The Journal. - From Ukrainian Teen to Russian Propaganda Star

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

When Russian troops invaded his hometown in 2022, Ukrainian teenager Denys Kostev filmed TikTok videos cursing Vladimir Putin and praising Ukrainian courage. But a few months later, Kostev suddenly began appearing in Russian propaganda videos. WSJ’s Matthew Luxmoore spoke to the Ukrainian teenager about how he became part of the Kremlin's propaganda machine.  Further Reading: -A Ukrainian Teen’s Dark Transformation Into Russian Propaganda Star  Further Listening: -The Grim Story of a Russian Prisoner Turned Recruit  -Actors Recorded Videos for ‘Vladimir.’ It Turned Into Russian Propaganda.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In February of last year, a video aired on a Russian state-controlled television channel. The video is an interview with a dark-haired teenage boy. His name is Denis Kostchev. Our colleague Matthew Luxmore saw the video. He's shown in an indoor soccer hall, playing soccer and then standing afterwards, draping himself in a Russian flag. He's asked what his plans are for the future.

And Denis answers that his plan is to join a Russian military academy because he wants to fight for the Russian army and serve the Russian Federation. This is a Russian propaganda video. But it had a twist. Kostyev, the teenage boy, is Ukrainian. And just months earlier, he was calling for Russia's defeat. I don't know if I'm allowed to swear.

Give it a try. He even had a sticker on his phone, say, you know, reading Putin is a dickhead, which is quite a popular slogan in Ukraine. Quite a transformation. Yeah, it was an incredible transformation. And his relatives were wondering what had happened to this patriotic kid. How did he suddenly start appearing in these Russian propaganda videos praising Putin? Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Kate Linebaugh. It's Monday, March 4th. Coming up on the show, how a Ukrainian teenager became a Russian propaganda star. With Uber Reserve, you can book your Uber ride in advance. 90 days in advance. Perfect for all you forward thinkers and planning gurus. Reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. Uber Reserve. See Uber app for details. After Matthew watched the video,

he wanted to find out how Denis Kostchev, this Ukrainian teenager, became a face of Russian propaganda. Matthew interviewed Kostchev's relatives and people who knew him, and he was able to piece together Kostchev's story. Dennis had an incredibly tough childhood. From the moment he was born, his parents were in and out of jail. His father was a repeat offender on various drug-related charges. And not long after he was born, a year after he was born, in fact, his mother was charged with drug-related offenses and sent to prison, which means both his parents were in prison and his mother later died. Kostchev was shuttled through foster homes and an orphanage. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022,

foster homes, and an orphanage. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Kostchev was 16 and living in a children's home. Dennis was known among the staff of the children's home and all the other children as someone who you could give any topic to and he would be able to speak about it off the cuff for a prolonged period of time and quite eloquently. As the war progressed, Russian forces took Kherson. The children's home where Kostyev lived was forced to close,

and he moved in with his grandmother in her small apartment. There, he started posting pro-Ukrainian videos on TikTok. pro-Ukrainian videos on TikTok. Denis would sit down in the apartment of his grandmother beside a window overlooking the street, and he would put his mobile phone up against a windowsill. He'd be wearing a T-shirt, and the phone would be, you know, focused directly on his face. And he was quite passionately delivering his narrative of events, his very kind of pro-Ukrainian and defiant

take on events. In one video, he says he hates Putin and the Russian elite. So he was incredibly pro-Ukrainian in those videos, incredibly patriotic. Putin and all the ruling elite who really started this war. So he was incredibly pro-Ukrainian in those videos, incredibly patriotic, and seemed to be incredibly committed to supporting Ukraine's resistance. Life in Kherson got harder and harder. One day, Russian troops detained Kostchev's grandmother for hours. She decided it was time to get out, and she left with Kostchev's half-brother.

They fled west to Germany, but they couldn't take Denis out because they didn't have a passport for Denis. So his grandmother, she drove across the river in Kherson and dropped Denis off with relatives. Eventually, Kostchev decided to enroll in one of the last colleges that was still open, a culinary school. And he moved into the dormitory. But life was about to get much more complicated for him. How long was he there?

it much more complicated for him. How long was he there? He was there only for about a week because very shortly after the Russian appointed director of the college came into the classroom flanked by armed Russian soldiers. And she announced that all the kids in the school, and there were very, very few of them, was dennis and about eight other kids were being taken to crimea to russian occupied peninsula in the south they will be taken for two weeks of summertime rest by the sea to a children's camp where they can enjoy themselves and get away from the troubles of the war and when the children tried to resist, they were essentially told that they don't have a choice. They have to go. So the very next day, they were loaded onto a bus and driven to a summer camp in southern Crimea called Friendship, Druzhba in Russian.

Druzhba is one of several camps where Russian troops have moved thousands of Ukrainian children. Ukrainian authorities say this is a war crime, that it's the forcible removal of children with the aim of erasing their Ukrainian identities. — Kyiv census has managed to confirm the identities of more than 20,000 children that have been taken to Russia. And they actually have a website where they keep a list of these kids. The website displays photos of children. For each child, their place of disappearance is listed under their birth date.

At one point, Kostyev was on that list. Russia says the reason it's moving these Ukrainian children is to protect them from war. Russia has, from the outset, said that it launched this invasion to prove the Russians and Ukrainians are essentially one people. And young children of Denis's age and teenagers, they will form the future. And it is they who are the biggest target of Russia's campaign to push through its narrative. And by taking those children onto Russian occupied territory and subjecting them to this campaign of indoctrination, this is one large element of Russia's campaign to essentially re-educate the Ukrainian population. A campaign of indoctrination was what Kostchev was about to see firsthand.

When he arrived at Druzhba, or Camp Friendship, he joined dozens of other children. At the camp, the children were woken every day at 6 a.m. to physical exercise and then a performance of the Russian national anthem. There were Russian flags flying everywhere. A lot of children say that some of them were punished for speaking Ukrainian or, for instance, having socks in the color of the Ukrainian flag. And could they leave if they wanted to? They weren't given the option to leave,

and it would have been incredibly difficult to go back home. And how long was he at the camp? So he was at the camp for a couple of months. Then he was moved to another camp in November of 2022, where he also stayed for a couple of months. And then in January 2023, he was moved north to camp in November of 2022, where he also stayed for a couple of months. And then in January 2023, he was moved north to Henichesk, a Russian occupied city. And there he and the other children who had been taken from Kherson with him were enrolled in a college where they had classes, but they also had a very concerted and organized program of indoctrination classes in Russian history, which portrayed Ukraine as an artificial state, military patriotic, so-called military patriotic classes.

On the one-year anniversary of the invasion, a Kremlin-controlled TV channel aired that video of Kostchev, the one where he's draped in a Russian flag, professing his desire to serve in the Russian army. Denis would appear in dozens more Russian propaganda videos. And in those videos, he was speaking very eloquently and very persuasively about how Russia is saving Ukrainian children. There's one where Kostchev smiles and talks about how wonderful the camp was. No one was forced to be there, he says. In another video, Kostchev is in a camo T-shirt and a red military-style beret, the uniform of the Russian army's youth wing.

He's with other kids, learning how to disassemble a Kalashnikov rifle. The Kalashnikov rifle was adopted in the USSR in 1949. And then he would also appear in videos that were filmed on his phone, praising Putin and saying that Russian troops are doing virtuous things and that Russia will win the war, that Russia will be victorious. At the same time he was making these videos, Kostchev was in touch with his relatives in Germany. He said to them that he missed them and wanted to be reunited. So his family connected with Save Ukraine, a Kiev-based non-profit that has helped get

Ukrainian children back. To do that, a relative needs to travel to Russia. But Kostchev's grandmother was too ill to travel, so a family friend named Olga Harulia volunteered to try to go and get Kostchev out. She and seven other women who were traveling also to Russia to get their children back. They were all mothers of children in Russia. They boarded a flight for Moscow. But Horulia, the family friend, she didn't even get beyond Moscow airport.

Because as soon as she landed at Moscow airport, she was detained by Russian officials and placed in an interrogation room where she would spend the next two days. Harulia was handed a statement and instructed to record a video. In it, standing against a beige wall and looking at the floor, she's asked why she came to Russia. Harulia said she'd been sent to retrieve children she didn't know.

And after that, she was deported to Belarus. And later, in tears, found her way back to Germany, where she apologized to Denis's relatives for not being able to get him out. Herulia would also become a face in Russia's propaganda war.

The video of her forced statement that she was supposedly in Russia to take Ukrainian children was run on state media. Around the same time, Kostyev told his relatives that he didn't want to come home anymore. He said that the Russians are promising him a better life in Russia. They're promising him an apartment in Moscow,

a spot at a prestigious school in the Russian capital, regular subsidies and a salary tied to a part-time job. And all his friends are there and he no longer wants to go home. He cut ties with the rest of his family. They didn't hear from him for around seven months. And then one day in December, out of the blue, they did.

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After Kostchev reached out to his relatives in December, they put him in touch with Matthew. And the following day, Denis agreed to have a conversation with me. And we talked on the phone for around an hour. Hello? Hello, yes, hello, Denis. Hello. Hello. Hello, yes, hello, Denis. Hello.

Hello. My name is Matthew. What did he say? Denis told me that all the propaganda videos that he recorded and his kind of public, very public conversion to the Russian cause was essentially a charade organized by the FSB, the Federal Security Service. The FSB is Russia's primary security service. It grew out of the former KGB. And it is primarily concerned with counterintelligence, border control, and surveillance in Russian-controlled areas.

Kostchev said that the FSB threatened him with prison if he didn't do what he was told. He was forced to record those videos parroting Russian propaganda and praising Putin. And so Denis became, as he puts it, the main actor. He became a face of Russian propaganda, reading scripts that were provided, wearing in those videos military-style outfits. And that is how Denis appeared in dozens of these pro-Russian propaganda videos. And he understood that if he says no, he would be in big trouble.

And when he asked his FSB handlers, what you're telling me to do, is it obligatory? They said to him, well, look, they said to the 17-year-old, look, you're in a place that is under martial law. And if you say no to what we're asking you to do, we unfortunately will have to treat that as evidence of your pro-Ukrainian position. And he understood very quickly what that could potentially mean for him. He knew everyone who lived on Russian-occupied territory at the time was aware of a big spate of disappearances. People who were against the authorities would suddenly disappear. And no one would understand what had happened to these people.

And Denis was afraid that he would be next. Is there any way to corroborate what he was saying? It's very difficult to corroborate it, to verify. But it's in line with other accounts that we've heard from occupied territories where the FSB is very active. And the account that Dennis gave was quite detailed. The FSB didn't respond to a request for comment. After Kostchev got back in touch with his family,

they reconnected with that Ukrainian nonprofit, Save Ukraine. The organization helped Kostchev leave Russia and get to Poland. From there, he took a bus to the German border. But he was denied entry. Where is he now? Well, he went to Warsaw to stay with a Ukrainian family that had agreed to put him up. And I came to Warsaw to see Denis and I joined them for dinner and Dennis sat down in front of this family and one of the first things he said to them was well you know the Russians aren't as

bad as they're made out to be well during the hours that followed over dinner with this family and also later in a conversation with me he spent a huge amount of time trying to justify Russia's actions. Kostchev had told Matthew in that earlier phone conversation that he wanted to get out of Russia, that he'd been coerced by the FSB, that he didn't believe what he had said in the propaganda videos. But now, Kostchev was out of Russia, and in this conversation with Matthew, he appeared to be sympathetic to the Russians. Kostchev said that he now felt repulsed by the sight of the Ukrainian flag. And he repeated conspiracy theories about human rights atrocities committed by Ukrainians.

He said that he's been on both sides of the barricades. He understands both sides of the story. And that actually the mainstream narrative, as he said, on Ukraine is of the barricades. He understands both sides of the story. And that actually, the mainstream narrative, as he said, on Ukraine is not the truth. So I was really shocked by this. I asked Denis, when you look back and see those TikTok videos that you recorded in May of 2022 in occupied Herson, what do you think of this 16-year-old kid? And he said that he sees this 16-year-old, the person that he was less than two years earlier, as a brainwashed kid, someone who was naive, someone who, as he put it, was subjected to herd thinking.

What was it about? About what? Yes. I don't know, I would call it a herd instinct. A herd instinct? There was one moment that I asked Denis after everything that you've been through, like, who do you feel yourself to be now? What is your identity?

And he paused for a minute and then kind of shrugged his shoulders and he just said, basically, I'm a lost soul. And I always have been. And the Russian word he used is something that Russians usually use to describe pets that they've lost. It's a word, it's what Russians would say when they've lost a dog, or they've taken in an animal that has always been a stray. A stray, yeah. And that's the word that Dennis used to describe himself. What did that mean for you, that he used that word? When he used that word, I just feel like kind of all his humanity came out. And you can, of course, judge this teenager who is now, of course, an adult. You can criticize him for recording those videos

and for other choices that he made or didn't make because he was forced to do certain things but when you meet him you realize that he's actually an incredibly warm person very very smart and eloquent and I kind of just felt very, very sorry for him when he told me those things. And I was really just left hoping that this teenager who has really been kind of manipulated and used kind of gets back on his own two feet and builds a life for himself, wherever it may be. That's all for today, Monday, March 4th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.

Special thanks to Alexandra Tian and Tatiana Tian for their help with this episode. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.