisy and double standards.

Putin's triumph lies not in offering better ideas or values - democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences"

The West's reactive stance allowed Putin to continuously set the agenda. The vast "counter-disinformation" industry - now effectively destroyed by Trump’s aid cuts-  focused on debunking individual claims but consistently missed the bigger picture. From RT Arabic's dominant position in Lebanon to coordinated social media campaigns across Africa, Putin crafted narratives that positioned Russia as the champion of all those who felt betrayed and marginalized by the Western-led order.

"Russia's message lands well and softly," one editor from Johannesburg told me during a gathering of African editors in Nairobi in 2022. "The challenge for our team is to objectively navigate overwhelmingly pro-Russian public sentiment." 

The success of this strategy is now undeniable. And yet, Putin offers little in return for his repudiation of the West. Democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences, a gap that Western establishments proved unwilling or unable to address.

This blind spot - coupled with the West’s inability to imagine losing - became the so-called free world’s greatest vulnerability. While liberal establishments were congratulating themselves on the "end of history," Putin was methodically working to rewrite its ending. While they dismissed the appeal of traditionalist values as backwards and parochial, he was building a global alliance of like-minded leaders and movements. 

Putin's victory was never inevitable. At each step, Western institutions had opportunities to recognize and counter his strategy. Instead, their conviction in their own righteousness led them to consistently underestimate both the threat and the extent of their own failures.

Today, as Russian state media hosts celebrate their triumph and Trump prepares to negotiate Ukraine's surrender, the scale of Putin's achievement is breathtaking. He has succeeded where generations of Soviet leaders failed: not just in resisting Western influence but in fundamentally transforming the West itself. 

The Cold War’s new ending is exactly as Putin scripted it. Not with the triumph of Western liberal democracy, but with its possibly fatal weakening. The Kremlin's guiding framework—where power is truth, principles are weakness, and cronyism is the only real ideology—now defines the White House as well.The question isn't how we got here - Putin told us exactly where he was taking us. The question is whether we can finally abandon our arrogant certainties long enough to understand what happened - and what comes next.

Read More

The Club That Wants Russia to Take Over the World: Our 2018 investigation revealed how the Izborsky Club, a self-described "intellectual circle" of philosophers, journalists and Orthodox priests, was working to dismantle Western liberal democracy. Read how they laid the groundwork for today's reality.

The post How the West lost the war it thought it had won appeared first on Coda Story.

When he declared last week that Ukraine should "secure what we're giving them with their rare earth and other things," he inadvertently exposed a bitter truth: gauzy Western rhetoric about sovereignty and self-determination doesn’t apply to countries that neighbor a colonial power.

It was a lesson I learned for myself, reporting from Georgia in 2008 as Russian tanks rolled towards my hometown.By the time a ceasefire was called, Russia had invaded and seized 20% of Georgian land, the territory of America's most loyal non-NATO ally in the region. And Georgia had suffered a wound that would prove fatal. Just months later, Hillary Clinton, Obama's newly minted Secretary of State, presented her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov with a red “reset” button in Geneva. 

Despite the recent Russian aggression, there was Lavrov, laughing and joking with Clinton about a mistake in the transliteration from English to Cyrillic of the word “reset.” Every Georgian, Kazakh, or Ukrainian who had experienced Russian colonialism first hand, knew that what he was really chuckling about was the fact that Moscow had just gotten away with murder. 

Trump has exposed a bitter truth: gauze Western rhetoric about sovereignty and self-determination doesn't apply to countries that neighbor a colonial power.

In 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Ukraine was positioning itself to be a key player in the global green technology transition. The country's vast deposits of lithium and various minerals - including 22 of the 34 minerals that the European Union deems to be “critical” – promised a pathway to genuine economic sovereignty. But that future was stolen by Russia's invasion, with a significant percentage of Ukrainian minerals now under Russian control, including half of its rare earths reserves. 

The mineral deposits that remain – resources that could finance Ukraine's post-war reconstruction – are now being demanded by Trump as collateral for military aid. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy leapt at the offer: “let’s do a deal,” he told Reuters about Trump’s conditions, “we are only for it.” Zelenskiy’s desperate need for continued American support means he has little choice but to bargain away Ukraine’s resources. Even if it raises the grim colonial specter of the U.S. and Russia sitting across the negotiating table and carving up Ukrainian wealth amongst themselves.

Trump's approach eerily echoes Victorian-era colonialism. When Cecil Rhodes declared in 1902 that he would "annex the planets if I could," he expressed the same ruthless resource-extraction mindset that now drives Trumpian foreign policy. Both men share a vision of power measured in territorial control and resource ownership, backed by military might.

In his first term, Trump was frequently described as an isolationist, unwilling to continue to fund American military adventurism abroad, unwilling to intervene in the affairs of other countries, unwilling to shelter migrants, and unwilling to abide by international agreements and institutions. Back then, the label was suspect, a badge of convenience. Already in the first weeks of Trump’s second term, the label has become absurd. 

But Trump's mineral-for-weapons proposition, crude as it is, strips away decades of Western illusions. It acknowledges what leaders in Washington and Brussels long refused to see - that countries in Russia's shadow have never had the luxury of true independence. 

Since the 1990s, the West's approach to Russia has been built on a peculiar form of magical thinking - a stubborn belief that Moscow can be changed through engagement and dialogue. It’s a pattern that requires the West to bury its head in the sand after each example of Russian aggression. For instance, after Russia's cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, Western leaders dismissed it as an anomaly. And then, after the invasion of Georgia in 2008, they rushed to "reset" relations. Six years later, after the seizure of Crimea, they still spoke of finding diplomatic solutions. Each time Putin tested the West's resolve, he emerged more emboldened, his every action treated as an aberration rather than as part of a coherent imperial strategy.

Since the 1990s, the West's approach to Russia has been built on a peculiar form of magical thinking - a stubborn belief that Moscow can be changed through engagement and dialogue.

The medieval assault on Ukraine in 2022 seemed, finally, like a wake-up call. For a moment, it appeared that politicians in Europe and the United States understood that Putin wanted to rebuild a Russian empire. But the moment didn’t last long. Even as Putin openly declared his imperial ambitions, even as he openly dismissed Ukraine's right to sovereignty, Western leaders continued to search for off-ramps and resets that existed only in their imagination.

Joe Biden's tactics - treating the conflict as a crisis to be managed rather than a war to be won - became the final chapter of the West’s failed post-Cold War politics. Each delayed weapons delivery, each hesitation justified by the fear of escalation, reflected a familiar priority: stability with Russia over the right to sovereignty of its neighbors.

Those underground deposits in Ukraine tell the story: a large portion now lies in territories controlled by Russia or too close to the front lines to be mined. No wonder, Zelensky is courting Trump’s interest in its rare earth deposits. The choices facing Ukraine's leadership and people remain what they've always been - a series of impossible decisions to be made in the shadow of an empire that has never accepted their right to decide.

“They think we are fighting to join NATO. But we are only fighting for our values and they happen to be the same as Europe's values," a Ukrainian soldier told me in 2015. His words haunt me now as we enter this new, cynical era. Deep beneath Ukraine's soil lies both promise and peril - deposits of minerals that could fuel either independence or a new era of colonial extraction. The familiar irony for Ukraine is that these resources, which make sovereignty viable, must also serve as collateral in a great game between colonial powers.

Now that the magical thinking and pretense is over and the hard calculations begin, the only certainty is that the cost will be borne, as always, by those who do not have the privilege of being able to harbor illusions and magical thoughts in the first place.

A version of this story was published in last week’s Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Donald Trump’s imperial dreams appeared first on Coda Story.

The encounter was jarring not just for its surreal nature - a discussion of political theory amid artillery fire - but for what it revealed about Russian propaganda's evolving sophistication. When I researched the Overton Window after our conversation, I discovered that Russian state media had long been obsessed with the concept, transforming this Western analytical framework into something more potent: both an explanation for social change and supposed proof of Western cultural warfare. Russian commentators didn't just cite the theory -  they wielded it as both explanation and evidence of Western attempts to undermine Russian society.

Over the next decade, I watched this once-academic term slide from Russian state TV screens and the trenches of eastern Ukraine into mainstream Western discourse - embraced by commentators on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum. What began as a framework for understanding social change became a blueprint for engineering it.

Now we're watching this process play out in real time.  For instance, Elon Musk's handpicked team running DOGE - the new Department of Government Efficiency - are inexperienced young men between the ages of 19 and 24 with unfettered access to federal systems. A decade ago, putting Silicon Valley twenty-somethings in charge of critical government functions would have sparked outrage. Today, it's celebrated as innovation.

What began as a framework for understanding social change became a blueprint for engineering it.

The transformation extends far beyond Washington. When America's president proposes to "take over" Gaza and turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East," when Musk tells Germans to "move beyond" Nazi guilt, they're deliberately expanding what's politically possible. From Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson, from African opinion writers praising Trump's aid cuts as "liberation" to conservative thinkers reimagining solutions for Gaza - each pushes the boundaries of acceptable discourse a little further.

The shift manifests across every domain of power. Inside federal agencies, tech executives now make decisions once reserved for career civil servants, normalizing private control of public functions. On the global stage, raw deal-making has replaced diplomatic principles, with decades-old alliances discarded in favor of transactional relationships. El Salvador's president offers his prisons to house American inmates. Ukraine, fighting for survival against Russia, signals its willingness to trade military support for mineral rights. Even humanitarian aid, long seen as a moral imperative, is being recast as a form of dependency that needs to be eliminated.

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has already adapted to this new reality. Their latest analysis simply divides nations into "winners and losers" based on their ability to navigate this new transactional diplomacy and stay on Trump’s good side. No moral judgments, no democratic values - just raw negotiating power.

The Overton Window - or "Окно Овертона блядь" as the Russian commander put it in 2014, mechanically adding the profanity at the end of each phrase like a full stop - offers a powerful framework for understanding how societies transform - not through sudden upheaval but through the gradual shifting of what people consider acceptable.  Whether through the brutal recalibrations of war or the calculated provocations of political theater, the Overton Window is always in motion, reshaped by those willing to push its boundaries.

This systematic normalization of the extreme is a core tenet of the authoritarian playbook - a calculated strategy of gradually expanding what society will tolerate, inch by inch, controversy by controversy. The goal is not just to push boundaries, but to exhaust resistance, to make the previously unimaginable seem not just possible, but inevitable.

The same mechanism operates in political discourse, where deliberate provocation becomes a strategic tool for reshaping collective perception. Donald Trump is the master of this approach. 

Whether through the brutal recalibrations of war or the calculated provocations of political theater, the Overton Window is always in motion, reshaped by those willing to push its boundaries. This systematic normalization of the extreme is a core tenet of the authoritarian playbook.

His political methodology isn't about achieving specific outcomes, but about continuously expanding the boundaries of acceptable discourse. Each provocative statement serves as a strategic instrument, deliberately designed to recalibrate social and political norms. When he suggests purchasing Greenland or proposing radical reimaginings of geopolitical landscapes like in Gaza, the actual feasibility becomes secondary to the act of introducing previously unthinkable concepts into mainstream conversation.

The genius of this approach lies in its relentlessness. By consistently proposing ideas that initially seem outrageous, extreme positions gradually become reference points for future discussions. Each controversial statement doesn't just distract from previous controversies; it fundamentally reshapes the political imagination. The goal is not immediate implementation but permanent transformation - moving the entire conceptual framework of what society considers possible.

Russian propagandists were early to grasp its significance, weaponizing the Overton Window theory itself as supposed evidence of Western cultural imperialism. That commander in Donetsk was just echoing what Russian state media had been claiming for years: that the West was deliberately expanding society's boundaries to impose its values on Russia.

A decade later, we're watching this process unfold in reverse. As transactional relationships replace values-based alliances, as oligarchic control displaces democratic institutions, as the unthinkable becomes routine - the transformation of our societies isn't happening by accident. 

Through the years of Brexit, Trump's first win, Orbán's rise, and the growing global polarization, that conversation in the ruins of Donetsk has stayed with me. There was something chilling about a commander discussing political theory between artillery fire - not because it felt academic, but because he embodied how thoroughly manufactured narratives could drive real-world violence. He was willing to fight and die for a worldview constructed by Russian state media about "traditional values" under attack. 

In the end, we are all unwitting participants in this grand narrative shift, our perceptions subtly recalibrated by the very forces that seek to reshape our understanding of what is possible, acceptable, and true. And whether we are shocked by those in power or find ourselves applauding them, we are simultaneously the observers and the changed.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Shattering the Overton Window appeared first on Coda Story.

AfD has become a serious threat to Germany’s political establishment, with its leader Alice Weidel even leading the race  in one recent poll to become the country’s next chancellor. Weidel, a once obscure figure, enjoys the very loud and prominent support of Elon Musk, who interviewed her for over an hour on X last month and appeared at an AfD rally via video link last week to tell the crowd that there was “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt. “ He exhorted AfD supporters to “be proud of German culture and German values and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” 

Many AfD members have in the past called for an end to Germany’s “cult of guilt” over the Holocaust. And Weidel herself, while endorsing that phrase, has said German politics should not be about its past but about “confidence and responsibility for the future.”

When Musk told thousands of Germans they need to "move beyond" Nazi guilt, I reached out to Erica Hellerstein, a brilliant reporter who has spent months investigating Germany's complex relationship with historical memory. In 2023, her story for Coda dived into  the little-understood opposition to Holocaust remembrance inside Germany. 

"What's interesting to me is seeing that view migrate from the fringe of German society to one of the most powerful shadow politicians in the US," Erica told me.

"Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents," Musk declared to cheering AfD supporters, just hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Musk’s own grandfather was reportedly a pro-apartheid, antisemitic conspiracy theorist in South Africa - another country that, like Germany, has been celebrated for its post-conflict reconciliation efforts.

To understand today's shifting power dynamics, you have to understand how leaders manipulate our view of the past. The battle over historical memory has become one of the most potent weapons of modern authoritarianism, though it often goes unnoticed in daily headlines. Whether in school textbooks, political speeches, or family stories, the rewriting of history isn't really about the past at all. It's about who gets to control the future. 

No one understands this better than Vladimir Putin, who has written the playbook that authoritarians around the world are now following: Close the archives. Rewrite textbooks. Silence historians. Transform perpetrators into heroes.

What makes this tactic so effective is how stealthily it works at first. The rewriting of history begins in intimate spaces - in family silences, in selective remembrance, in subtle shifts of narrative.

We sent Erica to Germany in the wake of America's racial justice protests because we wanted to understand what Europe's model for historical reconciliation could teach a nation grappling with its own buried past. What Erica uncovered was revealing: even as Germans publicly embraced their culture of remembrance, many maintained a studied silence about their own family histories during the Nazi era - much like the buried stories of racial violence she found reporting across the American South. It was in these intimate gaps between public commemoration and private amnesia that she found the seeds of today's shift.

"Silence distorts memory..." wrote Erica Hellerstein in Coda nearly three years ago. She had traveled to Germany to report on its lauded culture of remembrance. Now with Elon Musk telling Germans to move on from their guilt, Erica's prescient piece reminds us why we must interrogate the horrors of history so as not to repeat them in the future. READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

"I don't think it's particularly surprising that someone with Musk's particular brand of grievance politics would gravitate to the AfD's brand of grievance politics," Erica told me, "but it does make me wonder if it will give license to other authoritarian movements to more vocally reject movements to reconcile with the past."

It’s already happening: Argentina's new president Javier Milei is actively whitewashing the country’s brutal period of dictatorship in the late-1970s and early-1980s. And in Hungary, historical revisionism has been essential to Viktor Orbán maintaining his grip on power.  While, in the United States, conservative politicians continue to rail against the 1619 Project and any attempt to teach accurate history in schools.

In Russia, where 70% approve of Stalin's role in Russian history, nearly half of young people say they've never heard of the Great Terror. Years before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine we saw how the Putin regime began to implement its meticulous, systematic erasure of Soviet crimes: “cleansing” history books, culture, music, film, media.  By rewriting the past, Putin's regime cleared the way for future atrocities. When he finally declared Ukraine's statehood a historical fiction in 2022, the groundwork had been laid over decades of perpetuating carefully constructed historical myths. 

Now, as Musk amplifies a view that was once barely whispered in German living rooms, we're seeing  the results of the same erosion of historical memory burst into the mainstream. It’s evident in the support for extreme right wing groups across Europe,

What makes this moment particularly dangerous is how it weaponizes a very human impulse - the desire to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths about our past. As one Gulag survivor told us, of wrestling with this challenge in Russia: "How do you hold people accountable when there are millions of interrogators, millions of informants, millions of prison guards... These millions were also our people."

This selective amnesia creates exactly the kind of buried tension and grievance that authoritarians exploit. From Moscow to Buenos Aires, from Mississippi to Munich, we see how silence about the past can pave the way for power grabs in the present. When Musk aligns himself with Germany's far right, he's not just making an inflammatory speech - he's giving global legitimacy to a movement that understands what Putin has long known: controlling society’s memory is the key to controlling society.

Today, as we witness what Erica calls "the global ripple effect of this kind of embrace of a once-taboo interpretation of history," I'm struck by how the grand sweep of politics often begins in the quiet spaces of our homes. 

The stories we tell our children, the silences we maintain at family gatherings, the questions we dare or don't dare to ask about our ancestors - these intimate choices extend outward, shaping not just our personal narratives but our collective future. 

As Erica put it: “I think it’s so important to start with our family stories - because over time, memory gaps can mutate into memory wars.” And so, perhaps our most important task begins at our dinner tables: facing up to the stories we've been afraid to tell.

The post To control the future, rewrite the past appeared first on Coda Story.

But perhaps the real shock should be that Silicon Valley was shocked at all.

For years, Silicon Valley and its cheerleaders spread the narrative of inevitable American dominance of the artificial intelligence industry. From the "Why China Can't Innovate" cover story in the Harvard Business Review to the breathless reporting on billion-dollar investments in AI, U.S. media spent years building an image of insurmountable Western technological superiority. Even this week, when Wired reported on the "shock, awe, and questions" DeepSeek had sparked, the persistent subtext seemed to be that technological efficiency from unexpected quarters was somehow fundamentally illegitimate. 

“In the West, our sense of exceptionalism is truly our greatest weakness,” says data analyst Christopher Wylie, author of MindF*ck, who famously blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica in 2017. 

That arrogance was on full display just last year when OpenAI's Sam Altman, speaking to an audience in India, declared: "It's totally hopeless to compete with us. You can try and it's your job to try but I believe it is hopeless." He was dismissing the possibility that teams outside Silicon Valley could build substantial AI systems with limited resources.

There are still questions over whether DeepSeek had access to more computing power than it is admitting. Scale AI chief executive Alexandr Wong said in a recent interview that the Chinese company had access to thousands more of the highest grade chips than people know about, despite U.S. export controls.  What's clear, though, is that Altman didn't anticipate that a competitor would simply refuse to play by the rules he was trying to set and would instead reimagine the game itself.

By developing an AI model that matches—and in many ways surpasses—American equivalents, DeepSeek challenged the Silicon Valley story that technological innovation demands massive resources and minimal oversight. While companies like OpenAI have poured hundreds of billions into massive data centers—with the Stargate project alone pledging an “initial investment” of $100 billion—DeepSeek demonstrated a fundamentally different path to innovation.

"For the first time in public, they've provided an efficient way to train reasoning models," explains Thomas Cao, professor of technology policy at Tufts University. "The technical detail is that they've come up with a way to do reinforcement learning without supervision. You don't have to hand-label a lot of data. That makes training much more efficient."

By developing an AI model that matches—and in many ways surpasses—American equivalents, DeepSeek challenged the Silicon Valley story that technological innovation demands massive resources and minimal oversight.

For the American media, which has drunk the Silicon Valley Kool Aid, the DeepSeek story is a hard one to stomach. For a long time, Wylie argues, while countries in Asia made massive technological breakthroughs, the story commonly told to the American people focused on American tech exceptionalism. 

An alternative approach, Wylie says, would be to see and “acknowledge that China is doing good things we can learn from without meaning that we have to adopt their system. Things can exist in parallel.” But instead, he adds, the mainstream media followed the politicians down the rabbit hole of focusing on the "China threat." 

These geopolitical fears have helped Big Tech shield itself from genuine competition and regulatory scrutiny. The narrative of a Cold War style “AI race” with China has also fed the assumption that a major technological power can be bullied into submission through trade restrictions. 

That assumption has also crumpled. The U.S. has spent the past two years attempting to curtail China's AI development through increasingly strict controls on advanced semiconductors. These restrictions, which began under Biden in 2022 and were significantly expanded last week under Trump, were designed to prevent Chinese companies from accessing the most advanced chips needed for AI development. 

DeepSeek developed its model using older generation chips stockpiled before the restrictions took effect, and its breakthrough has been held up as an example of genuine, bootstrap innovation. But Professor Cao cautions against reading too much into how export controls have catalysed development and innovation at DeepSeek. "If there had been no export control requirements,” he said, “DeepSeek could have been able to do things even more efficiently and faster. We don't see the counterfactual." 

DeepSeek is a direct rebuke to both Western assumptions about Chinese innovation and the methods the West has used to curtail it. 

As millions of Americans downloaded DeepSeek, making it the most downloaded app in the U.S., OpenAI’s Steven Heidel peevishly claimed that using it would mean giving away data to the Chinese Communist Party. Lawmakers too have warned about national security risks and dozens of stories like this one echoed suggestions that the app could be sending U.S. data to China. 

Security concers aside,  what really sets DeepSeek apart from its Western counterparts is not just efficiency of the model, but also the fact that it is open source. Which, counter-intuitively, makes a Beijing-funded app more democratic than its Silicon Valley predecessors. 

In the heated discourse surrounding technological innovation, "open source" has become more than just a technical term—it's a philosophy of transparency. Unlike proprietary models where code is a closely guarded corporate secret, open source invites global scrutiny and collective improvement.

DeepSeek is a direct rebuke to Western assumptions about Chinese innovation and the methods the West has used to curtail it.

At its core, open source means that the source code of a software is made freely available for anyone to view, modify, and distribute. When a technology is open source, users can download the entire code, run it on their own servers, and verify every line of its functionality. For consumers and technologists alike, open source means the ability to understand, modify, and improve technology without asking permission. It's a model that prioritizes collective advancement over corporate control. Already, for instance, the Chinese tech behemoth Alibaba has released a new version of its own large language model that it says is an upgrade on DeepSpeak.

Unlike ChatGPT or any other Western AI system, DeepSource can be run locally without giving away any data. "Despite the media fear-mongering, the irony is DeepSeek is now open source and could be implemented in a far more privacy-preserving way than anything offered by Meta or OpenAI,"  Wylie says. “If Sam Altman open sourced OpenAI, we wouldn’t look at it with the same skepticism, he would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize."

The open-source nature of DeepSeek is a huge part of the disruption it has caused. It challenges Silicon Valley's entire proprietary model and challenges our collective assumptions about both AI development and global competition. Not surprisingly, part of Silicon Valley’s response has been to complain that Chinese companies are using American companies’ intellectual property, even as their own large language models have been built by consuming vast amounts of information without permission.

This counterintuitive strategy of openness coming from an authoritarian state also gives China a massive soft power win that it will translate into geopolitical brownie points. Just as TikTok's algorithms outmaneuvered Instagram and YouTube by focusing on accessibility over profit, DeepSeek, which is currently topping iPhone downloads, represents another moment where what's better for users—open-source, efficient, privacy-preserving—challenges what's better for the boardroom.

We are yet to see how DeepSeek will reroute the development of AI, but just as the original Sputnik moment galvanized American scientific innovation during the Cold War, DeepSeek could shake Silicon Valley out of its complacency. For Professor Cao the immediate lesson is that the US must reinvest in fundamental research or risk falling behind. For Wylie, the takeaway of the DeepSeek fallout in the US is more meta: There is no need for a new Cold War, he argues. “There will only be an AI war if we decide to have one.”

Additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

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For years, Silicon Valley's tech moguls have systematically engineered a world where truth is optional, equity and justice are expendable, and facts are toxic waste. By dismantling both fact-checking operations and DEI programs, Meta stands to save millions - with DEI programs already facing cost-cutting measures in 2023, the move shows that the only responsibility Zuckerberg appears to take seriously is the bottom line. The surprising part isn't that Meta has stopped pretending to care about anything but their power and profit - it's that we were ever naive enough to believe they did.

The consequences of this decision will play out globally, and few understand those consequences better than Maria Ressa. The founder of Rappler, was among the first to document how social media platforms enabled the rise of authoritarianism in her native Philippines, where Facebook became so dominant that it "rewired our people's brains." Ressa, a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. says "propaganda is like cocaine - you take it once or twice, you're okay. But if you take it all the time, you become an addict. And we are all addicts today." When she spoke these words at Coda's Zeg Festival last June, they felt like a warning. Now they read like a prophecy fulfilled.

Her warning wasn't just about addiction to propaganda – it was about the deliberate architecture of our digital world. "These tech companies are engineering a world without facts," she says, "and that's a world that's right for a dictator."

The Engineering of Chaos

Tech pioneer Judy Estrin frames the problem in stark infrastructural terms: "Digital platforms mix 'digital water' and 'sewage' in the same pipes, polluting our information systems and undermining the foundations of our culture, our public health, our economy and our democracy."

This pollution isn't accidental - it's a feature, not a bug. Meta's announcement, coinciding with Elon Musk's open championing of far-right movements in Europe, reveals a profound transformation in Silicon Valley. Tech moguls who once felt pressured to champion openness and truth are now racing to shed any pretense of responsibility.

It isn't just about catering to Donald Trump and the sentiments of his followers. The shift is about how tech companies view their stakeholders. Where platforms once felt compelled to respond to pressure from employees, users, and advertisers concerned about digital pollution, they've now consolidated power solely around profits. The workforce  that once served as a guardrail for online behavior has been neutralized - a trend Elon Musk pioneered when he bought Twitter. And Meta's move to end its 'Diverse Slate Approach' to hiring and representation goals, while adding Trump allies like the Ultimate Fighting Championship supremo Dana White to its board, shows exactly where power now lies.

The Infrastructure of Authoritarianism

For years, we've analyzed electoral manipulation, documented democratic backsliding, and tracked the rise of strongmen while treating platforms as mere conduits rather than active architects of our political reality. The entire debate around content moderation appears in retrospect to have been a carefully crafted distraction – a game of Whack-a-Mole that kept us focused on individual pieces of content rather than the systemic nature of the problem. As one former Meta employee said, "It's like putting a beach shack in the way of a massive tsunami and expecting it to be a barrier."

"Facebook's 'fact checking' initiative was at heart always a PR exercise," argues Emily Bell, whose research at the Tow Center at Columbia University focuses on the intersection of platforms, media and information integrity. "Nothing has changed about the platform's mission: to make money from the exploitation of IP and data created for free."

By abandoning civic responsibility, while disingenuously claiming to be acting in the interests of free speech, Zuckerberg and Musk aren't so much transforming their platforms as finally being honest about what these platforms have always been: engines of engagement designed to maximize profit and power, regardless of societal cost. The real shift isn't in their behavior – it's in our belated recognition that no meaningful conversation about democracy can exclude the role of the broligarchy in shaping our information ecosystem.

The Future of Truth

Tech platforms have wielded the First Amendment much like the gun lobby has wielded the Second: turning constitutional protections into a weapon against regulation and accountability. Just as gun manufacturers claim they bear no responsibility for how their products are used, platform owners insist they're merely providing neutral spaces for free expression – all while their algorithms amplify lies and fuel society's most self-destructive impulses.

And we are all complicit. The endless scrolling of TikTok and Instagram, the ease of WhatsApp communications, the ability to instantly connect with friends and family across the globe – these aren't just corporate products, they're now fundamental to our daily lives. But in our embrace of this convenience, we've sleepwalked into a future where the rejection of facts isn't just the domain of authoritarian governments in Moscow or Beijing, but of giant tech companies in Silicon Valley.

Many respected journalists and human rights defenders lent their credibility to Meta's Oversight Board – a body that could review a handful of content decisions but had little effect on the platform's fundamental design or business model. "The Oversight Board is absolutely the wrong problem [to address]," Ressa says. "They tried to call it the Supreme Court for content. Content is not the problem. The distribution and the rate of distribution is the problem. The design of the platform, none of which they have any power over. But yet they were able to get very credible people."

The Path Forward

The solutions we've pursued – from fact-checking initiatives to content moderation boards – have been mere band-aids applied on a deep systemic wound. As platforms poured millions into lobbying and institutional capture (Meta spent $7.6 million on lobbying the U.S. government in just the first quarter of 2024), we settled for superficial fixes that left their core business model untouched. As long as news organizations treat platforms as mere distribution channels rather than existential threats to information integrity, we will remain trapped in a cycle of ineffective half-measures. 

Before journalists point fingers solely at tech platforms, we should also look in the mirror - especially those of us who've made careers out of dealing in facts and telling truths. Journalists, researchers, scientists, educators - we're all part of this story. While tech platforms may at some point be regulated (though good luck with that during a Trump administration), we need to get real about our own role in this mess.

While we must figure out how to work toward systemic change, there is still power in how we choose to engage with these platforms. Every scroll, every share, every moment of attention we give is a choice. By being more conscious about where we get our information, how we verify it, and most importantly, how we pass it on, we can start reclaiming some control over our information environment. Small individual actions - from supporting independent journalism to thinking twice before spreading unverified content - add up to collective resistance against a system designed to exploit our worst impulses.

Those of us in journalism and media must also ask ourselves: Have we been complicit in providing cover for systems we knew were fundamentally broken? Have we prioritized our convenience and digital reach over the integrity of information? Most importantly, are we ready to acknowledge that our industry's survival, and arguably that of democracy overall, depends on confronting these platforms' role in undermining the very foundations of factual discourse?

The answers to these questions will determine whether we can rebuild an information ecosystem that serves society rather than corrodes it. But the very first step towards a society in which facts matter and truth has value, is admitting that the destruction of truth wasn't an accident - it was by design.

*Disclosure: Maria Ressa serves on Coda's Board of Directors.

The post The death of truth was by design appeared first on Coda Story.

I was at a dinner party in California, when one guest who clearly did not vote for Trump said: “My hope is that there will be such chaos, they won’t get anything done. They don’t seem to have a plan.” 

I’ve heard versions of this analysis a few times since that dinner, both in conversation and in print, and every time it has  baffled me.

Of course there will be chaos. But isn’t that the plan? It certainly seems so now that Trump’s proposed cabinet features an alleged Russian “asset” as national intelligence chief, an alleged sexual predator as attorney general, thus leading a department that recently investigated him for sex-trafficking, and as health secretary an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist who does not believe HIV causes AIDS. Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense sports a tattoo associated with white supremacist groups, doesn’t believe in women serving in combat or, bizarrely, in washing his hands and has never run anything bigger than a small non-profit. These nominations are designed to cause a flurry of noise and chaos, and this has long been deliberate. 

Disruption, noise and chaos was most certainly Steve Bannon’s plan when I met him in 2019.  I had been invited to speak at the annual Eurasia Media Forum. The vanity project of the daughter of Kazakhstan’s former President Nursultan Nazarbaev, the conference still managed to bring together an eclectic and fascinating group of people. I accepted the invitation mostly because I had heard a rumor that Steve Bannon was going to be the keynote speaker.  

“I’ve taken the model from Soros. I disagree with Soros’ ideology, but I admire the way he’s done it. He’s very smartly built cadres, he’s built cadres that can go into NGOs that can go into media companies, that can go into political things, that can go into businesses, and be able to get stuff done. I’m trying to build a cadre.”

Right up to the last minute, Bannon kept the organizers guessing. Eventually he showed up, wearing his signature black button-downs, one on top of the other, and gave a performance that was equal parts chaotic, thought-provoking, disturbing and entertaining. He was, I thought to myself at the time, perhaps the best public speaker I’d ever encountered. 

After the panel, Bannon agreed to an interview. The three of us – Bannon, myself and British journalist Matthew Janney who was reporting for Coda from the event – rode up the elevator to his hotel suite on the 26th floor of a glitzy skyscraper. Along the way, we chatted about gay rights and racial equality: Bannon was enthusiastically “pro” both. He told me he was worried for his gay friends who had to live in a hostile world. It was the first of many inconsistencies in his approach that we never managed to resolve.

This week, as the initial contours of Trump’s new cabinet take shape, I keep circling back to that experience, that conversation with Bannon and Matt’s insightful piece that emerged from it. 

“Revolution is coming,” Bannon said on the stage in Almaty, addressing his fellow panelists: a former EU Commissioner for Trade and a liberal professor from New York. “You are all finished,” he shouted passionately “From London to Frankfurt to Berlin, you are finished.” According to my notes, at that point the room exploded in applause as he raised his voice, drowning out the EU commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who was trying to say something in response. I listened closely to make out her words. She was saying: “Shouting is not good.” Even to those of us who agreed, her attempted intervention felt beside the point. 

Afterwards, in his suite overlooking the glittering skyline of Almaty, the economic capital of Central Asia’s largest petrostate, Bannon was friendly and engaged even as Matt and I challenged him on some very obvious discrepancies in his arguments and some ironies. Including the fact that he was calling for revolution in a country run by a corrupt elite which allowed no freedom of expression. He shrugged off every one of our counterpoints. What he wanted to talk about was the time he was spending working with the far right in Europe and Latin America. He was excited about the movement he was helping to build alongside Europe’s rising far right political stars. 

To my surprise, though, the one person he really admired, he said, was the person he vilified most: George Soros, bête noire of the global right. “I’ve taken the model from Soros. I disagree with Soros’ ideology, but I admire the way he’s done it. He’s very smartly built cadres, he’s built cadres that can go into NGOs that can go into media companies, that can go into political things, that can go into businesses, and be able to get stuff done. I’m trying to build a cadre.” 

Just weeks ago, Bannon was released from prison, where he apparently taught civics, continuing, I assume, to build that cadre. Bannon, pending further legal troubles, is now a free man and even though he is no longer in Trump's inner circle, he has a voice, a vision and a plan. A friend of mine, inadvertently, is part of this plan: he is on Bannon’s vast retribution list, the list of people on whom he wants to take revenge. 

“You better be worried. You better lawyer up. Some of you young producers, you better call Mom and Dad tonight. ‘Hey Mom and Dad, you know a good lawyer?’ Lawyer up. Lawyer up,” Bannon said on his show, War Room, last week.  He is excited, he says, for Attorney General Matt Gaetz to start rounding up journalists. 

Bannon built the cadres. They are in power now. And chaos is the plan.

A version of this story was published as a newsletter. Sign up here to be the first to get Coda’s stories delivered straight to your mailbox. 

Disclosure: This article is part of our ongoing coverage of the changing nature of modern day authoritarianism. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, we are committed to transparency about our funding sources. The Open Society Foundations is among our many supporters. We maintain full editorial independence, and our funding sources are publicly disclosed to ensure accountability to our readers.

The post What Donald Trump owes to George Soros appeared first on Coda Story.

“Let that sink in” wrote Elon Musk on X shortly after it became evident that Trump would return to the White House – four years after losing the 2020 election, attempting to overturn the results, facing two presidential impeachments, a criminal conviction and many other criminal charges (all of which will now melt away). 

The post was accompanied by a smiling photo of Musk photoshopped into the Oval Office, holding a sink. 

The last time musk appeared with a sink was in October 2022, when he made a theatrical entrance into Twitter’s headquarters shortly after acquiring the company. That moment, which went viral, was part of Musk's takeover of Twitter, a move that would transform the platform into a hub for disinformation and political propaganda.

Musk was not the only bro excited by Trump’s victory:  Trump’s win is a win for oligarchs, autocrats and their patrons of all shapes and shades everywhere.  There was palpable, genuine enthusiasm in tweets from fellow populist leaders in  Hungary, India, and Israel. The Kremlin’s official response was tempered but there was no shortage of glee from those who speak on Vladimir Putin’s behalf. Few paid any heed to the FBI allegations that Russia was behind bomb threats at polling stations in battleground states, choosing instead to celebrate “victory over Ukraine” as the inevitable outcome of Trump’s election.  “Kamala is finished. Let her keep cackling infectiously. The objectives of the Special Military Operation remain unchanged and will be achieved,” posted Russia’s former President Dmitry Medvedev, referring, of course, to the full scale invasion.  No wonder that Volodymyr Zelensky’s message of congratulations to Trump sounded like a plea.

“Fuck!” was the headline in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, the weekly Die Zeit. But should anyone really be surprised?  

Liberalism has been on its deathbed for a while, for reasons that are many and varied: from our inability to resolve historic injustices and address the horrendous inequities that are inherent in neo-capitalism, to the toxic effect of America’s post 9/11 wars, to the tenacity and determination of U.S. enemies in the Kremlin and Beijing, and, in sharp contrast to that determination, the complacency and arrogance of individual leaders who represent the collective “liberal” West.

I often wonder whether the decline of liberalism actually began right at the point of its greatest triumph, when after winning the Cold War, the United States encouraged Russia to embrace the wildest, most unregulated version of capitalism imaginable. 

The alternative could have been a “Marshall Plan” for the Soviet Union, a responsible, long term strategy to bring wounded, defeated Russia and its still frightened, traumatized colonies into the Western liberal world. Instead, the U.S. stood by and benefited from unrestrained privatization that bred corruption and  nepotism. 

How does this connect to what is happening in the United States today? It created the foundation not only for modern day Russia but also for  the new geopolitical alliances of oligarchs and autocrats that have now come into full bloom. 

At first glance, that first generation of Gucci-wearing Russian oligarchs has little in common with the fit, fleece-sporting super rich of the United States. And yet, just like the Russian tycoons of the 1990s who accumulated unseen amounts of wealth because no one regulated them, the Silicon Valley moguls celebrating Trump’s victory today have managed to acquire unprecedented riches by skillfully avoiding government regulation. 

The latest, seismic political change is an aftershock from a bigger change that’s shaking the entire world. Because unlike the Russian oligarchs, the Broligarchs of Silicon Valley have not just grabbed untold riches, they’ve created products that none of us can or want to live without. 

Just as electricity changed the way we ate, slept, and worked, artificial intelligence is transforming the very fabric of our society. It’s building on the foundation laid by social media, which has already fractured the very idea of truth, legitimizing and scaling the age-old human trait of believing what we want to believe despite all evidence to the contrary.

Now, as the power and the ubiquity of digital services grow, so does the power of the men behind the monopolies  that have built the digital architecture of our lives. American voters, as Axios pointed out “have just decided – among many other things – that artificial intelligence will grow up in a permissive, anything-goes household, rather than under the guidance of stricter parents.” 

It’s not Donald Trump,  it’s the Peter Thiels, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks of the world who will be making up the new rules that will govern our lives. These men, who have accumulated unprecedented wealth will now be able to translate it into unprecedented political power.

And they got it democratically. The decisiveness of Trump’s victory is sobering and it shows that liberalism, or at least  its current political interpretation, is unable to offer people meaningful solutions to crises that they need resolved. 

“Holy smokes! Literally nothing? Literally not one county?” gasped CNN’s Jake Tapper in the early hours of Wednesday morning as CNN's election map showed that Kamala Harris did not outperform Joe Biden in a single county in Pennsylvania. 

But is this not also just a more dramatic, more globally consequential version of a movie we’ve all watched before?  In Brexit Britain or during countless recent elections around the world, where “liberal” and “progressive” forces  failed again and again to match the imagination deployed by their opponents. 

In 2012, I watched this very same scenario unfold in my own country, Georgia, when people, fed up with the government, voted in an oligarch who made his money in Russia in the 1990s.  It was the country’s first democratic transition of power since the collapse of the USSR and it was applauded by the West as a “step forward” for a young democracy. At the time, Georgian multimillionaire reformer and educator Kakha Bendukhidze, made an astute observation: “We did make a step forward,” he said “But we stepped into deep shit.” 

Very few at the time understood that what he meant was that the country was once again becoming part of an alliance built not on shared principles and values but on oligarchic alliances, criminal networks and the unregulated quest for money,  power and impunity.

Georgia never managed to reverse its course. The oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili,  is still there, still supported by Russia and currently celebrating Trump’s comeback in the United States. The Georgian  opposition says his party rigged the recent elections. Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating in the streets agree, but they are impotent: the government has passed enough repressive laws to quell any dissent. The tools of democracy that this particular oligarch  used to come to power are no longer available for those who now want to get him out. 

The global authoritarian playbook is effective because it is so simple. One of its core rules is:  use the tools of democracy until you can make them obsolete. The formula works. Overwriting  it will require  bold new ideas and courage to re-imagine how we can collectively defend liberal values in the age of Broligarchy.

The post The Age of Broligarchy appeared first on Coda Story.

But empires are also built from the margins, and no one knows this better than Vladimir Putin. 

This week, Putin scored a huge geopolitical victory when the party the Kremlin was rooting for in Georgia pulled off a seemingly impossible electoral win. 

 “Georgians have won. Attaboys!” posted Margarita Simonyan, head of RT and the Kremlin’s chief propagandist on X. 

“I woke up in Russia. How can I go back to being Moscow’s slave?” a devastated friend texted the morning after the vote. 

The ruling Georgian Dream party, run by an oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili secured a parliamentary majority. Ivanishvili made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, earning in the process the nickname “anaconda” for being methodical and relentless at eliminating rivals. 

He moved to Georgia shortly after Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, and became one of the country’s most impactful philanthropists. He supported culture and arts, paid for hospitals, kept the entire Opera House on his payroll and stepped in every time the government’s coffers didn’t stretch far enough to pave a road or build a school. He was also a recluse, until in 2012 when he set up the Georgian Dream party and scored a landslide victory against Mikhail Saakasvhili, Georgia’s former president whom Putin famously promised to “hang by the balls” and who is currently in jail in Tbilisi.  

Since the 2012 victory, Ivanishvili has been methodically moving Georgia back into Russia’s orbit:  covertly and slowly at first, openly and aggressively in more recent years. 

This caused a lot of friction with the society: Georgians had tired of Saakashvili’s government, which was becoming autocratic, but many were set on a turn towards Europe. For centuries Georgian luminaries have cultivated the idea of Europe as the way of protecting the Georgian language and identity from oppression by its neighbors. The modern Georgian constitution calls for a closer alliance with the west, in particular the EU and Nato. The country’s entire cultural identity is built around the story of struggle against historic oppressors: Persians, Ottomans and, for the past two centuries, Russians. 

By the time Russia launched the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Georgians were disillusioned in Ivanishvili but they were still shocked when the government chose to openly side with Moscow against Kyiv. Ukraine had stood by Georgia through all of its wars, including the most recent Russian invasion in 2008. The government’s position felt like a betrayal. 

But then the Georgian Dream went even further, passing some of the most repressive Russian-style laws, launching brutal crackdowns on activists, targeting the LGBTQ community and unleashing dirty disinformation campaigns straight out of the Kremlin playbook. By 2024, hundreds of thousands were taking part in regular anti-government demonstrations led by the youth demanding that Georgia stays on its European course. 

This election, the only democratic way of getting the country out of Ivanishvili’s and Russia's tightening embrace, became the most pivotal vote in the country's history since the independence referendum in 1991.  Polls, including traditionally reliable exit polls, put the opposition in a clear lead. On the day of the vote, the turnout was so high that in some polling stations people queued for hours to cast the ballots.  

And yet, the Central Election body announced that the Georgian Dream party beat the country’s pro-European opposition and secured a fourth term. “This seems to defy gravity,” a friend in Tbilisi commented.  

In the next few weeks, the opposition in Georgia will work to galvanize supporters and try to prove that the election was stolen. The list of recorded irregularities is long, and include suspicious discrepancies in numbers, violence and ballot stuffing. Despite the evidence, fighting for justice in courts controlled by an oligarch is likely to be futile. 

The opposition also faces the reality that the Georgian Dream did perform better than anyone has expected, in part at least thanks to an aggressive pre-election campaign that focused on fear: the governing party’s singular message equated opposition with another war with Russia.  Their campaign included billboards that juxtaposed ruins of Ukrainian cities with peaceful landscapes of Georgia.  It proved effective in the country, where Russia still occupies 20% of the territory and memories of the 2008 invasion, as well as previous wars,  are very much alive.

The election results may defy both logic and hope for many Georgians but they align disturbingly well with the broader trajectory of the world. For this is not a story of a rigged post-Soviet election, but rather the story of a larger, systemic game that has been rigged against us all. 

Over the past decade, the interplay of oligarchic alliances, disinformation, abuse of technology, and selective violence have all eaten away at the foundations of all societies. These interconnected trends, often obscured by the noise of our news cycle, are part of a larger authoritarian web that is enveloping the globe, and polarizing our communities from within. Connecting the dots between them reveals a pervasive threat that extends far beyond any single event.

In this rigged game, the losers aren’t just the Georgian opposition and their supporters, but everyone who believes in the value of freedom: whether it is the freedom to speak out without being beaten or imprisoned, or the freedom of a newspaper to endorse a presidential candidate. The real winners aren’t the Georgian politicians or even the oligarch who pulls their strings, but anyone who puts money and power above shared values. 

In the case of Georgia, the biggest winner is the Kremlin, who has just won a battle in its global war against liberal democracy.  Ahead of the US elections, there is a warning here too. Georgia has always been the place where the Kremlin has rehearsed its global playbook. 

Throughout the 1990s, it was in Georgia  that Moscow ignited wars and transformed them into frozen conflicts, a precursor to the tactics later employed in Ukraine. As Putin’s Russia grew more assertive, it occupied territories and meddled in elections, using methods that would then spread to Europe and the United States.

It was in liberal, progressive Georgia, where the Kremlin first piloted anti LGBTQ+ narratives, teaming up with the members of the American and European religious right and carefully targeting traditional parts of the society and testing ways to spin marginal homophobia into a larger culture war that  eventually took root in the West. 

Yet, for all the lands Putin has seized and the narratives he has spun, his true success hinges on two tools handed to him by his own adversaries in the West. The first is our information system that is fuelled by social media platforms, which are run on profit-driven algorithms built to spread disinformation, conspiracies, and lies. The second–fueled in part by the first–is the dwindling attention span of those who can and should want to help.

Georgian opposition is unlikely to succeed, unless it gets focused attention from Europe and the United States. But with the tragedy that has enveloped the Middle East, the drama of the US elections and the urgency of the increasingly unsustainable war in Ukraine, events in Georgia will struggle to compete for attention. And yet, the reason empires crumble from the margins is because true resistance always comes from the edges. Helping Georgia bring back its democracy will keep it alive elsewhere.

A version of this article previously appeared in the Guardian newspaper.

The post From the Margins to Power: Georgia’s Elections and the Kremlin’s Empire appeared first on Coda Story.

The Oxfam report argues that the “global oligarchy” of the super-rich, make international cooperation on solving issues like climate change and poverty all but impossible. “The immense concentration of wealth, driven significantly by increased monopolistic corporate power, has allowed large corporations and the ultrarich who exercise control over them to use their vast resources to shape global rules in their favor, often at the expense of everyone else,” the report says. 

Bill Gates is a case in point. Compared to the corrupt, nepotistic, Russian-style oligarchs that we tend to imagine when we think of “oligarchs,” Gates is a good kind of rich guy. The billionaire software engineer has given away more money than anyone else. He runs one of the world’s largest charities and, for years, he has passionately pursued the noble cause of fixing Africa’s severe food security crisis. 

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation established itself as the most influential player in fixing Africa’s food inequality. It is also the largest media funder of journalism on the African continent. But there are concerns that the foundation’s support for both journalism in Africa and for “development journalism” in general have essentially given Bill Gates full monopoly over the narratives on development in Africa. 

“One of the most difficult subjects for African journalists to write about is the work of Bill Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Africa,” writes Simon Allison, International Editor and co-founder of The Continent, an independent digital publication. “This is not to suggest that the foundation is deliberately seeking to influence coverage but given the lack of alternative sources of funding, it doesn’t have to,” Allison says. 

The Continent’s recent investigation into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s work in Africa is a rare example of accountability journalism on the Foundation’s work in Africa. Gates–the biggest owner of farmland in the US–centers his work in Africa on the belief that modern industrial agricultural practices can solve world hunger. If you describe it like this, the problem seems easy to fix: “to feed the people, you have to fix the farms.” 

But as The Continent investigation points out, the farms in this case refer to 33-million smallholder farms in Africa that currently grow 70% of the continent’s food with some of the lowest yields in the world. It’s not a small problem to fix, and multiple studies on the region have suggested that the American model of industrialized farming and genetically modified seeds is not working in Africa. There is a real consequential tension between philanthropic approaches and the urgent need for systemic policy reforms to establish equitable food systems and fight poverty

Reactions to The Continent’s investigation highlight the modern day axis of power: oligarchy, disinformation and digital technology. According to Allison, initially the investigation into the Gates Foundation was “widely popular online” among The Continent’s usual audience of policymakers, diplomats and businesspeople. But then “it got picked up and amplified by conspiracy theorists. These are not the people we want to be amplifying our work, and it has the effect of muddying the waters again between what is credible journalism and what is absolute nonsense.” 

One solution is taxation. A report by the French economist Gabriel Zucman, commissioned by Brazil, suggests that billionaires currently pay the equivalent of 0.3% of their wealth in taxes. This is a “phenomenal lost opportunity,” Nabil Ahmed, the director of economic and racial justice at Oxfam America, said in an interview with the Voice of America. “We know governments, rich and poor, across the world need to claw back these revenues to be able to invest in their people, to be able to meet their rights,” he said. 

Brazil–which currently holds the presidency of the G20–is leading a campaign to impose a 2% minimum tax on the world’s richest billionaires. According to their calculation, it would be possible to raise up to 250 billion dollars from about 3,000 billionaires. Enabling resources for healthcare, education and the needed funding to tackle climate change. South Africa, Spain and France all back the plan. The United States doesn’t. In the most recent G20 meeting in July, US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen told reporters: “The tax policy is very difficult to coordinate globally and we don’t see a need or really think it’s desirable to try to negotiate a global agreement on that.”

Correction: The earlier version of this article identified Simon Allison as the Editor in Chief of The Continent. His correct title is International Editor.

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These currents connect the crises happening in different parts of the world into a global web of intricately connected problems. It may not be obvious, but Silicon Valley is right at the very heart of this web. Home to some of the richest and most powerful men on earth, Silicon Valley is the birthplace of the technology that has given us so much convenience and also taken so much away from us. 

The world may be on fire, but things are going well for Silicon Valley’s most powerful men. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which is now officially worth $157 billion and Mark Zuckerberg, whose $72 billion dollar wealth surge this year could now make him the richest person on earth. 

Both are in a position to address some of the world’s greatest problems, yet both choose to avoid any responsibility, and instead choose to obscure and deflect. 

Take AI-powered disinformation in this election for example. It’s rampant, scary and consequential for American democracy. Sam Altman’s response? He wants us to be patient. In his recent letter worthy of a techno-optimism medal Altman argues that it would be a “mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works and we will solve the remaining problems”.  

Zuckerberg says he wants Meta to be remembered for “building big,” not safe. Meta no longer even engages in a whack-a-mole game of fact checking and content moderation. Along with Google, Amazon and X, Meta has essentially dismantled its Trust and Safety team that at least tried to mitigate the real life damage caused by the algorithmic promotion of hateful content. Mark Zuckerberg, who wore an “Aut Zuck Aut Nihil.” “Either Zuck or Nothing” shirt as he presented his latest meta verse at the company’s annual developer conference. As for life in this world, he is apparently done with politics. 

It takes a very special kind of privilege to ask for patience in the face of a major, life threatening, world changing crises. The attitude is familiar to anyone who has seen authoritarianism up close: the goal of an authoritarian is to secure a monopoly on money and power. Maintaining a monopoly of the narrative is the way of achieving that. Human suffering may not be the objective, but if that’s what it takes to achieve the desired outcome, then it’s just collateral damage. 

I spent a lot of my week speaking to people who could be considered “collateral damage”: people in Beirut, where unprecedented escalation of violence between Israel and Iran is wreaking havoc on millions of lives. Friends in Ukraine, where Russia is making territorial gains while continuing to bomb, kill and maim civilians.  

As well as my own family in Georgia, where the Kremlin is making political gains: the Russian state propaganda machine is now openly backing an autocratic, populist government that is about to use a democratic tool–elections–to pull the country deeper into its autocratic orbit. The government’s campaign strategy resembles blackmail. “If you don’t vote for us, Russia will do to you what it did to Ukraine,” is literally the message of the election billboards the Georgian government put up this week.  

The roots of each of these crises are buried deep in the history of individual places, but so much of the journalism we do at Coda brings us back to Silicon Valley. 

The valley is the modern day equivalent of the heart of the Roman empire; a place of extreme abundance, fantastic innovation and terrifying detachment from the rest of the world.  
For this reason, it has never been more important to connect the dots between the patterns that weave into the web of our modern life.

The post Global Crises, Local Consequences: How Silicon Valley Shapes Our World appeared first on Coda Story.

One million people are on the move in Lebanon, says Save the Children. With one fifth of the country’s population fleeing attacks. It is a continuing cycle of escalation, in which Israel retaliates for Iran’s recent missile attack that it launched in retaliation for Israel’s attacks. 

Nasrallah’s assassination followed a weeks-long Israeli strike on other Hezbollah leaders and their foot soldiers, using both air strikes and exploding pagers and walkie-talkies. But even before these devices began blowing up in the hands of their owners across Lebanon, killing Hezbollah members, terrifying civilians and prompting parents to unplug their baby monitors, Israel had assassinated two Revolutionary Guard generals in Syria, a senior Hamas commander in Lebanon, and the political chief of Hamas visiting Tehran, who was in Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new President, to name just a few incidents.

How did Israel get so good at finding their targets? That was the question sent in from one of our readers, this week after Nasrallah’s asasonation on September 27th. For any journalist who has ever attempted to negotiate an interview with a Hezbollah commander, let alone Hassan Nasrallah himself, the fact that Israel finally got him is simply mind blowing. 

By 2008, the year I arrived in Lebanon to take over as the BBC’s resident Beirut correspondent, Nasrallah had stopped giving interviews. We kept trying, but even trying, or even a meeting with one of his commanders involved complicated negotiations, security clearances and endless trips to the Dahieh,–the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut. 

Nasrallah’s face was everywhere in Dahieh. A local boy turned leader of mythic stature. His picture was on store and office walls; looking down from giant roadside billboards or stenciled graffiti; or in countless car bumper stickers amid the city’s chaotic traffic. 

The image of Nasrallah that Hezbollah’s efficient marketing team cultivated with plenty of care and intention was that of omnipresence and invincibility. And his historical record helped make that image resonate.

In 2000, eight years after he assumed the leadership of Hezbollah following the assassination of his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi by Israel, Nasrallah forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, ending the 18-year long occupation. 

In 2006, Hezbollah, and Lebanon, paid a devastating price for its 34-day war with Israel. But by surviving and not ceding any territory, Nasrallah was hailed as a hero by his supporters and Hezbollah went on to become Lebanon’s dominant political force as well. 

Two years later, when I was in Beirut’s southern suburbs, his portrait was on every corner and his speeches were being used as mobile phone ringtones. I felt acutely aware that Nasrallah was also literally there: in the tunnels that Iran helped Hezbollah dig and maintain under the busy hubbub of the Southern suburbs. 

But I also remember a lingering sense of a possibility of another, invisible spider web that was being weaved in the Dahieh at the time. Israel’s greatest failure during the 2006 war with Lebanon was that it failed to kill Nasrallah, the man who was behind the deaths of so many Israelis. After the war, as Hezbollah’s backers in Tehran invested heavily into modernizing the network of tunnels under the southern suburbs of Beirut, Israeli intelligence focused on building human networks, working hard to identify, cultivate and subsequently deploy every nugget of dissatisfaction and dissent that they could find. 

Reporting from Southern Lebanon, I often wondered who were the Israeli spies at Hezbollah’s crowded rallies or at dinners I attended in the suburbs. And while I could never tell who they were in Lebanon at the time, now we have proof that they were definitely there.  

Lebanon’s divided society and geopolitics made Israel’s task of penetrating Lebanon much easier. Scars of Lebanon’s civil war in the 1970s continued to ooze hatred and distrust. Israel was the enemy, but it was the region’s big powers that never let Lebanon heal: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria each supported different factions and sects within Lebanon, constantly deepening the existing divisions. 

Add to this hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the Middle East’s endless wars: Over the past decades Palestinians, Iraqis, Yemenis, and Syrians have all found shelter in Lebanon. Even the most functional governments would have struggled not to collapse under this combination of pressures. Lebanon’s government was the opposite of functional. 

Hezbollah thrived amid Lebanon’s dysfunction and corrupt, sectarian political environment. Yet many Lebanese “rejected Hezbollah's vision of perpetual war and hated Nasrallah’s recklessness for provoking the 2006 conflict with Israel. Many also correctly understood Hezbollah to be on the side of authoritarianism and theocracy,” writes Thanassis Cambanis, author of  A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Endless War, in this excellent piece. 

But for a long time, in a state that was on a brink of perpetual collapse, Hezbollah was also a force that actually got things done. Plenty of Lebanese voted for Hezbollah, not because it promised war, but because they needed a functioning state: someone to pick up garbage, keep schools open, run the government. During the 2009 elections in Lebanon that I covered, Hezbollah slogans called for war against Israel but also for better education, and for eradication of poverty and corruption. 

The problem was that the more political power Nasrallah’s party gained, the more corrupt Hezbollah itself became. Violence, corruption and economic hardship are a perfect mix for those working to recruit informants.

Assassinations of the entire command structure of the most powerful militia in the Middle East requires state of the art technology, incredible human penetration into target societies and extraordinary strategic patience. 

French media reported that Nasrallah’s arrival at Hezbollah underground HQ was leaked to the Israelis by an Iranian mole. These reports have not been corroborated, but the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad produced a jaw-dropping sound bite when he told CNN Turk that even the head of the Iranian unit countering Mossad was an Israeli agent. 

Ahmadinejad said that twenty agents in the Iranian intelligence team tasked with monitoring Israeli spying activities also worked for Israel, allegedly providing Mossad with sensitive information on the Iranian nuclear program. He said they were behind some key Mossad successes in Iran, including the assassination of the nuclear scientist they killed with a remote controlled gun, or the warehouse in Tehran where Israeli officers blowtorched their way in, stole 50,000 pages of documents and 169 discs relating to the Iran’s nuclear program within 6 hours and 29 minutes, leaving the rest of the facility untouched. 

Security experts agree that it would have taken decades of infiltration of Iranian and Lebanese command structures to pull off the operation of the scale that killed Hassan Nasrallah.

Friends in Beirut, who have lived through many explosions including the devastating blast in the  Beirut port in 2020, said they have never heard anything comparable to the blast that shook the city when Israel dropped 2,000 pound US-made bombs on a residential block in the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing many people, including Hassan Nasrallah who was hiding in a bunker 60 feet below the ground.

The ping pong of retaliations triggered by this bomb is certain to kill many more. Israel’s precision attacks are bound to impact millions of lives, in the Middle East but also all across our deeply interconnected world.

The post Decades in the Making:  The Intelligence Operation Behind Israel’s Assassination of Nasrallah appeared first on Coda Story.

I was in the crowd, reporting for the BBC at the time, as hundreds of thousands of people came out to greet George W. Bush in the main square of the capital Tbilisi. It must have felt refreshing to Bush, by then already hated by so much of the world for the disasters caused by the “war on terror”, to arrive in Georgia to a genuine hero's welcome. Georgians embraced Bush, because they needed him to fight their own existential battle against constant, ongoing threats from Russia.

Tens of thousands turned up and stood for hours in the heat as they waited for George W Bush to come out into the main square to give public support to Georgia and send a message to Moscow that the country was not alone in the face of Russian aggression. 

Among those in the square was 27 year old Vladimir Arutunian. According to this FBI report, which is full of rather brilliant detail, he “stood for hours in the hot sun, wearing a heavy leather coat and muttering and cursing to himself, part of a huge crowd waiting for President Bush to speak …He was clutching to his chest a hand grenade hidden in a red handkerchief. He was planning to kill the President.”

As soon as Bush started speaking, Arutunian “pulled the pin and hurled the grenade in the direction of the podium. It landed just 61 feet from where the  President, First Lady Laura Bush, the President and First Lady of  Georgia, and other officials sat”

Compared to the unforgettable scenes that unfolded in Pennsylvania, the assassination attempt against Bush was pretty anticlimactic. The grenade failed to detonate, no one on stage even realized it had been thrown, President Bush’s speech went uninterrupted, and afterwards, Arutunian went home to the apartment he shared with his mother in a sleepy Tbilisi suburb. 

His miscalculation, FBI would explain later, was that he tied his red handkerchief a bit too tight around the grenade, preventing the firing pin from deploying fast enough.

It didn’t take long for the FBI and the Georgian security services to track down Arutunian. A few months later, Arutunian who was unemployed and spent most of his days  experimenting with chemicals and explosives in his makeshift home laboratory, appeared in a small stuffy courtroom overflowing with reporters. He had already confessed to throwing the grenade and said he didn’t regret a thing because he hated the Georgian government for “being a puppet of the US.”

What I remember most vividly from the trial is Arutunian, thin with a black beard, pacing back and forth in his two by two meter metal cage in the corner of the courtroom. I counted his laps to keep myself awake in the airless room, as the judge began to read the verdict. A couple of my colleagues in the back tried to stay awake by chatting to each other, which got the rest of us in trouble. The judge forced everyone to stand up as he very slowly and very monotonously read the entire verdict. It took him four hours. I lost count of the laps, because Arutunian never stopped pacing. 

I reported at the time that as he was led out of the courtroom, he was asked by one journalist if he considered himself a terrorist or an anti-globalist. "I don't consider myself a terrorist, I'm just a human being," he replied.

Today, the man who could have changed global history, is in the 20th year of his lifetime sentence. He spends his days making crafts: tiny soldiers and tanks and occasional portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Che Guevara, according to his mother who spoke to our reporter, Masho Lomashvili, the day after Trump’s assassination attempt. 

Masho called the 83 year old Anjela Arutunian to ask whether she had spoken to her son and whether he had heard about the Trump assassination attempt. “Someone tried to kill Trump? I hadn’t heard, I have mostly been watching football,” said Angela Arutunian “Is he okay?” she asked.

Additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

The post Almost an assassin  appeared first on Coda Story.

It was during those slow, meandering rooftop conversations that ventured into every aspect of our lives—from crushes and struggles with identity to global politics—that I was handed the gift of a Senegalese lens to re-examine and better understand my own story. 

I grew up in the nation of Georgia, where as a child I lived through the violent collapse of the Soviet Union and learned—primarily from my parents—that instability and chaos were a small price to pay for the triumph of Georgia’s centuries-long struggle for independence. Among many contradictions that laced my childhood was the fact that I learned Russian, the Soviet lingua franca, from my half-Polish, half-Armenian mother, who would force me to read War and Peace in the original, but also insisted that my formal education be conducted in Georgian—and that I was to never trust anything that came from an appointed authority, especially one in Moscow.  

It was not until I sat on that Dakar rooftop that I thought of my mishmashed identity as a byproduct of colonialism. Just like me with Russian, Khadim loved all the opportunities that French, the language of his historical oppressor, had unlocked for him. Like me, he had a native-level appreciation for the language of a country he’s never lived in, and a nuanced understanding of a culture he was never part of. But unlike me, he was acutely aware of the price he had paid for that access. “I never thought of Russian in the same way that Khadim thinks of the French, but I think I also have a love-hate relationship with it,” I wrote in my journal that particular evening. “It is weird how it represents oppression and opportunity at the same time.” 

My old journal documents my awe (or was it envy?) at the deep awareness that Khadim and his friends possessed when it came to understanding how the historic legacy of French colonialism in West Africa affected their personal journeys. It is a record of my delight over the similarities I discovered between the Senegalese saint Cheikh Amadou Bamba, who led a pacifist struggle against French colonialism, and the Georgian orthodox saint and healer Father Gabriel, who was tortured and sentenced to death by the Soviets after he set a 26-foot portrait of Lenin on fire in 1955.

Today, “colonialism,” with all of its many prefixes and subcategories, often feels like an overused term: there is neo-colonialism and tech-colonialism, post-colonialism and eco-colonialism, settler colonialism and internal colonialism. I could go on—the list is so long, it feels tedious. And yet, no other word at our disposal can quite capture the historical continuity of domination and oppression that is the root cause of so many of the world’s current troubles. 

Every one of us is a carrier of a colonial legacy, either as a victim or the beneficiary—or sometimes both. Colonialism is the system of oppression that our world is built on. As we obsess with decolonizing everything from our schools to industries and corporations, it is useful to remember how easily our understanding of colonialism can be manipulated unless we first decolonize ourselves. 

My story is both typical and telling. My parents may have cherished Georgia’s freedom from Moscow, but somehow I had still bought into a widely accepted myth that the Soviet Union was an anti-colonial power. Both at my Soviet school, and later at university in the United States, I was taught that colonialism was something that Western countries did to Africa, Asia, and the Far East. It was only when I went to Senegal and stumbled upon the depth and ease with which I was able to relate to the anti-colonial part of the West African identity that I began to realize that I, too, was a product of “colonialism.” Until then, the struggle of non-Russian Soviet republics for independence was compartmentalized in my mind as something qualitatively different from the plight of formerly colonized people elsewhere.

Like the Black Lives Matters protests in the United States and the reckoning with anti-Black racism that followed, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 triggered a profound reconsideration of colonialism, including demands for restructuring and amends, from across the periphery of Russia’s historical empire;  a backlash from Russia itself followed. 

From Central Asia to the Baltics, from the Caucasus to Poland, activists, academics, historians, journalists, and ordinary citizens were suddenly digging up long-hidden stories of oppression, deportations, ethnic cleansing and “Russification” policies that the Kremlin had imposed on them over the centuries. Their stories were different, but the point they were making was the same: Russia’s war in Ukraine was a quintessentially colonial conflict, part of the centuries-long cycle of relentless conquest and subjugation.  

Across Russia’s former empire, this struggle to break away from subjugation has defined generation after generation. Today in Georgia, the children of those who in 1989 protested against—and helped end—the Soviet Union are out on the same streets, protesting against the current government’s attempts to take their country off its pro-European course and bring it back into Russia’s fold.

“Do not fear! We will win honorably,” read one poster held up by three women who joined tens of thousands of protesters in May 2024 on the streets of Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. The words are more than a hundred years old and belong to Maro Makashvili, a young Georgian woman who wrote them down over a century ago just as the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution helped end Tsarist rule in Russia. For Georgia, the revolution meant freedom from two centuries of domination by  its northern neighbor and, finally, a chance to write its own story.

Few know that in those years, Georgia emerged as one of the most progressive democracies in Europe, a place where women could vote and minorities were granted rights. Young Maro Makashvili watched it all and documented Georgia’s ambitious experiment with democracy in her diaries. The experiment ended, abruptly and tragically, when Bolshviks invaded Georgia in 1921, annihilating the country’s intellectual and political elite, violently forcing Georgia into the USSR and rewriting the country’s history to fit the Soviet narrative. 

“To me, Maro Makashvili lives on in every beautiful, strong, smart, young woman protesting in the streets today,” said Tiko Suladze, a Tbilisi resident who held up Maro Makashvili’s portrait at the recent anti-Russian, anti-government demonstration.

The sentiments Makashvili described in her diaries during this time talk of freedom for women—and her whole country. These are ideas that resonate today with those living in the trenches of the long war against Russian imperialism. Ukraine is its current and bloodiest epicenter, but its frontline stretches across Russia’s vast former empire. You wouldn’t know it, though, listening to mainstream media in the West that explain the war through the prism of a geopolitical struggle between Moscow and Washington and, inadvertently, diminish the actual struggle of people on the frontline. This happens, in part at least, because we have a narrow definition of what colonialism is.

The very nature of Russian colonialism doesn’t fit the Western definition of oppression. Over the centuries, while European powers conquered overseas territories, Russia ran a land empire that absorbed its neighbors. While Europeans instilled the notion that their subjects were “different” from them, Russians conquered using another device: “sameness.” In the Russian colonial system, which was subsequently refined by the Soviets, subjects were banned from speaking their language or celebrating their culture (outside of the sterilized version of a culture that was sanctioned by Moscow). In exchange, they were allowed to rise to the top. In 2022, while dropping bombs on Kyiv, Vladimir Putin launched an audaciously counterintuitive campaign that positioned him as the global anti-colonial hero. The Russian Ministry of Culture announced that thematic priorities for state-funded films in 2022 included promotion of “family values,” depiction of cultural “degradation” of Europe, and films on “Anglo-Saxon neo-colonialism.” 

Piggybacking on the Soviet legacy of support for anti-colonial movements, and banking on people’s genuine disillusionment with the double standards of American foreign policy in places like the Middle East, Putin ordered his diplomats in Africa, Latin America and Asia to double down on the anti-colonial message. Using social media, the Russian propaganda machine beamed the same message, targeting newsfeeds of left-leaning audiences in the West, as well as immigrant and Black communities in the United States. 

The tactic worked. In 2023, I found myself at a small conference in Nairobi that brought together a dozen or so senior editors and publishers from across the African continent, a Ukrainian journalist, an exiled Russian editor, and myself. The conference 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 the 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 toward 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.  

Ukraine, my African colleagues explained, was perceived as a “Western project.” Delivered primarily through Western diplomatic and news channels, the Ukrainian message in Africa was met with resistance because of the West’s perceived refusal to account for the US 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,” Nwabisa Makunga, an editor of the Sowetan in Johannesburg, told me at the time. The challenge for her team, she explained, was to objectively navigate overwhelmingly pro-Russian public sentiment and a widespread belief that Ukraine caused the invasion.

During my trip to Nairobi, one of the editors shared an unpublished op-ed sent to him as an email from the Russian Ambassador to Kenya, Dmitry Maskimychev. It read: “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 Ukraine is not a manifestation of Russian ‘imperialism’ but a ‘hybrid’ clash with NATO.” It is an effective message that lands equally well with many Western intellectuals who continue to argue about the rights and wrongs of NATO enlargement and not the fact that a sovereign country has the right to break away from its colonial masters. 

Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko is among the most prolific voices when it comes to comparing Russian and Western colonial styles. He is also the one who first introduced me to the idea of “sameness” as an instrument of domination. The message of Western colonialism was: “ ‘you are not able to be like us’, while the message of Russian colonialism was ‘you are not allowed to be different from us,’ ” he explained at the Zeg Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi in 2023. While there were differences in the way the Russians and the Europeans constructed their empires, the result was the same: violence, redrawn borders, repression of cultures and languages, and annihilation of entire communities. 

The idea of “sameness as an instrument of domination” also explains why most well-meaning Russians I meet often seem weirdly unaware of their country being perceived as a colonial master. There are, of course, notable exceptions, but for the most part even the most liberal Russians I know seem utterly disinterested in engaging on the issue of colonialism with the country’s former subjects like myself.  Soon after the Ukraine invasion, I asked a prominent liberal Russian journalist whether he was going to introduce the topic of colonialism to his equally liberal, Russian audiences. He seemed genuinely insulted by the suggestion. “We are not colonialists!” he said. 

One reason why the debate about colonialism is largely missing from the Russian liberal discourse is because Russia is still missing from the debate about colonialism in the West. Yermolenko believes that when it comes to colonialism, the Western intellectual elite went from one extreme in the 19th century to another in the 21st. “They went from saying, ‘we are the best and no one can compare to us’ to saying, ‘we were the worst and no one can compare to us,’ ” Yermolenko says. 

Georgian historian Lasha Bakradze takes the argument a step further: “At the heart of this inability to understand, accept and analyze other forms of colonialism lies, paradoxically, the West’s own colonial mentality. This is where skeletons of Western colonialism are really buried.” 

For two decades, these self-imposed limits of Western debate about colonialism have given the Kremlin an enormous propaganda advantage, enabling Putin to position Russia as an anti-colonial power, and himself as the champion of all victims of European colonialism. They have also shaped our own, self-imposed, compartmentalized frameworks through which we understand oppression. 

“To this very day, the core of decolonization for me is about being able to learn and tell your own full story in your own words and being able to follow the narrative of your choice,” argues my friend, Ukrainian journalist Maksym Eristavi, whose book Russian Colonialism 101 is a succinct record of one part of Russia’s colonial adventures: invasions. “This means being able to dissect what is authentic in you and what is programmed by the colonizer.”   

But the process of deconstructing your own narratives can be a fraught and deeply uncomfortable experience. Take well-meaning Western academic institutions, for example, which have traditionally taught history and the languages of Russia’s former colonies in Central Asia and the Caucasus within their Russian studies departments. The war in Ukraine triggered a reckoning in American universities, where professors started debating how to teach imperialism and colonialism in Russia. 

Because of the invasion and Western sanctions, some Russian language studies programs could no longer send their students to Russia, and many reached for an easy solution: send them instead to places where Russian is spoken because it’s the language of the oppressor. It is only now that I learn about Americans coming to Georgia to learn Russian that I feel simultaneously angry at the colonial behavior of supposedly liberal arts institutions And embarrassed that at age 20, I did not once question the decision to go to Senegal to study French. 

It is impossible to paint a singular portrait of colonialism. But it is possible and necessary to listen and respect each of their voices. It is only through listening to the multitude of oppressed voices—from Gaza and Yemen, Georgia and Ukraine, American reservations and former slave plantations—that we will begin to understand the systems of oppression and patterns that run through it.

“Colonialism is about trauma first,” says Maksym Eristavi. “The trauma of your identity being violated, erased, reprogrammed. The trauma of losing your roots, figuratively and quite literally. The goal of the colonizer is to make you feel small and isolated. To ensure that you think that your arrested potential is your own fault.”

“At last my poor country will be blessed with freedom,” the young Georgian Maro Makashvili wrote in her diary in 1918. When the Red Army invaded Georgia in 1921, occupying the country for the next seventy years, thousands of Georgians were killed. Among them was Maro. Today, Maro Makashvili is a national hero. But unless her story becomes part of the global anti-colonial narrative, oppressors—in Russia and beyond—will continue to win.

The post When sameness becomes a colonial tool of oppression appeared first on Coda Story.

That was my very first insight into a lesson I’d learn again and again in my life: Good journalism is vital for people who need it.

The world has changed a lot since I sat in that kitchen. The Iron Curtain no longer divides geographies, but its digital successor cuts straight through our communities, polarizing us from within. From Manila to Minneapolis, societies are divided on many of the same issues: changing identities, economic inequity, climate change and lack of reckoning over past injustices, to name just a few. Modern-day authoritarians no longer need to jam shortwave radio signals or shut down journalism organizations (although plenty of them still do). Instead, they flood our digital information systems.

From Budapest to Washington D.C., rising authoritarian populists now share a playbook of digital, legal and narrative tools that they use to manipulate and abuse people’s legitimate grievances. At the heart of their strategy is the same age-old quest for money and power, but their tactics are new, often innovative and designed to confuse, distract and sow doubt. Noise, not just fake news, is the greatest weapon in their arsenal.

Journalism’s existential quagmire

For journalism, this new political reality spells an existential quagmire. Today, a journalist’s ability to grab attention, get through the wall of censorship and deliver vital information that helps people navigate their complex reality is more important than ever. But in our world of algorithmic flooding, where so many are overloaded to the point of zoning out of the news, it’s also becoming an almost impossible role to fulfill.

In the summer of 2024, I arrived at Stanford to take up John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship, convinced that in our digital information era, noise had become the new censorship, and that it was existentially important for journalists to figure out how to punch through the noise and focus people’s attention on stories that matter.

The question of how journalists can be part of the solution instead of complicit in the flooding of information has preoccupied me for years.

My career as a BBC foreign correspondent began with a freelancing gig in West Africa in 2000. By then in the United States, cable news had already created a demand for more content over better stories. But the British broadcaster’s 24-hour news channel was only three years old, and most correspondents in the field were left to focus on stories they published in regularly programmed bulletins, rather than constant live updates.

A few years later, as I became a staff reporter, that dynamic began to change: More media organizations went online and social media entered the scene. Lured by the new horizons of unprecedented, seemingly limitless reach, media companies, including the BBC, jumped on the bandwagon. By 2014, social media emerged as a key distribution platform for all information, including news.

As I went back and forth between covering the Arab Spring uprising in Yemen and the war in eastern Ukraine, my editors started asking me to do regular Facebook Lives along with the rest of the field reporting. Like many of my colleagues, I grumbled. Not because of the extra work, but because the effort inevitably took away from the actual job: talking to real people, finding sources, getting information that those in power were trying to hide and putting stories together in a way that respected their complexity while making them easily accessible to the wide audience.

But what we reporters wanted didn't matter. Human information consumption habits were changing. The distribution channels most of our audiences were migrating to were not designed for complexity and nuance.

I left the BBC because I felt that as a journalist I was no longer effective. I could no longer fulfill that role that I saw on display in my childhood kitchen. The stories I was doing were being stripped of impact, not because they were not important, but because they were competing for dwindling attention spans with everything else in the digital world. Because they no longer lived in the context of an editorial flow or a news program but had instead followed audiences to the bottomless pit of internet algorithms.

Coda: Connecting the dots

But what if there was a better way of using the internet? The BBC, along with the rest of the mainstream media, I thought, was too focused on feeding incremental pieces to its 24-hour news channels and their hyperactive social media platform cousins. I wanted to connect the dots and explain why things mattered, and I wanted to figure out how to use technology to create sustained narratives, to break away from incrementalism, to show context, complexity and nuance that people need to understand the world they live in.

My research showed that audiences wanted that too, and that led to creating Coda Story, a newsroom that focuses on reporting the roots of global crises and connects the dots between local communities and global trends. Coda launched in 2017 as a crowdfunded reporting project and by 2022, it was a bustling newsroom, with a bunch of awards in the bag, a loyal audience, an impressive portfolio of mainstream media partners and a unique thematic approach that was designed to create context and continuity. Our editorial model rejected the noise, focusing on the “why” and “how” instead of “what” and “when.”

We worked hard to get away from the reactive instincts of the news industry, to stop being a slave to the artificial 24-hour news cycle. Our model enabled us to find evergreen stories often missed by others and identify patterns that explained the root causes of big crises before they hit the headlines. Using thematic lenses (e.g., war on science), we deployed journalists to identify stories bubbling under the surface. Again and again, our approach was validated as patterns we detected and focused on, be it certain conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxer movements, surveillance trends or disinformation narratives, would inevitably burst into headlines like they did when Covid paralyzed the world or when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

And yet, proud as we were of our model, it was also becoming increasingly clear that producing good journalism was no longer enough.

Our journalism was excellent, but our distribution channels were profoundly, irreparably broken; social media platforms kept rolling out newer and better algorithms for targeting. They favored hate over reason, shouting over discussion and gossip over journalism. Then came advances in AI and the volume of noise spawned the information pollution crisis into stratospheric proportions, making it even harder for journalists to compete for our century’s most precious commodity: human attention.

The incrementalism of our information consumption has broken our conversations and fragmented our societies. Information pollution amplifies humanity’s every crisis, be it wars, racism, inequity, climate or dysfunctional politics. The noise stands in the way of every solution.

There is no singular — or easy — way out of this mess, but the past year as JSK Fellow at Stanford gave me space and time to think about how, if at all, journalism can help. Spoiler alert: I think it can. I am coming away with three practical insights, and, in the spirit of Stanford’s culture of experimentation, a plan to test them through Coda’s work in the next year.

Radical collaboration

The first is radical collaboration. The year at Stanford changed my understanding of who the allies and foes of journalism are and left me convinced that in order to survive in the age of AI, newsrooms — and especially small newsrooms that have been so important to diversifying the media landscape — need to profoundly rethink collaborations. My instinct is that the only way for non-mainstream newsrooms to survive is by building vast, yet agile and cross-disciplinary networks for sharing audiences, content, revenue and expertise.

For Coda, this translates into a two-circle approach to radical collaborations. In our inner circle are other journalists, organizations and individuals, with whom we are going to build closely knit (in some cases merger-like) partnerships that will enable us to share insights, audiences, capacity and revenue.

In the outer circle are much more broad, agile and most importantly cross-disciplinary partnerships that bring different industries into the conversation to feed our journalistic output.

We are currently working with artists, philosophers, historians and select influencers, in ways that aim at bringing them into the process of both production and distribution of stories. Our hope is that the partnerships we are currently testing will generate completely new kinds of media products, services and experiences for the audiences who are curious about the world, yet dissatisfied with what media offers.

Rethink distribution

The second insight concerns distribution. We are in the process of rethinking ways we distribute our journalism and we are making a new commitment to distribute for relationships, not just scale. The reason why distribution is so key is because in the digital age, medium has truly become the message. Over the past decade, media has grown overly dependent on social media and tech platforms. That has come at a huge cost.

It is time to change the power dynamic and stop relying on the middleman. From now on, for us at Coda social media is just a marketing tool, the rest of our distribution will focus on a mix of channels that allow us to build new feedback loops and genuine relationships with our audiences from in-person events to creative online storytelling.

Reimagine growth to scale for impact, not traffic

The third insight is around impact and how we understand and measure the impact of our journalism beyond the number of illusionary views or clicks. In the case of Coda, our impact — that will now inform both our audience and editorial strategies — will focus on attaining narrative change around issues that we cover (after all, every real-life change starts with a new story). As we scale our impact, we will also test new mechanisms of getting and learning from feedback.

Scaling for impact, testing radical, multi-disciplinary collaborations, rethinking distribution and experimenting with new channels that focus on building relations are three ways we can make sure that our journalism punches through the noise, reaching and engaging people who need it.

For the past six years, our readers like you have made our work possible. We are grateful and we hope that with us, you’ll stay on the stories that matter.

Coda is, of course, still a tiny outlet, but we have a huge ambition to lead by example and catalyze a much needed ecosystem change. What’s driving us isn’t really all that different from what made me want to become a journalist all those years ago: a deeply rooted belief that journalism that breaks down walls is a lifeline that our societies both need and deserve.

If you are interested in exploring any of this in more detail, or in teaming up, please get in touch! I’m on antelava@codastory.com.

This piece was originally published as a Stanford University’s John S.Knight Fellowships post.

The post Rising above the noise appeared first on Coda Story.

With Navalny dead, the chilling title of Russia’s highest-profile political prisoner now belongs to Vladimir Kara-Murza. Kara-Murza, a 42-year-old historian, journalist and opposition politician, is currently held in Siberia, in the same type of punitive solitary confinement cell that Navalny had occupied before he was transferred to a penal colony in the Arctic, where he died on February 16. 

Kara-Murza, who comes from a long line of Russian dissidents, was arrested in April 2022 and sentenced to 25 years in prison for charges related to his criticism of President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. By then, he had already survived being poisoned twice, once in 2015 and again in 2017. In February 2021, a Bellingcat investigation uncovered that Kara-Murza had been followed by the same unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service that allegedly poisoned Navalny with a nerve agent in 2020. Kara-Murza was also a close associate of Boris Nemtsov, another slain Russian opposition politician who was gunned down in Moscow in 2015. 

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the eventual murder of Navalny, and Russia’s descent into a Stalinesque dictatorship were still only hypothetical scenarios when Kara-Murza and I sat down for an interview in Tbilisi, Georgia, five years ago. He was there for a conference. We talked about disinformation, his hopes for Russia and what makes him angry. (Spoiler: It was the complacency of the so-called “golden billion,” the people who live in democratic countries and take their freedoms for granted, while so much of the world is not free. 

The interview was supposed to become part of a larger Coda project that never got off the ground, thanks to Covid. In the years that followed, I assumed the interview had been lost amid Coda’s pandemic-era transition to a fully remote team, but recently we found the footage. We are publishing it now; the transcript below has been edited for clarity.

What keeps you awake at night?

The thought that Russia, my country, one of the most cultured and one of the most beautiful nations in the world has for two decades now been ruled by a corrupt and authoritarian kleptocracy that is stealing from its own people and that is violating the most basic rights and freedoms of its own people. That’s not a normal situation.

What do you think has been your country’s biggest mistake?

I will separate my country from the government of my country and I think the biggest mistake of the government of my country was the failure in the early 1990s to fully reckon with our communist and our Soviet past and to fully reckon with the mistakes and the crimes of that Soviet and that communist past. The Russian people were ready for it in the 1990s but the Russian government at that time was not up to the task.

I’ll say a word and if you can finish the sentence. Disinformation is…

Lying.

Give me an example of a fake news story that fooled you.

I think almost two decades of Putin’s propaganda has taught us not to trust a lot of things that we hear so I’m not even able to think of one immediately.

Give me an example of a fake news story that has had a huge impact on the world.

Well, there was a story in 2014 on Channel 1 on Russian state television about Ukrainian soldiers crucifying a Russian child in the town of Sloviansk and it caused as you can imagine for any normal human beings, it would cause, it caused them an outpouring of anger and grief and resentment and then of course it turned out to be completely and utterly fake, just completely made-up. This is just one small example in a vast sea of propaganda and lying and disinformation put forward by the Putin regime. 

How do we stop democracy turning into plutocracy?

Well, as Winston Churchill said, democracy is a very flawed system but it’s the best one of everything that’s been created, so I think if a democracy functions properly and the institutions function, that in itself is the best guarantee against turning into plutocracy. Because when you have a government that is transparent and accountable to its own citizens, the citizens will not allow it to become a plutocracy.

Is technology helping dictators or democrats?

You know, the sun shines on both good people and on criminals, so I think in the same way, technology can be used for good and for bad and dictators have certainly been savvy very often with using modern technology and so should we be, and I can tell you that, you know, today in my country, in Russia, the internet and the social media are a major instrument that supports the civil society and the democratic movement and the pro-democracy movement, and I’ll give you just one example: Last year, in 2017, there was an investigative video put forward by the Anti-Corruption Foundation led by Alexei Navalny about the corrupt dealings of current Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and of course, if you watched Russian state television, you wouldn’t hear a single word about it and yet tens of millions of people watched that investigative video on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitter, and tens of thousands went on the streets all over Russia to protest against it. And I think that gives a powerful example of how important and how influential independent information space in modern technology can be.

What’s the biggest benefit of the Trump presidency?

I think it’s a very… I think the Trump presidency in many ways is a very useful reminder to those people who may have harbored some illusions that our job will be done for us by somebody else, that somebody else will come in from the outside and solve all our problems, that it’s not going to happen and it shouldn’t happen because it’s only for us, it’s only for the citizens of Russia to effect change in our country, to change the political situation in our country, to return democracy to our country. It’s not going to be done by Trump or Obama or Bush or Merkel or Macron or anybody else. This is only for us to do, it’s for us to sort out the situation in our own country, and I think the attitude of the current U.S. administration is a very good reminder of that.  

What’s one thing you would tell President Trump?

I will tell him what I will tell any Western leader if I were to meet them, is that, you know, if your country and your government and your system claims to adhere to the values of democracy and human rights and rule of law, then act on it and please stop enabling the crooks and the kleptocrats and the Kremlin by giving them safe havens in your countries for their looted wealth, for their bank accounts, for their real estate, for their families, which is what the West has been doing for many, many years. And that is why it is so important for those countries that have passed the Magnitsky laws, which are the laws imposing personal targeted sanctions on crooks and human rights abusers, to implement those laws to the full extent, and that includes the United States. And that’s why it’s so important for the countries that have not yet passed the Magnitsky laws to pass them and to implement them.

What is one thing you would say to Vladimir Putin?

I have nothing to say to that man. He knows full well what he’s doing. He’s an intelligent person and everything he’s been doing to our country for the last two decades, he’s been doing on purpose and I have nothing to say to this man.

What is Putin’s biggest nightmare? 

The answer is very clear: It’s the people on the streets. We saw how scared and how frightened they were in December of 2011 when we had tens of thousands people on the streets of Moscow protesting against the Putin regime. So for a few days the regime was caught completely surprised. For the first time in their time in power, they had lost the initiative and they were on the defensive and you could see the terror in their eyes and frankly, you know, if you look even at the faces of the policemen who came to the Sakharov Avenue protests on December 24, 2011, when we had something like 120,000 people on the streets of central Moscow protesting against the Putin regime, you can read the fear in the eyes of those police officers and you can read that the biggest thing they were afraid of is that they would be given the order to shoot and they didn’t want to shoot because these people are their friends, their neighbors, their relatives, and that is the thing that is the biggest nightmare for the Putin regime. Just as it has been a nightmare for so many authoritarian regimes all over the world, including here in Georgia.

What should the Western liberal democracies fear more: the government of China or the government of Russia?

You know, I think human rights are universal and the rule of law is universal and the principles of democracy are universal, so I don't want to sound as if I think different standards should be applied to different countries. No, human rights are for everybody, the citizens of China and the citizens of Russia. But I do think that it is important to remember that Russia is a member of the Council of Europe, that Russia is a member of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and everything that Vladimir Putin has been doing both in his domestic and his foreign policy over the last two decades is breaking and violating the most fundamental rules of those organizations, and so I think for that reason Western countries should be much more indignated about what Vladimir Putin’s regime has been doing.

What makes you angry about the world?

About how few people care about the violations of the rights of people in other countries. It’s, you know, the so-called golden billion, the people who live in successful democracies. They very often forget that the vast majority of the population of our globe live in countries that are not free, live in conditions that are not free and they lack the basic rights and freedoms that so many people in the West take for granted. I think it’s very important for the people in the West not to lose sight of that.   

What makes you hopeful?

When I look at the tens of thousands of young people who have been and continue to come out to the streets of cities and towns all across Russia to voice their protest against the endemic corruption and the authoritarianism of the Putin regime despite the pressure and the dangers and the threats and the beatings and the arrests. That really makes me hopeful about the future of my country and about the future of the world as well. 

What’s one film everyone should see?

It’s going to be a tough competition, but given everything that we’ve just been talking about, I’d say watch the “Trial at Nuremberg” [“Judgment at Nuremberg”]. It’s a film that made one of the most profound impacts on me, I can tell you that, and that phrase there at the end of the film, when the young prosecutor is talking to this elderly American judge about the situation, I’m not going to give a spoiler, you’ll know what I mean when you see the film, but what that elderly judge answers is that “Yes, what you’re saying is correct, is factually correct, but there is nothing on this earth that makes it right.” I think that’s a very important message to remember in our time as well.

One book everyone should read?

My favorite is “Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov, but I think I’m biased towards Russian literature.

When was the last time you felt really scared?

I suppose it was in the early hours of February 2 of 2017, the second time I was poisoned in Moscow, and I knew what it was because it had happened before so I knew the symptoms and I knew I only had a few hours left of being conscious before falling into a coma again and it was… The scariest thing was not being able to breathe. When you make this movement that every person makes every day, every minute, to take in the air and you feel as if the air is not coming in, you feel as if you’re suffocating, and that’s very painful but also a very frightening experience. 

What does the world look like in five years?

Hopefully with a Russia that has a government that respects the rights of its own people and that respects the rule of law and democracy at home and that behaves as a responsible citizen on the international stage.

This piece was originally published as the most recent edition of the weekly Disinfo Matters newsletter.

The post An unseen interview with Vladimir Kara-Murza: ‘Putin’s propaganda has taught us not to trust a lot of things’ appeared first on Coda Story.

For the autocrats, 2023 was a pretty good year. For the rest of us, not so much. 

New wars emerged, old ones persisted, and a global rift over reality and truth deepened further. Divisions over how to interpret the world around us have, of course, existed since time immemorial, but we often forget that the yawning gulf between societies today is driven by algorithms engineered in my unlikely new home in Silicon Valley.

A few months ago, just as generative artificial intelligence took the global spotlight and we all buckled up for another tech shake-up, I landed in Silicon Valley. Every year, the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University brings together a small but mighty cohort of journalists and tasks them with figuring out the future of our embattled profession.  

We couldn’t be in a better place. The technology that this valley has birthed has played a key role in creating the very problems we are here to solve: the demise of journalism’s old business models, proliferation of viral disinformation and the global rise of authoritarian populists, for whom journalists are public enemies number one. 

Living here, I often wonder if this is what ancient Rome felt like: a place of incredible financial and intellectual abundance, limitless possibilities and terrifying detachment from the rest of the world. 

Most conversations I have here don’t dwell on the troubles of people affected by technology. Instead they focus on the exciting frontiers of generative AI. “Collateral damage,” one ex-Googler told me when I challenged him. 

Meanwhile, Coda’s intrepid journalists spent 2023 on the ground, reporting on the “collateral damage”: real men and women whose lives are maimed by algorithms they can’t control.   

We produced a multi-part podcast called “Tech, Tyrants and Us,” together with our partners at Audible. We investigated how a EU-funded agency uses surveillance tech to keep migrants from reaching Europe’s shores, how flashy but misleading posts on TikTok emptied a town in Albania and how AI-generated deepfakes are changing the nature of military intelligence. We reported extensively on the efforts of those in power to manipulate collective memory, we traveled all the way to the Swedish Arctic to tell the story of “green colonialism,” and we even tried our hand at a new genre: a true crime podcast called “Infamous International.” I am happy to report that it’s blazing a trail, ranking among Spotify’s top 5 true crime podcasts. 

I couldn’t be more proud of the journalism we’ve done in 2023, but being in Silicon Valley has given me a front-row seat to the advances in generative AI as well as an insight: Our information ecosystem is about to change beyond recognition and producing great stories is no longer enough. 

NOISE IS THE NEW CENSORSHIP 

My project here at Stanford focuses on figuring out how high-quality journalism like Coda’s can punch through the deafening noise of the modern-day information ecosystem. Years on the disinformation beat convinced me that when it comes to disinformation, the real problem isn’t the fake news but the noise. Social media moved most of our conversations online and turned them into a shouting match, in which the loudest, most obnoxious voices are always poised to win and it is easy to manipulate and override reason.

Noise is the new censorship. It rips our communities apart from the inside and builds walls that run through the middle of them, polarizing us and rendering us unable to have a conversation about any subject — be it climate change or the war in Gaza. 

With the rise of AI, this cacophony is poised to grow. Just to be clear: I am not worried about killer robots. But I do think that we will have to reimagine what it means to be a journalist in the age of AI. It is time to accept that we will never again be the gatekeepers of information and focus instead on providing the important service of helping people navigate the cacophony and access the information they need. We have to find a way to punch through the noise and get the attention of our audiences.

As the world heads into 2024, a key election year in the U.S. and around the world, our team will continue to put a spotlight on stories that are shaping our lives: from memory wars and the war on science to disinformation and — of course — tech, which is emerging as the linchpin connecting all of these crises. But we will also be bringing you new formats and new collaborations that focus on creating, curating and connecting conversations that matter. 

And so, buckle up. 2024 is going to be quite a ride. Make sure you are strapped in next to people you like and join us! Subscribe, share or — even better — tell a friend about Coda. And please consider supporting us. Every dollar makes a huge difference.

Happy New Year!   

Natalia Antelava

Editor in Chief, Coda Story

The post 2024: The year of punching through the noise appeared first on Coda Story.

To mark the occasion, European Union flags are flying above all government buildings in the capital Tbilisi — the Georgian government, although criticized for its meek response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, did apply for EU membership two years ahead of schedule — and the city spent much of the week preparing for annual festivities. 

But away from all the usual fanfare, a small, privately organized exhibition in one of Tbilisi’s hip venues reflected the lack of historic reckoning that makes Georgia’s independence ever so fragile.

The idea for the exhibition was hatched after a group of Ukrainian journalists contacted their colleagues at Tabula magazine in Tbilisi. The Ukrainians asked them for evidence of atrocities committed by Russians in the early 1990s during the internecine conflict in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, when Georgian troops and paramilitaries, Abkhaz forces, local civilians, as well as fighters from the Russian Federation fought a brutal war strafed by massive human rights abuses on all sides.

“It took the massacre in Bucha for us to dig into our own past,” says Tamara Chergoleishvili, founder of Tabula and the organizer of the exhibition called “Before Bucha there was Abkhazia.” “I was shocked by what we found, but even more so by how little we know and understand.”

Chergoleishvili discovered that in 1994, Georgia had set up a national investigative commission to look into whether atrocities committed against the Georgians amounted to a genocide. The commission interviewed nearly 25,000 victims of the war and identified 800 people, including members of the Russian military, who participated in human rights violations in Abkhazia. Tabula obtained and shared with me a summary of the findings that detail many of the horrific atrocities that took place. In 1999, the Georgian prosecutors office, using the commission’s report, launched an investigation into the war and sent the report’s summary to the UN in Geneva. But nothing came out of either.

Several people featured in the exhibition testify to what happened in 1993 in a village called Akhaldaba, where 300 ethnic-Georgian residents were held hostage in a local school. Militiamen separated men from women and children. Many of the men have never been seen since, while women and girls were tortured and raped.

“I felt ashamed. These people, the refugees from that war, still live among us, with enormous trauma of what they have been through, and yet, we never acknowledge it, never ask them whether they are okay,” Chergoleishvili said. 

The war in Georgia’s Black Sea province of Abkhazia flared up in the wake of the Soviet collapse: ethnic Abkhaz did not want to be part of an independent Georgia, while the province's predominantly Georgian population did. In villages like Akhalba, situated in the Abkhazia region but inhabited mostly by ethnic Georgians, this brought violent confrontations of the worst kind.

Moscow promoted this rivalry, fanned the flames of ethnic tensions and — once the fighting began — provided weapons, military personnel and propaganda support to the Abkhaz side.  

In years to come, the Kremlin’s role in Abkhazia would become a blueprint for Russia’s approach to conflicts from Moldova’s Transnistria to Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Donbas in Ukraine. “Remember the little green men in Crimea?” asks Malkhaz Pataraia, a refugee still living in Tbilisi who co-founded “Abkhaz Council,” an umbrella platform for many organizations that represent victims of the war. “I have met them in Abkhazia.”

The “little green men” were Russian soldiers Vladimir Putin sent to Crimea without insignia so that he could unofficially establish (and lie about) Russian military presence in the peninsula. Moscow has always denied their soldiers fought in that war, but unlike Ukraine, Russian disinformation about Abkhazia went unchecked and unchallenged for years.

By the time most international organizations arrived in Abkhazia at the end of 1993, Georgian forces and nearly 250,000 Georgian residents had been driven out and nearly 10,000 people had been killed on both sides. Numerous UN fact-finding missions and international investigations like this one by Human Rights Watch all came to similar conclusions: horrible atrocities were committed by both sides, including bombardment of civilian targets by the Russian air force. In subsequent years, the ethnic cleansing and massacres of Georgians were officially recognized by Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe conventions during the Budapest, Lisbon and Istanbul summits. 

But unlike the war in Ukraine, which has been meticulously documented and full of compelling human stories delivered straight to our feeds, the narrative around Abkhazia is still weaved with the mind-numbing language of international organization reports.  

The geopolitical mood was also radically different. Until very recently, Western policies towards Russia were underpinned by a belief in a possibility of a democratic, Western-friendly Kremlin. Reluctance to undermine that possibility meant that slagging off Moscow was frowned upon. 

“No one wanted to hear about things Russians were doing to us,” said Pataraia, the refugee from Abkhazia. But his definition of “nobody” includes Georgians — both the government and citizens. While it is today a widely accepted truism that Georgians have not been able to face the terrible atrocities that their side committed in Abkhazia, the war in Ukraine suggests that Georgians also have been unable to face their own trauma. 

Pataraia believes that inertia and Russia both played a role in ensuring that stories of suffering and questions of responsibility remained buried. And today, it is clear how this lack of historic reckoning backfired and played into the Kremlin’s hand. Sweeping the stories of victims under a proverbial carpet and locking memories into the furthest corners of consciousness created a vacuum, an ambiguity that the Kremlin masterfully exploited.

For both Abkhaz and Georgians, the conflict became a wound that oozed instability, crime and violence. As politicians failed, survivors suffered. Many of their stories had been collected but never properly told.

Venera Mishveliani, a Georgian refugee from Akhaldaba, told Tabula that some of those who held her hostage in the school were Russian. In a 2009 documentary called “Russian Lessons” filmmaker Andrey Nekrasov featured both victims from the school and a Russian who claims to have been there. 

In the film, Naira Kalandia, a doctor, describes being stopped by “blonde men” speaking Russian “with no accent” who emptied their magazine into her 17-year-old son. She was taken hostage and held, for nine days, along with others, in a building of a local kindergarten. “They used an electrical wire to hang me upside down from the ceiling in a library room, and underneath they burned children’s books,” she tells the camera. The scenes she describes are horrific: one day, she says, soldiers forced her to swallow an eye removed from one of the corpses. Another, she was forced to watch how militia threw hostages into a deep well.

“We were mostly Russian and Armenian, maybe 20% of us in the unit were Abkhaz,” says a man who describes himself as a Russian soldier, who volunteered to join a unit of “ground troops” because he wanted to “help the small Abkhaz nation.” He says he was quickly disillusioned.

“Seeing people thrown into a well was really unpleasant,” he says “I did not like it. I did not like how naked girls, ages 12, 15 would be brought to our base.”

Akhaldaba is next to a town where I spent much of my childhood. My grandmother was among 250,000 Georgian refugees who eventually fled the war in Abkhazia. To her very last days, she talked about her dreams of returning to her house by the sea, or visiting my grandfather’s grave in the hills above it. But we never spoke about the horrors that took place in villages we both considered home. There was an awareness of them, but never a conversation — not in my family and not in the larger society. “Everyone deals with trauma differently, we buried it,” Chergoleishvili said. 

This burial, Pataraia told me, brought the horrors of the war back in 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia, slicing away more territory both in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Georgia has pushed for justice for the victims of the 2008 war, filing and winning a case in the International Criminal Court. They also fought and won a case in Strasbourg Court of Human Rights over forcible deportations of Georgians from Moscow in 2006. But the search for justice for the victims of the Abkhazia war has not even begun. 

Could the war in Ukraine jumpstart the process? Pataraia’s organization is campaigning for the Georgian parliament to adopt a declaration deeming abuses against Georgians in Abkhazia a “genocide” just like Ukrainians have done. He also wants the prosecutors office to resume an investigation into the war crimes committed in Abkhazia and then, eventually to push for international justice.

 “We owe it to the victims,” he says.

The post Invasion of Ukraine pushes Georgia to reexamine its fraught history with Moscow appeared first on Coda Story.

This was 2014, during the first Russian invasion of Ukraine. After the Ukrainian army pushed Russian-backed forces out of the city, Garmash joined a group of volunteers who quickly got to work, scrubbing and fixing their hometown. But one thing they couldn’t fix was the fallen television tower that had once overlooked the city. Russian-backed militants used it to beam the Kremlin’s message at residents of Slovyansk during the three month long occupation and destroyed it before they left. 

“How will we get the local news?” Garmash remembers asking a local journalist as they cleaned up a street in Slovyansk that July. “There will be no local news,” she replied. 

She was wrong. Within weeks of that conversation, Garmash launched a new media site and named it 6262.com.ua, a reference to Slovyansk’s city code. 

“People really needed local news. And all I needed to provide it was the internet and social media,” Garmash tells me.

By the time Russia invaded again, in February of 2022, Garmash was running the city’s most popular, most trusted local news site. But as Russian tanks rolled towards Kyiv and Western sanctions kicked in, local journalism in Slovyansk was silenced once again. This time, it seems that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — not Russia — was to blame.  

“People we serve no longer get our news in their Facebook and Instagram feeds. In that sense what is happening with Facebook is not all that different from what happened with the TV tower back in 2014,” Garmash tells me.

‘WE CAN’T GET THEIR VOICES OUT’

Meta has mobilized resources in response to the war in Ukraine, and the company says it is taking the issue of disinformation around the war seriously. Staffers sent us this statement two weeks ago:

"We're taking significant steps to fight the spread of misinformation on our services related to the war in Ukraine. We've expanded our third-party fact-checking capacity in Russian and Ukrainian, to debunk more false claims. When they rate something as false, we move this content lower in Feed so fewer people see it, and attach warning labels. We also have teams working around the clock to remove content that violates our policies. This includes native Ukrainian speakers to help us review potentially violating Ukrainian content. In the EU, we've restricted access to RT and Sputnik. Globally we are showing content from all Russian state-controlled media lower in Feed and adding labels from any post on Facebook that contains links to their websites, so people know before they click or share them.” 

I read it to Andrey Boborykin, who manages some of the biggest Facebook publishers in Ukraine, in addition to serving as the executive director of Ukrayinska Pravda, one of Ukraine’s largest dailies. He laughs.

The organic reach of Russian propaganda voices in the West has indeed been curbed — Facebook is blocking pages for RT and Sputnik in the EU, as noted above. But for Ukrainian publishers, none of this makes much difference. 

Ukrainian newsrooms are being flooded by graphic images from the frontlines of the war. It’s newsworthy, at times vital content that is in public interest but it is impossible for editors to know what they are allowed to publish on Facebook and Instagram because Meta, Boborykin says, “never made attempts to identify key controversial topics and provide additional guidance to publishers on how to treat these topics on their platform.” 

And even where there are rules, they are confusing and inconsistent. Here is just one example: it is impossible to cover the war in Ukraine without mentioning Azov Battalion, a key group fighting Russians in eastern Ukraine. But a mere mention of Azov Battalion can be considered a violation of community standards. The punishment for such a violation is a “strike” and several strikes could result in their accounts being blocked or suspended. 

Recently, Meta made a temporary change to its hate speech policy, allowing calls for violence against Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion. But when Ukrayinska Pravda posted stories about Azov Battalion cheering after hitting the enemy targets in Mariupol their pages got “strikes.” 

Things are especially dire for publishers on the frontlines: dozens of small, independent newsrooms in eastern Ukraine, who have recently lost their ability to promote their posts to their communities. 

“We woke up one day to the news of invasion, and the next day to the news of all of our Facebook and Google ad accounts being blocked. We contacted both. Google fixed the issue within twelve days. We are still waiting for Facebook,” Garmash told me. 

Boborykin says restricting advertisement is normally used by Meta to curb what the company calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior” of state-backed accounts who use ads to promote propaganda, hatred and fake news. Blocking ad capabilities is part of Meta’s effort to combat disinformation on its platform. But what is happening in eastern Ukraine illustrates something else. It is an example, Boborykin says, of platforms applying a “one-fits-all” policy without any attempt to understand the local context. 

“If you are a small publisher from eastern Ukraine, there is a high chance that right now you don’t have any advertising capabilities and you have your pages blocked,” says Boborykin. 

As a result, Boborykin says 31 newsrooms, including 6262.com.ua, are experiencing a massive drop in Facebook revenue and audience. In addition to his day job, Boborykin works with the Media Development Foundation and is currently running emergency fundraisers for local Ukrainian newsrooms. Limits that Facebook has imposed on them, he says, are affecting wartime fundraising too. 

“We can’t promote their pages, we can’t get their voices out,” Boborykin says. “It’s crazy because it means that [local publishers] are cut off from their communities. And many of them are already cut off physically, because they’ve had to flee. If they don’t flee they work under shelling. It’s crazy that they have to be dealing with technical constraints imposed by Facebook on top of it all,” he says. 

In early March, in order to continue operations, Valerii Garmash moved most of his 14-strong team away from the frontline in eastern Ukraine, keeping only a few journalists in Slovyansk. “In extreme times like this, people need information more than ever. But they are no longer seeing us on their feeds,” he says.

On Facebook, in what appears to be the result of new company policies on Ukraine, 6262.com.ua has seen an 80% drop in audience since the war began. The numbers are similar on Instagram. Financing independent journalism is never easy, but Garmash has taken a unique approach, providing spin-off services like video production and social media consulting to local businesses.

Garmash says his team runs 25 business pages on Facebook alone. The local vet clinic, the city’s pharmacy and a clothing shop are among 6262.com.ua’s clients. But now they can’t get on the feeds of their community members either.

I asked Meta staffers I am in touch with whether they are aware of the huge losses that their company’s policy brought to small and struggling independent publishers in Ukraine. Their reply reads that “Meta remains committed to building systems that promote and protect news content on our platforms, in order to help news publishers, large and small, better make money and serve their local communities.”

“We can't respond to the specific claims reported on by Coda Story as these details were not shared with us prior to publication,” the statement goes on “but we do partner with international institutions such as Reuters and ICFJ as well as regional and local organizations — including in Ukraine — to train journalists and newsroom professionals and get a better understanding of the challenges they face.”

In the last two months, staffers at 6262.com.ua have contacted Meta at least 40 times. They have yet to receive a response. 

NO ANSWER: A GLOBAL PROBLEM

The experience of the team of 6262.com.ua is playing out for independent media across eastern Ukraine, and even beyond its borders. 

We recently profiled two independent newsrooms in Georgia, a country also partly occupied by Russia, that saw their audiences decline by as much as 90%t after Facebook blocked some of their posts about the war in Ukraine. The reasons why the posts were blocked are unclear, but both newsrooms suspect that they were reported by Russian trolls. 

After the piece was published, a Facebook representative asked me to pass on his personal details to the journalists we profiled and promised to review their cases. I did and journalists followed up with Facebook directly. Two weeks have gone by, and neither television station has gotten a clear answer from Facebook. 

An estimated 26 million people in Ukraine use Facebook every month. “These platforms are crucial for us,” Boborykin says. Having worked across the African continent and closely watched Facebook’s controversies in places like Myanmar, Boborykin says he has no illusions about Meta’s business model, or any issues with it, for that matter. The problem, he says, is the way that Meta deals with people and organizations they like to call partners. 

“What they have done in the case of Ukraine is 1% of what they could have done,” Boborykin says. “Have better news partnerships, reach out to local publishers, make lists of people and media organizations that you trust. Reply to their messages.” 

What would you say to Mark Zuckerberg if you met him? I ask Valerii Garmash, the founder of 6262.ua before we hang up. 

“I’d tell him that in Ukraine he is violating his own mission,” Garmash says. “He set up Facebook to give people power to build communities. He is destroying ours.”

This story originally ran in our weekly Disinfo Matters newsletter that looks beyond fake news to examine how manipulation of narratives, rewriting of history and altering our memories is reshaping our world. We are currently tracking the war in Ukraine. Sign up here.

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The post Fleeing Russian bombs while battling Facebook. A Meta problem Ukrainian journalists did not need appeared first on Coda Story.

“You cannot post or comment for 3 days”

“You can’t go live for 63 days”

For Afghan journalist Shafi Karimi, the list of restrictions that Facebook has imposed on him goes on and on. “I am blocked and I am losing an audience, and people are losing vital information,” says Karimi, who is covering Afghanistan from exile in France.

He is not the only one. From Afghanistan to Ukraine, and much of the rest of the non-English speaking world, journalists are losing their voice. Not only because of the increasingly oppressive governments that target them, but also because policies created in Silicon Valley are helping oppressors of free speech peddle disinformation. 

Over the past month, Karimi has sent numerous appeals to Facebook, but has gotten no reply. And so last week, Karimi pushed his way through a champagne-sipping crowd of journalists and media representatives at a reception that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, threw at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. 

The festival is one of the industry’s key annual events and a rare opportunity for journalists like Karimi to speak to big tech company representatives directly. 

Karimi found a Meta staff member and, shouting over the crowd, tried to explain to him how all independent voices on Afghanistan are being affected by Facebook’s poorly thought-out policy that seems to indiscriminately label all mentions of the Taliban as hate speech and then summarily remove them. He explained that Facebook is an essential platform for people stuck in the Taliban-imposed information vacuum and that blocking those voices benefits first and foremost the Taliban itself. The Meta representative listened and asked Karimi to follow up. Karimi did – twice – but never heard back. 

As Karimi was pleading with one Meta employee, I cornered another one across the crowded reception hall, to deliver a similar message from a different part of the world. A friend working for an independent television station in Georgia had asked me to pass on that her newsroom had lost a staggering 90% of its Facebook audience since they began covering the war in Ukraine.  The station, called Formula TV, made countless attempts to contact Meta but received no response. 

Was there anything these Meta staffers could do to help?

‘Facebook pages of real, independent journalism are dying’

“We went from reaching 2 million people to reaching 200,000,” Salome Ugulava, Formula’s chief digital editor told me. The drop followed a warning they received from Facebook after its algorithm flagged a quote from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as hate speech. The post, which she showed me, was merely a translation into Georgian of a post by Zelensky himself. 

This seemingly technical error caused the station to lose 90% of its audience, but also a chunk of its revenue. “Monetization has been suspended. It is a harsh punishment,” Ugulava said. 

The Tbilisi-based opposition TV station Mtavari saw similar declines when it ran a story about Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian volunteer paramilitary group that has been defending Mariupol, where some of the worst atrocities of the war have occurred. Facebook removed the story on grounds that it was “a call to terrorism.” The Azov Battalion is controversial because of the far-right and even neo-Nazi leanings of many of its members, but only Russia categorizes it as a terrorist organization. 

“We were already under constant attacks from Georgian government troll farms, but since the invasion Russian-backed organizations began reporting us too. Azov incident was one of many,” Nika Gvaramia, the channel’s Director General told me. 

Gvaramia says many of the Ukraine-related stories that Mtavari posted in early March were taken down by Facebook in early April, weeks after they were first published and seen by millions of people. The Mtavari team has good reason to believe they are being reported by Kremlin-backed accounts. 

“The worst part is that there is no warning mechanism, there is no obvious criteria for these takedowns and appeals to Facebook take weeks … Facebook pages of real, independent journalism are dying,” Gvaramia said. His channel’s engagement, he said, dropped from 22 million in early March to 6 million in early April.  

For a place as small as Georgia (population 3.5 million) the consequences of these takedowns are huge. Like in many countries outside the West, Facebook has become the nation’s virtual public square – the place where people gather to discuss and debate their future. This discussion is existential in Georgia, because the future is so precarious: twenty percent of the country is already occupied by Russia, and many fear that Ukraine’s invasion will push Georgia further into Moscow’s embrace. Kremlin-funded disinformation campaigns have put independent media covering the situation under massive pressure. When media outlets like Formula TV and Mtavari disappear from people’s Facebook feeds, the very ideas of liberal democracy disappear from the public debate. 

“The power that Facebook has is scary. The way it is using it is even scarier,” a Russian journalist, who did not want to be named due to security concerns, told me. Her account was suspended after she was reported to Facebook by numerous accounts accusing her of violating community standards. She suspects the accounts that reported her were working on behalf of the Russian government. Like Karimi, who says Facebook is helping the Taliban, she says Facebook’s policies are aiding Vladimir Putin’s agenda. 

“Silicon Valley is helping Putin to win the information war. It is insane and it has to stop,” she said “But we don’t know how to tell them this, because it is impossible to speak to them directly.”

None of this is new

Meta has been accused of promoting hatred and disinformation around the world before, from Nigeria to Palestine to Myanmar where the company was famously accused of fueling the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. And experts in regions like the Middle East and Africa have noted that even though tech platforms are failing to adequately address the content crisis around Ukraine, they have brought a faster and more robust public response in this case than in places like Syria or Ethiopia. 

With each new crisis, Meta has made new promises to better account for all the cultural and linguistic nuances of posts around the world. The company even put out an earnest-sounding human rights policy last year that focused on these issues. But there’s little evidence that its practices are actually changing. Facebook does not disclose how many moderators it employs, but estimates suggest around 15,000 people are charged with vetting content generated by Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users globally. 

“It is like putting a beach shack in the way of a massive tsunami and expecting it to be a barrier,” one moderator told me. I cannot name him, or say where he is, because Facebook subcontractors operate under strict non-disclosure agreements. But he and other people with access to moderators told me that the Ukraine war is the latest proof that Facebook’s content moderation model does more harm than good. 

Facebook moderators have 90 seconds to decide whether a post is allowed to go up or not. From Myanmar to Ukraine and beyond, they are dealing with incredibly graphic images of violence or highly contextual speech that typically doesn’t line up with Facebook’s byzantine rules on what is and is not allowed. The system, in which posts live or die depending on a quick decision of an overworked, underpaid and often traumatized human, takes a toll on the mental health of the moderators. But it is also damaging the health of the information ecosystem in which we live. 

“The weight of this war is falling on outsourced moderators, who have repeatedly sounded the alarm,” says Martha Dark, director of Foxglove Legal, a UK-based tech justice non-profit group that is working on issues of mistreatment of Facebook content moderators around the world.   

“Despite its size and its colossal profits, Ukraine has shown that Facebook's systems are totally unequipped to deal with all-out information war,” says Dark. “No one is saying moderating a war zone is an easy task. But it's hard to shake the sense that Facebook isn't making a serious effort at scaling up and fixing content moderation – because to do so would eat into its profit margins. That's just not good enough,” Dark said.

Facebook has pledged to reply to my questions about the cases of Shafi Karimi from Afghanistan and FormulaTV in Georgia in the coming days – I’ll report on it as soon as I hear back. In the meantime, my contacts there offered this response, which is attributed to a “Meta spokesperson”: 

"We're taking significant steps to fight the spread of misinformation on our services related to the war in Ukraine. We've expanded our third-party fact-checking capacity in Russian and Ukrainian, to debunk more false claims. When they rate something as false, we move this content lower in Feed so fewer people see it, and attach warning labels. We also have teams working around the clock to remove content that violates our policies. This includes native Ukrainian speakers to help us review potentially violating Ukrainian content. In the EU, we've restricted access to RT and Sputnik. Globally we are showing content from all Russian state-controlled media lower in Feed and adding labels from any post on Facebook that contains links to their websites, so people know before they click or share them.”

It’s true that the company has deplatformed some of the most prominent sources of Russian disinformation, such as Russian state broadcasters. And we can’t know what impact some of these other measures are having, due to the company’s lack of transparency about its actual day-to-day content moderation decisions. But the real power of Facebook, which is arguably the most potent communication tool in the world at the moment, lies in organic, peer-to-peer shares and that’s where so much disinformation flourishes. 

“We can no longer cover the war,” says the Georgian journalist Salome Ugulava. “Our followers are not seeing us on their feeds.” 

It’s not just Facebook: Twitter is facing similar accusations of doing a terrible job policing its platform when it comes to Ukraine. “You are failing,” tweeted journalist Simon Ostrovsky who is covering Ukraine for PBS Newshour. “Hundreds of sock puppet accounts attack every tweet that counters the Kremlin narrative, meanwhile you fall for coordinated campaigns to suspend genuine accounts.”

This story originally ran in our our weekly Disinfo Matters newsletter that looks beyond fake news to examine how manipulation of narratives, rewriting of history and altering our memories is reshaping our world. We are currently tracking the war in Ukraine. Sign up here.

The post How Silicon Valley is helping Putin and other tyrants win the information war appeared first on Coda Story.

On Sunday, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus used a military jet to intercept a commercial airliner and bring home the dissident journalist Roman Protasevich. 

The Ryanair flight was carrying 122 passengers from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania, when it was forced to make an emergency landing in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Witnesses say no one panicked, except for one young man, who grabbed his head and “began shaking.” 

It is chilling to imagine what went through the mind of 26-year-old Protasevich when he realized that the plane that was supposed to carry him from the safety of one European country to another was, instead, taking him straight to the nation where he stands accused of terrorism — a crime punishable by death in Belarus. 

Protasevich is the founder and former editor of Nexta and Nexta Live, two Telegram channels that played an important role in broadcasting huge opposition protests against the Lukashenko regime. As the president cracked down on the demonstrations with increasing brutality, Protasevich continued his work from the presumed safety of exile in Europe. 

Belarusian state media reported that Lukashenko himself ordered that the plane carrying Protasevich be stopped, so that he could be apprehended. It appears that the country’s authorities used a fake bomb threat and sent a fighter jet to intercept the plane and force it down.

After seven hours grounded in Minsk, the rest of the passengers were allowed to reboard and fly to Vilnius. They watched as Protasevich was taken away. “I will be executed,” were his last words to one of them. 

U.S. Ambassador to Belarus Julie Fischer has described the situation as “dangerous and abhorrent,” while European officials have slammed the Belarusian authorities and threatened “serious consequences.”  It is clear that Lukashenko’s decision to completely abandon international norms has created a new reality for hundreds of dissidents around the world, for whom even crossing the airspace of their countries could now pose a grave threat. 

What lessons other authoritarian leaders will draw from this episode depends on whether Lukashenko is allowed to get away with it.  And Russia appears to be playing a key role in making sure that he does. 

Russia has an uneasy relationship with Belarus, but over the past year, as both governments have faced waves of popular protest, the two nations have stuck by each other. Protasevich’s arrest, which placed 122 other passengers at risk, immediately raised questions about Moscow’s possible involvement. 

The question is important: if Lukashenko acted alone, the arrest of Protasevich could be a sign of desperation. If he acted with Moscow’s blessing, or even support, then this could be a much more serious geopolitical provocation, designed to test the willingness of the West to stand up to Russia ahead of the planned, though not yet scheduled, Putin-Biden summit.  

Russian journalists are investigating a theory that Russian operatives followed Protasevich in Athens, were on the plane and helped to carry out the operation. But there is a simpler, yet insightful barometer of the Kremlin's thinking: its own messaging. 

When things don’t go according to the Kremlin’s plans, Russian media tends to go quiet. Over the past five years, international scandals involving the Russian government — be they hacking revelations, the poisoning of opponents or the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 — have been characterized by an almost trademark few days of silence, during which the nation’s propaganda machine takes a deep breath to formulate its response, and only then launches into a full offensive.

But, this time, while European and U.S. politicians voiced their outrage and talked about new sanctions against Lukashenko, Russian state television was immediately on the case, spinning the narrative in the opposite direction. 

On Sunday night, Dmitry Kiselyov, President Vladimir Putin’s “propaganda tsar,” dedicated a 10-minute segment of his flagship show Vesti Nedeli (News of the Week) to Belarus.    

Kiselyov set the tone with two main messages about Protasevich’s arrest: first, that the West’s reaction revealed its hypocrisy, particularly in the case of the European Union; second, that there was nothing unusual about what Lukashenko did.

“The Americans arrest anyone they don’t like, anywhere they want,” Kiselyov said, bringing up a gallery of images of Russians who have been detained around the world. At the top of the list was Victor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer arrested in Thailand and extradited  to the United States in 2010, where he was convicted on several charges, including weapons trafficking and conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens and officials. 

Kiselyov’s second argument was based entirely on the 2013 case of Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, whose jet was forced to land in Austria after several European countries — pressured by the U.S. — closed their airspace to the plane, which was taking Morales home after a summit in Moscow, following a tip-off that Edward Snowden was on board. 

The story resonated. Within minutes, Twitter lit up with variations on the argument. From trolls to Russian diplomats around the world, a link to the Morales incident was ready to undermine every disapproving tweet about Protasevich.   

When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded an international investigation into the “brazen and shocking act,” Dmitry Polyansky, a senior Russian diplomat in the U.S, replied with  #doublestandards and a demand for an investigation into the 2013 “hijacking” of Evo Morales plane.

The message quickly spread beyond the Russian bubble. “Why does the West pretend to be outraged when a nation imitates its gangsterism like the air piracy Belarus engaged in? Belarus didn't forget when the U.S. forced the plane of a head of state, Evo Morales, to land in order to arrest Edward Snowden & got away with it.” tweeted American activist Ajamu Baraka to his 90,000 followers, echoing the thoughts of a number of other influencers. 

Russia uses this kind of whataboutery because it has worked ever since the Cold War. In the words of Peter Pomeranzev, one of the world’s leading disinformation experts, the Kremlin exploits systemic weak spots and inconsistencies in the Western system by “providing a sort of X-ray of the underbelly of liberal democracy.” 

The Morales example, is in fact, pertinent, and there would be nothing wrong with pointing out the West’s double standards, were doing so not based on the assumption that two wrongs somehow make a right. Meanwhile, the West has remained tight-lipped regarding its own mistakes. 

Without an appropriate response from the West, the Kremlin is able to use this reliable and familiar strategy to muddy narratives, dampen outrage and plant seeds of doubt. As leaders in the West scramble over the penalties they want to impose on Belarus, Russia’s line is already making moral clarity and decisive action just a bit more elusive and Protasevich’s story easier to shrug off.

The post Opinion: Can Alexander Lukashenko get away with the dramatic arrest of a dissident Belarusian journalist? The answer lies with the West appeared first on Coda Story.

When he arrives in the capital Tbilisi, Pompeo will find a situation eerily similar to the one he may be trying to escape: rising Covid-19 numbers and big street protests over a bitter, disinformation-mired election dispute. And while Pompeo is a lame duck diplomat in much of the world, his visit to the small South Caucasus nation could alter history. 

On October 31, Georgians voted in a highly contested parliamentary election. After eight years on the political sidelines, the opposition thought it stood a chance of at least diluting the power of the ruling Georgian Dream party. 

But according to the opposition, the game was rigged from the start. The election was marred by disinformation and allegations of vote buying. And once the ballots were cast, evidence of fraud began to emerge. In over a hundred polling stations, for example, no one voted for the opposition  — a statistical impossibility in a politically divided Georgia. In some areas, the vote totals cast for the ruling party were greater than the number of people who actually voted. 

The ruling party is run by the Bidzina Ivanishvili, the country’s richest man, an oligarch with ties to Russia who, over the years, has successfully managed to keep the opposition weak and fragmented.   

The international community — the usual arbiter between the Georgian government and the opposition — has been distracted by the pandemic and the turmoil in the U.S. While there has been some criticism of the government, overall the response has been muted and government-backed media channels cite Pompeo’s upcoming visit as a validation of the election’s outcome. 

For years Georgia, an ally of the U.S., has been held up as a model for the region. This election further erodes the country democratic stature and is likely to come at a geopolitical cost for the West. 

The “Ivanishvili government has hired lobbying firms in Washington while embracing Russian disinformation narratives and Russian tactics at home,” says Giorgi Kandelaki, an opposition politician. “Retreat of democracy here harms the United States interests and works to Putin’s benefit” 

As America’s top diplomat, Pompeo often urges free and fair elections and peaceful transitions of power. But his two-day visit to Georgia does not include a meeting with the country’s opposition, and his apparent refusal to accept election results in his own country makes him a deeply compromised interlocutor. 

Upping the stakes is a massive geopolitical tremor in the region. The South Caucasus — which includes Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan — is a key global transit route and a strategic gem that Washington and Moscow have been at loggerheads over for years. This week, its map was redrawn, literally, when Azerbaijan scored a military victory over Armenia in a war over the long-disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. 

It was a conflict much of the world didn’t even notice, but regional powers Turkey and Russia filled the vacuum created by a distracted America. Over the past six weeks, Ankara provided key military support to Azerbaijan, while Moscow stood back, allowing Azerbaijan to crush Armenia, Russia’s most loyal ally. This week, after Azerbaijan took key territories, the Kremlin stepped in, negotiated a truce and was invited by Azerbaijan to maintain stability. Moscow is sending troops to act as peacekeepers.  

Who the ultimate geopolitical winner of this situation is in dispute. Azerbaijan is the obvious one. But Russia now has boots on the ground and new leverage over both Azerbaijan and Armenia. Turkey, too, has come out ahead.

Losers are much easier to identify. Armenia: a devastated nation now sinking into a political crisis that will take years to overcome. And the United States: for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington is suddenly not even a player in a Great Game that it only recently led. 

As Mike Pompeo leaves the election chaos at home to embark on his foreign tour, the Caucasus provides a striking destination to showcase America’s diminished role on the global stage.

The post Pompeo to arrive in troubled Caucasus region with diminished stature, credibility appeared first on Coda Story.

The manufacturer sells hundreds of thousands of tons of fertilizers to many traders and companies around the world. The company’s director Ephrem Urumashvili said he could neither confirm nor deny his company sold the particular batch of ammonium nitrate stored in the Beirut port because it “happened under a different ownership” and that Rustavi Azot was preparing an official statement. 

Another company representative said he was worried about a flurry of Russian disinformation and accusations about sales of ammonium nitrate and the factory. 

Concern over becoming collateral damage from disinformation campaigns and online media attacks seeking to capitalize on the humanitarian catastrophe in Beirut is well founded. 

In the minutes and hours following the devastating explosion in Beirut, conspiracy theories ricocheted not only in Lebanon — a country riven by political factions, sectarian division, and conflict— but across the region and even much farther afield. In Georgia, years of disinformation campaigns coordinated in Russian media targeting a U.S.-funded biolab called the Lugar Research Center have more recently attempted to falsely pin the Covid-19 pandemic on the lab.

Two Georgian government officials, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said that following news reports of the blast they checked and confirmed that it was manufactured in Georgia and 2,700 tons of fertilizer were legally shipped from the country’s Black Sea port in Batumi. “It was a registered, clean sale and there was no reason for us to be suspicious,” one of the officials said.

The ammonium nitrate loaded in the Batumi port was destined for Mozambique. The vessel, called MV Rhosus, sailed under a Moldovan flag and was owned by a Cyprus-based Russian businessman named Igor Grechushkin. The crew were Ukranian and Russian nationals. 

Captain Boris Prokoshev joined the crew when the ship docked in Turkey. In an interview with Russian media, he said he was told that the ship was headed to Mozambique but that during their refuelling stop in Greece, the owner, Igor Grechushkin ordered him to sail to Beirut to load it up with additional cargo. 

Ammonium nitrate, which is a dual-use fertilizer, is banned in Lebanon. “I have no idea how Grechushkin got permission for us to dock in Beirut,” Prokoshev said in the interview with the Russian publication MediaZona, adding that in Beirut the crew was told to load up the ship with heavy machinery. The captain refused to receive the machinery on board because the ship “could not physically take so much.” By then, he said, the crew had grown increasingly angry with Greshuchkin over his failure to pay their salaries, and a partial strike ensued. The Lebanese authorities confiscated the ship for failing to pay port dues and taxes, and Prokoshev and his crew spent the following 11 months trying to get out of Lebanon.

"They should have gotten rid of the vessel right away instead of confiscating it and demanding fees for harboring it," Prokoshev told RFE/RL.

Lebanon is one of a handful of countries that has outlawed dual-use fertilizers. According to leaked court documents, Lebanese customs authorities between 2014 and 2017 repeatedly asked Lebanese courts to allow them to re-export the banned chemicals which “posed a grave danger to public health.” 

Lebanese authorities are still investigating the cause of the fire that led to the massive explosion.

Photo by Daniel Carde via Getty Images

The post Ammonium nitrate that devastated Beirut was manufactured in Georgia, officials confirmed appeared first on Coda Story.

As the Western world struggles with the coronavirus pandemic, Russia is carrying out an influence operation in Italy unimaginable under normal circumstances. 

Ten days after President Vladimir Putin sent military personnel and aid to the coronavirus-stricken nation, experts as well as diplomatic, military and government sources in Rome and the European Union's Brussels headquarters warn that the Kremlin is using the crisis to undermine NATO and the EU.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, Moscow, like Beijing, has seized soft-power opportunities by dispatching aid to hard-hit nations, while broadcasting propaganda on state and social media. 

On Tuesday, Russia sent a cargo plane filled with masks and medical equipment to the U.S., after President Donald Trump accepted an offer of humanitarian aid from Putin to fight the coronavirus outbreak. 

Trump praised the assistance as “very nice.”

But the military optics of Moscow’s aid mission to Italy, dubbed From Russia with Love, make the operation qualitatively different from other aid operations like the planes full of doctors or supplies that China has sent around the world. 

“This is a half-propaganda, half-intelligence operation,” said Sergio Germani, director of the Gino Germani Institute for Social Sciences and Strategic Studies, a Rome-based think tank. 

Germani, who researches Russia’s role in Italy, says Moscow is using the Covid-19 outbreak “to strengthen anti-EU feelings and to reinforce the impression that the EU is crumbling, to make propaganda gains and gather intelligence at the heart of NATO.” 

After a telephone call between Putin and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte late last month, during which he accepted Russia's offer of humanitarian aid, Russian media went into overdrive, applauding Moscow for stepping in “where Europe and NATO failed,” accompanied by footage of a military convoy carrying 122 personnel and decontamination equipment to Bergamo, the center of Italy’s epidemic. 

In response to a La Stampa article on March 24 reporting that 80% of Russian supplies are of little use to Italy, the Kremlin published a list of equipment delivered to Italy: 600 ventilators and 326,000 masks, as well as military decontamination equipment.

However, two sources inside the Italian military have now backed the assertion that most of the aid is superfluous to the country. Italy is reputed to have some of the best nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities within NATO.    

"If NBC [nuclear, biological and chemical] assets were needed in Bergamo, why were they not used already a month ago? And then, why not use the Italian ones? Our army has perhaps the best NBC troops in NATO,” said Italy’s former defense spokesman Andrea Armaro. 

Russia now has its NBC officers stationed in Bergamo, the epicenter of Italy’s outbreak with more than 8,800 coronavirus cases. Italy has lost more people to Covid-19 than any other country --13,155 deaths as of Thursday, about a fourth of the global total.

“Russia and China both have been using the pandemic as an opportunity to project their soft power,” said Rose Gottemoeller, former NATO Deputy Secretary General. “That is understandable because that is what they like to do.” 

“The gains for Russia are clear. What’s not clear is how the Italian government allowed this to happen,” said Germani, the think tank director. 

The answer to this question is likely to lie in a combination of Rome’s general stance towards Moscow, Russia’s successful cultivation of populist factions in Italy’s government, and a chaotic crisis management effort.

“Historically, Italy has always had a softer approach to Russia, but over the last few years Moscow invested a lot of resources into supporting cultural centers, think tanks and news outlets and laying their groundwork,” Germani said. He added that “there is a widespread perception in Italy that the EU has not responded effectively to the crisis and [there] is no leadership in the US.” 

Germani sees the Russian military presence in Bergamo as the culmination of many years of Russian soft power investment into Italy. 

The 122 officers from the Radiological Chemical and Biological Weapons Defense (RChBD) unit are led by General Sergey Kikot, the deputy commanding officer of Russia’s RChBD troops. 

In military circles, Kikot is best known for asserting the Russian government’s position that no chemical weapons were used by the Assad regime in Syria’s Douma province in 2018, and that the White Helmets rescue group had staged video footage of regime attacks.

"It is very troubling that a Russian general who was lying about Douma, as far as the British government and the [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] are concerned, is now charging around Italy," said Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, former commanding officer of NATO's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion.

“This would be unimaginable in any other situation, to have this many highly trained Russian troops in a NATO country,” he added. “It is true that these types of troops do have capacity for decontamination, but Italians have this capability as well, and it's more modern. The Italians are at the forefront of chemical and biological weapon defence in NATO, and they hardly need any advice from the Russians.” 

Chemical weapons experts like De Bretton-Gordon say Russians could be using Italy as an opportunity to test new equipment and to gather intelligence about both the virus and a NATO member state. Western military and chemical weapons experts contacted by Coda Story and La Stampa said that there is a significant overlap between the Radiological Chemical and Biological Weapons Defense unit of the Russian military and the GRU, its intelligence agency. 

“Undoubtedly, there are GRU operatives on the ground in Italy right now. Any intelligence service would take advantage of this situation, and especially the Russians. They will want to be finding out as much as possible about the Italian forces. They will be setting up intelligence networks, there will be an enormous amount of activity going on right now,” said De Bretton-Gordon.

NATO headquarters did not respond to Coda Story and La Stampa’s requests for comment, but in an interview, Italian General Marco Bertolini warned of the possible dangers of accepting aid from Russia.

"You don't refuse aid, and it's true what they say that you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. This said, we also need to be very careful — the Mediterranean, both eastern and central, is a battleground for hegemony, from Syria to Libya,” he said.

“We need to prevent a health crisis from becoming a political-military incident. It's good if there's an offer for aid, but we also need to set boundaries," he added.

But in Italy, a country overwhelmed by the enormity of the coronavirus pandemic, few are in a position to consider the long-term geopolitical consequences of the decision to accept Russian help.  

“The significance of what’s happening with the Russians in Bergamo is being lost in the panic and noise that this crisis has created,” said a senior European diplomat, who asked not to be identified.

Russian media, in the meantime, is amplifying the genuine gratitude many Italians feel. One video that has been especially prevalent on Russian television shows an Italian man taking down an EU flag and replacing it with a Russian tricolor. He then holds up a sign saying, “Thank you Putin. Thank you, Russia.” 

“The Russians are trying to get the story out there that they are the good guys in some way. It's a charm offensive,” said Gottemoeller. 

Whatever the label, so far Russia seems to be successfully controlling the narrative of its presence in Italy. Italian media outlets rely on Russian crews traveling with the troops for pictures and video of the operation and, for the most part, on information about what Russian troops are doing in Bergamo. 

According to the Russian press, Russian troops have so far decontaminated two nursing homes, while a team of 32 Russian military personnel is due to start working in a new hospital Italian authorities are building to accommodate the overwhelming number of Covid-19 victims. 

For Italy’s exhausted medical workers, what matters most is the help that they are getting, said Sergio Rizzini, director of the field hospital in Bergamo. More than 60 Italian doctors to date have died from the virus. “Healthcare facilities found themselves with much less personnel to face an ordinary situation, much less an extraordinary one,” he said. “Any help is well received.”

Additional reporting: Cecilia Butini, Burhan Wazir

The post The influence operation behind Russia’s coronavirus aid to Italy appeared first on Coda Story.

Dima and Tanya are an unlikely couple in modern-day Kiev: Dima was formerly a leader of the city’s most powerful ultra-right movement, and Tanya is an ultra-left activist and self-proclaimed anarcho-feminist.

Together Dima and Tanya fight their own battles to reinvent themselves against a backdrop of violence, loss, and instability in post-Maidan Ukraine.

Hunted by members of Ukraine’s ultra-right movement and ostracized by friends and family, the couple fights the momentum of their pasts while standing together, back to back, in a courageous tale of love and self-discovery.

The post A Ukrainian Love Story appeared first on Coda Story.

The post What to do about Stalin? appeared first on Coda Story.

As tributes began pouring in, his fellow journalists across the world wrote up their obituaries about the third critic of the Russian leader to be killed in the Ukrainian capital in the last 18 months alone.

Reportedly shot in the back at home, Babchenko’s murder, as Ukraine’s prime minister was quick to point out, appeared to have had all the hallmarks of another Kremlin-ordered contract killing.

The Russian government and the many media outlets it controls looked like they were on script too — circling the wagons in a familiarly defensive ring against the accusations that Moscow was responsible.

But then, to the sound of ringing phones at a hastily organized news conference in Kiev, the script was ripped up. Babchenko walked into the room, very much alive. His death was fake news.

Standing next to Ukraine’s top security officials, Babchenko explained that he had just taken part in a sting operation aimed at catching real assassins who had been sent by Moscow to kill him and others.

As the Ukrainian officials revealed the very undead journalist turned special service agent, they looked pleased. But it was, arguably, the Russian government that could not believe its luck.

In the words of “Moskovsky Komsomolec,” one of Russia’s biggest tabloids, the fake death of Babchenko was “a gift for the Kremlin.”

Since Babchenko’s stunning comeback, the Russian state-controlled media has gone into overdrive to exploit this unexpected propaganda present. After so long on the back foot, they now have the high ground. “The unfortunate reality is that the next time a real tragedy strikes, we will all pause to question whether the news reports are true.” Former U.S. Defense official, Michael Carpenter

Many outlets were also quick to make a link with the survival of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, after they were poisoned in the British town of Salisbury in March with what the U.K. government says was a Russian nerve agent.

It is a “continuation in a series of miraculous resurrections,” was how the main evening bulletin of Russia’s Channel 1 described it, adding “the so-called child victims” of the “alleged chemical attacks” in Syria to the list as well.

“Copying the British” read the headline of the government-run Rossiskaya Gazeta. “Back then in London, just like now in Ukraine, they blamed Russia for everything before the case was even closed,” the newspaper said.

“A bad parody of Skripal,” read the headline on RIA-Novosti.

The conservative pro-Kremlin Tsargrad took a slightly different tack, calling Babchenko’s staged death a “low quality Skripal.” It claimed the Western security services had helped the Ukrainians to carry out the operation, but they had failed to give it a “flare of professionalism we saw in Salisbury.”

The Ukrainian authorities are now under pressure to justify the way they handled the operation, with many asking whether lying about his death so publicly was necessary. But in some ways, that part of the story is already being obscured by concerns over the impact on public trust.

For the Russian government and its media machine, what has just happened in Ukraine is proof, as they see it, for what they have been saying all along. Moscow is the victim, not the perpetrator, in the disinformation war with the West.

“Regardless how the plot twists, the finale will be the same,” read an editorial on Vesti.ru, part of the Rossiya-24 network. “Everyone thought that Babchenko was dead and Moscow is to blame. We learn that Babchenko is alive, but it’s still the Russians who are to blame.”

The more independent business daily Vedomosti said the Babchenko affair takes the concept of “fake news” to a whole new level. “After the ‘murder’ of Babchenko it will be much harder to believe not only the media, but also official announcements.”

It ran a well reported piece describing how other governments have used fake assassinations as a tactic in the past. But the Ukrainian case was different, it argued, because of the way it had so openly manipulated the public.

And Russian state-controlled media was suddenly able to turn to voices they normally choose to ignore: media-rights organizations and Western analysts.

Many reports enthusiastically quoted the Committee to Protect Journalists, which called the operation “extreme” or Reporters Without Borders which condemned “the manipulation of the Ukrainian secret services,” adding that “it is always very dangerous for a government to play with the facts.”

The “Moskovsky Komsomolets” tabloid even ran a long quote from the former U.S. deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Carpenter who said, “Russia will exploit this fake murder to accuse Ukraine of spreading fake news and to cast doubt on future attacks on dissidents and journalists inside and outside of Russia. The unfortunate reality is that the next time a real tragedy strikes, we will all pause to question whether the news reports are true.”

That’s a trust problem the Ukrainian authorities will face sooner, if and when they present evidence of why they needed to stage the journalist’s death for their sting.

The case has created a rare moment of agreement between Russia’s few independent media outlets and state-controlled newspapers and channels. For different reasons, they see this as a game changer for the Kremlin.

Meduza, an influential independent Russian publication, quoted the concerns of one of Babchenko’s friends, reporter Pavel Kanygin.

“Of course I felt a sense of gigantic relief, as if a weight fell off me,” said Kanygin, describing how he felt when he heard he was alive. “But these are complex feelings. I don’t understand why it was necessary to do it like this.”

Could it be then, that the strange non-death of Arkady Babchenko will end up having more far-reaching consequences than if he had really been killed?

Additional reporting by Grigory Vorontsov.

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