Russia’s Info War

ABC – Transcript

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: In the heart of Moscow, Kremlin-approved propagandists call for nuclear strikes.

PROPAGANDIST:  ‘Strike the decision-making centre! Washington!

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: As the war in Ukraine enters its second year, Russia is ramping up its propaganda.

RUSSIAN SINGER: 'Oh Mother Russia our beloved nuclear missile is ready to strike. Trust us and the red banners, Grandmother!'

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: In Putin’s world there can be no dissent.

MARTYNOV: If some person in charge is suspicious about you in Russia, that means you will be arrested.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: For the past year, Vladimir Putin hasn’t just commanded the invasion of Ukraine. He’s led an information war at home and abroad. In June, I was one of several international journalists to be sanctioned for critical reporting, meaning I can never go back to Russia. But that’s nothing compared to what’s happened to independent Russian journalists who were forced to flee their country. Most have regrouped here to the Latvian capital Riga to try to counter State propaganda that is no longer just extreme, it is verging on insane.

RUSSIAN TV PROGRAM: Without regaining consciousness, the terrorist leader starts broadcasting.

ZELENSKYY: What can I say? We are strong.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: This is how prime time Russian television portrays Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a satanic drug addict.

LAVROV: Zelenskyy smokes or injects himself or snorts so much stuff that it is impossible to comment on his words.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: But in Latvia, exiled Russian journalists are fighting propaganda with facts.

EKATERINA: This is something that we have to do and we know how to do it and we need to fight this war.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Can they win the war of words?

RUSSIAN SINGER: 'Our enemy is gloomy, There is no victory for him. Only betrayal.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter:  In a rented studio in downtown Riga, banned Russian journalists are back at work. This is TV Rain, a private station that was closed in Moscow but has re-opened in Latvia. Tonight, presenter Ekaterina Kotrikadze is investigating a missile strike on civilians in Ukraine.

EKATERINA: Well we’re talking about Dnipro and this terrible attack of Russian forces. There are 45 confirmed deaths in one building. Which is devastating. I mean it’s quite terrible and not easy to talk about. But anyways, we need to.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: All the things you don’t see on Russian State television?

EKATERINA: Oh never, never. Everything on Russian State TV is such a terrible hypocrisy. Like they don’t remember that Russia has started this invasion. And of course, they don’t say anything about dead children. Maybe they don’t care, I don’t know. Well.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: The price for independent reporting is exile. Russia banned TV Rain in the first days of the war after Yekaterina Kotrikadze delivered this scathing editorial.

EKATERINA: "What is happening to us right now is a catastrophe. How did we end up in this hell? One person flashing nuclear weapons like keys to an expensive car took it upon himself to determine the future of my children, our children. He decided that the future of our children in Russia is poverty, isolation and war."

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: She and her husband, Tikhon Dzyadko, the station’s editor in chief, fled Russia the next day to avoid arrest. I first met them a month later in the neighbouring state of Georgia where they were trying to re-establish TV Rain. It was clear they were not welcome.

TIKHON:  We know that Georgian government is not happy with us being here.

EKATERINA: They are afraid of President Vladimir Putin bombing Georgia because we are here, because he doesn't like the Russian opposition, people and journalists that… yeah… exist.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Latvia came to the rescue, offering sanctuary to the journalists who Putin had banned. TV Rain was granted a licence to broadcast their programs from Riga. Russia blocked their transmission, but they evade censorship by putting content on YouTube. Russians are among the world’s biggest users of YouTube and the Russian government hasn’t yet dared block it.

EKATERINA: After the relaunch, we are having approximately 22 million unique viewers monthly, and 65% of this 22 million viewers are from Russia. It is very important, even though we are here in Latvia, we are outside of Russia, the main part of the audience is inside.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Latvia was happy to help undermine Russia’s propaganda. This small nation of just 1.8 million is one of Ukraine’s most ardent backers and an historic enemy of Russia.

CHOIR: 'Bloody days loomed Over the valley of our Fatherland. The nation fell into the shackles of slavery, Our heroes fell to their deaths.'

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Along with its Baltic neighbours Estonia and Lithuania, Latvia endured nearly half a century of Soviet occupation until winning independence in 1991. Riga’s Museum of Occupation not only commemorates Moscow’s crimes against Latvia but also Ukraine, where millions were starved to death under Stalin.  Egils Levits is Latvia’s president.

"Please sit down."

EGILS LEVITS: We lived for 50 years under occupation, and we don't want this again. And therefore we are on the side of Ukraine.  We have allowed in Latvia work of Russian journalists to spread free information. And I think it's interest of Europe and we have allowed these broadcasting companies to work from here.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Latvia sees the Ukraine war as an echo of its own trauma. Every January, it commemorates Latvians killed by Soviet troops in independence protests.  President Levits was among the first heads of state to visit Ukraine and the first to stay overnight in Kyiv.

EGILS LEVITS: It is a political support, because Latvia is supporting Ukraine from the beginning of the war. And also, for me, as head of the state is also a personal issue too, because, we are taking democracy seriously. And therefore, we should be supportive for a country which is attacked by an autocratic regime, and which is based on a imperialistic ideology.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: While Latvia has banned Russian tourists, it fast-tracked the visas for hundreds of Russian journalists. The city is dotted with Russian news programs and investigative websites along with Russia’s last independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. Its editor, Kirill Martynov, was the first to arrive.

MARTYNOV:  We had like 85 journalists, all of them and their families who are at risk. And I decided to go to Europe to find partners, to understand if we can continue our work from here. And so what we need to do.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: So you arrived here with a suitcase and the laptop to try to restart Novaya.

MARTYNOV:  Even without suitcase. I was so shocked that I never prepared suitcase.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: What unites them all is a passion to bring accurate news to Russians and undercut the monopoly of State propaganda.

MARTYNOV: We try to help people to stay sane inside Russia, because a lot of people, I mean millions of people, they think, "Maybe I'm crazy. If everyone talks that war is great, maybe something is wrong was me. Maybe I'm a crazy person." And we need to provide them real stories about the war and the consequences and crisis inside Russia, to help them just to survive in this situation, and after that, we try to rebuild public opinion in Russia.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Novaya Gazeta’s website is now blocked in Russia, but it sends out its copy on Telegram channels. It’s also running a YouTube channel to try to reach more people.

"So are you winning the information war?"

MARTYNOV: No, we are fighting. We are not winning, but we are not losing. Propaganda can't deliver its information and its worldview to any single Russian citizen. And we fight for huge minority of Russians. I think it's like 30 millions of people.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Most Russians however, especially older ones, get their news from Russia’s three State-run TV channels.

Vladimir Solovyov once worked for TV Rain’s owners, but is now the Kremlin’s leading mouthpiece.

SOLOVYOV:  We’re doing quite well.  Killing all the Ukrainian Nazis, their nameless allies and their pathetic pederasts is not a problem. But let’s use our entire arsenal for that!

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: His program ‘Evening with Vladimir Solovyov’ runs five nights a week on Russia’s top-rating channel. His regular co-propagandist is Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Russia’s international network Russia Today. She supports complete State control of information.

SIMONYAN:  People ask me, ‘What do you mean, do you want to be like China?’ Yes, I very much want us to be like China. I dream of being like China.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: As Russia has been pushed back in Ukraine, the rhetoric has become ever more strident. At the start of the war, State media were pushing the line that Ukraine was a Nazi state. The line now -- believe it or not -- is that it’s run by LGBT Nazis trying to make Russia gender neutral.

SOLOVYOV:  It’s another step in eight years of escalating genocide by Ukrainian Nazi authorities against Russian people, Russian speakers, against those who don’t accept LGBT transgender Nazi values. 

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Solovyov claims Ukraine’s president is not just a drug addict, he’s a gay paedophile.

SOLOVYOV: Just look at Zelenskyy. Even in his acting career he was constantly promoting pederastic values. All his dancing in latex, all his gay mannerisms. All that playing around with drugs.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: There was no such talk in 2013 when Solovyov’s channel presented a spangle-filled New Year’s Eve concert hosted by a popular young Ukrainian entertainer Vlodomyr Zelensky. Among his adoring fans -- Vladimir Solovyov himself.

This idea of LGBT Nazis.  Maybe you can enlighten me as to the issue, because I’m not quite sure what even means or how it’s possible. What is it all about and do people believe it?

TIKHON: Well, I think that the main problem for the Russian government and for the state propaganda, that they have to somehow sell the process of demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. But these two words, they just don't have any meaning, any sense, because yes there are Nazis in Ukraine, but there are also Nazis in Russian Federation and in the United States and in Germany and everywhere. And people are just not buying it. And so the Russian propaganda switched to the idea that Russia is the last fortress of traditional values

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: The key narratives of State propaganda come straight from Putin’s mouth.

PUTIN:  Do we want our Russia to have parents number one, two and three instead of Mum and Dad.  Have they gone mad out there? 

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: In speeches and interviews he’s laid out the tropes of transgender Nazis and an existential fight against NATO and Satan.

PUTIN: Such a total denial of humanity, faith and traditional values. Such suppression of freedom starts to look like a perverted religion, outright Satanism.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: The lines are reinforced at weekly meetings with media officials in the presidential administration.

MARTYNOV: They discuss what is the message, how to cover different topics, how to bring bright picture of President Putin, how to explain war, how to explain what happens in Russia. If there are some blacklists, these people can't be on Russian TV anymore. Not to mention this topics and so on.

MP:  LGBT is nowadays a tool of hybrid war.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Members of parliament are now citing cartoons as proof of Western subversion.

MP: The cartoon South Park has a school chef who’s a paedophile. Peppa Pig. Apparently a well-known cartoon.  In one episode a polar bear draws a portrait of her family and says ‘I live with my Mummy and my other Mummy’.

TIKHON: That's what Vladimir Putin is saying. They're in the West, they have all these LGBT activists, and they have gays everywhere. And your kids would be sick with gayness or something. Here in Russia we’re still the cradle of traditional values.

TV PRESENTER: The West continues to trample Christmas traditions into the mud. In Australia parents take their children to transvestite shows for the whole family that have clear allusions to gay sex and promote gender transition for very young children. The parents think this is normal and that transvestite shows are just like modern Disney shows that are drenched in the inclusive agenda.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Russia has close to the world’s highest rates of divorce, widespread prostitution and it’s officially secular, but that doesn’t stop the relentless message that they’re fighting to protect religious family values. Russia Today’s Margarita Simonyan portrays herself as a beleaguered mother, fearful of NATO troops dictating how she can raise her children.

SIMONYAN:  To live in a world where I couldn’t put dresses on my daughter or tell my son he’s a boy. I don’t want to live in a world where governments take this right away from me, which is already happening in many countries. For me it’s unbearable. For me this is worse than war.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Putin has rewarded his propagandists handsomely. Vladimir Solovyov owned two villas on Italy’s Lake Como before losing them to sanctions; protesters dyed his swimming pool blood red. Simonyan received an order of honour for her attacks on Ukraine and Ukrainians.

SIMONYAN:  "Thank you for tearing our people away from the bloody hands of these cannibals. And we will help you by slaying those cannibals for as long as you need. I serve Russia. Thank you."

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: State TV’s bombastic tone owes much to the US network, Fox News, which makes similar attacks on Western liberalism. Russian TV not only emulates the network’s style, it runs anti-Ukraine commentary from Fox New hosts like Tucker Carlson.

TUCKER CARLSON:  "Of course they’re promoting war. Ukraine is not a democracy. It has never been a democracy in its history. And it’s not now. It’s a client state of the Biden administration."

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Russian propaganda may have copied Fox News, but Kirill Martynov believes it has gone much further

MARTYNOV: I think the question about Russian State TV programs is the question for some scientists like anthropologists and some doctors, because if you watch it for several hours, well it hits you.

SOLOVYOV: "Can we finally launch a strike on London? What’s the problem? No, no, only at military targets. Well, at the Parliament too."

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter:  Latvia is not just at the front line of the information war. Forty minutes' drive from Riga, NATO troops are preparing for battle. This Danish battalion was sent here three months after the invasion to beef up the alliance’s frontline presence. They train in urban warfare, capturing POWs and surviving sub-zero temperatures. Denmark has fought NATO engagements before, but the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Lunau, says this time the feeling’s different.

LUNAU: We are used to deploy soldiers to, Iraq, Afghanistan.  It was a war, in the distance. But now there are war and crisis in Europe, and in that respect, it’s more meaningful, at least to me as a soldier, to be here and protect the democracy and, well, our common values in Europe. 

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Latvia joined the Western defence alliance in 2004, bringing NATO troops deep inside the former Soviet Union. Now of course critics of NATO expansion argue it forced Russia to respond militarily. But here, again, the feeling is the opposite. Latvians believe that if they hadn’t joined NATO, if they didn’t have NATO troops training here, Russia wouldn’t just be attacking Ukraine, they would now be threatening Riga. Russia’s propagandists are suggesting Latvia, and its Baltic neighbours, Lithuania and Estonia, should be next in line.

SOLOVYOV: "Why should we recognise their independence at all. The breakup of the Soviet Union wasn’t legally formalised. Legal process wasn’t followed. Why should we recognise the Nazi states that formed on the remnants of the Soviet Union?

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Comments like that reinforce a deep-seated belief in Latvia that Russia will always be an imperialist threat. Many here have also lost trust in ordinary Russians, including the exiled journalists.

MARTYNOV: Any single neighbours of Russia these days is in fear because everyone understands that Putin can attack other countries too. And Latvia has this experience of occupation for many decades. And so it's totally understandable why not every people here in Latvia trust Russian journalists.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Some hard line Latvian nationalists believe the country has quite enough Russians already. One in four people in Latvia is Russian speaking, a legacy of Soviet occupation. Parts of Riga feel like downtown Moscow.  Many don’t even speak Latvian so they’ve been denied citizenship.

BABUSHKA: Please try.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter:  May I?

BABUSHKA:  I will give it to you as a present. Is that OK?

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Yes, please.

BABUSHKA:  It is extremely nutritious.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: As the months wore on, Tikhon Dzyadko felt increasingly under scrutiny.

TIKHON: Some of the parts of the society here in Latvia were not happy with us being here.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Do you think they were people looking for you to make a mistake?

TIKHON:  Absolutely.

EKATERINA: A lot of them.

TIKHON: Without any doubt. Part of the society here was waiting for the mistake to happen. And it did happen.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: In December, a presenter in Georgia was discussing the appalling conditions for mobilised Russian troops and ad-libbed what sounded like an offer to send them aid.

PRESENTER: "…for example, with basic amenities at the front."

EKATERINA: He said something about support of Russian soldiers on the front, which is absolutely unacceptable. TV Rain does not support Russian soldiers on the front. TV Rain does not support army of Russian Federation.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: The presenter was fired, his comments were taken offline. It didn’t matter. Five days later Latvia cancelled their broadcast licence.

EGILS LEVITS: They wanted to help Russian soldiers to kill Ukrainians. And we cannot tolerate such views in our country, because we are a democratic country.

TIKHON: They revoked our licence, and they called us the threat to the national security of Latvian Republic, which in our point of view is absolutely unacceptable accusations, because we are absolutely not a threat to the national security of Latvia.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Latvia’s journalists’ union condemned the decision but the government refused to budge. Russian State television, of course, was gloating.

SOLOVYOV: "The West has completely drowned in hypocrisy and lies. There isn’t a hint of free speech or respect for human rights there.  That’s hit Russian liberals who were ready to betray their own Motherland to get on the West’s good side. And now they’re getting a slap in the face like that foreign agent TV Rain.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: TV Rain is continuing to send content on YouTube but can no longer broadcast to Russians inside Latvia. Over the coming months it plans to relocate again. The Dutch government has stepped in and granted a broadcast licence.

TIKHON: We hope that we will still be able to keep part of our team here, but the main part of our team, soon will move to Amsterdam, to the Netherlands.

EKATERINA: Me and Tikhon, after this whole scandal and collapse of the situation, we were one night looking at each other and saying, my God, I'm so tired. I just can't do it anymore. Just, I don't have any resources. You know, I have two kids. I mean, I'm tired and Tisha has four kids. So it's enough. But next day, early morning, we woke up and we went to work because there's nothing else we can do.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: As the war enters its second year, Russian journalists on both sides are settling in for a long fight. The propagandist Solovyov has taken to visiting the front lines. Here, he’s exhorting troops from Russian’s Muslim regions to fight harder against the godless West.

SOLOVYOV: "50 countries are against us. They’re united by one thing – Satanism."

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: Solovyov, who is Jewish, tells them it’s a holy jihad.

SOLDIERS: Allahu Akbar!  Russia is power!

MARTYNOV: Yeah, it's crazy. But if you try to support totally unprovoked, criminal war for year, you will find yourself in this hole. You know are just like in Alice in Wonderland, you are just falling. And they don't understand basically what happens. I think that propaganda isn't controlled itself. They need to raise stakes, and they are, well, out of any reasonable like human beings anymore.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: At TV Rain, they continue the daily slog of showing uncomfortable facts and critical interviews, and hoping people back home are watching.

TV RAIN NEWS REPORTER: I think that this year will be terrible the second year of the war, because Russia will try to make a contra offensive. We will see rivers of bloods and tens of thousands people would be killed. And Russia will lose, because Ukrainians are fighting on their own lands, and Ukrainians are fighting with the help of the Western countries.

ERIC CAMPBELL, Reporter: When will you go home?

TIKHON: Couple of years.

EKATERINA:  It was the right question. Very good question. I think it's the best question, but we don't have an answer.

PUTIN:  Our main task is the preservation of Russia. Military activity is not just heroic work, it is hard work. We have always had to counter efforts to disorientate our people. The most important thing is the truth. And credibility. That is our most important weapon.

Executive Producer Morag Ramsay