Disinformation before it was disinformation

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I remember the old school information days during the Maidan protests in 2013, and even before then, there was concerted disinformation campaigns directed at Ukrainians. This was long before the average person in the West even knew what disinformation was or casually flung the term gaslighting at every political opponent.

I had professors at my university in the US toe the party line that Russians were great cosmopolitans, apparently went to the opera, ballet, theater and art museum at every chance, the Soviet Union had abolished racism and that all problems in the region were from “nationalists” who were really just Nazis.

During the Maidan, I was a freelancer and worked with many Russian clients. They were genuinely concerned that I would be killed by Ukrainian nationalists because of my Polish heritage and that I primarily speak Russian. No amount of me explaining that I was frequently on the Maidan, spoke only Russian and that it was a movement against corruption and for a Ukrainian future integrated with the West, including values like rule of law, democracy, respect for minority rights — none of this had any effect. I was always told by Russians that they knew what was actually happening because they’d seen it on TV.

The Western press was little better. Coverage was obsessed with far right figures, who incidentally got about 1% of the vote right after Maidan. The most comical incident was the BBC reporting about “locals” fighting against “Kiev” then picturing a group of obviously imported Chechans.

The biggest story, the birth of a modern and tolerant civic nationalism was completely lost. My guess is that most Western journalists came to their knowledge of the region via Russia and Russian sources and could never quite step out of that paradigm. In Ukraine you had a massively tolerant society that was multi-lingual (if a Ukrainian speaker spoke to a Russian speaker, each carried on in their respective language with no need to force the other to switch), muti-ethnic (literally nobody cared about Ukrainian “blood” or such nonsense: ethnic Russians, Jews, Armenians, Georgians, Tatars were part of the Maidan movement from the start, modern Ukrainian nationalism is civic, not ethnically based).

I’ve never seen a self-critical reflection in the Western press about how they got everything about Ukraine so wrong. Even now, with it obvious looking at Bucha, Izium and other liberated territories that Russia has been engages in a genocidal war, many Russian claims are taken at face value. Still.

Quoting a tweet and responses:

A BBC investigation proves that those dark web posts “selling” US-donated weapons from Ukraine were fake.
What a surprise, wow, wow, shocking.

Link to the original story.

The response point out that Amnesty International pushed this story, the Financial Times ran with it as well as other “respected” Western outlets.

Die Linke, the German left-wing party, calls the Russian killings in Bucha probably faked. Meanwhile, the German Greens are shutting down safe and clean Nuclear power plants in Germany. I can’t think of a greater gift to Putin’s Russia. Belgium is also shutting down its last Nuclear power plant.

My takeaways: