Front Burner - Bonus | Nothing is Foreign: How Russia is selling the war on Ukraine

Episode Date: March 12, 2022

Peering inside Russia – and it’s complex web of state propaganda – presents a very different view of the war in Ukraine and who the real victims are. As nations around the world condemn Russia���s invasion, many within Russia are supporting Russian president Vladimir Putin. How is Putin selling the war to the Russian people? Will thousands of anti-war protesters challenging the Kremlin make a difference to the government? This week, Nothing is Foreign takes you inside the alternate reality being created by Russian state propaganda, explores how fear and new laws have choked off dissenting voices and listen in on the difficult conversations between a Ukrainian son and a Russian father in the war over disinformation. Featuring: Alexey Kovalev, investigative editor of Meduza. Sergey Utkin, researcher and head of strategic assessment at Primakov Institute of World Economy and International relations. Misha Katsurin, Kyiv resident and creator of Papapover.com. Yulia Zhivtsova, anti-war protester in Moscow.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello? Dad. Hi, Misha. How arein. He's calling his dad for the second time since the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Misha's a restaurant owner, and he grew up in the country. But his dad left Ukraine decades ago. He's a church custodian who works in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. Misha says he was surprised that he hadn't heard from his dad four days into the invasion, so he gave him a call. And that first conversation, he says, was weird. So I called him and told him, so do you know what's going on in Ukraine? He said, yes, I heard something.

And I told him that we are super scared and that Russia invade Ukraine and there is bombing and like people are running away. And so that's a disaster. And he told me, stop, stop, stop stop stop stop everything is like not like this in reality Russia now helps you to like to beat your nazist government and to save Ukraine and the most interesting thing he told me that the Russian soldiers they give Ukrainian people He told me that the Russian soldiers, they give Ukrainian people food and warm clothes. Misha pushed back, saying, I'm here and I'm telling you what I'm seeing.

And he continued to tell me, no, no, no, you understand nothing. I will tell you everything. So I just realized that this conversation doesn't have sense because he just, he cannot hear me. And I said, okay, father, goodbye. Have a good luck. Misha went on to make an Instagram post about this experience. It's since been shared over a hundred thousand times. There are 11 million people in Russia who are related to someone in Ukraine. Misha says he started seeing comments from people who said they were dealing with the same thing, from their mothers and fathers, their siblings, their aunts and uncles in Russia. And he realized his experience wasn't unique. The majority of these people, they like watch these federal channels, they watch TV, they read newspapers, they listen to radio, and that's all federal Kremlin propaganda. So that's their reality.

we're taking you inside Russia to see what the war looks like from the point of view of ordinary Russians, how the invasion is being sold to them on state-controlled media channels, and why some people aren't buying it. I'm Tamara Kandaker, and you're listening to Nothing is Foreign. Nothing is foreign. If you're in Russia right now, and you're looking to find out what's happening in Ukraine, if you turn to traditional media like TV, radio, and newspapers, you'll hear a narrative that's completely different from what we hear in the West. That Russia is helping Ukraine and fighting Nazis. They behave like fascists in the truest sense. Neo-Nazis are putting military equipment next to residential buildings.

Across liberated areas of Ukraine, convoys of Russian aid, food and essentials are an increasingly common sight. That's a sample of what you hear on Russian TV. This is all in line with the Kremlin's official messaging. Pushback against the official narrative is easily drowned out and the climate for independent press has become increasingly hostile. I still blame myself for kind of chickening out of this increasingly hostile. I still blame myself for kind of chickening out of this because as a journalist, you don't really get a second chance to cover something like this, a momentous event like this on

the ground. Alexei Kovalev is a journalist with the English and Russian language independent news outlet Meduza. Last week, he made the difficult decision to leave Russia with his wife and go to Latvia. I talked to him from where he is now in the capital Riga over Zoom. I admire the bravery of people who did actually stay to cover this. Although there won't be any bylines on the stories because it's just too dangerous. Nobody will talk to you, to your sources,

because they're also scared. Russia passed a law last week that criminalizes spreading quote-unquote fake information about its invasion of Ukraine with up to 15 years in prison. The law makes it a crime to call the war a war. The Kremlin says calling it that undermines national interest and discredits Russia's

armed forces. The government's also blocked access to Twitter and Facebook for putting restrictions on state-owned media. At some point, we realized that we really need to leave now. At some point, we realized that we really need to leave now. We booked a cab to the nearest border crossing point of Russia and another country. And yeah, we drove for nine hours and then we just crossed the border on foot. And then we found out that our website, the website I worked for Meduza, was blocked by the Russian censorship ministry that the parliament, on the same day, the parliament passed a law that effectively criminalizes my work. So, yeah, it would simply would have been too dangerous to stay behind. In the lead up to the passing of this law, and since, a number of independent outlets have shut down.

No to war was the final statement made on Rain TV, the channel's suspending operations after being threatened with closure by authorities. In its last seconds on the air, the channel broadcast the Swan Lake ballet performance. It was often played on loop by Soviet TV and radio, either at times of political crisis or after the death of a leader. And many foreign outlets have suspended their operations inside Russia. Almost everybody else on the day that this law was passed, most remaining non-government media in Russia declared that they will be refraining from any reporting on the war for fear for the staff safety. We're still refusing to do that. Right. Could you give me an overview of the Russian media landscape and how people get

their information? I mean, I'm curious, like, how does it break down when it comes to like state-run media versus independent media? What kind of information do people have access to? And where do most people turn to stay informed? also 100% loyal to the government. But on paper, they are private institutions. So that would be, I would say, in the area of 70% of the entire media landscape. That is actually reflected in the polls and the political ratings. For example, Vladimir Putin's own ratings always hovers in the general area of 65 to 70%. That is roughly the number of people whose media diets consist of just primarily or solely government-controlled media. There was a poll recently also done by a government-controlled polling agency,

which claimed that 68% of Russians support the war in Ukraine. But of course, they answered yes to the question that was posed to them. Do you support not the war, but the special operation? What remains is a pretty chaotic scene of local media, of local newspapers, but all the major radio stations, every single national TV network, almost all newspapers, and two of the three biggest news agencies in Russia are all owned or controlled by the government. We're doing pretty good at Meduza.

We're doing pretty good at Medusa. Before we were blocked, I think we had about 2 million hits a day. So that's pretty good. But still doesn't quite come close to the stranglehold that the government media have on the general population. If you break it down demographically, is it mostly younger people who are turning to independent media sources and older people are relying solely on state media? Or is it more complicated than that? consume media very passively. It's just the TV that's going on background all day. I would say that's people in their 60s, maybe, who also happen to be Vladimir Putin's most loyal demographic. The younger people are, they have the less kind of legacy media like television they consume.

But it doesn't mean that all of them are super pro-opposition and anti-Putin. It doesn't really work like that. But in very simple terms, yeah, the older people are, the more state media they consume. What's your understanding of how government-backed or government-controlled media has such a tight grip on the information landscape, despite the fact that people have had access to the internet and to independent media. How have they managed to have such a stranglehold? Yes, it's a very complicated phenomenon. Because at some point we thought we should just offer people the facts

and they would embrace the truth and see things for what they are. But it turns out it's really not as simple as that, because it's not just a matter of access to factual information. And I got to tell you, the state television in Russia right now, it's a parallel reality. If you turn on Channel One, which is controlled by the government, and RT, which is the state-funded English-language TV station, for example, you'll likely hear that Russia isn't waging a war in Ukraine, but conducting a so-called special military operation. And this is an operation against nationalists. So this is the word that you hear most often,

that this is not an operation against Ukraine or Ukrainian people. This is an operation against nationalists. This is Sergei Utkin, a prominent researcher and head of strategic assessment at the state-funded Primakov Institute of World Economy and International Relations. He's based in Moscow, and he's been speaking out against the war. And even if you have Ukrainian armed forces on the other side, even then the point is made that, well, in every regiment of those Ukrainian armed forces, you have a core group of nationalists who actually do all the fighting. That is what Putin described as denazification of Ukraine. And it goes along with what he also calls demilitarization. So his

argument is that as long as Ukraine develops armed forces in close cooperation with NATO, it can acquire missile technologies because it did have sites of missile technology development in the Soviet time, it will be a growing threat to Russia. So he decided sort of to stop this threat before it becomes too big. So before we move on, I just want to go back to Putin's denazification claim for a second. It's not totally clear where his thinking on this comes from. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and has family members who died in the Holocaust. And there are Jewish communities that are being destroyed by this war. What we do know,

though, is that there has been growing concern about the rise of far-right groups in Ukraine in recent years, like the Azov Battalion. That's a far-right paramilitary group which includes neo-Nazis and was officially integrated into Ukraine's National Guard. Its founder, this man Andrei Bilecki, has in the past expressed racist and anti-Semitic views. Its logo has clear Nazi overtones. In Ukraine's 2012 election, the far-right party Svoboda got 10% of the vote. But in the 2019 election, the political power of the far-right looked like it had shrunk pretty significantly,

and far-right parties got around 2% of the vote. Putin's propaganda drastically inflates the Nazi threat. So if you just watch the TV, you get a feeling that the Russian army is there to liberate Ukrainians from nationalist regime that was pushing Ukraine at some point in the future towards horrific conflict with Russia that would include biological and maybe even nuclear weapons. So you also won't hear much on Russian TV about the destruction of cities and towns outside of the two breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, known as the Donbass. That's where Putin says the Ukrainian government, which, according to him, is run by Nazis, is carrying out a genocide against the Russian-speaking population. There have been 14,000 people killed in the conflict that's been ongoing there since 2014, and the U.N. has accused both sides of human rights violations. But Putin has offered little evidence to support the claim of genocide, and observers have called it baseless. All of this, Sergei explains, is shaping public opinion of the war inside Russia.

this, Sergei explains, is shaping public opinion of the war inside Russia. And opinion polls at wartime, they are probably even less reliable than under normal conditions. But as far as I can see, there is quite some people, especially in the intellectual circles, intellectual circles who do dislike very strongly what's happening. Some of them, they are more vocal, some less, but this is a significant group. Then you have majority probably of those who take a wait and see approach. They think, oh, well, if the president took this decision, probably he had reasons. Yes, the West is pressurizing us. They just don't like Russia out there. Then you have a small group, I'd say, of those who indeed buy the arguments for this war. It's either neo-imperialists, those who think in terms of territorially greater Russia.

This, too, is a common theme from Putin. I would like to start by saying that the modern Ukraine was completely created by Russia. To be more exact, by Bolshevist, Bolshevik communist Russia. This process has started... And you have some people who feel sympathetic to the fates of the population in the Donbass. So this also goes very close to the official line, that this whole military operation is actually in defense of people in the Donbass who suffered for eight years from attacks of the Ukrainian armed forces,

a kind of humanitarian argument, but in a way that you will probably not hear that often in the West. We actually heard a bit of the sentiment in the call between Misha and his dad. Misha's dad says Ukrainians have been raised to hate Russians. He says Russian speakers are oppressed in Ukraine. Misha says that's not true. As a Russian-speaking person,

he hasn't experienced it. But his dad says he saw it himself when he lived in Ukraine. Alexei offers another explanation for why people might be willing to support the government's narrative. It doesn't have anything to do with the facts on the ground. But still, people accept that as the only reality because what the propaganda is offering them is an easy way out of a terrible moral quagmire,

especially people like loyal Putin supporters. Not all of these people are just brainwashed drones. For many, it's a conscious choice because he offers them some coherent... Okay, as much as twisted as it is, it's still a coherent, solid worldview for them. But for those people, at some point, a question is going to arise. Is the Russian army really bombing a brotherly nation?

And it's hard to explain how intertwined Russia and Ukraine are. So the next question will be, what is my role in this? What is my responsibility in this? Should I have done more? Should I I voted differently when it was my chance to turn things around? So to give people kind of an off-ramp, the propaganda is telling them,

you couldn't have done anything. None of this is your fault. We're just helping Ukraine, helping get rid of the Nazis. We're not bombing civilians. We're not bombing civilians. Police in Russia say they've arrested more than 3,000 people across the country just yesterday as war protests continue to erupt. These defiant Russians have been demonstrating against the invasion despite the threat of

prison time. A human rights group in Russia says police arrested protesters in 69 different Russian cities. What do you think about the protests that we're seeing right now? How representative are they of how the broader Russian public feels about this conflict? Well, these are probably the bravest people in Russia right now because they are very well aware of what they're facing. They are risking violence, tension, at this point probably torture at police precincts and beatings and quite possibly massive backbreaking fines and prison terms. And still they're coming out.

And it could have been more, but people are just too scared. People are already losing their livelihoods every single day. And now in this scenario, also going to prison for 15 days at best would also mean that you'll certainly lose your livelihood because you most certainly will be fired from your job. Not just because you'll be missing two weeks of work, but because now you're a political liability for your employer. We talked to one of these protesters. Her name is Yulia Zhivstova. When we first reached out to her, she was in police detention for the second time for being at a protest.

And despite how risky it is to speak out against the war, Yulia insisted that we use her name. I'm not doing anything illegal. I know I'm right. And I'm just very reluctant to adjust to such kind of a reality where you need to just follow some stupid laws that do not make any sense and they're just totally illegal in the first place. And so what drew you to the protests?

Because we can see from the news, from TV, quite a different picture from, well, it's very different from what we can see on the internet and from what we can see from our friends and relatives in Ukraine. I mean, it is quite sad, but there are still lots of people who do believe in all the propaganda and they do not have, not that they do not have access to the internet, but now probably some of the sources are blocked, but they just are comfortable with whatever they are being fed. They just want to live the usual quiet life and they agree to whatever they're told. Based on where I'm sitting and the coverage that I've been seeing, they're pretty sizable.

But like you said, there's a lot of people who are just watching state propaganda and there are people who support it. And it's not like everybody's coming out to protest it en masse, right? I still think that people who support all that or who believe in propaganda, there are less of them. I mean, it doesn't mean that everybody who's not speaking out, everybody who's not protesting is for, well, supports this. They might be privately opposing it. Yeah, that's what a lot of people do now. Is this causing division in people's personal lives? Is that something you've encountered, disagreement over the war?

So all my friends, I don't know, almost all my relatives are okay with what I'm doing. Well, except for obviously my father. My dad is just quite pro-Putin at the moment. What does he think about the war and why is he pro-Putin right now? I think many people, just like my dad, they're just scared to accept the reality of what's going on because it's difficult to come to realize that our country is basically attacking some other country for no actual reason. some other country for no actual reason and it is very difficult for for us because we all learned in our childhood how wonderful we were how we defeated nazis etc etc i mean we were all being fed this we were all learning the same poems at school we used to have conversations with war veterans when they were still alive i I mean, my generation still kind of saw them. They were invited to schools.

In the childhood, our grandmothers told us, oh, you know, when Leningrad was blocked, while people had no food, we were frozen and we had to eat, I don't know, dogs, rats, etc., etc. And even though it is not about us, but, well, that's what we've learned from our childhood. And it is quite difficult to see that, oh, basically now we're doing the same thing to somebody else. So probably just like some kind of psychological tool, just to, you know, some defense, just not to see the reality. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix.

I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cops. Thousands of Russians are protesting the war, which is still a small portion of the population. But like Alexei said, people there are taking on a lot of risk just by showing up. And Ukraine and the West are hoping sanctions will put pressure on Russian society. Moscow residents stood in long queues for ATMs on Tuesday as Western sanctions over

Russia's invasion of Ukraine hit residents on the street. Muscovites interviewed by Reuters said they had tried to get money from different ATMs but weren't successful. had tried to get money from different ATMs, but weren't successful. Ukraine, of course, has its own objectives around messaging and propaganda. And Volodymyr Zelensky has been speaking directly to Russians, in Russian, during his addresses, hoping to get through to them. There are over 2,000 kilometers of common border between us. Your army is along that border now.

Almost 200,000 soldiers, thousands of military vehicles. Your leadership approved for them to take a step further, to the territory of another country. I asked Alexei what, if anything, could spark mass opposition to the war inside Russia and whether that could actually put enough pressure on Putin to end it. So I guess a sizable chunk of the population will probably at some point realize that they've been sold something entirely different, an unwinnable and a completely unjustified war. And especially when the sanctions are going to hit them and when their sons are going to be drafted into this army, their mothers and their fathers, their relatives will wake up to the fact

that this is a terrible tragedy, but it's still not enough. I mean, you need millions of people, not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, because Russia is a country of 144 million people. You know, these sanctions are unprecedented and we haven't really hit the rock bottom yet. And they're going to hit us really, really hard. And a lot of people are going to be impoverished and physical and mental health will decline, surely.

But it doesn't really mean people will get to the point of desperation, will just go out in the streets in the millions in protest because sanctions don't really work like that. And propaganda will be waiting there for them, telling them this is all the West's fault. They are punishing you, ordinary Russians. So as much as I would like to hope for a mass anti-war movement in Russia. And a lot of people are probably secretly holding those sentiments. And hopefully, you know, messages like Vladimir Zelensky, who's speaking his native Russian, because his mother's language is not Ukrainian, it's Russian. Yes, he's a very touching and powerful word.

But if you are Russian living in Russia, you have to be actively seeking them out to be exposed to those words. Because they won't show that on Russian television. Both Twitter and Facebook are blocked in Russia right now. Our website where we put out news about these statements by Zelensky is also blocked. So you have to be savvy enough to actually actively seek out this information and know how to use VPNs and proxies to access it. It's a big deal to get not just thousands, but millions of Russians exposed to that information. There are people in Russia, like Yulia, and like Misha who are trying and who believe that if it's not millions, even changing one mind will make a difference.

what he's been seeing in Ukraine. How his grandmother has spent most of her time stuck in the house and hiding in her bathroom because it's the safest place to be when there's shelling going on. How for three days he'd been working to evacuate one of his chefs from the basement of one of his restaurants. And that when the chef finally got out,

he told him, Misha, I've never seen so many corpses in my life. How his wife's family is stuck in a bomb shelter in Kharkiv. This whole time, his father is listening quietly. And then he says, I believe you, Misha. I'm so worried. And then he says, I believe you, Misha. I'm so worried.

Misha says, I just want you to know the truth. So he believed in these stories. And he already answered me that, oh, son, war, it's so horrible. So he already called it war, not special operation. He already told me that it's horrible. He already understands that something is wrong, that it's not okay. And it's not about warm clothes and food, which Russian soldiers give to our people, that they're killing us. This must be a really difficult conversation to keep having, to keep trying to convince your relative and them not believing you. So why

do you think it's important for people to do that? I don't want to blame my father in his position. That's not his position. That's why I understand that I need to help him. We've discussed lots of questions and in majority of them he didn't hear me. But in some of them, I feel that he started to believe some things. I believe that people need to know the truth. And if all the people will know the truth, that can help the war to stop. And that's all for this week.

You've been listening to Nothing is Foreign. Our producer is Joyta Shangupta. Our sound designer is Graham McDonald mcdonald and our show runner is adrian chung nothing is foreign is a co-production of cbc news and cbc podcasts willow smith is our senior producer nick mccabe locos is our executive producer our theme music is by joseph chavison if you're a fan Nothing is Foreign, we'd really love it if you could leave us a review or a rating wherever you're listening to this. These make a big difference in helping new listeners find the show, and we'd really

appreciate it. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at CBC Podcasts. I'm Tamara Kandaker. Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you back here next week.