Science Vs - Ukrainian War: Fighting Russia's Propaganda Machine

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

Russia attacked Ukraine more than a month ago — and the war has raged ever since. From the beginning, Russia has been pushing out propaganda and disinformation about what’s actually going on. So this week, we’re sharing parts of a podcast from independent journalists Pyotr Ruzavin and Natalka Gumenyuk, who have been covering what’s happening in Ukraine and what the people who live there are experiencing. Their show is called Fuck War.  Find Fuck War here: https://zona.media/podcast/fuck-war  Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/show/2HitRAGEqtOHygJwpgvjqs  English transcript of Episode 1, released March 15: https://bit.ly/FuckWarEp1 English for Episode 2, released March 17: https://bit.ly/FuckWarEp2 English for Episode 3, released March 21: https://bit.ly/FuckWarEp3 Here’s a link to our episode transcript: https://bit.ly/3wRhdmi    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. Lately on the show, we've been talking a lot about misinformation, the problems it can cause, how it spreads, and what to do about it. But there's an even more blatant way that people undermine the facts, and it's called disinformation. This is where fake information is spread deliberately to mislead people. And this has been a huge issue with Russia and its war on Ukraine. Since Russia attacked Ukraine a month ago, they've been pumping out propaganda, basically trying to create an alternate reality that's a million miles away from the facts. So today, we're going to hear from two journalists who are trying to tell the real

story here. They're looking at what's actually been happening on the front lines and what Ukrainians have been experiencing during these Russian attacks. So meet Pyotr Rusavin. He's an independent journalist from Russia. I was born and I grew in Moscow. Several years ago, he fell in love with and then married Natalka Minik, a Ukrainian who lives in Kiev. I began to start living between two cities. She's also a journalist, a famous one in Ukraine. A month ago, they were together in Kiev when

Russia invaded Ukraine and the war started. After this, everything changes. There is just black and white. Millions of people were forced to flee their homes. Thousands have since died. And very quickly, some cities and towns in the southern part of Ukraine were taken by Russian troops, and they were occupied. And meanwhile, Russia has been blocking independent media in Russia and spreading this bizarre story that Russians are in Ukraine to fight Nazis. And as you'll hear through this episode, Russian forces are even trying to convince Ukrainians in the occupied territories that they are there to find Nazis. I asked Pyotr, why Nazis? I mean, the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish. For Russian society, there was only one real war, the war. It's the Great Patriotic War.

And so this is a part of Second World War, where the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany. And it's a great source of pride in Russia. So when Russian authorities say that they are fighting against Nazis in Ukraine, they want to make an image of an enemy that is not, you know, like your relative Ukrainian, but some bloody Nazi that took control over Ukraine. And while some Russians aren't buying this, when academics analyze Putin's propaganda campaigns, they say that that's not the whole point. Part of his strategy is probably just to confuse people, to make them think that there's no truth, that everyone lies.

And if a person starts thinking like this, so he will take the truth that is more convenient for him. And of course, it's for a big part of Russian society. It's convenient to think that their president and their country is not killing Ukrainian people. And so Pyotr and his wife have been reporting on what's happening. And they started a podcast called Fuck War. For me as a Russian journalist, and I feel it as a part of my job, to try to tell what's really happening. From my point of view, the only mission, to highlight what's happening from different sides of this horrible shit. Today, we're going to take you inside Ukraine

to see what's actually been going on in the past several weeks. And we'll also show you how Russia has tried to get its propaganda machine up and running in some parts of Ukraine. That's all coming up after the break. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan Eleven?

I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right. I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jan Eleven. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is...

Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Welcome back. So today we're hearing stories from Pyotr Rassavin's podcast, Fuck War. We're going to play some of the tape in Russian and Ukrainian,

and Pyotr and Natalk will also tell us what's happening. This is from episode one. It was released on the 15th of March. Pyotr takes it from here. Hello, everyone. My name is Pyotr Rozavin, and I'm a journalist from Russia. All my life, I've been working for independent Russian media. My wife, Natalka Gumumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist. Over the past few years I've been living between Moscow and Kyiv.

On the 24th of the start of the war. And soon after, literally 10 minutes, windows in our flat started rattling. It was from shootings in the outskirts of the city. We spent the following week in Kyiv. Like all the citizens, we got used to the air raid sirens. There were more and more every day, and we learned to mechanically, automatically go down in bomb shelters. It becomes routine, like going to the bathroom to brush our teeth. We left our flat on the third day of war to some place safer.

I'm telling Natalka, like, shit, we forgot my long jacket. Natalka just gave me it as a present. We hear a siren. Blin. I want to smoke and don't know whether to put on our bulletproof vests or not. Natalka is teasing me about filming everything and we decide not to put on our bulletproof vests. I'm not very good at drawing conclusions and making pompous speeches, but I'll try to put this into words. On the 24th of February, 2022,

the troops of my home country by birth began a full-blown invasion of my home country, the one that I chose. By making this decision, Putin in just one day deprived me of my first homeland, because obviously the Russia I loved and knew no longer exists and never will and it's unlikely I will go back there anytime soon. And he's now trying to destroy my second homeland. The war has been going on over two and a half weeks already.

Thousands of people have died. Russian soldiers, Ukrainian soldiers, and peaceful Ukrainian civilians. There are already more than 3 million refugees from Ukraine and the numbers are only going to grow. Ukrainian cities are being destroyed by the Russian army. We couldn't decide whether or not to leave Kyiv and Ukraine. That was, for me, a complicated and tricky question. But one week after the start of the war, my wife Natalka and I left Ukraine for Moldova. And here is one of our last conversations that we recorded together while we were still on Ukrainian territory.

She's asking me if I really plan to record everything. And I tell her that I am. I tell Natalka she's very beautiful. I love you very much. She tells me to turn off my phone and asks me why are you getting sad. I'm not sad,

I told her. She doesn't believe me. From Moldova, I went further to the west, but Natalka went back to Ukraine, to Odessa. It's some kind of legendary city, like the gates to a black sea. Привет. Привет. And she tells me that she has been talking to someone who is in Irpin, a suburb in Kyiv, and the most brutal part of battles in Kiev region at that moment,

he told her that there are bombed-out houses all over, bombed-out houses, bombed-out houses. But where Natalka is, the restaurants in Odessa are still open, but, of course, not everything is in usual time. The women are making a lot of cocktails, for instance. From Odessa, Natalka went to a small city called Nikolaev. And all around the city, there are Russian troops. So I really want to tell you about Odessa and Mykolaiv. You remember, we were together in Mykolaiv four months ago,

and you were laughing at me, because it's not the prettiest city, whereas I liked it a lot. There is this wide river, and the central building of the city council is made to look like the Buckingham Palace. And I wrote about it for The Guardian, that the mayor of Mykolaiv was this trendy reformer, the youngest mayor in Ukraine, progressive.

He came to our class in business school. And now when I came here, he has a shotgun, a Kalashnikov, a pistol, body armor. And Valera, his spokesperson, also has a shotgun. Valera used to be a very successful stand-up comedian. And now he has a gun, and he looks natural. And it's weird to see them all in these circumstances. And there was also another guy from the city council with them. He had a tennis racket case over his shoulder. And I thought, it's like, you know, some gangsters where they hide their weapon. But he's actually an athlete, but he also hid his gun in there. To be honest, the saddest thing was just to drive. We went to the bombed out villages.

You look at these people, talk to them. And if before I used to calm them down, this time I didn't calm them down at all. And I usually say, everything is going to be okay. But now I realized that the city may be cordoned off and that they are actually preparing for a siege. And I say that the worst things happened near Kiev, that people are taken hostage. They are prevented from going out through the humanitarian corridor. They are getting bombarded in these small towns around Kiev. The same situation might happen in Mykolaiv. This is very sad. And when I was leaving, well, I felt uncomfortable, as if I was betraying them. I'm leaving while they could remain besieged. So Odessa has always looked down on other cities and now everyone is like, from Mykolaiv?

Mykolaiv keeps us safe, the heroic city. It's all very sweet, the solidarity between the cities because they know that Odessa will not be taken until Mykolaiv is taken. Odessa is holding up in a very inspiring way. I went to a shooting range there where they taught people how to use guns. It's a private shooting range, very cool in a trendy area in the suburbs. They sang the anthem first and later I asked about their jobs. There were several hundred people in line. And they were all like, I'm a sailor.

I'm a diplomacy student. I'm a driving instructor. I'm a builder. I'm a window installer. And I was thinking like, shit, window installer? It's actually a job? And now this guy is going to defend his homeland? I met this very interesting person. He works in a museum, an art museum.

He was so serious, so he was taking the art collection out of Odessa. The museum is near the port. It's in the old mansion. And of course, he said it was sacrilegious to him to be saving works by the Russian artists from the Russian occupants. After Natalka's trip to Nikolaev, Russian troops launched missile strikes on the city. Local authorities said nine people died. From Odessa, Natalka traveled to Kharkiv in Ukraine. It's 40 kilometers away from the Russian border. As I recorded my second episode, I was in Austria. It was the 20th day of the war. Natalka sends me a video that she filmed.

In it, I see 16 stored residential building, half of it's black and completely burned down, and the other half has all its windows broken. There is shelling all around. She tells me they're shooting all around, but she feels safe. Hi, Peter. Well, I have to say we're feeling quite down today in Kharkiv. Everything started good, but now we're feeling crap.

As I said, we arrived yesterday, we had some time to walk around the city center, we meet with our friends, but it all looks weird. Destroyed fashion shops, restaurants, Nekipelo, the local news outlet, the place where they used to have their office. Now it's in a terrible condition. Some people still live there in the downtown area. You know, we also went to the area on the edge of town, like the very edge of town where the fighting takes place.

And some people still live there. Like this old man we met. We met him accidentally. He left the house to charge his phone as it was the only place in his area to do so. So he stayed there for 18 days. He couldn't leave. There were shelling.

His flat is on the ninth floor in a house that's right under the fire. So we approached him and asked, why are you not leaving? Because I thought that there are sometimes people who don't. But he said he didn't know how. And he told me that he's old, that there is no electricity, water or gas in his house, nothing, and he wants to leave right away.

So we said, of course, we're taking you. Come on. And we ran with him to the ninth floor. The grandpa is 72 years old. So we ran up to the ninth floor with this oldish man so he can take his documents. Then ran down from the ninth floor. To be honest, his house is probably the most dangerous.

It's the last town on the edge of the city. And the battles are taking place just outside. And there we could hear every two, three minutes, every two, three minutes, every two, three minutes, the sound of explosion. But the last place we were at made us feel very dumb. There are people living at one of the metro stations for almost 18 days already. They are left without their homes.

So as in Kiev, in Kharkiv, the subway is a kind of bomb shelter. But those people, they actually live there. At some point, there were 2,000 people at the station. They were making announcements, telling people to come get some borscht to eat. They say, please tell people that hot borscht is being handed out. I saw a woman, she was 80, born during the Second World War. And she said, if Putin and his foreign minister Lavrov knew what they were doing to us, they would have gotten heart attacks or strokes on the first date. Trust me, they wouldn't be able to standard the things that an average Ukrainian citizen is living right now.

I didn't want to disappoint her or argue, but I don't think so. They wouldn't care. There are about 600 people now, sleeping, sitting everywhere, reading, staying overnight, in nightgowns, coats, with books, kids, dogs, cats, but they're trying to keep it all neat. There is no way to rehouse these people. There was this one guy, he really stuck with me, the police guy. He's 24. He's from this area as well. His flat is destroyed too. He's been there for 18 days. He actually looks very young. He's got his girlfriend there, Malaya, as they say in Kharkiv. He's just such a regular guy from Kharkiv suburbs. But he's also the local angel there. Everyone's guard, angels, all the grannies say hello to him.

Kids follow him. So there is a kid chasing him all the time, asking to teach him some tricks. So they have found a hero for themselves, a young policeman. And he knows them, takes care of them, really treating them with such understanding. But I thought about this guy, a regular guy from the suburbs who has this on his shoulders. After the break, Russia starts occupying cities in Ukraine and we hear what it's like for people living there. Welcome back.

Today we're sharing stories from a new podcast from Russian reporter Pyotr Rusavin. It's called Fuck War, and it's about what's happening in Ukraine. Pyotr recorded the third episode for his podcast on March 21st. The war had been going for 26 days. And some cities were being occupied by Russian troops. Ukrainians were protesting. This episode zooms in on a couple of these occupied towns, Melitopol and Kherson. Pyotr takes it from here. On the 20th of March, Sunday, Ukrainians protested the occupation.

It went quite smoothly, but the day after, things changed. Russian security forces threw stun grenades and opened fire at the protesters in Kherson. And locals posted videos of civilians who had been injured. Protests in occupied territories have been going on for several weeks. At the same time, people started to disappear. Local politicians who refused to cooperate with the Russian army, activists, journalists. Among them is the mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov. Melitopol had been occupied by the Russian troops since the start of the war

in February, and the protest against occupation started there immediately, and the mayor defiantly refused to give up or cooperate with the occupants. Good evening, dear Melitopol people. This is our Fedorov. He is saying that the TV and radio towers are controlled by the armed Russian forces. On the 11th of March, he has been detained and replaced by Galina Danilchenko. She was a member of a pro-Russian party in Ukraine. And now is a Russian collaborator. Here is one of her first speeches in Melitopol.

She's saying that our main goal is to get used to the new reality, to start a new way of life as soon as possible. She says that people in the city shouldn't take part in extremist actions. I ask you to be, be reasonable, don't be... Propaganda is a very important weapon in this world. In fact, when the Russians started occupying Ukrainian towns, the first thing they did was to block the Ukrainian broadcasting and start showing the Russian radio and television stations. Here are some examples of radio programs that are being broadcasted in Berdyansk, which is near Melitopol and is also occupied by Russian troops. They say that Russia fights not against Ukrainians, but groups of nationalists.

The radio broadcasts say, our main goal is to restore normal functions of state authorities and business, and to create conditions for the unification of the Russian Federation and Ukraine. They say that it's necessary that Russian guard forces patrol the streets. Russia doesn't want to hurt the Ukrainian people, but to protect Russia from those who took Ukraine hostage. It is, of course, propaganda. The mayor of Melitopol, Fedorov, real mayor, was released fairly quickly.

Ukrainian authorities exchanged him for nine Russian soldiers. After that, he got a call from President Zelensky himself, who later awarded him with the Order of Courage. President Zelensky says that he is very glad to hear from the mayor. You have the voice of an alive man, he says. The mayor, Fyodorov, thanks Zelensky for not leaving him. We don't abandon our own, says Zelensky.

Zelensky says he's very happy to have Fedorov back. On the 19th of March I spoke with a woman in Melitopol, Tatyana Kumok. She is a citizen of Israel born in Melitopol. She's been there since the start of the war. And she told us what it was like to live under Russian occupation. She says the Russian special forces were chasing protesters and yelling, catch the young and kick their legs. They took people

outside the city and made them rub their faces with zelenka, this is green antiseptic used in the former USSR. It's painful if it gets in your eyes and the green stains your face, so it's some kind of a traditional form of humiliation in the former USSR. They would beat people up, kick their teeth out and leave them on the road, she says. The Russian special forces, this is police, specifically brought from Russia to do these nasty things. She talked about Russian state TV that's now broadcasting in Melitopol. And the news reports say that the Russians are fighting against Nazis here. And she asks, who are the Nazis?

Me and my Jewish dad. Tatyana says she feels like she's in a movie about the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust, but that it feels like a new nation is being exterminated this time. And she adds that there are flyers around the city saying, we are looking for Nazis, contact us to help. There will be a prize given for every Nazi surrender. I ask her, is it possible to get out of the city, to escape? And she says, there is only one way to leave, to Crimea, which is controlled by Russia. They can't go to Ukraine-controlled territory because it's blocked by Russian soldiers. Tatyana says that Russia has blocked access to food in the city also.

She's worried about people starving. She tells me that Ukrainian sources are encouraging locals in Russian-occupied territories to dismantle the railroad tracks running to Crimea. And Tatyana loves because she remembers in the 90s people stealing the rails. So she thinks that many hands

still remember how to do it. We say our goodbye. Thank you. Thank you. We've already done the main thing, and now we can just wait a little bit. Thank you. Thank you. Goodbye. Goodbye. Soon after I spoke to her, Tatyana, her mother, and her father, the founder of a local news outlet, were detained by Russians. I told Natalka the news, and she sent me this voice message.

I wonder if you can hear the birds? The spring has come. It's very warm in Kiev. It was very cold, very cold before. But you know, as about the situation, unfortunately, things are not really good. Because if before they managed to tolerate all those pro-Ukrainian protests, now they're just going door to door looking for pro-Ukrainian activists them. Everyone is a friend of some soldier. Well, you know, so they basically started going door to door and the situation has gone worse. People even talk about some murders, abductions. So it must be very depressing in all these cities.

The cities are Ukrainian, so everyone, people, society, journalists, share the same official, you know, like just citizen, pro-Ukrainian stance, obviously. So basically you could accuse any public person or something. In the villages, the soldiers are taking food from the people living in those villages. They are taking their phones, So they are not communicating with anybody. They are taking pigs to slaughter them and to eat them. So really, there is quite a difficult situation. And the problem is these are the towns where we do not have real access. So the situation is not good.

And I'm thinking this is the next chapter of what is going on to happen to these occupied cities. Soon after Piotr published his episode, he found out that Tatiana and her parents had been released. But he says that many more are still missing in the occupied territories. And as we're finishing up this episode, Russia and Ukraine were having peace talks. So we'll see what unfolds. For now, Pyotr and Natalk will keep reporting. She's going to be moving closer to the occupied territories.

And they'll keep putting out their podcast, Fuck War. We're going to put a link to it in our show notes. And if you want to listen to the full episodes, which I totally recommend you do, they're in Russian and Ukrainian, but we've transcribed the first three episodes in English. There's a link in the show notes as well. So that means you can listen to Pyotr and Natalk and read the English translation. That is if your Slavic languages are a bit rusty. Piotr Rusavin is the host of the podcast Fuck War.

The editor is Igor Skovoroda. Sound engineer and composer, Alexey Zelensky. And it's made by Mediazona, which is an independent media company that was founded by the members of Pussy Riot after they were released from prison. It's been blocked in Russia since the start of the war. Science Versus is me, Wendy Zuckerman,

Blythe Terrell, Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn, Akedi Foster-Keys, Rasha Aridi, and Courtney Gilbert. Fact-checking by Erica Akiko Howard. This episode was mixed by Bumi Hidaka, with help from Emma Munger. Scoring by Alexei episode was mixed by Bumi Hidaka with help from Emma Munger. Scoring by Alexi Zielinski, Bumi Hidaka, Bobby Lord, Peter Leonard, So Wiley, and Emma Munger.

Translation by Alexandra and Tatiana Tian. A big thanks to Nicole Beam-Styer-Bohr, the Zuckerman family, and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.