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How to expose Russian fakes? – Interview with Andriy Kulish.

Russia withdraws its troops from Korenevo district of the Kursk region. It's forced. Because - supposedly - all three supply bridges that were used by the Russian military to receive equipment and reinforcements were destroyed. Andriy Kulish, Ukrainian veteran, and co-founder of the Propaganda Study Institute, gave an interview to Henry Keen about the numerous lies and fakes spread by the Russian information space. The issues of exposing the lying mechanism of Russian propaganda in the modern world were also discussed. — Well, just talk, me and my audience through. Propaganda study Institute. What do you guys do? — We are studying the mechanisms of Russian propaganda, how it's made, how it's planned, how it's implemented in the media, in the social media, how to expose it and how to fight it, because it's something really important nowadays. Not only in Ukraine. In Ukraine, we had that problem since 2008, at least, even earlier, but also in Europe, in the European countries where informational warfare is waged by Russia for almost a decade as of today. — Have you found out any proper ways to counter Russian propaganda? Do you know the ways? — Two best ways to counter Russian propaganda is, first, we have to expose it. It's probably one of the most effective ways. It's really easy, of course, to close all kinds of pro-Russian channels so they don't have any tools to retransmit their propaganda and deliver it to the masses. But at the same time, we live in a free society with freedom of speech, where it's only up to you whether you trust information or not. So we have to do whatever we can to expose Russian propaganda. I believe that it's probably the best way. We have to show people how it works and what it does to democracies. — If the best way is to expose, rather than just cut off the wire, how would you command that the Ukrainian parliament cut off the FSB channel (Russian orthodox church)? — It was an organization that was created in 1943 by Stalin himself. We made a small research on this, and I believe that our viewers can find it on YouTube. It was an organization created in 1943 after years of eliminating religious organizations in the Soviet Union in Ukraine, specifically killing thousands, hundreds of thousands of people priests and clerics. In 1943, Stalin decided to restore the Russian church, the orthodox church in the Soviet Union. Because people back then didn't want to die for the ambitions of communists, for ambitions of the red terror. That's why they needed something, some kind of force to be motivated, to be inspired. And unfortunately, a lot of people don't know that 100% of people that were involved in restoration of this church, they were basically the KGB. — You exposed Russian propaganda. Can you give us a story of that? — Absolutely. I've been exposing Russian propaganda regarding all those myths that were created since 2014. Eight years of bombing Donbas, Nazi in Ukraine, evil Azov killing Russians in Donbas, which provoked Russia to invade Ukraine and things like that. Azov was basically created month after beginning of the Russian invasion. All those myths that were produced by the Russian propagandists and broadly used nowadays. Still, there is a lot of retransmitters of this propaganda in Ukraine and on the West. Im basically teaching people, arming them with facts because this is something very important. You cannot train a person to do fact-checking, to fight Russian propaganda, to become someone who can best Russian and propaganda professionally. You can all do that on YouTube. But what you can do is arm people with facts and knowledge. And this is what we're doing right now. — I'm very interested in how a person can believe sometimes in absolute unbelievable lies by Russia. I mean, even if this is a domestic audience, like fighter geese, Ukrainian fighter geese, like the geese that are flying whatever, faster than the fighter jet whatever. Or the mosquitoes, the killing mosquitoes. What are they? Who is creating that? And is that only for domestic audience? — The problem is there's not only two audiences, domestic and external audience. There are different target audiences that are used in different informational operations. So we, me and you, we would never believe in combat geese, genetically modified ducks, american bio labs and things like that. But unfortunately, or fortunately, we are not their target audience because we're not susceptible to Russian disinformation. Russia targets specific target audiences that are more susceptible, people who can speak conspiracies, people who are more susceptible to facts that must be checked. They don't check information. So there are specific target audiences. And unfortunately, the audience of people who don't check information is pretty huge because this is our nature. We don't usually check information because we are informational consumers. We're not fact-checkers. And I'm not blaming anybody for not checking information because it's natural. This is what we do. — So if I would like to become a fact-checker, you're actually saying that this is something unnatural. How do I do this? How do I teach myself for fact-checking? Like, I pick up three or four, five or ten sources, and what I do then? I just compare the information? — You can pick at least three sources of information at least. One thing you should also remember is Russia is not a reliable source. Russia is not a country where people have freedom of speech. Russia is not a country that has independent media. Russia not a country where independent journalists can operate freely without risking of dying. Right? So why then considering Russian sources of information as reliable sources? That is something that everybody should ask themselves. Sometimes they provide information that can be trusted, but in most cases, everything you can hear coming from Russian news channels, state media, mainstream media, so called, that is basically whatever correlates with Russian agenda, Kremlin's agenda. First thing you gotta do is when you hear some kind of insane sensation, some kind of hype ish information, you need to check the source of this information. Is it true? Anybody can write anything nowadays in social media. Russians do this all the time. They post fake news from big resources like Politico, for example. It's a very well-known magazine, but recently they published already several publications regarding Ukraine being abandoned by our allies and things like that, which never existed. So they posted this all over the media, but this publication never existed on Politico. And same with other sources of information, with other media. So you got to be really careful. If you see some kind of message in social media, you have to go to the real resource and check if it's there. And also you should check the initial source of this information, because Russians like to do it this way. They create an article with the source somewhere in, let's say, Bangladesh, like local Bangladeshi newspaper that never existed. Then using this as a reliable source of information, they deliver it to the Western media. So that is something that we should always remember. We got to check the sources, the initial sources of information. — What about being proactive? What about creating the events that actually would make our enemy to try to expose our truth or the way we deliver it? — So the main difference between us and them is that Russians are massively using propaganda and disinformation. But we cannot fight propaganda with propaganda. We have to fight Russian propaganda with proper communications and public populations. We have to be as much transferable as we can be. I believe that this is the only proper way, because if you spread propaganda, eventually you will lose all kind of trust from the society. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TESGx7vt2GM&t=442s Read also: Ukraine is changing the world politics. Interview with Kurt Walker The post How to expose Russian fakes? – Interview with Andriy Kulish. appeared first on Freedom.