In Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin holds sway over half of TV news channels and uses them against Ukraine, according to former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
“Practically there is no longer any real solid freedom of speech,” the politician said during a discussion at the Kyiv Security Forum, held online on May 15 due to COVID-19 quarantine restrictions. “What we are facing right now in some parts of the world is the freedom of lying.”
Yatsenyuk pointed at the existing resistance to disinformation, led by respected media outlets like Washington Post or The New York Times.
“(They) are fighting for the truth, and the same is happening in Ukraine. But the problem is that we have a lack of this freedom of speech space. It’s all about who owns media outlets, TV channels. Putin controls 50% of the news channels in Ukraine, so he can easily control 50% of the minds and hearts of Ukrainians,” he added.
At the same time, according to Yatsenyuk, in the media world, the Kremlin seeks to undermine the actual truth, to sow chaos and mistrust, but it can be combated with high-quality, truthful journalism.
Peter Pomerantsev, a British author and journalist, added during the discussion that the central idea behind the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns is eliminating the interrelation between material prosperity and democracy in public opinion all over the world.
“Ukraine has been a big example of that,” Pomerantsev said.
“In Russian propaganda, there’s a pattern: ‘Look, these people fought for democracy, and it brought war and destruction.’ From the informational point of view, the whole goal of the covert campaign in Ukraine has always been to prove that narrative. That’s what they said about the Middle East (following the Arab Spring of 2011)…they even tried to say this about Eastern Europe. There are Russian adverts, for example, which say: ‘Ah, they fought for freedom in 1989 in the Baltic, and now they clean toilets in London’.”
In many ways, what’s happening with Russia’s activity in media space in a form of revenge for the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991, he added.
“That is the heart of anti-ideology of Putinism, which is to say: ‘Look, we might be corrupt, but everywhere is corrupt’,” the author said. “There’s no idea of progress, nothing to strive for, no movement toward some sort of a better future. Everything is rotten. And they would start wars in order to prove that.”
