Tuesday, March 28, 2023

NOPE. Definitely not

"It was easy to make fun of RT America. Funded by the Russian government, the English-language news outlet seemed to worry little about journalistic standards and often engaged in bald propaganda. Now that it’s gone, it’s hard to mourn it. But the closure of RT America also signals the end of an era of more open communication between Russia and the United States. On episode 45 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene discuss the aims of Russia’s experiment in American news, the grim transformation of Russian politics over the past two decades, and what’s to come. Guests include Ben Judah, the author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin, and Peter Pomerantsev, the author of This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality.

Laura Marsh: It sounded almost like a familiar story in media. A TV station with a big news website starts in the mid-2000s. The station never attracts as many viewers as it’s supposed to, and the funding gets cut off. The station goes out of business, and most of the staff lose their jobs. Except this case was different, because the TV station is Russia Today, or RT America. Its funding came from the Russian government, and it shut down in the first week of March, amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Alex Pareene: The station’s management described the closure as a result of “unforeseen business interruption events.”

Laura: Cable providers have cut ties with RT, and in Europe, YouTube, TikTok, and Meta all blocked RT content.

Alex: RT had been a platform for speakers and views from the right and, perhaps especially, the left that are rarely heard on mainstream American TV news. It was Larry King’s last professional home and the comedian Dennis Miller’s, as well. As an American TV news outlet, it was unusual. As a foreign propaganda effort, it was more conventional.

Laura: If we think of misinformation as being subtle, RT was the opposite.

Alex: This week on the show, we’re talking about Russia’s experiment with American news.

Laura: What was it meant to accomplish? How did Russia change over RT’s lifespan?

Alex: And what comes next? I’m Alex Pareene.

Laura: And I’m Laura Marsh.

Alex: This is The Politics of Everything.

Laura: Peter Pomerantsev is a journalist who spent several years living and working in Moscow. He’s the author of two books on Russian disinformation and propaganda, and we thought he could explain to us what RT was all about. Hi, Peter, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Peter Pomerantsev: My pleasure.

Laura: We’re talking about Russia Today. RT was launched in 2005. What was its stated mission, and why was it created?

Peter: RT was initially created with the mission of being Russia’s kind of public diplomacy–state information channel, a bit like Deutsche Welle, the German one, which is tied to the state but pretty independent, or I guess a little bit like Voice of America or something. Officially, Russia felt that it needed its own voice internationally, and a lot of the content right at the start was really quite anodyne. It was just, you know, here’s a travel show about Russia, here’s the world news, but we interviewed a Russian official about it not an American one. A perfectly legitimate bit of statecraft that most big countries did.

Alex: You mentioned Voice of America; this is something that is not out of the ordinary for a country to have: state media broadcasting internationally.

Peter: Yeah, Deutsche Welle would be a better comparison, because Voice of America is housed outside of government and inside something called USAGM, which has institutional barriers between itself and the state. So Deutsche Welle or France24, as well, which is literally the culture ministry; its TV channel is funded directly, not through Congress and various other things.

Laura: If you took the stories that were broadcast on Russia Today at face value, what kind of image did it project of Russia?

Peter: So just at the start, it was all about countering this image of Russia as a country of drunks and potholes and prisons and saying, “Well, there’s a bit more to it than that.” That’s perfectly legitimate. It was meant to be news about Russia. But then from 2008, it pivoted very hard, and after the invasion of Georgia it became something completely different, and it becomes very much a tool of Russian political warfare. It was a way of basically tapping into various narratives of discontent in Western societies—and not just Western, also Middle Eastern, also Latin American, and shaping them in line with the priorities of Russian foreign policy. For example, in Germany, they targeted the anti-vaxxers. They would do lots of conspiracies about vaccines to get in with that group in society and then feed them disinformation about Syria and Ukraine.

Alex: And it was around the time of the shift you identify that they launched RT America here in the states. And what was interesting was, as you said, there was very little content about Russia on RT America, for the most part. They had a lot of voices on that you would identify with the American political left, often discussing domestic issues. What benefit did that have for Russian foreign policy? Why would that be a messaging strategy that they would have pursued in the United States?

Peter: In the United States, the Russians generally have been cultivating the far right and business elites and the far left—I mean, you just basically look at whichever elements of society are important and open to your messaging. The far left criticizes American imperialism, and that’s very useful for Russia. So it’s not a hard sell. Whether they have any meaning in American politics, I don’t know. I think the far right—the Bannon far right, and now the Tucker Carlson far right—are much more meaningful.

Laura: How do you see Russia Today as fitting into a broader Russian propaganda strategy? Because obviously this is just one outlet, and it’s a pretty traditional way of doing propaganda, having a TV station.

Peter: I don’t think as a TV station it was effective in Europe or America. I think, in a sense, where it was effective was online. That means, for example, targeting content in very, very specific ways to very specific audiences. But also, more than that, being part of this whole network of fake online accounts, websites that look genuine but aren’t, and putting themselves in that network, which first obviously helps with diffusion of their messaging but, maybe more important, starts to game the Google algorithm and, sort of, the stories. So the digital operation was meant to be much more effective than the broadcast one, where they’re, I think, not very impressive.

Laura: One of the reasons that we were interested in doing an episode on this is that you can look at Russia Today in a serious way and say, “This was a project of the Russian government,” but it’s also really hard to look at RT and take it seriously, because I don’t think it was ever taken seriously by a large number of people. It’s kind of ridiculous, right, because it’s so openly biased.

Peter: Unlike the rest of American TV?

Laura: Wow! We can definitely have that conversation.

Alex: I think that’s what I found interesting about it, though. Because I think it’s a projection of the Russian government’s really firm belief in the complete hypocrisy of the West, in that, “Your television stations are just propaganda, so it shouldn’t really matter if ours is unconvincing propaganda,” almost.

Do you think there’s anything to that? . ."

INFORMATION WARS: The Battle for Narratives

Western leaders talk about isolating Russia globally, but they cannot achieve this goal without discrediting the Kremlin’s narrative where it resonates most.

... A battle for narratives has always been an inseparable part of warfare. Effectively countering Russian narratives outside the liberal world is a key missing piece of Western efforts to support Ukraine. Past EU practices of countering disinformation can be useful, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel entirely. But the Middle East presents its own unique challenges.

"Over a year into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the group of countries directly aligned with Moscow remains a motley handful of lackeys and vassals, including Aleksandr Lukashenko’s Belarus and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Just six countries voted with Moscow against the U.N. General Assembly’s anniversary resolution calling for Russian withdrawal, compared with 141 that voted for it. By this measure, the effort to isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin on the world stage has been a great success.

Conversations with elites in many Middle East capitals—influential diplomats, government officials, journalists, and businesspeople—reveal a surprising appreciation for Russia’s position, including sympathy for Putin’s argument that Russia was forced to act to avoid encirclement by NATO. In addition, the Arab Youth Survey 2022, conducted by the Dubai-based PR consultancy firm ASDA’A BCW, found that more young Arabs (aged 18-24) blame the United States and NATO, rather than Russia, for the war in Ukraine.

There are several reasons so many of Washington’s traditional friends in the Middle East are, at best, ambivalent about the Ukraine war. Some of this has to do with their own sense of abandonment by the United States in their hour of need, a common complaint of Saudis and Emiratis who, like Ukraine, have been on the receiving end of Iranian drones—but not, in their view, the same massive showing of U.S. support.

Some relates to the fact that Washington—which was willing to send more than half a million U.S. soldiers, sailors, and airmen to liberate Kuwait a generation ago—considers it a heavy lift today to send arms and ammunition to support the Ukrainians fighting their own battle, suggesting there is scant chance the United States would ever again send its young men and women to protect a distant Arab state.

✓ Some of this is borne of the perception that Russia is the strong horse, more comfortable wielding power than Washington—evidenced by Putin’s willingness to prop up his ally in Damascus after former U.S. President Barack Obama balked at the use of force despite promising to punish Syria for using chemical weapons against innocent civilians.

And, especially common in Cairo salons, is nostalgia for the days when Russia was the prime supplier of weaponry at a time, decades ago, when Egypt was an Arab colossus.

These ideas, however, did not take root all by themselves. The missing ingredient that brought these ideas home to so many in the Arab world is the pervasiveness of Russia’s disinformation outlets.

Arabic articles. The European Union’s disinformation database offers an extensive record of RT Arabic reposting across regional media, at Nabd and other sites. The headlines are as typical as they are illustrative: “The West and US not interested in supporting Ukraine but weakening Russia,” “Washington’s mission is to limit the growth of its European and Asian partners,” “Ukraine is forced to fight on behalf of NATO,” and so on. These Russian-sourced articles—and even cartoons—eventually made their way into the Arab media, without reference to their origin.

> The impact has been real and powerful. Time and again, in private conversations with Arab interlocutors, I heard echoes of the Kremlin’s favorite propaganda lines: Russia was provoked by NATO enlargement; Russia-Ukraine history is “complicated”; and the United States, which invaded Iraq without cause, has no standing to criticize Russian action in Ukraine.

Diplomatically, these sentiments have translated into repeated calls by regional officials, including those of the UAE and Iraq, for peaceful negotiations to resolve the Ukraine-Russia crisis, a non-accusatory alternative to condemning Russia for its unprovoked aggression.

To give another example, immediately after the invasion, the Arab League issued a statement that expressed “great concern” on the situation in Ukraine and called for “all efforts aimed at resolving the crisis through dialogue and diplomacy,” without naming Russia as the aggressor.

Economically, Russia’s information offensive has scored a victory in convincing Arab capitals not to join Western sanctions regimes, with some Middle East states (chiefly Turkey and the UAE) even registering increases in their bilateral trade with Moscow in a year when the West was pushing to isolate Russia.

If this is the situation after year one of the war, imagine how much worse it will be as the war continues. Because the United States and its allies have largely succeeded in getting most world leaders to vote the way they want in the U.N. General Assembly, they believe they are winning the battle of narratives. But in much of the world—including important places such as India, South Africa, and much of the Middle East—Russia is faring better than they probably think. And with another year of disinformation and propaganda masquerading as news and analysis, sympathy for Moscow’s position will only spread.

Helping Ukraine achieve a victory on the battlefield is the swiftest and surest way to ensure Moscow doesn’t deepen its hold over Arab hearts and minds. But as the West settles in for a protracted war, there is much still to be done to counter Russia’s deceptive narrative and compete with its warped media outlets. The West needs to seize the initiative in countering Russian disinformation in the Middle East and broadcast its own vision clearly to the region.

How Russia flipped the West’s narrative on the war in Ukraine to win support from developing nations

Not only is Putin far from being universally shunned, his sympathisers include those suffering most from the food and energy crisis sparked by his war
Through well-placed propaganda, he has blamed Western sanctions for rising global poverty, a claim reinforced by the West’s own neglect of struggling nations

Mohamed Zeeshan

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Published: 3:30am, 14 Jul, 2022

"Ever since the Ukraine war began, there has been a sharp and almost civilisational divide between the West and the rest. Previously torn apart by Donald Trump’s bombast, the war gave Nato and the broader transatlantic partnership a unifying purpose. At a widely advertised Nato summit last month, US President Joe Biden hailed his allies’ “unmistakable message” that “Nato is strong, united” against Russia.

But that sentiment has not been echoed in other parts of the world. In recent weeks and months, far from being isolated, Russian President Vladimir Putin has corresponded with – among others – Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo, Sri Lanka’s recently deposed president Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Senegal’s President Macky Sall, who is also chair of the African Union.

At a G20 meeting in Bali last week, the West shunned Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. But Lavrov was still caught in cordial conversation with colleagues from China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Türkiye and Argentina..."

Spotlight

Security and Defense

Russia's war on Ukraine

A year after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, experts from across the Atlantic Council are assessing the conflict’s consequences for Ukraine’s sovereignty, Europe’s security, and the United States’ leadership.

New Atlanticist

One year, eight world-changing numbers. Quantifying Russia’s war in Ukraine.

by Atlantic Council experts

Experts from across the Atlantic Council have drawn up the figures they believe best illustrate all the ways this war has shaken the world.

Report

Narrative warfare

by Atlantic Council experts

In the weeks and months leading up to Russia invading Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Kremlin and pro-Kremlin media employed false and misleading narratives to justify military action against Ukraine, mask the Kremlin’s operational planning, and deny any responsibility for the coming war. Dive into a full accounting of the road to war.

WESTERN DISINFORMATION

The Ukraine conflict is a war of narratives – and Putin's is crumbling

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Oct 27, 2022 · Russian politicians and their media claim Russia is fighting Nazis in Ukraine who usurped power in a 2014 coup d'état and pushed the country ...

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Feb 23, 2023 · The Ukraine-Russia war is also a narrative battle between Putin in Russia, Biden in the US, and Xi Jinping in China.

Russia's narrative of a Great Patriotic War in Ukraine must be buried

www.scmp.com › Comment › Opinion

Mar 4, 2023 · Originally used to describe the Soviet victory over Nazi German invaders, the narrative is being used to push the Russian war effort in ...

War of Narratives: Russia and Ukraine | Royal United Services Institute

rusi.org › publications › commentary

May 16, 2022 · As the war continues to dominate headlines around the world, what are the major narratives being fashioned by both Russia and Ukraine?

A war of narratives: Russia's disinformation abuses history

neweasterneurope.eu › Posts

Jan 23, 2023 · The narratives of the Second World War propagated today by the Russian regime are often counterfactual, supported by the historical ...

Ukraine: US and Russia battle for narrative supremacy - YouTube

m.youtube.com › watch

Video for Russia Today, battle for Narratives

Duration: 25:16
Posted: Feb 19, 2022

The Ukraine conflict is a war of narratives – and Putin's is crumbling

theconversation.com › the-ukraine-confli...

Oct 27, 2022 · Russian politicians and their media claim Russia is fighting Nazis in Ukraine who usurped power in a 2014 coup d'état and pushed the country ...

The War in Ukraine Is Also a Battle of Narratives - World Politics Review

www.worldpoliticsreview.com › putin-w...

Feb 23, 2023 · The Ukraine-Russia war is also a narrative battle between Putin in Russia, Biden in the US, and Xi Jinping in China.

Russia's narrative of a Great Patriotic War in Ukraine must be buried

www.scmp.com › Comment › Opinion

Mar 4, 2023 · Originally used to describe the Soviet victory over Nazi German invaders, the narrative is being used to push the Russian war effort in ...

War of Narratives: Russia and Ukraine | Royal United Services Institute

rusi.org › publications › commentary

May 16, 2022 · As the war continues to dominate headlines around the world, what are the major narratives being fashioned by both Russia and Ukraine?

A war of narratives: Russia's disinformation abuses history

neweasterneurope.eu › Posts

Jan 23, 2023 · The narratives of the Second World War propagated today by the Russian regime are often counterfactual, supported by the historical ...

ADEQ Live Camera Site: Superstition Mountains

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Aerospace & Defense News

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Mar 27, 2023

LM Developing Long Range Maneuverable Fires Missile for US Army

LRMF will significantly extend PrSM's range-and accelerate PrSM Inc. 4 development

"The U.S. Army’s Aviation and Missile Center has selected Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) to develop an advanced propulsion Long Range Maneuverable Fires (LRMF) missile. The missile can be fired from existing Army launchers to defeat distant threats at ranges that significantly exceed those of the PrSM baseline.

“Lockheed Martin is partnering with the U.S. Army to give soldiers a decisive edge on the battlefield by extending their reach,” said Steven Botwinik, vice president of Advanced Programs Execution and Transition at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. “With half a century of expertise integrating advanced propulsion systems and supporting the Army’s precision fires ecosystem, we are ready to develop a solution that significantly extends PrSM’s range.”

Phase 1 focuses on design and risk-reduction activities, with optional follow-on phases leading to flight test demonstration. Following flight tests, LRMF will transition to the U.S. Army’s Strategic and Operational Rockets and Missiles (STORM) project office to inform the design of an extended-range Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) Increment (Inc.) 4.

Rockets & Missiles Market Report 2023-2033

Forecasts by Guidance Mechanism (Unguided, Guided), by Speed (Subsonic, Hypersonic, Supersonic), by Product (Cruise Missiles, Ballistic Missiles, Rockets, Torpedoes), by Launch Mode (Surface to Surface, Surface to Air, Air to Air, Air to Surface, Subsea to Surface), by Propulsion Type (Liquid Propulsion, Solid Propulsion, Hybrid Propulsion, Ramjet Propulsion, Turbojet Propulsion, Scramjet Propulsion) AND Regional and Leading National Market Analysis PLUS Analysis of Leading Companies AND COVID-19 Impact and Recovery Pattern Analysis

To reach a significantly extended range with launcher volume constraints, Lockheed Martin’s solution will employ unique design elements and key technologies to address size and endurance challenges."