#2
Bloomberg
April 2, 2015
Sanctions-Strapped Russia Outguns the U.S. in Information War
Moscow drowns out Voice of America, and facts are a casualty.
By Nicole Gaouette
 
The troubled U.S. agency responsible for delivering news around the world is being outgunned in Eastern Europe by Russian outlets unrestrained by notions of fact-based journalism.

The unequal competition raises fears among U.S. officials that Moscow is winning the information war about events in Ukraine, even as the Russian economy staggers under economic sanctions imposed after the takeover of Crimea.

"Russia has engaged in a rather remarkable period of the most overt and extensive propaganda exercise that I've seen since the very height of the Cold War," Secretary of State John Kerry told a Senate subcommittee in late February. It's "spending hugely on this vast propaganda machine," he told another panel the same day, and it's succeeding "because there's nothing countering it."

Not literally nothing. Up against Russia 24, Rossiya 1, Russia K, First Channel, Sputnik and other around-the-clock operations, are new U.S.-sponsored Russian-language offerings including, "Current Time," a newscast of just 30 minutes beamed into Eastern Europe on weekdays. The Voice of America show, co-hosted from Washington by Natasha Mozgovaya, is part of $23.2 million in programming aimed at Russian speakers. That comparatively small sum is up 49 percent from last year, according to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.

Russia Spending

How much Russia spends on its information programs is difficult to pin down, but in the face of sanctions forcing cuts elsewhere, President Vladimir Putin pledged to increase budgets for state-run outlets and cultural outreach. He said outlays for Rossotrudnichestvo, an organization devoted to spreading knowledge of Russia and its values abroad will rise from $60 million to $300 million by 2020.

The differences in approach between what Kerry describes as Russian propaganda and U.S.-supported outlets were on display last month, on the first anniversary of the Crimean annexation.

State-owned RT quoted Putin recalling that Crimeans had voted to return to the Motherland in the face of Ukrainian nationalism. The headline: "Coming Home." VOA reported details RT omitted from the same interview: Putin's acknowledgment that Moscow had planned the annexation and sent in troops weeks before the referendum. That headline: "Putin's Latest Crimea Spin Attempts New Narrative."

Fact-Checking

Given the David-and-Goliath challenge "Current Time" faces, preparation and fact-checking are among the program's best assets, says Mozgovaya, 35, a Russian-born, Israeli-raised former war correspondent. "We need to double and triple-check everything because the only thing basically that we have here is credibility," she said. "It's a very big responsibility because broadcasting one fake from our side will cost us the reputation."

Budgeted at about $2 million a year, the program airs in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Lithuania and Latvia. It's available free to networks and on Google Inc.'s YouTube. The Broadcasting Board of Governors, the parent agency of VOA and other government-backed outlets, doesn't know yet how many people watch "Current Time," which began in October, but social media feedback shows it's striking a chord, said Arkady Cherepansky, assistant managing editor of VOA's Russian Service.

Beyond the Russian-speaking region, RT, with an annual budget of at least $241 million, sends Moscow's version of events to the world in English, French, German, Spanish and Arabic.

Editorial Stance

The network is seen by more than 600 million people worldwide, said Peter Pomerantsev, who described Russia's "weaponization of information" in his book, "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible." U.S. and European officials and analysts say one of its aims is to undermine Western unity over economic sanctions.

Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius has called RT "no less destructive than military marching in Crimea." Its editorial stance is that there is no objective truth, said Pomerantsev. The point isn't persuasion, says Stephen Blank, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, but to muddy the waters. "You have your truth, I have mine, there is no truth."

The network's slogan is "Question More."

That editorial approach means RT gives air time to people who blame the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and entertains multiple theories about who shot Malaysian Airline System Bhd.'s Flight 17 out of the skies over eastern Ukraine.

'Broken' Agency

RT is amplified by social media disguised to look like ordinary people's accounts, said Angela Stent, director of Russian studies at Georgetown University in Washington. Its social media use is "very sophisticated," she said, and includes "people who troll and immediately bite back" at critics.

Requests for comment from the Russian Embassy and RT weren't answered.

Facing off against the Russian juggernaut is a U.S. agency that lawmakers have called "broken" and "dysfunctional." Last year, the State Department's inspector general found that the BBG, with a budget of more than $720 million for its worldwide activities, had wasted almost $5 million on unapproved purchases, couldn't properly record budget transactions, had inadequate IT security, and wasn't able to keep track of physical property.

In another blow, Andrew Lack, the former chairman of the Bloomberg Media Group who was sworn in as the BBG's chief executive officer and director on Jan. 20, left just six weeks later to run NBC News.

Spending Increase

Still, the U.S. is boosting the BBG's budget, saying that the Russian narrative in Eastern Europe must be countered. Baltic states are so "flooded with propaganda," Kerry told lawmakers, that people there aren't aware Russian soldiers have crossed the border into Ukraine or died there. Many think "we're the problem," Kerry said.

For fiscal year 2016, the Obama administration is requesting $38.6 million for Russian-language programming, a 66 percent increase, plus more than $20 million to train Russian-speaking journalists, support independent media and other programs.

Much of the effort to counter Russia's narrative unfolds in a ground floor studio at VOA headquarters on Washington's National Mall. In a darkened control room nearby, a producer scans dozens of wall-mounted screens as his team prepares to tape "Current Time."

Russian Speakers

The name, a pun in Russian, carries the connotation of "the real deal."

Some screens feature the show's Uzbek co-anchor preparing in Prague, others have camera angles at the United Nations. Several screens show Mozgovaya, blond head lowered over a laptop as she prepares for the show.

The BBG has hired more part-time correspondents who speak Ukrainian, Tatar and Russian. It set up news websites such as "Donbass Realities" focused on places under siege. There are plans for a central Asian version of the show and another focused on the Caucasus and for new mobile platforms, said Jeffrey Trimble, deputy director of the BBG's International Broadcasting Bureau. A 24-hour global Russian-language TV station, perhaps with European partners, is a longer-term possibility.

Information War

The target audience -- Russian speakers inside and outside the country -- is 260 million people worldwide. Stent, of Georgetown University, said Western democracy is one complicating factor in trying to reach them. "The problem is in the West we don't have one message and we're up against a very coordinated information war," Stent said.

Cameron Johnston, an analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris, said the Kremlin's media strategy "rests on three key propositions: there is no such thing as objectivity; journalists are not critics but servants of the state and, in wartime, they are 'soldiers of the ideological front.'"

Reaching those inside Russia, where Putin has steadily tightened controls on media, is increasingly difficult. In 2005, VOA was carried on almost 100 Russian outlets. Now it's on just one, and that may be eliminated by proposed Russian legislation that would ban "undesirable foreign organizations."

Alexander Tarnavsky, a supporter of the measure, said in the lower house of Russia's parliament on Jan. 20 that he hopes the law will "put the brakes on some of the foreign companies that joined the fight against Russia."

At the "Current Time" studios, staffers like Cherepansky say Russia's closed media market gives their job added urgency, particularly in spreading U.S. views on events. "Unless we go out, talk about it, it's as if it never happened," he said.

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 #3
The Hill
www.thehill.com
April 1, 2015
Is America losing the information war?
By Agnia Grigas and Seth Freeman
Grigas is the author of The Politics of Energy and Memory between the Baltic States and Russia and a forthcoming book on Russian compatriots and information warfare from Yale University Press. Freeman is a multiple Emmy-winning writer and producer of television, a journalist and a playwright.

It would be hard to imagine Athenian generals worrying about the reporting of Spartan news or even, twenty-four centuries later, Douglas MacArthur caring much about media broadcasts from the land of the rising sun. But when General Philip Breedlove, the Supreme Commander of NATO, recently called on the West  to make a greater effort to counter Russia's toxic war of disinformation against Ukraine and its western allies, his concern made perfect military sense.  In a world in which the dissemination of information is a key tactical element in violent conflicts, the West and America have remained far too passive in confronting both the insidious campaign of lies on Russian state-controlled media and the notoriously effective internet recruitment efforts of terrorist groups.

At the height of the Cold War America's Radio Free Europe was reverentially listened to in hushed rooms behind shuttered windows across Eastern Europe - including in the home of one of the co-authors of this piece (Agnia Grigas) who grew up in Soviet-occupied Lithuania.  The promise of freedom and prosperity, especially as represented by American film, television, and media, spoke to millions around the world.  Some Sovietologists only half jokingly credit the TV series Dallas with helping to win the Cold War by offering a glimpse of the American dream in its most exuberant form.  Today more than ever, the United States, the country which developed the most successful forms of communication and which invented the very concept of public relations, should be leading the West in its battle to influence and inform.

The good news is that European leaders have tasked High Representative for Foreign Affairs Federica Mogherini with developing a plan to counter Russian disinformation by June.  Also, encouragingly, a rejuvenated Radio Free Europe and Voice of America launched a 30-minute Russian language televised news program late last year.  

The discouraging news is that these initiatives are no match for even the single Russian state-funded English language round-the-clock news channel Russia Today with an audience of 700 million in more than 100 countries and a budget of $240 million. Moreover, in late 2014, the Russian state-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya launched a new international media project Sputnik to be broadcast in 45 languages across the post-Soviet information space - an arena which Russia presently already dominates.

America and the West appear even more perplexed and ineffective in the face of the success of terrorist groups who are recruiting fighters and participants to their violent project via online videos and social networks.  The current U.S. administration, taking the threat seriously, has given the State Department's Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications a larger role in coordinating the government's response to terrorist messaging.  Those in charge of this effort understand that the standard, familiar approaches will not win the battle.  As President Obama pointed out in his address to the recent summit on combating terrorism, the West is not effectively connecting with its message because its opinion leaders are not connected.  The new efforts need to be pursued in smart, innovative ways that recognize how people, especially young people, communicate today.

With new forms of media being invented weekly, daily, and even hourly, we constantly have to be creating not just content but new and attractive message delivery systems.  The West needs to push back against the around the clock stream of disinformation with the truth - in a timely and forceful fashion.  Meanwhile a separate, more deliberately developed response is required to blunt the seduction of slick recruiting videos and websites by putting forth even more attractive positive messaging which emphasizes the opportunities for young people to create meaningful, satisfying lives by adhering to the basic principles of freedom of expression, the rule of law and respect for the rights of others.

If the television series Dallas delivered an effective brief for American culture in the nineteen eighties, it was not through its portrayal of venal, scheming protagonists; what impressed viewers in less affluent countries was in the background of the action, a vision of an open, attractive contemporary world.  People outside of the West envied the freedom of the characters to pursue their machinations without worrying about where their next meal was coming from or if the secret police were going to knock on the door.

The first job of any American information campaign is to tell the truth rather than engage in propaganda, but the message will only carry the day with the planet's disaffected people if it has a compelling and appealing truth to tell.  Ultimately the West needs to be able promote more than just its material success in a slick advert campaign.  We need to be able to show, honestly, that we have created - or at least are dedicating to working toward - a truly just society in which all people are treated fairly without regard to the color of their skin, or cultural background, their religious beliefs or gender preferences.

Our most compelling message has always been - not that American society is some homogenized, idealized consensus utopia - but that when people honestly see things differently, they can express their views openly, even offensively, without fear of arrest or censure.  It is this core principle of our system that has intoxicated suppressed people for over two centuries, and when we are engaged in a war of information before a global audience, that message is also our most powerful weapon.

 [return to Contents] 

 #4
Legatum Insitute
www.li.com
October 30, 2014
The Menace of Unreality: Combatting Russian Disinformation in the 21st Century
[Video here http://www.li.com/events/the-menace-of-unreality-combatting-russian-disinformation-in-the-21st-century

This livestreamed panel examined how Russia's extensive disinformation campaign undermines Western democracy.

Anne Applebaum, Director of the Legatum Institute's Transitions Forum, moderated a discussion with Geoffrey Pyatt, US Ambassador to Ukraine, Oleksander Scherba, Ambassador at Large at the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Michael Weiss, Editor-in-Chief of The Interpreter, and Peter Pomerantsev, journalist and documentary producer. John Herbst, Director of the Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Centre at the Atlantic Council and partner for this event, gave introductory remarks.

The Kremlin's war in Ukraine includes not just covert military action, but deception and confusion- a new vision of how to conduct warfare in the 21st century. To fight Russian disinformation we must first define it.

Peter Pomerantsev opened the discussion by quoting a 'pearl of wisdom' from Russian media 'guru' Vasily Gatov: "In the 20th century, the great battle was for freedom of information. In the 21st century the battle will be over the abuse of freedom of information by various maligned state and non-state actors".  

Since 2008, Pomerantsev argued, the Kremlin and military in Russia have adopted a body of thinking where information can be used as a tool to "confuse, demoralise, divide and conquer" and thus be used as a weapon. This comes from the Kremlin's recognition that it cannot take on the West in a traditional military fashion and expect to win. Rather, over the years, Putin has talked about needing to be cleverer than the other side.

One of the Kremlin's main strategies is to destroy people's faith in journalism and the possibility of debate in media.  Michael Weiss noted that this disinformation is most problematic when it is picked up by mainstream media organisations and circulated in the spirit of objectivity. The Putin regime, Weiss claimed, understands that Western institutions valuing transparency and objectivity can be exploited. "Even if you read through and see that a story is nonsense, the headline will still begin to penetrate", he said.

He posited that as money was the main motivation of the Putin "virtual Mafia state", journalists and governments should look into corruption, extortion and bribery on an international scale to find links with Putin's party of "Crooks and Thieves" (as it came to be known in the 2011 Duma protests). Weiss also called for more support for investigative journalism, to uncover dubious Kremlin links. Inevitably "the investigations would lead back to the West", he warned, "We need to get our own house in order.

"We need to fundamentally change the debate about Russia", Weiss argued. At the moment the West, and particularly the USA is unsure whether Russia is a partner or an adversary.

Turning to the example of Ukraine, Oleksander Scherba noted the three ideological misconceptions upon which the Russian propaganda feeds: first, the notion of Ukraine as a failed state. The second is accusing anyone who disagrees with the Kremlin or pro-Russian groups of being 'fascist'. Third, that Russia is legitimately attempting to regain the former power of its historical empires.

Ambassador Pyatt emphasised the importance of recognising that the battle for the information space is just one layer of Russian strategy to exercise influence over the Ukrainian people. In Slovyansk, the first thing soldiers did was switch TV and radio stations over to Russian content. To this day the separatist areas only stream Russian broadcasting channels full of disinformation; this helps cultivate an environment of fear that works in tandem with Russia's advanced weapons systems in the Donbass.

"The best way to deal with this campaign of misdirection is the truth", Pyatt stated, using the successful parliamentary elections on Sunday 26 October 2014, which were independently judged to be free and fair, with an unambiguous mandate for further reform working towards greater European integration.

The panel was preceded by a workshop that brought together a range of European and American experts to identify what constitutes Russia's disinformation campaign, the theory and motivating factors behind its international project, and ways to find common solutions. As part of this workshop, the partner organisations conducted a series of short videos and podcasts with participants to discuss the impact of Russian disinformation on Europe and the rest of the world.

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 #5
Epoch Times
www.theepochtimes.com
November 30, 2014
Russia's Weapon of Choice: Information Warfare
New report by the Institute of Modern Russia states Russia "weaponizes information" to confuse and subvert adversaries
By Gary Feuerberg

WASHINGTON-With its annexation of Crimea, aggression in the eastern Ukraine, and military and economic threats to NATO nations, the Kremlin has resumed a new kind of Cold War. Regardless of what Vladimir Putin may say, his motives are not benign. The West has reacted with surprise, confusion, paralysis, and mostly inaction.

To understand the Kremlin's modus operandi and to counter it, the Institute of Modern Russia (IMR), a nonprofit think tank based in New York, sponsored a special report. Authors Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss described the methods the Kremlin uses to confuse its adversaries and exploit the West's weaknesses.

"The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture, and Money" describes Russia as a Mafia state, whose leaders have no qualms about spreading falsehoods through the media, supplemented, if need be, by covert military threats and force deployment.

Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov can speak in diplomatic voices, while Russia is really engaged in a war with the West that is leaving it bewildered. The democracies of the world have not figured out how to deal with Putin and the challenges he poses to freedom, democracy and the security of nations.

"Essentially, they are weaponizing information, and I recognized as a journalist, I had no analytical tool to which to analyze it," said Pomerantsev. He spoke at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) on Nov. 13.

"Around 2004, Kremlin theoreticians and Duma members talked about setting up Russian compatriot NGO organizations abroad to subvert foreign countries," he said. In his introduction to the report, Pomerantsev said the Russian Orthodox Church was to be used for the same purpose.

It's making war with minimal use of military. Pomerantsev and Weiss say that in the Ukraine conflict, Russia used local vigilantes, but when that was insufficient, it resorted to small-scale incursions that "change facts in the ground without ever quite seemingly enough of a reason for a full-blown declaration of war."

Enigma of Putin

"One of the stranger aspects of 21st-century geopolitics has been the West's denial that it has an adversary or enemy in Vladimir Putin," stated Weiss, in his introduction to the 44-page report. For 14 years, the United States and Europe believed they had "an honest partner or ally in the Kremlin," no matter how badly he behaved, Weiss said. The annexation of Crimea and his invasion of eastern Ukraine changed all that.

Michael Weiss is editor-in-chief of "The Interpreter," which is a daily online journal that seeks to make available to English-speaking people Russian language press and blogs. The Interpreter is a project of IMR.

"[Putin] is very adept at the conning of the openness and transparency of the Western system, particularly the Western media outlets, essentially becoming accomplices in his information warfare," Weiss said.

Disinformation on the Ukraine

Pomerantsev and Weiss say the weapon of choice is "disinformation," which goes much further than just propaganda. For example, Russian television inside Russia and in eastern Ukraine created the reality that "'fascists' have taken power in Kiev, ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine are in mortal danger, and the CIA is waging a war against Moscow."

Those brave souls who brought down corrupt Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych and lost about 100 lives in doing so were depicted as fascists. The authors quote Ben Judah, "The Maidan never managed to shake the impression it was inherently far right."

Western journalists looked for the Nazis among the revolutionaries, and so the Kremlin narrative managed to spoil the image of the Maidan for people in the West.

Another example of disinformation was when Putin used the name Novorossiya for a part of southeastern Ukraine, which he might annex someday. The name was pulled from czarist history. The authors say the people in the area don't identify with living in Novorossiya. Yet, "Novorossiya is being imagined into being." Russian media show its map, its history is being written in Russian school textbooks, it has a flag and a news agency, and several Twitter feeds.

The Russian disinformation technologists came up with some imaginative tales about the downing of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, when 298 people died, presumably shot down from a Buk surface-to-air missile fired by Russian separatists supplied by Russian military. The Russian state-funded cable and satellite television's RT spread conspiracy theories, such as the plane was shot down by Ukrainian forces aiming at Putin's personal plane.

The Kremlin's Internet-troll army was turned on The Guardian covering the MA17 tragedy, flooding it with 40,000 comments a day, rendering any kind of meaningful discussion impossible and undermining normal communications.

Russian media technocrats know that the Western media, such as the BBC or the New York Times, are obliged to present both sides for balance in reporting. So no matter how absurd or outrageous the lie, when the Russian Foreign Ministry puts out a claim who downed the MA17, Western media "is duty bound to repeat both sides of the story," Weiss said.

Russia Today

RT used to be named Russia Today, but the name was changed to make less evident to people living outside the Russian Federation that it is Kremlin-funded or even associated with Russia, said the authors. It's not guided by "objective truth," which its managers say doesn't exist. One opinion is equal to another in their view.

RT is very popular online because of its anti-US and anti-West themes, and its abundance of conspiracy theories.

"Recently, Spanish-language RT featured a report that considered whether the US was behind the Ebola outbreak-a modern echo of Soviet dezinformatsiya about the CIA being behind the AIDS virus," states the report. The made-up account was translated into English, said Weiss.

Regarding the Syrian civil war, RT broadcast programs about an alleged massacre by rebel forces at Adra. Even after it was evident that there was no Adra massacre, RT commentators continued to discuss it as a reality, states the report.

"Even if people don't believe it, they are still talking about it," said Weiss. The Russian disinformation is not to convince others that their version is true; "it's to distract them, confuse them-'look over there, but don't look over here'."

Recommendations

The report recommends a way to counter the "weaponization of information." Legitimate media organizations should adopt the practice that when there is conscious deception, they will not use the source in news reports. Media should resist the practice of seeking to present "balance" in this case.

One big reason that more investigative reporting is not done on Putin and the "near-institutionalized corruption" that the Russian state has become is the fear of libel suits that Russian criminals bring, especially in the UK where laws are more favorable for these kinds of suits. Few publications have the means to expose Kremlin-connected figures. The authors recommend establishing a fund for journalists who face libel litigation.

 #6
Newseum
Www.newseum.org
April 2, 2015
JOURNALISM/WORKS: PUTIN: POWER, PERSUASION AND PROPAGANDA

WHEN: April 2, 2015 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
WHERE: Knight TV Studio
555 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest
Washington, DC 20001
USA

Anti-American sentiment and a nationalist fervor in Russia are rated higher today than at Cold War peaks - and at the heart of those twin developments is a master of propaganda, media control and mass audience appeal: Russian president Vladimir Putin. This year is the 30th anniversary of the launch of perestroika and glasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev - and the 15th anniversary of Putin becoming president.

Join a panel of experts for a provocative program examining how this high-profile, yet enigmatic leader has shaped his own public image, taken control of the Russian news media and marshaled public support to put Russia on a collision course with the West. How do - and can - Europe and the United States counter the production and promotion of "a hybrid truth" in Russia and news produced in formats that mimic Western news media, but in reality generated by state entities with no political oversight or control?

Panelists:

Fiona Hill, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at The Brookings Institution, and co-author of the new book, "Mr. Putin - Operative in the Kremlin"
Jill Dougherty, former foreign affairs correspondent for CNN, now a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, researching "Re-defining Russia: Vladimir Putin's Ideology"
Peter Pomerantsev, British television producer, author of "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible" and senior fellow, Transitions Forum, Legatum Institute
Angela Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies and professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown University, and author of "The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century"

 [return to Contents]

 #7
Kevin Rothrock's Twitter coverage of the April 2 Newseum meeting "PUTIN: POWER, PERSUASION AND PROPAGANDA" (pending a transcript)
@KevinRothrock
"Cool guy. Chief edits @RuNetEcho at @GlobalVoices, co-manages @RuNetMemes, and doesn't afraid of anything. @meduza_en producer of http://meduza.io/en"

[From latest to earliest]

The highlight of today's live-tweeting.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Alright, folks. This thing is over. Thanks for listening! Миру мир! Peace to all mankind!

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
A few final book plugs and the @Newseum panel event is now wrapping up.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
"The past is always changing-the past is changing again," says Angela Stent. Russia can't move forward like this, she says.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Angela Stent says youngsters in Russia today blame the USA for tanking the USSR. The Soviet Kremlin did nothing wrong. Nuzing!

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Fiona Hill says contemporary Russian youths don't have that healthy Soviet skepticism and it's gonna make working with them later hard.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Fiona Hill answered the "who cares" question by pointing out that Russia is ... very big?

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
A nice university student from some southern college asks how any of this stuff affects the average American.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@jillrussia says "Putin is weaponizing information."

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
WHO IS TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT OIL? IS IT GENERATED IN THE EARTH'S MANTLE?? asks a kind-looking old man. Fiona Hill handles it like a pro.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Oh God. The Q&A has arrived. "The nature of oil" question is here.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Fiona Hill points out that there is no Great Firewall on the RuNet. "There's a lot of orchestrated content."

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Questioner asks about Putin's control over TV, knows @tvrain exists, but can't remember its name. @peterpomeranzev dismisses Dozhd, however.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
"We are an open book," Fiona Hill says of the West. "We have no poker face and all our cards are on the table."

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Fiona Hill says Russia's political system may be institutionally simple, but its a closed system, so "Russia Watching" is tricky business.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@jillrussia says we could wake up tomorrow and the US would no longer be considered Russia's enemy, if the Kremlin willed it.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Or maybe that's not what he asked. (But I wish he had!)

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@genefac asks if Americans don't also just repeat 4-5 soundbites about Russia.
=
Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@peterpomeranzev says Russians would win any PR war against the West because they "don't care at all about the truth."

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@peterpomeranzev says, "People in Russia don't argue," they just recite "sub-conditioning"

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@peterpomeranzev says Russia aggravates its historical memories, and Putin appears "as a cult leader" to manipulate a shaken public.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@peterpomeranzev says Russian media uses constant, contradictory conspiracy theories to "zonk out" people's critical minds.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@peterpomeranzev says Russia uses the "poor fallen empire" identity to its advantage.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Stent says "taking it seriously" can lead to military escalation, but ... oh well?

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Stent implies that the US isn't "taking the initiative" enough relative to Russia. "We must take these threats seriously."

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Fiona Hill says some parts of Russia's post-Cold War humiliation can be compared to British bad feelings vs. the USA after WWII.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
"What can we believe in what we're seeing? Is the bluster real?" asks @genefac at @Newseum's panel.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Stent says "we have to do something to combat this," referring to Russian propaganda. "We have to reach the younger gen [inside Russia]."

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Angela Stent questions the "nobody believes anything" narrative in modern Russia, saying cynicism seems to be declining these days.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Angela Stent would like you to know that the Russian translation of her book is very good, but the title & cover art were curiously changed.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@genefac asks Angela Stent to speculate about the future of hard politics (guns! nukes!) in Europe.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
It seems @peterpomeranzev was making too many jokes. He's cut off and the panel is handed over to Angela Stent.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@peterpomeranzev says the nationalist conservatives of today are the modernizers of a few years ago. "Malleable" ideology.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@peterpomeranzev says Westerners have trouble understanding life in a system where everyone lies about the foundations of society.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@jillrussia says anti-Americanism is a genuinely unifying force in Russia. Fear of regime change is genuine and widespread.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@genefac asks if it's wrong to speak of a single Russia. Are there "fractures" in the Rus Fed that make comparisons to the USA unfair?

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
MSU journalism head told @jillrussia that anti-American is part of a bigger project to create a "new identity" for Russia.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@jillrussia says Americans believe in universalistic democratic values, whereas Russians have inward-looking values.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
"Putin created a pastiche," combining various eras of Russian nationhood, says @jillrussia.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
1st stage of Putinism: get domestic media under control. 2nd: reestablish dominance in the former USSR. 3rd: intl power, says @jillrussia.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
"Strengthen, exploit, and preserve Russian power" was Putin's aim, when coming to power in 1999, says @jillrussia.

Kevin Rothrock retweeted
 RuNet Echo @runetecho  ·  
Analysis Reveals Full Scale of Kremlin's Twitter Bot Campaign http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/04/02/analyzing-kremlin-twitter-bots/ ... Dataviz & story by @LawrenceA_UK

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@jillrussia says the USSR has a powerful brand (communism), but the collapse has left the nation without a coherent "brand."

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@jillrussia says Russian officials like to think of "democracy" as America's "brand."

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
.@jillrussia says Russian politics is all about branding, but Russia struggles to know what the heck its brand is exactly.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Next at "Journalism/Works: Putin: Power, Persuasion and Propaganda" is @jillrussia, who likes the "branding" metaphor.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
(Fiona Hill refers to Putin's solitary walk after Anatoly Rakhlin's funeral.)

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Putin has occasionally revealed "a human side," Fiona Hill says, namely when personal friends have died.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
"Putin sees the media as a legitimate tool of policy," Fiona Hill says.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Putin's disappearance was a distraction PR stunt, Fiona Hill says.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Putin needs to "keep grabbing the imagination of the Russian people," Fiona Hill says. It's very "emotional" and "ephemeral."

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Fiona Hill says Putin found in 2012 that his "brand" was waning and in need of a refresh.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Fiona Hill says Puin's pillars of legitimacy are unique: no political parties, just the constitution and popular acclaim.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Fiona Hill now cataloging Putin's various PR stunts. Animals, planes, risks, firefighting, diving. And Putin admits they're PR stunts.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Fiona Hill says Vladimir Putin's politics are a perpetual presidential campaign.

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock  ·  
Will now do some live tweeting from Journalism/Works: Putin: Power, Persuasion and Propaganda

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#8
New York Times
November 25, 2014
SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
'Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,' by Peter Pomerantsev
By MIRIAM ELDER
Miriam Elder is BuzzFeed's foreign editor and a former Moscow correspondent for The Guardian.

NOTHING IS TRUE AND EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE
The Surreal Heart of the New Russia
By Peter Pomerantsev
241 pp. PublicAffairs. $25.99.

The name "Vladimir Putin" is almost impossible to find in "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia." He usually appears only as "the President," lording over and lurking behind the tales of tragedy and absurdity in Peter Pomerantsev's captivating new book about modern Russia and its discontents.

Pomerantsev, a British journalist of Russian heritage, began going to Russia regularly as a reality television producer almost a decade ago, and it's through that prism that he sees the country. "Reality" is scripted by the dark forces inside the Kremlin. Fake opposition parties engage in fake opposition to those who rule, a fake justice system goes through the motions of the legal process, and the fake television news shapes what Russia's 143 million citizens are allowed to see.

Behind everything, however, is Putin. "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible" arrives near the end of a year in which the Russian president dominated global headlines. Russia's annexation of Crimea and its sponsorship of the rebellion in eastern Ukraine were explained, at best, as a result of his imperialist ambitions, at worst by his madness. Pomerantsev's almost complete refusal to mention Putin's name can be taken as a suggestion that we focus too much on him, that he's so big he no longer requires discussion - or that we do not and cannot ever know who he truly is, so why even bother? (The device works: The reader spends half the book waiting for Putin to appear and the other half accepting the idea that he influences everything.)

Instead Pomerantsev focuses on a group of apparent outliers, using them to tell the story of today's Russia. Among these figures are a gangster who loves movies, a model who committed suicide and a lawyer whose death in prison epitomizes the Kafkaesque nature of the country's pretense of a justice system. Yet in Pomerantsev's telling, they aren't outliers at all; they're characters playing parts in the Kremlin's script.

"TV is the only force that can unify and rule and bind this country," Pomerantsev writes. "It's the central mechanism of a new type of authoritarianism far subtler than 20th-century strains." This provides the best framework with which to understand Putin's publicity stunts. "All the shirtless photos hunting tigers and harpooning whales are love letters to the endless queues of fatherless girls," Pomerantsev writes, telling the story of Oliona, a young beauty seeking an oligarch to care for her. Putin's tough-guy talk also appeals to Vitaly, a small-time gangster. When Putin first came to power in 1999, anointed by an ailing Boris Yeltsin, the question on everyone's lips was: "Who is he?" Pomerantsev's answer: whatever Russians need him to be. As one personality on state-run television puts it, "We all know there will be no real politics. But we still have to give our viewers the sense something is happening. . . . Politics has got to feel like . . . like a movie!"

Part reportage and part memoir, "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible" follows the author as he navigates the reality show that is Russia. At first, he is drawn in by Moscow's chaos, with its fresh and gaudy wealth, wild parties and intense personalities. He embraces the world of Moscow's extremes, working for a network called TNT, producing shows with titles like "How to Marry a Millionaire." Yet he soon sees the dark side of the madness - the violence, the emptiness and, ultimately, the lack of control average Russians have over their own fate. Russians' ability to adapt to their environment no longer seems admirable. "It was only years later," he writes, "that I came to see these endless mutations not as freedom but as forms of delirium."

Pomerantsev's pitches for shows arise from the reality that he, as a knowing outsider, sees. In response, he is met with coos from the higher-ups at the network and suggestions that he concentrate on positive stories. Russian television isn't meant to mirror reality, it's meant to shape it. And no one at TNT - no one in the country's leadership - needs to explore anything controversial.

Putin was keenly aware of how his critics once used the pluralistic, and politicized, television media of an earlier era to attack him; the first sign of his autocratic tendencies was his crude move to bring major television channels under state control. Some wondered if this was an aberration, but Putin soon used the same methods to steer everything from the oil industry to unruly oligarchs into the Kremlin's fold.

Putin has now fully established control over the media. A vast majority of Russians still get most of their information from television, and the three major channels are either owned directly by the Kremlin or by state-owned companies. Each week, a Kremlin official directs their coverage. Major newspapers have been cowed. Russia's only independent television channel - TV Rain - is facing enormous pressure to shut down.

That - and the question of how the Kremlin distorts reality - is no longer a question for Russians alone. The crisis in Ukraine has been fought just as much through the telling of its narrative as through its deployment of weaponry. Russia has directed its propaganda campaign to devastating effect, not only at home but through international ventures like the television news channel RT (formerly Russia Today), which continues to expand, most recently opening an affiliate in South America and announcing a ­London-based version to focus exclusively on Britain. It's an information war, and the reality into which the Russians in Pomerantsev's book have been indoctrinated is the Kremlin's latest export.

The international audience is an entirely different one, however. And, despite its keen observations, what Pomerantsev's book lacks is deep background for that audience. Readers of "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible" aren't given a clear sense of why the Kremlin is deploying its propaganda so forcefully (does the author mean to imply, perhaps, that it's simply a matter of power for power's sake?) or of why Russians are so acquiescent. In a sense, this makes the book feel truly post-Soviet: There's no mention of Russia's long and tortured history with authoritarianism. Yet this tactic also raises a multitude of questions about why another chapter in that history is being allowed to unfold.

A particularly telling quote comes late in the book, from the British judge who presided over one of the most dramatic trials in modern Russian history, the London confrontation between the exiled ­oligarch-turned-critic Boris Berezovsky and the Kremlin favorite Roman Abramovich: "I found Mr. Berezovsky an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be molded to suit his current purposes. I gained the impression that he was not necessarily being deliberately dishonest, but had deluded himself into believing his own version of events."

Pomerantsev's book shows that those phrases can be applied to much of Russian society, and that this is no accident.
 

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 #9
New York Times
Decembere 12, 2015
Russia's Ideology: There Is No Truth
By PETER POMERANTSEV
Peter Pomerantsev, a British television producer, is the author of "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia."

LONDON - IMAGINE if you grew up lying. Not a little bit, for convenience, but during every public moment of your life: at school, at work, at social events. You had to lie to survive, because the punishment for telling the truth was the loss of your academic or professional career, or even prison. For Russians who came of age before 1991, this is the only way they know. The mature generation grew up with this behavior during the later years of the Soviet Union: reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and listening to clandestine BBC reports in private while pretending to be good Communist Youth League or party members.

When I went to work as a TV producer in Moscow in the early 2000s, I would ask my peers which of the "selves" they grew up with was the "real" them. How did they locate the difference between truth and lies? "You just end up living in different realities," they would tell me, "with multiple truths and different 'yous.' "

When members of this generation came to power they created a society that was a feast of simulations, with fake elections, a fake free press, a fake free market and fake justice. They are led by religious Russian patriots who curse the decadent West while keeping their children and money in London and informed by television producers who make Putin-worshiping shows during the day, and listen to energetically anti-Putin radio shows the moment they get into their cars after work.

It's almost as if you are encouraged to have one identity one moment and the opposite one the next. So you're always split into little bits, and can never quite commit to changing things.

But there is comfort in these splits, too. That wasn't you stealing from that budget, making that propaganda show or bending your knee to the president - just a role you were playing. All cultures split the public and private selves, but in Russia that split is often total.

The Kremlin's goal is to control all narratives, so that politics becomes one great scripted reality show. The way it wields power illustrates and reinforces this psychology. Take Vladislav Y. Surkov, an adviser to President Vladimir V. Putin who is said to manage, among other things, the public image of the Russian-speaking separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine. He helped invent a new strain of authoritarianism based not on crushing opposition from above, but on climbing into different interest groups and manipulating them from the inside. On his desk in the Kremlin, Mr. Surkov had phones bearing the names of leaders of supposedly independent parties. Nationalist leaders like Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky would play the right-wing buffoon to make Mr. Putin look moderate by contrast.

With one hand Mr. Surkov supported human rights groups made up of former dissidents; with the other he organized pro-Kremlin youth groups like Nashi, which accused human rights leaders of being tools of the West. In a novel presumed to be written by Mr. Surkov, who is also an art-loving bohemian when not waging covert wars, he celebrates the triumphant cynicism of a post-Soviet generation that has seen through the illusions of belief in any values or ideology.

"Everything is P.R.," my Moscow peers would tell me. This cynicism is useful to the state: When people stopped trusting any institutions or having any values, they could easily be spun into a conspiratorial vision of the world. Thus the paradox: the gullible cynic.

As the Kremlin plays the West, we see it extend the tactics it uses at home to foreign affairs. The Kremlin courts the West's financial elites, including the German and American business lobbies that opposed new sanctions; backs anticapitalist shows like Abby Martin's "Breaking the Set" on the broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today); and encourages the European far right with money and support to parties such as France's National Front. The Kremlin can't hope to dominate the West as it does the domestic situation, but its aim is to sow division, to "disorganize" the enemy through an information war.

At the core of this strategy is the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth. This notion allows the Kremlin to replace facts with disinformation. We saw one example when Russian media spread a multitude of conspiracy theories about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in July, from claiming that radar data showed Ukrainian jets had flown near the plane to suggesting that the plane was shot down by Ukrainians aiming at Mr. Putin's presidential jet. The aim was to distract people from the evidence, which pointed to the separatists, and to muddy the water to a point where the audience simply gave up on the search for truth.

Sadly, this mind-set resonates well in a post-Iraq and post-financial-crisis West increasingly skeptical about its own institutions, where reality-based discourse has already fractured into political partisanship. Conspiracy theories are prevalent on cable networks and radio shows in the United States and among supporters of far-right parties in Europe. President Obama, responding to Russian aggression in Ukraine, pointed out that Russia is not the Soviet Union. "This is not another Cold War that we're entering into," he said. "Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology." But perhaps he was missing the point.

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 #10
New York Times
February 14, 2015
The Saturday Profile
A Russian TV Insider Describes a Modern Propaganda Machine
By STEPHEN CASTLE

LONDON - NORMALLY a boisterous sort, Peter Pomerantsev says he kept quiet when he found himself, at the age of 24, in a Moscow meeting room listening to 20 of the country's top media executives discussing the news agenda for the week.

Not what the news was, but what they would make it, said Mr. Pomerantsev, the author of a recent book chronicling the moral and financial corruption of modern-day Moscow and the manipulation of a Russian television industry that he later joined.

He listened in amazement, he says, as a prominent news anchor reviewed the coming events as if they were part of a film script, musing on how best to entertain the audience and questioning who that week's enemy should be.

"It was shocking," said Mr. Pomerantsev, speaking over coffee in London last month. "They really saw television and news as a movie, and talked about it as a movie."

That was in 2002. With the conflict in Ukraine now part of an information war, as well as a physical one, Mr. Pomerantsev's book, "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible," has particular resonance, describing a world where laws change at the whim of the powerful and where television provides an ever-present, entertaining and emotionally charged distortion of reality.

Kadri Liik, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a research institute, described Mr. Pomerantsev's work as "a very valuable insider's view" and said his reputation as an expert was growing. His account of "how crudely it is done, and the mentality of these people, confirms things you have suspected," she added, but perhaps could not quite believe.

Mr. Pomerantsev's area of study is propaganda, and he believes he saw many classic techniques at work in Moscow. He says one favorite trick was to put a credible expert next to a neo-Nazi, juxtaposing fact with fiction so as to encourage so much cynicism that viewers believed very little. Another was to give credence to conspiracy theories - by definition difficult to rebut because their proponents are immune to reasoned debate.

"What they are basically trying to undermine is the idea of a reality-based conversation," Mr. Pomerantsev said, "and to use the idea of a plurality of truths to feed disinformation, which in the end looks to trash the information space."

From that perspective, Mr. Pomerantsev is not optimistic about Russia's immediate future, which includes limping along with a ruble that has lost more than half its value and a budget that will come under increasing pressure from the collapse in oil prices.

He believes that the priority of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, is to "keep Ukraine bubbling," no matter the financial costs. Mr. Pomerantsev fears that the financial pressures and Western sanctions, instead of compelling Mr. Putin to change course, are likely to make Russia more closed and dictatorial.

"What matters in a dictatorship is control of the security services and control of propaganda," Mr. Pomerantsev said, predicting that there would be more arrests to compensate for the lack of economic progress.

"There is nothing good about the ruble crashing," he said. "It's just making stuff worse in Russia."

CURLY-HAIRED, with glasses, and wearing a vest, Mr. Pomerantsev looked at home in the Legatum Institute, a liberal, free-market research institute in London that is equipped with a basement cafe for convivial debate and a book-lined library for study.

Though he grew up in West London, Mr. Pomerantsev was born in 1977 in Kiev, then part of the Soviet Union. His father, Igor Pomerantsev, is a writer, poet and broadcaster who fell afoul of the Soviet secret police, the K.G.B., for distributing works by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Nabokov. Encouraged to take the exit visas that were then sometimes available to Soviet Jews, the family left in 1978 for Vienna, later crossing into West Germany, where they claimed asylum. A couple of years later, Igor Pomerantsev was offered a job in the Russian service of the BBC World Service.

Apart from a brief period in Munich, when his father moved to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Peter Pomerantsev grew up as what he calls an "accidental Brit" in London. He attended one of the country's most prestigious fee-paying schools, Westminster (the alma mater of the current deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg), but says he has still never visited large parts of his adopted country, where he lives with his Russian-born wife and three children.

At Westminster, where there was some low-grade teasing about being a Russian spy, his background generally gave him an exotic air. Though he is no Garry Kasparov, Mr. Pomerantsev's Soviet origins were used by the school chess team to intimidate opponents. He studied English and German at Edinburgh University before being drawn by Moscow.

At the beginning of the century the city was, he said, "full of vitality and madness and incredibly exciting" and "the place to be." There was optimism, he said, because Russia appeared to be heading in the direction of European democracy.

Though he may gesticulate more than the average Briton, Mr. Pomerantsev seems and sounds English but, then again, when he speaks on the phone, he sounds Russian, too. It was not always so, he says.

When he arrived in Moscow in 2001, he had an English accent which he soon shed enough for people to think he was Estonian. With a little more time in Moscow, he says, he sounded Russian but just a little dim. "I couldn't get the jokes and I couldn't get all the cultural associations."

FOR a time, at least, Mr. Pomerantsev, now 37, seems also to have been at home in the raucous world of middlebrow Russian television, making films about gold-digging women (hunting men known as "Forbeses" - as in the Forbes list of the wealthy), ruthless gangsters and sinister cults. His book is in part, he says, about the Faustian bargain made by an ambitious youngster working in Russia's medialand of opportunity.

He says his book is written in different genres, a sort of intellectual docudrama. Mr. Pomerantsev concedes that some of the dialogue he quotes is from memory, though those based around his TV films are taken from transcripts.

In any event, he says his experience in Russia underlines the extent to which any new Cold War would be different from the last one, in the information arena at least. The breezy documentaries Mr. Pomerantsev worked on could hardly be more different from the dreary television output served up by the Soviet Union.

During Mr. Putin's first stint in the presidency, slick techniques imported from the West helped engineer a spectacular rise in his approval ratings. They are now being deployed, not just against Western policies, but against basic Western values, Mr. Pomerantsev argues.

"It's not so much an information war, but a war on information," he said.

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 #11
Washington Post
February 13, 2015
Book Review
'Nothing is True and Everything is Possible,' by Peter Pomerantsev
By Megan McDonough
Megan McDonough is a weddings and obituary writer for The Washington Post.

NOTHING IS TRUE AND EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE
The Surreal Heart of the New Russia
By Peter Pomerantsev
PublicAffairs. 239 pp. $25.99

In Russia - a country that constitutes one-seventh of the world's landmass, spans eight time zones and has a population of 143 million - television unites the nation. It is "the only force that can unify and rule and bind this country," writes Russian-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev. "It's the central mechanism of a new type of authoritarianism, one far subtler than twentieth-century strains."

In his aptly named book, "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible," Pomerantsev uses his experiences as a Moscow-based reality-television producer in the early 2000s to depict the profound unreality of Russian media. Television, the most popular news medium in Russia, has become a political means to an end, with powerful, state-controlled outlets dictating public opinion and disseminating the Kremlin's narrative. Pomerantsev offers a peek at what's behind the Kremlin's smoke and mirrors: modern Russia's authoritarian landscape.

Post-Soviet Russia has continuously transformed itself in the past several decades, evolving from perestroika to liberalism to nationalism to oligarchy to its present-day "postmodern dictatorship." The pursuit of money, power and privilege by oil-rich oligarchs has resulted in a justice system riddled with corruption and devoid of scruples. As the author quips, "Russians have more words for 'bribe' than Eskimos do for 'snow'."

The populace generally participates - some willingly, others reluctantly - in the new system. "The cash has come so fast, like glitter shaken in a snow globe, that it feels totally unreal," the author writes, "not something to hoard and save but to...cut like papier-mâché into different quickly changing masks."

Via a series of short vignettes, some humorous, others tragic, the author tells of those who successfully manipulated the iniquitous justice system and others who were exploited and penalized by it. Success stories include a former prostitute who runs a profitable gold-digger academy for country girls, teaching them not-so-subtle tricks to snag a Moscow millionaire; a mob boss who uses his gangster past as fodder to create a crime television series and launch a film career; and the Night Wolves, a nationalistic, messianic biker gang ("the Russian equivalent of the Hells Angels"). Others, however, were less fortunate, including a successful businesswoman thrown in prison after becoming a pawn of Russian political extortion, and an anti-corruption lawyer who was arrested and tortured, and who died in Russian prison for opposing political depravity and cronyism.

This is a gripping and unsettling account of life in grim post-Soviet Russia.

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 #12
Institute for War & Peace Reporting
https://iwpr.net
January 14, 2015
How Russia Fights its Information War
The Kremlin is committing huge resources to extending its influence through spin rather than soldiers.

As the Ukraine crisis continues, IWPR editor Daniella Peled talks to writer and regional expert Peter Pomeranzev about how Russia is using the media as an extension of its military power.

Peter Pomeranzev is a regional expert and a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute. His latest book is Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.

Q: Russia is devoting great resources to the information war - how effective is this proving within the country?

Russia has used information warfare to achieve its aims much more than any other authoritarian regime in history. If the previous format was 80 per cent violence and 20 per cent propaganda, this regime has reversed that into 80 per cent propaganda and 20 per cent violence. Stalin had to arrest 30,000 people to intimidate the population, whereas Putin can arrest one oligarch and spread as much terror.

It's no coincidence that the first thing Putin did on taking power was to take over the media and the TV by going after [media oligarchs Vladimir] Gusinsky and [Boris] Berezovsky. Chechnya was a made-for-TV war, and turned Putin from a nobody into the figure he is today.

The regime uses television as its most important tool. First, it mixes entertainment with social control. For instance, there are very amusing debate shows which are broadly scripted by the Kremlin - the heads of the TV channels have weekly meetings there. So the control is very, very strong, but at the same time the effect is entertaining.

As in other authoritarian regimes, the media is used to promote non-stop conspiracy theories and to break down critical thinking in society. Television is used very aggressively, with a lot of NLP-style [neuro-linguistic programming] tactics, repeating key words like "the enemy", for instance. This was used epically over the Ukraine crisis. I don't think I have ever seen a country convince its citizens of such an alternative reality as Russia is now doing.

This isn't straightforward deception, like saying a country has weapons of mass destruction when it doesn't. This is a huge reality show with various emerging narratives.

The Kremlin has reinvented the conflict in Ukraine as a genocide against Russians. People believe that the fascists are coming to get them, because that's what they have seen on TV, or that the CIA is behind massacres in Ukraine. After they said for ten years that Ukraine is "our brother nation", now it has become Russia's deepest enemy. From saying previously that Ukraine was actually part of Russia, the narrative now is that Ukrainians are fascists. And Russia has spread this story about Ukraine being a failed state. Ukraine is a lot of things - if anything it's a crap state - but it isn't a failed state.

None of this is meant to make sense. It is intended to confuse and to strike fear into the hearts of the population.

Q: What kind of impact has the Kremlin's media strategy had outside Russia?

There are 30 million Russians who live abroad, so Russian-language media has a much larger reach than just within the country's borders. As far as foreign media is concerned, the approach is granular, with different tactics deployed in specific countries. It is very focused. There is a different approach in each case.

The approach to Britain plays on the anti-European Union, pro-business trend. Russia has been courting UKIP. There is no suggestion of any financial impropriety, but Russia Today invited Nigel Farage on as a guest before the BBC would have him, for instance. Anything anti-European can be built on - the idea of European expansionism, that the EU is an evil empire. This leads to the conclusion that Russia is just defending itself. This is the ideological bridge to Le Pen in France. They make an alliance with whoever they need to be friendly with at the time.

As for how effective it is, nobody is really sure, in the West or in Russia, whether it achieves very much. There has no sociological research on the effect of Russia Today, for instance. It claims to be the most-watched channel on YouTube, but in a way that is admitting that no one actually watches you. Russia Today is just really crude, and my sense is that in Britain at least, it works almost as a decoy, a distraction. The real problem is the financial players who are in thrall to the Russian economy. The City is Britain's Achilles heel. Deep down, people wonder why should pesky Ukraine get in the way of us making money? And a lot of "experts" have received funding through Russian organisations. It's quite subtle.

The Kremlin's idea of soft power is absolutely different - it is an extension of military power. The Russian military has for the last 10 years been moving away from the idea of kinetic force to informational operations. We in the West think of it as something that accompanies military action - introducing MTV to Afghanistan, for instance - but the Russians see it as the main part of warfare, to demoralise, divide and conquer, to split society and create a permanent information war. They wage this war through NGOs, the church, business, the media - how to bring a country to its knees without ever invading, basically.

Q: How much has the Russian government harnessed the power of social media?

Russia latched on very, very fast to the power of the web. The [opposition] protests in 2011 were very internet-driven, and Moscow realised very quickly that it was the ideal tool for authoritarian rule. They hired very dirty PR firms to start their own stories, and social media was awash with crazy stuff. Trolling is also a way of intimidation. It's like suppressive fire - it bogs people down.

They are also trying to do that in the English language media. There was [Brazilian journalist] Pepe Escobar who wrote about MH17, and the mysterious Carlo who worked in air traffic control in Kiev and had a mysterious Twitter feed full of disinformation - that he saw a Ukrainian jet following the plane for instance. Then Carlo disappeared. It was all apparently suppressed by the Western media. This is a story which took an hour to fabricate, but it actually got traction.

Social media lets Moscow get material into the informational bloodstream, and technology makes it easier to spread disinformation.

Q: Are independent voices managing to makes themselves heard within Russia?

Even dissenting voices have to be very carefully framed. There has been a clampdown on independent media in general. The Kremlin killed all the big internet news portals because they were creating the top line of the news agenda, and replaced independent editors with their own little slaves.

Even in supposedly more independent media, there is not necessarily obvious propaganda, but instead there are quite subtle messages. Their message is not necessarily that there are fascists in Ukraine - they leave that to the TV and the gutter press - but they relativise and smudge the discussion. The independent news channel TV-Rain, which has been pushed onto the internet, also operates with boundaries.

Everyone is waiting for Moscow to do something more extreme. Regarding bloggers, a law has been passed which means that if you have more than 3,000 daily readers, then you have to register with the mass media regulator, so this puts all kinds of restriction on you - a way to kill off blogging, basically. Facebook has to register with the regulator, too, and store data on its users within Russia. It's about making life difficult without an outright ban. Then there are new laws about extremism which are so loosely worded than they could be used to shut down anyone, and people are waiting for a legal trick to be performed that does just that. Everyone is very worried.

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 #13
Foreign Affairs
February 18, 2015
Unplugging Putin TV
How to Beat Back the Kremlin Propaganda
By Peter Pomerantsev
PETER POMERANTSEV is Senior Fellow of the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute and the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia. Follow him on Twitter @peterpomeranzev.

Invading Ukraine with near impunity isn't the most impressive feat Russian President Vladimir Putin has pulled off lately. That distinction goes to his skill at keeping Russians in thrall to a virtual reality-one in which NATO is about to invade their homeland, Ukraine has been taken over by neo-Nazis, and U.S. President Barack Obama spends all his waking hours scheming to subvert Moscow. Figuring out how Putin does this is the first step toward the West's key strategic imperative: formulating an appropriate response.

It isn't just a question of censorship. Inside Russia, many sources of accurate information survive. True, most of them are now either websites or newspapers-television, the main source of news for most Russians, is controlled by the Kremlin-but the country is significantly more open today than the USSR was 30 years ago. Even so, Putin commands domestic support ratings upward of 80 percent. And even among the 30 million Russians who live abroad and have easier access to television stations not controlled by the Kremlin, many believe in the Kremlin-dictated reality. In Estonia, for example, over half of the Russian population still thinks that the country had volunteered to give up its independence and join the USSR after World War II, according to a 2005 poll.

These kinds of sentiments have fueled a surge of Russian patriotism that has enabled Putin to continue his aggressive geopolitics in the face of Western sanctions-which explains why he takes propaganda very seriously. His first move after coming to power in 2000, before reining in the energy sector and the bureaucracy, was to seize control of television. Since then, he has diligently remade it to suit his purposes. The first thing to note about modern Russian TV is that, unlike the stale Soviet fare, it is highly entertaining. Western consultants have helped Russian producers launch glitzy talent shows, addictive sitcoms, and steamy pop videos-content that draws huge audiences. If in the Cold War part of the West's appeal was the implicit link between Western entertainment and democracy, Putin's Russia has undermined this. It's now possible to love Taylor Swift but hate the United States.

Once the audience's attention has been grabbed, Russian television sets about reshaping its perception of the world. The process starts with an assault on critical thinking. Russian television is full of conspiracy theories and mysticism, not just about the nefarious CIA agents who stand behind every public protest in Russia or Ukraine but also about countless other threats lurking everywhere. Bizarre pseudoscience programs warn viewers about impending deadly fungi epidemics and introduce them to psychics who can enter their minds. Any sort of rational debate is rendered impossible by a constant stream of false assurances-illogical connections between two associations where two random facts are fused to create a distorted whole.

"A coincidence? I don't think so!"-that's the catch phrase of the popular talk-show host Dmitry Kiselev, Russian TV's propagandist in chief. Kiselev has famously asserted that a Swedish education program that teaches children about bodily functions demonstrated the West's appalling moral decline. He has also attributed Sweden's recent criticism of Russia to a historical grudge that he said the Swedes have harbored since suffering a military defeat at the hands of Peter the Great in the eighteenth century. These statements came in December 2013, when Ukraine was racked by antigovernment protests over its previous administration's refusal to sign an association agreement with the European Union-a deal that European countries, including Sweden, were encouraging.

Having drawn in the viewers and disabled their critical defenses, Russian television reaches deep into the nation's emotional traumas. Politicians and presenters feed the audience nonstop reminders of the difficult 1990s, when, they argue, the West cheered at the sight of a weakened Russia and of the tremendous human toll of the two world wars. Saying that Russia suppresses its past wouldn't be quite correct; rather, Russia engages with history in a way that inflames traumas instead of healing them. To take just the most obvious example, Kiselev and other commentators have repeatedly described the leaders of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution as followers of Stepan Bandera, the World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist and one-time Nazi collaborator whom most Russians associate with Nazi atrocities.

These kinds of tricks are not aimed at helping viewers achieve closure-in fact, they serve the opposite purpose. Coming to terms with the past requires that people bring their traumatic experiences into the realm of critical thinking in order to grapple with them-an approach used in psychotherapy. Russian television, by contrast, works more like a cult-heightening the vulnerability of its followers by forcing them to relive bad experiences without ever making peace with them.

Once viewers have been turned into emotional putty, Russian TV makes its final move: lifting them up with tales of glorious victories achieved by national leaders, from Joseph Stalin to Putin, thereby tying the viewers' emotional uplift to the Kremlin's heroics. ("Russia is getting up off its knees" is a favored slogan.) The necessary disinformation is added as the icing on the cake-and by that point in time, the audience is ready to swallow almost anything.

It has taken the Kremlin 15 years to perfect its strategic use of television, but until recently the application of this tactic remained mostly domestic. With the crisis in Ukraine, the strategy has taken on international significance. Policymakers in Brussels and Washington are now debating the best ways to counter the Kremlin's information campaign, including by creating alternative Russian-language content. Such content would, of course, never match domestic Russian television in funding-Channel One, the battering ram of Kremlin propaganda, has a budget of some $850 million-or compete with it in making big talent shows and movies. Still, there are alternative avenues for winning over Russian viewers that are well worth exploring.

BREAKING THE TRANCE

For all its power, Russian television does have an Achilles' heel. Although it is very good at making talent shows and sitcoms, it avoids gritty, true-to-life reality formats and dramas such as the British Benefits Street and the U.S. The Wire-the kind of content that would engage emotionally with the complex social themes the Russian government would rather ignore. The fact that the Kremlin has failed to produce this content, however, doesn't mean that Russian viewers don't want it. In fact, they do.

I was able to observe this unmet demand firsthand when I worked in the Russian media world as a producer for an entertainment channel in 2008. At the time, the documentaries I made about teenagers resisting corrupt cops and businesspeople falling victim to the bureaucracy received good ratings. Soon, however, my editors asked us to stop making "social" films. When Channel One took a risk and put out a documentary-style drama about the lives of teenagers at a tough provincial school in 2010, the series became a sensation even though they were screened late at night. But the genre never became mainstream, since it went against the positive patriotism promoted by the Kremlin.

This shortfall leaves an important niche. Filling it with smart, engaging programming could give independent producers an opportunity to counteract Putin's message. They could take inspiration from British formats that feature engaging subjects while shining a light on thorny social issues. A British documentary program titled Make Bradford British, for example, has grappled with ethnic hatred by putting people of different races in one house (in the style of the U.S. show Big Brother) and forcing them to confront their prejudices. Imagine a Russian-language program that would use a similar tactic to probe an emotionally charged subject-say, the bitterness between Russians and Ukrainians in a place such as Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city lying just outside the separatist-controlled territory.

New programs could also invite Russians to engage with the dark pages of their country's past through formats such as the popular BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?-a show that follows celebrities as they trace the lives of their ancestors, often by grappling with the horrors of twentieth-century wars and genocide. In the Russian case, these kinds of programs would require their subjects to explore the human cost of the gulag, the holodomor (Ukraine's enforced famine under Stalin), and the KGB arrests. Some participants would discover their ancestors among the victims; others, among the executioners. In both cases, they would have to reckon with past traumas, a highly emotional and cathartic process.

Such content would allow the audience to move away from the collective historical narratives imposed by the Kremlin, which stress how Russia's leaders, from Stalin to Putin, led the nation to triumph. Viewers would instead turn to personal narratives that would show how the actions of these very leaders destroyed people's lives. Any eastern Ukrainian demonstrator who cheers for Stalin at a pro-Russian parade is likely to have a horrific tale about his or her ancestors' suffering during the famine. Finding a deeper, more intimate connection to history would help viewers cast a more skeptical eye on the mythology promoted by the government in the present.

But telling personal stories is just one aspect of any such media counteroffensive. A far more important challenge is to encourage critical thinking. A way to do this is helping viewers retrace the stages of getting manipulated and to deconstruct the mind tricks at play.

As one potential model, Gogglebox, a popular British show, records the reactions of regular TV viewers as they watch British television. That show cunningly casts its characters to show a picture of national attitudes and its social strata, even though its objective is purely entertainment: the viewers mostly joke around and make amusing chitchat during programming. But imagine a similar Russian-language program that would observe people who consume a diet of Kremlin propaganda and watch them coming under its influence. This footage would be intercut with commentary by psychologists, who would explain the linguistic and emotional tricks used by the producers, helping to build up the audience's immunity to manipulation.

Such shows would be easy to broadcast to Russian speakers outside of Russia; broadcasters in the Baltics, Ukraine, and beyond would be eager to take on good content. Inside Russia, however, proper distribution would be more difficult, since the government largely controls access to the airwaves. Western donors could look to partner with existing independent channels that continue to broadcast online-the most prominent of which is the news station Dozhd-or explore more innovative forms of online distribution.

A handful of television companies and media outlets around the world already offer examples of how to produce positive change through entertainment. As one case in point, BBC Media Action, the international development arm of the BBC, makes dramas that explore social themes in developing countries, such as human trafficking in the Balkans. Another production company, Layalina, promotes liberal democratic values in the Middle East through reality shows; one of its series profiles young entrepreneurs in Egypt. Public diplomacy initiatives of this kind tap into the so-called Sabido methodology that was initially developed in Mexico in the 1970s and used telenovelas and radio dramas to effect social change. During the 1970s, the Mexican government successfully used this technique to bring down the country's birthrate. By focusing on story lines that inspired the viewers to think more carefully about pregnancy, producers helped decrease the national birthrate by 34 percent.

INFORMATION WARS GO GLOBAL

These challenges are not confined to the sphere of Russian-language media; the intensity of information warfare is on the rise across the world. China, for one, has developed the concept of a three-front war against the United States, which uses media and psychological warfare to enhance territorial claims on neighboring states. In the Middle East, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) was able to quickly swell its ranks thanks in large part to its effective propaganda. The stakes in future media campaigns are sure to grow further as undemocratic regimes partner up to create international disinformation networks. Russian TV channels, for example, have already been helping to disseminate story lines favorable to the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. And the entry of China into the game will only strengthen such informational alliances.

To mount a strong counteroffensive, any alternative media supported by Western donors must be broad in its reach and regular in delivery-priorities that require a significant long-term commitment. Today's public interest television companies, such as Layalina, barely survive on small grants and commissions. It would take a qualitatively different level of funding to bring larger and more effective outlets on air. But good television is no longer merely about humanitarian values; it's now a matter of global security.

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#14
PBS Newshour
December 4, 2014
How the Kremlin uses TV to shape Russian political 'reality'

President Vladimir Putin gave his state of the nation speech, trumpeting Russia's incursions into Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. A new book, "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible," examines how the Kremlin uses television to promote Putin's views and influence its citizens through reality TV. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner interviews author Peter Pomerantsev.

GWEN IFILL: Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual state of the nation speech today. Defiant in the face of international sanctions, he boasted of his country's incursions into Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, reiterating that it belongs to his nation.

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russia (through interpreter): For Russia, Crimea, ancient Korsun, Khersones, Sevastopol have a major civilizational sacred meaning, the same as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem has for those who confess Islam and Judaism. And this is exactly how we will treat it from here forever.

GWEN IFILL: For many observers, the speech was classic Putin, using television to assert his view of reality to his own people and the world.

Putin's use of the medium is the subject of a new book, "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible," by Peter Pomerantsev, a Russian-born British writer and television producer. He returned to Moscow to work in the Kremlin's vast television apparatus, creating Russian reality TV shows.

Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner spoke with him yesterday.

MARGARET WARNER: So, Peter Pomerantsev, thank you for joining us.

You have described television as the nuclear weapon of politics in Russia.

PETER POMERANTSEV, Author, "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia": Yes, it takes on a - it's at the core of the political system.

You have to imagine a country that is absolutely huge. It's about a sixth of the world's land mass and it's also sociologically very varied. So you have sort of very contemporary towns like Moscow, and then you have near feudal villages, which have a completely different sense of reality.

And the only thing that brings them together is the television. Television is at the core of the present political system.

MARGARET WARNER: You say, now, at the center of all of this is the president himself as performance artist. What do you mean?

PETER POMERANTSEV: Putin was no one. He was this great guy famous for wearing horrible suits everywhere he went. Nobody would notice him in meetings. He was a no one.

And they took him and created him to be what we know today, oligarchs who control TV, and P.R. TV producer guys who were very close to the KGB. It's this incredible mix of secret services and television producers. And they made him into sort of a hero for all seasons.

So he could be the president who is the ideal lover, the ideal matcher guy, the ideal businessman. And this was all done through television. And the first thing that Vladimir Putin did in 2000, when he came to power, was to get rid of the oligarchs who controlled television and take it over.

MARGARET WARNER: And at a very young age, from London, you got a chance to get in on the inside. You describe this one organization that essentially, you said, controls everything on television, entertainment and news.

PETER POMERANTSEV: That place is actually the Kremlin.

There was always a telephone to all the major TV channels, but all kind of coordinated by the Kremlin itself.

MARGARET WARNER: But you started out as a producer for one of the networks in that big apparatus called TNT doing reality shows.

It sounds harmless, sounds apolitical enough.

PETER POMERANTSEV: Around 2000, TV started making a lot of money. And they wanted to get producers from the West to come and make their version of "The Apprentice" or "Housewives of New York."

And that's why they needed people like me. You have to understand the Kremlin is very, very aware that they have to make TV entertaining nowadays. Their aim is kind of synthesize political manipulation and entertainment.

And so very soon, I found that even entertainment had this sort of very insidious element of social control. Politics has become like a reality show. So, you have debates on Russian TV. They're completely sort of scripted from the Kremlin.

So, you have a puppet right-wing opposition, a puppet left opposition. They kind of shout at each other. And the result is to make you feel, oh, my God, Putin is in the middle and kind of let's have Putin instead, the opposition is mad. People become very malleable. The population becomes almost sort of incapable of critical analysis. So, that's a much sort of deeper form of manipulation.

MARGARET WARNER: This has much broader international implications. This isn't just a problem for Russia.

PETER POMERANTSEV: Well, increasingly, the Kremlin has been thinking about information in terms of - basically as a weapon, weaponized information. It's a tool to distract, demoralize the enemy, to be used as a decoy in a military operation.

So now you have a huge international sort of broadcasting arm being set up by the Kremlin, whose aim is really to sort of do psychological operations against Russia's enemies, whether that's Ukraine or increasingly the West.

MARGARET WARNER: And we have certainly seen it play out in Ukraine.

PETER POMERANTSEV: Well, in Ukraine, it's been total.

That's really been the new thing about this war in Ukraine. So, there's a small military operation, covert mainly, and 98 percent propaganda. They are using the idea of freedom of information, which is something that we value very much, to do disinformation.

Let's say Russia today after the MH-17 crash spits out tens of conspiracy theories about why it might have happened. The idea that Ukrainians thought it was President Putin's personal plane and they shot it down? They're not doing this out of a search for the truth. They're not doing this out of a passion for investigative journalism.

They're doing this to kind of muddy the waters as quickly as possible.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, one of the great mysteries in the West is why, as the sanctions tighten around Russia, as oil prices drop, as Russia's headed into recession next year, Putin remains wildly popular.

PETER POMERANTSEV: In Russia, love is always very close to fear. So, when 84 percent of say they love Vladimir Putin, they might almost be saying that they fear him.

MARGARET WARNER: Is there something about him that touches something in the Russian soul?

PETER POMERANTSEV: I think they have manipulated it to make people feel that there is something in him which touches the Russian soul.

Listen, his polls were doing very, very badly after coming back into power. They started a big war in order to get his ratings up. And 84 percent is what Bush had after the start of Iraq. It's the classic figure for a wartime president. And the question is, how are they going to hold this? Are they going to have invent new wars?

And you have to understand who the war is with. So, Russia isn't in a war with Ukraine, according to Russian propaganda. It is at war with America. It's kind of this funny thing. America is like barely paying attention to Russia. Russia, if you watch Russian TV and if you increasingly talk to Russians, is now at war with America.

MARGARET WARNER: Peter Pomerantsev, thank you so much.

PETER POMERANTSEV: My pleasure.

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 #15
BBC
November 16, 2015
Russia's global media operation under the spotlight
By Stephen Ennis
BBC Monitoring

The Kremlin's international media operation appears to be going from strength to strength with two recent high-profile launches and more in the pipeline.

But it is also coming under increased scrutiny over its lack of editorial balance and accusations that it is deliberately using disinformation to counter and divide the West.
In a spanking new press centre in Moscow on 10 November, controversial TV news anchor Dmitry Kiselev, who is also head of the Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today) news agency, unveiled Sputnik - the Kremlin's latest foray into the international news arena.

With its planned network of media hubs in 30 cities, Sputnik is the new brand for the radio station Voice of Russia and the foreign-language operations of the RIA Novosti news service, which were taken over by Rossiya Segodnya when it was launched last December.

Propaganda

Kiselev said the new project was aimed at a global audience "tired of aggressive propaganda promoting a unipolar world and who want a different perspective".

But with his own relentless denunciation of the West and demonisation of Ukrainians as fascists on state TV, there can hardly be a more practised purveyor of "aggressive propaganda" than Kiselev himself.

The Sputnik launch came less than a fortnight after the Kremlin's international TV channel RT (formerly known as Russia Today) unveiled a dedicated news service for viewers in the UK. Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan (who holds the same position at Rossiya Segodnya) said that RT UK would seek to "promote debate and new ways of thinking about British issues".

RT's funding is set to rise in 2015 to over $330m (£210m; €264m). It is said to be planning to add French and German operations to its existing services in English, Spanish and Arabic.

But RT UK's debut was greeted with a barrage of criticism in the British press. Writing in the Observer, Nick Cohen accused the channel of spreading conspiracy theories and being a "prostitution of journalism". Meanwhile, in The Times, Oliver Kamm called on broadcast regulator Ofcom to act against this "den of deceivers".

'Weaponisation'

Oliver Kamm did not have long to wait. On 10 November, Ofcom found RT guilty of violating the broadcasting code's "due impartiality" rules in its coverage of the Ukraine crisis in early March. It rejected RT's contention that as a station that challenges the "established" view in the UK it was somehow exempt from the normal broadcast requirements.

In view of past violations, it put the channel on notice that future breaches may result in a "statutory sanction", which could include fines, or even the suspension or revocation of RT's broadcast licence.

For President Putin, RT is spearheading Russia's bid to challenge the "Anglo-Saxon monopoly" on global news. But, according to a recent report by US journalist Michael Weiss and UK-based writer and TV producer Peter Pomerantsev, it is part of a strategy of disinformation aimed at countering and dividing the West.

Entitled "The menace of unreality: How the Kremlin weaponises information, culture and money", the report was produced under the aegis of the US-based Institute of Modern Russia (IMR), which is part-funded by members of the family of former oil tycoon and Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Adapting techniques inherited from the old KGB, say the authors, RT makes extensive use of conspiracy theories that serve to undermine a "reality-based discourse". This, they argue, then creates the conditions in which the Kremlin can advance its own disinformation to "confuse situations at critical junctures".

They give as examples a spurious RT report about Jews fleeing Ukraine over anti-Semitism, equally bogus insinuations that a US think tank was advising Ukrainian President Poroshenko to carry out ethnic cleansing, and the spreading of conspiracy theories concerning the downing of Malaysian airliner MH17 over east Ukraine in July.

According to Weiss and Pomerantsev, this kind of media manipulation amounts to a "weaponisation of information", a phrase also used in relation to Russia by Mark Galeotti, a professor of global affairs at New York University.

'Information war'

But Ms Simonyan insists that RT is not very different from other major news broadcasters. Responding to the Ofcom ruling, she said the BBC was also guilty of "bias" in its reporting of Ukraine, as well as its coverage of other issues.

In a statement posted on RT's website, she said other broadcasters would also have to change the way they operate, "if double standards are to be avoided".

Weiss and Pomerantsev, meanwhile, came under fire in an anonymous article on the pro-Kremlin English-language website Russia Insider. Part political critique, part personalised attack, the article accuses them of being members of a "Russophobic hack pack" that also includes Edward Lucas of The Economist and US journalist Anne Applebaum.

Ordinary Russians appear to hold similar views. A poll published on 12 November by the independent Levada Centre indicated that 88% of the population believe the USA and other Western countries are waging an information war against Russia. Just 4% dissented from this view.

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#16
The Conversation
https://theconversation.com
March 30, 2015
Russia fighting information wars with borrowed weapons
By Cynthia Hooper
Associate Professor of History at College of the Holy Cross

"Life would be boring without rumors."

So said Russian President Vladimir Putin, upon re-emerging from a mysterious ten-day disappearance, during which the internet exploded with speculation he was dead.

The Kremlin added fuel to the fire after posting photos of Putin on its website it claimed were current - but which turned out to have been images from a meeting that had taken place a week earlier.

It's not the first time that Putin and the Kremlin have played fast and loose with the facts. At the annual G-20 summit in Australia last fall, when the Prime Minister of Canada told Putin to get his country's troops out of Ukraine, the Russian leader apparently responded, "Unfortunately, this cannot be done, as we are not there." (And remember the "little green men" in Crimea whom Putin suggested were not Russian soldiers, but unknown citizens masquerading in used Russian uniforms?)

Yet according to polls, 85% of Russians voters trust Putin, an all-time high. And even though it's common knowledge that the state has seized control of the country's three main television stations, somewhere between 80% and 90% of citizens continue to rely on those stations for their news. (Russians watch an average of 3 ½ hours of state TV a day.)

Why are Russians so willing to swallow misinformation? Have the country's citizens - after decades of learning to read between the lines during the Soviet era - suddenly become gullible?

Not exactly. Instead, the Kremlin has become increasingly sophisticated in its media strategy. Even as it continues to enforce conformity of coverage at home, it criticizes conformity abroad. Moreover, it borrows from the playbook of its former Cold War enemy, the US, to shape public opinion - in part by concocting a powerful story of Western spin.

Newspeaking from both sides of the mouth

To the international audience, the Kremlin advertises pro-Russian coverage as an "alternative point of view" that any truly "free" press should acknowledge.

"Question More" reads the slogan of the Kremlin's English-language news service Russia Today (RT).

Such rhetoric borrows heavily from that of Fox News. Upon launching in 1996, the nascent network introduced itself to US viewers as a "Fair and Balanced" alternative to what it claimed was the country's overwhelming "liberal media bias."

Likewise, in selling their product as more open-minded alternative to the supposed "Anglo-Saxon mass-media monopoly," RT has enjoyed astonishing success.

Last November, the government went even further, announcing the formation of a new global media service named Sputnik to challenge US-led "aggressive propaganda promoting a unipolar world."

These media agencies are slick - and not stupid.

In particular, their criticism of the American political establishment is often hard-hitting, conveying concerns about US-led hegemony shared by other countries across the world.

Such outlets typically argue that the US media frames the Ukraine conflict in outdated Cold War clichés, and that it too readily embraces Ukrainian leaders who are also manipulating information to elicit Western sympathy (not to mention vast amounts of financial aid). It also argues that Western media hypocritically avoids probing into the United States' own checkered record of overseas crimes.

"We've switched roles," crowed Sputnik chief Dmitry Kiselev last year. "Russia is for freedom of expression and the West is not."

A Western toolbox

Some accuse the Kremlin of "weaponizing information," combining the Newspeak of George Orwell with "the savvy of Don Draper." According to journalists Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss, Russian "political technologists" work behind the scenes to insert deliberately false material into international public debate in the name of balanced and objective coverage.

At the same time, they strive to discredit the very principle of objectivity, encouraging viewers to believe that - especially during international conflicts - all journalism is skewed by politics and preconceptions.

It's a deeply cynical strategy. But it works. Most Russians appear to embrace the argument that "everybody lies" - including the West.

"Isn't the labeling that CNN and BBC use also propaganda?" opined leading Russian state television anchor Andrei Kondrashov. "We [in Russia] have simply adopted the same methods that they use today."

Kondrashov and others point out that US corporations and Hollywood celebrities (not to mention US presidential candidates) all hire expensive PR firms to place stories, tactically leak information and cultivate point people who can be relied upon for appropriate spin. And, indeed, a recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a decrease of 7,200 journalism jobs by 2022, but an increase of 27,400 positions in PR.

Then there's the mass hiring of internet trolls to articulate a pro-Putin message on Western media sites. Many US journalists have called it a "Kremlin attack" to "claim control over the internet." Moderators at the British Guardian - where articles can be flooded with as many as 40,000 comments a day - have termed it an "orchestrated campaign." Meanwhile, the English-language Moscow Times has been forced to shut down its online discussion forum, citing floods of spam.

Russia's only remaining independent investigative newspaper interviewed individuals who admitted to being paid to produce a quota of 100 posts a day. But in explaining their responsibilities, the interviewees echoed the language of US election campaign managers who organize "rapid response" teams of volunteers to write letters to the editor, post on social media and comment on articles - all to shape and influence debate.

Entertainment's agenda

Russian celebrities also play a role in molding public opinion.

Director Nikita Mikhalkov, for instance, is a long-time critic of Soviet-style dictatorship. (He won an Oscar for his anti-Stalin 1995 film Burnt By the Sun.) Yet he's also an outspoken Russian nationalist - and a close friend of Putin. At the premier of his most recent film, Mikhalkov declared, "Anyone who says Crimea is not Russian is the enemy."

His next project will be a television series about the death of legendary 19th century Russian writer-diplomat Aleksandr Griboedov. The director claims that he will correct the historical record, to "prove" that Griboedov was killed in Tehran by Muslims acting under the direction of British spies during a time of Anglo-Russian competition for influence in Central Asia.

Though set in the distant past, the project reinforces contemporary media messages: just as the British connived to undermine Russian interests in 19th-century Persia, so, too, are the Americans meddling in Ukraine.

But US popular culture is also filled with anti-Russian allusions. For example, the third season of House of Cards depicts US President Frank Underwood locking horns with his Russian counterpart, Viktor Petrov - a figure who shares not only the same initials as his real-life model, but also a KGB background, an extended term in office, a failed marriage and a penchant for political cynicism.

"Russia has nothing to gain from peace in the Middle East and, more importantly, nothing to gain from working with America," Petrov intones in one episode, minutes after being received at the White House.

Meanwhile NBC's Allegiance centers on Russian spies in America who are plotting a terrorist operation to retaliate against US sanctions. It's an attack that will, exults one character, "allow us to operate as we wish, in Ukraine, in Europe, in the world."

One early scene depicts the plotters slowly feeding one of their colleagues suspected of betrayal into a furnace, after reminding him that the name of their organization may have changed but "the rules remain the same."

Viewers are thereby encouraged to link contemporary Russian intelligence operatives to the Soviet-era KGB, with a twist of modern-day ISIS thrown in.

Still, Russia's in a league of its own

But differences in degrees of media freedom matter, and borrowed strategies do not mean equivalent ones. What's important is to find a way to criticize the shortcomings of US media practice and policy, without fully embracing Russian spin.

While both countries may be promoting a "new Cold War" along cultural lines, what distinguishes Russia is the level of manipulation involved in, as Putin's critics phrase it, "activating hatred."

It's a process fueled by an increasingly organized, largely invisible set of censorship personnel and practices. Government pressure on the handful of independent outlets that remain continues to grow. (The haunting question of who's behind the death of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov looms large.)

Meanwhile, the most popular programs remain the ones where fact and fiction unapologetically blur.

A self-described "documentary film" that aired in mid-March to commemorate the first anniversary of Russia's annexation of the Crimea opens with a shot of a Russian Orthodox church, a military helicopter and an interview with Putin.

"I invited the head of Special Operations to the Kremlin," Putin somberly recounts, "and told him, 'let's speak directly, that we must save the life of the President of Ukraine.'"

Combining professional History Channel-style packaging with staged re-enactments of events (that may not have even taken place), the film, titled Crimea: The Way Home has already garnered more than five million views online.

It's a testament to the immense - and rapid - growth of Russia's mighty media megaphone.

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 #17
Moscow Times
March 27, 2015
Russian Propaganda Exploits Western Weakness
By Andrew Kornbluth
Andrew Kornbluth is a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley.

It is becoming clear that certain authoritarian models of government are capable of matching and, in some respects, even exceeding the accomplishments of their democratic counterparts. Whether Russia, with its dependence on energy exports and otherwise undiversified economy, should be counted among them is debatable, but there is one area in which the Russian state has so far demonstrated a clear mastery over its Western opponents: its propaganda or, to use the public relations term, its messaging.

But impressive as the information component of Russia's current "hybrid war" over Ukraine has been, its success arguably owes less to its ingenuity than to ingrained flaws in Western democratic culture for which there is no simple solution.

The effectiveness of Russia's spin is difficult to deny; in addition to the almost 90 percent of Russians who support their president and, albeit passively, his expansionist campaign, a large part of the Western public, especially in Europe, remains convinced that Russia bears little or no responsibility for the war in Ukraine.

Ironically, Russian messaging has worked by exploiting vulnerabilities in precisely those mechanisms of self-criticism and skepticism which are considered so essential to the functioning of a democratic society. The modern Western culture of self-doubt has proved particularly susceptible to manipulation in a 21st-century confrontation that strongly recalls its Cold War origins.

Four assumptions popular in contemporary Western democratic discourse have been co-opted by Russian messaging in the present crisis. The first is that all sides in a conflict are equally guilty. Never far beneath the surface, Europe's suspicion of the leader of the Western alliance, the United States, has been reinvigorated by successive scandals over the war in Iraq, torture and eavesdropping. Everyone has committed crimes - so the thinking goes - so how can the West possibly reproach Russia?

Likewise, in this confused moral landscape, the "illegality" of the Ukrainian revolution is blithely juxtaposed with the illegality of Russia's annexation of Crimea, while the enormous differences in nature, scale and motive between the subjects under comparison go unmentioned.

The second assumption is that there are "two sides to every story." The desire to consult multiple sources and the unwillingness to accept just one narrative are part of a healthy critical outlook, but the system breaks down when one side is a fabrication. There is no middle ground, for example, between the claim that the Russian army is fighting in Ukraine and the claim that it is not.

But Russian messaging counts on the fact that a certain percentage of Westerners, aware of past distortions by their governments, will inevitably give credence to Russian denials, however implausible they may be. Once again, the feeling that the United States has betrayed the world's trust in recent years has contributed to this situation.

The third assumption is that in a confrontation between the West and a non-Western entity, the West is invariably the aggressor. Half a century of political and military interventions in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia has left a not altogether unjustified impression of Western impunity, an idea embraced by many in the European Left.

By contrast, the Soviet Union, secure in the possession of its Eastern European colonies after 1945, posed as an advocate for the oppressed during its existence. The suffering of ordinary Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union only reinforced the image of Russia as yet another victim of the capitalistic West, despite the reality that Russia was and is the world's largest country, sitting on one of the world's largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and holding the world's largest reserves of natural gas.

The final assumption is that general conflict in Europe is an impossibility. Peace has reigned for so long in the major countries of Europe that its interruption seems as inconceivable as an extraterrestrial invasion, as World War II begins to fade from memory. Russian messaging has had no difficulty persuading people that calls for military preparedness are nothing more than militarism and fear-mongering.

To be fair, the effectiveness of Russia's propaganda, both at home and abroad, has declined as the visible gap between word and deed in Ukraine has widened. But the ease with which disinformation has piggybacked on deeply held dogmas of the Western liberal order should serve as a reminder that even the most stable democracies are more fragile and vulnerable than they appear.

A powerful antidote to corruption and misrule, the practice of speaking truth to power is part of what makes the West strong and sets it apart from authoritarian states. Paradoxically, however, this culture of self-criticism risks becoming just another substitute for independent thought in a self-satisfied Western consumer society that assumes its place in the world is unassailable.

History has a way of playing tricks on those who think it has ended.

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#18
EU gears up for propaganda war with Russia
By Francesco Guarascio

BRUSSELS, March 19 (Reuters) - The European Union is set to launch a first operation in a new propaganda war with Russia within days of EU leaders giving formal approval to the campaign at a summit on Thursday.

Officials told Reuters that a dozen public relations and communications experts would start work by the end of March in Brussels with a brief to counter what the EU says is deliberate misinformation coordinated by the Kremlin over Moscow's role and aims in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe.

It is the first stage of a plan that leaders want EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini to finalise by June, which may include efforts to produce and share Russian-language broadcast programming, notably for ethnic Russians in ex-Soviet states.

Those communities currently tune in heavily to Russian state broadcasters, which have bigger production budgets than local stations for their entertainment output, as well as news.

EU leaders, most especially in the Baltic states, have been alarmed at how Moscow has used its media to gain support for its views and policies - with budgets that are still likely to dwarf the few million euros a year that officials said the EU may provide.

EU leaders agreed on Thursday to extend economic sanctions to push Russia to respect a Ukraine peace deal. And a summit statement also said they "stressed the need to challenge Russia's ongoing disinformation campaigns", tasking Mogherini with delivering a fully fledged plan by June.

The new Brussels unit's immediate task is the "correction and fact-checking of misinformation" and to "develop an EU narrative through key messages, articles, op-eds, factsheets, infographics, including material in Russian language", according to a description circulating among EU officials seen by Reuters.

Staff will be drawn from civil servants already employed by EU institutions or seconded from some of the 28 member states.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT

The EU already provides some support for media within the bloc and beyond, including grants and technical assistance to support diverse cultural programming and coverage of EU affairs. It could now look at linking some of that aid to countering Russian influence. "We may ask for a higher return for our investment," said one official involved in preparing the plan, who declined to be named.

The EU-funded European Endowment for Democracy (EED), which promotes democratic development in neighbouring regions, will present proposals on media issues to a summit in Latvia on May 21-22, where EU leaders will meet those from Ukraine and a handful of Russia's other ex-Soviet neighbours.

EED director Jerzy Pomianowski said one option being studied was "greater integration and cooperation" among existing Russian-language media in states bordering Russia, to share content that can compete for audiences with Moscow-funded programming.

The EU official said experts could be brought in to help produce programmes to attract Russian-speakers who do not tune in to existing Western-funded Russian-language media such as the BBC, RFI, Deutsche Welle or Radio Free Europe. "We need to spread the word beyond the usual suspects," he said.

Still, EU officials involved in the project said they could not hope to compete head-on with the expensive news and entertainment channels that Russia beams far beyond its borders, or the teams that promote Kremlin ideas on social media.

The bloc is also constrained by a reluctance to be seen to as manipulating news content or to engage in overt "propaganda".

"Countering Russia's hard propaganda with its same weapons would not be effective and is not feasible," a second EU official said.

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#19
ValueWalk
www.valuewalk.com
March 21, 2015
Will The EU Be Able To Withstand Russia's Propaganda?
By Polina Tikhonova

While Russia is concluding a week's celebration of the one-year anniversary of the annexation of Crimea, world is finally realizing how dangerous the Russian propaganda-machine really is. The European Union (EU) has recently made a decision to create a new communications team to counter what they perceive to be misinformation coming from the Kremlin.

Thanks to the Kremlin's propaganda, Russian President Vladimir Putin is able to wage a war in Ukraine and increase his approval rating at home at the same time. The most recent Putin's approval rating has reached 86%, despite the fact that annexing Crimea led to a worsening of the country's sanctions-hit economy and relations with the West.

A year ago, when Putin was preparing his takeover of Crimea, Russia launched its all-out propaganda war in an aim to portray the protesters who had overthrown Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych as neo-Nazis. That kind of narrative tricked the Crimea's and eastern Ukraine's population into believing in all those horrible things about the West. And that's not a coincidence that one of the first acts of the Russian-backed rebels in Donetsk was to take control over the televised center and replace Ukrainian broadcasts with the Russian propaganda-driven ones.

The thing is that Ukraine is not the only target of such propaganda here. No. It spills much further. It spills into eastern European countries via televised broadcasts of RT (aka Russia Today, fully financed by the Kremlin, broadcasts in English, German, Spanish and French) or op-ed pieces placed in the The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) and such. And then, of course, there are those Putin-backed online trolls who fool around at discussions forums, comment sections and social networks.

A year after the annexation, Putin admitted in an interview aired on Sunday that he indeed ordered the Russian soldiers to execute a well-planned operation to take over Crimea. Furthermore, Putin admitted in the interview that "we were ready to do this" when asked about his willingness to ready Russia's nuclear forces.

Russia vs. EU: the beginning of propaganda war

EU leaders, most especially in the Baltic states, have been alarmed at how Russia has used its propaganda machine to get support for its policies in Europe.

The EU officials told Reuters that a dozen public relations and communications experts would start work by the end of March in Brussels in an aim to counter what the EU says is "deliberate misinformation" coordinated by the Kremlin, which targets Ukraine, the Baltic states and other member states.

The EU leadership agreed to extend economic sanctions in order to push Russia to stick to the cease-fire agreement reached in Minsk on February 12. The EU's summit statement also said they "stressed the need to challenge Russia's ongoing disinformation campaigns" and have the developed plan of how to do so by June.

The task of the new Brussels' expert team is the "correction and fact-checking of misinformation" and to "develop an EU narrative through key messages, articles, op-eds, factsheets, infographics, including material in Russian language", according to a description circulating among EU officials reported by Reuters.

The EU official said experts could be brought in to help create programs that attract Russian-speakers who do not watch the existing Western-funded Russian-language media such as the BBC, RFI, Deutsche Welle or Radio Free Europe. "We need to spread the word beyond the usual suspects," he said.

The most effective way for the EU to counter the Kremlin's propaganda would be to get Russian-speaking EU member states such as Lithuania-or any other state that has been clear and unmistakable in its opposition to Russia-to put together qualified people in order to disseminate more information giving the EU perspective to Russians.

Russia vs. the Baltics: information warfare has already begun?

However, some EU countries will have to do most of the work on their own, given that, for example, the UK's challenges to win a war against RT's propaganda are very different from those in Baltic states or in war-torn Ukraine.

Last year the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania temporarily banned Russian broadcasters. The third Baltic state of Estonia is poised to launch its own general televised channel aimed at the Russian-speaking minority, which is the quarter of Estonia's population.

Furthermore, Latvia, home to the EU's largest Russian-speaking minority, has proposed publicly funded pan-Baltic channels. Meanwhile, the Dutch government has financed the European Endowment for Democracy, a source of promoting the European values of freedom and democracy created by Brussels, to consider a number of proposals. Federica Mogherini, the EU's foreign-policy chief, will carefully read its report, due in May. However, Ms. Mogherini and her team made it crystal clear that large schemes that require large funding is not something the EU is looking for.

However, the EU is facing plenty of its own problems, some of which are much more serious than the growing pro-Russian sentiment in some of its 28 member states.

"The political challenges facing Europe are now immense - dealing with the perceived threat from Russia, the rise of far right/far left and anti-immigration impulses, and generally centrifugal forces and the sense that European institutions are still detached from the people," Tim Ash, head of emerging markets research at Standard Bank, told CNBC.

EU officials participating in the project said they could not even hope to compete with the Russian-financed news and entertainment channels, or the trolls that promote Kremlin ideas on social media and comment sections. Which is true considering how well-financed the Russian propaganda is, and how hard the Kremlin is trying to 'zombie' as many people as it can.

Therefore, Europe's best hope and the best way out is to promote European values such as free speech and a commitment to truth.

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#20
EUObserver.com
March 23, 2015
Russia: half-hearted EU propaganda no match for robust policies
By GARETH HARDING
Gareth Harding is Managing Director of Clear Europe, a communications company. He also runs the Missouri School of Journalism's Brussels Programme. Follow him on Twitter @garethharding

The EU is engaged in a new Cold War with Russia. It is a struggle for Europe's soul, European values and the future of peace and democracy on the continent.

Not that you'd know from reading EU leaders' conclusions on Thursday (19 March).

After the usual throw-away language about honouring commitments and fully implementing agreements in Ukraine, the European Council "stressed the need to challenge Russia's ongoing disinformation campaigns and invited the high representative, in co-operation with member states and EU institutions, to prepare by June an action plan on strategic communication."

In other words, a year after Russia swallowed Crimea, the EU is moving into the propaganda business in a bid to win an information war it is currently losing.

It is unlikely president Vladimir Putin and his coterie of advisers will lose much sleep over this.

Firstly, according to Reuters, the initial European PR team is set to number about a dozen officials with a budget unlikely to rise above a few million euros a year.

Compare this with the RT broadcaster, which receives over $300 million a year and employs 2,000 people.

Or contrast with Kremlin-backed troll farms - like Internet Research, which employs 400 cyber-nerds posting pro-Putin comments, blogs and tweets around-the-clock.

Secondly, the EU's spin-team is to be largely made up of the same civil servants who have so miserably failed to convince the bloc's own citizens of the benefits of Europe. Having worked with EU officials for almost a decade on training programmes and public information films, it is impossible to exaggerate how bad at communicating most are.

More often than not, they: confuse information with propaganda; prefer preaching to engaging the public in conversation; are obsessed with process rather than results; are incapable of using language ordinary people understand; and sign off on press releases which are unreadable, films that are unwatchable, and websites which are unnavigable.

Thirdly, the EU's messages will only resonate with its target audiences in Russia's backyard if they are coherent, credible and consistent. Unfortunately, when it comes to the EU's policy towards Moscow, these three crucial communication campaign ingredients are in short supply.

For example, how is the Union supposed to convince Russians - and citizens in neighbouring countries - that it is united in ostracising Kremlin war-mongers when its own states are offering Russian warships berths in their ports (Cyprus) or cosying up to Putin for sweeter gas deals (Hungary) and bail-out loans (Greece)?

With Moscow able to play divide and rule with EU states, it is little wonder European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said last week that "in terms of foreign policy, we don't seem to be taken entirely seriously".

When I visited the EU's representation in Prague in the mid-1990s, I asked one official why there weren't the usual posters and brochures extolling the benefits of EU membership. "Czechs think they are too much like Soviet propaganda," he said.

Propaganda

Propaganda never works in the long run because it is rarely believable and usually flies in the face of reality.

For example, despite Moscow's relentless PR campaign since its annexation of Crimea, a survey by US pollster Pew noted that negative views of Russia in Europe rose from 54 to 74 percent last year.

"Places gain their reputation by the things that they do and make not by the things they same about themselves," says government reputation advisor Simon Anholt. "When places talk about themselves in the media everyone recognise that immediately as state propaganda and they ignore it."

This doesn't mean the EU should throw in the towel in its information bout with Russia. Kremlin lies should be forcefully rebutted wherever they appear. Lobby firms that do Putin's PR should be barred from receiving EU contracts. Political parties that act as Moscow's cheerleaders, often in return for cash, should be named and shamed.

And the EU, which is the biggest funder of Euronews, should use its clout to make sure Russian broadcaster RTR does not increase its growing stake in the channel.

But ultimately, the EU's success in countering Russian disinformation will not be due to what it says but because of the appealing values it stands for and the robust actions it takes to counter Putin's thuggery.

Thousands of Ukrainians didn't risk their lives on Maidan Square because of a glitzy PR campaign by the EU but because the prospect of closer ties with Brussels was more appealing than Moscow's icy embrace. Likewise, Moldovans and Georgians will only remain committed to the EU path if membership of the club is offered as a real possibility, however distant.

The reason the EU is so spooked by Russia is not because its communications are weak but because its policies are.

Instead of throwing a couple of million euros to produce TV programmes few will watch - a kind of Russian version of EuroparlTV - EU states should show Putin they are serious about defending their values and borders.

This means boosting defence spending, offering unconditional support to defend Baltic states if attacked, holding out the prospect of EU membership to Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, ending dependence on Russian oil and gas as quickly as possible and further stepping up sanctions against Kremlin cronies.

Muscular actions like these are more likely to change Russia's tack than any half-hearted propaganda campaign.

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 #21
Politico.com
March 4, 2015
LETTER FROM MOSCOW
Ukraine, Putin TV and the Big Lie
You won't believe what the Russian media is saying about America right now.
By LEONID RAGOZIN
Leonid Ragozin is a freelance journalist in Moscow.

Professor Sergey Markov is that rarest of species-an English-speaking pro-Kremlin pundit. That makes him just about the only Putin backer who regularly pops up on global TV screens to explain the rationale behind seemingly irrational Russian policies. He understands the international audience and does his best to retain an air of respectability. But all of that changes when he switches to Russian.

This is how Markov justifies the Russian invasion of the Ukrainian region of Crimea in an interview with one of Russia's most popular tabloids, Komsomolskaya Pravda: "Had Russia failed to interfere, Crimea would have come under pressure from police forces controlled by radicals and from neo-Nazi militants. Within a month, they would have established their government in Crimea and within one or two years they would have driven out almost all Russians."

The best propaganda always has a tiny grain of truth. The vast majority of people in Crimea are ethnic Russians or Russophone Ukrainians who felt uneasy about the victory of pro-European protests in Kiev, which indeed had a very visible Ukrainian nationalist component. At the start of the protest, Independence Square in Kiev was awash with the red and black banners of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army-an anti-Soviet World War II guerrilla movement, which Russian propaganda dismisses as Nazi collaborators in a blatant oversimplification of history. Ultra-nationalists from the Right Sector coalition played a key role in the physical defense of the protests against riot police.

But all that is a far cry from Nazis taking over Kiev, an image now being stamped into the brains of Russian and East Ukrainian audiences 24 hours a day on Kremlin mouthpieces from television to newspapers, websites to official statements. Never mind that Kiev's pro-democracy movement was overwhelmingly liberal, tolerant and, toward the end of it, increasingly Russian-speaking: to Putin's propaganda machine, it's all an American and European plot to destabilize Russia and turn the Russian people into slaves of the West. If Americans puzzling over what to make of Ukraine's revolution and the crisis in Crimea could only hear what's being said about them, they'd be shocked.

Just a sentence later in the interview, Markov concedes that the specter of a Nazi takeover is overblown. "Of course it wouldn't take the same radical forms as in Nazi Germany. But they have a plan to turn Ukraine into Latvia or Estonia: Russians becoming second-tier citizens, Russian language banned."

Again, a kernel of truth: After they became independent in 1991, Latvia and Estonia denied citizenship to hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians who had moved into the two Baltic countries in the Soviet years. They were issued special "non-citizen" passports, which allowed them to stay, work and own businesses, but denied voting rights. It was unjust, but it didn't lead to people fleeing to Russia in any significant numbers. On the contrary, Baltic countries became a destination for Russian capital fleeing the corruption and graft of Moscow. The Russian language was never banned, though, and an ethnic Russian is now the mayor of Latvia's capital, Riga. All of this is something Russians never get told by their state-controlled media.

Having explained the horrors awaiting his Russian audience, Markov reaches a crescendo. "Crimea is not their main target, they really don't care about it," he continues. "Their main goal is to turn Ukraine into an anti-Russia within three years, install a Kiev version of [former Georgian President Mikheil] Saakashvili as president and then to start a rebellion in Russia proper."

Any Russian reader will know that by "them," Markov means the United States and its European allies, which becomes clear from the newspaper's next question: "Will NATO deploy troops next to Rostov and Kursk [Russian cities near Ukrainian border]?"

"Had Putin failed to request permission [from parliament] to use force [in Ukraine], NATO would have gone much further than Rostov and Kursk-it would have been in Moscow. The goal of those who staged a coup d'etat in Kiev is to bring the likes of [Russian opposition leaders] Nemtsov and Navalny to power in Moscow. Russia would have been simply carved up," answers Markov.

In recent years, Western strategists have shown little interest in post-Soviet politics, too busy dealing with the turmoil in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Northern Africa. But many Russians sincerely believe that all the West cares about is how to destroy their country.

Tell this to Russians brainwashed by state propaganda and they'll be outraged: How come all the West cares about is how to destroy Russia? Libya, Egypt, Syria and now Ukraine are just preludes to the main attack-aimed like a missile at Moscow.

And Markov is fairly tame next to some of his compatriots. While Putin's ministers are showing a degree of restraint, deputies in the State Duma, Russia's Parliament, are letting their freak flags fly.

"So what-these Yankees, who shut their parliament when temperature drops to -15C, want to lecture us?! Dumbheads!!," tweeted nationalist MP Ilya Drozdov, apparently referring to recent weather calamities on the East Coast. That was after he ripped off a few tweets mocking proposed new U.S. sanctions intended to punish Russia for the invasion. "Hooray!" he tweeted, hearing about the United States suspending military cooperation. "Hooray again!" he went on, hearing about the United States suspending trade talks with Russia. When word came of the Russian retaliation-the decision to re-introduce the ban on the U.S. pork-Drozdov wrote: "No entry for pigs from the USA."

By invading Ukraine, MP Andrey Tumanov suggested in an interview with Sobesednik magazine, Russia is merely following America's lead. "Russia should learn to be as shameless as the U.S. They live according to jungle laws. Anyone who is behaving decently and honestly they regard as a loser."

Another MP, Vladimir Nikitin, waxed apocalyptic in an article on Ukraine for the regional website Pskovskaya Lenta. "The main battle of World War III is under way in Ukraine," he writes. "The aggressor is Western civilization, which includes the U.S. and Europe." After a long, unhinged rant, he concludes: "The American-style globalization has already led to a global crisis and may still lead to the demise of humanity."

And here's the most depressing part: All of these views are completely mainstream in Russia

In Russia, big lies spread by TV transform into gigantic ones after being processed by the rumor mill. As I was writing this story, a cleaning lady kindly informed me that U.S. troops had already invaded Western Ukraine. (They haven't.)

The picture drawn by state-owned TV channels is only slightly more subtle: The Ukrainian protesters who overthrew President Viktor Yanukovych are proxies trained and armed by the United States.

This is how, on March 1, Channel 1 reported Obama's initial anodyne statement on the Crimea crisis ("There will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine."): with bald-faced lies.

The package starts off with Yury Vorobyov, the deputy head of Russia's upper house, addressing the parliament. "We've heard President Obama saying that Russia would pay dearly for its policies. We know that Kiev militants have been trained in Lithuania and Poland ... I think that this statement by the U.S. president is a direct threat. He has crossed the line and insulted Russian people."

Cut to footage of some cottages in the countryside. Presenter: "Experts have no doubt that coup experts were trained in Poland and Lithuania. Channel One has reported it. Training took place under the guise of a workshop. Our correspondent tried to enter, but was shoved away. The training was sponsored by European foundations." The rather dull footage then shows some people standing around in a non-descript room, seemingly shot with a hidden camera.

Cut to another top-level Russian MP, Vyacheslav Shtyrov: "The U.S. played an important role in this. U.S. officials have openly admitted that they have invested a lot of money in order to create this situation."

Again, the magic kernel: U.S. and European NGOs really have organized workshops for activists in post-Soviet countries, where they taught them how to organize peaceful protests. But the suggestion about military training is blatantly false.

The onslaught of grotesque propaganda has prompted many in Russia to talk about creating fact-checking organizations like those in the United States. Prominent lawyer Pavel Chikov, a human rights activist, has already started doing this. For example, he and others accused Channel One of showing footage of a busy checkpoint on the Ukrainian-Polish border during a story about thousands of Ukrainians allegedly fleeing into Russia. The Russian media initially reported 143,000 Ukrainian refugees. News wires have now reduced this number to five-persons, not thousands.

Activists also uncovered that an "eastern Ukrainian anti-fascist" who hoisted the Russian flag on the local government building in the city of Kharkiv was in fact a pro-Kremlin activist from Russia. They even found photo of him wearing a Nazi uniform. The man said he put it on for the purposes of "historical reconstruction."

Finally, hundreds of social network users and journalists helped expose the Russian media and officialdom's biggest lie: that heavily armed armed men wearing modern uniforms who took over Crimea are "local self-defense forces," not regular Russian soldiers. The Ukrainian website stopfake.org has been created to accumulate such falsehoods and expose new ones.

With Russian civil society essentially barred from receiving financial aid from the West, this is one area where Western NGOs could actually help, because one doesn't need to be physically present in Russia to undertake such online work.

And it's not like Russians have no access to objective information, as in Soviet times. There are a couple of newspapers, several news portals and some monthly magazines that report to international standards, although all of these outlets are dogged by fears of a clampdown, which makes them prone to self-censorship. The only truly independent TV station-Dozhd-is facing closure after it was taken off all major satellite and cable networks under the ridiculous pretext of insulting WWII veterans.

But all of these outlets cater to a negligibly small audience, while the vast majority of Russians, around 73 percent, remain slaves to what they themselves call "the zombie box"-television, which is almost entirely under the Kremlin's thumb.

Not just Russia, but the entire Russian-speaking world, which includes all former Soviet countries and huge Russian-speaking diasporas in the United States and Europe, badly needs a Russian-language equivalent of Al-Jazeera-or rather, many of them working on different platforms. Provided it stays independent and free, Ukraine, where at least half the population speaks Russian in everyday life, would be an ideal host for a project like that.

Perhaps that is why Vladimir Putin is so nervous.

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#22
http://wuwm.com (NPR Milwaukee)
March 31, 2015
Ukrainian Journalists Fight Russian Propaganda With Facts
By MITCH TEICH & AUDREY NOWAKOWSKI

In American journalism, the website Politifact has emerged as a leading national effort to fact-check statements made by politicians and other news makers. It's a given, though, that the American media is an independent one, and while some elements might be opinionated, it is not seen as a tool for national or local governments to issue propaganda.

Contrast that dynamic in the United States with the Cold War-era Soviet bloc, in which news outlets such as TASS were unquestionably the mouthpiece for the regime in power. But have things changed since the Iron Curtain came down? A team of Ukrainian journalists would say they have not, at least in the context of the Russian annexation of the Crimea region and its ongoing conflict with Ukraine.

Tetiana Matychak and Olga Yurkova are the co-founders of the website, Stop Fake [www.stopfake.org], which works to expose fraudulent news reports about the conflict. They've been in Milwaukee since last week to speak at the invitation of the UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies. Matychak, Yurkova, and associate professor Maria Haigh spoke with Lake Effect's Mitch Teich about their efforts in a constant battle with media.

They say images, which are either Photoshopped or taken out of context, are the most common type of fakery they deal with.

"When the fake [photo] is created, it is quickly spread across the web. It is very difficult to follow the spreading and to refute it and to disseminate it in the same way," says Matychak.

In a time where using the internet and social media is commonplace, you might assume that most internet users are tech savvy and can easily fact check any report, photo, or source that appears in their news feed. However, Olga Yurkova says this is not the case.

"Using the internet, it's usually possible to establish the credibility of any photo within a matter seconds. As it turns out however, most users are incapable of this. They instantly believe."

Since Stop Fake's efforts began, both the founders and their organization have received threats and have sustained hacker attacks. But despite the potential dangers, Matychak and Yurkova say they're determined to continue their effort to expose fraudulent news stories and try to counter them with the truth.

To that end, their website even offers a guide to identify a fake photo, produces regular news broadcasts, and is constantly on the look out for more stories to correct. Despite the internet being the source of the fake news they are combating, it is still their most valuable tool.

"Even if they demolish our website, we will create another website, and then another website, and then we have social networks to spread our ideas," says Matychak.

StopFake's cofounders, Tetiana Matychak and Olga Yurkova join Maria Haigh, a Ukraine native who is now an associate professor in the School of Information Studies at UW-Milwaukee at a roundtable discussion on Ukraine March 31st at the UWM Library's American Geographical Society Library.

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 #23
Kiev International Institute of Sociology
Laboratory of sociological assistance to information security
March 25, 2015
INDEX OF RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA EFFICIENCY
[Many charts here http://kiis.com.ua/?lang=eng&cat=reports&id=510&page=1]
 
Between February 14 and February 24, 2015 Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) conducted the nation-wide public opinion poll. The survey was conducted in 108 settlements in all regions of Ukraine, (except the Autonomous Republic of Crimea) according to the random sample, which is representative for adult population of Ukraine (aged 18 and over). Totally 2013 respondents were interviewed face-to-face during the field stage. In Donetsk and Luhansk regions the poll was conducted both in territories controlled by Ukraine's government forces, and territories controlled by separatist forces.

Statistical sample error (with probability of 0.95 and design-effect of 1.5) does not exceed 3.3% for indicators close to 50%; 2.8% for indicators close to 25%; 2.0% for indicators close to 10%; 1.4% for indicators close to 5%.

Russia's information warfare against Ukraine helped Russia to reach success in annexation of Crimea, to gain support for those actions from its population and to provoke the war in Donbass.

Information warfare is of the same importance for defense of Ukraine's unity and independence as military actions. It is unknown what is more effective in this struggle. It could be that providing a part of resources, spent on the war, not for mobilization, weapons and equipment, but for defense from Russian propaganda, would be more efficient way to save the lives of our military men than direct financing of weaponization.

Effective action on countering Russian propaganda in Donbass can reduce the number of people who enroll into separatist forces, and also deprive the aggressor of the opportunity to involve the people from other eastern and southern regions of Ukraine into the confrontation.

And if to succeed in dispelling some myths shared by the Russia people, and to decrease support of Putin's actions among the citizens of Russia, it would significantly weaken the Russia's abilities to escalate military actions.
 
The idea of creating Russian Propaganda Efficiency Index (RPE)

It is impossible to conduct counterpropaganda without estimation of its effectiveness. The efficiency of counterpropaganda can be measured as the reduction of Russian propaganda efficiency per unit of expenses. That is why the index of Russian propaganda efficiency is needed.

Index of Russian propaganda efficiency, which we offer, can become a tool for evaluation of Ukraine's counterpropaganda measures in different regions and among different social groups.

Under efficiency of Russian propaganda in Ukraine we mean the spread of supporting main ideas of Russian propaganda among citizens of Ukraine, or among people in different regions.
 
The idea is to select such statements of official Russian propaganda, which are trusted by more than 80% of Russian citizens, in other words - statements which proved their effectiveness in Russia and on occupied territory.

We think that the core of propaganda is a quasi-logical chain of reasoning:

Euromaidan was organized by Americans and nationalists → as a result of Euromaidan, the power was taken by nationalists, who pose a threat to Russian-speaking people → Crimea and Eastern Ukraine were in danger → Crimea managed to avoid the threat by joining Russia, but Eastern Ukrainian oblasts rebelled and demand autonomy and security guarantees → nationalists who seized the power started the war against their own people.
 
So we developed a number of statements which cover the main theses of this quasi-logical chain - statements on Euromaidan, attitudes toward United States, support to annexation of Crimea, disapproval of ATO, confidence in Russian media, distrust the Ukrainian media.
 
Survey findings

Index of RPE can be used to evaluate changes over time in propaganda efficiency and to compare harm caused by Russian propaganda to people from different regions and from different social-demographic groups. The mean value of RPE index for general population of Ukraine is 26; now we can't evaluate dynamics because it is the first round of the survey.

By gender and age:
There is no essential differences by gender and age (see tables in appendix): female (RPE = 28) are slightly more amenable to propaganda, than male (RPE = 25),
People aged over 70 years (RPE = 29) are slightly more likely to believe in Russian propaganda than in average for Ukraine (RPE = 26).

By level of education:
The influence of education is also not crucial - people with higher education are slightly less amenable to propaganda (RPE=24) than in average for Ukraine.

By regions:
The most significant differences in predisposition to believe Russian propaganda are connected with a region of residence. Russian propaganda has the least influence on people in Western (index of RPE=12) and Central oblasts (RPE=19).

In Southern oblasts the index is significantly higher (RPE = 32).

In Eastern oblasts (RPE=48) the index of RPE is four times more than in Western regions. We can see that Eastern region is problematic and needs serious efforts to counter Russian propaganda. The situation in Southern oblasts is also not fully trouble-free.  

As we can see on Chart 2, Russian propaganda (aside from Donbass) is strongly influencing the residents of Kharkiv (index of RPE = 50) and Odessa(index of RPE = 43) oblasts.

The situation in Kherson, Mykolaiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhya oblasts is much better (index of RPE = 28-29).

In Kyiv the situation is similar to those of the other places in Northern and Central Ukraine (index of RPE=19).

Unfortunately, sample size of 2000 respondents is not sufficient to get reliable figures for each oblast of Ukraine. If to aggregate the data from one or two more surveys, we can get representative results for each oblast. So the numbers presented here for oblasts are just indicative.    

But in spite of this, we can suppose that there is a strong need for active counterpropaganda actions in Kharkiv and Odessa oblasts.

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 #24
BBC
March 3, 2015
Ukraine's new online army in media war with Russia
By Yana Lyushnevskaya

With clashes continuing in eastern Ukraine, the country is seeking to launch an offensive on another important battlefield, the internet.

In an effort to counter Russian propaganda, the controversial Information Ministry is creating an online army of volunteer bloggers tasked with debunking misinformation in the Russian media and promoting pro-Ukrainian views on the web.

The cyber army is depicted a graphic (above) on the ministry's Facebook page.  

But many bloggers have been sceptical, fearing this is yet another example of Ukraine imitating Russia's own propaganda machine.

As has been well documented in both Western and Russian media, Moscow employs an army of internet activists or "trolls" who are paid to influence and disrupt debate on social media and other websites.

Online army

The recruiting of "information troops" began as soon as the slick website i-army.org went online on 23 February. Its stated purpose is to fight Russian "bots", "fake" news reports and "psychological pressure" from Moscow-based media.

"Over the past year, we have managed to create a powerful combat-ready army which courageously defends us in Donbass. Now the time has come to stand up to Russian occupiers on the information front as well," the Information Ministry explains.

Bloggers who have signed up with the "information troops" have said that their first task was to create new social media accounts and pose as residents of eastern Ukraine, adding from five to 10 friends per day.

Many social media users appeared sceptical of the idea, fearing that the "troops" would be doing exactly "what Russian bots do", as one user put it on the project's Facebook page.

Responding to these and other allegations, Information Minister Yuriy Stets promised in an interview with the Russian website Meduza that the "information troops" would only spread the "truth".

"Ministry of truth"

The creation of an online "army" follows a series of other controversial steps to counter Russian propaganda.

In late 2014, the establishment of the Information Ministry prompted its opponents to dub it the "ministry of truth" in reference to George Orwell's "1984".

In February, Stets announced plans to launch a new English-language channel, Ukrainian Tomorrow, which would broadcast abroad alongside the privately-owned station Ukraine Today.

Journalist Vakhtanh Kipiani argued that it was "crazy" to pursue foreign broadcasting while the country is struggling to develop an efficient media policy domestically, especially in the Russian-speaking east.

"Unacceptable" policies

The Ukrainian media as whole has been less than enthusiastic about Kiev's counter-propaganda initiatives.

"The current crisis and war should not teach us how to lie. Winning back trust will be very difficult. Telling the truth is patriotic as well, isn't it?" journalist Khrystyna Berdynskykh said on the website of the Novoye Vremya weekly.

The media analysis website Telekrytyka argued that the most efficient way to counter misinformation is to offer "truthful and comprehensive" reporting - which should also be timely: "It's unacceptable to keep silent for hours without giving any comments, as was the case after the shelling of Mariupol [on 24 January] for example, when a hundred theories spread through social networks and Russian media".

The Ukrainian authorities have been especially criticized for downplaying casualties and losses in important battles, such as those at Donetsk airport and the strategic rail hub of Debaltseve.

"Such lies become even more humiliating when they are easily refuted by the enemy," the weekly Zerkalo Nedeli said on 21 February.

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 #25
The Economist
March 12, 2015
Ukraine's media war
Battle of the memes
Russia has shown its mastery of the propaganda war. Ukraine is struggling to catch up

IN LATE 2013, early in the Maidan demonstrations, Savik Shuster, one of Ukraine's most influential television hosts, made the mistake of inviting opposition leaders onto his talk show. Mr Shuster's network, whose owners were aligned with Viktor Yanukovych, then the president, promptly dropped Mr Shuster's programme "Savik Live". It was picked up by Channel 5, a station owned by a western-leaning oligarch named Petro Poroshenko. Last month, Mr Shuster again found himself under pressure-this time, he says, from Mr Poroshenko, who is now Ukraine's president.

Mr Shuster's offence was to invite on air a Russian journalist who criticised the Ukrainian government for killing civilians in a "fratricidal war". Ukraine's National Council for Television and Radio Broadcasting issued him a warning for violating a law against war propaganda and incitement of hatred. In today's atmosphere, Mr Shuster says, his attempt at bringing balance to the discussion proved a step too far: "There are now people who shouldn't be on the air, and things that shouldn't be discussed." As one of his other guests, a deputy from Mr Poroshenko's party, remarked later in the show: "Today, an information war is being waged against Ukraine...Our task is to be united, to comment as one."

Information warfare, like the shooting kind, is a new art for Ukraine, and the learning curve is steep. Faced with a finely-tuned and well-funded Russian propaganda machine, truth and openness ought to be Ukraine's most powerful weapons. But truth-telling is slow and painful work, and Kiev often opts for misinformation of its own instead. The Ukrainian authorities gloss over military losses, so much so that domestic observers now interpret the government's daily situation briefings as a euphemistic code: "14 [killed] means there was lots of fighting, two means it was a relatively quiet day," says Vitaly Sych, editor of Novoe Vremya, a weekly.

Ukraine's leaders consistently and implausibly deny any responsibility for civilian deaths, further undermining trust, especially among the population in separatist-held territory. Criticism of the government is dismissed as mudslinging by Kremlin agents. Last month authorities jailed Ruslan Kotsaba, a western Ukrainian blogger who had spoken out against mobilisation. Ukrainian authorities accused him of working in Russia's interests; Amnesty International labeled him a prisoner of conscience. "We're becoming just like them," one senior Ukrainian official laments.

Tasked with bringing order to the information front is the newly-created Ministry of Information Politics, led by Yuriy Stets, a former producer at Channel 5 and a close personal friend of Mr Poroshenko. Journalists and civil-society activists derided the ministry's creation, dubbing it the "Ministry of Truth". Mr Stets says his critics "read Orwell but not Churchill," and compares his information ministry to the one Britain operated during the second world war. Mr Stets aims to fix poor coordination between often contradictory government agencies and develop tools for resisting Russian information warfare. "We must teach the authorities to tell the truth," he insists, promising not to engage in propaganda or censorship. Heavy censorship in Ukraine is, indeed, unlikely-not least because the media remains in the hands of powerful oligarchs.

Yet the ministry's first steps suggest it may be unwisely trying to imitate the better-funded, more professional Russians. "They see what Russia does and think they can bring it to Ukraine," says Oksana Romaniuk of Kiev's Institute of Mass Information. "We're battling propaganda with propaganda." The ministry has announced plans to create a worldwide television channel to counter Moscow's Russia Today network; it will be called Ukraine Tomorrow. Mr Stets has also launched the "Ukrainian Information Army", a volunteer force of internet commenters tasked with spreading government-approved content and combatting Russian trolls. A recent mission asked the troops to post a propagandistic Ukrainian response to a Russian-made propaganda video.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian journalists have been struggling with how to carry themselves in a war where the media plays an outsize role. Inside the newsroom of 1+1, one of Ukraine's top television stations, Ukrainian flags signed by soldiers hang on the walls. Spent shells rest on bookshelves, and on the floor lie fragments of the ruined Donetsk airport. Next to a target-practice mannequin dressed in a separatist uniform and labeled "Putin", a donation box calls out: "Help Protect Ukraine". Aleksander Tkachenko, chief executive of 1+1 Media, says journalists have found themselves "participants in a war. Not physically, but a new type of war."

Journalists constantly debate whether they can help Ukraine without contradicting their professional standards. "Ukrainian journalism is undergoing a crisis of values," says Olga Chervakova, a television journalist turned politician, who now sits on the parliamentary Committee for Freedom of Speech and Information. Threats to Ukrainian journalists from separatist forces have made traveling to Donetsk and Luhansk too dangerous for most. As a result, news reports are often one-sided, sometimes lumping together all residents of rebel-held areas as "terrorists". Such generalisations prevent Ukrainians from truly understanding the crisis, writes Nataliya Gumenyuk of Hromadske TV, one of the few Ukrainian journalists who travels to separatist-held territory.

Covering a conflict in one's own country raises complex moral dilemmas. "When you are being attacked, there is a natural human instinct to defend oneself," says Olexandr Martynenko, director of Interfax-Ukraine, the country's leading news wire. More often than not, Mr Martynenko notes, Ukrainian journalists are choosing patriotism over professional standards. For many, including Andrei Tsaplienko, a war correspondent at 1+1, remaining above the fray is close to impossible. Before the war, when Mr Tsaplienko covered conflicts in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, he witnessed human suffering but could do nothing about it. In Ukraine, parallel with his journalism, he has begun collecting and delivering aid to the front: "Here, I understand that I can help." At one point Mr Tsaplienko considered joining the army, but was dissuaded when soldiers told him he could do more good as a journalist. How much Ukraine's journalists are aiding its cause by forgoing impartiality is debatable.

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#26
Kyiv Post
November 20, 2015
How to fight information war with Russia
by Oksana Lyachynska

What does the Russian propaganda war mean for Ukraine and the world? How do you fight it? Experts from the United States, Britain and Ukraine attempted to answer these and other questions at the Kyiv Post Tiger Conference. Below are some of the highlights from their talks.

Macon Phillips, coordinator of Bureau of International Information Programs at the U.S. Department of State:

"Russia, the Kremlin push a lot of disinformation and you nearly want to argue about every individual piece of information, why it's right or wrong. ... We need to do more in terms of response. We need to actually protect the open system of media that is by far the best way to respond to these things."

"The most effective way to counter the information war here in Ukraine is for Ukraine to succeed. We can spend all of our time trying to respond to this or that. But ultimate reality is going to drive that. If the Ukrainian government continues to implement reforms, continues to move forward, continues to sustain itself, eventually the reality will reach everyone."

"The best way to respond to misinformation is with the truth. But the truth is a difficult thing to talk about."

Dmytro Kuleba, Ambassador-at-Large for Strategic Communications at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine:

"Russian information aggression is a threat not only to Ukraine but to all democracies. ... The only difference is that Ukraine is in the front line."

"What Russians are doing is not information attacks or information campaigns or information operations. They created a comprehensive reality encompassing all aspects of their interests. When you have to confront reality you have to create your own reality."

"Russian information machine is built on fakes and manipulation, so if we want to win this game we have to focus on credibility."

"It's about changing communication culture inside the Ukrainian government. For example, minister of defense is key here. And we are working to change the communication culture to become more available for media. This is critical."

"Russian strategy is based on the use of weapons of mass destruction. By this I mean Russia Today, Sputnik, army of trolls, bots, proxies, paid commentators. We base our strategy on something completely different, we base it on opinion leaders. I call them precision weapons. What cannot be done by us, can be done by opinion leaders in their countries. They can help us to disseminate the message. All we have to do is make them trust. They need to have trust in us."

Ariel Cohen, director of the Center for Energy, Natural Resources and Geopolitics at the Institute for Analysis of Global Security:

"We believe that Ukraine can make it as a European, free, Western-minded country. So does Vladimir Putin. And he is scared of that because an alternative Slavic, Eastern Slavic, Orthodox, half-of-the-country Russian-speaking country next to Russia is something they cannot tolerate. And information warfare is a very-very important part of the fight that has been launched."

"To me Ukraine is now fighting its war for independence. This is where the United States was in 1776, where Israel was in 1948. This is creation of a nation. A part of it is an understanding that information is one of the battle fields, it's an integral part of the strategy, of the war fighting."

"To answer your question about Ukraine, what this is going to be in terms of the information campaign or information warfare, there is a famous quote from the cult novel of the Soviet times "The Twelve Chairs": "Saving of those who sink is the matter for those who sink themselves." So, it will be up for Ukraine."

Timothy Ash, London-based head of emerging market research for Standard Bank:

"Over twenty years Russian interests infiltrated the West."

"To know your enemy is key. The Russian state knows exactly how West functions because they infiltrated business, banking, academia, journalism, politics in the West. ... The infiltration of Russian interests in the West is a huge threat to Western values and Western civilization. ... The weaknesses of European Union is certainly been exploited."

"This is a wonderful opportunity for radical change. Countries very really get this opportunity. Crises create opportunities, they force change. Ukraine is in desperate need of deep structural change. Putin has done a huge favor by uniting the population around this concept of European values. There is the price, but the fighting for democracy and freedom is worth it."

Paul Niland, managing director of PAN Publishing:

"The Russian media is acting to continue this fight to encourage people as volunteers to come and to kill people in the east of Ukraine. And for that reason my conclusion is that the Kremlin is directly responsible for all those deaths. They are directing media campaign, they are responsible."

"The second conclusion is as long as Russia's media campaign against Ukraine continues we can expect the hot war continue as well. They go hand in hand one to support the other."
 

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 #27
Kyiv Post
April 2, 2015
Ukrainian TV to start new life without Russia
by Yuliana Romanyshyn

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a bill on April 2 that bans the broadcast of Russian films on television. The legislation, which parliament debated and revised for six months, gives channels two months to substitute the newly prohibited content.

The law contains three bans.

The first prohibits movies, including television series and programs "that glorify the government," military, law enforcement and other "punitive agencies of the aggressor state ... that were made since August 1, 1991."

Another is a prohibition on all Russian movies made since January 1, 2014, almost two months before Russia invaded Ukrainian's Crimean peninsula.

The third measure forbids the broadcast of movies with actors who pose a national security threat with their actions or public statements. The list of actors will be approved and published by a special commission of the State Film Agency of Ukraine. Soviet films will continue to be broadcast as in the past in order to avoid angering nostalgic, older audiences.

"I want to congratulate everyone, because from now on the Russian propaganda that distorts our history and glorifies the aggressor will disappear from our screens," parliament speaker Volodymyr Groysman wrote on his Facebook page on March 18 after signing the bill.

However, the law may cause difficulties for television companies. According to research by the civic organization Vidsich, three channels - NTN, Ukraina, and Inter - air 10-12 hours of Russian content per day. They, and others, now face the problem of finding content to fill the gaps that will also maintain and support their ratings.

Ukrainian lawmaker Mykola Kniazhytsky, co-author of the bill and founder of the Espreso television channel, told the Kyiv Post that Russian broadcasting may be easily substituted with cheaper American or European programming. In his opinion, the channels with overwhelming Russian content kept afloat with money from oligarchs, not by viewer demand.

The patriotic attitude among Ukrainians has changed viewer preferences recently. One episode in 2014 of a Russian television program cost $60,000-$80,000, StarLightMedia CEO Volodymyr Borodyanskyi told news website Liga.Business. It has since dropped to $15,000 - $30,000. StarLightMedia is billionaire Viktor Pinchuk's media holding, which includes Noviy Kanal, ICTV and STB channels.

But American and European television programs are still cheaper and can cost as little as $5,000-$10,000 per episode, said Konstiantyn Striukov, the head of the advertising agency Vizeum, cited by Forbes.ua.

This may give Ukraine an impetus to alters which way its television market leans from Russian to Western, as well as to produce and broadcast more of its own products.

Vyacheslav Kyrylenko, the vice prime minister and culture minister, has started negotiations with Polish filmmakers such as Krzysztof Zanussi, to borrow from their experiences in reforming Polish television.

"For its part, the state will back those channels that invest in their own production," Milan Lelich said, Kyrylenko's spokesperson said.

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 #28
www.foreignpolicy.com
January 27, 2015
Top American Diplomat Decries 'Lies' of Russian Media
Victoria Nuland rebuts Russia Today's coverage of the Ukraine crisis and belittles the network's "tiny, tiny" audience in America.
BY JOHN HUDSON

America's top diplomat for Europe denounced Russian state-media coverage of the Ukraine crisis on Tuesday and belittled the Kremlin's propaganda efforts in the United States as fallacious and ineffective.

"All you have to do is look at RT's tiny, tiny audience in the United States to understand what happens when you broadcast untruths in a media space that is full of dynamic, truthful opinion," said Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, referring to the Kremlin-backed global media company. "State-owned Russian media spews lies about who's responsible for the violence [in Ukraine]."

Speaking at a Brookings Institution event in Washington, D.C., where advertisements promoting RT programming appear on numerous bus stops and public placards, Nuland rejected a journalist's proposal to ban RT from broadcasting in the United States, saying, "We believe in freedom of speech, freedom of media in this country."

"The question we ask Russians is, why are you so afraid of diversity of opinion in your own space?" Nuland added.

A spokesperson for the Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

In recent days, Russian media has gamely relayed the Kremlin line that the Ukrainian army is a "foreign legion" that represents NATO's interests and that Kiev is responsible for a devastating rocket strike that killed 30 civilians in Mariupol - accusations Western nations categorically deny.

The battle for hearts and minds in Ukraine and Russia comes as fighting between the Ukrainian military and Russian-backed separatists has escalated dramatically in Ukraine's east. On Monday, Jan. 26, Kiev declared a state of emergency in the rebel-held regions of Luhansk and Donetsk as separatists launched new offensives against Ukrainian forces, tearing to shreds any semblance of the cease-fire put in effect in September.

Both Barack Obama's administration and Congress have expressed concern about the United States losing the propaganda battle in a divided Ukraine. Last year, Congress mandated additional aid for Russian-language broadcasting in Eastern Europe by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America to serve as counter-messaging to RT (formerly Russia Today) and other state-funded outlets.

Although Nuland correctly assessed RT's modest broadcasting penetration in the United States - its ratings are minuscule despite the network's cable reach of 85 million viewers - her remarks did underestimate the considerable influence of its website.

RT.com, which traffics in a kooky mix of anti-American conspiracy theories, Kremlin hagiography, and occasionally valid criticisms of U.S. policies, in 2013 became the first news channel to reach 1 billion views on YouTube, underscoring the virality of its alternative content and user-generated videos.

Still, the sharp downturn of the Russian economy amid plunging oil prices and newly imposed international sanctions has had an impact on some of the Kremlin's heavily subsidized media arms. One of Russia's largest state news agencies, TASS, will let go a quarter of its staff next month as government funding dries up. The news agency, which employs some 1,700 people, is also expected to cut employees' salaries by 20 percent, according to the Moscow Times.

During Nuland's speech, she also vowed to provide more funding for Ukraine as it attempts to clean up its famously corrupt government. "The U.S. will commit a billion dollars in new loan guarantees to help stabilize Ukraine this year along with a new IMF program, and will consider another billion dollars later in the year if Ukraine stays the reform course," she said.

She also promised an increase in nonlethal military aid to the country. "Last year the United States committed $118 million in security assistance for Ukraine, and we have 120 million more in additional training and equipment on the way in 2015," she said.

Many in Congress have lobbied the Obama administration to begin shipping weapons to Ukraine, arguing that it would raise the cost of Russian aggression. Others fear that shipping more weapons could escalate the crisis and invite further Russian belligerence.

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#29
Reuters
April 1, 2015
Sacked Russian media chief takes up keyboard in exile
By Katya Golubkova

(Reuters) - A year after she was fired as editor of one of Russia's most popular news websites for falling foul of the authorities, Galina Timchenko has decamped to Latvia and launched a new site to keep the flame of Russian independent media alive.

"Meduza", published since last October out of a newsroom in Latvia's capital Riga, offers an alternative to Russia's stridently nationalist state-controlled media and the remaining independent news sources that, Timchenko says, are deferential to the authorities out of fear.

Russian media have "totally forgotten the profession's principles ... that a reporter should be uncomfortable for everyone," Timchenko told Reuters in an interview in Meduza's newsroom.

"The authorities will always try to occupy as much space as possible," she said. "Media should stand at the front saying: 'No, we are guarding (people's) interests and you won't be allowed to go any further'."

With a staff of 23 people based in Riga and Russia, Meduza publishes on a website and a mobile phone app, and is already racking up 2.5 million unique visitors a month. Her aim is to double that audience within a year.

REAL RUSSIA, TODAY

A former editor of the Russian business daily Kommersant, Timchenko took over as editor-in-chief at the Russian news website lenta.ru more than a decade ago.

Its mixture of political and social news helped make lenta.ru one of the most clicked-on websites in Europe. But Timchenko ran into trouble last year as tensions rose between Russia and Ukraine.

She was dismissed by the owner, billionaire Alexander Mamut, after a state regulatory agency issued a warning that lenta.ru had published material of an "extremist nature" by carrying an interview with a member of a Ukrainian far-right group which included a link to remarks by its leader.

Her removal was seen in the West and by the Russian opposition as a blow to independent media, as state-run outlets stepped up what is widely seen as an information war over Ukraine. Many of the site's other staff also left.

By publishing in Latvia, she is now out of reach of the Russian authorities. She says she and her journalists have nevertheless had no trouble traveling or working in Russia.

This week the site ran an article by a prominent friend of slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov providing details from a report Nemtsov was compiling on Russian military activity in Ukraine, before Nemtsov was killed in February outside the Kremlin walls. Moscow denies its troops are fighting on behalf of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine.

Meduza's subjects are wide ranging. A recent report on cancer in Russia said patients were choosing to die without proper treatment, prompting debate about the health care system.

Meduza also publishes an English-language version, which calls itself "the real Russia, today", a not-so-subtle dig at Kremlin-funded overseas broadcaster RT, formerly Russia Today.

With news compiled from other sources as well as its own reporting, the English Meduza is a remarkable resource for non-Russian-speaking readers.

What you won't find out from Meduza is who is paying for it. Timchenko says she does not disclose her financial backers to protect them from the "political and personal risks" associated with the project. They are, she says, private figures, some from Russia and some from abroad, without ties to politics.

The website is registered with the Latvian authorities to a company which lists Timchenko as its founder and names no other shareholders.

All Timchenko will say is that she is not receiving funding from Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former billionaire and leading opposition figure who was jailed for a decade. Timchenko said she discussed working with him last year but decided not to, and regrets the publicity those discussions brought.

She says she is frustrated by questions about her funding, arguing that an internet media startup is not actually a very expensive proposition, so the identity of her backers should not matter much. The goal is to build a big enough audience for the site to pay its own way within a few years.

"Media is a low-margin business - we don't trade arms, we don't trade drugs or oil. We have a plan which aims at self-sufficiency by the end of 2017," she said. "If we reach self-sufficiency then it will be a success."

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 #30
Los Angeles Times
April 2, 2015
At Meduza, self-exiled Russian journalists avoid Kremlin censorship
By CAROL J. WILLIAMS

Russians at Meduza seek to resurrect their crusading journalism and recover their loyal readership

The office of the Meduza Project brims with light and open space, a metaphor for the freedom that the dozen journalists who left Russia to avoid censorship feel in their newfound home.

The white-washed interior walls of a 200-year-old former grain warehouse where the reporters work are cut with faceted windows overlooking the Daugava River and the sun-splashed plains east of Riga. Ochre and pink bricks forming the building's arched windows and pitched, crenelated roofline evoke the architecture of the Hanseatic League that in the late Middle Ages united Northern European ports from Rotterdam to Tallinn in a trade and defense confederation.

Inside, the 11 a.m. news meeting is running overtime as the journalists ponder how best to present the latest actions of Russian state media censors in outlawing reports on the motives behind suicide.

The edict is intended to prevent a Meduza Project report from spreading to publications in Russia: It says that at least 12 cancer sufferers in Moscow took their lives in February because government-run hospitals denied them pain management medications.

"We were looking into why the government has gotten involved in determining who gets pain medications and who doesn't," said Konstantin Benyumov, editor of Meduza's English-language edition.

Eventually, the meeting adjourns and reporters disperse to their laptops on sleek blond-wood desks atop wrought-iron sawhorses. Some dash downstairs first to the wind-swept courtyard for a smoke or the daily call home to family in Moscow.

Meduza's reporters and editors are an outgrowth of the late Lenta.ru investigative news organization that, like most independent media in Russia, has been subverted by politically motivated firings and stifled by government edicts criminalizing reporting on embarrassing issues.

Like its namesake mythological Greek monster whose severed head retained the power to turn into stone all who gazed into her eyes, the Meduza Project's self-exiled Russian staff lives on, bedeviling Kremlin efforts to control and manipulate information.

A year ago, Lenta editor Galina Timchenko was fired, reportedly for publishing an interview with a member of the Ukrainian nationalist militia Right Sector.

"It was just the pretext for her firing, as it wasn't banned at that time," Benyumov said of the Ukrainian paramilitary now battling pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine.

In solidarity with their editor, 74 of Lenta's 82 employees resigned, leaving the publication ripe for ideological takeover by the Kremlin.

Six months ago, Timchenko and a dozen Lenta veterans moved to Riga, bankrolled by donations from well-heeled Russian supporters of media freedom. They seek to resurrect their crusading journalism and recover their loyal readership.

"We have 2.5 million unique views a month and this we are trying to monetize," said Timchenko, a determined businesswoman of late middle age.

The mission to replicate the work of Lenta was initially backed by Kremlin nemesis and disenfranchised oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Timchenko said. But their visions of Lenta's afterlife conflicted, and the association with Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison for challenging Russian leader Vladimir Putin, exposed the project to "vulnerabilities," the editor said.

"We want our publication to be completely independent," she said. "We don't want to be the plaything of any oligarch."

Seventy percent of Meduza's readership is in Russia, and most of the rest is in countries with large Russian emigre communities - Israel, Germany, the United States - Benyumov said.

The website is a compilation of original reporting by colleagues still in Russia and posted articles of other media, domestic and foreign. Investigative projects that brought Lenta to the forefront of Russian journalism continue, with collaboration between the remote headquarters here and stealthy reporters and freelancers in Russia.

Last month, the website carried a series of articles on the Russian government's falsification of crime statistics and the effect of the underreporting on efforts to curb violence and corruption. A retrospective on the life of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, killed near the Kremlin in February, resides prominently on the site, http://www.meduza.io.

The transplanted journalists say they miss home but feel comfortable in exile.

"We all have jobs here, so we don't feel like refugees. Half the population of this city is Russian-speaking. It's only an hour and 20 minutes to Moscow by air, and most of us fly home once a month," Benyumov said, calling their displacement "immigration light."

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 #31
Bloomberg
January 23, 2015
Putin's Propaganda Industry Tightens Its Belt
By Leonid Bershidsky

"One does not economize on ideology" -- so, according to historian Roy Medvedev, went a favorite saying of Mikhail Suslov, the man responsible for maintaining the purity of Marxism-Leninism in 1970's Soviet Union. While high oil prices held, Russian President Vladimir Putin acted in full accordance with this adage, building an expensive, powerful propaganda machine to bolster support for his policies at home and abroad. Now, however, the Putin ideological apparatus -- both its public and private tentacles -- is suffering ruthless cost cuts. For all its Soviet nostalgia, Putin's Russia is a quasi-capitalist corporation, after all.

Last year, the state news agency, ITAR-TASS went back to its Soviet brand, simply TASS -- once short for "the Soviet Union's Telegraph Agency", now a standalone acronym like BP  -- and adopted the proud slogan "We know." Ramzan Kadyrov, the fiercely pro-Putin leader of Chechnya, went so far as to name a mountain peak in the Caucasus after TASS. But yesterday, the agency, which had just two years ago tempted many private media journalists with salaries only an oil monarchy could pay, announced a 25 percent staff cut and a 20 percent salary cut. Those who refuse to take it are offered five times their monthly salaries to quit immediately.

Sergei Mikhailov, the veteran spin doctor who became TASS director general, brusquely explained the cuts by saying the team had failed to achieve "a global breakthrough in terms of both quality and quantity." "We put out, on average, one news item per two employees, it costs no less than 3000 rubles ($47) to produce, and we have very little exclusive, much-quoted information," the news site Meduza.io quoted Mikhailov's memo on a TASS internal site as saying. "We still follow news trends rather than form them."

TASS is only the latest propaganda outlet to make cuts. The government-owned Rossiyskaya Gazeta, which holds the monopoly on the official publication of new laws and government decrees, is letting go 10 percent of its staff. News Media, the holding company that runs a number of media assets for Putin's close friend Yury Kovalchuk, decided to cut between 15 and 30 percent of its staff, including 15 to 17 percent of the employees of Lifenews, the TV channel that has carried some of the most powerful domestically-targeted propaganda on the Ukraine crisis.

Faced with a steep drop in oil revenues, the Russian government is sequestering the 2015 budget to cut spending by 10 percent. Government-financed media are not exempt from the cut. Last week, they received official word from the finance ministry that their funding will be reduced by 10 percent. This concerns the national TV channels and Russia Today, the entity that runs a Russian-language news agency that competes with TASS, a Russian radio station and an international TV operation under the RT brand.

Six months ago, RT had been promised a 30 percent increase to its 2014 budget so it could start broadcasting in German and French. Now, the 2015 allocation, 15.4 billion rubles ($240 million), will be cut by 10 percent. RT is still getting more money than last year, but the ruble's sharp devaluation in recent months means that the dollar value of the subsidy has decreased by 46 percent. That's important for RT because it works in foreign markets and hires foreigners. According to RT editor Margarita Simonyan, about 80 percent of the operation's expenses are in foreign currencies. Plans for the German and French versions will probably be scrapped, Simonyan told the daily Vedomosti, at least for this year.

At the same time, the Russian Communications Ministry is setting tougher goals for Russia Today to justify the subsidy. In Russian government programs, future disbursements depend on how the subsidy recipient meets key performance indicators -- see, Russian government managers have been to business school! So a new version of the "Information Society 2011-2020" program, under which Russia Today is funded, requires RT to have an audience of 640 million, up from 630 million in the previous version. If the program is approved, Russia Today will also need to make sure that its work is cited 13,500 times by foreign media, compared with 7500 times planned for 2014.

The problem with these KPI's, of course, is that when foreign media cite RT, they don't use it as a source of information, regardless of the the media platform's goal of "forming an objective image of Russia abroad." Rather, RT quotes are used as samples of Russian propaganda, or sometimes to convey the Kremlin's official views. It appears not to matter to Kremlin ideologues, however: They just want to make sure their point of view is out there.

"The aim of this new propaganda is not to convince or persuade, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted, passive and paranoid, rather than agitated to action," Peter Pomerantvev and Michael Weiss wrote about Putin's domestic propaganda in their recent paper, "The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money."

The creators of the Russian propaganda machine assumed this approach would work for European and U.S. audiences, too. That was too audacious an assumption.

For about 90 percent of Russians, television is the primary source of news (compared with 69 percent of Americans), and when television is state-controlled and every channel projects the Kremlin's views, the effectiveness of propaganda is assured. In the West, RT, with its potential audience of about 600 million, is one of a number of relatively small media outlets. It will never be an effective weapon in the Kremlin's perceived information war unless the audience is bombarded as regularly and thoroughly as it is within Russia.

Even in the fat years, Russia could not afford to inject enough cash into the propaganda machine to have a serious impact in the West. Now, the Kremlin is unwilling to spend much of its dwindling foreign currency reserves on what amounts to a vanity project. As for the domestic theater of the information war, opposing views have been marginalized so effectively in Russia that the propaganda outlets can cope with their job even on a tighter budget, with fewer staff. The journalists who were tempted with above-market pay two or three years ago, and who are now being tossed unceremoniously into the street in the midst of an economic crisis, will now realize they were only needed to help plow over the previous media landscape and establish the government monopoly on information. Now, their job is done, and the Kremlin's generosity is, too.

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#32
RFE/RL
March 16, 2015
The Trolls Who Came In From The Cold
by Viktor Rezunkov

ST. PETERSBURG -- Last May, Tatiana N decided she wanted a higher salary than the average journalist can expect.

After responding to an advertisement in the popular HeadHunter job-search website, she became a Kremlin-paid Internet troll. Tatiana -- who, like others interviewed for this story, asked that her last name not be used -- worked out of a 2,500-square-meter warehouse in the suburbs of St. Petersburg.

The job paid 40,000 rubles a month, significantly more than the 25,000-30,000 most journalists make. But it came, she said, "with pain."

Tatiana joined a round-the-clock operation in which an army of trolls disseminated pro-Kremlin and anti-Western talking points on blogs and in the comments sections of news websites in Russia and abroad.

The operation, Internet Research, is financed through a holding company headed by President Vladimir Putin's "personal chef," Evgeny Prigozhin.

"So you write, write, write, from the point of view of anyone," Tatiana, 22, says.

"You could be [posing as] a housewife who bakes dumplings and suddenly decides: 'I have an opinion about what Putin said! And this action by Vladimir Vladimirovich saves Russia."

The roughly 400 employees work 12-hour shifts and are split into various departments. Some focus on writing up themes and assignments, others concentrate on commenting, and others work on graphics for social media.

One department is devoted entirely to maintaining blogs on Livejournal that intersperse banal posts with rough-edged pro-Kremlin propaganda.

The daily assignments -- shown in a document first published on March 11 by independent St. Petersburg newspaper My Region -- are usually drawn directly from pro-Kremlin media and go into sometimes excruciating detail about the message the bloggers and commenters are supposed to relay.

One assignment instructed trolls how to frame the February 27 assassination of opposition figure Boris Nemtsov: Either it was orchestrated by Ukrainian oligarchs to frame Russia and harm Moscow's relations with the West, or it was carried out by Nemtsov's supporters as a "provocation" ahead of opposition protests.

Lena N, another former employee, says she stopped working at Internet Research after refusing to blog the company line about Nemtsov's killing.

"It was necessary to bring people to believe that the killing of Boris Nemtsov was a provocation before the march and a murder carried out by his own [supporters]," she says.

The Kremlin's footprint in the Russian Internet has grown considerably since massive antigovernment protests broke out in Moscow in 2011-12 -- protests that were largely organized online.

Although, with some notable exceptions online news is still largely uncensored, a growing array of voices -- many suspected of being trolls -- sometimes cloud online conversations with disinformation.

Internet Research, which is officially run by a retired police colonel named Mikhail Bystrov, was first exposed as a "troll farm" by the Independent Novaya Gazeta weekly newspaper in late 2013.

The hierarchical structure, former employees say, is as opaque as the makeup of the Russian bureaucracy itself.

"The underlings not only aren't allowed to approach management," says Tatiana. "But they don't even know who they are. They know only the little boss -- the so-called team leader."

Stress, former company associates say, is also high.

Video posted on the My Region website shows what it says are employees sprinting into the building in the St. Petersburg suburb of Olgino. Apparently being late comes with a 500-ruble fine.

"In the information war, every second counts," the paper writes.

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 #33
BBC
March 19, 2015
Ukraine conflict: Inside Russia's 'Kremlin troll army'
By Olga Bugorkova
BBC Monitoring

Over the past year, Russia has seen an unprecedented rise in the activity of "Kremlin trolls" - bloggers allegedly paid by the state to criticise Ukraine and the West on social media and post favourable comments about the leadership in Moscow.

Though the existence and even whereabouts of the alleged "cyber army" are no secret, recent media reports appear to have revealed some details of how one of the tools of Russian propaganda operates on an everyday basis.

"Troll den"

The Internet Research Agency ("Agentstvo Internet Issledovaniya") employs at least 400 people and occupies an unremarkable office in one of the residential areas in St Petersburg.
Behind the plain facade, however, there is a Kremlin "troll den", an investigative report by independent local newspaper Moy Rayon ("My District") suggests.

The organisation, which the paper ties to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a restaurateur with close links to President Vladimir Putin who allegedly pays bloggers to produce hundreds of comments on top news websites and manage multiple accounts on Twitter, LiveJournal and other social media platforms.

"[During one 12-hour shift] I had to write 126 comments under the posts written by people inside the building. And about 25 comments on pages of real people - in order to attract somebody's attention. And I had to write 10 blog posts," a former employee, Anton, told Radio Liberty.

Typical troll accounts, Moy Rayon noted, were operated by people posing as "housewives" and "disappointed US citizens".

To avert suspicions, the fake users sandwich political remarks between neutral articles on travelling, cooking and pets.

"My name is Tatyana and I'm a little friendly creature)). I'm interested in what is happening in the world, I also like travelling, arts and cinema," user "tuyqer898" wrote on her blog.

However, a leaked list of alleged Kremlin trolls published by liberal Novaya Gazeta newspaper suggests that "Tatyana" is in fact a fake account.

Strict guidelines

A collection of leaked documents, published by Moy Rayon, suggests that work at the "troll den" is strictly regulated by a set of guidelines.

Any blog post written by an agency employee, according to the leaked files, must contain "no fewer than 700 characters" during day shifts and "no fewer than 1,000 characters" on night shifts.

Use of graphics and keywords in the post's body and headline is also mandatory.

In addition to general guidelines, bloggers are also provided with "technical tasks" - keywords and talking points on specific issues, such as Ukraine, Russia's opposition and relations with the West.

One recent technical task, former employee Lena told Radio Liberty, was devoted to the murder of prominent Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov.

"It was mandatory to convey the message to the people that Nemtsov's murder was a provocation ahead of the [opposition] march and that he was killed by his own associates," she said.

"As a result, hundreds and thousands of comments, where this idea is served up under different dressings, emerge under every news article of leading media," she added.

"Reverse censorship"

Despite the efforts of the founders of the "troll den", some Russian experts are not convinced there is much point in the Kremlin having an online army.

"The efforts the paid crowd make to create a pseudo-patriotic and pro-government noise on the net go to waste," popular blogger Rustem Adagamov told St Petersburg-based news website Fontanka.ru.

"It is TV that changes the public conscience, rather than the internet," he added.

Internet expert Anton Nosik agrees. "Internet trolling is not, in the first place, aimed at effectiveness, that is at changing the political views of the audience," he told Moy Rayon newspaper.

But prominent journalist and Russia expert Peter Pomerantsev, however, believes Russia's efforts are aimed at confusing the audience, rather than convincing it.

"What Russians are trying to go for is kind of a reverse censorship," he told Ukrainian internet-based Hromadske TV ("Public TV"). They cannot censor the information space, but can "trash it with conspiracy theories and rumours", he argues.

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 #34
The Independent
March 27 2015
Revealed: Putin's army of pro-Kremlin bloggers
Hundreds of workers are paid around £500 a month and required to write at least 135 comments per day - or face immediate dismissal
By PAUL GALLAGHER  

They are the online army of pro-Kremlin commentators familiar to anyone who dares read below the line on web articles about Russia.

Now one former foot soldier has broken ranks to expose the Orwellian 'troll factories' where state-sponsored employees work 12-hour shifts posting pro-Putin propaganda on news and social media websites.

St Petersburg blogger Marat Burkhard lifted the lid on the 24/7 life in an unassuming four-storey modern building he compared to the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell's 1984. Hundreds of workers are paid above-average salaries of around £500 a month and required to write at least 135 comments per day - or face immediate dismissal. The repressive system's strict rules and regulations include no laughing and fines for being a minute late. Friendship is frowned upon.

Asked if he agreed it sounded like something from Orwell's dystopian classic novel Mr Burkhard said: "Yes, that's right, the Ministry of Truth. You work in the Ministry of Truth, which is the Ministry of Lies, and everyone kind of believes in this truth. Yes, you're right, it's Orwell."
 
The structure is simple. Once a story has been published on a local news forum the troll army goes to work by dividing into teams of three: one plays the 'villain' criticising the authorities with the other two debate with him and support government officials. One of the pro-Kremlin pair needs to provide a graphic or image that fits in the context and the other posts a link to some content that supports his argument.

"You see? Villain, picture, link," Mr Burkhard told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. "So in this way our little threesome traverses the country, stopping at every forum, starting with Kaliningrad and ending in Vladivostok. We create the illusion of actual activity on these forums. We write something, we answer each other. There are keywords, tags, that are needed for search engines. We're given five keywords - for example 'defence minister' or 'Russian army'. All three of us have to make sure these keywords appear all over the place in our comments".

The funniest assignment he was given involved President Barack Obama chewing gum in India and spitting it out.

"[I was told] 'You need to write 135 comments about this, and don't be shy about how you express yourself. Write whatever you want, just stick the word Obama in there a lot and then cover it over with profanities'.

"In the assignment, there's always a conclusion you've got to make that Obama doesn't know anything about culture. You stick him in ancient India and he chews gum there. It's funny in the sense that they're ready to grab onto any little thing. On the other hand, it's not funny. It's absurd and it crosses a line."

There are teams dedicated to Facebook and other social media. "There are about 40 rooms with about 20 people sitting in each, and each person has their assignments. They write and write all day, and it's no laughing matter -- you can get fired for laughing. And so every day, any news does the trick -- it could be Obama, could be [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, could be Greece, North Korea.

"Even a political scientist can't be an expert about the entire world, but here people are expected to write about everything. And how you write doesn't matter; you can praise or scold. You just have put those keywords in."

Staff are forbidden from leaving the building during their 12-hour day or night shifts which they work two days on two off. After two months Mr Burkhard had had enough.

"I decided I can't engage in absurd work. It's all absurd. I don't share this ideology, I'm absolutely against it. I was located in the enemy camp. To keep on working made no sense, even for money, because it's such hard work that -- just forget it, forget the money. Just don't make me go there anymore."

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 #35
The Guardian
April 2, 2015
Salutin' Putin: inside a Russian troll house
Former workers tell how hundreds of bloggers are paid to flood forums and social networks at home and abroad with anti-western and pro-Kremlin comments
By Shaun Walker in St Petersburg

Just after 9pm each day, a long line of workers files out of 55 Savushkina Street, a modern four-storey office complex with a small sign outside that reads "Business centre". Having spent 12 hours in the building, the workers are replaced by another large group, who will work through the night.

The nondescript building has been identified as the headquarters of Russia's "troll army", where hundreds of paid bloggers work round the clock to flood Russian internet forums, social networks and the comments sections of western publications with remarks praising the president, Vladimir Putin, and raging at the depravity and injustice of the west.

The Guardian spoke to two former employees of the troll enterprise, one of whom was in a department running fake blogs on the social network LiveJournal, and one who was part of a team that spammed municipal chat forums around Russia with pro-Kremlin posts. Both said they were employed unofficially and paid cash-in-hand.

They painted a picture of a work environment that was humourless and draconian, with fines for being a few minutes late or not reaching the required number of posts each day. Trolls worked in rooms of about 20 people, each controlled by three editors, who would check posts and impose fines if they found the words had been cut and pasted, or were ideologically deviant.

The LiveJournal blogger, who spent two months working at the centre until mid-March, said she was paid 45,000 roubles (£520, $790) a month, to run a number of accounts on the site. There was no contract - the only document she signed was a non-disclosure form. She was ordered not to tell her friends about the job, nor to add any of them to the social media accounts she would run under pseudonyms.

"We had to write 'ordinary posts', about making cakes or music tracks we liked, but then every now and then throw in a political post about how the Kiev government is fascist, or that sort of thing," she said.

Scrolling through one of the LiveJournal accounts she ran, the pattern is clear. There are posts about "Europe's 20 most beautiful castles" and "signs that show you are dating the wrong girl", interspersed with political posts about Ukraine or suggesting that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is corrupt.

Instructions for the political posts would come in "technical tasks" that the trolls received each morning, while the non-political posts had to be thought up personally.

"The scariest thing is when you talk to your friends and they are repeating the same things you saw in the technical tasks, and you realise that all this is having an effect," the former worker said.

Marat, 40, worked in a different department, where employees went methodically through chat forums in various cities, leaving posts.

"First thing in the morning, we'd come in, turn on a proxy server to hide our real location, and then read the technical tasks we had been sent," he said.

The trolls worked in teams of three. The first one would leave a complaint about some problem or other, or simply post a link, then the other two would wade in, using links to articles on Kremlin-friendly websites and "comedy" photographs lampooning western or Ukrainian leaders with abusive captions.

Marat shared six of his technical task sheets from his time in the office with the Guardian. Each of them has a news line, some information about it, and a "conclusion" that the commenters should reach. One is on Putin offering his condolences to President François Hollande after the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris.

"Vladimir Putin contacted the French leader immediately, despite the bad relations between Russia and the west," reads the section explaining the conclusion the troll posts should reach. "The Russian leader has always stood against aggression and terrorism in general. Thanks to the president's initiatives, the number of terrorist acts inside Russia has decreased dramatically."

The other task sheets demand glowing reviews of the YotaPhone, a Russian-made smartphone, abuse and teasing for Jennifer Psaki, the former US state department spokeswoman, and three relate to Ukraine and the west's plans there.

The desired conclusion of one reads: "The majority of experts agree that the US is deliberately trying to weaken Russia, and Ukraine is being used only as a way to achieve this goal. If the Ukrainian people had not panicked and backed a coup, the west would have found another way to pressure Russia. But our country is not going to go ahead with the US plans, and we will fight for our sovereignty on the international stage."

To add colour to their posts, websites have been set up to aid the troll army. One features thousands of pasteable images, mainly of European leaders in humiliating photoshopped incidents or with captions pointing out their weakness and stupidity, or showing Putin making hilarious wisecracks and winning the day.

Many of them have obvious racist or homophobic overtones. Barack Obama eating a banana or depicted as a monkey, or the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, in drag, declaring: "We are preparing for European integration." The trolls have to post the photographs together with information they can pull from a website marketed as a "patriotic Russian Wikipedia", featuring ideologically acceptable versions of world events.

The entries for the Maidan revolution in Kiev explain that all the protesters were fed special tea laced with drugs, which is what caused the revolution.

The trolls were firmly instructed that there should never be anything bad written about the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) or the Luhansk People's Republic (LNR), and never anything good about the Ukrainian government.

"I would go home at the end of the day and see all the same news items on the television news. It was obvious that the decisions were coming from somewhere," said Marat. Many people have accused Russian television of ramping up propaganda over the past 18 months in its coverage of Ukraine, so much so that the EU even put Dmitry Kiselev, an opinionated television host and director of a major news agency, on its sanctions list.

After two months of working in the troll agency, Marat began to feel he was losing his sanity, and decided he had to leave. From the snatched conversations over coffee, he noted that the office was split roughly 50/50 between people who genuinely believed in what they were doing, and those who thought it was stupid but wanted the money. Occasionally, he would notice people changing on the job.

"Of course, if every day you are feeding on hate, it eats away at your soul. You start really believing in it. You have to be strong to stay clean when you spend your whole day submerged in dirt," he said.

The most prestigious job in the agency is to be an English-language troll, for which the pay is 65,000 roubles. Last year, the Guardian's readers' editor said he believed there was an "orchestrated pro-Kremlin campaign" on the newspaper's comment boards.

As he spoke decent English, Marat was sent for a test in the English language department, where he was given the task of writing a one-page text in English about his political views. Not wanting to overdo it, he wrote that he was apolitical, and thought all politics were cynical. It was not good enough to pass.

Before he was told he had failed, however, other people in the room were told they had passed the preliminary test and were set to work composing comments on two English-language articles about Ukraine - one by the New York Times and another by CNN.

Lawyers in St Petersburg said it was extremely rare for such a big enterprise to be working entirely on the "black economy", not paying any tax and not officially registering its employees. Leaked documents have linked the opaque company running the troll factory to structures close to the Kremlin, but there has been no hard evidence. As long ago as 2012 there were leaks suggesting Kremlin youth groups were funding online troll activities.

It is unclear whether the St Petersburg troll hub is the only one or whether there are many others, but what does seem clear is that the enterprise has grown enormously since it was discovered two years ago.

"When I got the job there in 2013 it was a small building, I was working in the basement, and it was clear they didn't have enough space," said Andrei Soshnikov, a St Petersburg journalist who infiltrated the company two years ago and has continued to cover it. He linked the move to a much bigger office with increased online activity around the Ukraine crisis, and said that while the trolling can seem farcical, it would be naive to write it off as ineffectual, especially in the domestic arena.

"People of my generation who grew up with the internet can perhaps spot the troll comments easily. But for the older generation, people who are used to television and are just getting online, they look at all these forums and networks, and it turns out that everyone else out there is even more radical than they are, than their neighbours are."

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 #36
Buzzfeed.com
June 2, 2014
Documents Show How Russia's Troll Army Hit America
The adventures of Russian agents like The Ghost of Marius the Giraffe, Gay Turtle, and Ass - exposed for the first time.
By Max Seddon
Max Seddon is a world correspondent for BuzzFeed News and is based in Kiev. Seddon reports on Ukraine and Russia.
[Graphics here http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/documents-show-how-russias-troll-army-hit-america#.ncxBeL76L]

Russia's campaign to shape international opinion around its invasion of Ukraine has extended to recruiting and training a new cadre of online trolls that have been deployed to spread the Kremlin's message on the comments section of top American websites.

Plans attached to emails leaked by a mysterious Russian hacker collective show IT managers reporting on a new ideological front against the West in the comments sections of Fox News, Huffington Post, The Blaze, Politico, and WorldNetDaily.

The bizarre hive of social media activity appears to be part of a two-pronged Kremlin campaign to claim control over the internet, launching a million-dollar army of trolls to mold American public opinion as it cracks down on internet freedom at home.

"Foreign media are currently actively forming a negative image of the Russian Federation in the eyes of the global community," one of the project's team members, Svetlana Boiko, wrote in a strategy document. "Additionally, the discussions formed by comments to those articles are also negative in tone.

"Like any brand formed by popular opinion, Russia has its supporters ('brand advocates') and its opponents. The main problem is that in the foreign internet community, the ratio of supporters and opponents of Russia is about 20/80 respectively."

The documents show instructions provided to the commenters that detail the workload expected of them. On an average working day, the Russians are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day. By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day. On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and tweet 50 times a day.

They are to post messages along themes called "American Dream" and "I Love Russia." The archetypes for the accounts are called Handkerchief, Gay Turtle, The Ghost of Marius the Giraffe, Left Breast, Black Breast, and Ass, for reasons that are not immediately clear.

According to the documents, which are attached to several hundred emails sent to the project's leader, Igor Osadchy, the effort was launched in April and is led by a firm called the Internet Research Agency. It's based in a Saint Petersburg suburb, and the documents say it employs hundreds of people across Russia who promote Putin in comments on Russian blogs.

Osadchy told BuzzFeed he had never worked for the Internet Research Agency and that the extensive documents - including apparent budgeting for his $35,000 salary - were an "unsuccessful provocation." He declined to comment on the content of the leaks. The Kremlin declined to comment. The Internet Research Agency has not commented on the leak.

Definitively proving the authenticity of the documents and their authors' ties to the Kremlin is, by the nature of the subject, not easy. The project's cost, scale, and awkward implementation have led many observers in Russia to doubt, however, that it could have come about in any other way.

"What, you think crazy Russians all learned English en masse and went off to comment on articles?" said Leonid Bershidsky, a media executive and Bloomberg View columnist. "If it looks like Kremlin shit, smells like Kremlin shit, and tastes like Kremlin shit too - then it's Kremlin shit."

Despite efforts to hire English teachers for the trolls, most of the comments are written in barely coherent English. "I think the whole world is realizing what will be with Ukraine, and only U.S. keep on fuck around because of their great plans are doomed to failure," reads one post from an unnamed forum, used as an example in the leaked documents.

The trolls appear to have taken pains to learn the sites' different commenting systems. A report on initial efforts to post comments discusses the types of profanity and abuse that are allowed on some sites, but not others. "Direct offense of Americans as a race are not published ('Your nation is a nation of complete idiots')," the author wrote of fringe conspiracy site WorldNetDaily, "nor are vulgar reactions to the political work of Barack Obama ('Obama did shit his pants while talking about foreign affairs, how you can feel yourself psychologically comfortable with pants full of shit?')." Another suggested creating "up to 100" fake accounts on the Huffington Post to master the site's complicated commenting system.

WorldNetDaily told BuzzFeed it had no ability to monitor whether it had been besieged by an army of Russian trolls in recent weeks. The other outlets did not respond to BuzzFeed's queries.

Some of the leaked documents also detail what appear to be extensive efforts led by hundreds of freelance bloggers to comment on Russian-language sites. The bloggers hail from cities throughout Russia; their managers give them ratings based on the efficiency and "authenticity," as well as the number of domains they post from. Novaya Gazeta, Russia's only independent investigative newspaper, infiltrated its "troll farm" of commenters on Russian blogs last September.

Russia's "troll army" is just one part of a massive propaganda campaign the Kremlin has unleashed since the Ukrainian crisis exploded in February. Russian state TV endlessly asserts that Kiev's interim government is under the thumb of "fascists" and "neo-Nazis" intent on oppressing Russian-speaking Ukrainians and exerts a mesmerizing hold on many in the country's southeast, where the channels are popular. Ukraine has responded by banning all Russian state channels, barring entry to most Russian journalists, and treats some of the more obviously pro-rebel Russian reporters as enemy combatants.

The trolling project's finances are appropriately lavish for its considerable scale. A budget for April 2014, its first month, lists costs for 25 employees and expenses that together total over $75,000. The Internet Research Agency itself, founded last summer, now employs over 600 people and, if spending levels from December 2013 to April continue, is set to budget for over $10 million in 2014, according to the documents. Half of its budget is earmarked to be paid in cash.

Two Russian media reports partly based on other selections from the documents attest that the campaign is directly orchestrated by the Kremlin. Business newspaper Vedomosti, citing sources close to Putin's presidential administration, said last week that the campaign was directly orchestrated by the government and included expatriate Russian bloggers in Germany, India, and Thailand. Novaya Gazeta claimed this week that the campaign is run by Evgeny Prigozhin, a restaurateur who catered Putin's re-inauguration in 2012.

Prigozhin has reportedly orchestrated several other elaborate Kremlin-funded campaigns against opposition members and the independent media. Emails from the hacked trove show an accountant for the Internet Research Agency approving numerous payments with an accountant from Prigozhin's catering holding, Concord.

Several people who follow the Russian internet closely told BuzzFeed the Internet Research Energy is only one of several firms believed to be employing pro-Kremlin comment trolls. That has long been suspected based on the comments under articles about Russia on many other sites, such as Kremlin propaganda network RT's wildly successful YouTube channel. The editor of The Guardian's opinion page recently claimed that the site was the victim of an "orchestrated campaign."

Russian-language social networks are awash with accounts that lack the signs of real users, such as pictures, regular posting, or personal statements. These "dead souls," as Vasily Gatov, a prominent Russian media analyst who blogs at Postjournalist, calls them, often surface to attack opposition figures or journalists who write articles critical of Putin's government.

The puerility of many of the comments recalls the pioneering trolling of now-defunct Kremlin youth group Nashi, whose leaders extensively discussed commenting on Russian opposition websites in emails leaked by hackers in 2012. Analysts say Timur Prokopenko, former head of rival pro-Putin youth group Young Guard, now runs internet projects in the presidential administration.

"These docs are written in the same style and keep the same quality level," said Alexei Sidorenko, a Poland-based Russian developer and net freedom activist. "They're sketchy, incomplete, done really fast, have tables, copy-pastes - it's the standard of a regular student's work from Russian university."

The group that hacked the emails, which were shared with BuzzFeed last week and later uploaded online, is a new collective that calls itself the Anonymous International, apparently unrelated to the global Anonymous hacker movement. In the last few months, the group has shot to notoriety after posting internal Kremlin files such as plans for the Crimean independence referendum, the list of pro-Kremlin journalists whom Putin gave awards for their Crimea coverage, and the personal email of eastern Ukrainian rebel commander Igor Strelkov. None of the group's leaks have been proven false.

In email correspondence with BuzzFeed, a representative of the group claimed they were "not hackers in the classical sense."

"We are trying to change reality. Reality has indeed begun to change as a result of the appearance of our information in public," wrote the representative, whose email account is named Shaltai Boltai, which is the Russian for tragic nursery rhyme hero Humpty Dumpty.

The leak from the Internet Research Agency is the first time specific comments under news articles can be directly traced to a Russian campaign.

Kremlin supporters' increased activity online over the Ukraine crisis suggests Russia wants to encourage dissent in America at the same time as stifling it at home. The online offensive comes on the heels of a series of official laws and signals clearly suggesting Russia wants to tighten the screws on its vibrant independent web. In the last 30 days alone, Putin claimed the internet was and always had been a "CIA project" and then signed a law that imposes such cumbersome restrictions on blogs and social media as to make free speech impossible.

"There's no paradox here. It's two sides of the same coin," Igor Ashmanov, a Russian internet entrepreneur known for his pro-government views, told BuzzFeed. "The Kremlin is weeding out the informational field and sowing it with cultured plants. You can see what will happen if they don't clear it out from the gruesome example of Ukraine."

Gatov, who is the former head of Russia's state newswire's media analytics laboratory, told BuzzFeed the documents were part of long-term Kremlin plans to swamp the internet with comments. "Armies of bots were ready to participate in media wars, and the question was only how to think their work through," he said. "Someone sold the thought that Western media, which specifically have to align their interests with their audience, won't be able to ignore saturated pro-Russian campaigns and will have to change the tone of their Russia coverage to placate their angry readers."

Pro-Russian accounts have been increasingly visible on social networks since Ukraine's political crisis hit fever pitch in late February. One campaign, "Polite People," promoted the invasion of Crimea with pictures of Russian troops posing alongside girls, the elderly, and cats. Russia's famously internet-shy Foreign Ministry began to viciously mock the State Department's digital diplomacy efforts. "Joking's over," its Facebook page read on April 1.

Other accounts make clear attempts to influence Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the country's restive southeast. Western officials believe many of the Twitter accounts are operated by Russian secret services. One was removed after calling for and celebrating violent attacks on a bank owned by a virulently anti-Putin Ukrainian oligarch.

"This is similar to media dynamics we observed in the Syrian civil war," said Matt Kodama, an analyst at the web intelligence firm Recorded Future. "Russian news channels broke stories that seemed tailored-made to reinforce pro-Assad narratives, and then Syrian social media authors pushed them."

Other documents discuss the issues the Russian commenters run into when arguing with the regular audience on the American news sites, particularly the conservative ones. "Upon examining the tone of the comments on major articles on The Blaze that directly or indirectly cover Russia, we can take note of its negative direction," the author wrote. "It is notable that the audience of the Blaze responds to the article 'Hear Alan Grayson Actually Defend Russia's Invasion of Crimea as a Good Thing,' which generally gives a positive assessment of Russian actions in Ukraine, extremely negatively."

But praise can be as problematic as scorn. "While studying America's main media, comments that were pro-Russian in content were noticed," the author wrote. "After detailed study of the discussions they contained, it becomes obvious: the audience interprets those comments extremely negatively. Moreover, users of internet resources assume that the comments in questions were either written for ideological reasons, or paid for."

The documents align with the Kremlin's new attention to the internet. Putin, who swiftly monopolized control over television after coming to power in 1999 and marginalized dissent to a few low-circulation newspapers, largely left the "Runet" alone during his first two terms in power, allowing it to flourish as a parallel world free of censorship and skewed toward the educated urban middle class. Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's protégé who was president from 2008-12, made a show of embracing social media, but it never sat well with officials and Putin supporters. The gulf between Medvedev's transparency drive and Russia's Byzantine bureaucracy's reluctance to change only highlighted his impotence, earning him the nickname "Microblogger" for his small stature.

"In the best case they looked funny, in the worst, their actions exposed their real motives," said Katya Romanovskaya, co-author of KermlinRussia, a popular parody account mocking Medvedev's clumsy efforts. "Twitter is an environment where you can instantly connect with your audience, answer direct questions, and give explanations - which Russian officials are completely incapable of. It goes against their bureaucratic and corrupt nature."

The current internet crackdown comes after protests by middle-class Muscovites against Putin's return to the presidency in early 2012, which were largely organized on Facebook and Twitter. All but a few officials have since abandoned the medium and many did so en masse last fall, raising suspicions they did so on Kremlin orders.

"Putin was never very fond of the internet even in the early 2000s," said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who specializes in security services and cyber issues. "When he was forced to think about the internet during the protests, he became very suspicious, especially about social networks. He thinks there's a plot, a Western conspiracy against him. He believes there is a very dangerous thing for him and he needs to put this thing under control."

Last month, the deputy head of the Kremlin's telecommunications watchdog said Twitter was a U.S. government tool and threatened to block it "in a few minutes" if the service did not block sites on Moscow's request. Though the official received a reprimand (as well as a tongue-lashing on Facebook from Medvedev), the statement was widely seen as a trial balloon for expanding censorship. Twitter complied with a Russian request for the first time the following Monday and took down a Ukrainian nationalist account.

A new law that comes into effect in August also forces bloggers with more than 3,000 followers to register with the government. The move entails significant and cumbersome restrictions for bloggers, who previously wrote free of Russia's complicated media law bureaucracy, while denying them anonymity and opening them up to political pressure.

"The internet has become the main threat - a sphere that isn't controlled by the Kremlin," said Pavel Chikov, a member of Russia's presidential human rights council. "That's why they're going after it. Its very existence as we know it is being undermined by these measures."

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 #37
Pando.com
April 2, 2015
The Kremlin's comment trolls are real - as is the media's amnesia about them
BY COMRADEMARK (Mark Ames)
http://pando.com/2015/04/02/the-kremlins-social-media-trolls-are-real-as-is-the-medias-amnesia-about-them/

The Russian Trolls Are Coming! The Russian Trolls Are Coming!

It's every cybertopian's nightmare: Barbarian hordes, in the form of Kremlin trolls, infiltrating the frictionless, innocent democratic paradise known as "online comments sections." Inscrutable Russian savages, riding under the authoritarian banner of Putin the Terrible, sneaking into our Jeffersonian E-den, corrupting and poisoning the once-thriving social media idyll, valued for its earnest, civic-minded three-pointed-hat conversations and debates, where the crowd was wise and fair and incorruptible. Everything those savage Russkiis ain't.

The story of how Kremlin trolls are being weaponized to subvert our hallowed social media first broke into the English-language media in mid-March in an article headlined "The Trolls Who Came In From The Cold" - published in, ahem . . . 'scuse me, somethin' caught in my throat here... published on the website of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Yes, that's Radio Liberty, aka "Radio Liberation from Bolshevism" aka the US government's psychological warfare media outfit set up by the CIA during the Cold War, and covered extensively in Pando by Yasha Levine.

So yes, the irony here is thick as Bill Casey's brain tumor.

And as malignant, considering how much this Kremlin Trolls story has gone viral, as they say. A few days after the RFE/RL story, BBC (gah! government again!) followed up with "Inside Russia's 'Kremlin Troll Army'", before lobbing the story back to Radio Liberation from Bolshevism (RFE/RL), which published a long (and rather interesting) tell-all interview with a defector from the Kremlin Troll Army named "Marat."

The two government outlets bounced the Kremlin Troll Army story back and forth enough times to create critical hack mass, leading to sensational followups everywhere from the tech press to Vice, the New York Post, the Independent, and today, The Guardian.

What makes the story newsworthy is that it's a rare look into a secretive new area in the PR industry,which we've all had to suffer one way or another: paid social media trolling. There's so little reporting exposing how this area of PR exploits and corrupts social media on behalf of powerful clients - thanks to the almighty non-disclosure agreement, the most powerful secrecy weapon since Beria was retired - and here we have the name of the PR company (Internet Research Agency), an address (55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg), and a Hollywood villain as the client: Vladimir Putin's Russia.

And yet - for all the sensational shocker value of the Kremlin Troll Army story, it turns out that this very same story has been reported before. More than a few times.

The RFE/RL story in March that all of today's stories stem from first appeared in a local Petersburg paper, Moi Rayon ("My Region") not exactly known for its muckraking, which titled its exposé "The Capital of Political Trolling" complete with photos, YouTube videos, and internal documents and screenshots of trolls.

And yet - a few weeks before the Petersburg story and before the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty story, Finland's own government news behemoth, Yle (Finland Broadcasting Company), ran the exact same expose - dated February 20, 2015:

"Yle Kioski Traces the Origins of Russian Social Media Propaganda - Never-before-seen Material from the Troll Factory

"...what kind of a workplace employs people whose job is said to be to praise Putin's Russia? Kioski investigated the background of the secret office building in Saint Petersburg that is called "the troll factory" and followed the life in it for three days."

Scrolling down, we get a Google Maps screenshot of the building on 55 Savushkina, St Petersburg - plus screenshots of trolling habits, exclusive Vimeo interviews and gotcha clips, all the stuff we've come to expect from every version of this story.

And wouldtcha know it, there are more versions of this story. Earlier 1.0 versions, including the Atlantic's "The Kremlin's Troll Army" by Daisy Sindelair- who happens to work for Radio Liberation from Bolshevism Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

And a few months before that, Buzzfeed's Max Seddon published his big Russian Troll exposé headlined, "Documents Show How Russia's Troll Army Hit America." Ah, those leaked documents - FOIA'd documents, leaked documents, we don't trust anything but leaked secrets anymore. Seddon's piece, published almost a year ago, exposes the name of the troll factory:

"a firm called the Internet Research Agency. It's based in a Saint Petersburg suburb..."

Yep, that one.

And where did Seddon get his scoop? From a 2013 article in Russia's Novaya Gazeta, exposing "Where the Trolls Live, and Who Feeds Them".

It's the trolling story that keeps on giving, with all the regularity of a herpes outbreak, but with no memory to go with it, because each time this Internet Research Agency story is reported, it's more shocking than the last time.

Your typical Russia apologist will look at this and whinge as they do about the ol' double-standard. And that's certainly true: Israel is notorious for paying legions of social media trolls to wage hasbara PR wars with its critics. Ukraine established an actual Ministry of Truth and plays online underdog in its trolling wars with Russia, even though Ukraine hardly suffers from hostile western opinion the way its armed forces suffer on the battlefield against Russia.

It's not just evil governments who corrupt and despoil social media - powerful private corporate interests from the Koch brothers to Big Agro to Libertarians to you name it, have been poisoning comments sections, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and everywhere else in virtual DemocracyLand pretty much since these forums first appeared.

What makes the Kremlin Troll Armies different, I suppose, is that they're the consummate alien invaders - authoritarian-minded bugs from their horrible bug planet invaded our Jeffersonian, horizontal, frictionless paradise.

And the upside is, we caught them! We caught the aliens through journalism, through leaked documents, through YouTube and Vimeo videos and Google Map addresses. It doesn't matter that this story keeps running every six months, the same characters, same names, same address, same trolls. We caught the barbarians. That can only mean one thing: The crowd is wise. Our Jeffersonian social media paradise really does work.

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 #38
Sputnik
March 28, 2015
It's Worse Than You Thought: The 'Kremlin Troll Army' Exposed
[Graphics here http://sputniknews.com/politics/20150328/1020147102.html#ixzz3WFw5SyYS]

As the alleged Kremlin troll army continues its apparent octopus-like spread across the globe, the US government's international broadcaster RFE/RL has courageously struck back by exposing it right in its lair. But would that be enough?

In the past few days, articles have been popping up around the web, providing explicit details about a "Kremlin troll army" which operates out of a Saint Petersburg suburb, a scary place where laughter is prohibited and 400 professional trolls toil day and night to convert public opinion in Russia and abroad.

There is only one problem with the article: there is no pro-Kremlin "trolling" taking place in the evidence the authors provide. While employees of these "troll farms" do allegedly make hundreds of political posts, they are made on local forums with tiny membership, rarely over 500 users, and even tinier posting activity at most, 5 posts per person, most of which appears to be from the "trolls."

Considering the extremely low impact of such posting, the goal appears to be not to convert public opinion, but rather search engine optimization (SEO): search engines such as Google crawl the web for keywords and links, which are then used to give weight to certain web pages when search terms are entered. The interviewee even admits it himself:

"There are keywords, tags that are needed for search engines. We're given five keywords - for example, "Shoigu," "defense minister," "Russian army." All three of us have to make sure these keywords appear all over the place in our comments. They can't even be conjugated or declined. Sometimes it's very hard to write when you can't use any declensions!"

The bit about declensions is important because Google does not work well with Russian morphology, for example processing the keyword "armies" separately from the keyword "army," unlike Russian search engines such as Yandex. The keywords are used to give weight to certain words when they are searched for in Google. Then there is the question of "fake discussion." Of course no forum moderator would be happy if they discovered that their forums are used to post link spam like this:

However, if the articles do generate some discussion, which seems to be limited to 2-5 replies, and do appear to be expressing different points of view, forum moderators would be more likely to keep them. The use of tiny forums with low readership is also important for this, as that allows the posts to remain on the websites for months or years, without being deleted because there are other threads discussing the same topics or being archived.

The US government's international broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) did discover something, but it's quite the opposite from an ominous troll army which works around the clock to convert the entire world to a Putin-based religion. They found a search engine optimization (SEO) company, likely subcontracting for a political consultancy firm.

The history of SEO, and in particular "Google bombs," as well as their use by businesses and politicians goes back to the 1990s. Google and other search engines have combated their use by blocking their most obvious use, but hundreds, if not thousands of SEO companies continue working to promote business and political interests around the world.

However, the fear of "Russian propaganda trolls" has been used to whip up hysteria which is then used to push through funding increases for RFE/RL and other foreign broadcasters. This coincides with the very poor journalism of the article reporting on the "troll army," as the authors make no attempt to corroborate the story. There do not appear to be security risks involved, as the first and last name as well as a photo of the interviewee are published, and considering advancements in modern technology, hidden camera investigations have become one of the easier things in the world.

In this sense, the sensationalism of the story, the poor quality of the research and the lack of definite information about the "troll army" somewhat ironically contributes to the decline of government-controlled international broadcasters, which now ring alarm about the rising popularity of networks such as RT. The sentiment has also been echoed in Europe, where politicians such as German parliamentarian Norbert Rottgen claim that "Russian propaganda" presents itself as a "source alternative to Western media," which must be countered by "strengthening European international media, Deutsche Welle, BBC International and RFI (Radio France International)."

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