In Damascus, as over half a century of iron-fisted dictatorship crumbled to dust, journalist Zeina Shahla described the atmosphere:

• "I have lived in Damascus through all the years of the war, and this week has been like nothing else. The first two days were really violent. Now, though, people are back at work, shops are open, somehow life is becoming normal.  The future is still ambiguous. We got rid of a dictatorship that was ruining the country. We’re waiting, though, for news about the detainees. There are  more than 100,000 disappeared persons in Syria but only a few thousand have been freed. I’m still meeting each day with people who say ‘we’re searching for our loved ones. In prisons and hospitals.’ And there are many things to worry about – the economy, education, freedom of speech, freedom for women. But we have a rare chance to build something that unites all Syrians and to ensure that the Syria we are dreaming of is going to be inclusive.” 

Dialing in from a night bus making its way to Kyiv from Damascus, Oz Katerji, a British-Lebanese war correspondent and documentary filmmaker who is based in the Ukrainian capital, told us that what happened in Syria “really did feel like a slide backwards for autocracy”:

• “The story of the last 10 years has been autocrats in the ascendancy, with the interventions of Russia and Iran. So for all this to be undone in 13 days has sent a shockwave through the international community. What I saw in Damascus was a people free and expressing themselves in public for the first time in their lives. It has struck a hammer blow at Vladimir Putin’s ‘Dictatorship Protection Service’, putting a dent in his projection of both hard and soft power not only in the Middle East but also in Africa where he has been propping up dictatorships and involving himself in civil wars.”

The fall of Bashar al-Assad, as Katerji points out, has implications far beyond Syria's borders. Not least in Tbilisi, where protests have been continuing for over two weeks against the Kremlin-friendly government’s decision to suspend EU integration. According to Batu Kutelia, a former Georgian ambassador to the United States:

• “Georgia is more than Georgia. It’s not only about a tiny nation on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. It’s part of a bigger equation and it is in the pragmatic interests of the democratic world to make democracy inspiring again and not to let authoritarians claim another success story.” 

Kutelia was echoed by the Georgian photojournalist Mariam Nikuradze, a co-founder of the English-language news platform Open Caucasus Media who just days ago discovered that she was on a police wanted list for her coverage of the nightly demonstrations:

• "I don’t see the spirit of protestors dying anytime soon. Being a journalist  in Georgia has never been so dangerous. So many of my friends have been injured. But it just makes people angrier and they are not giving up. It’s very hard to predict what will happen but it’s getting harder and harder for this government to hold onto power.” 

What happened in Syria, Nikuradze told us, “gives hope.” But, as the Ukrainian human rights lawyer and Nobel laureate  Oleksandra Matviichuk pointed out, the path ahead is long and fraught:

• "We are losing freedom. This year, half the population of the Earth had elections. But don’t be naive, 80% of the world lives in non-free or partially free societies. This means that people who have a real right to vote are in the minority. The problem is not just the fact that in authoritarian countries the space for freedom is shrinking to the size of a prison cell, the problem is that even in democracies people start to question the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Freedom is very fragile. We have to support each other in our fight for freedom because we live in an interconnected world and only the spread of freedom makes the world safer.”

Writer Peter Pomerantsev, a contributing editor at Coda, is currently in Kyiv, where he was born though he was educated in Britain and lives in Washington, DC. Picking up on Matviichuk’s remarks about interconnectedness, he argued:

• "If you listen to someone like [U.S. vice president-elect] JD Vance, he says ‘we need to get away from the foreign policy of values, that’s been a disaster. We need to just think about our self-interest and security.’ But these things aren’t necessarily opposed and they don’t need to be opposed. Ukraine’s freedom will make the West more secure. If Georgia can maintain its freedom, it is so important for counterbalancing Russia’s ability and China’s ability to dominate possession of natural resources and dominate the Black Sea therefore undermining America’s security and economy. I wonder if we’re at a point here where we can get beyond this very, very cruel but also stupid idea that you should split apart values and interests, that they’re antithetical.” 

Edward Lucas, a London-based former journalist and prospective parliamentary candidate in the 2024 British election, did, however, strike a note of caution:

• "There’s a kind of wishful magical thinking that it ought to be obvious to everybody that Georgia is at a geopolitical crossroads and therefore it’s in the vital interest of the West to intervene to keep it out of Russia’s clutches and make it the fulcrum of Euro-Atlantic security in the Caucasus. I do worry that we’re in danger of thinking that people like JD Vance will eventually see reason because reason is ultimately reasonable but they’re coming from a different place.”

The post How did 2024 reshape our world? From Damascus to Kyiv to Washington, our experts weigh in appeared first on Coda Story.

Ukrainian journalist Svitlana Oslavska documents war crimes testimonies for The Reckoning Project, which comprises a team of Ukrainian and international journalists and legal experts established in 2022 to record, collect, and conserve witness testimonies of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. She spent a day with one of the local war crimes prosecutors who investigates the Russian army’s misdeeds in the south of Ukraine. 

One woman among the bombardments

In the city of Mykolaiv in July of 2022, Viktoriia Shapovalova drove to work as usual, parked, got out of the car, and immediately realized there was complete silence all around her. It is said that you don’t hear anything when you are in the epicenter of an air strike. And that was exactly what was happening. A missile hit a building some 150 meters away from her. The houses that stood between Shapovalova and the explosion attack saved her life. Remembering the feeling she had when a shell exploded nearby, she said it is “like your soul is being turned inside out”. 

Shapovalova witnessed most of the bombardments and missile attacks on Mykolaiv, a city that, before 2022, had a population of 470,000. She was there during the hardest days the city experienced during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

In the spring of 2022, the Russian army struggled to capture Mykolaiv, a regional capital located between Odesa and Kherson. Failing to seize the city, it started attacking its residential quarters with artillery and missiles. 

There was a period when artillery shelling occurred every two or three hours. Residents who stayed in the city adapted to this routine. Shapovalova spent nights in a shelter; a basement of a nine-storey block, with her teenage daughter. But life had to go on, so after the morning shelling attacks–which usually happened around six or seven in the morning– she prepared breakfast, walked her dog, and hurried to work. She knew there would be two or three quiet hours before the next shelling and, during that time, she could work.

In the spring of 2022, at age 37, Shapovalova was appointed chief of the war crimes department at the Mykolaiv regional prosecutor’s office. Before that, as was the case with most of the Ukrainian prosecutors, her work was not connected with war issues. After her appointment, she, like thousands of her colleagues, had to re-train as a war crimes investigator, diving into the topic of international humanitarian law. As part of the war crimes prosecutors training, Shapovalova had a chance to visit the Hague and the International Criminal Court. 

During the first two years of the full-scale invasion, Russia conducted more than 2,500 civilian infrastructure attacks in the city of Mykolaiv and the surrounding region, according to The Tribunal for Putin initiative. After an attack, the prosecutors team, together with the war crimes investigators from the Ukrainian security service and the police, as well as the emergency services, all go to the site to document what happened. The attacks often take place at night, which means Shapovalova would often work without sleep for the 24 hours after an attack. She must stay at the site of an attack until the last body is taken from under the rubble. 

Shelling of residential neighborhoods and other civilian infrastructure of Mykolaiv comprises about 70% of the 2,500 war crimes Shapovalova and her team is now investigating in the region. She says her experience of living in the city during all the attacks helps in her job: “I was there, I remember a lot.” But nearly every week, she spends at least one or two full working days out of her office, in the field. 

Witnesses are both eager and afraid to talk

The east and south of the Mykolaiv region were occupied in the spring of 2022 and liberated after eight months, in November of the same year, together with the right bank of the Dnipro and the city of Kherson. Since then, Shapovalova’s team of 10 war crimes prosecutors investigates atrocities in the once-occupied towns and villages.  

On the day I joined Shapovalova and her two colleagues, they met at an agreed-upon spot at 9am and headed to the north of Mykolaiv, to a small village that was occupied during the first half of March in 2022. The plan is to collect and document as many witness statements as possible. A team of lawyers from the not-for-profit Global Rights Compliance accompanies the prosecutors on this trip. GRC is specialized in international humanitarian law, and Ukrainian prosecutors need support to deal with thousands of war crimes cases. The lawyers are present during the interviews with witnesses, they read interrogation protocols, and advise Shapovalova’s team of war crimes prosecutors where exactly violations of international humanitarian law lie and what evidence has to be collected. In Shapovalova’s words: “They help us with the quality of justice.”  

In the front seat of the car, Shapovalova makes several calls to invite colleagues to a training session about OSINT investigations. “Good morning, how are you doing?” she starts every conversation with these simple words. In the context of possible night attacks, the question and the answers become meaningful. 

The cars turn from the motorway onto a dirt road. A herd of sheep with a shepherd crosses the road. We drive slowly between empty fields. “We’re going to meet the village's head first. He and his family were abducted by the Russians.” Shapovalova explains the plan for the day, adding that such field trips are often unpredictable. 

And she is not wrong. The car suddenly stops having come upon an  impassable stretch of road. The driver must walk around to find a detour. It’s a cloudy day, several degrees above zero, and we see no other cars on this village road. Finally, the driver finds a bypass across a forest strip nearby, but before we go, he has to uproot several small trees. 

But we are fortunate. Such an off-road maneuver wouldn’t have been possible in the southeast of the region, which was under occupation for eight months and where Russians left mines all over the fields. In the first weeks after liberation, the war crimes prosecutors started visiting towns and villages. “We called the mine clearance service, asked them to clear, for instance, a police building,” Shapovalova explained. “And after that, we went there to collect evidence.” Humanitarian mine clearance teams are working every day, but still, many fields and forests are surrounded by red signs that read “Stop! Mines.”

The village head is a thin man of around 50. The skin on his face suggests he works a lot in the open air. Shapovalova starts with some informal questions about realities under the Russian occupation. She already knows that this man had been abducted by the Russians and beaten, but he did not report this incident to the police after the village was liberated. 

“What for? We’re alive, and that’s enough,” he replies to Shapovalova’s argument that this was a violation of laws and customs of war. “Are you going to investigate this?” the man goes on in a skeptical tone. “That’s why we’ve come here.” Shapovalova is patient. She understands the man needs more time to trust her. She is also aware many people don’t want to discuss publicly what happened to them because they are afraid Russia may occupy the region again. 

Thus, Shapovalova changes the topic to the situation in the village in general. Several houses were destroyed by shelling, their owners have no ownership documents on those buildings, and that’s why they have trouble getting aid to rebuild them. Shapovalova promises she will look into it and see how she can help.   

Finally she comes back to the reason for our visit. “We have to document these crimes even if you don’t believe we will investigate them,” she says.  The village head goes outside to smoke a cigarette, when he returns he agrees to give a formal interview. One of the prosecutors stays to record his testimony on video, and Shapovalova goes on to meet the next witness–a woman whose son was shot by the Russian soldiers. 

The woman starts talking almost as soon as we step over the threshold. “They came to the house, tied him up, took him away, and abused him for two days. Then they took him to a forest, tied his hands with a wire, and shot him. He survived and crawled to a nearby village.” Her words show that she shares the confidence of many Ukrainians who lived through the occupation: that the perpetrators must be identified and punished. “Of course, I’ll testify. Why not when this happened?”

The array of Russia’s war crimes

What happened to the village head and the woman’s son is not unique but  common during the Russian occupation. 

According to international humanitarian law civilians are under the protection of the occupying force. But while talking to the people from the occupied territories, Shapovalova routinely recorded incidents of abductions, arbitrary detentions, and tortures. 

In one village, a local man was killed and his wife was abducted. A bag was thrown over her face, and she was brought to a trench where soldiers harassed and taunted her, at some point even pouring liquid on the 50 year old woman saying: “We’ll burn you and we will be looking at how Ukrop's mother is burning.” Ukrop is a derogatory term for Ukrainians and the soldiers used it to refer to her son who fought in the Ukrainian army. She spent five days in detention. During the first days, interrogations took place every hour. The same questions were repeated again and again, asking her about things she had shared on her social media pages and about her son. And then, as suddenly as she was detained, she was released. No one provided any reason for her detention. 

In another village of the region, a local mayor was abducted when he was trying to deliver 300 loaves of bread to people in the village. He was tortured with electric jolts and beaten. He spent three months of unlawful detention in several detention centers. 

And in another village, the Russians murdered an elderly local school teacher. Soldiers took him from his house. The teacher's wife looked for him everywhere in the village and nearby, riding a bicycle from one building where the Russian military were stationed to another. Finally, his mutilated body was found. It lay covered with a mattress in a shallow pit near one of the buildings known to the villagers as occupiers’ headquarters.

These are just some accounts recorded by The Reckoning Project team in the Mykolaiv region. Its researchers documented hundreds of similar cases in various parts of Ukraine that were under Russian occupation. Male and female village heads, volunteers and activists, former soldiers, or anyone who owned a weapons even just for hunting were often the first victims of arbitrary detentions, torture, and murder. 

“The occupying Russian forces neglected their obligations to safeguard the Ukrainian populace. Instead, they viewed Ukrainians under occupation solely through a security lens,” says Raji Abdul Salam, The Reckoning Project’s chief legal data archivist. They categorized, he explains further, civil and humanitarian actions, such as the right to access information, freedom of movement, and adequate housing, as potential security threats. This approach of prioritizing security-based measures over humanitarian considerations deprived Ukrainians of their fundamental human rights and exacerbated the suffering caused by the conflict. 

Justice is slow, and the prosecutors must work fast

To determine who was responsible for any given bombardment isn’t easy as it’s necessary to prove who gave an order. Investigating tortures and arbitrary detentions is difficult for another reason: survivors often don’t know a lot about the identity of their abductors and torturers. 

In most of the incidents documented by the researchers of The Reckoning Project, the Russian soldiers tried to conceal who they were: they did not provide their names, wore no insignia, and covered their faces with masks. They tied blindfolds around the eyes of their captives or put bags on their heads so that people would not be able to recognise who was torturing them. 

“The soldiers deliberately obscure their identities to evade accountability for their actions, including looting, extrajudicial killings, and unlawful detentions”, says Abdul Salam, adding that in over 90% of testimonies the researchers of The Reckoning Project collected state that the Russian soldiers were hiding their identity. 

“This underscores the complicity of the Russian military leadership, as their failure to take disciplinary measures on the ground condoned and facilitated these grave breaches of international law,” Salam explained. “The consequence of this unchecked misconduct was a relentless onslaught on the Ukrainian populace, inflicting untold suffering and trauma.”

On our way back, Shapovalova reflects on the mistrust many people have on perspectives of justice and punishment for Russian war criminals: “I understand this. Justice is a long process, and the victims want it right now. But the main task for the prosecutors is to collect the highest quality evidence.”

It’s almost 6pm when we come back to her office. Shapovalova is planning to stay at work for several more hours. She says 10 minutes of rest was enough to continue with a lot of paperwork after a day in the field. 

There is a large map of Mykolaiv on the wall of her office, with a small piece of paper pinned to it. A date is printed on it, “October 13th, 2022”. On this day, Russia allegedly attacked Mykolaiv with S-300 missiles that hit a residential block. Seven people died in that attack, one of them a child. The attack happened at night, when people were in their beds. When I Google this incident, I find images of a five-storey residential building. Its destroyed upper middle part looks like it was bitten away by some monster. 

This case is already in the courts. The investigators found a man, a resident of Mykolaiv, who passed information about this civilian building with no military objects nearby to the Russians. Besides this there are several other incidents of war crimes Shapovalova’s department has now passed to the court. They are about the inhuman treatment of civilians: imitation of shooting to death, and about the organizers of a detention center in one village of the region, where people were kept for several days in horrible conditions. The trials are ongoing. 

According to Shapovalova, those incidents have enough evidence for prosecutors to charge the Russian combatants with committing war crimes. Investigations of all the crimes, Shapovalova explains, will take years. This understanding, she continues, along with the fact that tomorrow may simply not come, motivates her to accelerate her work. 

Besides that, she adds, important online evidence, like Russian channels on Telegram, are deleted since they understand those posts and videos could one day also be used as evidence. 

Most of the trials for Russian war criminals in Ukraine are now conducted in absentia. The victims may not be satisfied with this result, but the prosecutor explains that it is not only important a particular soldier would be punished. “By proving a particular crime, we prove the guilt of the main perpetrator. For proving his guilt at the Tribunal, not only our verdicts would be taken into account, but also our evidence base,” says Shapovalova.  

The day after I left Mykolaiv I read the news about another Russian attack on the city and in the region. I go to the page of the Mykolaiv regional prosecutor and see the photos of war crimes prosecutors working on the site of the attack, Shapovalova among them.

The post A Day In The Life Of A Russian War Crimes Prosecutor In Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

One of my last stories before I left Russia was an exploration of how the state had weaponized Big Tech to persecute Navalny’s followers, ordinary Russians who had registered their personal details on his website because they were fed up with the status quo. Among the dozens of people I spoke to were Liza, Dmitry, Kirill and Magda, whose compelling stories I wanted to tell.

I was reporting for Coda’s podcast series, “Undercurrents: Tech, Tyrants and Us,” which featured the experiences of individuals around the world who had been caught up in the struggle between tech, democracy and dictatorship. In Russia, Navalny used social media to build a following. Many Navalny supporters gravitated towards him on Big Tech platforms — for instance, following his investigations into Kremlin corruption on his YouTube channel. 

Inspired by Navalny, Russians took to the streets to protest and donated to his Anti-Corruption Foundation,  or FBK in Russian. They signed up to use his “smart voting” app intended to consolidate protest votes around candidates in all of Russia’s electoral districts who could take on the ruling party. But both Apple and Google, caving to pressure from the Kremlin, removed the app from stores shortly before the 2021 election. Russia had completed the transition from authoritarian state to digitally savvy dictatorship.  

The police used Navalny’s database to knock on doors, to seek out people who had registered on the “Free Navalny” website. On the podcast, I found myself breaking the news to Liza, an old friend from school, that her name was on a list, including details such as her tax ID number, home address and employment status. It explained, Liza told me, why the police had come looking for her, asking her parents questions “as if I were a terrorist.”

I reached out to Liza again, as I did to other people I interviewed for the podcast, in the days after Navalny’s death. “Navalny’s death became for me the death of all hope that the Russia I remember could be saved,” she told me. A Ukrainian-born citizen of Russia, Liza now lives in Uzbekistan. Navalny, she said, was “like a key that you hide under a stone near your old house, just in case you have a chance to go back. Now there is no key, there is no stone, and there is no house.”

The police, Liza told me, still visit her parents in Moscow. The Kremlin, she said, “is still investigating the people who donated to FBK.” Five months pregnant now, Liza has lost hope that Russia will change. She is expecting a girl; her daughter, she told me, will be a citizen of Uzbekistan, not Russia.

I also followed up with Dmitry. He was a musician who registered on Navalny’s website and then suddenly found himself out of work, no longer welcome to perform at concerts. When he was not playing music, he drove around the city rescuing stray cats. He had, I said on the podcast, a “sweet round face and blond, hipster haircut.” Dmitry is still in Moscow, still singing in a choir and still rescuing stray cats. But like Liza, he too has lost hope that change is possible. “The feeling that you get living in Russia is that people are keeping a low profile,” he said. “They just wait.” 

The people I interviewed on the podcast were among thousands, if not millions, of Russians who genuinely believed Navalny offered a democratic alternative to Putin’s increasingly Stalinist regime. That belief has been stamped out. Kirill, a train driver for the Moscow metro, told me he had registered on the “Free Navalny” website out of curiosity. At the time, he had begun to date Magda, a liberal with little patience for the Russian establishment. His curiosity cost Kirill his job. “You fucking registered on his website,” his boss shouted at him, denouncing Navalny as an enemy of the state. Kirill was sacked for being “insufficiently loyal to President Putin.” 

Now in Sochi, a town on the Black Sea about a thousand miles from Moscow, Kirill and Magda await visas that will enable them to leave Russia. “I can’t speak freely right now, I’m in a public place” Kirill told me when I called him after Navalny’s death. Magda said she “had a feeling of deja vu.” The shock of Navalny’s death echoed the shock she felt when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. Two years ago, on February 24, she told me, “I received a message from a friend: ‘Are you awake? The war started.’” On February 16 of this year, the same friend sent Magda another message: “Are you awake? Navalny was killed.” Both events strengthened Putin’s regime, representing a decisive turn away from the country that Magda still hoped Russia could be. 

For a quarter of a century, Putin has controlled Russia. This weekend, he will extend his reign, with any serious opposition either dead or imprisoned. “The future is no longer frightening,” Liza told me, “because the worst is happening in the present.”

The post In Russia, the ‘worst is happening in the present’  appeared first on Coda Story.

“Everything is now going underground,” said Alexander Belik, who works for the LGBTQ advocacy group Sphere. “It’s not clear whether this will affect all members of the LGBT community, whether your sexual orientation simply counts as membership in this ‘extremist organization.’” 

The November 30 ruling means that “the international LGBT public movement” will be added to a national list of banned groups, including the Islamic State group, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and, since October 2022, Facebook owner Meta. Supporting an extremist group can be punished by up to 10 years in jail, but it’s unclear how the ruling might be enforced, since the LGBTQ movement isn’t a formal, recognized group. Belik, who uses they/them pronouns, believes that the ambiguity of the law, and its absurdity, is the end goal.

“The point here is to create total uncertainty in the LGBT community and to intimidate everyone,” they said. “It will definitely be used against activists, people who publicly say they defend the rights of the LGBT community. But, it could just as likely be used against any LGBT person living in Russia or their allies.”

When first filing the case to court earlier last month, the Ministry of Justice said that the international movement exhibited “various signs and manifestations of an extremist orientation, including incitement of social and religious hatred.”

Under President Vladimir Putin, the Russian government has increasingly targeted LGBTQ communities for political ends. In 2012, the government stoked a moral panic to try to shift attention away from corruption scandals that had driven a wave of huge protests. When the protest group Pussy Riot staged its infamous Punk Prayer protest in a Moscow cathedral, the government was able to capitalize on a backlash from middle-class Russians and portray itself as a defender of religious and traditional values. The following year, the Russian Duma passed a law outlawing the promotion of “gay propaganda” to minors.

Lawmakers have focused on framing anti-LGBTQ measures as a way to protect the country against a “Western export” that poses a major threat to Russia’s falling birth rate. Since 2014, discussion of Russia’s war and occupation of Ukraine has often been intertwined with the anti-LGBTQ campaign. On state television, broadcasters have railed against the threat of “Gayropa” encroaching on the Russian world as Ukraine pushes for European integration. After the full-scale invasion began last year, the Russian government imposed a series of increasingly severe anti-LGBTQ measures. This summer, Russia banned all gender-affirming care for transgender people and in November 2022 prohibited any activities discussing or promoting LGBTQ relationships.

Last September, Putin carved out time from the televised ceremony where he annexed four Ukrainian territories to speak out against transgenderism and gay parenting. "Do we really want, here, in our country, in Russia, instead of 'mom' and 'dad', to have 'parent No. 1', 'parent No. 2', 'No. 3'? Have they gone completely insane?” Putin said. “We have a different future, our own future."

That future has found favor abroad in countries such as India, Uganda and Turkey, where prominent anti-LGBTQ figures have been invited to speak at “family values” protests. Russia’s gay propaganda law has inspired lawmakers in Poland, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania and elsewhere to propose similar measures.

At Coda, we’ve tracked the weaponization of homophobia in Russia since our publication launched with a pilot reporting project on LGBTQ disinformation campaigns across Eastern Europe. Here is a rundown of how we’ve been tracking this story:

1. The LGBTQ rights debate is testing Ukraine’s commitment to Europe. Since the 2014 Maidan revolution, Ukraine has taken steps towards recognizing and protecting its LGBTQ population. Especially with the growing visibility of LGBTQ soldiers, legislative protections for LGBTQ people in Ukraine are now being cast as a cultural rebuke of Putin’s — and by extension, Russia’s — worldview. 

2. Russia’s new scapegoats. With the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal, we trace the roots of the anti-gay movement and shows how President Vladimir Putin uses this agenda to quash political dissent, exert influence on neighboring nations and bash the West.

3. On the run in LA from Russia’s anti-LGBTQ campaign. While Russian authorities only charged a handful of people with the controversial LGBTQ propaganda law, the legislation proved to be a powerful censorship tool for removing online discussion of LGBTQ issues from Google and other platforms

4. Russian investigators single out gay fathers in latest crackdown on LGBTQ rights. Our reporter looks at how child trafficking laws have been weaponized to jail gay men who fathered children with surrogate mothers.

The post In Russia, the anti-LGBTQ campaign marches on appeared first on Coda Story.

It’s the kind of direct political interference in education not seen in Russia since it was part of the Soviet Union. For nearly 30 years, teachers have been able to choose from a selection of approved textbooks to use in their classrooms. This year, Russian authorities have issued a single Russian history textbook nationwide for the 11th grade, and they plan to do the same across lower grades next year.

The revised textbook emphasizes continuity between the fight against Nazism in World War II and Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. The textbook quotes Vladimir Putin speaking about the “revival of Nazism” in Ukraine, and arguing that the country should not exist.

With an estimated number of Russian casualties exceeding 50,000, the Kremlin has continued to characterize the ongoing war as existential for Russia. The high school lesson plans — authored by Kremlin insiders — provide a window into the Kremlin’s thinking on the war and suggest that the Kremlin believes its own propaganda.

“On one hand history is being used as propaganda,” said Alexey Makarov, a member of the human rights organization Memorial in Moscow. “On the other, the people using history as propaganda — the Russian authorities — actually believe in what they’re saying.”

The newest chapters for students in the 11th grade, which is the final year of high school in Russia, include a section dedicated to the “special operation” in Ukraine. Ukraine is referred to as a “ultranationalist state,” the U.S. is said to be “prepared to fight until the last Ukrainian standing,” and a positive spin is put on global sanctions against Russia, calling them an “opportunity” for investment. The book’s front cover is dominated by a full-page photo of the bridge built by Russia in 2018 connecting annexed Crimea to mainland Russia.

“Ukraine, history, politics — they are inseparable,” said Jade McGlynn, the author of “Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Russia.” “It’s a memory war becoming a real war.”

The lead author of the textbooks is Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister who has represented Moscow in negotiations with Kyiv. Over the years, Medinsky has held various roles in government and served as a close aide to Putin, advising on history and the humanities. His career started in advertising, said McGlynn. During the 1990s, he co-founded a Moscow advertising firm best known for creating ads for MMM, a Russian company that ran one of the world’s largest-ever Ponzi schemes.

“That’s where he honed his skills in terms of selling narratives to people, playing on their hopes, their needs and sometimes their desperation,” said McGlynn. “He is ultimately an advertiser who aims to manipulate people.”

In the days following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, authorities already began distributing pamphlets to high school teachers across the country with instructions on how to talk about the invasion of Ukraine with students. The pamphlets followed a question-and-answer format:

Q: Why is the war happening?

A: NATO enlargement and its approach to Russia’s borders is a threat to all of us. There are the sad cases of Iraq, Libya and Syria. What’s more, Ukraine could create nuclear weapons. Considering the current regime in that country, it’s a direct threat to Russia.

Alexey Makarov, from Memorial, is a social studies teacher in Moscow and said he was devastated to read through the pages of the new textbook, soon to be taught at his high school.

“This is the same rhetoric that was used in the 1930s ahead of the invasion of Poland, exactly the same,” said Makarov, drawing a comparison between the textbook’s justification for Russian forces occupying Ukraine and the Soviet Union’s stated rationale for invading Poland at the start of World War II.

There has been a progression in the government’s campaign to rewrite history, starting with the reframing of Russian imperial expansion and the rehabilitation of figures like Ivan the Terrible. While history has long been an important focus for Putin, patriotic education became a top government priority in 2012, which the government declared to be the “year of history.”

“We know how the distortion of national, historical and moral consciousness leads to catastrophe for entire governments. It weakens them, leading to collapse, to the loss of sovereignty and fratricidal war,” Putin said in a meeting in 2012 on the importance of patriotic education in Russian schools.

In the lead up to the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin tightened its grip on institutions involved in documenting the country’s past. As Russian troops marched on Kyiv, the Russian Supreme Court struck down an appeal from Memorial to stay open. For three decades the nonprofit, a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been documenting crimes committed under Soviet rule.

Russia is far from the only country where the government has intervened to revise high school history textbooks. The Arab Spring has been distorted in Egyptian textbooks, Indian officials have excised mentions of the 2002 Gujarat riots from national textbooks, and new curriculum standards in Hungary assign the writing of a war criminal and Nazi sympathizer to students. Most recently, officials in the U.S. state of Florida approved classroom material that instructs students that “climate activists are like Nazis.”

The new Russian history textbooks will most likely cross the border into occupied Ukrainian territory. Last August, reports surfaced of Ukrainian teachers being pressured to switch over to a Russia-approved curriculum. Scores of teachers fled, some went into hiding, and others were sent to Crimea or Russia to “re-train” under new teaching standards. In occupied cities like Melitopol, Russian authorities ceremoniously delivered tens of thousands of Russian textbooks. Parents who tried to keep their children at home were threatened with having their kids taken away.

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This is what the Kremlin wants Russians to think happened when the battle-hardened mercenaries of the Wagner Group swept through Russia, unopposed, for over 600 miles before its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin called off the march to Moscow. 

As Wagner’s supposed coup attempt unfolded, Prigozhin became the undisputed star of the global news cycle. A former Kremlin caterer, Prigozhin, once an elusive figure, gained world renown following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As Wagner soldiers took on an increasingly prominent role on the frontlines, Prigozhin’s acerbic, angry rants about the incompetence of generals and legislators arguably represented the only sustained evidence that Russians were unhappy with how the war was going.  Given Prigozhin’s adept use of Telegram, it made sense that he would seize the initiative through his now infamous Telegram voice notes, effectively offering listeners a blow-by-blow account of his troops’ journey to Moscow.

But now that the uprising has seemingly fizzled out — with Prigozhin apparently having negotiated safe passage to Belarus — the Kremlin is scrambling to gain control of the narrative. According to Maria Borzunova, an independent Russian journalist who hosts a show debunking Russian state propaganda, Kremlin pundits on state TV have, so far, parroted four key narratives to explain the coup. 

First, the propagandists argued that the Russian military strike on the Wagner camp — which Prigozhin says precipitated his ill-fated march on Moscow — was staged. They also suggested that no one in Rostov-on-Don, the city Wagner briefly occupied, supported the mercenaries. This claim relies on a few shaky videos of Rostov residents confronting Wagner fighters. It also completely ignores widely circulated evidence of crowds in Rostov cheering Prigozhin’s private army. 

During the rebellion, and in the days since, state propaganda channels have also continued to remind viewers that Prigozhin’s actions played into the hands of Russia’s enemies, in particular Ukraine. But it is in the way pro-government talking heads describe the bewildering resolution to the standoff that is most instructive. 

According to the Kremlin’s version of events, the Russian people rallied behind Putin, displaying unity and resolve and undermining the enemy’s — likely foreign-funded — plot to bring Russia to her knees. “Their argument is that the civil war did not succeed because everyone rallied around the president,” said Borzunova. “However, this is not entirely true.” In fact, during the Wagner advance, a number of government officials recorded identical videos with the same text: “We support the president in this difficult situation.” Instructions for what they should write on social media were circulated to officials, Borzunova explained, and even then, some failed to publish the template text. 

On June 27, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an unannounced speech, his third in four days. Having already addressed the nation, he separately addressed the soldiers, who, he said, “have protected the constitutional order, the lives, security and freedom of our citizens, kept our homeland from descending into turmoil and stopped a civil war.” He handed out some medals and held a moment of silence for the pilots who were killed by Wagner mercenaries. 

No state channels carried this particular speech live, but Russian state media received a written set of guidelines for reporting on it. Independent media outlet Meduza managed to obtain these instructions. 

The document prompts reporters to refer to Wagner mercenaries as “rebels,” “traitors” and “false patriots,” whose actions could have plunged the country into chaos. It dubs the security forces “the real defenders of Russia” who worked to bring about a peaceful resolution. Putin, the guidelines remind journalists, is considered to be a “real leader” who prevented a “negative scenario of turmoil.” The explanation for Wagner’s sudden retreat is simple: The traitors realized that the Russian army “was not with them” and agreed to solve the conflict “without shedding blood.” 

The word “Prigozhin” is notably absent from the guidelines. Putin, too, has meticulously avoided mentioning Prigozhin in all his recent speeches — a tactic reminiscent of his well-documented refusal to utter the name of jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

Russian state propagandists have largely mimicked this rhetoric. “When virtually no one in society and in the government supported the rebellion, it became clear that the march on Moscow was meaningless,” said state TV presenter Dmitriy Kiselyov two days after the uprising. “Russia has once again passed the test of maturity, and the stronghold of unity has remained unshaken.” Russia’s commissioner for human rights, Tatyana Moskalkova, dubbed the uprising a lesson that “has once again demonstrated that Russia is undefeatable when it is united.” 

As for Prigozhin, he has been branded a traitor, a label he is unlikely to ever shake. This was a complicated narrative shift for many Kremlin pundits to execute, Borzunova told me. Prigozhin had been loyal to Putin, and many in the government and state media shared the grievances he levied at the defense ministry before the uprising. 

Still, the propagandists, though shaken, have quickly fallen in line. The rebellion has been quashed, the brave Russian soldiers commended and the coup leader mercifully exiled. Of course, the picture of unity that the Kremlin propaganda is working hard to paint is a fantasy. “The fabric of the state is disintegrating,” wrote Andrei Koleniskov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. Prigozhin’s actions were “an antecedent of civil unrest unfolding in real time.” 

And while speculation about the longevity of Putin’s regime continues around the world, the Kremlin propaganda machine keeps spinning its wheels, trying to narrate its way out of a crisis. The media guidelines that accompanied Putin’s recent speech emphasized the narrative that “the huge media machine of the rebels” attempted to destabilize the situation in the country. Evidently, it will take an equally powerful blitz of state propaganda to put Russia back on track. 

“Propaganda is doing everything to say that Wagner fighters are patriots, they were used,” said Borzunova. “Prigozhin is the main villain. Whether this works or not, we’ll see.”

The campaign to villainize Prigozhin is far from over. On June 28, Putin acknowledged, for the first time ever, that the Wagner Group had been financed out of Russia’s state budget for the past year, to the tune of $2 billion. “I do hope that, as part of this work, no one stole anything,” Putin said, in a clear signal that Prigozhin — still reeling from last week’s “armed mutiny” criminal charges, which were dropped — might be charged with financial crimes next. In fact, independent Russian journalist Dmitry Kolezev reported on June 29 that the Kremlin has now decided to focus its information campaign on the “commercial” character of Prigozhin’s rebellion. “Allegedly, there was no political dimension to the rebellion at all,” Kolezev wrote. “It was all for money.”

If the Kremlin succeeds at convincing Russians that Prigozhin’s actions were a money-grabbing ploy, then the rebellion that, only days ago, seemed existential for the regime might actually strengthen Putin’s hand. 

When every viable alternative to Putin — from the pro-Western, liberally-minded Navalny, formally jailed for fraud, to the Kremlin loyalist who took Bakhmut — is only after the nation’s coffers, there really is no alternative. Or so the Kremlin would have Russians believe. 

CORRECTION [06/30/2023 11:19 AM EDT]: The original version of this story said that Maria Borzunova hosts "Fake News." Borzunova is the former host of "Fake News" and currently hosts her own show debunking Russian propaganda.

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Disinformation in the Czech Republic has boosted vaccine skepticism and whittled away at public support for the government’s pro-Ukraine policies. Although the country has been targeted by Chinese and Russian disinformation, much of the information pollution that seeps into peoples’ homes is generated by around 39 Czech websites. The people behind these platforms seek a mix of advertising profits and societal influence, undermining legitimate news outlets and eroding trust between the electorate and the government in the process. 

Despite having a vibrant news landscape with audiences engaging with TV and print journalism, significant numbers of Czechs have been swayed by pro-Russian narratives. It’s a situation connected to both the history of the country, which was under communist rule until 1989, and to the success of disinformation campaigns targeting societal fears. The war in Ukraine and the uncertainty it has created across the region have exacerbated the spread of false narratives.

The situation has become so bad that countering disinformation and strengthening public media became important campaign promises for Prime Minister Petr Fiala in the 2021 election, but have resulted in largely failed policies.  

Disinformation experts point to several reasons for this outcome. Fiala leads a five-party coalition government, which can find little consensus on how best to counter disinformation. Moves to tackle false narratives have also been met with concerns about censorship and free speech, even from within Fiala’s own party, the Civic Democratic Party. When the government asked Czech internet services to block eight websites known to push out pro-Russia narratives following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it energized Fiala’s opponents who believed the move signaled an authoritarian bent.

More urgent issues, such as energy prices, have diverted government attention from efforts to counter disinformation. And a lack of consistent action by social media companies, which play a pivotal role in the spread of disinformation in the Czech Republic, has fueled apathy. In late March, the government of the Czech Republic, along with allies from across Central and Eastern Europe, sent a letter to tech firms urging them to do more to counter disinformation by rejecting revenue from sanctioned individuals and boosting accurate information through its algorithms. 

“Until the end of this winter, the Czech government was running in crisis mode” because of the neighboring war in Ukraine, said Jonas Syrovatka, a researcher at Masaryk University in the south of the Czech Republic. He added that there has been a “lack of political courage” to make substantive policy changes. 

The effects of disinformation on Czech society are hard to miss. Not only has information pollution affected vaccine uptake, it has also drawn people onto the streets in anti-government demonstrations. Spurred on by narratives that Fiala’s government is putting support for Ukraine ahead of the welfare of Czech citizens, over 70,000 people turned out to protest in September 2022. Scattered among the crowd were individuals who subscribed to pro-Russian narratives and called for an end to sanctions against Russia. Veronika Kratka Spalkov, a disinformation specialist at the European Values Centre for Security Policy, told me the demonstrations aimed to “create a gap between Czech citizens and Ukrainian refugees” in particular.

A promising step by the Czech government in the battle against disinformation came in March 2022 with the creation of a position of media and disinformation commissioner. But from the outset, there was confusion about the role, which combined two portfolios — strategic communication and disinformation. Soon after becoming the first commissioner, Michal Klima led a small team that drafted an action plan to increase the effectiveness of proposed laws that would shut down government-identified disinformation websites when there was an immediate threat to national security. The plan also proposed increasing financial support for anti-disinformation nonprofits working in media education and cutting off the advertising that the government spends on websites that engage in disinformation.

The path to government advertising on disinformation is a complicated one: State-owned companies, such as the Czech post office, would buy so-called “programmatic advertising” packages from organizations such as Google while not knowing where the ads will appear. In the Czech Republic, disinformation sites can have a high volume of traffic Spalkov told me.

Shortly after Klima’s action plan was circulated, it was denounced by disinformation hawks and perceived by a distrustful electorate as a government attempt to censor the media and curtail free speech. Almost as soon as Klima was hired, the media and disinformation commissioner role was scrapped by the government and the disinformation portfolio was moved to the jurisdiction of the government's national security advisor. 

Disinformation in the Czech Republic is complex and dynamic, according to Syrovatka, the researcher from Masaryk University. It usually originates on free-access websites whose anatomy is wholly composed of false information. It is then amplified across social media. Telegram has also become an important platform for disinformation circulation.

The Czech Republic is also host to a novel mechanism for the spread of disinformation: email chains. With around one-third of the Czech population receiving these threads straight into their inbox, they have been effective in creating hysteria around key issues such as vaccines and migration. This method of communication has become popular among older people and allowed Czech disinformation to bypass mainstream media and successfully appeal to a receptive audience. “We have a chain email problem, and I think we are the only country in the world with this problem,” Veronika Spalkova of the European Values Centre for Security Policy, told me. “These emails target peoples’ emotions, and they play a role in important events in this country.” 

It’s not just email chains, text messages laden with disinformation have been successful in fueling hysteria. In early January, people in the Czech Republic began to receive messages that claimed to be from Petr Pavel, the presidential candidate. The content falsely said that they were being mobilized to fight in Ukraine, and it set off enough panic to warrant a response from the police.

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“We’re a Russian-speaking media,” Rakovitsa told me as we settled in at the lobby bar of the InterContinental hotel in central Kyiv, now a hub for foreign journalists reporting on the war as the world looks on. Born and raised in Mariupol, Rakovitsa is also in the business of storytelling, but her audience is closer to the action than most.

The Institute’s online newsroom, News of Donbas, is aimed at people in Ukraine’s Russia-occupied territories.

“In order to reach our audience, we don’t use hate speech,” Rakovitsa told me. “We use the principles of conflict-sensitive journalism, and we don’t label people as orcs and Rashists,” she said, referring to the slang epithets that many Ukrainian media now use to describe Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

As the war grinds on into its second year, Ukraine’s news organizations have worked hard to showcase the brutality of Russian military forces and to keep the war on the international agenda. In the reporting of smaller media based in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainians who have Russian sympathies or are apathetic about living under Moscow’s hand are still somewhat present. But they have all but disappeared from coverage by outlets that are considered mainstream.

Rakovitsa’s organization is working to show how people in eastern Ukraine are experiencing the war and to counter the relentless tide of pro-Russian disinformation. They do this by reporting straight facts in a style that is bone dry, in both Russian and Ukrainian.

Among Ukrainian media, their approach stands out. And it is exactly what some people are looking for. Since the invasion, News of Donbas and its sister YouTube channel have seen their audience numbers skyrocket. People living under occupation have engaged with the newsroom’s mix of news updates and short features. And Russians hungry for facts have driven traffic to the YouTube channel in particular. More than 70% of the channel’s 169,000 subscribers are logging on from Russia, although some portion of this figure is likely Ukrainians who were forcibly moved to Russia over the course of 2022.

In the past, the organization’s divergence from the norm has led to criticism or doubt from other media outlets. Before the war, much was made of News of Donbas’ decision to publish photographs of Denis Pushilin, the Russia-backed leader of the unrecognized Donetsk People's Republic. The site also ran a photo of the region’s unofficial flag, a move that some saw as legitimizing Pushilin’s initiative. But since the war began in 2022 Ukraine’s journalists have united around a common enemy.

“The journalists in this country started a marathon of coverage over a year ago,” Rakovitsa told me between swigs of her non-alcoholic beer. “24/7 we’re covering this story and in so many ways it has brought us together. At times, yes, there are people who still criticize us, but I understand that they are also suffering from this war.” Ukrainian journalists, she said, are living with “nerves with no skin,” covering a war that is challenging their very existence as a people.

The Institute first launched in 2009, with a goal of shining light on corruption and life in Donetsk. In 2014, the work expanded to a YouTube channel, which focused on the Maidan revolution and human rights violations that proliferated as fighting erupted between Russian proxies and the Ukrainian government. With the majority of its reporters from eastern Ukraine, the newsroom became adept at obtaining and explaining information about what was happening inside occupied territories.

Now funded by major Western donors like the Council of Europe and USAID, the non-profit has developed various arms, including a think tank, the annual Donbas Media Forum and Crimea Today, a separate news outlet that focuses on communities in the annexed peninsula. “Our audience there watches us, trusts us, knows we are pro-Ukrainian media,” said Rakovitsa. “We don’t say they are fools and blame them for Russia’s actions,” she said.

This, too, sets them apart from the norm. Further west, many believe that a lack of local resistance to Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea helped set the stage for the 2022 invasion. 

Rakovitsa sees her organization’s work as integral to Ukraine’s future and thinks that discussions about what to do after the war need to start now, even as the battles rage on. People liberated from the occupied territories will have to be weaned off a robust diet of Russian propaganda, she told me.

Indeed, the Ukrainian information sphere has become highly charged, with people quick to judge one another and seemingly eager at times to define who has betrayed Ukraine and who has not. In the occupied territories, people are also experiencing wartime fervor, but for many, it is mediated instead by Russian propaganda. Rakovitsa expects that whenever the war ends, those who have only been fed the Russian side of the story will have a deeply distorted view of what has happened. She worries that this clash of narratives could result in a whole new round of conflict. 

“We need to ensure that there is no second war after the first one,” she said to me, a few times over.

In February 2022, the organization’s offices moved west following the invasion. In total, 50 staff members work under Rakovitsa. Most are now working remotely, due to the constant threat of shelling. And new obstacles arise each day. But the sense of mission is palpable and sustaining. 

“The people we are reporting to, they are our people,” Rakovitsa said to me, as we walked out of the hotel doors and onto the street. “We’re fighting for them.”

CORRECTION [04/28/2023 10:20 AM EDT]: The original version of this story said that the offices of the Donetsk Institute of Information moved west amid the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The editorial offices moved west in February 2022.

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The Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church have worked in lockstep to promote a conservative idea of “family values.” Russia has taken upon itself the role of principal opposition to the supposed excesses of Western progressives. Its soft power strategy, particularly evident since the start of its war in Ukraine, is to persuade much of the world that it is defending “traditional values” on the frontlines of the global culture wars. 

Kristina Stoeckl, a sociology professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, has spent years embedding herself in the transnational Christian conservative movement. It’s an alliance that spans borders and religions and is dedicated to protecting conservative values, a worldview that leads it to lobby and agitate against policies that protect women, the right to abortion and LGBTQ rights, among others. 

Co-authored with Dmitry Uzlaner, Stoeckl’s new open-access book, “The Moralist International,” examines how the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church have built up international alliances and support for its version of Christian social conservatism, in part by emulating the strategies of international human rights organizations.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you explain what the moralist international movement is?

It’s a movement of transnational moral conservatives, often religious, that try to work against liberal institutions and international human rights movements, which they see as too heavily driven by progressive liberal goals. These moral conservative alliances are often rooted in different religious traditions, but you also now get right-wing actors that are hooking onto the movement. Like Italy’s Lega Nord, or Hungary’s Fidesz for example. 

In the book, you talk about the World Congress of Families, a United States-based coalition that promotes conservative Christian values around the world and historically has strong ties with Russia. Tell me a bit about embedding yourself in this movement. 

I'm a sociologist and I do empirical research and fieldwork, and being inside that conservative milieu for a long time — it's tiring. It's also challenging. What I’m trying to do is to reconstruct their meaning. I want to understand why they think what they think, why they say what they say, and not just dismiss things at face value as illogical lies or propaganda. 

Because for them, it makes sense. And as scholars, we should understand how they construct their world and their meaning. So that’s the spirit in which I approach that world. Now that we’ve published our book, I’m not sure if it will be possible to go back.

I attended World Congress of Families events in Tbilisi, Chisinau and Budapest. My sense from the research was that a lot of people come to this milieu or begin attending something like the Congress of Families because of a very specific set of grievances. Maybe, for example, someone is worried about abortion and just thinks it's wrong or it shouldn't happen. Interestingly, I came across other people, like environmentalists who just think the world is heading in the wrong direction. 

And what this moralist movement does is couch their grievance in a bigger story. 

So what is that bigger story? 

The international moralist worldview tells the whole story of the 20th century in a new way. It reframes ideas around the society we live in and the political divisions we face. It tells people that capitalism and communism have both been equally bad for family values because in both systems, women have to work. 

It talks about how rights pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity are useful to the capitalist system because confusing our identities means we can more easily be controlled as consumers. One layer of this worldview after another is introduced. And then a proposal for a new order of things is proclaimed. 

So for that person who is against abortion — maybe they’re not against gay marriage at first. But then this story is told to them, that gay marriage and abortion are both part of a bigger design that’s bad for families. And it becomes one big narrative all packaged up. And that’s threatening for democracies because it prevents solutions. 

What kind of solutions does a worldview like that prevent?

Take domestic violence for example. Domestic violence is a real problem, both in Russia and in many other countries. But it can’t be discussed properly in this movement. Because if you start talking about women’s rights, you also talk about gender, and then you talk about homosexuality, and then it all goes down a slippery slope. Real solutions to real problems are blocked by ideology.

In the book, you describe Russia as a “norm entrepreneur” for international moral conservatism. Can you describe what that means?

For a while, Russia wanted to become a leading actor in that moralist international world. And it did quite well at first. So in places like the U.N., Russia was very effective in pushing certain resolutions. For instance, the resolution in the United Nations Human Rights Council that says that a better understanding of traditional values can contribute to the protection of human rights. That’s clearly an agenda to say, ‘Well, the West should stop pushing a certain definition of human rights, and other definitions are also legitimate.’ At one point, the Russian Orthodox Church started to become very attractive to conservative Christians outside of Russia. Especially for those who believe that laws against hate speech are threatening conservative Christians. Russia became a kind of hero when it passed its so-called gay propaganda laws. And so, Russia began to push for this conservative agenda abroad, by financing NGOs, and I think that for a while, transnational moral conservative alliances were thriving because Russia was leading the way.  

What’s been the response from this movement since the war?

So the Christian groups that used to engage directly with Russia — for example, the American Homeschool Legal Defense Association and [conservative activists] CitizenGO — I get the sense they’re trying to hide or obfuscate their relationship with Russia. But I don’t think they have changed their views.

What has been Russia’s goal in establishing and funding these transnational conservative alliances?

One goal is basically to disturb what they perceive as a Western-dominated liberal world order, made up of the United Nations, the international human rights regime and so on. They do that by sponsoring and funding NGOs in the West that criticize these institutions and say, ‘We don’t agree with the direction our society is taking.’ 

From the Kremlin’s side, I think the second goal — which hasn’t really worked out — has been to build more stable alliances. Perhaps, when they invaded Ukraine, they thought that sanctions wouldn’t happen and protests against the war wouldn’t happen because of the alliances they had built around traditional values. That has not really worked, but Hungary is an example of how the moralist alliance can effectively lead to the blocking of EU sanctions.

Now with the war in Ukraine, it’s all become a lot more difficult for Russia. But things might easily have gone another way. Think about Italy. The response to the invasion might have been different if, instead of the Brothers of Italy, Salvini or Berlusconi, who are much more pro-Putin, had won. Or if Marine le Pen had won in France. So for Russia, it was about weaving political alliances from the beginning. 

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Then the new year came, bringing with it Heger’s determination to cobble together a new parliamentary majority to see out his party’s four-year term. However, after going cap in hand to all possible partners, Heger conceded defeat on January 17 and said he would begin discussions about early elections this fall.

For Robert Fico, the former prime minister and one of Slovakia’s leading populists, a return to the ballot box couldn’t wait. Fico, who resigned from office in 2018 following the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, has said multiculturalism “is a fiction” and called for Slovakia to cease all aid to Ukraine. Now buoyed by growing support in the polls, Fico’s Smer party initiated a referendum on January 22 that would have cleared the way for early elections by amending the country’s constitution. Despite these efforts the plebiscite failed to meet the 50% turnout needed to validate the results.

Now Slovakia, a small country roughly the size of West Virginia, is holding its breath. With elections likely to be held on September 30, 2023, the race for power is expected to be rife with disinformation and old-fashioned scare tactics. The shadow of populism also looms. Fico’s Smer party is second in the polls to HLAS–SD, a social democratic party founded in 2020 by former members of Smer.

There is also a lot at stake. Slovakia is facing a cost-of-living crisis and its health care is in disrepair. The country is also on the frontline of Russian disinformation in Europe and its 5.4 million residents share a border with Ukraine. To better understand the mood in Slovakia and why the country might take another populist turn, I spoke to Juliana Sokolova, a Slovak philosopher and writer based in the eastern city of Kosice. Her key message: Slovakia’s descent is not guaranteed. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There has been a lot of political turmoil in Slovakia recently, but what is the general mood in the country?

At the moment, the political situation and the general atmosphere influence each other. To me, it feels like an intermediary period because we’re waiting for what’s going to happen. Of course, we know that there are people ready to vote because they are swayed by populist narratives but that is not something which surrounds me daily. There are also people who resist these narratives and have other views, so I wouldn’t say it’s completely bleak. It’s truly difficult to generalize at the moment because the situation is different depending on where you work or where you live.

If you look at the polls in Slovakia, there is support for populist narratives. Why is that the case?

Populism anywhere is successful because populists test issues and use ones that will resonate with people by arousing strong emotions, so it doesn’t arise randomly. It’s calculated and it’s the same in Slovakia. Of course, the issues are country-specific, but the mechanisms are the same. When I was growing up, the main nationalist and populist issue was around Slovak-Hungarian relations, they tried to create this idea of Slovak nationality away from the Hungarian minority and their language. Today, this topic no longer resonates, so they turned to the language of suspicion in relation to the LGBT community. They use the words “ideology,” or “agenda,” or “platform,” to create the idea that there is a scheme which is a threat to people.

The LGBT topic is one that has been pushed and massaged in Slovakia. It’s also a narrative across Russian disinformation media. It’s a mix of these factors, along with algorithmic targeting through the creation of sensationalist headlines, that have made the issue what it is. If you look back, 10 to 15 years ago people in Slovakia weren't saying LGBT was their main issue. It’s to an extent a created feeling.

Slovakia’s southern neighbor, Hungary, has become isolated on the world stage due to its position on Ukraine. Its Prime Minister Viktor Orban is also looking for friends. Could early Slovak elections help in this regard?

I do think Orban is waiting to see what is going to happen with Putin’s imperialist project and how it will impact the future of his own [illiberal] project. Fico dreams of being an Orban, that was always his ambition, but he wasn’t able to entrench himself in the same way Orban did in Hungary. Slovaks were also able to check Fico more than Hungarians were able to check Orban. But, yes, Fico is the same cut of populist with the same ambition. 

That said, Fico’s return to frontline politics is not a done thing. What is more likely in early elections is that the party that separated from Fico, HLAS, will make it. Now, that party is full of former Smer people who have tried to situate themselves on a more traditional spectrum, but we must remain suspicious of them. They have the ability to bend their views depending on possible power-sharing agreements. 

Slovakia is subject to a lot of Russian disinformation. Does this highly charged language and information pollution affect your work?

As a writer, you are very sensitive to the context in which you write, and even though it’s not always a conscious dialogue, it can affect your work. When the language of politics is stale and removed from life, you can feel the need to balance it out by using words that are fresh and strong. It’s also very useful to think about how we can describe the life we are living with different words. We often use clichéd or standardized sentences that block our thinking. A good example of this is the word “bubble,” as in social bubble. It has such a fixed meaning. So, we need other sentence structures and words that open new ways of speaking, and then maybe thinking. 

It’s also socially important to try and see how very manipulative and highly charged language can be neutralized or converted into something else. When it comes to Russian disinformation in Slovakia we have a big problem with the quality of education. I think our education system is not strong on fostering critical analysis of the media. This is very important. 

Given everything happening in Slovakia, a war next door, a contentious election coming up, disinformation swirling around, how do you see the country going forward?

It’s difficult because I’m not feeling gloomy, I cannot explain why. Of course, when you name all these things, our situation might not look great. But I do think that Slovak society is varied enough, that there are deeply entrenched progressive and educated groups and individuals operating throughout the country that can sustain us. The main thing for me is seeing what I can do to ensure that parties that employ controversial rhetoric have the least influence in the future government, that is a key priority. But I don’t have a sense that this country is heading to a dark place. 

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In fact, this year’s renewal of Russia’s war in Ukraine emerged from pre-existing twisted narratives. Espousing an alternative reality, Russian President Vladimir Putin has grounded his “special military operation” in false claims that Kyiv was orchestrating a genocide against Russian speakers in the country. He has unfurled a web of lies about the Ukrainian government having Nazi sympathies. Putin’s venomous dislike of the truth has now resulted in thousands of deaths in Ukraine and millions of people displaced.

Since late February, the disinformation frontlines in this war have evolved. At first the disinformation from Moscow was pushed out by state-backed media outlets and a worldwide web of influencers and allies. But as sanctions limited the reach of Russian state broadcasters, and social media platforms attempted to curtail information pollution about the war, the Kremlin’s disinformation machine worked to influence the Russian diaspora and shore up support from vulnerable domestic media globally. 

As the conflict dragged on, some organizations have profited from the ad revenue accrued from Russian lies. An investigation by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Yandex, the Russian version of Google and a Nasdaq-listed organization, helped “sites pushing false Russian claims make thousands of dollars a day through on-site adverts.” 

As the war shows little sign of slowing down, and with 2023 on the horizon, here are some of the key disinformation moments from the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Russia thought it could take Ukraine within a week. As tanks rolled across the border from Belarus and residents in Mariupol witnessed the brutal destruction of their city, a Belarusian-linked hacking group called Ghostwriter began to target the accounts of Ukrainian military and public figures. Like the tank assault on Kyiv, their campaign failed, and when it became clear to the Kremlin that the Ukrainians could successfully defend their country, the tone of the disinformation changed. The new messaging attempted to gaslight the world. Speaking on March 3 at a security council meeting in Moscow, Putin said that the “special military operation is going strictly according to schedule.” Since then, the same refrain has been used in spite of crushing Russian defeats both in the war and in the court of public opinion. But, as laid out by the Canadian government, “Russia wouldn’t need to mobilize another 300,000 citizens if its illegal war of aggression in Ukraine was going as planned.”

One of Moscow’s most incendiary lines of disinformation came early on in the war when the country’s Foreign Ministry claimed that special forces had found documents showing “evidence” of U.S.-financed military biological experiments in Ukraine. Playing off fears that the conflict would see casualties from the use of biological or chemical weapons, this disinformation flew around the world. It got the backing of Chinese officials, who had previously tried to distance themselves from the war. “This Russian military operation has uncovered the secret of the U.S. labs in Ukraine, and this is not something that can be dealt with in a perfunctory manner,” a Chinese spokesperson said at the time. In the United States, where the government was scolding Russia for its information war, QAnon conspiracy theorists were quick to capitalize on the disinformation to buttress their own narratives.

The mass murder and torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian troops in Bucha became evident to the world in early April. At least 458 people were killed in this town west of Kyiv, their bodies left scattered on roads, in shallow mass graves and in destroyed buildings. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, children were among those who were unlawfully killed. The horrors of Bucha not only showed the world the brutality of Russian troops but crushed Moscow’s claims of superior military prowess. The Kremlin’s rhetorical response was to falsely assert that the massacre was faked by Ukrainian forces to provoke Russia. In the following weeks, Putin and his spokespeople would deny any responsibility for the same horrors that emerged in Irpin and Izium. To this day, Moscow claims its forces do not target civilians. 

The war in Ukraine has caused the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II. According to the U.N. there are approximately 7.8 million refugees from Ukraine across Europe, while 4.8 million people have received temporary protection. But even as Europeans threw open their doors to those fleeing the Russian advance, pro-Russian websites and social media accounts were able to circumvent EU sanctions and effectively spread disinformation about the refugee population. Allegations that Ukrainian refugees were financially well off, that they were depleting resources for native populations and presented a security threat to host countries were widely shared. In the Czech Republic, Russian disinformation poured into the physical world when, in September, over 70,000 people took to the streets of Prague to protest the Czech government, Russian sanctions and assistance given to refugees.

The hybrid war in Ukraine mirrors the Syrian experience. Rife with Russian disinformation, the Syrian civil war marked its 11th year in March. Meanwhile, on the African continent, the Wagner mercenary group is pushing disinformation through powerful social media influencers to shore up support for its war in Ukraine and involvement in local conflicts. The Kremlin’s disinformation machine in 2023 will not slow down.

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“We are united by the rejection of the so-called ‘rules-based order’ that the former colonial powers are imposing on the world,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the audience via video message. “Russia greatly appreciates the fact that despite unprecedented and crude pressure, our African friends, like the overwhelming majority of the international community, have not joined the anti-Russia sanctions but continue developing dialogue and cooperation with us.”

Lavrov was warming the small crowd up for the event’s headline attendee Kemi Seba, who took to the stage for 20 minutes to condemn the West and wax lyrical about the benefits of Russian influence across the African continent.

Seba is part of a growing network of self-styled pan-African influencers who enjoy a close relationship with the Kremlin in return for spreading Russian disinformation. Ranging from disseminating anti-French rhetoric to extolling the virtues of sanctioned oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group mercenaries, these diligent mouthpieces have also justified Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Just hours after the Russian invasion on February 24, Seba took to Facebook to argue that Moscow was “trying to reconquer Russian lands.” Another well known influencer, the Swiss-Cameroonian Nathalie Yamb, commented that Ukraine is “full of neo-Nazis” and suggested that Kyiv is responsible for causing the conflict. The ferocity and reach of this disinformation has become so widespread that in early November the U.S. State Department issued an extraordinary statement that lambasted both Seba and Yamb and drew strong correlations between them and Prigozhin. “Understanding and exposing the role of disinformation in the Kremlin’s Africa strategy,” the State Department told us in response to written questions, “is a key step toward limiting its potential impact on the continent.”

French–Beninese Seba has amassed 1.1 million followers on Facebook and almost a quarter of a million subscribers on YouTube. The former head of the Russian-backed Afrique Media, the 40 year-old has crafted a reputation for spreading visceral anti-French rhetoric and claiming the West is on a mission to “destroy Vladimir Putin, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.” He is also the head of the organization Urgence Panafricaniste and the clout behind the relaunched media outlet Afrique Résurrection. 

Seba’s closest confidant is Yamb, whom he has described as “my blood.” Powered by 233,000 subscribers on YouTube, the 53-year-old has styled herself as “La Dame de Sochi” after attending Putin’s Russia-Africa Summit in 2019. Her repeated verbal attacks on Franco-African relations led to the French Minister of the Interior banning her from French territory in January for “incitement to hatred and violence.”

“Some of these influencers have gained quite a following recently, but the way to think about them is that they are just part of a broader disinformation system that Russia is deploying in Africa through Wagner,” said Mark Duerksen, a research associate at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, an academic institution within the U.S. Department of Defense. “[They are monetizing their work] through YouTube ad revenue, speaking engagements at universities in Russia, or paid attendance at conferences in Russia. They fashion themselves as pseudo intellectuals adopting tropes from a deep history of Pan-Africanism to their purposes," Duerksen said.

Pan-Africanism, in its modern form, was established in the early 20th century in response to the enduring legacy of European slavery and imperialism. Supported by intellectuals such as the American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, Pan-Africanism, in its broadest form, seeks to unify all people of African heritage against racism and colonialism. Today, Russia has latched onto some elements of this anti-colonial feeling to generate support for the war in Ukraine. Using historical narratives that focus on Soviet Russia’s engagement with African nations and Cold War support for resistance groups in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, Moscow has successfully argued that, unlike its 21st century rivals in the West, it doesn’t have a colonialist past or attitude.

It is an argument that has popular resonance across much of Africa. According to the Zimbabwean writer and editor Percy Zvomuya, “in the minds of some people in southern Africa, Russia, not Ukraine, is the direct successor of the USSR, the state that supported us during our own struggles against colonialism and apartheid.” And, he said, “that Ukraine receives much of its weaponry and diplomatic support from Britain and America makes it easy for Russia to say ‘but, look, these are the people who oppressed you yesterday.’”

The West’s manner in dealing with Africa continues to grate. Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s minister of international relations and cooperation, complained in August about “patronizing bullying” by European countries over the war in Ukraine. Both she and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa took aim at the United States over a bill overwhelmingly passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, titled “Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa.” They said the bill would punish the economic aspirations of Africans for doing essential business with Russia. The bill, reports suggest, is highly unlikely to become law but the language rankled. Pandor described it as “offensive” and disrespectful of African sovereignty.

In reality, though, it’s not clear that the Kremlin is any more respectful of African sovereignty. In many areas that have a high concentration of Russian disinformation, the Wagner Group is operating in the background. Reported to have been founded around 2014, Wagner is a Kremlin-backed private military organization that helps undemocratic leaders hold onto power in return for access to natural resources or strategic locations. A key factor in ensuring their (and the Kremlin’s) foothold in a country is a vast sea of disinformation that spews from social media influencers and Russia-backed organizations such as the Association for Free Research and International Cooperation, which supports many small African media outlets.

This network of positive coverage has allowed Wagner to destabilize entire regions of the African continent. In the western Sahel region, Mali’s ruling junta has moved from traditional assistance from France to support from Russia. In December 2021, Wagner mercenaries arrived in the country. Under the guise of tackling the landlocked nation’s warring militant groups, Wagner’s presence has resulted in alleged human rights abuses and shored up support for the country’s leadership.

“The [Russian] disinformation campaign in the region began long before the war in Ukraine. It really started when the Malian government had tensions with France and made an agreement with the Wagner Group,” Rida Lyammouri, from the Policy Center for the New South, a Morocco-based think tank, told us. “We know one of Wagner’s objectives is natural resources and Mali is rich in gold, but there is no evidence yet that that’s what they’re looking for.”

At the three-day US-Africa Leaders summit, which concluded on December 15, Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo alleged that Burkina Faso, one of the largest gold producers on the continent, had paid the Wagner Group with a mine to come into the country to contain insurgent violence. There have been two coups in Burkina Faso this year alone, the latest on September 30. Earlier this month, the recently appointed prime minister flew to Moscow on a Malian jet; his visit was reportedly “private.”  

Back online the depth of Russian influence over social media users does not just extend to top-tier influencers who have well-established links to Moscow. Other individuals are also jumping in on the game, especially on the issue of the war in Ukraine. Pointing to hypocrisy in Western criticisms of the Russian invasion, “whataboutism” has become a typical rhetorical strategy for those eager to parrot a pro-Russia line.

General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the son of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and arguably the country’s tweeter-in-chief, said on February 28 that “the majority of mankind (that are non-white) support Russia’s stand in Ukraine.” Kampala has been drifting towards Moscow as the East African nation becomes increasingly authoritarian. In Nigeria, the burgeoning influencer Joseph C. Okechukwu has taken to Twitter almost daily to update his 38,000 followers on the war in Ukraine where he regularly alludes to Ukrainian soliders having Nazi sympathies. The Cameroonian influencer Franklin Nyamsi has railed against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, while praising Russia for supplying weapons to Mali. 

Some analysts argue, however, that the collective bark of these influencers is worse than their bite. Two reports by the Brookings Institution, a U.S. think tank, suggest that although Russia has targeted the African continent’s information sphere to shore up support for its war in Ukraine, Russian disinformation does not “gain the same traction or attention on Twitter” as narratives closer to the hearts of African audiences. 

“The same messages are being spread on Facebook and Youtube, but what we learned from our research on Twitter is that the disinformation about the war, even disinformation about grain, is not getting as much engagement as established grievances,” said Mary Blankenship, the author of the report alongside Aloysius Uche Ordu. “What I also found interesting was that it’s official channels that have the most effect, such as a tweet from the Russian Embassy, rather than accounts with a significant following.” 

It is unlikely that Moscow’s interest in the African continent will end anytime soon. Since 2020, Russia has been Africa’s biggest supplier of arms. Long before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin has been driving Russian foreign policy to engage more with African states, to piggyback on Chinese investments and to diminish Western dominance over the continent. However, even with Wagner’s malign influence, it is unclear if the Kremlin’s concentrated appeal to African anti-colonial sentiments, and pledges of support outside human rights frameworks, is actually yielding a return on both geopolitical and financial levels. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, it is also not known if Russian influence across the continent will create a Russian power base that will “expand its influence in the years to come.”

Towards the end of his speech at the “Russia-Africa: What’s Next?” youth forum in October, Lavrov made sure to reference the second edition of the Russia-Africa Summit and Economic Forum due to take place in St. Petersburg next summer and to promote “peace, security and development.” There is little doubt that sitting in the audience will be Prigozhin’s influencers dutifully taking notes for their audiences back home.

A quotation from Mark Duerksen has been changed post-publication to reflect his intended meaning.

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The conference was a political lightning rod. As it began, protestors swept through the streets of Verona while conference attendees gave interviews outside the event hall. “Homosexuals must be treated, otherwise hell is waiting for them,” one woman told journalists outside the conference. 

Also at the conference, Giorgia Meloni, who was elected last month to be the new prime minister of Italy, gave a rousing speech to a standing ovation, railing against surrogacy for gay couples. “A puppy rightly cannot be ripped from the mother’s womb as soon as it’s born. So two rich men should not be able to buy a son from a desperate mother,” she told the enraptured crowd. 

Meloni’s election victory also swept in Fontana, 42, who was elected speaker of the lower house of Italy’s Parliament — the third most powerful position in Italian politics. But despite their history of overlapping values and a shared conference podium, the appointment came as a shock to people who have been watching Meloni’s rise to the pinnacle of government. 

“I was surprised,” said Marianna Griffini, a lecturer in European and international studies at King’s College London. She described how Fontana’s election as speaker is at odds with Meloni’s newfound moderation strategy. “As soon as she stepped into Parliament, into government, she basically went through a makeover of her discourse and image. The style was much less aggressive, much less emotional, much more moderate in tone.” 

In contrast to Meloni’s trajectory toward the middle, Fontana doesn’t mince his words, eschews compromise and calls for the complete repeal of Italy’s abortion law. This positions him as Meloni’s ideological standard-bearer, allowing her to sidestep political purity tests. In being her choice for parliamentary speaker, said Griffini, Fontana represents the new government’s core ideology, while Meloni wears a mask of moderation: “We have to see that she’s walking a tightrope between mainstreaming and radicalization.” 

Fontana, meanwhile, stakes out a hardline defense of “traditional family values,” a movement at the core of Meloni’s rise to power, which has been promoted and financed by a coalition of pan-European, U.S., and Russia-backed individuals and institutions for nearly a decade. A year before the Verona conference, Fontana, at the time Italy’s minister for families, made headlines when said he believed LGBTQ families “don’t exist.” Key figures in the traditional family values movement have coalesced in support of Fontana.

The multi-country campaign to roll back LGBTQ, immigrant and reproductive rights across Europe was galvanized five years ago by Vladimir Putin’s repressions against many public expressions of gay life in Russia — notably a ban on the promotion of "LGBT propaganda" among children that last month was expanded to include people of all ages. “The Russians might be the Christian saviors of the world,” said Larry Jacobs, the Congress of Families’ late managing director. In 2016, Fontana said that “with gay marriage and and immigration they want to dominate us and wipe out our people,” adding that the example to follow was Russia. 

Fontana joined the hard-right League party when he was 16 years old. He drove a forklift before becoming a politician. “Never has a politician from the city of Juliet risen to such heights,” the Italian newspaper La Repubblica wrote of him.

Intensely religious, Fontana has called Vilmar Pavesi, a priest in Verona with virulently anti-LGBTQ views, his spiritual father. “Gays are a creation of the devil,” Pavesi told Espresso magazine in 2018, before saying that he and Fontana think the same way. “If we thought differently, our paths would divide.” Fontana says 50 Hail Marys a day, and his social media channels are peppered with images of Christ and the Madonna. 

Fontana’s fast rise in Italian politics is often linked to his ability to cultivate connections with the larger constellation of right-wing, Catholic associations in Europe. In addition to the Congress of Families, Fontana has called members of Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn movement his “friends.” He has links to CitizenGo, the ultra-conservative Madrid campaigning platform that sends bright orange “freedom planes” and “freedom buses” around Europe with slogans like “boys have penises, girls have vulvas, don’t be fooled.” Fontana has also campaigned alongside Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the renegade, anti-vaccine, conspiracy-theory-promoting former Vatican envoy, who recently blamed the war in Ukraine on the American deep state, U.S. bioweapons labs and Zelensky’s “LGTBQ ideology.” 

Fontana admires Vladimir Putin. He once called him “a light for us Westerners, who live in a great crisis of values.” Alongside Matteo Salvini, a right-wing Italian politician known for his hostility toward immigrants, Fontana wore a “no to Russian sanctions” T-shirt in the Italian Parliament during Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. Later that year, the Kremlin invited Fontana to Crimea, alongside other members of pro-independence and anti-immigration parties, to act as international observers in a sham independence referendum.

Meloni has vowed to maintain unflinching support for Western sanctions against Russia no matter the energy implications on Italy this winter. Fontana, meanwhile, has expressed concern that sanctions against Putin could “boomerang” and that allowing Ukraine to enter the European Union “would risk exacerbating the already bad climate with Moscow.” 

Space between Meloni and Fontana is largely confined to foreign policy, while positions concerning LGBTQ people and women are more in lockstep. “I think they will try to make us like Poland. Keep out the possibility of abortion. The possibility to get a divorce, to get contraception. They will try — and I think they will succeed also,” said Silvana Agatone, a gynaecologist in Rome who leads an association protecting the rights of women to receive an abortion in Italy.

While Meloni has said she will not repeal Law 194, Italy’s version of Roe v. Wade which protects the rights of women to an abortion, Fontana has made no such promise. Instead, he is a member of a group called Committee No To 194, which works explicitly to overturn the 1978 law.

“We are concerned that they might create obstacles — financially, organizationally, institutionally  — so they might not touch the law, but they might physically make implementation impossible,” said Giulia Tranchina, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “It’s already incredibly hard, for poorer women, from southern Italy, from outside the big cities to actually access abortion,” she said. Doctors in Italy are allowed to invoke conscientious objection to performing an abortion, a law she worries will be taken advantage of by the new government. 

Since the new government was elected, Agatone, the Roman gynaecologist, has been receiving new, strange messages from people asking about her views on abortion after 22 weeks and abusive notes accusing her of “wanting to kill babies.” She said that her colleagues from other associations have received similar messages. “It’s almost like they are trying to catch me out in some way. Like my answers are under observation. So I think we will be attacked in some way.”

In espousing ideas about population decline, demographic implosion and an immigrant invasion, Fontana echoes white nationalists in the U.S. and in Northern Europe who embrace the Great Replacement — a conspiracy theory that holds that nonwhite people are being allowed and encouraged to come to the U.S. and Europe to "replace" white voters and achieve a leftist political agenda. In 2018, Fontana wrote a book called “The Empty Cradle of Civilization” where he argues Italians risk “extinction.” The legality of abortion forms part of this concern — in his view, the problem partly stems from births being terminated. “If every year we lose a city the size of Padua, the demographic decline is comparable to that caused between 1918 and 1920 by the Spanish flu,” said Fontana. 

In fact, Italy is currently facing population loss, a brain drain of young and talented people leaving the country in the hundreds of thousands every year. Fontana claims mass immigration  — alongside same-sex marriage and gender fluidity — will “wipe out our community and traditions.”

Outlawing abortion as a way of addressing demographic challenge is a tactic deeply rooted in the history of European fascism, said Neil Datta, executive director of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive rights. “It puts women and their procreative role in some sort of nationalist objective, producing more babies for the glory of the nation,” Datta said. 

When Fontana was elected speaker of the lower house of Italy’s Parliament, protesters took to the Piazza Dante in Naples dressed in the dystopian red robes of the Handmaid's Tale. “We dressed up as handmaids to recall the novel and TV series in which women are subjected to constant violence, so that their only role is to be a reproducer,” one protester told journalists. Members of parliament also staged a protest at the appointment, holding up a banner saying “No to a homophobic, pro-Putin president.” 

Others celebrated. On the World Congress of Family’s official news site, an article enthusiastically praised Fontana’s rise to high political office. “Lorenzo Fontana is the Parliament Speaker,” the article read. “One of us.”

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When France sent its soldiers to the Malian capital Bamako in 2013 — as part of the much-feted Operation Barkhane intended to put an end to terror attacks by Islamist groups waging IS and Al Qaeda-backed jihad — they were greeted as heroes by ordinary Malians singing paeans of gratitude.

After early successes, though, the French soldiers struggled and the relationship with Malians deteriorated to such an extent that the French were suspected of supporting the very terrorists they were meant to be fighting. 

On Facebook, a Malian activist group, “Yerewolo Debout sur les Remparts,” responded to the departure of French troops with glee, describing it as a historic triumph. The group posted a cartoon which summed up the feelings of many Malians – a French soldier on the receiving end of a giant Malian boot.

But now it's not only Malians who are celebrating the unceremonious exit of the French. The Kremlin too is delighted, happy to declare Operation Barkhane a debacle, with billions of dollars spent and the loss of thousands of lives, including dozens of French soldiers, to little effect.

If the West was hoping to isolate Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia sees an opportunity in the “global South” to gain more diplomatic influence and secure lucrative economic deals. “Russia is using Africa as a pawn to out-muscle the west,” Jean le Roux, Africa expert at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), told me.

Russia, for years now, has been adept at playing on and inflaming anti-France sentiment in former French colonies, from Mali to the Central African Republic. The Kremlin has largely succeeded in charming African leaders into tighter alliances and upsetting both the United States and particularly Europe, whose once unshakeable hold on the continent, in terms of trade, has considerably weakened.

Even now Russian trade with Africa ($14.5 billion in 2020) is but a fraction of the value of the continent’s trade with the EU (over $280 billion), China (around $255 billion) and the U.S. (over $65 billion). But Russia supplies a significant portion of Africa’s weapons, its wheat and grains, and its fertilizer.

And, as some have argued, Africa’s trading relationships with the EU are starting to chafe. In February, for instance, Odrek Rwabwogo, an adviser to the president of Uganda, wrote that “restrictive trade policies from wealthy western countries and blocs keep African countries chained to raw materials exports…while making the countries and blocs that implement them wealthier still.”

RUSSIA’S AFRICA STRATEGY

Last month, the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov undertook a five-day whistle-stop tour of Africa to talk up the growing collaboration between countries on the continent and Russia as a respite from colonial arrangements and colonial condescension from the European Union. Russia also blamed U.S. sanctions for the rising price of grains and fertilizer that had led to food insecurity and acute hunger in several African nations.

In a column, published in prominent newspapers in Egypt, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia, Lavrov wrote on July 22 that, “Our country who has not stained itself with the bloody crimes of colonialism, has always sincerely supported Africans in their struggle for liberation from colonial oppression.” Lavrov also evoked the “master-slave” dynamic that he wrote continued to characterize relationships between European powers and their former colonial possessions.

It is an argument that has been amplified on social media in recent years, particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to a receptive audience. Big Tech platforms, including the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, are notoriously lax in their moderation policies in much of the world, enabling social media in Arab countries, Latin America and Africa to be a practically unfettered space for Russian propaganda.

And Russia’s narratives are finding their mark.

In 2019, the Stanford Internet Observatory published a whitepaper describing Russia’s experiments with disinformation in Libya, Mozambique, Sudan, Madagascar, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In these six countries, the researchers concluded, Russia was “engaged in a broad, long-term influence operation.” Their tactics included posting “almost universally positive coverage of Russia’s activities in these countries,” while the posts also “disparaged the U.N., France, Turkey Qatar… most often while purporting to be local news sources.”

The researchers noted 73 Facebook pages set up by Russian agencies on Facebook alone targeting audiences in the six African countries, with as many as 8,900 posts being made across the pages in a single month. The disinformation came directly from companies linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the researchers said, whose Internet Research Agency had played havoc with the 2016 U.S. elections.

Backing up its cyberspace guerilla tactics, Prigozhin’s shadowy companies, chiefly the notorious Wagner Group, also had boots on the ground, providing paramilitary fighters and services across Africa.

THE ROLE OF THE WAGNER GROUP 

In Sudan, for instance, protests have been ongoing for over a year to remove the military junta that deposed the longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, only to hold on to power rather than create the conditions for democratic elections and a civilian government.

In Khartoum, more than a hundred protestors have been killed since October. Many more have been wounded. Democracy activist Nasr Eldin Safiyah was injured in a rally in June, the side of his head split open by a teargas canister hurled into the crowd. “I have not been well,” he told me. “But we are determined to take down this corrupt military junta.”

Standing in his way are Wagner Group mercenaries. “It’s a known fact here in Sudan that Russia supports the military junta,” Safiyah says. “Wagner is operating and training militias and they are helping them to loot our gold.” An investigation last month in the New York Times revealed that Russian firms are active in Sudanese gold country, mining tons of the precious metal and described the Wagner Group as providing “interlinked war-fighting, moneymaking and influence-peddling operations.”

As with the six African countries, including Sudan, studied in the Stanford Internet Observatory paper, Mali too has been the target of a sophisticated Russian campaign. Le Roux, the Africa expert at DFRLab, wrote back in February that a “network of Facebook pages promoting pro-Russian and anti-French narratives drummed up support for Wagner Group mercenaries prior to the official arrival of the private military group in Mali.” He added that these carefully constructed fake pages “also mobilized support for the postponement of democratic elections following a successful coup in May 2021, Mali’s second in less than a year.”

Russian president Vladimir Putin called Mali’s military leader Asimi Goita, as the last French soldiers prepared to leave, and reportedly reassured him that food, fuel and fertilizers would be made available. Goita tweeted to pointedly praise Putin’s respect for “the sovereignty of Mali and the aspirations of its population.”

Earlier this month, Russia also delivered several warplanes and a helicopter to Mali to bolster its defenses in its ongoing fight against Tuareg rebels and Islamist terrorists. And last year the Malian foreign minister visited Lavrov in Moscow in part to discuss the deployment of Wagner Group paramilitary troops in Mali. Both countries deny the official presence of Wagner Group mercenaries in Mali, describing the militants as instructors to Malian soldiers.

But a U.N. report unearthed this month by the Associated Press claimed “white soldiers” had been seen with Malian troops committing likely war crimes in the massacre of at least 33 civilians. Both U.S. and U.N. officials have confirmed the presence of Wagner soldiers in Mali. 

The Wagner Group, albeit supposedly unconnected to the Kremlin, is also playing a growing role in the fighting with Ukraine. State-sanctioned Russian media have lavished praise on the exploits of Wagner Group fighters in the Donbas region. And the presence of Wagner Group soldiers in Mali, even if it’s not clear how many, is in keeping with Russia’s intervention in the affairs of several African countries.

Prigozhin, the oligarch who controls the Wagner Group, is known as “Putin’s chef” because he apparently owes his great wealth to catering contracts signed with the Kremlin. He is also linked to Russian companies that have filed into countries like Sudan to illegally mine tons of gold which they carry away from military airports. Miners along the lawless Sudanese border with the Central African Republic accuse Russian mercenaries of massacring their colleagues and stealing their gold. Sudanese officials admit that about four-fifths of the country’s 100 million tons of annual gold exports are smuggled out of the country.

Mali, incidentally, is Africa’s third largest gold exporter.

WHAT’S NEXT?

On the day the military took power in Mali in May, last year, Malians took to the streets to cheer. Some shouted slogans in support of Russia, some raised the Russian flag and chanted “France degage!” Clear out, France. The support for Russia is real, despite groups like Human Rights Watch pointing to arbitrary detentions and torture and the connection of Wagner Group fighters to massacres of civilians.

DFRLab’s experts say Malian social media is where there is most praise for Russia and mentions of the Wagner Group. But neighboring Burkina Faso is catching up. In January, there was a military coup in the country and since then complimentary social media chatter about Russia and its influence in Africa has dramatically increased.

Burkinabe protestors have been rallying against the French presence in their country too, as French troops relocate Operation Barkhane to Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

In the last month, demonstrators in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, have burned the French flag and chanted, “France, the godmother of terrorism, get out,” and, “We are all for the liberation of Burkina Faso!”

Are Wagner Group mercenaries already packing for the 500-mile journey from Bamako to Ouagadougou?

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This was not part of the Russian Federation’s renewed assault on the Donbas and eastern Ukraine, but rather the extensive rehearsals for the May 9 Victory Day parades. This year the Russian state has invested its annual commemoration of Soviet victory in the Second World War — its statement of military might — with additional significance. Video clips of the rehearsals in Moscow and St. Petersburg circulated on social media. Spectators posed for photographs and videos, Russian press agencies circulated videos and details of the rehearsals on their telegram channels, western news outlets shared footage. Preparations for Moscow’s parade began much earlier. By April 19 soldiers were already pounding the parade ground in Albino, a small rural town outside Moscow.

In the late Soviet era details of Victory Day parades were closely guarded secrets. But in 2022 the Russian Ministry of Defense released detailed plans of the parade order, including the units, weapons, and aircraft involved. Victory Day preparations can be followed more closely than ever before.

The centrality of May 9 in the Russian national calendar and consciousness seems well established, an almost inviolable moment in Russian public life. In April 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, preparations for the 75th anniversary of the Second World War’s end continued. The rehearsals of nearly 15,000 soldiers tightly packed on the Albino military proving ground were memorably captured in a video, featuring some expressive Russian swearing, which went viral on social media. The parade was not canceled but rather postponed for two months.

It is testimony to the power of the public ritual and its propaganda value that they have been understood as a sacred element of national war memory with deep historical roots. May 9 and Victory Day commemorations, however, were at heart an invented tradition, a carefully choreographed statement of memory politics with a long and complicated history. It might seem, at least superficially, that Putin’s regime continued a Soviet tradition, but the reality as many historians have demonstrated was more complicated. Victory Day parades invoke history and exploit historical symbols, but they have also shaped history and its meaning.

According to the Ministry of Defense, 11,000 soldiers, 131 units of military hardware, and 77 aircraft have been involved in and will participate in Moscow’s parade. The RIA Novosti press agency has reported that a group of MiG-29 fighter jets will overfly Red Square in a Z formation, “in support of members of the special operation in Ukraine.”

There has been speculation for weeks that Vladimir Putin required decisive military breakthroughs and tangible victories to present before the people at the May 9 parades; that Putin will formally declare war on Ukraine in a May 9 speech on Red Square, dismantling the notion of his “special military operation” and issue a general mobilization; and even more recently that Russia will include 500 Ukrainian Prisoners of War, a clear contravention of the Geneva convention. These predictions may turn out to be true, but they all attest to the enduring importance of Victory Day in the Russian, and indeed to the western, political imagination.

Whereas Europe marked Victory Day on May 8, 1945, the Soviet Union’s announcement of victory came one day later, on May 9. It became the date on which the anniversary of the war’s end in Europe was marked, overshadowing the end of the war in the Soviet East in September 1945. The celebrations in 1945 that marked May 9 were spontaneous and unscripted. People gathered on the streets to sing, dance, and drink, celebrations independent of the Stalinist party-state. The first Victory Parade took weeks of planning and was scheduled for June 24, 1945. 40,000 soldiers from specially selected regiments marched across Red Square, as Stalin and other party leaders watched from Lenin’s mausoleum.

As befitted a closely choreographed propaganda spectacle, it was filmed and photographed for posterity. It signaled a return to a more regimented post-war politics, society, and culture, reinforcing the Stalin cult. All subsequent victory parades were in dialogue with this occasion. It is no coincidence that the website giving details of the units participating in the 2022 parade also publishes documents from Ministry of Defense archives detailing preparations for the first victory parade.

The June 24, 1945 parade was a dramatic moment in Stalinist public culture, but this effort was not sustained. On May 9 of the following year, in 1946, the day was not marked by a military parade. Indeed, May 9 was recategorized as a normal working day in late 1946, with the result that victory day in May 1947 was afforded less attention. This is often understood as the beginning of a more repressive phase of memory politics. It was not that the state encouraged forgetting; much about the war was too painful and divisive to be confronted. For nearly two decades Victory Day was marked by informal get-togethers of old comrades, political meetings, and firework displays, not grandiose military parades.

It was not until 1965 and the 20^th anniversary of the war’s end, that another parade was organized. They were reserved for landmark anniversaries in 1985, 1990, and only becoming an annual fixture after the 50^th anniversary in 1995. What seems like a deeply rooted historical ritual is relatively new.

Common elements, for example the prominence of the Victory Banner, remain. Yet throughout the post-Soviet period the dynamics of memory on display were in flux. The commemorations of the 1990s were more modest than Soviet parades, a product of economic crises, restricted budgets, and the collapse of the Soviet symbolic repertoire.

Under Vladimir Putin, however, a slicker presentation has signaled a more assertive Russia, trumpeting its military might and great power ambitions to domestic and international audiences. Putin’s first parade in 2000 was just two days after his first presidential inauguration. Since 2005 the media management of victory parades has become increasingly sophisticated. Clever camera shots and polished productions have turned the parade into a media event, choreographed for viewers at home. 

It has become the most important holiday in the civic calendar, commemorating a moment in the national past that all citizens are told they can proudly celebrate. There was a time when foreign politicians, statesmen, and diplomats attended Victory Day parades. In May 1995, for example, Bill Clinton and John Major both attended. But, since 2014 and Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine, foreign, particularly western leaders, have ceased attending.

As the number of remaining veterans of and eyewitnesses to the Second World War dwindles, Russian war memory has ossified, becoming as clunky as the T-34 tanks that have become a commemorative prop. Approaching war memory through the prism of a sacred victory has long served to justify the sacrifice and loss of life in war but creates difficulty with the multiple stands of the Soviet and Russian war experience that sit uncomfortably with this framework. So much of the horror of war, the pain, suffering and human costs are excluded from this sanitizing celebration of victory and heroism.

The set-piece parades in Moscow and St. Petersburg frame Victory Day through the priorities and objectives of the state. War memory has long been harnessed for political purposes. But people do not always operate within the official structures of memory. Since 2011, when its popularity grew, some Russians have participated in Immortal Regiment parades, where citizens carry photographs of deceased relatives who participated in the Second World War. 

Others might watch a Soviet war film on television, visit a relative’s grave, or finish a bottle. Beyond the Red Square pomp, local war memories and commemorative practices abound. A recent volume of essays has examined how Victory Day celebrations are marked in cities, locales, and spaces across Russia, in formerly Soviet occupied territories in eastern Europe, and beyond. It demonstrates how commemorative activity can be local and regional, how these have changed over time and frequently depart from official scripts.

Outside Russia, diasporic communities have long structured their own Victory Day commemorations around Soviet war memorials in their cities and communities. In 2015 Immortal Regiment parades were organized in over forty countries, many of these with significant Russian communities.

On May 9, 2022, eyes will be focused on Red Square, ears on Vladimir Putin’s words.  However, a better indication of changing memory politics and the importance of the cult of the Great Patriotic War to Russian political culture may be apparent in how Victory Day is marked in Russian occupied Ukraine.

Putin made a surprise visit to Crimea on Victory Day in 2014. And since 2015, Victory Day parades were unfurled in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s republics, which frequently featured military equipment in contravention of the 2015 Minsk agreements. What happens in Kherson, Melitopol, and Berdyansk, all Russian occupied cities, may be as instructive as the ceremony on Red Square.

Regardless of where Victory Day is marked, the use and abuse of history and war memory is likely to be intermingled with Russian nationalism, militarism, and wider geopolitics. It will be a toxic combination.

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The post The Russian May 9 holiday points to the toxicity of the country’s politics of memory appeared first on Coda Story.

Out of the 23 million tweets that posted the hashtag #IstandwithVladimir Putin, around 10,000 repeated the tweet five or more times. Before the invasion, these accounts had busied themselves tweeting about a range of political issues. Some pledged continual support for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, others were in favor of Pakistan’s leader Imran Khan, still others backed former South African president Jacob Zuma or were concerned with Nigerian fuel shortages, or else trumpeted Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka. 

But on the morning of the same day, they all began marching in unison. Thousands and thousands of times, they tweeted pro-Putin hashtags, along with memes and pictures in support of the Russian invasion. The hashtags began trending on Twitter, and was yet further boosted by Twitter’s algorithm. 

“I was pretty astonished that Twitter was letting this trend,” said Carl Miller, a disinformation researcher at Demos, a London-based thinktank, who woke up on the morning of March 2 to find his Twitter feed blowing up with the hashtag. Using data from the site, he scrutinized the networks pushing the pro-Putin narrative, and found that many of the accounts appeared to be brand new, fake, hacked, or working in coordination with one another.

What’s going on? 

In the enormous echo chamber that is Western social media, we have seen a wave of blue and yellow, an overwhelming level of support for the people of Ukraine. There is near unanimous agreement that Ukraine is winning, hands down, the information war against Russia. 

“There’s loads of articles considering it such a truism — really now it’s just about explaining why — that ‘Putin’s left his propagandists flat footed’ or ‘Zelensky is such a genius media operator,’” said Miller. “I’m just never really sure these ideas are true. It’s very hard for us to say who’s winning or not.”

One thing is for certain: the West presently is not the main target of Russia’s information offensive. And in other parts of the world, the Russian narrative is being pushed and gaining traction.

In India, more than 500 Hindi-language, pro-Bharatiya Janata Party spam accounts switched from sharing millions of pro-Modi messages to sharing pro-invasion memes in English in early March. The accounts have since pivoted back to just promoting BJP content.

In South Africa, an anti-colonial set of voices usually tweets about former South African President Jacob Zuma, and pushes out content in solidarity with BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.) Miller said the South African group appears to be more organic than the Indian group — and yet, it jumped on the #IStandWithPutin hashtag.

What do the posts have in common?

Posts expand on how Russia has supported India, or focus on “whataboutism” -– looking at past offensives by the U.S. and NATO. Some of the posts are not necessarily “disinformation” in the strict definition of the term. But they are deceptive. For instance, a meme highlighting past western invasions — such as Iraq and Afghanistan — is designed to shift focus away from Russian aggression and violence in Ukraine. And when it’s amplified inauthentically, by thousands of fake accounts, then it begins to skew thinking, inflating the pro-Russian narrative in a way that’s misleading. 

“There’s one meme I remember very vividly, which shows Russia as a kind of mighty mother bear. Ukraine is a kid with a stick that’s prodding this bear. And the U.K., U.S. and NATO are behind, prodding this kid. So the bear is having to come out of her cave to protect her cub. That’s probably not literally disinformation. To my eyes it’s a ridiculous misportrayal of the narrative around NATO. But I wouldn’t say there’s a truth claim there,” said Miller. “It’s not to say anyone’s spending too much time worrying about telling the truth. Whether you want to call it emotionally dis-informative is the reader’s call to make.” 

Who is behind it?

That’s the tough question. At this stage, without a full investigation using open-source data into the roots of these accounts, we can’t definitively say who’s behind it just by looking at the accounts. But we can look at who benefits from this kind of information war.

Miller says: “if this isn’t Russia or someone being funded by Russia, I don’t understand what the interest, or the benefit would be. There’s nothing else really being gained here other than an attempt to try and garner pro-invasion support.” 

How should we read this?

This digital swarm of support for Putin’s invasion shows the information war is shapeshifting every day, it’s important not to hold up this activity as a bellwether for real-life sentiment in these countries. They don’t reflect reality, and they don’t necessarily reflect public opinion, because they are being pushed and promoted in a way that’s deceptive. 

“The world is a much bigger place than our own timelines,” said Miller. “There is a whole world out there for Russia to play for.”

The post Ukraine is winning the information war in the West. What about elsewhere? appeared first on Coda Story.

Or is it a terrible break with that past, the result of Putin’s separation from reality during two years of pandemic isolation?

Analysts, politicians, security and military experts are arguing over it now.

“I wouldn't want to slip into that temptation to look back and say, ‘We've missed something that was obvious all the way along.’ It wasn't obvious,” said Ben Noble, Russian politics professor at University College London and co-author of ​​”Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future?”

“And that's the reason why lots of people are shocked, not only internationally, but also domestically, including members of the political and the economic elite in Russia.”

Precious N Chatterje-Doody, a politics and International Studies professor at Open University, U.K. and author of “Russia Today and Conspiracy Theories” also believes locating a premeditated grand plan in Putin’s actions is wrong. 

“One of the constant features of Putin's state leadership has been that he likes to make things unclear and to have multiple options. And in hindsight, he looks like a master chess player that had this planned all along,” she said. “I don't think that's usually true. I think he's a pragmatist. So he gives himself multiple options. It keeps people guessing. And then he kind of responds to situations as they occur.”

It’s impossible to read Putin’s mind. But Chatterje-Doody, Noble and other political scientists, journalists and writers, who have closely studied the country’s politics, identify political forces in Russia that the Putin government has harnessed to build the authoritarian state we see today. Here’s the breakdown.

Why is Putin claiming there are powerful Nazis in Ukraine?

“It's often misunderstood in the West, especially that Russia never reckoned with its totalitarian past, with mass repressions in the thirties under Stalin, basically a genocide of its own people,” said Olga Khvostunova, a Russian journalist and a researcher at the Institute of Modern Russia, in New York City.

Instead, Putin began emphasizing that Russia is a descendant of the powerful Soviet Union, the regime that saved the world from Nazism and crafted his rhetoric around it, especially during periods when he suffered from political unpopularity, said Khvostunova.

Instead of offering a unifying vision of the future that could lead to better post-Soviet Russia, Putin recycled the past. “What he offered as a unifying platform for the Russians was the vision of the past, which is, by the way, a very significant part of the fascist ideology — the great past that we need to restore,” said Khvostunova.

Putin’s campaign focused on glorifying the Soviet regime’s victory of Nazism, but distorted or minimized the history of mass repressions and massacres.

“It's basically the idea that Soviet soldiers paid for world freedom from Nazis and with their own blood, and this is used as a kind of constant refrain. It's like a key feature of contemporary Russian national identity,” said Chatterje-Doody.

Deflecting contemporary events onto World War II tropes also has been a key part of Putin’s narrative around the Ukraine invasion. Like most effective political propaganda, it has resonated at times because it contains a grain of truth. In the 2014 pro-democracy protests in Kyiv that ousted a pro-Russian president and in the subsequent war in the eastern Donbas region, military units aligned with neo-Nazism, like the Azov Battalion, were a part of Ukraine’s National Guard. In the 2019 elections, Ukraine’s far-right couldn’t even gather enough votes to enter parliament, and a Jewish comedian was elected president in a landslide victory. 

“What better way to weave doubt about the prevailing narrative in the West than to pick genuinely true bits of information and make them seem more significant than they are,” said Chatterje-Doody.

Strengthening the state against foreign interference

Since 2012, Russia has a law that allows the government to label NGOs and individuals receiving funds from abroad as “foreign agents,” subjecting them to reporting their every purchase at stores.

Informing this legislation is a foreign interference narrative that holds outside powers responsible for destabilizing the country.

“By claiming that the domestic opposition are traitors, the authorities can turn around and say, ‘you’re members of the opposition, but you are acting as agents of the West. You are traitors. You're not members of the loyal opposition,’” Noble, the University College London professor, explained. 

But it is in the last couple of years that the law has been applied much more aggressively against journalists and independent Russian newsrooms like Meduza, TV Rain and Mediazona.

Noble said the underlying message to the Russian populace is a powerful one. “You are not a critical independent journalist pointing out real problems in the country. You are creating false narratives and you are being paid and supported by people in the West. And the goal, your goal and those of your paymasters, the puppeteers, is to undermine the country.”

Protecting ‘traditional values’

The government’s repressive turn crystallized in campaigns against the LGBTQ community, portraying them as liberals out to destroy “traditional family values.” In 2013, Putin criminalized “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” 

Putin’s “anti-wokeness” ramped up support among right-wing and conservative politicians and influencers internationally. Russia has become the important power behind the World Congress of Families — a network of right-wing Christians opposing same-sex marriage and abortion. Putin has strong ties with far-right European politicians including Marine Le Pen, of the National Rally party in France, former Italian deputy prime minister and leader of Italian far-right League party Matteo Salvini, and Milos Zeman, the president of Czech Republic.

“It's quite a savvy, communicative strategy in a lot of ways because this anti-political correctness or anti-wokeness movement is actually gaining a lot of ground in the West, especially online,“ Chatterje-Doody said. “And when you look at how the Russian regime tries to use the online environment — sowing seeds of dissent by using particular small facts and weaving them into something bigger — this is a really big social debate it can get involved in.”  

Understanding the arc of Putin’s thinking provides some clarity on current events, according to Sam Greene, the director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London.

“It is about understanding how it is that Vladimir Putin came to be in a position where this war makes sense to him — it doesn't make sense to anybody else but it makes sense to him,” Greene said. “It also helps explain why it's so difficult for ordinary Russians, who don't like the war, to do anything about it.” 

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The eight-year conflict in eastern Ukraine has often been drowned in disinformation and tainted political narratives. Belorusets set out to correct this. I spoke with her about the importance of telling unheard stories, in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book shows what everyday life has been like for eastern Ukrainian factory workers, florists, manicurists, cosmetologists since 2014. Why did you decide that these fragmentary stories had to be told?

In this tragic situation in eastern Ukraine, violence emerges as an unnatural reality imposed from outside. Discussions usually center around big politics and trying to stop the aggressor. And that's normal. But my work allows me to look at the situation in more detail, to go deeper to the level where the interpersonal is more important than big politics.

I wanted to make this part of reality more visible and reaffirm its right to exist. A right that is very easily overlooked during radical military violence and in international discourse that acts not on behalf of a person, but a continent, country or region.

In one of the stories, “The Stars,” women sheltering in basements decide when it’s safe to go outside based on horoscopes. They don’t know if they are being shelled by Russian-backed militants or the Ukrainian troops and some of them even believe it’s Canada bombing to get the town’s coal. Was the story meant to illustrate the dizzying effect of a constant information war?

In 2014/2015 the Ukrainian media did not know what to do with this catastrophe. The inhabitants of these towns found themselves under attack. And, if before, every single killing of this kind without a trial would have been a crime requiring press and investigation, the new situation was different. People were dying in the streets from shelling, and the media said nothing about these victims, neither Ukrainian nor Russian. Moreover, Russian media began their toxic work of completely distorting the reality, creating numerous contradictory, inconsistent interpretations of events. 

The sharp devaluation of one's own life and these media mirages, media hallucinations, led to all kinds of rumors being spread among the residents of many small towns in Donbas. But most fundamentally, you wished to trust yourself more than any external sources of information. But how do you find your own credibility when there's fire under your feet? This is what my story is about.

Why are most of the protagonists in stories women? 

I didn’t want to bring everything to women’s bodies or women’s voices. But it turned out that the majority of people, whose experience stuck with me or seemed to me important, were women.

Many women were very honest with me exactly because they thought their experience wasn’t as important as that of men and hence so insignificant that talking about it wasn’t even dangerous. The conflict between self-negation and self-expression of those women — these elements seemed very valuable to me while writing.

Yet for me it’s very important to bring this not exclusively to women’s experiences but rather to the experiences that are most often seen among women, the experiences of living through those events as if from the second row of history.

What do people get wrong about how war affects people?

Sometimes, especially in the cities on the frontline, the collateral damage is coming from the Ukrainian side, not only from the Russian side. People live with the constant feeling of danger and incredible unfairness. 

Often people from Kyiv go to these places, like international journalists or people trying to help, and they ask these people what they think about politics. Sometimes they say, "We hate the Russians and the Ukrainians, leave us alone." And these very honest words are often used against them, that they are not patriotic enough, or they're not pro-Ukrainian enough. Maybe they don't understand what the political stakes are, but in my view, it's a very Soviet attitude towards people whose situation is so far from any kind of normalcy that you cannot force them to have some kind of “right” view. 

I think these people are heroes because they are trying to go on with their everyday peaceful life in a war zone. And maybe they can show us all how you can remain a person in a conflict, in the situation telling you, "You are not a human now, you can die every day just because you are crossing the street."

There’s a recurring character in your stories — Andrea. At times she gets very excited about the future but at other times she is very pessimistic about her own life as well as Ukraine’s future, and her presence is always fleeting. What is her role in your book?

The character of Andrea is all about love, about infatuation and connection between two women. She sounds negative and is complaining but complaining is the start of becoming a revolutionary. She is about the relations among different realities in Ukraine, about their capacity to simultaneously hate and love one another. Because in the contexts of such diversity, even mutual dislike can be productive, becoming the part of the exchange, which can be a stage to growth and development.

The post Exploring the everyday lives of the people in eastern Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

Meanwhile, a narrative began to take shape in pro-Kremlin Russian media. The Ukrainians on the streets weren’t actually pro-democracy. They were neo-Nazis and members of an ultra-nationalist group called Right Sector. And also they were sponsored by the CIA. The conspiracy theory spread like wildfire on Russian television. The film director Oliver Stone repeated the claim. 

Figuring the CIA in a multi-actor conspiracy theory wasn’t a new tactic for that part of the world, but it proved to be particularly noxious this time around in fomenting opinions in Russia about Euromaidan. 

Scott Radnitz is a professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of Revealing Schemes: the Politics of Conspiracy in Russia and the Post-Soviet Region. We sat down with him to talk about the role of conspiracy theories in modern politics.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Conspiracy theories are in vogue. Why are they such a useful political tool?

The reason that a lot of politicians use conspiracy theories is number one: many people believe them. They find that kind of rhetoric attractive because they see the world in conspiratorial ways. Or they are attracted to rhetoric that makes them feel like they're on the inside with the people who know what's going on and feel solidarity in the fact that everybody recognizes that they have a common enemy. In some ways, conspiracy theories are just a different, maybe more extreme form of what politicians typically do in their rhetoric anyway, which is to try to create coalitions to attract enough votes so they can win elections. Creating in-groups and out-groups, stoking emotion and fear — these are age old political tactics.

Your book largely focuses on Russia and the post-Soviet space. What are the main themes in political conspiracy theories in the region?

A conspiracy theory that is most prominent in Russia claims that the West or America wants to weaken, destroy or dismantle Russia as part of a broader geopolitical game. There are variations on how the U.S.,the West, the CIA or NATO accomplishes that. That’s one very large set of conspiracy claims, which should not come as news to anybody who's been following Russian politics for the last 20 years. 

Another theme is at the domestic level. It has to do with jockeying among politicians. That's mostly about creating narratives that make my political opponents look as bad as possible. It's a form of demonization and character assassination.

Then there are the fifth column claims where there's a domestic element and a foreign element. The conspiracy theory is that an insider is secretly working with outsiders in nefarious ways to overthrow the government, undermine the regime or destroy the nation. 

What stands out to you as the most important conspiracy theory in Putin's Russia? Is it that narrative about Western infiltration? 

Examples of the first kind happen on a daily basis if you just follow the narratives that come from the Kremlin. That is the overarching theme of the Putin era. And I think a subset of those claims is important for Russian politics and the decline of Russian democracy, which is that Russian insiders — opposition figures, activists, non-governmental organizations, liberals — they’re playing a role as a fifth column, somehow working with outsiders to bring in alien values or to work with the U.S., either as spies or infiltrators, to overthrow the government. Fifth column claims have paralleled and facilitated crackdowns on opposition to a greater or lesser degree throughout at least the second half of the Putin era. 

I always thought of these conspiracies about Western infiltration as a tool for stirring up nationalism and creating an outside enemy to coalesce against. But you also talk about how conspiracy theories can create in-groups and out-groups domestically, too. 

One thing I show in my book is that it's not simply a matter of the leaders of a country positioning themselves against other countries in order to control the nation. Often it's about politicians within a country competing against their domestic opponents. Conspiracy theories are a way of distinguishing oneself from one's political adversary and creating coalitions within the country. So domestic politics has a lot to do with it. There's been an assumption that the most notorious conspiracists are dictators who are already in control of a country and use conspiracy theories in order to maintain iron fisted rule by propagating these narratives to keep the entire population subdued. Political competition also produces incentives for conspiracy theories within the domestic political arena. 

In your book, you say conspiracy theories can be used as a sword and as a shield. What do you mean by that?

 Often, the people in power who are making conspiracy theories are feeling threatened at the moment. They're playing defense,and they feel a need to restore control. One of the ways in which they do that is rhetorically. When leaders are fighting a rearguard action, that's when they're using conspiracy theories as a shield to fend off these challenges. 

And conspiracy theories’ use as a sword is most visible when there's no imminent, prominent threat. But you still see conspiracy theories put out every day as a drumbeat on state media. It’s used offensively, where there's no clear threat, but the regime feels the need to keep laying the groundwork, probably because they assume that will come in handy. 

What are some examples that come to mind?

The same theory can be used for offensive and defensive purposes. What matters here is who is making the claim and the position they find themselves in when they're doing that. So what I'm doing in my book is situating this rhetoric in the broader view of what's happening politically in the country. 

Take the example of the fifth column narrative that the West is working with insiders to weaken Russia. On Russian political talk shows, this is just something that's assumed to be true. Some of the more prominent pundits who appear on Russian TV like Vladimir Zhirinovsky often claim it as common sense. That’s using the conspiracy theory as a sword. And that might not get a lot of attention because it fades into the background noise eventually. Zhirinovsky saying something crazy isn't news just like Trump by his second year saying something crazy or ridiculous or making a bald faced lie wasn't news. 

And then a defensive variant of that would occur during a heightened political drama like in the Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine. Now, say, the head of the FSB [intelligence agency] in Russia or some adviser to former president Viktor Yanukovych would say that these protesters in the Euromaidan are not authentic. They're paid by the Obama administration or they're working with John McCain. Using what has been established as common sense now defensively or tactically in the moment to explain what's going on and to demonstrate that the people who are making these claims actually have more control than you might assume.  

Is there a difference between propaganda and conspiracy theories?  

Yes. They’re not the same thing. Propaganda is usually understood as political rhetoric, not necessarily anchored to the truth that's intended to push emotional buttons in order to change minds or persuade people to believe something. But that can come in many flavors. It can be conspiratorial. It could be simply false, but not a conspiracy theory. It could be positive, but false. Or positive, but highly exaggerated. The kind of rhetoric that you might see in North Korean state propaganda that Kim Jong Un wrestles bears and shoots down missiles with his pistol— it’s propaganda, but that's not conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories can also be used for purposes other than for propaganda. As we know, a lot of conspiracy theories don't come from the top. They come from regular people surmising what's happening in the world, reading Twitter, sharing ideas about vaccines. This doesn't become propaganda until the state starts appropriating it and then feeding it back out to the citizenry.

The post How conspiracies work in Russia appeared first on Coda Story.

Now known across Russia as the “Grandson from Tomsk,” Samborsky, 27, had gone to Moscow to knock on the doors of federal authorities to file complaints of gross medical negligence. When it became clear that instead of considering his complaints, authorities intended to arrest him, Samborsky fled to neighboring Georgia.

Sambosky told me his story when we met in Tbilisi, where he says Russian-speaking men have approached him, telling him it’s time to return to Russia. For that reason, he doesn’t share his future plans.

This text is derived from an interview with Sergey Samborsky conducted by Katia Patin. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Читайте эту статью на русском.

My grandmother’s name was Yulia Fedorovna. She taught Russian language, literature and history and inspired a lot of bright minds. Many of them are now scientists in our city, have masters degrees, doctorates in language. She is the brightest, most decent person I’ve ever known.

She taught me how to play the piano. She raised me from childhood and was really strict, so that I would become a good person. And here I am, not completely normal, but good enough. My wife, my other relatives, I have never loved them the way I loved my grandmother. I would go through hell and highwater for her. And I have.

In Tomsk I worked as a welder. I had a quiet, normal, calm life and didn’t have any problems. I can’t say I have a lot of friends, but the ones I have are true friends. I lived with my wife, my brother and my grandmother.

Tomsk is a really beautiful city. It’s a university town. They call it the Athens of Siberia because we’re the smartest city in Russia with the largest number of students. I am a patriot of my city and the region where I was born. I know every stream, every part of the forest in a 100 kilometer radius of my village in the Tomsk region. The people there are kind, but the problems begin with the authorities.

People are dying in our hospitals. They are being treated with medications that the WHO does not recommend for treating coronavirus, for example arbidol, gripferon. If you break your leg, or have some other injury, and your temperature is higher than 37 [98.6 F], you are automatically admitted to the Covid ward, even if you’re completely healthy otherwise, and left there. When you call an ambulance and tell them you have Covid symptoms, they will show up at your house in six days. My friend had Covid and called an ambulance. They showed up a month later.

My grandmother was 84 years old and had Alzheimer’s. I took care of her at home. She was partially paralyzed, she had nearly full muscle atrophy. I would change her diapers, feed her, wash her. On October 21, around 5 p.m. in the evening, I was preparing food for her when she started gurgling. I turned around and she had foam coming from her mouth, her eyes had rolled back and her lips were blue. I called the ambulance.

When I got to the hospital, my grandmother had already been taken away for a CT scan. I walked up to registration, asked where she was and they directed me down the corridor where about 50 people were sitting and coughing. All with Covid. I walked by an elderly woman sitting on a stretcher practically naked with a mask underneath her chin. She was shaking from the cold. I asked a doctor for help and it took 15 minutes for him to find a nurse to get a blanket.

Then I went to find my grandmother. She was in a room with five beds, all Covid patients. The doctor said that she needed oxygen. I took down the phone number of the woman in the bed next to her and left after about an hour. The next day, I called the woman. She said no one had been in to see my grandmother. No one had fed her, washed her or changed her diapers. They had tied her to the bed.

This was really a shock to me. I’m an impulsive person. I got up and went straight away to the hospital. I watched nurses coming in and out of the hospital without even taking off their protective clothing. They would go for a smoke and then walk back in with their dirty shoe covers.

So I walked up to a parked ambulance and bought some protective gear off of the drivers. They aren’t allowed to do that but they sold it to me for double the cost. This is Russia. I walked to the back of the building where there is a small forest and changed. I had a protective suit, a mask and goggles. There was no security, the door was wide open. I started filming, walked in and no one looked at me twice.

When I got to my grandmother, I was horrified. I don’t know why they had tied her to the bed, her entire arm was covered in bruises from the restraints. I checked my grandmother’s diaper, it was filthy. She had her oxygen mask up on her forehead. She has three bed sores, one on her knee, two on her hips. They had changed the bandage on the right side, but on the left hadn’t even touched it.

How to explain this? It’s apathy and laziness. This is not some exceptional case. This is happening across Russia’s hospitals. I’ve had hundreds of people write to me with their own stories since I published my videos.

I spent eight or nine hours a day in the ICU. I would come in and out but for the most part was hiding, not to draw more attention to myself. Some of the other patients would ask me for water or to help with their bedding. I took out the trash.

Sunday, October 25 was the last day I was in the hospital before they discovered what I was doing. I sat down next to my grandmother on the bed and she looked up at me. She said, “Seryozha I love you.” She recognized me for a few seconds. She hadn’t recognized me in over three years. For that, it was all worth it. 

I gave my footage to the local channel TV2. TV2 is an exception in Russia. It’s the best regional channel in the country, they are always covering people’s real problems and telling the truth no matter how many times they’ve been threatened. Within two or three days, my story was all across Russia. At first, I stayed anonymous and was called the “grandson from Tomsk.” After TV2 published my story, the police confiscated their footage and called in their editor Aleksandr Sakalov for questioning.

Next, I thought that Moscow could help me. Moscow doesn’t know what is happening in the regions. Or maybe they know but just don’t acknowledge it publicly. There is this rap group called 25/17 from the city Omsk and they have this lyric: “My Moscow is the capital of your country.” Moscow really is a separate country. There are different people there, different laws. I thought Moscow was my last hope.

So I left Tomsk for Moscow for the first time. I went to the main office of the investigative committee. I offered to show my videos to the person I was directed to. “What’s the point in that?” He was completely unmoved. He said, “You’re welcome to file a complaint but if you get a response, it will take at least a month.”

I went to the federal prosecutor’s office and the office of the presidential administration. From all these places I got the runaround. The investigative committee told me to write to the regional office. The prosecutor's office recommended that I also go to the regional office. I got the same from the office of the president.

When I was in Moscow, the story became national news. A media campaign started against me across the pro-government channels. REN-TV was the worst. It’s a disgusting channel. We had agreed that they won’t publish my full name and will blur out my face, my grandmother’s face and the sensitive footage of her. But they showed everything. I told the truth about medical care in Tomsk and in Russia, the truth about our government. And now all the state channels were trying to drown me.

I’ve been accused of doing all of this for my grandmother’s retirement payments. That I beat her, had her chained to a radiator, starved her, kept her as a prisoner.

In Russia you hardly need to give people a reason to devour you. My story was forcing people to wonder whether their loved one had died from a disease or because of indifference from the system.

When I flew back to Tomsk, I was called in that evening to the local investigative office for questioning. They told me to hand over my phone and said they suspected that the video was fake, that I had edited the footage and made up the whole thing. They threatened to arrest me on the spot and search my home. I refused to hand over my phone.

On October 30, my grandmother died. The official cause of death was pneumonia. Not a single word about coronavirus. I always imagined my grandmother would die peacefully at home, the way we all should. It was her dream to pass in her sleep. But in the end, she died in despicable conditions.

I have a relationship with someone working in the police. He told me, “They are discussing opening a criminal case against you and you have to leave.”

I buried my grandmother, left Tomsk and Russia.

Now I’m in Georgia but I don’t feel safe here. I’m Russian. I still can’t get used to the fact that the police are okay here. I’ll be walking and hear a police siren and get all tense. The aftershocks of living in Russia.

Today is my birthday. We were celebrating last night. At midnight we opened a bottle of wine, had some food, and three people came up to me. They said, “Sergey Samborsky, it’s time to go back to the homeland.” These people aren’t my friends, they aren’t my relatives. My real friends wouldn’t tell me to come back home now. These were people somehow connected to the government.

It’s my 27th birthday today, I hope it’s not my last.

The post I disguised myself as a Covid ICU doctor to care for my grandmother. Now, the Russian government is after me appeared first on Coda Story.

Tertishnik’s village was once a backwater, best known for smuggling petrol and cigarettes across the poorly guarded border. But, in 2018, a tall barbed wire fence was erected by Russia along a street named Friendship of Nations, splitting the community into two: Milove in Ukraine and Chertkovo on Russian territory. The smuggling has stopped, and now relatives and neighbors on opposite sides of the street have to travel to border checkpoints to visit each other. 

The divisions in the village, and the country, have imposed a heavy economic and social cost on Milove, but when asked how his life has changed, the first thing Tertishnik mentions is the coronavirus — and vaccination in particular. The 73-year-old is angry because Ukraine does not use Russia’s Sputnik V shot, so he has to receive one of the several Western formulas registered for use in Ukraine.    

“I think Sputnik is better, because it’s been through so many tests and is being used in lots of countries,” he said. “These others, their quality is questionable. Even the media often says so.”  

The pandemic has created a tidal wave of disinformation in nations across the world. But in Ukraine, the conflict over lockdowns and vaccinations has been deepened by the fault lines of a war between government forces and Russia-controlled separatists in the east of the country since 2014. So far, the conflict has claimed 14,000 lives. It has also entrenched divisive narratives over whether Ukraine should look west towards Europe or east to Russia, that have led people like Tertishnik to favor an unobtainable Russian vaccine over the ones freely available at their local hospital. 

Tertishnik’s preference for Sputnik V is strongly linked to nostalgia for the Soviet era, which he remembers as a time of order, certainty and harmony. Economic hardship, the new borders separating him from neighbors and family, and conflicting media messaging — he says he watches both Russian and Ukrainian TV — have exacerbated his sense of grievance. Conversations with him are peppered with assertions that Russians and Ukrainians were friends for centuries before the West interfered, and that Ukraine is little more than a Western puppet state. 

To date, less than 10% percent of the population have had one or two coronavirus shots. Pandemic conspiracies and vaccine hesitancy can be found across the nation’s social and political spectrum. A survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in April found that 53% are not willing to be vaccinated, mainly because they fear that the shots have not been sufficiently tested. 

However, the biggest numbers of those uncertain or unwilling to be vaccinated were in the eastern and southern regions which are traditionally more Russia-oriented. A March survey by the independent research organization Rating Group Ukraine found consistently more vaccine hesitancy and refusal among supporters of the three main pro-Russian opposition parties in Ukraine. Those respondents were also more likely to trust Sputnik V than other vaccines.  

Ukrainian politicians don’t have to be pro-Russian to criticize the government’s pandemic response and vaccine policy. But research published in April by the European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic service, has detailed how Russia’s “vaccine diplomacy” drive has used state-controlled and proxy news outlets, along with social media, to undermine trust in Western-made vaccines, EU institutions and vaccination strategies. A report from the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre identifies how this disinformation campaign in Ukraine aligns with broader attempts to divide society and turn the country’s vector from west to east.

In February this year, the Ukrainian government announced it would not register Russian Sputnik V. Most of the EU, including France, Germany and Italy, had also not approved it, citing missing clinical trial data. But the Ukrainian government ruling explicitly bans Covid-19 vaccines developed or produced in an “aggressor state.”  

The ban provided a prime opportunity for Russian media, and pro-Kremlin media in Ukraine, to accuse the government of committing “genocide” of its people for political purposes. It also tied neatly into the long-term disinformation narratives that divide the country, accusing the West of pushing Ukraine into war in 2014 and, now, of experimenting on Ukrainians with vaccines, to the benefit of big business. 

While Ukraine negotiated for vaccines from the EU and the World Health Organization’s Covax program, Russia scored a propaganda goal by providing Sputnik V to separatist territories in east Ukraine.

The pandemic had already damaged increasingly tenuous ties between Ukraine and the eastern and Crimean territories it lost to Russia in 2014. Pre-Covid-19, more than a million people, mostly residents of separatist territory, crossed the de facto border in east Ukraine every month. When politicized quarantine restrictions restricted crossings, those people were largely deprived of family contact, jobs, Ukrainian pensions and other benefits, in addition to a shared information space.   

Ukraine initially closed all the de-facto borders with what it refers to as its “temporarily occupied territories” in March 2021, as part of a strict nationwide Covid lockdown. The government was keen to emphasize the alleged disastrous level of coronavirus infections in Russian-controlled territories, although real figures were impossible to come by. Restrictions were lifted after three months, but immediately imposed by separatists in the east and Russian-annexed Crimea, who cite Ukraine’s inability to cope with the coronavirus crisis. 

The separatist-imposed restrictions have remained in place ever since. Currently people must provide numerous documents to justify their trip over the de-facto border in order to obtain permission to cross at a set date and time. Just one crossing there and back is allowed a month. 

Konstantin Reutsky, who heads the Ukrainian NGO Vostok-SOS providing assistance to residents on both sides of the frontline, believes there is no epidemiological justification for the separatist-imposed restrictions. Instead, he says, they are just another tactic in the information war. Ukrainian media is blocked on separatist-controlled territory — and even in some adjoining Ukraine-controlled areas — and Russian and separatist media portray Ukraine as on the verge of economic and social collapse. With access closed, people have no opportunity to see that in fact Ukraine is rebuilding and developing areas close to the frontline. 

Russia and separatist authorities “don’t want people to see that things are better on this side,” said Reutsky. “Covid was an excuse.” 

Crossing points and vaccines

After a peak in spring this year, when coronavirus infections were reaching 15,000 per day, it is hard to see how Ukraine’s currently low rates of less than 1,000 new cases a day can justify the ongoing restrictions. Ukraine’s extensive building program in the east includes a whole new crossing point on the de facto border, with banking and postal services and a center for processing Ukrainian documents and benefits. This crossing, however, has never been opened due to disagreements for which each side blames the other. 

Meanwhile, Stanitsia Luhanska in Ukraine is one of only two crossing points with separatist territories now open. Queuing to navigate the jumble of fences and kiosks on the Ukrainian-controlled side, travelers have to contend with a number of coronavirus-related complications on Ukraine-controlled territory too. A free bus service to the Ukrainian checkpoint stopped when the crossing temporarily closed last year, and has not been reinstated. Until recently, Ukrainian authorities required that inhabitants of the separatist territories take a Covid test on arrival, but took months to provide free tests.  

In June, Ukraine hit back in the Covid vaccine propaganda war. It began a long-promised government program of free vaccination for inhabitants of annexed Crimea and the separatist “republics,”, describing the move as a response to “medical genocide” against Ukrainians living under Russian occupation. 

People can book an appointment by registering online or calling a hotline, and can choose locations near the front in east Ukraine and Crimea. Those who have registered for vaccination are allowed to skip the queue at the Ukrainian checkpoint. By mid-July, 393 people had registered for the program, according to the Ukrainian Ministry for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories. 

In Stanitsia Luhanska, vaccination with the Chinese CoronoVac is available for people from the separatist “Luhansk People’s Republic” (LPR) twice weekly in the primary medical center. Located in Stanitsia Luhanska hospital, the center is an island of bright new renovation in a building otherwise much in need of repair. On a recent swelteringly hot day, a family had traveled over 100 km from Alchevsk in the LPR, to renew their Ukrainian bank cards and for their 28-year-old daughter, Yelena, to be vaccinated.

“I’ve been waiting for this program,” Yelena said. The announced supplies of Sputnik V to the LPR ran out in April, she said, when priority groups such as medics and police were vaccinated. Since then, the only option was to travel to Ukrainian government-controlled territory, or, for Russian passport holders, to Russia. 

“I don’t like the propaganda around it,” she added. “But there’s propaganda on both sides.” 

Yelena found out about the Ukrainian program from the social media page of a Ukrainian NGO. “Those who want to find information discover ways of finding it,” she said. “And those who are okay with Russian propaganda don’t need alternative sources of information.”

Yelena said that there was a good deal of anti-vaccine sentiment in Alchevsk, as well as theories that the virus was artificially created or doesn’t exist, and distrust of the Ukraine program. 

“None of my relatives, except my parents, think it’s a good idea to come here,” she said. “Even my father was, like, ‘How do you know they’ll give you a vaccine? There’s a shortage of vaccines in Ukraine’. He’s skeptical, he doesn’t trust the government.”

Yelena’s experience at the clinic did not change her father’s mind, but by the end of their visit her mother, trembling with nerves, also got her first shot. 

While people like Yelena make the complicated journey west over the frontline to get a vaccine in Ukraine, Natalia Kravchenko, a doctor administering the program in Stanitsia Luhanska, would prefer to look east. She yearns for Soviet-era health care and research which she considers to still be effective and strong in Russia.

“I, personally, would like to be vaccinated with Sputnik V. I was born in Russia and have a Russian mentality,” said Kravchenko, who is in her 50s. “But we inject with what they give us. It’s all politics. We were friends and now we’re enemies. What can you do?”       

One village, two vaccine drives

Back in Milove the local hospital, which is being renovated as part of a $235 million European Investment Bank program for east Ukraine, had vaccinated just 410 people by mid-July from a population of 5,800. A mobile brigade from a nearby town is also providing shots.

“Everyone reads on the internet,” said Iryna Smyrnova, the hospital’s head of secondary medicine. “They all call now and ask, ‘What vaccine is it?”

The majority who do get vaccinated in Milove are keen to get Pfizer or AstraZeneca shots manufactured in the U.K. or Europe, according to Smirnova. Not because they think those vaccines are any more trustworthy than others, but because the vaccination certificate will allow them to leave both government and separatist Ukraine and travel abroad. 

Even Tertishnik has registered to get a Western vaccine. “I don’t think it’s better, I think Sputnik is better, but those up top decided,” he said. 

When asked for the reasons behind his decision, he replied, “I want to live a bit longer, and see my grandchildren.”  

The post Russian vaccine propaganda is deepening divisions in conflict-riven Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

But now, with Navalny in failing health as he serves a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for parole violations related to a 2014 fraud charge, pro-government voices have surged across traditional and social media channels.

“The government’s strategy has changed,” said Abbas Gallyamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter turned political analyst in Moscow. “In the past, they just ignored him, but now they’ve gone to war with him.”

On April 1, the pro-Kremlin channels RT and NTV sent camera crews to Penal Colony Number 2, where Navalny is held, about 100 miles east of Moscow. Maria Butina, a Russian agent who was jailed and later deported from the United States in 2019, was the first person permitted to visit the jailed opposition leader. The report centered around allegations made by Navalny of forced sleep deprivation and other abuses at the penal colony posted on his social media accounts. His wife, Yulia Navalnaya, wrote on March 25 on Instagram that “these bastards” were even denying him painkillers for the severe back pain he’s had since his trial. The pain had escalated and he was losing sensation in his legs. On March 31, Navalny went on a hunger strike in protest of being denied basic medical care. 

During the broadcast, Butina described the conditions in which Navalny is being held as “exemplary.” She glossed over Navalny’s more serious accusation and instead asked him why he refused to tidy up his personal space, an accusation leveled against him by a cellmate earlier on camera. Navalny responded by calling Butina a “sad parasite.”

On April 7, Navalny’s lawyers reported that the numbness he was experiencing in his legs had now spread to his hands and that he had dropped nearly 30 pounds in weight since arriving at the colony. The day before his personal doctor Anastasia Vasilyeva had been detained by police at a demonstration outside the prison gates demanding that Navalny be given medical treatment. A CNN reporter was also held. Earlier that week Navalny wrote in a social media post — sent on his behalf by members of his team — that three of his fellow inmates were hospitalized with tuberculosis and that he was displaying symptoms.

Amnesty International's Secretary-General Agnes Callamard addressed a letter to President Vladimir Putin on April 5 calling for Navalny to be released immediately. “There is a real prospect that Russia is subjecting him to a slow death,” read an Amnesty Twitter post. 

The details of Navalny’s imprisonment are now obsessively discussed nearly each evening on pro-government TV channels. During press briefings, government spokespeople have berated him for being a “hysterical sissy” about prison conditions.

This shift follows a rapid increase of awareness of Navalny’s work, even among those who support Putin. In the fall, following his recovery in a German hospital from an allegedly state-organized poisoning carried out in August, Navalny teamed up with the investigative journalism website Bellingcat, CNN and other international news outlets. His efforts went as far as calling up and duping a Russian agent into describing how Novichok nerve agent had been planted in his underwear. 

In January, when he returned to Moscow, Navalny was immediately arrested and put on trial. Two days later, his team published an investigation on YouTube into Putin’s personal wealth, which has now been viewed 115 million times. 

Vasily Gatov, a former senior executive at the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti, describes the media’s latest approach to Navalny as total “character assassination.”

“They hit somewhat of a dead end by allowing Navalny to develop on his own for such a long time,” he said. “In general, there are few figures that Russians trust, so the new frame here is distrust, that Navalny is not ‘for Russia’ and is a person of dubious character.”

The most high-level example of the shift is Putin breaking a historical, near-total silence on his most prominent critic. In October, Navalny had accused the Russian president of personally ordering the Novichok attack. During an annual press conference in December, Putin described the allegations as pure “falsification.”

“Who needs to poison him?” he said. “If they’d wanted to, they probably would have finished the job.”

With Navalny sick, in jail and under attack across Russian media channels, the ruling United Russia party has begun to co-opt some of his campaign strategies.

Navalny was never considered a serious threat to Putin as a candidate, but his political activism through a “Smart Voting” strategy upset the Kremlin’s power balance. First deployed during Moscow city elections in 2019, then again in nationwide regional elections in 2020, the highly organized voting campaign set out to unseat candidates from the ruling United Russia party in contested electoral districts.

Next up are parliamentary elections this September. But with Navalny behind bars, United Russia has launched its own “Smart Voice” strategy. Leaked campaign documents show that the party is deploying a bot army across social platforms to confuse voters into casting their ballots for the ruling party. At the same time, dozens of Navalny allies involved in Smart Voting have been jailed, with police even targeting the relatives of activists.

“You can say Navalny brought the fight to enemy territory,” Gallyamov said. “The entire government propaganda system is now working and Navalny is the enemy of that system.”

In recent days, Putin has further tightened his grip on power, passing a law on April 5 that allows him to stay in office until 2036.

The post Russian media launches a new line of attack against Alexey Navalny appeared first on Coda Story.

Last week, Russian prosecutors demanded a 15-year prison sentence for Dmitriev. The case centers around naked photos Dmitriev took of his then pre-teen daughter which were seized after an anonymous tip to local police in Petrozavodsk, a city in northwestern Russia. Dmitriev says he took the photos for doctors taking care of his daughter. The photos were also the subject of a previous child pornography case against Dmitriev which was thrown out in 2018.

The announcement from the prosecution on July 7 is the latest episode in a four-year-long courtroom saga.

“The charges are distressing and needless to say, sound horrible, and I think that this is a specific strategy because the goal wasn’t to just neutralize an undesirable person,” said Irina Galkova, director of Memorial International’s museum in Moscow. Most of the court proceedings were held behind closed doors and few details can ever be released about the case, said Galkova. “Even if he is acquitted, the strategy would have accomplished its goal.”

While Dmitriev was held in pre-trial detention, a group of Kremlin-backed historians have worked to rewrite the history of one of the largest sites the historian uncovered, Sandarmokh, where 9,000 victims of Stalin’s Great Terror are buried. The new narrative casts the site as a World War II-era burial ground and dilutes Sandarmokh’s association with Stalin. “This is happening across the board,” Galkova said. “We see how convenient it is to switch over attention from the collective memory of the repressions to the Great Patriotic War [WWII].”

Head of a local branch of Memorial, an NGO focusing on political repressions, Dmitriev has uncovered and documented mass grave sites since the late 1980s, well ahead of other memorialization efforts. He is responsible for recording thousands of names of those killed during the Great Terror and his name appears in the pages of Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize winning history of the Gulag, in Masha Gessen and Misha Friedman’s 2018 book “Never Remember” and in scores of other books.

Applebaum, who met with Dmitriev while researching her book, called his arrest “appalling” and a “profound reversal” in attitudes towards Gulag history when I spoke with her earlier this year for Coda’s documentary series, Generation Gulag. “This is somebody who should be a local community hero,” she told me.

The unusual nature of the charges against Dmitriev have brought the case international attention. Russian state television channels have hounded the historian, accusing him of attempting to escape abroad and other charges.

You can watch Coda Story’s Generation Gulag series about the Kremlin’s campaign to rewrite Soviet history here.

Photo by Igor Podgorny\TASS via Getty Images

The post Russian prosecutors demand 15-year prison sentence for Gulags historian appeared first on Coda Story.

Antonina is 23 years old. She doesn’t identify as male or female, and accepts any pronoun people assign to her. She has cropped dark hair and talks softly during our video chat.

“Yesterday, on the street, a little boy called me ‘lady’ and an old lady called me ‘boy,’” she told me. 

Before the lockdown began, life in Yekaterinburg, a city to the east of Russia’s Ural mountains, often threw up these situations for Antonina. She asked to be referred to by her first name only, for fear of repercussions. 

“The society in Yekaterinburg is not exactly tolerant,” she explained. 

In Russia, members of the LGBTQ community have long faced hostility, ignorance and abuse both outside and within their own families.

As Russia’s Covid-19 cases have rocketed to more than 414,000 – the third-highest infection rate in the world — a strict lockdown has been imposed across the country. Those measures have exacerbated Antonina’s feelings of isolation. 

“Self-quarantine is quite hard for me. I live completely alone and I get lonely,” she said. 

Unexpectedly, the early days of the lockdown also offered an opportunity to Antonina and many others. A LGBTQ-friendly festival had been planned for April in a St Petersburg warehouse complex. Rather than cancel it, the organizers decided that the three-day event would take place over Zoom. 

In previous years, Znakravenstvafest – which takes its name from the Russian for “sign of equality” – had been hugely successful with the community. 

“People felt they were in a different world – a different universe,” Nastia Dyakova, one of the organizers, told me during a recent video call. 

When the lockdown began, the organizers realized that holding a physical iteration of the festival was no longer possible. So, using the Russian social media platform VK, they began to advertise it as a ticketed online event.

On April 12, hundreds of people logged in to Zoom. The organizers asked attendees to shout out where they were from. The chat pinged with cities and regions all over Russia, the former Soviet Union and beyond. 

“People weren’t afraid to turn their cameras on,” said Dyakova. “They were dancing in their underwear, waving LGBTQ flags, and the atmosphere of acceptance was fully present.”

The 350-person gathering provided many young people with a means to escape the claustrophobic situations they had suddenly found themselves in. 

“I remembered that cleansing feeling of walking into a space and realizing people are like you,” said Alina, 21, who attended the festival from her bedroom in Karelia, northwest Russia and preferred I use just her first name.

The freedoms of the LGBTQ community in Russia are limited by both society and law. For instance, in 2013, Vladimir Putin’s “gay propaganda” legislation enshrined longstanding homophobic attitudes in law by banning the “promotion of nontraditional sexual relations to minors.” 

In practice, the law means that people under the age of 18 no longer have access to educational resources about sexuality. Activist groups like Human Rights Watch also report that these measures have contributed to a growing lack of mental health, legal and psychological support services for members of the LGBTQ community.

Russians will go to the polls on July 1 to vote on a constitutional amendment that will allow President Vladimir Putin to remain in power until 2036. On Tuesday, pro-Kremlin media released an anti-gay campaign video, warning viewers to vote for the amendment or face a country where same-sex marriage and adoption by gay couples is allowed. The video showed an orphan boy finding out he’s being adopted by a make-up wearing man. "Is this the Russia you’re voting for?” the video ends, as the couple embraces. The clip attracted hundreds of thousands of views – and harsh criticism. But the homophobia and prejudice it upholds are everyday realities for LGBTQ Russians like Antonina.

For Antonina, the festival — which included lectures, discussions and breakout rooms, all on Zoom — was eye-opening. 

“I realized there were so many people from the community,” she said. “There was a lecture on activism that really inspired us all to get engaged with the LGBT community in our cities.” 

For the first day of the festival, Antonina left her camera off, feeling safer watching anonymously.

 “On the second day, I got really into it. I turned my webcam on and was having fun with everyone else. I was smiling and started writing into the chat,” she said. Soon, she was dancing in full view of everyone. 

Gayza, 20, another festival attendee who asked to be identified only by her first name, is quarantined in the western city of Izhevsk with her parents. They don’t know that she identifies as queer.

“I’m still financially dependent on my parents,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out if they’d accept me. I’ve been trying to test the waters.”

Gayza added that her parents consume a steady diet of state media, via which the government’s anti-LGBTQ narratives are widely spread.

“My mother repeated some propaganda to me about same-sex marriage,” she told me. “She said, “how awful!”.”

Gayza had never been to an online or queer party before Znakravenstvafest. She stayed in her bedroom for three days, worried her parents might walk in because there was no lock on the door. 

“I told them not to disturb me,” she said. “I said it was educational, about feminism, and my mum didn’t react well. For her that’s the same thing as saying “queer.” She was like, ‘Don’t get yourself into a sect.’”

For the duration of the festival, Gayza joined her family only at mealtimes. Often, she found the lectures so interesting that she didn’t want to tear herself away.

 “My parents would get offended – “how is it possible?” they said. They couldn’t understand what was so important that I had to miss lunch.”

Since Znakravenstvafest, smaller LGBTQ and sex-positive Zoom parties have been happening every weekend in Russia. The security can be strict. 

Kinky Party is a Moscow-based sex party that welcomes people of all genders and sexual orientations. At its recently launched online events, there are queues to get in, and virtual doorstaff check names off against a list. On entry to the Zoom call, guests must introduce themselves to the host, or be unceremoniously kicked out. 

Despite hosting an altogether different kind of event, the people behind Znakravenstvafest also have to be careful. If the festival inadvertently admits someone under the age of 18, the organizers could face criminal charges under the propaganda laws. Meanwhile, LGBTQ-friendly events are constantly under threat of being hijacked or crashed by homophobic groups.

“We’re always trying to avoid the risk of the government approaching us or sanctioning us in any way,” said Dyakova, the festival’s organizer. 

But they believe the risks to be worth it. After the online event, Znakravenstvafest set up a Telegram chat, via which young people from all over Russia and the wider world could continue to talk. 

We are staying on the story of Russia’s anti-LGBTQ campaign. Last month, reporter Katia Patin examined how the laws forced one Russian YouTuber to flee the country.

Dyakova cried at the messages she received. Even over the internet, the festival had built a whole new universe. 

“The world we managed to create really was less violent and more accepting,” she said. “It was more open-minded than our reality.”

It has also paved the way for other online gatherings. 

Maxim Cuclev is an activist and filmmaker from Chisinau, Moldova, who has strong links with the Moscow queer scene and has made documentaries about LGBTQ life in his own country. 

Along with about 50 people from Russia, Moldova and Europe, I attended a Spring Queerantine party he co-hosted with fellow Moldovan activist Paula Cerescu in early May. Cuclev painted his face in what he described as “acid harlequin” makeup. Green disco lights bounced off the wall behind him and a patchwork of Zoom windows showed other faces lit in orange, pink and blue. 

Slava Rusova, a young non-binary musician quarantined with her mother in the Moscow region, stared through the camera with a languid expression, wearing a white tank top. The screen lit up her pale face. 

“Since we were born, we’ve been in self-isolation,” she said. “But it’s harder right now. We can’t be together with our friends.” 

However, Rusova added that the online gatherings do feel more secure than LGBTQ events in the real world. “You can just push the button and the person that’s trying to bully you goes away,” she explained. 

Still, lockdown – which is beginning to ease in Russia, despite continually rising Covid-19 numbers – can’t end soon enough. 

“I want to go to a real party,” she said. 

Photos by Thomas Dworzak, a photographer and current president of Magnum.

Alexandra Tyan contributed reporting. Karina Levitina contributed research.

Correction: The anti-gay ad was run by a pro-Kremlin outlet, not state media as stated in a previous version of this article.

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On the outskirts of Tbilisi, staff at the U.S.-funded Lugar Research Center are helping to limit the spread of COVID-19 in Georgia by testing hundreds of samples and turning results around in under 24 hours. 

The lab, funded by $350 million in American taxpayer dollars, has been at the center of Georgian media coverage for weeks. But for years prior to this pandemic, it’s been the subject of media attention for a different reason – as a key target for Russian disinformation campaigns.

In January, the lab activated its emergency response unit, and quickly focused its resources on testing for COVID-19. When Russian and Chinese state media began claiming the coronavirus is the product of a U.S. military bioweapons operation, one Russian outlet, Kremlin-backed RenTV, went further: it attempted to pin the pandemic to the Tbilisi Lugar Lab. 

“This is propaganda. What can we do?” said Paata Imnadze, director of the lab in an interview with Coda Story. He added that the coronavirus outbreak may now play a part in shifting Georgian attitudes towards the center. “For me it's  more important that the majority of our population will now see why we need it.”

Russian military expert Igor Nigulkin was one of the first Kremlin figures to push conspiracy theories linking the disease to the US military. “We will soon see who coronavirus is directed against,” said Nigulkin on Ren-TV in January. “It can be beneficial for American corporations that are developing these kinds of new diseases just for profit. Or maybe for the Americans themselves, because America is the only country that has 400 military biological laboratories around the world.” 

A reporter on Ren-TV, which reaches 115 million viewers, then singled out Tbilisi’s Lugar lab as a potential source of the virus.

When Coda Story visited the lab, technicians were busy testing samples of COVID-19. “It’s not the first time journalists have visited the center – one time, all of Russian TV was here,” Imnadze told me as we watched technicians testing samples through a thick glass window. “Of course the majority of them showed nothing – and if they showed something it was just the opposite of what we told them.”

Asked how he felt about the constant onslaught of disinformation targeting the lab, Director Paata Imnadze shrugged. “It doesn't affect me. But it does affect people who still believe propaganda. We’re waiting for the next propaganda activity from our neighbor.”

Conspiracy theories about the work done at the Lugar Lab have persisted for years. Coda Story previously wrote about the lab in 2018 when the Russian Defense Ministry claimed the facility was a secret U.S. bioweapons project, posing a threat to neighboring Russia’s security. Kremlin-backed media also floated conspiracies that the lab is a “nest of viruses,” illegally testing on Georgian citizens and responsible for events as diverse as flu outbreaks, Ebola, and the Skripal poisonings. 

It’s been a source of frustration for the lab’s directors and Georgia’s disease control officials. 

“I do not like this question. The source of this disinformation is one country – you know which country it is, yes?” said Amiran Gamrekildze, Head of the National Center for Disease Control. “If you can nominate another country except this one, our big neighbor, then I will answer this question. Everybody agrees that the Lugar lab is for public health research, and nothing to do what our big neighbors are manipulating.” 

The U.S. government built the $350 million lab in 2011, with the aim of limiting the spread of disease in the region, and dealing with deadly pathogens left over from the Soviet Union’s biowarfare program. 

The lab’s high levels of biosafety and advanced technology are part of what makes it a target for Russian disinformation. 

In recent months, the lab has been crucial in quickly testing for the coronavirus in Georgia. “For tracking the virus, it’s very important to have results as quickly as possible,” said Imnadze. “The technology we have here is very unique for this region,” he said, adding that the lab was starting to carry out sequencing work, contributing to broader international research on the virus’s behavior.

While the lab’s employees are fighting on two fronts, in Georgia at least, attitudes towards their work is changing. 

“There’s always been a big question mark about the Lugar Lab,” said Sandro Bregadze, the leader of the extreme-right Georgian March party, previously one of the loudest Georgian voices calling for the lab’s closure. “When something is secret there are always doubts – are they working in the Lab on some kind of biological or chemical weapon?” But, Bregadze added, seeing the work the lab had been doing to combat coronavirus in recent months, he was grateful. “I think that the Lugar laboratory plays a very important role in the fight against the virus,” he said. “I want to thank the lab for doing such a good job.”

At the time of writing, there are 34 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Georgia. Just a few hundred miles away from coronavirus-hit Iran, Georgia’s outbreak is currently under control. “We’re in response and containment mode,” the lab’s head of emergency response, Ana Kasradze, said. “We hope we’ll keep the rate very low.”

The World Health Organization is clear on how to mitigate the spread. “We have a simple message for all nations: test, test, test,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday.

The post A US-funded lab in Tbilisi, Georgia fights COVID-19 — and Russian disinformation appeared first on Coda Story.

The post Syria Propaganda Train appeared first on Coda Story.

Their hair pulled up in buns, earrings and necklaces glinting, they came to the front of the stage one after the other to pose, perching on high heels. The frozen smiles, the music, the "quiz" to test the candidates' knowledge: all the familiar stereotypes of beauty contests were on display. At the same time, there was another show underway — one that symbolizes the country’s new direction.

Near the front several CAR ministers and officials watched the models perform from a VIP table covered with a white tablecloth. But judging by their body language, the most important VIPs here were several Russian officials sitting beside them. One, the first secretary at the Russian Embassy, Viktor Tokmakov. The other, Valery Zakharov, a former member of the Russian intelligence services, now working as security advisor to the country’s President Faustin-Archange Touadéra. And the on-stage battle to become “Miss Bangui” was sponsored by a Russian company with close ties to the Kremlin.

The beauty contest in this war-torn, mineral-rich African nation is just the latest indication of Russia’s growing interest in the continent and its willingness to confront traditional Western power-brokers with “hearts-and-minds” initiatives and not just hard-nosed security assistance.

It is part of a campaign aimed both at securing a slice of the Central African Republic’s rich reserves of diamonds, gold and uranium, while at the same time building a new axis of Russian influence across the continent, sometimes at the expense of the old colonial powers. France, in CAR’s case.

In the streets of Bangui, billboards are filled with the colors of the CAR flag announcing the opening of a new Russian-funded radio station called “Lengo Songo, 98.9 FM” — which means “Build Solidarity.” For now, it is only broadcasting music, but there are plans for news and talk shows.

This summer and fall, Russian money paid for “The Cup of Hope”, a youth soccer tournament in Bangui — made up of two female and eight male teams — following the FIFA World Cup in Russia. There was a drawing and poetry contest dubbed "Peace Through the Eyes of Children,” organized jointly by the CAR ministry of education and the Russian embassy. The prize was a beach holiday in Russia-annexed Crimea.

Blurred lines

The two Russians looked bored as they watched the beauty contest, but they smiled politely and applauded as the girls paused each time on stage. And when the winner was announced, it was the security advisor Zakharov who went on stage to congratulate her and award her prize. (When the final “Miss Centrafrique” competition was held earlier this month, they flew in “Miss Russia 2013” to give the winner her crown.)

This meant that, in effect, Zakharov was taking precedence over Tokmakov, the officially-accredited diplomat at the event, an illustration of how Russia has blurred the lines in this and other foreign policy initiatives — leaving some observers wondering whether it’s the government or the private sector that is in the lead.

To muddy the waters still further, the funding for the beauty contest, and the new radio station, has come from a Russian mining company called Lobaye Invest, which received exploration rights for gold and diamonds in two western areas of CAR this summer.

But Lobaye Invest is also indirectly linked to the Kremlin, as it is reported to be a subsidiary of a larger Russian business group founded by the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has close ties to President Vladimir Putin.

One of Russia’s richest men, Prigozhin wears many hats. He is believed to be behind the shadowy private military contractor known as Wagner, which has deployed weaponry and mercenaries in support of Russia’s most controversial military interventions in the last few years, including in Ukraine and Syria.

Prigozhin has also been dubbed “Putin’s Chef” by the media because of his lucrative catering contracts with the Kremlin. Earlier this year, Prigozhin was indicted by the US Justice Department on charges of meddling in the 2016 American presidential election through his St. Petersburg-based internet “troll factory,” the Internet Research Agency. That led to him being placed on a US sanctions list.

All this is background noise in CAR. In the local press and on social media, Russia has been receiving glowing reports for the support it has been giving to social and cultural activities in the country.

Building goodwill for Russia

Russia has also been sending a growing number of CAR lawyers, army officers and students to its own institutions for training — much as the US does from countries around the world, with the aim of building both contacts and information sources, as well as a reservoir of goodwill. Similar, Soviet-era initiatives left a legacy of a far flung ‘diaspora’ of Russian speakers worldwide — and Russia is keen to keep this going today as part of its efforts to project influence.

To cap this soft-power offensive, the Russian embassy in Bangui says that plans are underway to build a Russian cultural institute in the next two years.

Moscow has been open about what it is doing in the CAR, said the Russian security advisor Valery Zakharov, in an interview: “There have been lots of rumors. It was important to clarify what is going on in the country.”

Moscow has been open about what it is doing in the CAR, said the Russian security advisor Valery Zakharov, in an interview: “There have been lots of rumors. It was important to clarify what is going on in the country.”

"Russia is not just about arms,” he said. “Security can come only when we change people's lives. We must create positive ground.”

"Russia is not just about arms,” he said. “Security can come only when we change people's lives. We must create positive ground.” 

Valery Zakharov, Russian security advisor

This Russian surge into CAR all started last year — with an arms deal. For the past five years, the country has been under an arms embargo and sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council — aimed at ending CAR’s six-year old civil war. But in December 2017, Moscow won an exemption from the UN, allowing it to provide Central African government forces with a wide range of Russian-made weapons, ranging from rifles to anti-tank guns.

France, ironically, helped pave the way for Russia to move in to its backyard. Amid tensions between the two states over the conflict in Syria, Moscow vetoed a plan by Paris to give CAR a consignment of confiscated weapons. But the French miscalculated when they asked President Faustin-Archange Touadéra to meet with the Russian foreign minister to get the veto lifted, giving Moscow the chance to fill the gap.

In the year since, there has been a steady influx of Russians arriving to teach CAR troops to use the new weapons — in addition to a European Union-run program with the same troops. These Russian trainers almost certainly have a military background, judging by their style and demeanour, but Moscow calls them “civilian instructors.” According to Zakharov, there are now around 250 of these Russian trainers in the country — though Western diplomats believe the real figure is higher. And some of these Russians are embedded with CAR troops who are being deployed to some provinces outside the capital.

There is also a contingent of Russian military contractors helping to guard CAR President Touadéra — an ostentatious sight when they appear with him at official events. Their military-style fatigues bear the insignia of “Sewa Security Services,” another Russian private military company, or PMC.

There have also been persistent, but still unconfirmed, reports from diplomats, UN officials and non-governmental agencies working in Bangui that some of the Russians in the country are mercenaries linked to the shadowy Wagner group.

This past July, three Russian journalists were killed in mysterious circumstances 60 miles north-east of Bangui, while on an assignment to investigate reports of Wagner’s presence — and what happened remains unclear.

Zakharov, the security advisor, rejected reports that the Wagner group is involved in CAR, insisting that the training personnel “are reservists and former soldiers.”

According to the independent Russian news site Fontanka.ru, Zakharov has worked with Prigozhin, the suspected backer of the Wagner mercenaries, in Russia. He had years of experience with an Interior Ministry surveillance unit in St. Petersburg, and later served in a similar role with customs enforcement, the website reports.

Although he denied links to Prigozhin when interviewed by Coda, Zakharov confirmed he has worked with the intelligence services in Russia’s restive north Caucasus and suggested his experience there is useful in CAR. “I am a specialist in the management of religious conflicts — I worked in Chechnya and Dagestan. And the situation here, after all, is somehow similar to what we experienced in Russia in the 1990s.”

In recent months, two more Russians have been making their presence felt at meetings with CAR officials and ceremonies for newly-trained Central African troops, working alongside Zakharov. Unlike the majority of the Russians sent here, who have a military-look, these two wear sharp suits and neatly groomed beards.

They are Vasily Alexandrov and Stanislav Skopylatov, whose job titles are “Assistant in public relations” and “Assistant in politics to the national security advisor” respectively, according to their business cards. Like Zakharov, and many other Russians working in CAR, they are both from St. Petersburg — the home city of Prigozhin and Putin himself.

The more polished of the two, Skopylatov previously worked for Alexander Khodosok, a member of Putin’s United Russia party in the St. Petersburg legislaturе and a former senior military figure. Not long before moving to Bangui, Skopylatov was reportedly named in an investigation into corruption in a defense ministry real estate deal.

Alexandrov is active on ultra-nationalist internet forums dedicated to Russian militarism, martial arts and far-right politics. In one post, he is photographed wearing a T-shirt printed with the words “Orthodoxy or Death.” In another post, he wears a tee from Pravy Bereg (Right Side), a St. Petersburg clothing brand popular with neo-Nazis and soccer hooligans whose slogan is “Against Tolerance.” In yet another post, he is with an instructor explaining the workings of a Kalashnikov rifle.

What unites the two is previous experience in public relations work. Alexandrov was a promoter for a discount card firm called “Go! Petersburg.” Skopylatov owned Image Service, a PR outfit that he shuttered in November. They came to fill a void in the Russian communications strategy, fitting in much better among Bangui’s elite, or on the entertainment scene, than their soldierly-fellow citizens.

For President Touadera, all this help from Russia has been timely. Two and half years after he was elected, he has little to show for it. He is struggling to keep his promises of reviving the country's economy and reestablishing security. One-fifth of the population is displaced or living as refugees outside the country. Armed groups continue to fight for control of mineral deposits, largely unhindered by the 11,000-strong UN peacekeeping force, which is often criticized for its lack of action. France ended it is military mission in the country in 2016, leaving many CAR people feeling abandoned.

"Then we are criticized for seeking other partners. Is that a joke?" 

Thierry Kamach, the CAR Environment Minister

"Then we are criticized for seeking other partners. Is that a joke?," said Thierry Kamach, the CAR Environment Minister and also a wealthy businessman, as he downed glasses of fine French wine at “Carré Gourmand”, a restaurant in Bangui popular among expats and wealthy Central Africans. "We are a free country. The Russians are here now, and the people are happy. This is a new era for the Central African Republic.”

Viktor Tokmakov, the First Secretary, said Russia is keen to rekindle old ties in the region. “Russia has had interests in the African continent for a long time. We decided to come back. We want to develop economic exchanges with CAR, and this can only be done with peace and security. Therefore, we’re trying to help in those fields”.

In the streets of Bangui, the general opinion is that Russia is a new, and helpful, development partner. But the value of Russian investments in the country is actually very low. As in other parts of the world where it is extending its influence, the Russian government has to do it on a limited budget.

Private companies such as Sewa Security and Lobaye Invest provide a multiplier effect for Russia, but in line with Kremlin interests given their close ties to the state.

"The political and economic objectives are linked,” argued Thierry Vircoulon, Central Africa analyst for the International Crisis Group (ICG), who has no doubt that Wagner is operating in CAR. “These companies work for the Kremlin’s security firm, Wagner, whose goal is also to make money.”

He points out that in many ways Russia has simply adopted the American approach, of employing PMCs that are closely aligned with the government — such as Blackwater, which had many key contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. “After all, it is the United States that has implemented this model," said Vircoulon.

There’s no interest in such details in the local media, which has increasingly adopted a pro-Russian tilt. Even relatively small initiatives — such as a donation of sports equipment to a school, or a trampoline to a childcare facility — receive extensive coverage.

There have also been reports that some local journalists have taken Russian money to write supportive articles. “Here, the press has to work with incentives. If anyone wants reporting on his activities, it often requires some kind of payment for the journalist”, said Yannick Nalimo, a civil society member, who regularly feeds local blogs and newspapers. “There is no advertising in the Central African media, so journalists need to survive.”

At the same time, a virulent press campaign has targeted the UN peacekeeping mission, France, and some foreign journalists who have been accused of seeking to destabilize the country.

ICG analyst Vircoulon says it is not all going to plan for Russia. They may have miscalculated “the complexity of the country," he said. “At the moment, they’re not making money in the Central African Republic. They need a peace deal to access the rebel-controlled diamond areas. If it does not work, they might just give up.”

There have been some signs of a Western pushback, with the UN Security Council refusing to approve Russia’s plans for a second delivery of arms to CAR. Russia responded by trying to stall the renewal of the mandate of the UN peacekeeping mission, before abstaining when it was finally approved. Nonetheless, the West still seems to be on the back foot, unable to compete with Russia’s energy.

Recent French efforts to play diplomatic catch-up have had little success. Likewise the European Union, which doesn’t provide any weapons as part of its training program. Africa as a whole has never been high on the strategic agenda of the US — compared to other parts of the world — and it has come as a surprise to see the Russians stepping in to places like CAR so energetically.

America has also been caught off guard by Russian peace initiatives elsewhere in the region — including in Sudan. So far, they have been unsuccessful there, but it is not giving up. And at the same time it is increasingly active in Angola, Eritrea and other African states.

Putin has already shown he is prepared to take long-term bets as part of his wider global push to re-assert Russian power. Some he may win, some he may lose. And in the game of chess that the Central African Republic has become Moscow is ahead. It may not be checkmate, but it has more pieces on the board and in better positions.

Support for Patricia Huon’s reporting was provided by the International Women’s Media Foundation.

The post Russia, the new power in Central Africa appeared first on Coda Story.

It is a memorial to more than 9,000 victims of Stalin’s “Great Terror”, who were shot and buried here by the Soviet dictator’s secret police between 1937 and 1938.

This striking piece of rock also serves as an unofficial monument to the work of the Russian historian who erected it and chose those words chiseled into its surface: Yuri Dmitriev has devoted his life to uncovering the truth of what happened at Sandarmokh, and putting names to these mass executions.

The pine forest beyond is dotted with simple tombstones and homemade memorials, adorned with plastic flowers. Black and white photos of the victims are pinned to the trees. That their descendants have been able to commemorate them in this way is thanks to Dmitriev’s tireless research, together with his colleagues from the Memorial human rights group.

So far — after 30 years of sifting records extracted from Soviet archives and digging up remains in the forest — they have documented the names of 6,441 people executed here, from 58 different nationalities. And the work goes on.

Except that now the history of Sandarmokh is being challenged.

A group of Kremlin-backed Russian historians are proposing to erect a new monument alongside the memorial to Stalin’s victims — to honor the Soviet Red Army. The “Russian Military Historical Society” says Red Army soldiers were the victims of war crimes committed here by neighboring Finland, when it occupied parts of Karelia during World War II in cooperation with Nazi Germany. Many of the skeletons in the forest, the society claims, may, in fact, be Soviet troops executed by the Finnish army — and it says its archaeologists have now dug up evidence.

Critics, though, say this is another Kremlin attempt to rewrite history, aimed at burying, or at least diluting, Sandarmokh’s association with Stalin. It is part of a strategy, they argue, to rehabilitate the Soviet dictator and emphasize his role as the victorious leader of what Russians call the “Great Patriotic War” to rally patriotic feelings. And it comes amid what Dmitriev’s supporters say is a concerted effort to discredit both him and his colleague, Sergei Koltyrin, the director of the museum associated with the Sandarmokh district museum

This September, the Russian Military Historical Society held a news conference in Moscow to declare what it called the “success” of its investigations at Sandarmokh. The assembled government-backed historians announced that during excavations at the site over the summer they had recovered the remains of five Red Army soldiers — who they said had been shot at point-blank range by Finnish troops in the 1940s.

Of more than 64,000 Soviet soldiers captured, it is estimated that at least a third died in Finnish-controlled prison camps from starvation, exposure and disease.

The announcement was notable too for the fact that Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin has previously preferred to ignore or even obstruct investigations into the fate of Soviet-era prisoners-of-war (POWs), regarding them as a stain on the Great Patriotic War narrative.

Amongst the evidence the historians cited was the discovery of green cloth, which they said had come from Finnish army coats that some Soviet POWs had ended up wearing.

Professor Mikhail Myagkov, one of the society’s historians, highlighted the range of foreign bullet casings he said had been found. “Remington, and the caliber 45, and Finnish rifles,” he reported before adding “and Soviet bullets.” But the presentation was far from conclusive.

There is no doubt, however, that Soviet Red Army soldiers captured by the Finns were treated terribly in the early years of what was known as the “Continuation War.” Of more than 64,000 Soviet soldiers captured, it is estimated that at least a third died in Finnish-controlled prison camps from starvation, exposure, and disease. At least 1,000 were shot trying to escape.

But this happened on Finnish territory, where the vast majority of Soviet POWs were kept, according to Antti Kujala, Professor of Finnish and Russian history at the University of Helsinki. There is no evidence of the Finns imprisoning Red Army troops at Sandarmokh, let alone executing them there. What’s more, according to Finnish archives, most Soviet POWs were given brown overcoats that had originally been procured from Britain before the conflict.

Far more likely, says Professor Kujala, is that the Russian excavations uncovered the remains of more political prisoners murdered by Stalin’s NKVD secret police (the forerunner to the KGB). “You can never reach 100 percent certainty in such cases,” he said, “but I still believe that the Military Historical Society has found the victims of the Great Terror from the 1930s.”

“I still believe that the Russian Military Historical Society has found the victims of the Great Terror from the 1930s.”  

Professor Antti Kujala, Helsinki University

Since making that announcement, the historical society — which is under the direct control of the Russian culture ministry — has been notably quiet. Its press office says only that the results of its investigations are still being examined. A request for an interview with Professor Myagkov went unanswered, and Sergei Barinov, the man in charge of the excavations at Sandarmokh, declined to comment for this story.

Nonetheless, if the goal was to spread competing narratives and to deflect attention from Stalin, then the Russian Military History Society has already proved itself.

Originally founded by Tsar Nicholas II as the “Imperial Russian Military Historical Society,” it ceased functioning with the Russian Revolution in 1917. Putin issued a decree in 2012 reviving it with a stated mission to “promote the study of Russian military history and counteract attempts to distort it,” as well as to “raise the prestige of military service, and education of patriotism.”

If the goal was to spread competing narratives, then the Russian Military History Society has already proved itself.

Even if the details are wrong, highlighting the fact that Finland has dark chapters in its past helps encourage “whataboutism,” experts on Russian opinion-influencing operations say, and makes it easier to neutralize discussion of Stalin’s crimes.

The Russian government has tried to protect Stalin’s image in other ways. Last month, it sought to ban an annual ceremony organized by the Memorial human rights group to commemorate his victims outside Lubyanka in Moscow, the longtime headquarters of Russia and the Soviet Union’s security services. It’s a sign of the depth of feeling around the issue that the authorities were forced to back down — with hundreds of people gathering in the square outside Lubyanka to pay tribute to the millions who died in the dictator’s purges.

Putin has made his own views clear, attacking what he called the “excessive demonization” of Stalin in an interview last year as “one means of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia.”

This political connection between Stalin's historical reputation and attacks on Russia may impact most the scholars and activists who challenge the Kremlin's preferred revisionism. There has been no let up on Memorial activists such as Yuri Dmitriev, the historian, and Sergei Koltyrin, the district museum director. The 62-year-old Dmitriev is now on trial for sexually abusing his adopted daughter, after being acquitted earlier this year on child pornography charges that also involved her. Koltyrin — who has openly dismissed the government historical body’s claims to have found the remains of Soviet POWs at the site — was detained last month.

However, many who have relatives buried at Sandarmokh are troubled by the Russian government’s attempts to distort and bury history.

”I’m against the new diggings at the mass burial site,” said Alexei, who discovered several years ago that his grandfather is buried there, thanks to Memorial’s research. “The Military Society ignores crucial historical events in order to create a new version of the truth,” he said.

Alexei lives near Sandarmokh and witnessed the Military Historical Society’s digging this summer. But he asked for his family name to be withheld for fear of being persecuted for speaking out.

He remembered how Barinov, the man in charge, had highlighted the fact that some of the skeletons they found had their hands tied together, suggesting that was a sign of “how the Finns killed the POWs,” shooting them from behind.

But that was a well-known signature of the NKVD’s execution methods. The archives show that at Sandarmokh they forced their victims face-down into pits — which they often had to dig themselves — before shooting them in the back of the neck. Professor Kujala agrees. “In my opinion, the fact that these five killed people had their hands tied behind their backs point to the NKVD.”

Alexei is receptive to the government on one point though — on how much responsibility should be laid at Stalin’s door. “The repressions? They were not Stalin's fault,” the 37-year-old said when asked who he believed had orchestrated the massacres at Sandarmokh and elsewhere.

And time may be with the government, as memories recede each year. A recent survey by a state-run pollster found that half of Russian young people aged 18-24 lack any knowledge of the killings during Stalin's purges — though they did say they would like to know more.

Another version of this article was published in the Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet

The post Digging up a new story for Stalin appeared first on Coda Story.

It started on August 23 with “a strong chemical smell,” Lena, a young lab assistant from Armyansk, remembered when we spoke. She thought it must have come from the Titan plant on the edge of town, which makes titanium dioxide, a whitening agent for paints and cosmetics. “At first I didn’t take much notice, because we often have chemical emissions here,” she said. But by the time she got home from work her eyes and throat were swollen and burning. “Next morning I fainted in the bath. I had an allergic reaction all over.”

Armyansk lies a short drive from the so-called Administrative Boundary Line (ABL) that has divided Crimea from Ukraine ever since Russia occupied and annexed the peninsula in 2014.

But as reports spread of what appeared to be a major health and environmental incident, authorities on both sides of the divide, in Russia and Ukraine, seemed more concerned with using the leak as a propaganda tool than addressing the needs of those affected or investigating the cause.

“No one said what was happening,” Lena recalled, as she sat smoking with a friend outside an empty Armyansk kindergarten. “The Ministry of Emergencies should have said to close the windows and stay inside. But lots of people went out and opened windows, and there was mass poisoning.” “Lots of people went out and opened windows, and there was mass poisoning.” Lena, Armyansk resident

Since Crimea’s annexation, the new Russian-backed authorities have imposed strict controls on the media, which now generally paints a positive, uncritical picture of events in the peninsula. What is reported is weighed not for factual accuracy, but to exclude dissident content and maximize propaganda value.

Fines and arrests for public dissent are a further disincentive to voicing alternative views. Lena and her friend, like everyone I met in Armyansk, would not tell me their surnames. After Yekaterina Pivovar, another local resident, spoke out about her concerns to the media using her full name, she was cautioned by the police and publicly pilloried on Crimea’s main television station.

There are no independent bodies left on the peninsula that can investigate. Neither can international agencies, with Crimea cut off from the outside world by sanctions and its disputed status.

When some local and Russian outlets picked up the Armyansk story on August 27, they reported only that there had been an emission of an “unknown substance.” The next day, Sergei Aksyonov, the man appointed by Russia to run Crimea, finally mentioned the leak. All he could say was that it was harmless, and “according to preliminary data” was emitted from the Titan factory.

The factory is owned by Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, currently in Austria fighting an extradition request from the U.S., where he faces charges of attempted bribery.

Bloggers in Crimea joined in the information battle. Those with pro-Ukrainian views posted emotional interviews with alarmed, angry locals. Others took Russia’s side and blamed the “Ukrainian terrorist government” — recycling what the Crimean authorities now said was the cause of the incident: Ukraine cutting the water supply to the factory’s waste reservoir.

Most of Crimea’s water needs used to be supplied from mainland Ukraine via a canal. After the 2014 annexation, Ukraine stopped the flow. Four years of falling water levels, coupled with a very hot, dry summer, were allegedly causing accumulated sulfur dioxide in the factory reservoir to evaporate into the atmosphere.

On September 4, some two weeks later, Aksyonov finally visited Armyansk. Distressed residents had gathered in the town’s square — a rare occurrence since under Russian laws now in force any gathering can be considered an “unsanctioned meeting” and participants detained or fined.

Aksyonov admitted that pollution levels were above normal, but insisted there was no serious health threat. The Titan factory was ordered to shut down for two weeks, and 4,000 children and their mothers were evacuated – although Aksyonov, and the government-controlled media, called it an “extended holiday.”

With the mass evacuation, Ukrainian media picked up the story. If Crimea-based outlets now report only good news, Ukraine’s media — with no accredited journalists in Crimea — now prefers only bad news casting Russia in a negative light. Ukrainian media claimed that Russian military exercises had caused the leak. Reports dubbed the incident a “second Chernobyl,” in reference to the devastating Soviet-era nuclear accident in 1986.

For the state-controlled Crimean media, this was a gift, allowing them to ridicule Ukrainian coverage instead of investigating what had happened. With many Ukrainian internet sites blocked, it is hard for people in Crimea to get any alternative news. One Armyansk resident who spoke about her concerns to the media using her full name was cautioned by the police and publicly pilloried on Crimea’s main television station.

About the only thing the two sides agreed on was to blame Firtash, the factory owner. For Russian and Crimean outlets, his nationality made him an easy target, ignoring his ties to Moscow that allow him to continue operating the plant. Pro-Ukraine outlets on the other side of the divide portrayed Firtash as selling out his nation and breaking international sanctions.

Hoping to get past the disinformation, I visited Armyansk in early September. After heavy rain, the heatwave had broken. Adults were on the streets. There was one sign of an official response: roads and buildings had been hosed down. But the air had a distinctly acidic flavor. Vegetation, especially on the northern side of town close to the factory, had turned brown or lost its leaves altogether, while a few miles south it was still green.

Nonetheless, some locals accepted the official line. “What happened? Autumn happened,” said Denis, a young man drinking coffee on a bench.

“The apples and pears are still there [on the trees], I just wash them before eating them. Just all the leaves fell off,” said Valya, a woman in her fifties selling soft drinks on the main street. She had no doubt the cause was the Titan plant, but she was apparently unconcerned.

“I was born here and I knew what it was right away,” she said. “For us, this is just normal.” Most of what she had read in the news, Valya said, was “exaggeration.” She was grateful to “our leadership for reacting in a timely manner.”

“It’s horrible, and why should we lie about it?” countered an elderly woman next to her, selling peppers from her allotment. But, she added, “Who can we complain to? We’re nothing; we’re just pawns.” One report dubbed the incident a “second Chernobyl.”

The Crimean health authorities had reportedly said there had been no increase in patients in Armyansk, and no cases of chemical poisoning. There were no patients to be seen in the hospital, nor anyone willing to talk. A group of nurses fell silent when I approached. An administrator told me only Crimea’s health ministry could comment.

I left Armyansk with a sore throat and the distinct impression — common in Russia-controlled Crimea — that people were afraid to tell the truth. The signs of pollution were obvious, although not as bad as some social media and Ukrainian reports had suggested. Locals said the evacuated children were due to return in three days.

Instead, three days later the authorities declared a state of emergency in Armyansk. Apparently another toxic gas — hydrogen chloride — had been detected.

At a news conference, Igor Mikhailichenko from the Crimean Cabinet of Ministers said that top of the list of the six likely causes was now “an emission of unknown chemical substances from the territory of the neighboring state”.

Ukrainian officials pointed the finger back. Among three possible causes they were considering was a “deliberate release of chemicals by Russia,” which they portrayed as a tactic to pressure Ukraine into resuming water supplies to Crimea. Monitors from Kherson administration bordering Crimea on the Ukrainian side said the pollution had most likely come from a one-off discharge. “We’re nothing; we’re just pawns.” Armyansk woman

There is no way to independently verify what had happened or its effect on health. A Crimea-based environmental NGO, the “Centre for Environmental Well-being”, told me it didn’t have the right expertise. Greenpeace International said there was not enough reliable information for it to be able to comment.

The state of emergency was lifted a week later, on September 23. Armyansk’s children returned to school. But earlier this month, Armyansk residents again complained of bad smells and allergies. The authorities in Crimea cracked down, and Yekaterina Pivovar was one of those who felt the effect.

She spoke to French television and the independent Russian outlet “Novaya Gazeta” about her children’s health problems, and her plan to visit the town mayor with other concerned mothers. Soon afterward, police came to her home to warn her against organizing an “unsanctioned meeting.”

That evening Crimean state TV named her as a provocateur and self-publicist spreading disinformation on behalf of Ukraine.

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The onset of fall has brought to Russia, as it often does, flu and conspiracy theories. Back in the news is Moscow’s seasonal talk of an imminent American biological attack, to be launched from medical research labs in Russia’s neighborhood.

In this telling, Russian pigs have become the first victims of a test run for a future offensive on humans. That was the insinuation from a recent press conference by the Russian Defense Ministry, which has noted that swine flu has been spreading to Russia from neighboring Georgia, home to a U.S.-sponsored medical research laboratory known as the Lugar Lab.

As Russia’s chief TV propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov is famously wont to say: “Coincidence? I don’t think so.”

And Moscow is bracing for things to get worse. “The U.S. is systematically building its biological potential and is getting control over national collections of pathogenic microorganisms” around the world, Major General Igor Kirillov told the October 4 press conference.

Russian defense officials described the U.S.-sponsored medical laboratory in Georgia as a mothership in a network of similar facilities built around Russia, “in Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan,” that can serve as launching pads for a germ war on Russia.

These accusations are not new. The epidemiological surveillance lab in Georgia, created to prevent outbreaks of epidemics, has long been the reason for paranoia outbreaks.

The U.S. government spent $350 million to set up the facility in Tbilisi, equipping it with a regionally unmatched capacity to detect and mitigate infectious disease threats. The lab — formally known as the Richard G. Lugar Public Health Research Center – is named after the former U.S. senator and non-proliferation activist, hence the Lugar Lab sobriquet.

But the U.S. funding and the involvement of American military medics turned the lab into one of Russia’s favorite information war punching bags, aimed at spoiling its neighbors ties with Washington. State-run Russian media has regularly targeted the lab in a vigorous scare campaign portraying the facility as a Pentagon-run petri dish of biological and chemical weapons, where unsuspecting Georgians serve as lab rats.

“Local residents tell us terrifying stories about the Lugar Lab,” ominously began one recent report by Russia’s Sputnik news network. “The wind brings a terrible stench, as from a stinky outhouse, [from the lab],” one elderly local woman told Sputnik.

An earlier report by Russia’s REN TV featured an elderly Georgian citizen who lives in the vicinity of the lab and “is wasting away before everyone’s eyes.” REN TV’s correspondent said that the woman’s health troubles began after “the former flight attendant sensed an unpleasant odor coming from the streets. She breathed in the air and immediately fainted.”

The story went on to claim that from 2014 the lab unleashed giant mosquitos and bats carrying viral infections across Georgia.

These tales tend to be laced with images of dead animals, biohazards signs and spooky video effects, and sci-fi horror tropes (think Andromeda Strain or Kiss Me Deadly). This correspondent visited the Lugar Lab last year and was disappointed to find a prosaic-looking research facility with no terrible stench, dead animals, or human subjected to experiments, but Russia can always argue that journalists don’t to get to see everything.

Russian news stories about the lab rely heavily on “revelations” coming from one eccentric American living in Tbilisi, a certain Jeffrey Silverman, who says that the U.S. will use bioweapons developed in Georgia to depopulate the Middle East and take over its oil. Despite a lack of evident expertise or knowledge, Silverman is held up as a bona fide American whistle-blower in the Russian media. “That lab is a time-bomb,” he intimated in an interview with REN TV.

But the source of the latest outbreak of ex-Soviet mysophobia is a shadowy former Georgian security minister, Igor Giorgadze. In September, Giorgadze called a press conference in Moscow to declare that the American military was conducting lethal experiments on humans in the Lugar Lab and that it is all part of Washington’s Strangelovian plans for Moscow. Giorgadze based his claims on documents that he allegedly obtained from the lab.

Giorgadze claimed that he had asked U.S. President Donald Trump to look into the work of the Lugar Lab. Trump has not said or tweeted anything about the lab, but Russian security and defense ministries followed up with a warning for Washington.

In Georgia, Giorgadze is widely seen as the KGB’s point man that late former President Eduard Shevardnadze was forced by Moscow to have as minister in his government. Giorgadze fled Georgia in 1995 after being accused of orchestrating an attempt on Shevardnadze’s life. Russian propaganda watchers are now saying that Giorgadze and Russian officials’ statements are part of a carefully planned information campaign, spread and amplified by Russian and pro-Russian international media.

“The reemergence of Russian media interest in the Lugar case coincides with charging [of] two Russian citizens in Britain with attempted poisoning of Sergei Skripal, [a] former Russian GRU office, and his daughter, Yulia,” said the Media Development Foundation, a Tbilisi-based non-profit group that keeps tabs on Russian propaganda. Some also linked the recent Russian preoccupation with biolabs with the series of indictments against Russian spies in the U.S., Britain and the Netherlands.

The Pentagon echoed that analysis, with spokesman Eric Pahon saying that the Russian defense ministry’s claims were an “attempt to divert attention from Russia’s bad behavior on many fronts,” AP reported.

Officials in Georgia and Azerbaijan also refuted Moscow’s accusations. Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry said the country has no foreign government-operated medical laboratory, while Georgian officials said that the Lugar Lab, although built with American money, is now fully controlled by Georgian authorities. U.S. military medical researchers continue to work at the Lugar Lab and insist that their work is entirely public health-oriented, but Moscow is not buying it.

In an unsuccessful attempt to assuage Russian concerns, the Lugar Lab’s Georgian management has repeatedly invited Russia journalists to tour the facility, but it hardly helped matters. “When Russian media representatives come visit the Lugar Center, they are all smiles,” said Paata Imnadze, head of Georgia’s National Center of Disease Control, which operates the Lugar Lab, in an interview with local news site ipress.ge. “But then they go back and spread dirt.”

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