"The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture, and Money"

Good afternoon everyone. I'm Chris Walker, executive director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy. It's my pleasure to welcome you today to our panel's discussion entitled "The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture, and Money."

This is also the title of a special report being presented today by The Interpreter, which is a project of The Institute of Modern Russia. The National Endowment for Democracy has the pleasure of hosting this event, although the Endowment hasn't been involved with the production of the report that's the basis of the discussion today. We have close ties with the organizations that are represented here and are proud to host and be associated with today's event.

The report's authors, Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss, have a shrewdly analytical take on a subject that cries out for deeper analysis. Their report will undoubtedly become the standard for understanding the ways in which Russia exerts influence in the 21st century context. The release of this report is especially important and timely for many reasons. Apart from coinciding with the Russian government's announcement this week of its major international media expansion, which has been branded Sputnik, I'll mention just three reasons apart from this one.

First, at a time when Russia appears committed to challenging and upending the international order, media have become the Kremlin's frontline weapon in pursuing this goal. Second, Russia's domestic political environment informs its behavior beyond its borders. The Russian authorities spare no effort or expense at home to control and manipulate news media. Russia is now taking their media values beyond their borders. Finally, and related to the second point, the international aspect of Russia's media and Russia's wider authoritarian diplomacy, if we can call it that, is increasingly impacting the democracies. So far, there's been a deep underappreciation by the democracies of the Russian government's aims of manipulating and corroding legitimate discourse in democratic settings. This report will help shrink the knowledge gap and should serve as the basis for a response to this growing challenge.

Quick word on social media for today's discussion. For those of you on Twitter, you can follow this presentation and contribute to the conversation by using the hashtag #infowar or by following the Forum at @thinkdemocracy and The Institute of Modern Russia at @inmodernrussia.

And now, it's a real pleasure for me to introduce the moderator of today's panel, David Kramer. David has served for the past four years as president of Freedom House. Prior to that, he was Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. And before that, he served eight years in the U.S. Department of State, including as Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. He also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and was a professional staff member in the Secretary's Office of Policy Planning. I would mention that we have David here today in one of his last public events as Freedom House president. He'll start soon, very soon actually, in a new capacity at the McCain Institute, where he will undoubtedly do great things. It's my pleasure to hand things over to David.

Chris, thanks very much. Um, thanks very much. It's a real delight to be here at the NED, where I feel like a member of the family, quite honestly. And my thanks to you and Mark and Carl and the whole team here for hosting this event, and of course, to The Institute of Modern Russia for putting this event together, and to my three colleagues sitting on the panel here. I can't think of three better people to be up here joining us today, particularly the two authors of the report, but also Hannah, who is a terrific expert in her own right. You have the bios for the three, so I'm not going to go into a lengthy introduction. But what we will do is we'll start with Peter, who will give an overview of the report that's just come out. We'll then turn to Michael for the recommendations part, and Hannah for her reaction on the report and the broader problems that we're facing.

Peter Pomerantsev is a British author and documentary producer. He's written for a number of prestigious publications and is an outstanding expert on these issues, as well as many others. He's been a consultant to the European Union and World Bank projects and others. So, without further ado, Peter, let me turn to you. And then we'll turn to Michael, who is the editor-in-chief of The Interpreter, which is founded as a news and translation service done by The Institute of Modern Russia, a position that he has started, been there since May 2013. And then Hannah is, Hannah is a Eurasian analyst at the Foreign Policy Initiative here in Washington, as well as Senior Research Assistant at the Center for the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, and has been a great colleague of mine over the years as well. Peter, over to you.

A long flight from London. I'll just... Is that better? Cool. Um, so I'll just talk a little bit about the genesis of this paper, and maybe that will take us right into the themes. So, a while back, Michael approached me with the idea of writing something about infowar. This was sort of around May, and infowar was in the air. Suddenly, everybody was talking about infowar. The, um, impressive Dimitri Kiselyov was suddenly giving interviews saying that infowar is the most important type of war. The word was in the air, and I assumed that I knew what the term infowar meant. I thought infowar was when two people from different sides shouted each other, saying, "This is not what I think, and this is what I think," and they kind of have a debate, and, you know, that's kind of the community and the ideas of, of, you know, information that I've grown up with.

But then I started reading some of the Russian military thinking about what they meant by infowar, and they weren't talking about debate. They were talking about soft power. They weren't talking about public diplomacy, persuasion, any of the vocabulary that I was familiar with. They were talking about using information essentially as a weapon to disorganize the enemy, confuse the enemy. They were talking about the resurrection of active measures and spreading disinformation to pollute the decision-making process in the West. We were talking about something called reflexive control, which was using information to get the other side, either West, to make decisions of their own volition which are conducive to the Kremlin. This was a whole... I felt this sort of... I'd stepped through a looking glass. Instead of the message being important, it was, it was, it was the mechanism and the sort of the underlying purpose of the Kremlin's information campaign which actually mattered.

So, essentially, what they'd taken, they'd weaponized information. And I realized that, sort of as a journalist, I had no analytical tools with which to analyze this, and we certainly have any sort of institutional ways to deal with this. I mean, I did a lot of interviews, you know, asking people, "What do you think the Kremlin is up to in its information game?" And they're like, "Well, it's doing propaganda. We do propaganda. Everyone does propaganda." And I think that's one of the key kind of suggestions in our report. We've almost got to jettison this word "propaganda" and find a new glossary: disinformation, misinformation, confusion, to look at the different ways information is being used. And that would maybe start giving us an analytical structure within which to look at what the Kremlin is doing.

But the Kremlin's, sort of, you know, its attempts to discombobulate the West don't end with information. They also include using something else we think of as very positive, culture, as a tool of, um, military thought, essentially. So, from around 2004, Kremlin theoreticians and Duma members talk about setting up Russian compatriots' NGOs abroad in order to subvert foreign countries. Again, this strikes right to the center of, sort of, our idea of liberal democracy. Just as we think that having lots of information is better for liberal democracy because we have a nice debate, we think having lots of, sort of, different cultural institutions, churches, compatriots' organizations is good for, you know, having a nice multicultural chit-chat. What do you do with an enemy or with a malign actor who thinks of you as an enemy, who is using freedom of culture in order to subvert your society?

And finally, I think an area which maybe we're more aware of, the Kremlin uses money and the idea of free trade as a weapon. Again, this gets right to the heart of liberal democratic ideas. If we think of, you know, globalized trade as a way of sublimating conflict into peace, as overcoming policy, what do you do with an actor that uses money and trade as an instrument of a belligerent foreign policy? All this comes together in one big picture, and it's something that the Kremlin refers to as asymmetric war. The idea behind asymmetric war is that Russia is weaker than the West. Russia could never take the West on in direct military confrontation. What are the clever forms that it can use in order to win what it sees as a new tussle?

And, and very, very simply, the key idea is: Let's use the openness of the Western system against it. Yes, to use the vulnerabilities of the Western system against it. Actually, let's use the strength of the Western system against it. So, that's kind of the space that we look at in the paper, and we come up with lots of ideas. Maybe some of them are realistic, maybe some of them would require too much money and government support with which to counter it. But I think the most important thing is to understand that this is a new sort of challenge. What the Kremlin is doing now, I fear, will be replicated by other malign states and non-state actors. Every rising authoritarian state can start using these techniques of asymmetric conflict in order to, in order to pursue their foreign policies.

And I'll leave you with one final thought that was, um, uh, told to me by a Russian media guru by the name of Vasily Gatov, who used to work at RIA Novosti before the purge there and now lives in Massachusetts. I thought he summed up part of the challenge very, very beautifully. He said that if, in the 20th century, the great challenge was to battle against censorship, against censorship for freedom of information, the great challenge in the 21st century is going to be the battle against the abuse of freedom of information in order to subvert it. So, with those thoughts, I'll pass to Michael.

Thank you, Peter. Um, so the way I sort of approached this, this notion of Russian, or I should say, Kremlin disinformation and propaganda, is also as a journalist. I mean, that's what I do for a living. And one of the frustrations I had in thinking up this report and how to approach it is, why is it that Putin succeeds so well in kind of hoodwinking the West, convincing the West that his motives are X when in fact they're Y? And one of the conclusions I think we came up with was that, actually, as Peter said, he is very adept at seconding the openness and the transparency of the Western system, particularly the Western news cycle, or the Western media outlets, to, to, um, you know, essentially become accomplices in his information warfare.

To give you examples of this, when the Russian Foreign Ministry puts out a claim, a claim which can be about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, who downed MH17, he knows, Putin knows, and his minions understand that the, you know, the BBC, the New York Times, The Washington Post, they are duty-bound to report "both sides of the story." So they end up giving equal weight to what the Russian Foreign Ministry says as to what the state, U.S. State Department says. The problem is, some things that are prima facie absurdities or just flat-out lies, real, whole cloth, you know, examples of disinformation, end up becoming the headlines of these stories.

To give you an example, after the Ghouta chemical attack in 2013, one of the first responses that the Russian Foreign Ministry said was, "Aha, this whole thing was staged, and we can prove it." Alexander Lukashevich, who's the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that the YouTube video showing the first alleged victims of the Ghouta chemical atrocity was uploaded before the attack took place. Now, the thing to understand about this is, YouTube uploads at California time, not Damascus time. But I swear to God, I mean, this was picked up by major Western news organizations and run: "Russian Foreign Ministry says Ghouta attack was staged." The real story there is the Russian Foreign Ministry doesn't know that the Earth goes around the sun on a daily basis, right? But this is, this is, this is the job of some lazy editor or some lazy journalist, not being able to just do, without any specialist knowledge of KGB active measures or disinformation, not being able to do their job.

So, one of the things that we do in the, in the report, in the recommendations section, is to give ways that, that the Western media can actually exercise a little more restraint or discipline. Um, when you have a source in media, and that source does nothing but lie to you, guess what? He no longer becomes a credible source. But when you're dealing at the level of governments, again, you have a difficulty here because what the Russian state says is important. People need to understand these things. But you can learn some tricks of the trade.

So, recall the episode with the first so-called humanitarian convoy that was being sent to Ukraine. This was a classic example, a classic example of the Kremlin essentially using the Western news cycle against its own interests or against U.S. interests. How do I mean? Well, from the state on down in Russia, the instruction was simple: Focus exclusively on the convoy. What's in the trucks? Where are the trucks going? Why is Ukraine, the fascist hunter of Ukraine, obstructing the importation of diapers and food and medicine for the beleaguered people in the Donbas? Every Western journalist ascended on that convoy of trucks, the BBC, The Telegraph, The Guardian, everybody. Fortunately, you know, this operation, I would count a failure. What it was designed to do was to misdirect. Right? Look over here, but don't look over there, because while you're all wondering what's in the trucks, we're actually sending tanks and armored personnel carriers and books and weapons across the border into Ukraine. And it was only by happenstance, you know, The Guardian, The Telegraph, actually had people who saw, who witnessed, you know, this kind of masquerade unfold, that we were able to kind of call time on it. But this was a very cleverly cooked-up kind of provocation, right?

What we say for the media, I mean, you know, in a sense, this is relearning some of the epistemology of the Cold War, some of the tactics that, that the Chekists have used, some of the tactics that, you know, sort of Russian diplomatic corps personnel have used, but adapting it for the 21st century. So, one of the things we suggest is actually having a disinformation ombudsman in major news organizations who can say, "This we know to be flat-out false," or "This we know to be a lie," and we have to frame it editorially in such a way that our readers are not going to be psychologically sort of duped." Because eventually, what happens is the more doubt, the more skepticism, the more kind of, you know, sand you throw in the air, eventually this does actually change Western perceptions of what happened. Conspiracy theories that, I mean, this is the stock and trade. This is the damp clay that the Kremlin is quite adroit at molding to its purposes. These people that exist in nature, people who believe the CIA invented the AIDS virus itself, a KGB active measure that was planted in, I think, the 70s or 80s. It's in the report. The CIA assassinated John F. Kennedy. It's an extraordinary thing, right? This made it into Oliver Stone's JFK film. Nobody who've probably seen that movie understands that this was cooked up in Moscow Center, planted in an Italian newspaper, and that newspaper was sent to the Dallas prosecutor's office, and suddenly there's this conspiracy theory that the U.S. government was responsible for the murder of the president.

The problem is, in the 21st century, with online media, you know, it's not the truth, in fact, that are being disseminated at a faster pace. It's that information is, and so active measures have become mediated. Okay? What could have been a week-long or month-long or a year-long provocation by the counterintelligence or KGB apparatuses in the 70s and 80s now takes literally about 15 minutes. Some guy living in his mom's basement who writes for Russia Today, who's paid maybe fifty dollars per article, puts up a story saying that the CIA has weaponized the Ebola virus for use as a biological weapon, which, by the way, RT did in its Spanish language media, and it was then translated into English. This takes 15 minutes to do, and you push publish, and suddenly it goes viral. Because even if people don't believe it, they still are talking about it, right? The goal of Kremlin propaganda or disinformation is not necessarily to convince people that their narrative or their version, their account of events, is true. It's to distract them. It's to confuse them. Right? Look over there, but don't look over here.

Another thing, frankly, I think that that media should be more duty-bound to enforce is editorial transparency. Right? I read any number of articles, per on a daily basis, op-eds in major broadsheets like The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, written by people either with vested financial interests in Russia who are telling us what should be done about Ukraine, typically Finlandization or some kind of settlement with Putin or some kind of neutrality agreement that the Ukrainian people don't necessarily want. I've also read articles, frankly, in in these broadsheets that are written by former Russian military intelligence officers, and in their byline or in their skirt, they're identified as people who work for prominent Western think tanks or prominent Russian think tanks. Let me ask you a question: If tomorrow, Leon Panetta wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about what should be done about Ukraine, and in the skirt it said, "Mr. Panetta is a prominent walnut farmer from California," somebody from The Times would be fired. I suspect they would be. And again, this information is open source. You know, I don't have access to, to, you know, who are former Chekists from from Russia who are now doing this stuff. It's out there. It's publicly available. So, again, the self-enforcement of editorial guidelines and journalistic standards, I think, is key.

Rhetoric, language, that is another tool that Putin has used and co-opted. And there are, everybody in this room, I guarantee you, myself and Peter included, are guilty of essentially regurgitating Foreign Ministry talking points without even knowing that we're doing it. Okay? I'll give you one example. There's a State Department official who told me that he went to the new, to a major Western news publication, and said, "Why do you keep referring to pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine? Most of these guys are Russian military, regular or irregular GRU officers, FSB. Why do you say 'pro-Russian separatists'?" This makes it seem like there's a spontaneous revolution occurring in Ukraine, led and commanded by Ukrainians. And the response was, "Well, if the U.S. government doesn't call them Russians, why am I obligated to use any other kind of, you know, lexical invention?" U.S. policy, I would submit to you, has been very, very confused, very contradictory, very ambiguous in terms of what its strategy is toward Russia.

Let me ask some simple questions. I'm sure nobody in this room has coherent answers to them, because God knows I don't. Is Russia a partner or is it an adversary? Are we at war, or another state of cold war with Russia, or is this some kind of, you know, hybridized pseudo-conflict that we are looking for an off-ramp to de-escalate tomorrow? And then, I mean, you know, is Russia helping us with Iran's nuclear program? You know, is Russia subverting all of the, the supposed dividends of the reset? Is integrating Russia into the global financial system through the accession to the World Trade Organization a good thing, or is it actually increasing that one export that Putin has besides oil, which is corruption and racketeering? I mean, if our State Department refers to Russia as a virtual mafia state, and our journalists do not treat it as such, or do not bother to do the investigation that might actually corroborate that claim, we have a fundamental problem.

And I would submit to you this: Instead of worrying about things like, "Did Putin put the shawl on the Chinese leader's wife and what does this mean?" and "Is Obama chewing gum when he should be acting with more solemnity in Asia?" Dory here, okay? The first suite of sanctions that were passed on Russia, excuse me, on the Putin regime after the annexation of Crimea, to my mind, the real impact here was not the deleterious effect it would have on the Russian economy. It was a disclosure made by the U.S. Treasury Department, and it was sort of smuggled in there, but it was a huge one. And let me tell you why. The disclosure was that Vladimir Putin has assets in a Swiss commodities trader called Gunvor and may have "direct access to cash."

Now, this establishes a few things. Number one, Putin has money invested in Europe while at the same time he is running a feverish anti-Western and anti-American campaign, right? And this is sort of, "Russia is the great bulwark against Western hegemony." Number two, um, why are journalists not focusing on Putin as the supposed richest man in Europe? When everybody knows, and this is the sort of going rumor, this is a huge story. The New York Times several weeks ago had a great piece, an investigative journalistic piece, on Bank of Russia and the sort of the oligarchic inner circle of the Kremlin and where the money is and how it works and how it washes through the global financial system. This, to my mind, is a huge story, and yet journalists are not being incentivized. They're not being told to go out and report it.

So, one of the things that can be done, one of the reasons, I should say, that they're not being incentivized to do it, is the cost-benefit ratio is completely disproportionate. The chances of being sued by a Russian oligarch with billions of dollars if you go out and you report on this stuff is enormous. So, one of the recommendations we have, and this is where civil society can sort of take up the cudgel, is to create a libel action defense fund for journalists. Okay? If you did that, then tomorrow, it would be a lot easier for even online digital media groups like BuzzFeed or Medium or Mashable to dispatch people to offshore jurisdictions like the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, to bang on doors, to talk to these registrar companies which are registering offshore companies, you know, and bank accounts in the names of sort of phantom nominee directors, but they're really stashing assets and cash belonging to oligarchs. And chances are, these oligarchs have real estate in London or Paris. Chances are they send their kids to Eton or Oxford or Cambridge. Chances are they're actually front men for people working inside the government. Okay?

Again, if you want to sort of change the nature of the debate we're having about Russia, refocus on the things that are important. Russia's GDP, according to an independent monitor, one-third of its GDP is frittered away annually through bribery. That's a huge story. Transparency International ranks Russia on par with Nigeria in terms of its transparency. So, if it's exporting this kind of racketeering, it's exporting these sort of mafia tactics, and it's trying to control like a capo di regime would control a mob, I mean, what are the tools that can be brought against it? Well, in terms of policy, you need something approaching RICO for a state government. But in terms of journalism and, you know, muck-raking reporters who will go out and actually report on these stories. So, in the report, you'll see kind of a list of recommendations. Most of them are intended not for non-governmental officials. But then again, when the U.S. government has alighted upon a coherent set of policies, or I should say, a policy objective with respect to Russia, then I think you're going to see some changes in the way that Russia is being reported. Because government can work cheek by jowl with journalists, it can leak information, and it can start to push back and be a little more aggressive. It's, you know, the goal is not to always be on the back foot and defensive. You know, everyone's worried about, "Oh, the Kremlin has this army of trolls. They pay 800 people to sort of tweet nasty things at Victoria Nuland or our ambassador in Ukraine." And what should we do about it? The answer is nothing. That's not the priority. That's another way to distract you, to keep you from doing your work.

So, I think, you know, one takeaway from our report, I should hope, if people agree with our assessment and our recommendations, is, you know, the nature of how we think about engaging with Putin, or how we think about sort of confronting his misbehavior, has to be completely sort of rejiggered. It's not about sort of an opportunistic, you know, step-by-step, "How can we get him not to invade Mariupol tomorrow?" It's, "How can we actually educate people as to what the nature of this regime is, and what it is, what motivates them, and how to get them to sort of stop?" So, at that, I think I should turn it over to Hannah, and you can pick up.

I'm not going to disagree, but what I do want to, and first, my thanks to the NED, to IMR, to the Forum for holding this event and for allowing me to participate. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the title, actually: "How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture, and Money." What does Russia export? Exports right now? Information in the form of Sputnik or in the form of Russia Today, RT. It is exporting money. You could say we would call it corruption through all of the bribery. But culture, that to me actually seems like the biggest thing that we haven't really taken a good look at.

At the end of the day, there is in the West, in the United States, there is a market for this propaganda. People are consuming it because they seem to, to want to consume it, because there seems to be a kind of desire for the other, for something else, for something that's unknown. And I think Putin has figured this out. And in my mind, he knows that the West, and particularly, in my mind, Europe, wants two things: They want leaders, strong leaders, in leadership, and they want values. And you look around the world, there seems to be a lack of leadership, of people who will really stand up and have the kind of machismo that Putin puts out there. And it's something that to a lot of people who live in a sort of emasculated society where they don't stand for anything anymore, at least Putin stands for something. It's attractive to a certain class, to a certain group of people.

And on the values, I would posit that I'm not sure Europe knows what it stands for anymore. It has questions as to what it actually is, what it believes, and what it's fighting for. Twenty-five years ago, Europe knew what it wanted: it was to fight for a Europe whole, free, and at peace. And now that they have that, there seems to be something lacking. And if you compare the two side by side, compare the vision that Russia's putting out. Russia is saying, "Look, we have leadership, we have strength, we're willing to stand for what we believe in." You may not agree with that, but at the end of the day, we want Ukraine, and we're going to take it. And there is a certain kind of appeal to that. But to me, one of the things that we need to do is actually sit down and actually ask ourselves what we want, to come up with a goal. Putin has a goal. I think it's a terrible one. I think it's going to damage a lot of people, but he does have one, and we don't. We need to figure out exactly what that goal is. We've allowed a kind of vacuum in the cultural space to appear, and I think Putin and his media machine are very happy to fill it and then use it against us, using all of the tools that Michael and Peter just laid out.

And I would also posit that there's there's one more word, a definition that I think you'll never see used very often in the space of propaganda, but it's "glamor." Glamor is what you can't have. It's the grass is always greener on the other side. You hear the word "glamor," and you may think of Sophia Loren, you may think of a nice ski chalet in Aspen. But those, we are attracted to those things because we can't have them, because they're something that is unfamiliar to us. It's the desire for the unknown, for what you don't have. And Putin has become very adept at that. I think first through his experience in creating the internal Russian media, the domestic Russian media, where he has very cleverly, with the help of Mr. Surkov and other people in his arena, have become very, very successful at casting shadows where there need to be shadows and creating mystery, and allowing Putin to be anything to everyone. He is, and has made himself, in the eye of the Russian public, the one person upon whom all Russians can cast their hopes and their dreams. That's why you see him go out, as soon as he thinks, "Oh, you know, Russians want to see a strong leader," he goes out and he shoots a tiger. Oh, you know, Russians want to see that someone's sensitive, and he'll have a sit-down and read a bunch of stories to small children in an orphanage somewhere. He gives them what they want while still maintaining the sort of aura of secrecy, this aura of greatness. It's what we don't know yet. It's very attractive. And I think he's now gotten to the point where those skills have worked so well, really on a domestic level, that they're beginning to push them out internationally.

If you watch Russia Today, you're not going to see stories about an impoverished village in Siberia. Not going to happen. What you will see is a story about a poor town in Iowa who may have lost some jobs back in 2008 and hasn't recovered yet. It's about showing you the flaws in your own life and not revealing the flaws in the vision that is portrayed. And to go back to what I said earlier about how there is no vision, if, if you are visionless, if you don't have something to grasp onto, be that religion, be it values, be it politics, if everything, if there's nothing to fight for, nothing to move towards, when someone offers you another option, whether you agree with it or not, that's not the point. You don't have to agree with it. You just have to watch it. It becomes very attractive. And and that's where I think Putin and the Kremlin have made incredible inroads into the way we think, into the way we report the news, into how we make our business decisions. It is, in a perverse and sort of very subversive way, glamor. And I'll leave it there.

Great. Thank you very much to all three of you. I'm going to get the conversation going and then bring in the audience here. But I'm going to start with a few questions to you. Um, the first is, is this, in a way, trying to put lipstick on a pig? Which is to say that despite what you were saying, Hannah, that Putin is projecting this strength and power and assertiveness and glamor, nevertheless, what they're dealing with and working with is kind of a lot of crap. So, does that matter? Does that make a difference, or is it a way to deflect from their own internal problems?

I would say it doesn't matter. It's all about the image you project. It doesn't, they don't have to see the reality. It just has to be, "We're showing a movie. We're telling a story." It doesn't have to be real. None of it has to be real. I think Peter, you've written some things about this.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's two things. I think a lot of the, if we're just talking about information, I think a lot of it doesn't fall into into usual PR. I think we're actually something completely different. I mean, we can go back to Hannah's points, but but what I find most alarming, um, I don't mind Russia Today's programs about Putin and Iowa. I think this is all part of, you know, a PR sort of narrative game. I think we can win that very easily. I think it's much more subversive is the use of freedom of information for disinformation. It's not an information war on information. It's an attempt to make the very idea of a debate impossible. So that's it. It really doesn't matter whether you're a pig with lipstick or you're a butterfly. It's not about that. It's, it's the goals are completely different. It's not from the PR departments of the Kremlin. It's not from the communications department where they have to move the conversation across the road. This is coming from the military and secret service department. It's a completely different conversation.

But coming back to the PR conversation, because that is happening as well. Look, around 2008, the Kremlin realizes it's not going to be loved apart from in Italy, and they're hungry. There are some places they can do different messages in different places. But in terms of the image, it's not about being loved. It's about being feared. So, it's all about looking big and strong. It's about, I mean, why no one really listens to sort of Russia Today here, but just the fact that Russia has this huge channel and all these thousands of trolls, it's meant to strike some sort of confusion and fear, like, "Hey, who are these guys? They look pretty powerful." So, a lot of it is about looking strong and feared, rather than being loved. So, it's not so much putting lipstick on the pig, it's putting fangs on on the pig. Dangerous killer pig, right? That is a useful phrase to have. Um, before Michael, you jump in, but let me just see. Peter?

Yeah, I was, um, at the OSCE Human Dimension Conference in September in Warsaw, and RT was all over the place, including with a very controversial and provocative display of a journalist who was killed, and it was the sole focus of this display right as you walked into the meeting. Is it so easy to dismiss the way you just do? Okay, so listen, different. The cleverness of the Kremlin is that it has a different approach for different places, and its aim is always divide and conquer. It's very detailed. So, what's gonna RT is going to open in France, where I assume it's going to be Jean-Marie Le Pen's private channel. If they can change public opinion through that, that's very dangerous. RT is not going to change public opinion in the United Kingdom. I mean, not even vaguely. Quite the opposite. My sense is they're trying something that is called a double bind in Britain. So, the double bind is when you put the opposition into a conflicting situation where either choice is wrong, and they go mad. It's actually meant to be one of the causes of schizophrenia as well, but usually it's used as a way of control without being without overtly trying to do anything.

So, what this seems to have done in Britain is, uh, they have, you know, they've shown programming which I'm pretty sure they must have at least suspected would get them in trouble with the British regulator. Unlike the US, we have fairly strict regulations about due impartiality and, and accuracy. So, surprise, surprise, a couple of days ago, the British regulator, Ofcom, brought out its first reports about RT's programming over Ukraine. So, this is just looking at their March stuff, and it's already said, "One more thing, and you're going to get sanctioned." The other, the next thing must be coming because they haven't even touched their stuff about Donbas. The thing is, and this is the big problem, my sense is that RT might be looking for exactly this, because for several weeks, way before this came out, they said, "If they take us off air, fine us online immediately." They have people tweeting, "Oh, there's no democracy in Britain." It's almost as if they wanted this. It's almost if they were provoking the British into the situation. The British are in a complete double bind. If they ban them, it's a much bigger, pure victory for RT than any programming the RT could have shown, which no one watches. If they don't ban them, it subverts our whole idea of having a regulatory field. What's the point of having it if we don't enforce it? Each choice is awful. And this is a classic Chekist thing. You know, let's put them in the, uh, the vehicle, the fork, the double bind, same thing. I mean, we see it done in the Donbas very easily. If the Ukrainians don't advance, then the, you know, the Russians will take more. If the Ukrainians do advance, they end up killing innocent human beings. Both choices are awful. So, they love doing that. So, in Serbia, in France, in Germany, which is the key swing state where there is public opinion that likes Russia, I think RT could actually have an influence on public opinion. In Britain and America, I think the game is slightly different.

You want to jump? Yeah, I mean, you know, the tendency, because we're all sort of sensationalistically minded, we seize upon the most extreme or hyperbolic instances of, as you put it, "in crap," um, you know, RT so articulately. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, our RT has a has a presenter or a correspondent, I forget which, who thinks that the Pope is a space alien, literally. I mean, um, RT's Middle East expert from Germany is himself a registered neo-Nazi. You know, things like that. It's great. You know, I mean, I worked in, Peter has a background in television. I've lived in the UK, and one of the things that the BBC likes to do is they love to put like fire-breathing jihadist clerics on the air. And I would ask them sometimes, "Why are you doing that?" And they said, "Oh, mate, it makes great telly. You know, the ratings go up and up and up and up." The same thing with putting conspiracy theorists about MH17 on the air, which they have done, by the way.

But I think what we're missing here, and and this is in the report too, and it's, it's, I think, one of Peter's great insights, there is a kind of overarching theme or a leitmotif to what all of this is designed to do, and that is to say, "Look, we know there's no such thing as democracy. We know there's no such thing as human rights. We know there's no such thing as open society and transparency. Everyone's on the take. Liberalism is, can I buy anybody?" And to prove it, here's Schroeder, you're going to be on the board of Gazprom. Putin uses the Western vices and shortcomings as much as the strengths against itself. And he, I mean, you know, has there been a country in the European Union where there hasn't been a major corruption scandal? The answer is no, actually. And we all think about Italy again because it's, you know, we love the sort of the camp and the hyperbole of a Berlusconi. But this has happened across the board. To Putin, this is sort of risk for the mill. Everything they say they stand for, all those principles, they're all lies. It's all bogus. So therefore, how dare they assail us for doing nakedly that which they only do, you know, clandestinely?

And and so, you know, this idea, sorry, I'll give you a second. Um, you know, moral relativism, whataboutism, which is a classic sort of Cold War piece of tradecraft. If you say, "Well, you invaded in annexed Crimea," they say, "Well, you went into Iraq," or "What do you expect after Kosovo?" And again, look, I can show you examples of U.S. policy intellectuals saying the same thing. Now, maybe they genuinely believe it, but every time they put out this argument, they are essentially doing Lavrov's work for him. Um, so, but again, I I keep coming back to money, because this is the one area where this sort of, you know, the Russell Brand moral universe of competitive narratives and there is no truth and everything is sort of subjective, that's where it falls apart. Because when you start seizing people's bank accounts, or showing how somebody who makes thirty thousand dollars a year officially can afford to build himself a hundred million dollar dacha, suddenly there is such a thing as empirical fact and truth, and it does sort of set the cat among the pigeons inside Russia. Um, so, yeah, there's a lot of crap, but then there's this kind of, you know, what is the theme? What is the thesis that's being sold? And I think that actually is quite powerful.

Yeah, RT sometimes strikes strikes me as one huge humanitarian convoy. Which he was sitting here. I mean, in Britain, for example, everyone's talking about RT. That's not how Russia is doing influence in Britain. It's doing it via Gazprom, turning up at meetings in Canary Wharf in the City of London, going, "Friends have failed. State, why don't we do business together?" You know, that's that's where the real influence is happening in Britain. They've worked out there are both our strength and our vulnerability is the City of London, our addiction, um, uh, to having sort of influence of foreign cash. That's what the real influence is happening. RT is the thing like, "Don't talk about this. Go and talk about this." Every time we have a conversation about in Britain, I'm like, "Okay, we're missing the point." In America, where they have much less, uh, financial influence, my sense is they've targeted the, uh, people sitting in this room, the expat community. That's really been the main operation. And here we're into something, my favorite bits of Russian information theory, reflexive control.

So, a friend of mine, [inaudible], turns up in Moscow, key expert in the think tank community, works both sides of the Atlantic, turns up. He's got really high-level sources in Moscow, he's always had them. He's running a couple of grandstanding books. He lands, and immediately they're like, "He's gone mad. Teresa's gone quite quite mad." Everyone he meets, everyone who's the insider, you know, all the liberals in the Kremlin, they're all saying, "He's gone quite quite mad. Don't do sanctions. They'll make him even more." He comes back, he starts organizing a conference, "How to Avert a New Cold War." "Don't do sanctions." Halfway through, he's like, "Hold on." And they do this all the time. They can be always doing this thing they call reflexive control, giving us information in order to make change our own behavior in a certain way. So, so they have, again, like RT in America, absolutely no influence. Influence in the expert community in Washington, rather huge, I'm afraid. I mean, but let me ask you about some of the immediate neighbors of Russia. How should they be responding to this? You've had Estonia make a concerted decision not to ban any broadcasting or internet sites coming from Russia, even though they might be aimed to... It's a decoy. It's that decoy. It's a decoy. Circle office in the building. Do not move. Um, oh, uh, so Estonia. But then you have Ukraine, which has decided to block some sites, some networks, journalists' access. Is there, should there be distinctions made depending on the situation? Ukraine, obviously, by Russia, it's a war with Russia. It's not a civil war. It's a war with Russia. So, does Ukraine get some special dispensation because of that situation?

Yeah, I mean, you know, so here we have the First Amendment, and the idea of pulling the plug on RT is unfathomable. In the UK, as Peter mentioned, Ofcom, which is the press regulatory body, is now faced with this kind of, you know, Hobson's choice. Do we enforce our own regulatory code and yank them off the air, thereby making them a martyr to freedom of speech? Or do we not do it, thereby allowing them to continue to put out all these lies and propaganda? I think, look, you know, each country has its own set of laws, its own sort of social norms, and such. With respect to Ukraine, you know, look, if if their fear is, "Well, we're, we don't want to allow in, you know, journalists from say, LifeNews, which is known to be quite close to the Russian security services," well, we don't see them as journalists. We see them as Russian intelligence officers. That is a fair argument to make. Now, I'm not advocating what Ukraine should do, but, you know, yeah, they have...

Wartime emergency measures in place. So even though I'm Chomsky says that during a war, he's talking about the Second World War, you gotta, you gotta, you've got to start doing a bit of censorship. Even I mean, if Chomsky said it, maybe the Ukrainians are allowed a little bit of leverage, a little bit of legend, but not too much. Because we, we all know the dangers, and Ukraine might, this might, we all know the dangers and, and the follow-on.

Um, I just got back from Latvia and Estonia and, um, you know, I was very alarmed. And I was mainly alarmed by something they kept on telling me, uh, which I think maybe people in this room appreciate, but maybe the general public in America and Britain don't understand. Look, Putin doesn't get up in the morning and have a political erection from the idea of sending tanks into. Target the whole point of the Baltics, whether it's to undermine Article Five or to like, sort of just subvert them, it's to make the White House look bad. This is being used as an information game, as a mirror to embarrass Washington. Because if you can prove Article Five as a joke, the 1991 transition was a joke, you basically pull the rug out of the whole edifice of America's reputation. So it's not about the Baltics. The Baltics will take a million and one measures, military, secret service, and so on, to defend themselves. This is about Washington. They are using the Baltics to get at you. And I suppose some people in the State Department understand that. I'm actually, the American public understands that. I think it's the regional problem. The American public doesn't even understand the exertions of hard power that are being used on a daily basis. I mean, I just read a report before coming here. Um, Russia has practiced firing cruise missiles into New York, Washington, Chicago, as recently as a few months ago. It came, I think, 50 miles from the California coast, which is the closest it's ever come since the end of the Cold War. There was a near mid-air collision between, I think it was a Swedish commercial airliner and a Russian fighter jet that had turned off its transponder. It's only by the dexterity of the Swedish pilot that that another MH-17 hadn't occurred. How many people in this room know these things? How much, how many of the people in the American general public or the European general public know these things? Well, then you have the kidnapping and the Estonian security officer from Estonian territory is still sitting in the Lubyanka. I mean, look, I think Putin has a lot of, has a lot of vulnerabilities. I think we're not really appreciating. You know, um, Belarus, I mean, Europe's last dictatorship under Lukashenko. Lukashenko is pissing himself in terror, thinking that actually Putin might do to him what he's done to other concepts. Right? So, you know, the idea that there's this sort of monolithic block and that the, the so-called Customs Union or the Eurasian Union is, is everyone to a man a Putin-ist. I think that's a misconception. I think there are their weaknesses that can be exploited. But again, it, you need to start with a premise. You need to start with a policy. And, you know, one of the things Russians do very well, or I should say again, you know, state agents and, and Chekists do very well, what's known as *mnoga*, you know, multiple moves at once to discombobulate your enemy. We don't do that. We're very sort of linear in our thinking. And, you know, US government can be, it takes decades. And we learn to do one thing really, really well. So in the Cold War, we did containment really, really well. It took a while, but we got there. And then the Berlin Wall came down. I'm like, okay, right, that's it. Russia is no problem. It's a regional nuisance now. Um, so let's go learn how to kill jihadis really, really well. And suddenly people are saying, well, gee, how do we deal with this? I mean, you know, I, we have friends in this room who are real old Cold War hands who can spot a Chekist a mile away. They can read Russian state propaganda, stuff that's been put out in the state press and say, aha, I've managed to spot a certain pattern here, and this is a sign that, you know, this is telegraphing what the next move is, or this is some kind of insight into criminology. Now, look, some of that may be alchemy, but some of it's actually quite useful. I mean, at *The Interpreter*, you know, we have Paul Goldberg writing for us, who's a great Cold War hand who understands this stuff very well, particularly the minorities issue, you know, what's happening in the Caucasus and in Central Asia. These people exist. We're just not relying on their expertise anymore. Keep on coming back to this question of policy because it really does, it really does come back to that. What is, what is the policy towards Russia? I mean, coming back to my example of the Baltics. So it's, I mean, this is the case of putting the Americans into a double bind. Because if you say, oh my God, there's a new Cold War on, that plays right into Putin's hand. So that's exactly the narrative he wants to, he wants to evoke. At the same time, you say there's nothing going on, Russia is irrelevant, you're also playing into his hands because he can further bully the near abroad. So again, it's almost as if we have to start reframing the conversation about Russia. Um, get out of the stupid binary that "win Cold War" or "nothing." That's kind of where we're at. They're both stupid. They're both wrong. These are specifically 21st-century challenges. I mean, one way of looking at Russia, it's not the way, is as a sort of a, sort of an agent of a malign globalization. You know, they're, they're giving sort of a dark globalization, um, as opposed to sort of the liberal democratic mission. So we really have to find a new language within which to, to, to put Russia in. Because I, I, I feel uncomfortable with some of this Cold War talk. I don't think I feel very uncomfortable with the Cold War talk. We're dealing, we see the enemy as the same person, but the, the reality on the ground is entirely and completely different. We're not fighting the same fight, and they're not fighting the same fight. More importantly, let me play devil's advocate for a minute. Um, you guys, I am making far too much of this. Our stakes with Russia are too important to get caught up in this information warfare. We've got the nuclear issue, we've got Iran, counterterrorism, all these things. It's unfortunate what's happening in Ukraine, but they're bigger stakes out there. I would have to respectfully disagree. I wouldn't even say respectfully. No, I would disagree quite disrespectfully, in fact. Um, I'm trying to be on my best behavior. Computer, trying in light to my mind. At the end of the day, and again, apologies if I do upset some of you, whether or not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict gets solved is, at the end of the day, not terribly important to the world order. Not Russia destroys what was set up after 1945 in Europe. Is, and to me, that's the end of the story. Um, here's a question. I, if you can answer this, then, you know, to my satisfaction, I might be inclined to agree. How does Putinism end? What is the culmination point? How does this regime either transfer peaceably into something else, or that, you know, the person in charge of it, how does he leave power? My fear, my belief is this is going to end quite messily with blood on the streets of Moscow. So if that happens, then you're going to have a failed state in possession of nuclear weapons, with a colossal military, one that's growing all the time at a rate of expansion that Western military simply are not growing at. So therefore, yes, this is a long-term strategic problem, and we do have to start treating Russia as, as a geopolitical menace. Which, I mean, this is where actually Peter and I do disagree a little bit. Because I, I appreciate his points about 21st-century information weaponization of information, all that, but they are still using 20th-century tradecraft and tactics. I mean, uh, President Ilves, 19th century, I'd say it's 2013. The Estonians do something quite well, which nobody else in Europe does nearly as well, and I don't think even the United States really does as well, which is counterintelligence. Classic counterintelligence. Estonia is chock-a-block full of Russian spies. So every year, they put out this annual review, they're the KPA, the domestic security services, and they basically say, these are the people we know who are agents of influence on the Kremlin payroll. We can establish that the money comes from governmental, non-governmental organizations, which invariably accuse Estonia of being a Nazi state or persecuting an ethnic Russian minority population or the Russian-speaking population. That the money comes from some state cultural agency run by the Foreign Ministry. So essentially, they're, they're sort of giving you a list of people that they know, they're aware of. And every year, invariably, they, they capture a Russian spy, somebody who's in their police force or the defense ministry or, God forbid, in NATO, and they put them on trial, and they out, they name and shame. We're not doing that. And, and President Ilves likes to joke in Brussels, there are like three people running counterintelligence for the entirety of the European Union. Do you want to guess how many Russian spies are running around Brussels, hoovering up information on contracts that are being signed by Germany, Poland, you know, all the countries in the EU? I mean, we do have to return, I think, to a little bit of 20th, 20th-century tradecraft. I think we, we neglect this, or we think, oh, well, we're past that point, at our peril. Yeah, I, I am, I think we have to look at this question of Russia's relevance. What is the name, what is the point of asymmetric? The idea of asymmetric warfare is to find the biggest sort of, uh, um, vulnerability, the sort of the crevasses within the Western system and catalyze and increase them. It's not a conversation about Russia. They're looking at our weaknesses. But these aren't, these aren't kind of minor weaknesses. These are the structural pillars, the cracks in structural pillars of our society. So corruption, the weaponization of money. If you can climb within globalization and as the Russians like to say, to shake it from inside, you're, we're in a very dangerous place. You can try, you can climb inside, free of information, and start ruining it from inside. We're in a very dangerous place. If you climb inside freedom of culture and start using it against itself, we're in a very dangerous place. It's all about us, actually. Russia can only sort of like dwell on our own weaknesses. So it's a question about us. Do we think our own weaknesses are important? I think they are very important. They're very good at calling our bluff. You know, I mean, we look at all the energy that our diplomatic force spent after the chemical weapons attack, and I do, I keep referring to that because I do a lot of work on Syria. *The Wall Street Journal* had a great anatomy of that event and sort of how the US government knew within seconds that this was Bashar al-Assad who unleashed sarin gas on 15 people in a capital city. How did they know? They intercepted communications from Moscow to Damascus saying, "Oh, what did you guys just do? Now you've really gone too far." Isn't that put on YouTube? The way that a conversation between one of our State Department officials and another State Department official, put on YouTube, or between, you know, an Estonian foreign minister and the EU High Representative? I mean, look, this sounds aggressive, and I've gotten a lot of resistance when I bring this up to the governmental level here. "We can't do that," or, you know, "The NSA will never do the NSA needs a little bit of good press." I think. And putting it, Putin and gas, the, you know, did the rebels gas themselves? Or, you know, was it Saudi Arabia cooking up this dirty one? One thing, one thing that would have completely cut leverage off and jerked them off at the knees at the UN Security Council, or at least made their jobs a lot harder. All right, let me ask one more question. I could actually go on for quite a while up here, um, and then I'll turn to the audience. Uh, and it's to the two of you. You name names in the report. Report, I think, is really good, by the way. I think it's a top, top-notch report. You name some names. I don't want to get into naming names up here, but how do you avoid the charge that anyone who disagrees with you is suspect? That people may actually, there's probably more agreement about the source of the problem, the Putin regime, but the disagreements may be boiled down more to what do we do about it? Yep. And so people who, there are some people who actually don't like sanctions. They actually think they're counterproductive. They think they unite Russians around Putin. So how do you address that charge that you're just painting everybody with a broad brush as suspect who disagreed? Well, I tell you, you don't paint either. I mean, I don't either. I, I, you know, I would say this, though, right? So I'm the first one. Some of my best friends are against sanctions. You know, can spontaneously alight on a set of policy recommendations that I don't agree with. But when they're making these recommendations, and like I said before, have vested financial interests in Russia that they're not disclosing. I mean, you know, DC now seems to be gripped in this sort of, um, kind of debate about where do think tanks get their money? Yeah. It's an excellent question. And, you know, one of the charges we have, I'm going to be very candid with you, we have leveled against us is, "Oh, well, in the report, we say, yeah, funded by Khodorkovsky." Right? So where are we wrong? Where's our information wrong? Where's the, you know, debunking of the evidence that we compile? Now, we've told you who gives us money. You tell us who gives you money, right? I mean, I can tell you, you know, you and I, I think everyone here, maybe signed this letter against the so-called "Boyz" initiative, right? Those of you who don't know, um, there was a, something that was billed as track two diplomacy on between, you know, the United States and, and Russia on how to resolve the Ukraine crisis. It was a meeting held on a Finnish island a few months ago. And what was interesting was there were no Ukrainians invited to this meeting. So two, you know, just one superpower and one, if you believe the president, regional power negotiating over the fate of a sovereign nation struck us as as particularly galling and rather rude. So we signed this paper saying, you know, we disagree with this. Who are the people invited to that meeting? And, you know, how are they getting paid? And, you know, who, what jobs do they have? And where's the money coming from? And, you know, are people now fundraising on the back of pretending that they have the ear of the US government and can actually cut a deal with Putin that will resolve this crisis amicably to everyone's satisfaction? I think, I think they're fair questions to ask. Now, I know it opens us to the charges of McCarthyism and all this stuff. But no, I mean, you know, where is the money? I say in Russia, follow the money. So the same thing applies here. I mean, this, if, if I have to say that there's a kind of sub-theme to the work that we're doing, it's this. There is a kernel of truth to Putin's game here, which is we have to get our own house in order. Europe has to repair what it is allowed to take, take place, which is the influx of dirty rubles, sort of energy dependency on Russia, which is now hobbled their foreign policy. I mean, the European Union, no sanctions, no more sanctions. As Russia is sending more material across the border and sending more troops and tanks up to the border, well, you know, Putin is sort of sitting there rubbing his hands together saying, you know, look at these guys, they've tied them up in knots because they're, they're desperate to end the sanctions regime completely. I can do whatever I want. So it is, this is a kind of a Western self-criticism, first and foremost. Okay, we'll open it up. We'll start with Ariel and then go from there. Please identify yourself and try to keep it brief. Ariel Cohen, Center for Energy, Natural Resources and Geopolitics. A terrific report, um, very important descriptive part. RT, Russia Today is not really, uh, a medium. It's not a member of media in our understanding. And if the British authorities, Bennett, I will be the first one to applaud. And the second question, somebody said the First Amendment would apply to RT. We need a really serious legal examination of that by the appropriate legal counsel in the government. If a government-sponsored, uh, tool of foreign policy that is aimed at undermining the existing regime, for the lack of better word, is that something we would ban? We do ban, if as far as I know, Al-Manar, the Hezbollah television. We do ban Al-Kuds TV. No, Russia did not invent that. It has been a part of the landscape in the Middle East for at least 30 years. The question is to the esteemed panel and to even more esteemed moderator, is where are we here in this town? Are we paying attention at all? Policy-wise and policy tools-wise, not just at the information component, but at the changing landscape? I attended yesterday a very high-level panel at CSIS with former Chiefs of Staff of the White House, former head of the CIA, etc., etc. And people said, at this scenario that they discussed was invasion of Estonia, and very senior people said, "We should do nothing." And I was shocked. So are we paying attention to what's going on at all? Or are we paying attention at the healthcare reform? Um, just yesterday, the Russian Orthodox Church, and I'll finish with that, announced an official test who is a Russian, uh, Google it, a Russian is a person who is a believer in Russian Orthodoxy and has no other allegiances, ethnically, than the Russian nation. So a country where 80% of the population is now has to, uh, be a part of this definition that some may say can be compared to definitions of race or a nation from a different period of European history, from a past century. What are the implications of it? Are we paying attention to that? So what are the policy tools, both domestically and vis-à-vis Russia, in this town? Thank you. I think yes. Sorry for being so like a couple rows back. Galaxy. Yep. Yep. Okay. My name is myself. Uh, my question is very simple. Um, you mentioned, one of you, many, I'm asking the journalists, you mentioned the Malaysian airplane. Now, the airplane which was shot down over Ukraine got twice or three times less coverage than the Malaysian airplane which disappeared in the Indian Ocean. And this airplane could have been basically a silver bullet which could help us get rid of this empire. Why the West, Western Europe specifically, opted not to continue investigating? Why do we still don't know who shot it down? And nobody is indicted? Let's take one more, and then we'll come to some responses. Uh, right there, and then I promise I'll come to the side. Right. Yep. My name is from Russia, and here I'm a writer and filmmaker. My doctoral dissertation was about freedom of information, and I've been writing the dissertation in the Soviet Union, then continued in post-Soviet Russia, and then I came here. I've spent here five years already. And so I've been comparing always what the landscape here and there for freedom of information, cultural development, and so on. And what I found, all my life living in the Soviet Union, I had been sure that we were living behind the Iron Curtain. And in my city, children, I lived even behind a double Iron Curtain because it was a closed city. But at the same time, I've been able to see, to watch the best American movies in every small library, even in the villages, it was possible to find American best, best novels written by different American writers, old and modern, and we were able to understand American culture and American politics. And when I came here, I found that Americans lived even for more hard Iron Curtain because the general public was not able to watch Soviet movies. And now, not too many people are able to watch Russian movies, and Russian literacy is not very popular here because it's not translated. So your question is, my question is, maybe are we missing anything? American journalists, American media specialists, living in this relaxation atmosphere of no competition now, not able to fight with people who lived in a world which was ready to fight for their position. And now Russia are doing this. So maybe it must be more discussion and more efforts to increase, first of all, geopolitical culture of journalists, their geographical culture of journalists. For example, very respectful. Real quick, because we're running a lot of time. Five million people were not able to vote because they were surrounded by Russians. Okay? And they put pictures of women in hijab on the street of Donetsk. What is it? Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Who wants to start? Um, I can still remember the questions before I forget. I'll just do it really quickly. Um, so to Ariel's actually one of our recommendations about RT being, is it part of the media community? So we have two key recommendations regarding this problem. So what I'd firstly like to see, I don't know if this will ever happen. I want to see, I have a vision. Fox and Al Jazeera and the BBC and Deutsche Welle and even Russia Today sitting down together and creating a charter for international broadcasters saying, "We all hate each other, but this is our kind of, this is the behavior we subscribe to." Um, you know, you can all hate each other, debate, la la la. We don't do disinformation. We don't rely on purpose. And people who don't subscribe to it, they're kind of out of the club. So I'd like to see peer pressure. The second one that I'd like to see is sort of a Transparency International for disinformation. I'd like to see a rating system that would be able to slap on different media organizations so we can immediately tell what kind of journalistic standards they have. So Russia Today might look, actually, I'm not going to name Russia Today, a media organization might look like a media organization, who might talk like one, but it'd have a one out of ten on the rating. Well, that said, straight away, it would kind of be pushed out of the community. I'd much prefer seeing that kind of peer pressure because I think it would discipline us as well, rather than top-down censorship. But, you know, I'm a woolly liberal, so, you know. Um, well, you know, Ariel's much tougher than that. Yeah. I mean, my tactic with Russia Today is, first of all, don't legitimize them as a proper news organization. It actually does get under their skin because people who work there, I mean, look, there's a crisis in media, right? You know, foreign bureaus are being shuttered, you know, directory press is kind of collapsing, and we don't quite know how to fix these things. So RT comes along with a budget of $300 million, increasing by 40% in the next year, going up and up and up, and offering, what, you know, entry-level stringers to $80 grand a year? Not bad, right? But these people eventually want to go on in their careers and do something else. So if you just say, "Right, we know what you are," and don't pretend that you're Al Jazeera or BBC or Fox News or whatever, it does get under their skin. And that also means don't appear on their show. I can't tell you the number of people I know in the expert community, particularly when it comes to counterterrorism, yeah, because they love to go on about, you know, the jihadis. Don't go on the show. They say, "Well, you know, better to give a countervailing viewpoint." No, because it doesn't matter what you do, even if it's live broadcast, they're going to spin it, they're going to co-opt you, and you, you're granting them an authenticity certificate that they frankly don't deserve. What about the Jamie Kitchen scenario? That was a great thing, but how, you know, everybody's going to go on RT and and say, you know, "I denounce you for being, you know, propaganda." Just after a while, that gets quite prosaic. I mean, Jamie, that was a match, you can only light once, I think. Yeah, and he's not going to be invited back. Um, to the point, I want to just answer the question about MH17. Yeah, actually, this is something that that bothers me a lot. This was a huge, I mean, it's not true that the media was silent on this. I mean, I practically lived in MSNBC studios for two days straight doing nothing but MH17. But, um, it's kind of disappeared from the headlines. Uh, the fact that, you know, there hasn't been an investigation. Well, there's sort of a pseudo-investigation, but let's be honest, that crash site was contaminated within 15 minutes, and, you know, separatists blocked people from coming in. You're never going to get a credible investigation given the time that's gone on. I would say this, though, look at what they said, their response. Again, there was not a single narrative or account for what happened. The first thing was, this was Ukrainians aiming at Putin's presidential plane, which flew over the same, this guy, in the same time. Nonsense that was debunked. Then it was, "O2 Sukhoi 25s by the Ukrainian Air Force tracked the plane and shot it down." Doesn't matter that Sukhoi 25s have an altitude ceiling 10,000 feet below that of MH17 where it was flying. Then they said, "Actually, that one of the Sukhoi 25s was hovering around the crash site." 25s don't hover because if they, they have a stall speed of like 300 miles an hour, so they would have fallen out of the sky too. Again, but these kinds of things, they're so transparently ridiculous, you don't need specials. This was the one, the plane was full of corpses. Himself said, "Yes, they got to their site and, and they found that all the blood had been sort of taken out of the bodies." But here's, by the way, taken straight from a Sherlock episode. There you go. But we actually devoted a lot of time to this story because separatist media initially claimed credit for doing this, right? They said, "We got another Ukrainian cargo jet." And then they said, "Oops, I mean, cat's out of the bag." But if you go to the Russian state-controlled media, to this day, you will see articles still posted where the separatists are claiming credit for this. So, you know, the evidence is out there. It's, you, you don't need to do, you know, sort of covert ops. I don't think it's silent. It's just, it's, look, we're now, we're at war in Iraq and Syria, probably tomorrow in Poland, who knows? I mean, so like everyone's focus is, is changed. There are, there's a lot of different nodes of focus. I mean, it certainly bothers me, as one who spends all of my time focusing on that area, that when I turn on CNN at night, there's absolutely nothing on there. Maybe five minutes about what's going on in Eastern Ukraine. Yes, that bothers me. Absolutely. But I do think that there is a certain problem with the fact that people in the journalistic community and people in the expert community have gone for a long time where the money is, where the jobs are, and where the interest is. And for a long time, that's been not Eastern Europe. A lot of people still do not know how to cover, how to write about, how to deal with what's going on in Eastern Europe. And I think that shows in the coverage. I just say one thing, and then we'll take another round. Um, the last round of sanctions would not have happened had the airliner not been shot down. Yeah. I think there is a tendency in the West to pat ourselves on the back too much because we passed that round of sanctions. The EU was not going to go ahead, in my view, at least, with another round if it hadn't been for the tragedy of the 298 people. So whether there was insufficient attention or not, at least that did trigger a, a strong reaction. But I underscore the word reaction, and the Western policy has been far too reactive and slow, instead of being preemptive and preventive and trying to block Putin from from the aggression. And just one tidbit real quick, I believe it was Bellingcat who just did a sort of investigation about MH17, and they went through and geolocated absolutely everything to reports online. It's very well done, so I'd recommend you go look that up. All right, uh, back there, gentlemen, was a hand up, and David, and then over there, and always see you again in the back. Okay, all right. My name is Seth Konovitz, I'm just representing myself. Um, quick question. Uh, the key, uh, countries, Estonia, Lithuania, the Baltic states, attempted to put together a Russian network which would counteract some of the issues that you're talking about, and it failed miserably, evidently. A lot of them couldn't find the money, and some of them specifically decided for various reasons to go at it themselves. I believe Estonia is just doing, working with RFE. What do you take from this, this situation where the key people who are enemy number one, having watched RT, can't even put together a Russian network which would counteract this? And how do you interpret that? Okay, David, same lines. I'm David Ensor, Director of Voice of America. And my question for you is, what should we do? What should Voice of America, what should Radio Free Europe, what should BBC Russian do now? Thank you. Thank you for the success of that question. We like them. Peter Krupovics, CSIS. Two short questions. First, when did, uh, the Russian, you, you identified, um, Mr. Sorry, if you're going to, Peter, um, you identified the Russian military using information war early on. Was that the Second Chechen conflict that you see it as the starting point, or earlier? What are the major turning points in the Russian state's co-opting of the news media? And, um, further, kind of along the same lines as Voice of America, what, uh, are there any prospects for moderate or non-state news media penetration in Russia at this point? Could a Russian blogger who's not with the state get anything off the ground, or is he going to be co-opted immediately? Thank you. And then I saw a hand in the back, and I'm also conscious of the time. Um, so we'll take that one. Hold on for up for a mic. Hold on one second. Um, thank you. Chris Austin, with the Lithuanian-American Community, Incorporated, grassroots membership organization. I'm, uh, to see David here. And my question follows up on the three previous ones. RFE has gotten, RFERL has gotten surge money to do this 30, 30-minute a day generic Russian language program targeted to the Russian minorities in their broadcast area. So have any of you listened to that program yet? It's been on about a month, I think, or five weeks. And what do you think? Oh, there you go. I didn't listen to it, though. I mean, I wouldn't listen to it. Yes, I believe that program was blocked, but anyway, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. All right. You got four questions. Okay. These are mainly in my parish because I'm actually a TV producer and I'm very, very obsessed with these questions. Um, very quickly about the military stuff. So, look, from the 1990s, you have eccentrics like Igor Panarin talking about the Fourth World War being the information war. Practically when the serious guys start writing about it, you know, the Gen-Stab guys, they start writing about it after the Orange Revolution, 2004. They start writing about it a hell of a lot more after Georgia. Yeah, during Georgia, they're already using against sarcasm, which can be seen as one huge reflexive control sort of operation and complete double bind on sarcasm, really. But about doing it Western, from 2008, that's really when when the big guys start writing about it. But it's in the air already in the mid-90s. I mean, asymmetric war goes back to Soviet times. A lot of these techniques, look, a lot of these techniques, they're part of any country's covert sort of like operations. What Russia has done is taken the covert and made it overt. They've taken what, like a couple of like, you know, we do this as well, the West does it as well, but it's that tiny little things that are kind of like some ridiculous Twitter projects in Cuba or something. Operation Mockingbird in the 50s. You know, the techniques are old. What Russia has done is focus them and ramp them up to make them the kind of. Can I just add, in those military doctrines are out there, you can look them up, you can read them. The military doctrine from 2010, go look up all of, uh, General Gerasimov's speeches. He says in 2010 and 2012 exactly what happened in Crimea, exactly what's happening in Donbas right now. It's out there. They're very, very clear about it, but we're not paying attention. The terabyte will also have to be careful because they like to write a lot. That doesn't mean, you know, there's a Russian, there's a Soviet culture like doing a lot of *doklad*, you know, they love that. When it comes down, it's like, it's basically Putin and Kadyrov and a couple of other people going, "Hey, what do we do?" Um, but, um, so we have to be careful with their theory stuff as well. The vote itself, so I've just been to Riga and Estonia. They're actually, they haven't abandoned the idea. They're thinking of different ways of making it happen. The thing about how to collate material, how they take back the news from Dodge, something from RFE programming, from October, to kind of create this sort of hodgepodge of something. Um, in terms of response, so now I worked inside of Russian TV in the mid-noughties, and I saw this Frankenstein growing. We have to understand what they're very good at. We have to rid ourselves of a couple of 20th-century illusions. So firstly, they have perfected the art of mixing entertainment and authoritarianism, of, uh, mixing indoctrination and Jerry Springer. I mean, they make incredibly entertaining programs which are deeply politically insidious at the same time. Also, we have to slightly understand that information isn't going to be enough. You do get information in Russia. You certainly get information in Estonia. The fact is, Russian, uh, media is so insidious in its emotional, um, uh, manipulation that it kind of overrides the information. Doesn't matter that the information is out there. They do much stronger narratives by using really a bunch of psychological and emotional techniques which are actually closer to the way a sect works rather than an information agency. We can get into how they do that in a more detailed conversation, maybe next time. Um, but they have one Achilles' heel. They have one massive Achilles' heel. And when I was working on Russian TV, oh, and a few other people, we started making programs for an entertainment channel about the real lives, really gritty documentary stuff about the real lives of kids getting beaten up by cops, by people having their business taken away. These were emotionally engaging films about normal people having a horrible time from the state. The ratings were really, really high, and it was the media of Thor. It was kind of like a blind eye was turned. Then, boom, it was off Channel One, which is the main propaganda's channel. Ran a really good documentary-style drama about life in a Russian school. Huge ratings, became cult. Taken off there too. Edgy. Question talks about this all the time. He knows this is his Achilles' heel. They can use a similar of democracy. They can't get into the real meat of society. So apart from information, we have to start making shows. This is really the TV producer on the Alice Through Me talking, that will be able to engage with serious social issues in an entertaining way. The Americans don't know how to do this. The British are brilliant at it. So we have something called genre. You just don't do it. You just do talent shows, for example. We have, we had, we have a population, but for example, we had a reality show called "Make Bradford British." So Bradford is a very divided town in northern Britain where we have a lot of race riots. So we took, Channel 4 media's, sort of, an Islamist, a skinhead, a couple of other races, put them in a house together like Big Brother, and got them to sort out their problems. Fantastic. It went really well. And, you know, I want to do sort of like "Navalny House" or something, or "Make a Ukrainian." So we have to, we have to get into telling these. That's the one thing that the Russian propaganda can't do because it's always going to be similar because the whole society is like that. Sorry, this is my pet hobby. There. Yes. Thank you. I actually think, um, you know, the Ukrainians are quite pathfinding in this respect, right? You know, we talk about Ukraine, and this is something we have to sort of stop doing ourselves. Ukraine is not this sort of battleground between West and East. It is a country with its own culture, its own people, its own agency, its own sovereignty. And civil society in Ukraine has discovered, look, we can broadcast in Russian and English about events taking place in this country. We can criticize the government. We can go after corrupt oligarchs who are enthralled to Moscow and doing all kinds of nefarious deals with European companies and European governments. For instance, TV Hromadske, which is founded by Mustafa Nayem, who was an anti-corruption crusader, sort of like the Navalny of Ukraine, who's now gone into parliament, somewhat controversially. They just launched an English-language Sunday sort of Meet the Press style chat show broadcast on the internet. The first guest that they had was Timothy Snyder, who has essentially become the historian laureate of Ukraine, even though he's American. It's actually compelling TV. There is no, no reason why Ukraine can't actually be the cockpit for this sort of experiment in reaching Russian-speaking audiences. And again, remember, I mean, going back to first principles, why did Putin decide he wanted Crimea? Why is he trying to to overthrow this government or destabilize Ukraine? Well, it goes back to 2004, the Orange Revolution. That to him was a sign of things to come in Moscow. If it can happen in Kyiv, it will happen here. Never, never, ever. So if Ukraine succeeds as a country with sort of open society, democracy, rule of law, eradicating corruption, which I mean, I interviewed the chief of staff of Petro Poroshenko, and he said he was the former head of Ukraine Microsoft. So Western-educated, worked for Western companies. He said, "My favorite law invented by, you know, all mankind is the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which we have here, because that prevents people and companies from going abroad and paying bribes." He said, "If we had that in Ukraine, you could Hoover up corruption in five to ten years." I think these are the things we need to encourage. And, you know, like everyone's sort of questing for institutions and new groups and trying to raise money to do things that actually already exist. It's just seizing upon some of these talents and some of these assets and saying, "Oh, hey, have you seen this?" And they'd be investing a little more in them. I, again, watch Ukraine because Ukrainian civil society, that is the heartbeat of the Euromaidan Revolution, and it's something that hasn't gone away just because Yanukovych has been overthrown. And, yeah, I mean, they can reach the Baltics, they can reach the Russian-speaking diaspora well. And I'll add to that. I mean, a lot of the journalists in Russia who had been working for places like RBC, or had been working for magazines or for online sites that have now sort of been taken over or or co-opted, they have now actually made a conscious decision to move to Ukraine because they feel as though that's a place that they can actually work. They can work for Hromadske TV, they can work for Spektr.Nobody, they can work for all of these new upstart media organizations that are actually doing serious work. And a lot of them do feel as though they can do the investigative things that need to be done from Ukraine, and Ukraine gives them a platform. And they're doing it in the Russian language, and it is reaching a Russian audience. Um, I was in London at a conference recently and met Evgeny Fedchenko, the head of StopFake.org. He said it's a website that's devoted to sort of exposing lies in in the Russian media and lies about Ukraine. And he said, "You know where one third of our audience comes from? It's from Russia." There are people in Russia who want to have that kind of information. There are still a few open portals. It's getting harder, it's getting smaller. And I think to your blogger's question, they've now set up the laws in such a way that it's going to be nearly impossible for anyone to be a blogger with it, with any kind of serious following, anything over three thousand, uh, hits a day, you're going to have to register as a member of the media. But there are ways around that. You can do, say, listservs, you can do email blasts. There are certain ways that people can get around them, and they're being very creative about it. But the atmosphere, I think, is only going to get tougher as time goes on. Let me close with the last question. Quick answers from each of you, if you would. Vladimir Putin disappears tomorrow, gone. Is this all systemic, and therefore it's not going to change just because Putin isn't there? Does it depend on how he disappears? Is this not dependent on just him? I think it's absolutely not just dependent on him. You know, the question of will there be a coup, and if so, who will be in charge of it, and when will it happen? Professor Mark Galeotti, who's a friend of ours and very insightful, nine months in Moscow, I asked him this question. He said, "Look, in order to do that, if they, if there was a conscious decision taken on the part of sort of inner circle in the Kremlin to replace Putin, it wouldn't be now, and it would actually be a long-term project because you have to line up, you know, the heads of the five families, so to speak, the siloviki, the business community, the business elites." I mean, one of the things Putin did immediately when sanctions started to be passed was to say, "Okay, anybody in the oligarchic community or this sort of business establishment who even thinks about being disloyal or a jumping ship, I'm going to cut your head off." And you have to shank those arrests. Was this to me? I mean, this had little to do actually with sanctions and all these things. This was sort of a scarecrow, sort of a classic Stalinist measure. Even, even people who are, yeah, even people who are loyal to me are subject to being sort of disgraced, discredited, having their assets taken, and being thrown in jail. Um, so I think he's very, again, adroitly co-opted that group. But look, you know, I, I don't think he's going to be replaced. I think he's going to stay in power as long as he can. And again, my concern is, I mean, we keep hearing all these things like, "Well, if the Russian economy starts to teeter, then something will happen." And if oil drops below $100 a barrel, it used to be that's it for Putin. Well, now it's $80 a barrel, and you're still in power. I mean, you know, how much money does he have in reserve? You know, I don't think Anders Åslund could answer this, but how much money does Putin have stashed away, a rainy day fund in case he wants to invade another European country and has to withstand sanctions? I think it's quite a lot, actually. And I see him preparing his population for a kind of, you know, soft Stalingrad against the West. You know, we're now at war with the West, and we need to kind of, and by the way, it's not nowhere near as bad as it was in the '90s. I mean, people can still eat. You know, this is not austerity the way Russians know austerity. So I think there's some staying power here. And, you know, I don't see anything sort of systemically changing soon. I, I'll agree. And I think that to pick up on your last point, I think one of the things Putin has actually done reasonably successfully, in part through his use of the media, is to try and change the social compact. I think he, he had built with the Russian people where beforehand it was, "All right, the 1990s had been a terrible time for you, you have all these economic problems. What I'm going to give you is stability and an increased level of living, and in return, you let me do as I please." And I think the new deal he's trying to make with the Russian people is essentially, "Look, you're going to have to suffer a little bit, just like your grandparents did during World War II, or the Great Patriotic War, as it is sometimes known. But what I'm going to give you in return is is a Russia that is back in its proper place in the world, one that people respect, one that they fear, and one that is considered on an equal footing." So if he's successful at that, and I think if you look at the polling data, he has been. You know, of course, something could always happen to him. People do die. That happens. Um, but it does, it does. I'm just putting that out there. You know, you, you never know. We have that in the report, especially in the UK, if they drink tea, or you know, that Russia has a structural problem with what we will know is what, who is going to be the, uh, structural problem. Virtually this, they haven't, oh, I confetti talk. They haven't been able to systematize the idea of how the air comes along. They haven't managed it out. Last week, therefore, when Putin goes, I think we'll see a major *pirito* because it's systemic. They have no systemic way of choosing the next person. So no, I'm actually going to disagree. I think, um, I'm not saying things will get better, but I actually think they'll be very, very turbulent. Okay. Well, let me first thank the NED and the Institute of Modern Russia for putting this event together. A particular thanks to Peter and Michael for a great report, but also a real special thanks for Hannah for rounding out what I thought was a very interesting, informative, and entertaining panel. And thanks to all of you for coming. Thank you very much. [Applause]