[Theme Music Starts]

RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

Right now, much of Ukraine is in the cross hairs of war. Russian troops continue to descend on the country, and shelling is intensifying near the capital Kyiv, and in other cities including Kharkiv and Mariupol.

But as the war on the ground in Ukraine escalates, there is another battle playing out: a coordinated series of fake videos and social disinformation - produced by Russia as justification for the invasion.

Today, Ukrainian media scholar Eugenia Kuznetsova on what’s real and what’s fake - and how disinformation could affect the outcome of the war.

It’s Wednesday, March 9.

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RUBY:

Hello, Eugenia.

EUGENIA:

Hello.

RUBY:

Hi, it's Ruby here.

EUGENIA:

Hello, Ruby.

RUBY:

How are you today?

EUGENIA:

I’m fine, thanks.

RUBY:

Maybe could you just start by telling me a little bit about who you are and and where you are at the moment?

EUGENIA:

I am now living in Spain, but originally I'm from Ukraine, so I'm basically before the war started. I lived between the two countries because I work in Ukraine.

RUBY:

Mm-Hmm. So you would have family in Ukraine at the moment?

EUGENIA:

Yeah, my, my mother, my sister, my nephews, all of them are in Ukraine at the moment right.

RUBY:

How are they going?

EUGENIA:

And they fled Kyiv. They all came to a village house in the central Ukraine and they are trying to wait there and see what will happen next. They left the big cities.

RUBY:

Mm-Hmm. Well, I hope they stay safe. It must be hard to be elsewhere when when something like this is happening in your home?

EUGENIA:

Exactly. Exactly. Thanks.

RUBY:

And the reason that I wanted to talk to you today, is because of your work - what you do - because it's become very relevant to what is happening in Ukraine. So could you just tell me about your work?

EUGENIA:

I’m a media researcher with focus on various types of disinformation. Specifically in Ukraine and the territories occupied by Russia in Ukraine.

And disinformation has always played a key role in the Russia Ukraine conflict and Russia Ukraine relations in general at least since 2014.

So and right now we can also see that disinformation plays a key role in this unfolding war.

Archival tape -- News:

“And there there we go. I've just heard the first siren has just gone off and I’ve been told by city officials that indicates this is a city under attack..”

EUGENIA:

And every time we hear about some shelling or attack, we are flooded with a huge flow of different digital content: videos, posts, memes, news stories.

Archival tape -- CBS:

“I don't know whether it's what the explosion brought here and exploded or it was rockets. I don't know. I don't know whom to trust.”

EUGENIA:

And it's difficult to tell what is true and what is not.

Archival tape -- News:

“Now Facebook and Twitter have just removed two anti-Ukrainian quote covert influence operations from their platforms- it’s all to stop the spread of disinformation.”

EUGENIA:

There is a deliberate disinformation that is done to harm people to particularly impact the lives of people, to create chaos and to win on the information battle ground.

Archival tape -- CBS:

“While this land war ensues, there's also a war of information and disinformation underway. Russia will surely take advantage of the media to justify…”

RUBY:

Eugenia I wonder in order to help us understand what is going on, if there is maybe one particular video or one particular piece of disinformation that you’ve seen on social media recently, that has impacted the conflict in Ukraine?

EUGENIA:

So to give you a bit of context first…

Putin has been pushing the narrative that Ukrainian government is illegitimate.

So Russia has established two self proclaimed, unrecognised republics with centres in Donetsk and Luhansk in the east of Ukraine.

So prior to the 2022 invasion Putin has been pushing the narrative that people in these so-called republics have been under attack from the Ukrainian side for years.

So there is one video that now has about half a million views on Twitter.

And that video shows body cam footage of supposed Ukrainian and for some reason Polish saboteurs trying to blow up Russian chlorine containers.

The video is dark and grainy, there is lots of gunfire.

And this was framed as an attempt from the Ukrainian side to cause a chemical explosion.

After that video was published - the Russian-backed leader of the region - made a video address.

Archival tape -- Donetsk leader:

“Russian: The first to be evacuated are women, children and the elderly people.”

Archival tape -- News:

“Without providing any evidence separatist leader Denis Pushilin said Ukraine was preparing to attack separatist held territory.”

EUGENIA:

Telling the population of those republics that they have to immediately evacuate to Russia because of the threat of a chemical attack from the Ukrainian side.

Archival tape -- News:

“Warning sirens echoed through the streets separatist city of Donetsk after the Moscow-backed leader there announced plans to evacuate civilians to Russia.”

EUGENIA:

It turned out that address was pre-recorded two days before the chemical attack. And that the chemical attack video itself was a fake as well.

It was proven that it is fake based on the metadata of the video. And also the sound was also fake - it was taken from Finnish military exercise published in YouTube back in 2010.

Both videos worked in tandem to emphasize that Russian-speaking people in east Ukraine are under threat.

RUBY:

Right, ok, so before the invasion of Ukraine - so at the very beginning of this war - Russia made and published a fake video that claimed to show Ukrainians were going to cause a chemical attack in separatist areas. And that led to a video address telling Russian speakers to evacuate eastern Ukraine to Russia. What was the purpose of these videos?

Archival tape -- Putin:

“In exercising the Treaty on Friendship and Mutual Assistance with the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republics. I've taken the decision to conduct a special military operation.”

EUGENIA:

These videos, they were used as a justification to invade. They were used to say that Ukraine is planning a kind of genocide in the east of Ukraine.

Archival tape -- Putin:

“Its purpose is to protect people who have been subject to abuse and genocides by the Kiev regime for eight years.”

EUGENIA:

And Ukraine is using some banned methods of warfare like chemical attacks, and that this just contributed to a general narrative of Putin, who says that Ukraine is led by a Nazi president who is, by the way, Jewish.

Archival tape -- Putin:

“And to do this, we will strive to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine and also bring to justice those who have committed numerous bloody crimes against civilians.”

EUGENIA:

So it was just a justification before the invasion.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Eugenia, we’ve been talking about the Russian disinformation, how it relates to the current conflict in Ukraine. But this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen these kinds of tactics - faked videos and posts have been used. So where does this begin?

EUGENIA:

Oh, well, I think we first saw it in 2004, when there was a first democratic revolution in Ukraine, so-called Orange Revolution.

But I think that Russian propaganda machine has been at its highest performance in 2014.

Russia annexed Crimea and then invaded Ukraine from the East and created those to self proclaimed republics.

But back then in 2014, this campaign has not been documented well by Western media. And you know, Ukraine has been quite alone in this. We were trying to pioneer in some fact checking resources. We were trying to debunk all the fakes appearing. But you could not even imagine how many fakes we we had to deal with.

And I think it became obvious for the West how propaganda and disinformation campaigns can work in 2016,

During the US elections, when Russia has launched a disinformation campaign in order to harm the campaign of Hillary Clinton and to boost the candidacy of Donald Trump.

RUBY:

Ok so that was back in 2016, Russian disinformation was targeted at American voters, but if we look at whats happening now in Ukraine things like this fake chemical attack video targeted at, who is the audience now?

EUGENIA:

You know, the way how those videos have been prepared, it doesn't seem that Russia really put any effort in preparing those videos because they have been published by Russian state agencies. They have not been published by Western media as any serious news. It looks like those videos were targeted just at the Russian domestic audience.

RUBY:

Right, and so if that is the case, its about convincing Russians at home - is it working?

EUGENIA:

Unfortunately my answer yes it is working. Because Putin has been really in Russia now for 22 years. And if you live in this atmosphere of propaganda, it's really difficult to keep the ties with reality.

You are living in another reality, and that is why I really want to be wrong. But I don't think that any calls to Russians like you have to protest this war. You have to go in the streets. I don't think that it may stop the war.

I know that we can't trust Russian sociology for sure, but still, sociological surveys show that Russians do support this war.

Basically, disinformation allowed Putin invade Ukraine with the support of the majority of Russian population, and it has a direct impact on the course of this war.

RUBY:

And it's interesting, Eugene, to think that this is really the face of war today because on one hand, we've got troops and we've got tanks on the ground in Ukraine, which is, I suppose, quite a traditional type of warfare. It's what you think, when you think of wars 50 years ago. But we're also seeing this kind of parallel war playing out on social media and in a way that the troops and the tanks, that's that's a battle for the territory of Ukraine. But what's happening on social media is really it's a battle for the narrative - of what happens.

EUGENIA:

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. There is certainly a battle ground in like an information battle ground.

The Ukrainian government is now treating the information war as a real, real frontline.

Like, you know, our current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, by the way, his comedian and showman in the past, so he knows the power of social media. Many say that he's actually an Instagram president. So he really frequently posts on social media to combat any rumours for instance there was rumour he has left Kyiv but he didn't so he immediately recorded a video showing that he is in the city, he is with his people.

You know, so in this regard, we can see that social media have downsides and upsides Upsides is that now we are witnessing a huge mutual support and social media. It would have been really difficult to keep spirits high without social media in Ukraine. It really makes Ukrainians believe that it is possible to win Russia.

In 2014 we have been battling that and we were really in despair. But now it seems like since the world already realises the power of disinformation, it really makes it hard for propagandists to deploy disinformation.

And I think the critical thinking also improved in the last year is that even regular audience sometimes puts some information in doubt and says, OK, we have to check that first. So it wasn't it wasn't the case some years ago. It's a it's a really recent development.

RUBY:

Well, thank you so much for sharing your expertise on on this propaganda and disinformation. I really appreciate that. And I also really hope that everything goes OK with your family in Ukraine and that they stay safe.

EUGENIA:

Thank you. Thank you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Two people have died in Western Sydney after their bodies were discovered in a stormwater canal on Tuesday.

NSW State emergency services say there have been over 2,500 calls for assistance in the last 24 hours, with over 100 rescues of mostly motorists driving through floodwaters.

Evacuation orders are in place across the state - including in Kempsey and surrounding communities on the Mid-North coast and parts of metropolitan Sydney.

Widespread flooding and dangerous weather conditions are set to continue across the state today.

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And the Australian government has announced further sanctions on Russia. According to a statement released by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Marise Payne, the new round of sanctions is targeted at quote “Moscow’s propagandists and purveyors of disinformation, who are trying to legitimize Russia’s unprovoked, unjustified invasion with false narratives.”

The announcement comes after the United Nations announced that roughly 1.7 million Ukrainians are believed to have fled the country since the invasion began. The UN believes that number could reach up to five million.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am, see you tomorrow.