92: A Misinformation-Rich Environment
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hello and welcome to the september 14th edition of ukraine without hype i'm anthony bardaway last episode we did a very large breakdown on the form and function of russian misinformation or misinformation in general really though we focused on the russian part

And as luck would have it, there were quite a bit of updates in that direction, so we'll be getting to that at the back half of the episode. Before that, we're going to go into the various combat updates of the front half of September. There's been a lot of activity and movement, as well as covering the large rash of Russian missile attacks on both Kyiv and the rest of the country that has taken place over the previous weeks.

And finally, we'll go over a big shakeup in the Ukrainian government and what that means, especially in regards for the centralization of influence within the country. But first, some announcements. And as always, I'd like to invite anyone to join our Patreon at patreon.com slash ukrainwithouthype and join our groups of supporters and join us on our Discord channel from there. There are various tiers of support that you can choose from. And also, I guess we have...

an ad, I suppose. We are asked by one of our supporters to share information from the Norwegian Refugee Council, and that is it should be known that the Norwegian Refugee Council does have a cash program to support Ukrainian and other refugees in case they need extra help

surviving in Europe or wherever they may be. In 2023, the NRC assisted 61,463 people with food and livelihood support by providing hot meals, food kits, and vouchers to meet immediate needs while working with local authorities to improve the employability of internally displaced and conflict-affected people. They provided 130,045 people with multi-purpose cash assistance and

to cover emergency basic needs. So if you are a Ukrainian refugee or you know one who could use that support, please go to the Norwegian Refugee Council and look into the options there. And also before getting into the news, I would like to acknowledge two deaths that occurred recently. David Knowles, you may know him from the Telegraphs

Ukraine, the latest podcast series, one of the larger podcasts that cover Ukraine news. It's been a daily thing. It was always quite good. I would like to unfortunately report, if you had not seen the news, that David Knowles has passed. The announcement was that he had a heart attack while in Gibraltar, with no further information from there. Was a very generous, very gracious person, very kind, very passionate about Ukraine.

Great guy. Unfortunately, he is now no longer with us. 32 years old. And the other is Anton Szymborski, Hebrew name Matityahu. He is the son of the chief rabbi of Ukraine, Moshe Asmon. He was adopted by the rabbi at the age of 10, raised within his family. Recently, the family announced that he and his wife had a child.

but had been conscripted into the Ukrainian army to resist the Russian invasion in July.

He went missing and not much was known of him until just this week. It was confirmed that he had, in fact, been killed in action in Donbas. His funeral was held at the Brodsky Central Synagogue in central Kyiv. It was attended by, you know, press, representatives of civil society, government, military, etc. Chief Rabbi Osman is a major figure in Ukraine.

in that he has been a huge supporter of Ukraine. He has done a lot for humanitarian relief. He's been kind of an unofficial diplomat, and I can't imagine what he's going through right now with the death of his son, Anton. So, David Knowles, Anton, may your memory be a blessing.

So from here into the combat update, I'll kind of go in geographical order here from north to south. That's first to talk about the Kursk incursion, the occupation of the Kursk obelisk by Ukrainian forces. In the past days, there was a Russian counteroffensive that was able to push the Ukrainian lines eastward a bit and giving more relief to the besieged Russian town of Korolynevo. This is the first major setback.

of the cursed invasion. However, as the lines were pushed eastward by the

by some distance. The Ukrainians were also able to push northward, take some villages in the northern direction. Meanwhile, there was another border incursion by Ukrainian forces slightly to the west of there, not too far, in order to get themselves behind this Russian counteroffensive. Some villages were taken elsewhere on the border and

just from looking at the state of play there, if they are able to make significant advances towards the river there, then they will be putting the Russian forces who just took part in that counteroffensive into a bit of a pincer. So some bad news there, but also the Ukrainians are not giving up and are already working to counter the Russian movements in Kursk. The lines at Vovchansk have not changed significantly.

very dramatically, though there was a Ukrainian counteroffensive that was able to take a

a couple of kilometers in the western part of the russian incursion into arkiv oblast south from there at the kupyansk direction the russian bulge that i've been mentioning for the past few episodes has continued to expand although this time it has been in a kind of winding direction not just straight on they are looking to take advantage for wherever they can go

However, it has expanded to the point where any transit from the north to the south of that part of the front line is extremely hazardous. They are increasingly getting close to

the town of Senkova, which is one of the Ukrainian strong points along the Oskol River. South from there, looking at New York, and I know I just gave a bit of a eulogy for New York, but the 3rd Assault was able to launch a counteroffensive in New York and take part of the northern neighborhoods of Senkova.

that town and while I do not expect them to liberate the town anytime soon, what it did was blunt the Russian initiative in that area, which will prevent them from moving on so quickly to Toretsk and the other towns and villages behind it.

But now for, of course, the most worrying part of the front line, the Pokrovsk direction. Since our last update, the Russians have not advanced so far directly in the direction of Pokrovsk. The defensive lines there have greatly slowed down the Russian advance directly upon that axis.

However, they are still grinding towards it. Much of the town of Hrothovka has been taken already, roughly about half, but ultimately that's only a couple of blocks within a three-week span of time. The more problematic direction is heading south. Last I mentioned, they had taken much of the highway there, and at this point they've both

They've fully taken that highway to the south of Pokrovsk and are working to create a large encirclement to the

the Russian positions to the east of Kurohivka, though it seems as though Ukrainians are able to withdraw from those positions and have been doing so slowly for the past few days. However, if that cauldron can be closed, that is a fairly large chunk of territory claimed at once. There is another railroad line that they will soon be running up against.

which could be a trickier defensive barrier than other parts of that front. And finally, south of there to Vulhidar. Vulhidar has been the linchpin of the southeastern defenses. If you imagine it, it's where the rushing lines go from

west to east, and from north to south. That is the juncture of those two directions. Vulidar has been a very tough defensive position through this entire war. During the battle, during previous battles for this city, Russians have taken extremely heavy casualties trying to advance upon it. And at this point, the Russians are trying to work their way behind the defenses of Vulidar to cut it off from supply and take it

from there. If the Russians are able to take Volhidar, that will open up a large amount of territory the north of the city that can be more easily overrun and more dangerously in conjunction with the

Pokrovsk salient, they could work to encircle a lot of the defenses that have existed in between Volodar and Pokrovsk. This is not good news coming from this sector, nor has it been for the past several months. Though, like I said, the Russian advance directly towards Pokrovsk has slowed down, and these other movements are in large part a reaction to that.

The next segment will be about the many, many missile strikes that have been ongoing in the start of September.

They have been particularly deadly and active recently, and they have affected every corner of the country. Perhaps the largest singular attack was at the Military Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technologies in Poltava, a university in that city. A strike on Poltava killed 58 people with 325 injured.

One of the deadliest missile strikes of the entire war. In Lviv, there was a strike that hit a residential building around the city center, the historical city center, where there is a lot of density to the residential areas there very close together. And this strike killed almost an entire family, the mother and three children. The father survived, though his anguish has been an unfortunately iconic symbol of

of this war in September. An entire family wiped out in a city that a lot of people think of as being in some way safe. Lviv is quite far from the front lines. It's the city closest to the Polish border. A lot of people are there as refugees because they think it is so safe, but it's not. Nowhere's safe. Anywhere in the country, there could be a missile that

wipes out an entire family. In Sumy, the Russians hit an orphanage and a rehabilitation center for kids, 18 injured, six of them children. In Kharkiv, the Russians hit the Palace of Sport.

And one Kharkivite that was murdered was a talented young artist named Veronica Kozushko. People remember her as being a passionate young woman who was always ready to challenge authority and stand up for what is right. And now she's dead because of Russia. Zaporizhia, there were strikes. Dnipro, there were strikes. In Kiev, an intercepted missile hit a large...

mosque in the city, the Islamic cultural center of the Muslim Association of Ukraine. I wrote an article about this for New Voice of Ukraine. Thankfully, nobody was in the mosque at the time. It was about five in the morning. And because of the

the air raid alarms nobody was there for the morning prayer this mosque is important because it is kind of the crimean tatar religious authorities in exile when russia invaded and illegally annexed crimea the religious head of the kremlin tatars the mufti became a collaborator much to the

outright disgust of most of the community there. And so one of the first orders of business when fleeing Crimea for Kiev was to reestablish an independent muftiyat, and that's where that was located. They have been very active in supporting humanitarian efforts, supporting Muslim soldiers in the Ukrainian army. Ukraine is a multi-ethnic, multi-national, multi-

religious country where everyone sees themselves as fighting for the same common cause and that's what they were doing on the Muslim side of things. If a soldier needed access to halal food, they would provide it.

along with other Muslim associations in Ukraine. It is a large and diverse community. Thankfully, there was no serious structural damage to the mosque. And like I said, nobody was there. And the larger strike hit a business center on the other side of a small lot from them.

Again, no injuries there. But here they are. They had to run away from the Russians in Crimea. Many of them had to run away from the Russians in Kherson, ended up in Kiev, and here the Russians are hitting them here. And of course, as we talk about these much more headline-getting attacks, every day Sumy is under assault.

Every day, the villages on the border with Russia are being shelled. Rocket attacks, artillery, people are dying all the time.

But the Russians have been particularly active, especially with the beginning of the school year, which started at the beginning of September. These strikes are often happening shortly before kids go off to school. And so these strikes are designed to make life in Ukraine more dangerous and unlivable by telling people that your children are at risk.

Though our next episode that we have recorded already is an interview, part of this very topic, the issue of children going to school in Ukraine. It's like I said, the beginning of the school year, important topic.

And another strange Russian missile strike happened in the Black Sea. A ship full of grain on its way to Egypt, as it was leaving Ukrainian waters and entering the Romanian economic zone, the Russians decided to hit it with a missile. No casualties, thankfully, but this is a serious escalation by the Russians in the Black Sea.

The Black Sea has been the front of this war where they have done the worst. The Russians are unable to operate in open waters on the Black Sea because over a third of that fleet has since been destroyed. They are not able to operate freely out of Crimea and instead have retreated to naval bases in Russia as well as occupied Abkhazia.

Their initial plan was to blockade Ukraine directly by being able to interdict

any merchant vessels that come into or out of Ukrainian ports, and they were not able to do that. The blockade was lifted because of these attacks on the Russian Navy. So in the absence of being able to do direct interdiction, they have instead decided to just start directly attacking merchant shipping. If this becomes a trend, we don't know yet, but the immediate goal is to...

Ward shipping away from Ukraine under the direct threat of death, not just stopping them or turning them away, but just straight up shooting at them. Maintaining a blockade was one of the more sensitive things that the world cared about when dealing with this war because Ukraine produces a lot of food and the ability to get that food out of Ukraine and towards Iran.

Egypt or especially other places in the global south is a very important factor in avoiding mass starvation. And while the Russians said that was in fact their goal, the diplomatic actions by other countries, especially Turkey, pointed out that that is something of a red line that they would work against. So we'll see where this goes of if there are any further attacks, if the world will respond to them.

And how? And the other topic that the issue of these various strikes brings up is being allowed to actually hit where the missiles are coming from. So far, there has been a block on Ukraine using foreign-made weaponry to attack deep into Russian territory. This taboo has been slowly lifted. At first, the rule was that no American or European equipment could be used

in anything that involved directly attacking Russia. That has slowly eroded. There have been permissions to use American and European weaponry to defend hardline

Kharkiv, for example, to blunt the Russian offensive in the Kharkiv region. With Ukraine's offensive into Kursk, they are using American tanks, armored personnel carriers, etc. There's no real limit on the use of equipment anymore. But there's still this back and forth over if Ukraine can use missiles, long-range missiles. And that is why Secretary of State Blinken and other leaders came to Ukraine to discuss if Ukraine

Ukraine could use these missiles to attack long distance into Russia to, as the phrase is here, kill the archer, not the arrow. Shooting down an enemy missile that can miss can cause collateral damage. But if you can hit the launcher before a missile is ever fired from it, that takes care of that problem.

That is what Ukraine has been lobbying for. That is what Ukraine's allies have been lobbying for. But what the White House and some leaders in Europe, Europe is split on this issue, have denied Ukraine the ability to do, citing the danger of escalation or escalation management.

This conversation has happened over and over and over again with every bit of new equipment, with every change in the front line. There's always this concern of, are we finally crossing the Russian red lines? And no, not.

you're not by showing weakness you are encouraging further russian aggression by showing strength you're causing russia to back down that has always has it has been and what is always what the europeans and americans have failed to understand no russia will not suddenly change everything because they are being able to be struck by storm shadow missiles a storm shadow missile from britain and france

was used to destroy the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea. That is an important and crucial military installation in what the Russians saw as being Russia already. According to the Russians, we are already using British, French, American weaponry against what they see as Russia. So there's no difference there. If anything, some missile launcher in Krasnodar

is not as sensitive as the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol. Putin, as well as Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, have been threatening the West that this is the final red line, that you can't do missile strikes on Russia with American weapons without it causing global thermonuclear war.

But they say this every single time, and every single time it's false. The Russians did not launch nukes when Ukraine liberated Kherson, even though that's what they said. They did not use nukes when the F-16s arrived in Ukraine, even though that's what the Russians said. They did not use nukes when Ukraine has directly attacked both the quote-unquote new territories that they...

attacked in Ukraine, but also Kursk. And that did not lead to thermonuclear war. They're lying. They're bluffing. Don't believe them. Call their bluff. Force them to back down. That is one thing that we should have learned by now.

Moving on from the missiles to a considerable shakeup in the Ukrainian government. Through the course of this war, I would say that most of the civilian powers of Ukraine have been being further centralized in the office of the president himself. The only ministry really taking fame on its own accord is the Ministry of Defense and also the Interior Ministry.

Because those are the ones that deal directly with the waging of war, while a lot of, say, the diplomacy and other factors, that decision making has become much more centralized in the presidency's office. However, there has just been a large scale shuffle of government ministers, the heads of various ministries.

Many of them, I'd say, are not particularly interesting, with three exceptions that I want to look at the most. The first of these is in the foreign ministry. Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba was replaced by

by Andriy Sibiha. Now, Koleba has been a bit of a celebrity in Ukrainian politics. He is much beloved by both Ukrainians as well as foreign diplomats that he deals with. He is very effective, and there have not been serious complaints about him. Though the situation with the foreign ministry has been quite challenging. Ukraine has been facing an ever more difficult time with its foreign affairs and its diplomatic strategies.

One of the biggest problems, of course, being what I just said about escalation management and permissions to use American and European missiles against Russia. And that has been a lot of spinning its wheels for a long time. There's been a lot of deadlock, unresolved

on a whole lot of diplomatic issues so i could see the purpose in wanting some new blood just to see what could be done with somebody different in charge it's understandable even with kuleba being as much beloved as he is he only wrote a book that people like as well i think however this is a lot of the problem that was talking about earlier though the foreign ministry i

I think has been quite effective, all things considered, throughout this war. They've been doing a lot with very little. A lot of the independence of the ministry has been wheeled away at by the presidential office, with a lot of the diplomatic decisions being made within the executive branch that way. This is not an unusual problem. It's one that has been a problem with America for decades.

years at this point, the U.S. State Department has been getting battered in one way or another by most presidential administrations. Although not as bad currently under Biden, Trump

was outright cruel towards the State Department, basically leaving a lot of very important positions freed up and leaving a lot of America's foreign policy slowly in the hands of his son-in-law. Before that, Obama, and though Obama's team might have been more professional, in hindsight, they made a whole lot of money.

whole lot of mistakes that led to this current war, mistakes that could have been seen at the time, really. But the problem I'm talking about now is that the Obama administration did centralize a lot of foreign affairs decisions within the presidency rather than the State Department. A bit of that problem with Bush as well. So when I say that the Ukrainian government has not treated its foreign ministry particularly well, that's not rare. It's not a...

a big condemnation of what they should be doing. But it's one that I certainly disagree with. Diplomats should be allowed to be professional diplomats. But on that point that I'm trying to make here is that the ministry had already been, to a large extent, co-opted

by the presidential office. And this change to Andrei Shibuha is really more of that. Andrei is the former deputy head of the office of the president. He is close to Andrei Yermak.

kind of Ukraine's gray cardinal. So that is mainly what I see this turnover as being, is bringing the foreign ministry more directly into the field of the presidential office. This is also the story with the Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications. This ministry has gone through a few changes. It was originally the Ministry of Information Policy as well as the Ministry of Culture. They were merged at first, then they were broken apart.

and then they're kind of merged again with a new focus on strategic communications. This is something that I think is very important. As somebody in communications myself, I do think that Ukraine's communication strategy could use a lot of work. Though Zelensky himself is very good at communicating. I think that's pretty undoubtable. Everyone can have negative opinions in different directions, but everyone agrees he's a good communicator. He's a good communicator.

advocate for Ukraine, but it can't just be Zelensky. It can't just be the presidential administration that has this focus. It really does need to be more broad and across the board. And I'm not just saying that because they might give grant funding. But what I do

do see here is that again this is the same issue as with the foreign ministry is that the new minister mikola tochitsky he is qualified as a diplomat but he's another guy who is close to the office of the president he was another former deputy head of the office of the president of ukraine don't see as much of a problem in this one because the office of the president

is good at communications. So being able to spread that expertise out a bit, I see as being valuable. They are the headliners in that case. So spread the wealth a bit. But still, he is very close to Yermak. And this is just another thing that centralizes power in Ukraine in a...

Not great way. There needs to be independence in all these ministries that they are not getting. And also, because this is part of the Ministry of Culture, he doesn't have any experience with cultural policy. He's a diplomat, and I guess in a way diplomats have to deal with cultural diplomacy issues, but that's not where he's at. We'll have to see what his team comes up with, but he doesn't seem like the right guy for the job.

And the third change I want to talk about has to do with Alexander Kamyshyn. He's a bit of a political celebrity here. When the full-scale war began, he was the head of Ukrainian railways, and that was universally regarded as one of the best organizations in Ukraine. During the initial attacks, when everything was chaotic, the trains were going constantly, trying to get people to safety, bringing soldiers to the front. The train system was impeccable.

I have nothing but good things to say about Ukrainian railways, especially when he was in charge of it during that initial phase of the invasion. Because of their impeccable organizational skills, a lot of people are alive right now. Because of that, he had later received an upgrade to the Minister of Strategic Industries and basically in charge of Ukraine's military industrial complex.

That's the most important thing. When he got that promotion, we talked about it. He has done a great job in that position to the point where now Ukraine has begun a lot of national production of a lot of drones, missiles, drones, missiles that people are saying are just drones for some reason that for differences, I can't.

Fully understand. But again, he's done a very good job in that. So when he was being removed from the Ministry of Strategic Industries, a lot of people were concerned that they were getting rid of a very effective guy from a very key position. But he received yet another promotion as advisor to the president of Ukraine on strategic issues. So not just industry, but industry.

a much broader remit than that. And he'll do a good job in it. His replacement at the Ministry of Strategic Industries is Herman Smetanen. But as much of that is a promotion, again, same issue. That promotion is as an advisor to the president. And I really do think that more attention does need to be paid to the independence of various state ministries and not just

That presidency controlling everything. That is a problem. It's a hard problem to fix in the middle of war because you do need a certain amount of centralized decision making. But the purpose of a lot of the independence is to allow there to be diversity of thought for new ideas to show up to for various ministries to have their own focuses they can really zone in on. And that's just not happening enough right now.

So for the rest of this episode, it's kind of an unintentional sequel to our last episode on misinformation. Within days of that episode being released, a lot more has gone on in these last two weeks regarding just the continuous degradation of the state of information in the United States and misinformation.

Really, the epistemological collapse of the American psyche. So, once more, unto the breach, dear friends. Once more, misinformation. There has been an ongoing investigation into the activities of RT, formerly known as Russia Today. RT is one of the larger Russian propaganda projects.

projects and has been for many years. I think it's worth giving a bit of a background to RT, even though it does deserve its own focus at some point. But once upon a time, it was a pretty anodyne, isn't Russia a nice place to be channel. Not...

so overtly focused on being the hardcore propaganda outlet that it is today. But we're talking about the 2000s at this point when the relations between America and Russia were, unfortunately, quite friendly. Their big change, in my opinion, happened during the Occupy Wall Street movement. At that time, there was a hunger on the part of American progressives and the left

for some kind of alternative news. This is when Al Jazeera English really took off. This is where a lot of what will become progressive media in the U.S., as it exists now, has its origin.

And in that milieu came Russia Today. And Russia Today, what they were doing at the time, was taking various politically dissident Americans, many of them on the left or the progressive end of the spectrum, and telling them, we won't tell you what to say, and in exchange, we'll be paying you far better money than you'll be making otherwise. So there is a lot of very sympathetic coverage there.

of Occupy Wall Street by Russia Today. And at the time, I feel like people were understanding that the reason Russia was

giving people this money was just because they knew that it made america look bad but because a lot of it was so independently driven it was able to gain a lot of credibility the understanding was as long as russia today is not talking about russia then they can be the voice of

dissidents in the US or whatever. This was a severe miscalculation. The next big change happened after the Russian invasion of Crimea. One, this alienated quite a few people that were working for Russia today. Abby Martin was

Probably the biggest celebrity on RT at that time, and she quit following the annexation of Crimea, as did Liz Wohl. And in the following months, the Russian managers of the channel made the decision to cut its

independence and make it just Russian media by putting Russian managers in charge of all the English language content as well. And from that point on, it kind of became a lot less effective. Having some lame Soviet boss try to lord over what

is aimed at being an American outlet did not work very well, and it lost a lot of credibility in that way, which only continued for the next years. What reputation it did have as being an outlet for any random person that might be against the U.S. government, it was seen much more for what it was, which is a Russian propaganda outlet.

Though it did tend to be the outlet that invited still the real cuckoo cranks of both the American far left as well as far right, especially as Russia shifted from a much more broad strategy of appealing to people, such as with Occupy Wall Street, to just trying to be a conservative wonderland.

And so they did shift a lot to the far right in that way. With the full-scale invasion, Russia Today, or RT at this point, had been banned from a lot of places as a Russian propaganda outlet, a Russian state propaganda outlet, most importantly. While there are always issues with frauds,

free speech and all that, they're war criminals, so it's easier to make laws against them. And the internet's the internet. It's not as though you can't access Russia today if you really want to.

But with having their broadcast licenses revoked, this did severely harm their reach in America, and so they decided to look for alternative ways to influence things. And what the Department of Justice just discovered was that this involved funding various organizations

influencers i'll call them i'm not going to call them journalists but i'll go with influencers and paying them to produce propaganda this investigation has been ongoing and it does seem as though there will be a lot more updates coming in the near future so stay tuned but this release that we just got has uncovered a large russian influence operation done through what's called tenant

Now, this is not directly stated in the investigation that was released. It's all left anonymous. But with the amount of information there, it's 100% Tenant Media. And the people who work there have confirmed that, yes, they are who this is being talked about. Tenant Media is a right-wing network. Hell yeah.

Use their words to describe themselves here. Tenet Media is a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues. Our goal is to support creators who question institutions that believe themselves to be above questioning. In our view, all issues du jour merit rigorous and honest discussion if one wants to come closest to the truth. For those interested in authentic coverage of the topics that matter most,

Tenant Media is your home for content. Fearless voices live here. And what it is is just a bunch of far-right crankery about cancel culture and threats of sexual violence against Taylor Swift was one of the recent ones that... It's trash. It's trash media made for people who...

who like the most boring trash media, in my opinion. The personalities that it involves are Laura Southern, Dave Rubin, Tim Poole, and Benny Johnson. Laura Southern has long had connections to Russia. She has worked with Russian fascist Alexander Dugan. Tim Poole, his big thing is saying how there's going to be a civil war in America and recently went on a big tirade calling Ukraine America's biggest enemy.

And actually, I think I'll play that for you now. So trigger warning, Tim Pool being an idiot. But I don't know that it matters anymore. This is psychotic. Ukraine is the enemy of this country. Ukraine is our enemy being funded by the Democrats. I will stress again, one of the greatest enemies of our nation right now is Ukraine. They are expanding this war. Now, don't get me wrong. I know you've got criminal elements of the U.S. government pushing them and guiding them and telling them what to do.

Ukraine is now accused, a German warrant issued for blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline in triggering this conflict. Ukraine is the greatest threat to this nation and to the world. We should rescind all funding and financing, pull out all military support, and we should apologize to Russia.

Yeah, so that is what we're dealing with here. There's also Benny Johnson, who recently did a story on Haitian immigrants in Ohio stealing pets to eat. Basically drumming up a pogrom against Haitians is what he's going for. Funded by the Russians because nothing Russia loves to do more than fund people.

Far-right propaganda to encourage pogroms, that's like their main thing, that's their favorite thing to do. Dave Rubin, the most boring man in media, in my opinion. And all led by Lauren Chen, a former employee of Blaze TV, the outlet run by Glenn Beck. There's a lot to this story, and I'm trying to cover it in the...

most distinct way that I can, but how it basically worked was that Lauren Chen, the person who started this outlet, was herself in direct contact with Russian handlers through RT, as were most of the producers of this channel. Thus far, it seems as though the talent, the personalities that I just listed, were not directly aware of

Who was paying them? Now, to me, this sounds absolutely insane. These people were paid $100,000 in episode in money that, as far as they concerned, was pulled from the ether. Well, the official story that they were going with was that there was a Hungarian billionaire in Brussels named Eduard Gregorian who...

was funding all this. But there's no information about this guy because he doesn't exist. He's completely fake and not even a good fake. The only picture that they seem to have of him was a...

stock image of a rich guy in a plane with his face blurred out in the most generic and made up backstory ever created. Just some rich banker that wanted to spend money on heterodox voices. Now, for a normal person, I would not believe them when they said that they did not know where this money comes from.

But these are very stupid people. Tim Pool and Dave Rubin in particular are two of the dumbest people to have ever lived. And honestly, I can kind of see how they were just told, here's a couple million dollars, $10 million in total for this operation, and just be like, smile and take the money because they are automatons who live only for greed. And it should be stated that most of this content...

was of their own production. They did not receive very many notes of what needed to be covered. This is already what right-wing media is like. Russia just wanted to inject the finances to make sure that it could be boosted as much as possible. Kind of hearkening back actually to those

original days of RT when they knew that just allowing Americans to work in an American context was the easiest way to speak to Americans rather than being micromanaged by Russian media people who don't actually understand the market as much. These are all successful people in their own right. And I struggle so hard to say successful because they're supposed to be journalists and they're complete hacks.

But monetarily successful people, they know better. And Russia today, unfortunately, understood that. Now, part of the briefing that this operation referred to as doppelganger took part in, I'll read the summary of the content of the campaign, what they're going for. So, quote, content of the campaign.

campaign. We would like to reiterate that in the United States, there are no pro-Russian and or pro-Putin mainstream politicians or sufficiently large numbers of influencers and voters. There's no point of justifying Russia and no one to justify it to. All American politicians and influencers are patriots and supporters of American supremacy. However, there is a feeling among the political party A that

that the president's policies, censorship on social media, and the policies of the political party B government are encroaching on their rights. They are dissatisfied of dramatic decline in the standard of living and large expenditures on offensive policy of the United States in Europe and Ukraine.

They're afraid of losing the American way of life and the quote American dream. It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in slash for the United States. So in our last episode, I was talking about how they just find a politically salient topic and hammer on it. And this is kind of what I'm talking about. Russian propaganda in the United States is not primarily focused on saying that Russia is good.

Some of it is, but that's quite niche for a minority audience. Most of it is raising other seemingly unrelated problems and saying that the American or Western system is incapable of handling it.

Right now, there's often taking the case of economic concerns, cost of living, inflation, that kind of thing. But in the case of Tenet Media, really, it's just banal, socially conservative stuff about hating trans people and immigrants. That is what Russia's willing to pay for, is that. So, quite frankly, whenever you hear it, keep an ear out for who it could be. And as part of this investigation, though we know about Tenet Media...

It also states that there are hundreds, thousands even, of influencers being paid by Russia in order to produce content. Content that Russia wants distributed for one reason or another. Now, as I said, this investigation is ongoing and more information is being released, so I expect to hear more names soon. But quite frankly, with the numbers of people involved, I can make some guesses. I'm basically treating the entirety of the right-wing...

information space as being a potential vector for Russian propaganda because that's what it is and we know that the things said by people being paid by the Russians that we know of and the things that we don't know of it's exactly the same messaging if

If you're listening to Tim Pool or Dave Rubin, they're not making any different talking points from Tucker Carlson or any other given people on the right. Tucker Carlson is definitely at the top of my list of people I assume are being directly influenced by the Russian government. So maybe I'll go deeper into whatever the Russia Today investigation is whenever that information comes out. But be very alert right now.

is a misinformation-rich environment. On their part, all the people that I listed are outright denying that they knew that was happening, and they say that they themselves are victims. They're tricked into taking millions of dollars. Those millions of dollars are forced upon them. They don't know. Innocent little babies. Innocent.

So right now they've all been saying how they're cooperating with the investigation. And interestingly, because these are some of the most annoying people within an already annoying info space, a lot of them have doubled down by saying, oh, people are accusing me of being a Russian asset. It's always Russia, Russia, Russia with these people. Yes, because it is Russia. Tim Pool, you were a Russian asset.

And the only reason that you might be getting free from that is that you're too stupid to realize that you're a Russian asset. Congratulations. That's where you stand. But yes, more information forthcoming. We'll see where this investigation to Tenet Media specifically goes. But it goes deep. It all goes very deep.

And this second bit of misinformation that I want to cover is a documentary released by a Russian journalist, Sosia Trofimova, called Russians at War. It was initially shown at the Venice Film Festival, where people began to take notice of...

How horrible it is. Now, I'll have to start out by saying that I have not seen this documentary because it just is in the home festival circuit right now, so there's no great way to see it, but a lot of Ukrainians have seen it by now and have reported as to the contents. So, just with the contents.

It is essentially building the clean Wehrmacht myth. The clean Wehrmacht myth refers to what happened after World War II, where...

Basically, the reasoning behind why this happened was because they needed to rebuild a German state, and to do that they needed Germans, and a lot of Germans had collaborated or were Nazis. I mean, they ruled the country for a long time, there's no way around that. And...

Part of justifying keeping bits and pieces of the German system around was by saying that the Wehrmacht, the German army, was largely clean of war crimes and that the war crimes were almost exclusively done by the Gestapo, by the SS, by direct Nazi party organs, but not the German army.

They're fine. Spoiler alert, they were not fine. Every single massacre of Jews and others in Eastern Europe and also in Europe was done by units of the German army. We know now that no unit of the German army was free of committing war crimes. They were all guilty. Every single part of the German army.

But they had to build this clean Wehrmacht myth by saying that, oh, they were just forced to fight. They didn't really want to do it. But this documentary, Russians at War, wants to do with the Russian army what was done with the Wehrmacht by saying that, oh, these Russian soldiers, they don't really want to be there. They

don't really know what they're fighting for. It's all just Putin. Putin's the one who's responsible for all the bad things, not anybody in the Russian army. No, there are no war crimes that she saw. Anastasia said directly that she had not seen any war crimes herself in the months that she was embedded.

Just a poor, poor bunch of babies that are just caught in the situation that they don't want to be in. Well, one, that's not true. These were basically all contract soldiers. They volunteered to be in Ukraine. Most Russian soldiers in Ukraine signed that contract of more or less their free will. They could have had some

Some arms twisted to get there, but the Russians are more or less following their rules about who can and cannot be deployed to Ukraine, and that excludes conscripts. They all know what they were doing, and much like the German army, no element of the Russian army is free of war crimes. Every single place where the Russian army has been, there has been proof of torture, of executions, of kidnapping, of murder, of mass murder, theft, of rape,

Of every possible pravity that you can think of. And this is everywhere that the Russian army has been. So there can be no element of the Russian army that is innocent of this. Except in this documentary. So that's just the content of the documentary. But what has happened afterwards has been...

Utterly stupefying. They have only dug deeper and deeper into problems. So the real issue came up with the Toronto International Film Festival, which is ongoing right now, where Asasiya Trofimova, the filmmaker, has made a whole bunch of very bizarre statements. So one, we learned that...

She was embedded with the Russian army for months, months and months and months. Something that just doesn't happen with embeds. Embeds happen if an embed that happens within weeks is a long one.

That's special. So apparently she claims that this embed was not done with any cooperation with the Russian government. She was just there on her own. No one in the Russian government knew about it. She's not getting permissions from any of the occupation authorities. That's not true. There's no way that can be true.

We've had Russian journalists that are anti-Putin explain that that is simply impossible. There's no way that can be true. You do not embed for seven months in the Russian army and not have anyone know about it. It is with 100% certainty that she was being supervised by Russian intelligence services. Next, we know that during this time, she was wearing a Russian military uniform that was given to her by the commanders that she was with.

And that's illegal. Don't wear a military uniform as a journalist. But also the reason why she was told to do this is that by wearing a uniform, it meant it was less likely for Russians or ours, as she put it, to shoot her. Why are Russians shooting people in civilian clothing? Ask that question. You're a journalist. But she didn't, of course. She didn't make these people look good.

When confronted by saying, well, why did you not get permission from the Ukrainian side to do this? You are in Ukraine, even if it is occupied by Russia. And to operate within Ukraine, you need the permission of Ukraine to do it. And she responded by saying that she wouldn't be able to do it because Ukrainians would torture her. Unbelievable.

What she's doing there is just continuing to spread the myth of Ukrainians being thoughtless, violent barbarians, which is Russian propaganda for the war. She decided to air. And again, not true. There are plenty of people of Russian background and even with Russian citizenship doing journalism in Ukraine. It's not unheard of, though she likely would have been

turned down for those permissions. You know how we were talking about Russia today? She worked there for years. She is a professional Russian propagandist. So yeah, she probably would have been turned down.

The most shocking part about this is that this documentary, I say with sarcasm, was funded by many elements of the Canadian government, especially in Ontario. They applied for their grants, got their funding, and Canadian public money went to fund Russian propaganda. There has been mixed success.

in holding people accountable. Some have ended their relationship with this movie. Some have taken account for their past support for it. However, the Toronto International Film Festival has behaved with utter insanity. The worst of it...

is that they have claimed that they had to end showings, or I should say pause showings, they're going to do it again later, of this documentary due to credible threats. They're saying that the Ukrainian and other Canadian protesters that have tried to hold this film festival accountable for showing more propaganda...

which have been entirely peaceful, by the way. Very polite, very peaceful, just raising their grievances as you can, according to the principles of free speech. And they just accuse them of being violent. Now, was there ever a threat? Is this a valid reason? No. They...

Activists reached out to the Toronto police asking them if there was any threat of any kind of violence. They said no. They did not hear of this. The film festival made it up themselves. If they felt credibly threatened, they would have contacted the police because the police are the ones that can do security. They didn't do that though because no such threat existed.

What they did was just try to smear Ukrainians and their supporters as being needlessly violent to the point of possibly being terrorists. Again, like I said with that whole torture thing that she claimed would happen, they are doubling down on this grotesque stereotype of Ukrainians as being violent people. And...

Not as civilized as the Russians, because keep in mind, the whole point of this documentary is to humanize Russians and show them as being reasonable. Russians, reasonable. Ukrainians, unreasonable. And violent. Straight up war propaganda, like I said.

This situation continues to go on. It's not been resolved or anything. Other film festivals have possibly paused of showing this film, possibly not. We'll see where the activism on that goes.

But it seems as though with every passing day, there's another strange twist to this story where it just gets worse and worse, where they're just outright smearing protesters. They are refusing to acknowledge anything that could be wrong with this documentary. And a lot of the...

Canadian film media industry has backed them up on it. They see no problem with this documentary. Everything's fine. Really, it's anti-war. It wants to just show how people in Russia don't understand what they're fighting for. It's just Putin. Putin's the problem.

We have to understand Russian propaganda. All of that nonsense. And a lot of it nonsense because they refuse to listen to what people who actually know about Russian propaganda have to say. Because this documentary is not anti-Russian propaganda, it is Russian propaganda. Kyiv Independent did a good article breaking down some of the people who saw this movie and you actually know what they're talking about. But

With the root of this, what it really comes down to is that there's a bunch of people in the West who think that they just know better, that they're the ones who understand, they're the real protectors of free speech. Unlike those dumb, barbaric Eastern Europeans. Do better.

do better. And as this means for misinformation, additionally, one of the points that we said in our previous episode was the respect given to Russia and Russians by official institutions

and how their opinion is very often more respected than Ukrainian opinions. And this is that in spades. We have a bunch of Canadian media professionals who were duped by it, and I'm sure could potentially be educated on what that problem is, but won't because they just see themselves as being better and too arrogant to learn and...

We'll see who is paid as these investigations into RT continue further. But that Russian perspective was given a prime place where Ukrainians often struggle. Although even as I said, Russian journalists themselves have pointed out these problems I mentioned.

But anyway, Ukraine Without Hype does not have access to $10 million from Russia today, so if you would like to go to patreon.com slash ukrainwithouthype and help us with maybe $5, that would greatly increase our reach and our ability to deliver news to you, our wonderful listeners. I am very proud of that segue. If you would like to learn more about Ukraine, go to our link tree to learn more.

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