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Hello and welcome to the Battleground Ukraine's Big Interview with me, Saul David, and Patrick Bishop. Today we're talking to a remarkable young man, Dmytro Pleschukov, co-founder and CEO of Osserville, a Ukrainian artificial intelligence platform that was set up after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine to counter the spread of Russian disinformation.
Dimitry, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what you were working on when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022? I'm a tech entrepreneur. I've been working on startups and building companies in the field of AI for the past around 10 years.
I'm from Ukraine originally, most of my companies were either based or headquartered in Ukraine. And a few years before the full-scale innovation started, I sold my previous startup and I've been building the R&D center in Kyiv for a public company focused on the development of the AI. And I had a contract for a couple of years
A few months before the full scale innovation started, my contract was about to end actually. And I had a lot of promising plans to take a break from business and work and maybe sit back and relax somewhere in a warm place. And I started executing that plan back in January 2022, thinking that, okay, maybe it's time to get some of the reward for the past activities.
But then the full-scale invasion started and it obviously changed my plans and the plans of millions of people.
And what I realized pretty quickly is that first, like I want to be somehow involved in the resistance and help Ukraine maximize chances of victory. And second, there was a huge need for technology in this war. So this war is maybe unlike wars of the past, is very technologically advanced. And AI is like not the last thing being important on the battleground.
And due to my background, because most of the things we built before, they were related to data, data analytics, we realized that the battleground where my expertise, expertise of my team can be relevant is the information battleground, because it has to do with all the data and the data is being populated real time, it's being used real time, and it's a super intense battleground. From the very first days, it became obvious
that Russians are not only attacking on the ground and in the air, but also online, heavily trying to seed chaos, seed disbelief between people, panic and any kinds of counterproductive emotions using disinformation, using influence operations and stuff like that.
And so basically in March 2022, so pretty early on, we started doing something in that direction, which led us eventually more than one year after to having a company focused on countering stuff like that with AI.
and working super actively with the Ukrainian government. Now, Dmytro, most of the people listening to this will have some rough idea of what you're talking about, but find it quite hard to visualize what it is you actually do. Can you first start off by telling us what the threat from Russia constitutes, how it actually manifests itself? Give us some practical examples of how it is that Russian disinformation enters the information space and harms Ukraine's cause.
Yeah, it's a very interesting topic because Ukraine in particular used to be a good target for Russian disinformation and propaganda. And I think Russians thought this way because information-wise, info space-wise, Ukraine used to be very connected to Russia. Just to give you a few examples, back in 2014-2015, the most popular social network in Ukraine was VK, which is a Russian social network.
allegedly controlled by FSB. So super tight to Russian government. Used to be top one. Then it like ceased to be the case, but it's an eloquent example. Top one messenger is Telegram.
which is owned and controlled by Pavel Durov, who is Russian ex-VK CEO. There are a lot of rumors about is he or he's not connected to Russian government, but at least Telegram is also top one in Russia. So it's very familiar space for them to operate.
Of course, many people are Russian speakers, even if they speak Ukrainian, mostly they understand Russian, which again removes the language barrier. So culture, space, you know, a lot of influencers, opinion leaders used to be shared pre full-scale invasion.
So Russians had a lot of bridges or sort of channels to infiltrate. The strategy that they are using, as I started to mention earlier, I think mostly is targeting disbelief, skepticism and mistrust between different groups of people. I think even though they have narratives they promote, I would not say it's like that they promote, they stick to one particular narrative and try to convince someone in one story. What they're trying to do more is
is to push many controversial things in parallels to stimulate this skepticism among people. So they stop believing anything at all. They start to look at the world as a grey picture. There is no black and white.
There is nothing you can really trust. Anything, even something you see with your own eyes might be doubted. Like the government is bad, the army is inefficient, all types of things that would ruin your... Basically, that would ruin two things that make Ukraine so strong. First is unity. Everyone is like united. So what Russians are trying to achieve, destroy unity. Second, destroy the encouragement and destroy the belief in victory
and destroy the motivation to defend. This way or another you can destroy motivation using many tools. You can say: "Okay, your government is corrupted, so why should you fight for it?" You can say: "Okay, you have no chance to win, Russia is so strong." You can say whatever else and they are very creative and they keep pushing and pushing and pushing and trying to find the buttons to push which will actually be
You know, reflects the vulnerabilities of society. So they're trying to find, OK, maybe this topic is something that will actually de-unite them. And that's pretty much how it looks on a daily basis, actually. How does the message actually arrive? I mean, what form does it take? Can you give us an example of a tactical disinformation intervention?
that will illustrate the point. Yeah, there's a lot of them. One in particular I can share, and that was the one that we actually countered. So it's an interesting case study of how it started and how it stopped. It happened in, I think, November, October, November last year. And that was a disinformation campaign, like a classical one. An interesting thing about it, that it was cyber-enabled.
So they said that they managed to hack an email or a data storage of Ukrainian officials and find their secret document, which they sort of leaked. And it was fake from the very beginning. But the document said that NATO supplied Ukraine with some blood for medical purposes, and the blood was infected by many viruses like HIV and hepatitis.
and other ones and that ukrainians figured out that the blood is infected but unfortunately like the blood was already used and so there is a huge exposure but not because now many soldiers who were wounded
might have been exposed to that blood, which eventually means that they might have been infected by super serious disease because of NATO. So that was pretty much the narrative they were trying to push through the leaked document which they fabricated. How did it start? It started on the smaller Telegram channels and communities which are in Russia.
And in many cases they do it this way, so they start small. And that's like a trial and error approach. Our colleagues usually say that it's very data driven in a way. They put it somewhere, they see how it goes, and then they scale it out. They have many ways to scale it because they have networks. They have like affiliated people in different countries, including Western countries. They have coordinated networks on social media like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which are able to amplify messages.
But mostly it starts in the Russian segment. And in that case, it started in a couple of smaller, less known Telegram channels. And then usually it starts there. Then bigger influencers take over it and give it a bigger push. Then it enters the Ukrainian info space. Then it gets some traction in the Western world or Latin America or Middle East. And then it gets like the global exposure.
And so in that case, we were able to track it at a very early point. When we first spotted it, it had only four instances of this publication being posted in four places, mostly smaller. And that's a good example of how countering works, because when you're able to spot it early on, there are not yet not many people who saw that message. Ukrainian government was pretty quick in doing something about it. So we worked here with the Center Against Disinformation.
at the Security Council of Ukraine. And what the guys did, they spotted this threat, they quickly prepared the report explaining the possible risk and what is it and what does it say. And they communicated to the relevant government body. In this case, it was the Ministry of Health Care.
and they managed to convince them to act super quickly because it's like an emerging threat. And the guys came up with the public communication, which actually debunked this story. So they told the truth and they explained what the reality is and that we actually never got the blood donated. It never was the case. And because our communication was quick and to the point and loud, because it was amplified by all the Ukrainian media and authorities,
It happened that there was no point for Russians to keep promoting the fake because it was debunked super early on and the story never took off. It actually mostly stayed where it was in a couple of communities and it never left to the broader, bigger info space. And that's a brilliant example of why time matters. Because there are many, many stories where the reaction would not come that early.
and the exposure would be much larger and much broader. And to give you some color to that, there are many narratives there that are around with which Russians are getting some traction, I would say. Let's say they keep coming back to the story that Ukraine is selling weapons on the black market. And so the idea is that we are being donated or sent some arms, some weapons, then the corrupted Ukrainians are sort of sell them to certain countries.
And then these weapons pop up here and there and Russians make big stories about it. And they keep coming back to this narrative from the very early days up until now. Every other month they will do a small push to that because, as I understand, they see that there is some traction and there are some people who are willing to believe that happens, even though there are many communication that that's not true and checks and audits and stuff like that. And the volume is huge. The volume is incredible.
We're talking about hundreds of campaigns happening on a quarterly basis. I don't remember the exact number. We calculated with our partners. It was a few hundred campaigns during the Q1 of this year, let's say. And some campaigns are smaller, some are bigger, but the nature is more or less similar to what I described. Well, that was all very fascinating and thought-provoking. Do join us in the second half to hear what Dimitro had to say to us next. You may get a little excited when you shop at Burlington.
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Welcome back to the second half of this week's big interview with Dmytro Pleschukov, co-founder and CEO of Ossival. This is what Dmytro told us.
And can you tell us, Dmytro, how your relationship works with the Ukrainian defense sector? I mean, have you effectively, like a lot of Ukrainian civilians, been co-opted? Are you now military or are you entirely separate, but you're working in collaboration with and, of course, providing software for the defense sector? Yeah. So we started as a volunteering organization back in March last year.
And that's pretty common in Ukraine, to be a volunteer. That's, I think, the phenomenon of this war also, that this volunteering movement is really, really huge. At some point, I think almost every family in Ukraine had a person who was volunteering, actively doing something. And there are different aspects. So some brought, like...
vests or equipment or ammunition, some helped with the humanitarian aid, some helped with evacuation and some helped with more high tech stuff like us, like building the software or some people building drones and so on and so forth.
So a lot of prominent companies that are quite successful in Ukraine today, they started as a volunteering, spontaneous reaction to what was happening. And we are not an exception. So it started very spontaneously because like me, myself, because I had this entrepreneurial background and my partner, we were pretty well connected.
In Ukraine, we knew many people. And the fact about Ukrainian government these days is that there are a lot of young, innovative people working there in different agencies, including Ministry of Defense, including National Security Council. There are many innovative, very vision-driven teams.
And we were in touch with those guys and they started to share their pains that, okay, we have this huge exposure to Russian propaganda and we don't have tools in place to be able to cope with that. And we would love to, because there is a lot of manual work, our capacity is not there.
And we started building just based on the requests coming to us, being an independent but very informal organization. We started to help them with those requests, one by one. This case, that case, this organization, that organization. And at some point, eventually, we realized that what we have, if we put it together, it looks like a software platform already, which has some pretty strong capabilities.
And starting from then, we started to deliver it as a software and we transformed ourselves to become a company. Just as a side note, we keep delivering software in Ukraine pro bono because we think that's our contribution to Ukrainian victory. But we operate globally now and we sell it
to partners, to other organizations worldwide. - Yeah, just to follow on from that, because it seems pretty clear that what you've done here, although extraordinarily useful and important for Ukraine's cause in the war, it clearly has capabilities that are just as relevant to a peacetime environment or a seemingly peacetime environment. I mean, that is the case, isn't it? I mean, this sort of stuff is gonna be used by, I mean, congratulations, by the way, Dmytro, it's astonishing what you've done in a relatively short space of time,
but this is going to be useful for governments in peacetime and organizations in peacetime, isn't it? Absolutely. Absolutely. That's something we realized pretty early on that what's inspired by war
is not limited to war or military use case and we don't even consider ourselves to be like a militech or military oriented company because that's a broad like that's a technology for broad use basically misinformation disinformation propaganda influence operations they are all over the place
You can take elections as an example. It's flooded by that. You can take COVID as an example. It was a huge eye-opener for many of us that our media are so easily manipulated. You take an organization, any public company is exposed to this risk. Any officer of a public company is exposed to this risk. So we're living in a world where everyone is pretty vulnerable because we are all living in this open internet, which can be manipulated.
And so if you have assets that are out there, those assets are vulnerable to these types of risks and these types of threats, similarly to how cyber works, right? There are cyber threats that can attack your assets, your entities, your employee. Pretty similarly, information threats and information threat actors can try to do the same. They can try to target
at a different level. They can target your organization, they can target your society as a whole, they can target your nation. So what we are seeing in Ukraine, the whole nation is targeted, right? It's a huge, huge risk.
And by the way, not just Ukrainian nation. We see that it also has a huge impact on the Western world. It has a huge impact on the global South. But in many cases, this information is much more precise, targeted, doing some smaller things. Just to give you one example out of military context, it was a pretty loud story recently. So some guys, they created a Twitter account.
They bought this Twitter blue for eight bucks or how much does it cost? So not much. And they mimicked to be like a Bloomberg or a big well-known media. And they posted a deep fake image of an explosion next to Pentagon or Pentagon, I think, or White House in the D.C. And what happened? So it's just one image, right? And it was...
It was pretty easy to debunk that nothing happened there and it eventually happened. In a couple of hours, everyone understood there was no real explosion. But the public markets, stock markets, they reacted instantly. There was a huge dip, which then regained, but the loss was there, right? And some people were able to gain on that, some people lost money on that. And that's an impact of one small image.
which is disinformative, which is seen by a malicious actor. Imagine if it's something more long-term, something planned, and something with a stronger intention to attack you in a broader meaning. On that subject, Dmitry, have you formed any precise idea of who the players are in Russia who are organizing this campaign? Do you know which organizations is it, the FSB,
Is it the military? And do you actually know the names of any of the sort of leading figures in this, your kind of counterparts, if you like, you know, young, very, very technically competent or the rest of it on the other side of the fence? Yeah, that's a good question. I know that our customers in Ukraine know that to a very good extent. They know names of organizations, sometimes names of the people.
To some of this information we don't have access, like being outside. To some of this information we have access but we cannot share it. But generally, on a broader level, yes, there are organizations there that are focused on this and not one. And yes, unfortunately, even young and creative people in Russia also participate in this. So it's not like these are old-fashioned generals planning these things. Youngsters are also involved.
which is in a way disappointing because many, I think many people, especially on the West, they still have this expectation. It's like a Putin's war and like the young, creative and well-educated people, they are, of course, are against. They have nothing to do with it. So not necessarily the case. A few facts that are like publicly available, not exactly on our field, but on something similar is that PVC Wagner,
They even organized hackathons in Russia. Imagine what an oxymoron is that, that PVC Wagner and like super malicious evil organization creates a hackathon, something very like high-techy, nice and hipster-ish. And people participated there, young guys, 19-20 years old, and they built some tech for those Wagners and they felt all right about that.
Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned Wagner. I mean, we've been speculating for so long, Dimitro, on the role that Prigozhin and Wagner's playing in this war. And it's got particularly murky over the last few weeks, of course, with
with the mutiny and now the reality that Prigozhin, far from being punished, is actually in Russia negotiating with Putin. But going back to something that Prigozhin and Wagner are alleged to have been involved in, and that, of course, was interfering in the 2016 US presidential election.
Given what you've developed now, if that had existed in 2016 and the Russians, sorry, the Americans had had their hands on it, would they have been able to identify that disinformation campaign and combat it? I think to some extent, maybe to a large extent, because one of the capabilities that we have and that we are actively using is the attribution of activities that happen in English-speaking Western segment of Internet, let's say Twitter or media,
to things that originate from Russia, like to Russian narratives or to Russian threat actors that distribute stuff. And we saw evidence that that happens. And there are many coordinated networks out there that actually can be traced back to Russia this way or another. And of course, in Russia, Prigozhin had a media empire, but there was a lot of sources, actors, channels, whatever, telegrams associated with him.
Even in Russia, their media landscape is not unified. There are different subgroups and Precursion was a major significant player there. And in many cases you can trace back what's happening, like the narrative, the story, the distribution to that origin. And that's important and also that's important to do it early on. I think we're still, we, I mean, not us as a company, but generally we as a society or we as an open democratic world, we're still not effective at tracing that.
There was an article in Washington Post not far, a long time ago, and they said that only around 1% of bots has been taken down on social. There is an alarming trend that like trust and safety teams in big tech companies are being laid off because of the economic reasons.
And so I think we are opening the door this way because we are putting less efforts to combat that while the trend of the activity is growing. And that's why we think that the need for the technology like ours is present and we need to collaborate. Also, going back to your question, would we be able to spot that? That depends not just on the technology. That's a complex process, right? You need to have different stakeholders
willing to get the result. You need to have tech, which is one component, but that's not the main component. You also need to have like motivation on the other side and things like that. Dimitra, moving on to, if you like, the kind of offensive side of your operation, do you actually have one? Are you in a position to actually...
get into the Russian information space and construct some counter-narratives there that, if you like, kind of preempt the Russian efforts. This is something that we get lots of questions about from our listeners, is what can we do to actually change Russian minds? They seem to be fed this constant diet of lies, misinformation, distortions, etc.,
Yeah, so firstly, we do not do any offensive things. That's like the position of our company. We are building defensive assets and defensive technology, and that's it. So we're not involved in the offensive side of things.
But just to give you my opinion from what I saw and what we experienced, first, it's a very challenging task because generally offense in the closed types of societies is more difficult than in the open societies. The web is nothing like our web, right? Let's say VK, any platforms that they have heavily moderated, heavily controlled, they
But more importantly, the narrative is controlled. The narrative is controlled in a centralized way and people are exposed to the information
over such a long period of time in such a concentrated way that if you infiltrate it with your one, two, three messages, it doesn't make any big difference. The confirmation biases are that strong and generally the effectiveness of that machine being run for 20 years is not something you can overcome in a week or in a month. So the only way is to do something long term.
Though, what gives us hope in that regards is that it's not just information, but it's a combination of multiple things. It's like, it's the reality that happens plus the information. And if you look at the reality over the past year and a half since the full-scale invasion, it's a sequence, it's a chain of, you know, the events that would not make Russians really proud, right? You want to get Kiev during three days and then you fail. Then you want to take...
archive region and then you fail and then there is a huge counter offensive pushes you back and here and there constantly their narrative kind of gets further and further from the reality so this mismatch is growing and this growth is an opportunity for us because that's what makes their whole story vulnerable right because as a person you can live in the illusion but the further illusion goes from the reality the easier is to like to crash the illusion
So I think mostly what we're trying to do is to open their eyes, to highlight the facts and highlight the stories that would prove or show that it's not like what they believe in. It's different.
So being outside, I have this opportunity to get connected to people on the West, companies on the West, organizations on the West, fundraise and make sure that this venture runs successfully and can give back on the Ukrainian side. We have a huge commitment to Ukraine in many ways. So we deliver software in a pro bono way. So we're not benefiting from it. Quite the opposite. We are trying to give away.
Our team is in Ukraine and we are hiring in Ukraine. We give preference to candidates who are based there because we want to contribute to economy and we want to support people and give them opportunity to
sustain their lives. We help people when needed with whatever they need, like when the electricity shortages are in Kyiv, we are willing to give them stuff to sort of produce electricity and maintain their workability. Personally for myself, like my family is in Kyiv and of course when anything happens there, any shelling, any explosions, it becomes very personal.
And many people think that it's not that bad there as it used to be. So there is like a general understanding or consensus that it was super bad, like let's say February, March, April last year, but it keeps improving. It doesn't feel like that though, because let's say we take this May or June this year. In Kyiv, shellings happened every other night, sometimes every night.
So my family spent every night in the shelter, sleeping in the concrete, very cold room. It has nothing to do with the normal or okay life. Well, that was a real eye-opener for me, Saul. I must admit, I'm pretty ignorant about all this kind of stuff. And what I got from that was, first of all, a very clear indication of what strategically these disinformation campaigns are trying to do.
basically blur the contours of reality, create disbelief, undermine unity, try and excite a climate of despondency. And it all sort of became quite clear to me what all this energy has expended.
is actually setting out to do. So that was, for starters, that was a very valuable bit of enlightenment for me anyway. And also, wasn't it interesting, his point at how Ukraine was such fertile territory for this sort of disinformation, Patrick? You know, partly on language grounds, partly on the grounds that the fact that Ukrainians, which I didn't know, certainly pre-2014, were heavily embedded with the use of Russian social media,
In other words, they were getting their information from Russia in the first place and it can't have been that difficult, certainly at first, for the Russians to spread this sort of chaos, to create, in Dmytro's words, that sort of grey world where nothing is clear any longer. Anything is possible in terms of stories that are being told. Can you believe what your own government is telling you? Are they just as likely to be up to mischief as the enemy?
That's right, isn't it? I think, you know, by and large, that is the world we live in now where there is a climate of disbelief. But this course has been around for a long time, hasn't it? I'm reminded of that old proverb, a lie is halfway around the world before the truth.
can get its boots on. It's attributed to various people from Mark Twain to Ernest Bevin. But here is, you know, what Demetrius is trying to do is counter that, you know, stop the lie in its tracks before it gets very far. And he seems to be pretty successful in doing that, or at least has some very good tools for doing that. But I'm always, I must admit, I am still quite surprised at what people are prepared to believe. You know, that,
story that the Russians put out about the infected blood, NATO donating infected blood to Ukraine. I mean, the first thing you're going to say is, well, I thought NATO was meant to be on our side. Why would they be? But apparently, you know, no lie is outrageous enough not to be worth a given an airing.
And one really encouraging aspect of this whole story, and we've heard it with other interviewees, Patrick, is this extraordinary upsurge in involuntary work that the civilian population of Ukraine, in defense of its own country, has been prepared to...
offer the government and the military. I mean, I asked that question how deeply embedded he was with the military these days. And of course, he isn't. He's working in partnership with the government. So there's this kind of blurring of the lines. We're used to distinguishing, aren't we, in our work between who comes under the sort of military hierarchy and who is assisting. But in Ukraine, it's clearly a lot more complicated than that because
that because a whole nation now is working in one sense or another to try and defeat this existential threat. Yeah, it is clearly a unifying experience, isn't it? And there is a great integrated national effort going on. But Dimitra did make the point that, you know, rather than
You're seeing the same thing on the other side. We associate young people with progressive ideas, with liberalism, and particularly those who are in the world of tech. But he was, I must admit, I had a bit of a laugh when I thought of this Wagner-sponsored hackathon for...
Young techies on the Russian side. There we are. But having said that, Saul, I was encouraged by what he said about, you know, the Russian misinformation, disinformation campaign campaign.
And he made this very fundamental point, I think, about the dangers of a very mismatched narrative between what is being spun, what lies are being told, and the reality, inescapable reality, that no amount of manipulation can actually disguise. And he says the further you are
From reality, the easier it is to crash the illusion. And, you know, we've been seeing this process, haven't we? Maybe we're being a little bit optimistic, but it seems to me that that is the way things are going in Russia and that the whole kind of edifice of lies may one day come tumbling down, hopefully not in the too distant future. All right.
That's all we have time for for the big interview, but do join us on Friday as usual when we'll be analysing all the news and answering listeners' questions. Goodbye.