Insights from Bellingcat on Russia's Ukraine ambitions | RISJ seminar with Christo Grozev, lead Russia investigator, Bellingcat: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

Insights from Bellingcat on Russia's Ukraine ambitions | RISJ seminar with Christo Grozev, lead Russia investigator, Bellingcat

Reuters Institute1h 2min

Meera Selva

00:11

Hello, and welcome to the global journalism seminar series at the Reuters Institute. We're always keen to talk about Russia this week, we would do to have answers that Moscow bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal join us, but in ways that you know, are really awful to discuss the world has changed. A week ago Vladimir Putin entered Ukraine with a military operation that we soon realized was an invasion. And Ukrainians are now now going through a catastrophe. And I thought so with them, and especially with the Ukrainian journalists risking everything to get their stories out to the world. This is a space where information is contested and hard to come by. So it seems especially appropriate that we have with us today, the Bulgarian investigative journalist Chris de Graaff chef, who's also executive director and lead rusher investigator at Bellingcat. A fact checking an open source intelligence site that has pushed the frontiers of journalism in so many ways. Bellingcat as you well know, began sobran Moses blog run by Eliot Higgins as an investigation into the use of weapons in the Syrian civil war. And it's become a site where militarized militarized spaces are mapped out, understood and turned into stories about what's happening on the ground. It's reports on the war in Donbass, including the damage of Malaysian Airlines flight 17. Belgian Quito raid, the unmissable civil war and scruple poisoning have changed the world and change journalism. Christo himself has won awards for his work in identifying the suspects in the 2018 scribble poisonings in Salisbury lit that linked senior Russian officials linking senior Russian Russian officials to downing of Malaysian Airlines flight 17 in 2014. Russian intelligence involvement in the 2016 Montenegro coup plot and more recently, the poisoning of Alex in Avani knee in 2020. Crystal, thank you so much for joining us today. It's an easy week for you, you know, would you like to tell us a little bit of what you've been doing in the last week and then I'll open it straight up to questions after that.

Christo Grozev

02:19

Sure. I'll probably start start earlier than last week because I've been watching this war come around in slow motion and not being sure how to report on it for almost a year. So this boils down to this specificity one Bellingcat is and what it isn't, it is not the traditional news outlet is not a media outlet that can we bought source information source based information we don't do that. Sometimes we feel bad. We can't do that. But we've taken that path and we count on data why we don't like to use sources because sources of agendas sources. Information is often valuable, but you need to net it out of the agenda of the noise and find the the the valuable information and there are way too many quality other media to do that. So we don't do that. So but because of the high profile we receive through our investigations and we're always data driven. We've also become a sort of a go to place for some whistleblowers or some double agents pretending to be whistleblowers. So we receive a lot of data from Russian sources, including from Russian civics or the term that is used for the FSB. Last year you whoever belongs to the militarized elite in Russia. So it's almost a year ago received some credible sounding information that things will change in Russia this year 2022 That it will be like nothing we've seen before that Russia will become a dictatorship. There'll be North Korea 2.0 that journalists will be jailed and free media will the remaining on the islands of free media will be shut down. And that the country will become an army or it will run like an army. This is exactly verbatim the descriptions we got that was valuable insight. Of course, we couldn't validate that. But it was context it was something that allowed us to watch out for what data would prove or disprove in the future. More recently, it was December when another whistleblower again a civic source told us that more war with Ukraine is on the agenda told us that Putin had decided and boasted to his small circle of loyalists that he was going to start a war in Ukraine and that he was going to actually consider using tactical nuclear weapons, and that this has actually frightened everybody well. Except for a very small, militarized elite. That he trusted, that he had stopped just stopped trusting the larger elite economic elites that are traditionally his buddies and childhood friends. And he only trusted a few really corrupt militarized, gung ho not cases. Again, this was a source we couldn't use that but it allowed us to or it scared us, and it forced us to look for the data that would support or disprove this and the data started coming in started coming in January February of this year we sold the aggregation of of large Armed Forces units around the border when we saw the movements of our units from around the country to Ukraine under the guise of a with exercises, and then we were sure that this is what it seems to be not just exercises, not just a sort of a show of force when Russia started lying about whether or not they were sending weapons to the border, and it was saying the factory was moving weapons for the border. So we saw all of this instable motion but it was all, not much data a lot of sources. And when the war was about to start when the war was already pre announced by the by the ministration and who leaked a lot of information to other agencies, and media started publishing on the pending war. We decided that our first and foremost goal would be to try to prevent it if possible to prevent a casus belli because it was clear that that Russia preferred to start the war based on a plausible pretext. Nobody wants to start the war just because they're a bad guy. They would if they have to, but ideally, it should look like somebody provoked them. So we focused initially our efforts in trying to find evidence as soon as something like a false flag operation or a provocation appeared to be spread by Russian state run media that looked like it might provoke a global outcry or it might justify the case for invasion. Our focus initially was to disprove that odor prove it, that is to be the case. But to make it sort of clear for other media how to report on this particular incident when it's announced.

Christo Grozev

07:07

Very soon the war started and we actually the war started without Russia being able to resort to such a casus belli to search a false flag. There were many that we disproved, but none of them actually pass the muster test for Western media to believe in it and to start reporting on it as if it happened. So Russia started the war without a congressman really, it was a really invented and fabricated cosmetic that few people outside of Russia believed. But then we had to switch the resources from trying to prevent it for to trying to archive it to try to to find evidence of war crimes. That's what we do. That's what we've done in previous wars, and validate them because there'll be a lot of propaganda on each side of any war. And this is a very, very special one. We will talk about why it's special. It's like nothing we've seen before, but we switched our resources to trying to archive validate. Prove disprove war crimes, and human rights violations. A lot of this work is on visible a lot of this work will end up in courts in the future. And it might seem to a lot of people who are familiar with the sort of public facing side of Bellingcat all of our investigations that we're doing very little that's not true. We're doing a lot that is below the surface. We are archiving every single incident report an incident of a war crime of illegal munition or unacceptable munitions being being used unacceptably. All of that is getting into a into a proper archiving system. That we've unfortunately we had the chance to develop in previous wars. And of course, part of that and I'm finishing with that part of part of what we do this end up in the public domain in real time, because there's a lot of propaganda on each side now in Russia. is trying to launder its activities by creating failures and forgeries and blaming human rights violations on their sites such as destroying a cultural and administrative center with human civilian damages in Harkat today's ago and blaming it arrogantly on Ukrainian provocation. So obviously we have to focus on that because hopefully, it won't be publish with hard evidence trickles down to a Russian audience that is more and more restricted from the Western world of information. But we're trying to simplify this data and make it believable make it visual so that even somebody who's not inclined and bias towards believing the I don't want to call it the Western narrative, but it's like the normal relative narrative in this war is going to likely be convinced. So mostly archiving, war crimes validating in disproving them a little bit trying to prevent the world from continuing by exposing Russian claims about provocations and Ukrainian side about lack of civilian casualties. And one thing last thing that we do reluctantly, but we have to do it is we're counting and trying to validate the the casualties on the Russian side. Because according to official, official reports, the casualties on the Russian side are next to nothing. They stopped saying they're nothing yesterday, but they're still saying they're next to nothing. And they're not they're in the 1000s and trying to validate that and trickle that information. To the Russian mothers and fathers and sisters is just one way to stop the war sooner. So that's what we're doing. And I would like to answer any questions that might come up in this conversation.

Meera Selva

10:42

Thank you. So there are lots and lots of questions. I'm just going to start with picking up on two points you made about hoping that this information trickles down to Russian audiences that aren't getting their access to independent journalism ever more restricted politically by the hours and times. How can you just talk a little bit about the mechanisms out through which you think this information will get to the Russian population? And then related to that question from Ted Sullivan, which you've touched on but it perhaps you'd expand on is you know, how do you think that the the work you're doing will could help to turn the tide of the war?

Christo Grozev

11:20

That's getting more and more difficult to pass information towards audiences before mean you will never have a country especially a country that has been in Russia's circumstances of governors, where the majority of the people actively seek out news in Russia. The majority of the people are waiting for the news to be delivered to them. That's how they grew up. That's how they they've they've learned from their parents because of a long tradition of socialist centralized planning and end before in Russian case even. So, you before you had at least a diversification of internet sources. Where a lot of the people who are not actively looking for data for news would see a diversity of opinion. They would end up on Twitter for entertainment and they would see some reporting from independent sources trickled into their into their timeline, the same with Facebook. And the same with Tik Tok. What we have now is Twitter essentially being having disappeared. I mean, it's it's next to impossible to get on Twitter in Russia, except for some operators and some regions of the country but my friends in the deep middle of Russia in the sort of mid Russia and eastern Russia are just unable for five days. To access Twitter. They can't get into Facebook, Facebook has been throttled. And they're essentially defaulting to v k, which is the version of Facebook and that is completely penetrated by a psychological operations campaign run by the FSB, where essentially every second post is a planted post, which debunks the world's view on on the war and plants, the exact opposite. So it's getting more and more difficult. And the only way to bypass this is through opinion leaders. Unfortunately, that minority of the people that seek out information, they know how to get it, they know how to use VPN, they know how to, to access information and critically evaluated themselves. And the only thing we can do now is push on to them. The importance of talking to more people or spreading the information to more people and to not give up when the first relative when the first uncle says This is bullshit. We know the truth because we saw it on television. And that's where the messaging from from me and from from us as long as the last few days. And I'm sorry, there was the second part of the question which I

Meera Selva

13:47

know how do you think this can help turn the tide of the war or fever kick and

Christo Grozev

13:51

I almost answered that the only way to the only way that this will becomes unacceptable to the large majority of Russia says if two things are achieved First, the large majority and volition understands that civilian casualties in Ukraine are happening at a rate that is not collateral damage at the rate that is not acceptable. And whether or not that is a salt effect, or it's the result of an incompetent army. It is reality. So this would be an unacceptable price for the Russian population to pay even more unacceptable would be the home price, the price of 3000 4000 5000 Any 1000 number of casualties of their soldiers. So these are two pieces of information that if delivered to Russian population to the pacified version population will make a difference will put pressure, maybe not directly on Putin, but on the people around Putin to stop the war.

Meera Selva

14:48

Okay. And again, I'll come to you, Laura in a minute, but just follow up from this, Ukraine, but I've had the leak of the kind of details of Russian soldiers that I think is still being verified. I just wondered if you had thoughts on the significance in defense of whether that can be verified in any other way?

Christo Grozev

15:08

Well, yes, it can. It's a it's a more it's it's only the fifth or sixth day of the war and we have to allocate resources. And we think that at this point, the most important thing with a small team relatively small team is archiving more claims for the near future. But validating the people who are I mean, it's our team the people who are fighting they're against their their own wish, because there are conscripts, so contracted soldiers that are 19 or 20 years old, is not what I would like to do. Proving that some of them had been killed is something I would like us to do and we're trying to use volunteers for that and others are doing it as well. But yes, a lot of lists a lot of leaks are floating. I mean, this is one of the things that makes this war different than anything else is the digitalization of the war. And the fact that because of much of it is digital and the information part of it is completely digital. It has equalized essentially the sovereign states who previously owned the propaganda machine to non sovereign states like Bellingcat, or to real biased parties on each side who actually have the capabilities, the sophistication and the data to either put out the truth or to put out a disguised truth so it is very difficult war from an abundance of information and misinformation for anybody to to figure it out. And that makes even for journalists, but that makes the role of journalists 1000 times more important than in previous in previous wars when you only had a binary choice of this is one piece of propaganda. It's issued by this government and this another piece of propaganda issued by the defending government. Now we're talking about multi vector propaganda messaging coming from bad actors on one side and from good actors, but also putting out fakery, so the other side, so you have to really, as journalists, we have to be the gate gatekeepers and to simplify it for the audience.

Meera Selva

17:16

Thank you. Thank you very much. Lera. Read Now,

Speaker 1

17:22

here on Bologna, I have two questions for you. The first one is about the European Union censorship, oppression today on a movie you call it censorship. And the second one is how do you think the conflict can be escalate at least from journalism?

Christo Grozev

17:39

The last question how the conflict can sorry,

Meera Selva

17:41

de escalate. I'll just kind of repeat those two questions if that's okay. What do you think about the European Union's censorship or blocking Russia today and Sputnik? Would you call it censorship? And how do you think the conflict can be de escalated by journalists by the media, which again relates a little bit to what we were talking about?

Christo Grozev

18:00

Generally, we we don't like the fact that the European Union is giving Russia an even more false equivalence reason to ban everything else in Russia. We, we understand the logic we understand the guttural instinctive wished to block misinformation and that is truly a misinformation. There's no question about that. That is coming from Russia today and Sputnik. But then when they're talking to, to the preaching to the choir, they're preaching to people who already believed in anybody would go to at this time to sort of garner information from Sputnik and Russian they, they are lost. So therefore blocking them is not really it's not really achieving any outcome other than getting Russia the false equivalence are going to block the BBC to go Deutsche Bank, which they did and to block steel and then so on and so forth. So I don't I don't think that's a fair thing. How to de escalate. Well, it's exactly these two messages. I mean, try to try to prove to the people who, who are the sovereign in Russia that, that this war is really costing them that is really costing the end in surmountable and unquantifiable economic future. I'll share one thing I was attending a couple of months ago, when none of this seemed realistic. I was attending a secret meeting of secret get together of the Russian independent journalists who decided to meet and think about how to deal with the dictatorial situation in Russia. Outside of Russia. It happened somewhere in Europe. And I attended that meeting. And at the end of the meeting that one of journalists said, we all great talking about what's wrong in the country here, but we have to understand that not a single person in Russia is going to give up 10% of their economic welfare in order to achieve 80% more freedom. They're not going to do that. And what is happening now is actually it's not 10% it's 80% of their economic welfare will be gone. And therefore they will start thinking, do I actually, is it worth it to be deprived of freedom, when I'm not getting the comfort that I was promised? So actually, exposing the cost of the war to the Russian audiences is in any way is deescalation.

Meera Selva

20:26

Thanks very much. I'm going to go to Hannah in Norway, because I think suddenly the Scandinavian countries are on the edge of a new front line.

Speaker 2

20:35

Hi, thank you so much for being here. I have two questions if that's all right, the first question is with the tsunami of information that's available right now. It seems like we know everything but of course we don't. So I'm wondering what are the unknowns about the war effort that you're most curious and looking to know right now? Then the second question is Do you think anybody at this point has good sources about what's happening in the Kremlin? Or is it all is everybody just interpreting from public appearances?

Christo Grozev

21:11

Yes, I got the question. The second question perfectly and the first one, if you could rephrase it, please repeat it. From the studio.

Meera Selva

21:18

What are the unknowns in this information base at the moment? What makes you feel is missing? Sure.

Christo Grozev

21:24

What we have now I'm talking not as Bellingcat, the open source researcher but as the analyst that has some idea what's happening but it's different from Bellingcat. I'll put another head there. What is clear to me was that the plan did not go to plan. The war has not gone to plan. The plan was for blitzkrieg war, which would have delivered care within a day or maximum to maximum three. This was based on false information about the quality of the Russian army. This was based probably on starting the war somewhat earlier than was planned. This may have been a forced hand by the Biden leaked information, which which which called Russia on complete, not completely prepared for the war, but it has not gone to plan. And there's no easy plan B at the moment. There's it's clear now that Russia can not occupy the country that they cannot decapitate the country and quickly replace it with a proximate modern government that will have some degree of plausibility anywhere in Ukraine or in the world. It is clear that the population is not easily scared and easily succumbing to the threats as they thought it would. So that plan is gone. And what is unknown here is what was plan B and it seems to me that plan B is being written at the moment and they don't know what this and the fact that it's already taking two days that a long column is getting just longer when it's not moving a convoy of weapons may be an indication of the plan not being written yet. So that's that's the biggest unknown what they will do. Another big unknown is we've seen, sadly that Russia has on the Kremlin has internalized the reputation cost completely so they decided that they are the bad actor. They don't care about how they're perceived. And the example to this was the shelling of the most Russian sound Russian I sit in Russia in Ukraine, which was hard because everybody there speaks Russian and they like Russia and so on so forth. And they shell that and they ship they they shelled it indiscriminately and they killed dozens of people. So it seems like they've given up the idea of rationalizing what they're doing and they just want to terrorize Ukraine into submission. So the problem is that a jump from that to using nuclear is not unthinkable anymore. So that's another nor are they crazy people like crazy enough to say, well, that's a nice show for us if we can't show success. So these are the analysis really. Nobody knows really, whether the Ukrainian show of resilience and agility and ingeniousness ingenuity is going to deliver a deflection of the attacker is going to win them the war most likely not. But it looks like it's a tie at the moment. So that's another unknown how long can this can Ukraine sustain and keep the big towns out of Russian reach until Russian runs out of the logistical supplies of the Indian dairy entered the money to win the war, which is another 10 or two weeks, 10 days or two weeks is not an in surmountable number of days. So these are all unknowns. To answer your second question very quickly. Again, I'll have to default the sources here and sources say that people around Putin are freaking out and they're thinking how to minimize the dimension of themselves. And that doesn't include thinking about how to get rid of him. So and it's natural. It is not something that that we haven't seen before in history. It doesn't have to be conspiracy theory. It's the natural inclination of the oligarchs who brought into power and are now suddenly threatened completed their livelihood, their existential their existence is threatened by his anti pragmatic behavior.

Meera Selva

25:36

Thank you very much, which again, kind of goes back to the efficacy of sanctions within

Christo Grozev

25:41

Exactly, exactly. When did the sanctions what what media was media should do? We should think ahead of what the trickle down effect of the sanctions is going to be so that we can explain it. And the trickle down effect is huge. Think think, only about for example, the fact that there are millions of Russian tourists or business people stranded outside of Russia and they can't go back to Russia at the moment because of well, because of the sanctions because of the Arab airspace being closed. Now, this alone creates social pressure, social tension in Russia, and it's a trickle down effect of sanctions, but there's so many such factors that need to be investigated and publicized.

Meera Selva

26:24

Okay, I'm just going to go back to you, you can the thing you mentioned about the nuclear threat and more turn I think just wanted to ask a bit further about that. Oh, Martin from Copenhagen, Denmark.

Christo Grozev

26:36

How do you assess the nuclear threat at this point? We as analysts sitting in the West, we assess it as a crazy thing to do. It's never going to happen. What I'm afraid of is that people close to putting assess it as realistic. That's what I'm really afraid of, and they know him better than we do. And we're trying to analyze his behavior based on prior behaviors of other self interested leaders. What if he's not self interested? What if we don't know what's what's in his head? What if it is really what if he has a what if is ill and and he doesn't care what the what will happen? One, the only thing I'm alerting you is that people close to him believe that nuclear is an option that he's considering. But there's no way it's unknowable. It's knowable through data. And the only thing that was a hint in that direction was his statement two days ago, but I'm just let's keep our eyes open. It's not crazy.

Meera Selva

27:40

Thanks very much. Can I go back to the kind of the journalism and a question from Ron Philip in the audience about could you talk a little bit about say, the most important or useful data bases and tools you're using at the moment?

Christo Grozev

27:55

This is another thing that this world has changed at first, we used our most of our investigations will be based on leak data, or an open source data leak data in Russia. There's a lot of databases of registry, registered addresses of people in Moscow car registrations with the phone numbers and car numbers and addresses. And a lot of these databases have allowed us in the past to pinpoint search of data to a particular subgroup. For example, military people who are registered particular military addresses or FSB people who have parked their cars in New York Lubyanka one Lubyanka two. So we have from the past accumulated a lot of data on the most likely people involved in you know, clandestine preparation for a war and then managing the war after that. So this is a very useful core that we are able now to track to track sometimes and I'm not going to spill all the beans here but track their communications trying their movements and see what when there's chatter when there's a lot of surge of communication that means either something is being planned or something went wrong and you use it to then you use the public the public data to try to find out the explanation of what you see as data surges. But what has changed now is that there's an almost a manageable new inflow of such information because of all the hackers, the ethical hackers. We have the bell Russian cyber partisans, who were able they created themselves out of the revolution in Belarus in 2020. And they are now not only able to disable the, the railroad system of, of Belarus and to to prevent them from helping the Russian aggression, but they're actually leaking out to journalists who are interested information about all the military officers in Belarus who are now being engaged in the war. So there's an abundance of new available data. Anonymous, they hacked and leaked about 120,000 names, emails, and, and telephone numbers of active Russian military officers. All of that is available for anybody who wants to spend half an hour looking for it. It's really what you make of it that that that can make a difference and trust me, we are only able as Bellingcat to instrumentalize three or 4% of that data. So it's open season for everybody.

Meera Selva

30:25

Thank you and that's kind of going to mirages question about is how are you counting them?

Speaker 3

30:32

Oh, I was wondering, you said earlier that Russia and China saying that the casualties are next to none, but they're in 1000s. So I'm wondering how you came up with that figure.

Christo Grozev

30:44

There are two different approaches that we and our colleagues from the consortium of open source investigators are using the conflict Intelligence Team are is a Russian outlet that only focuses on war crimes and war, war activities. They're doing a bottom up approach where they're counting essentially, verified open source data of dead bodies and have burned out tanks and have have of the almost hard evidence of dead Russian soldiers. And they're getting to or at least as of yesterday, they were getting to a number that was about 700 to 900. And it's lower than the number that I'm quoting because I'm using a slightly different approach. I'm trying to validate the number and trying to validate the number of actual destroyed weaponry of tanks of airplanes of armed transport vehicles. And then then use that to, to come to a analytical number of how many people were there at the minimum before before the destruction. And that takes us to a couple of 1000 3000 as of as of yesterday, but I'll be honest, we stopped counting because the focus now is on more crimes and and I wish some and I hope somebody's taking that count as a as a priority because it is it is important, but we just can't do it. We don't have enough people.

Meera Selva

32:19

Can I ask about the war crimes documentation and could you talk a little bit more about what, again, what you're doing and exactly what you're documenting and what what will you do with this data? will it then be presented somewhere or will it be then released via media outlets? Once again,

Speaker 4

32:37

we've created a consortium with several media and also non media but organizations with experience in archiving information for war crimes in the past. It's a five party group and we invite on one hand we have automated data collection bots that look for any tick tock Twitter or or other social media evidence of, of explosions of hits, where there seems to be residential or other buildings hit and therefore there's likely to be civilian casualties. We then duplicate all of this humongous archive of data we're getting. We've we've put out an appeal on Twitter to anybody who sees something that looks like maybe a war crime to send it to us. So first step is deduplication. Second step is geolocation and verification and, and corner location which is also important because a lot of the data that is out there in social media is actual war crimes, but it's not from now it's from other conflicts and it's from or it's from the 2014 2015 so we have to Crona locate the event to be sure that it's from the current war. And then obviously the next step is trying to find conclusive evidence that it's the Russian side or the Ukrainian side of the games, maybe that is the originator of the crime. And to do that, we have to look for the smallest of feet of a piece of evidence such as the angle on which the crater is slanted in one direction or another. And then try to geo locate the exact crater, put it on a compass and then to see what the angle of approach of the missile would have been an essentially creating a reverse political analysis to see from where would have come in 2014 15 and 16. We did a lot of that that is out there published and is has gone to court already. So you, you can see what we will publish in the future by going and seeing what we did in the past. For example, our analysis of the Maria Maria pool shelling of 2015, where we proved that it came from Russia and all of that has been handed over to to the ICC, and this led me answer to the second part of the question, all of this will go to whoever needs it. And the ICC and iCj are the obvious recipients. But what we see is more countries being open to us universal jurisdiction this time than in any previous conflicts we've seen, to litigate and prosecute the war crimes on their territory. So it might not be just the Hague, it might be Germany, it might be the Netherlands. And so it may be multiple jurisdictions that that prosecute this. We're just preserving the data, validating it and we'll make it available. tenable.

Meera Selva

35:24

He talked about propaganda on both sides. And I just want to kind of talk a little bit more about this and what firstly, what propaganda are you seeing from from the west from Ukraine, and then in terms of verification, how much time and how able are you to verify what's coming out to the Ukrainian sides? And then there's a question related to that, from nuclear hand therapists fight in the audience about they don't seem to be as many photos and videos of Ukrainian troops as there are Russian troops and why why might that be?

Christo Grozev

35:55

Well, it's the answer that is obvious when you have a friendly population to the Ukrainian army and they would not willingly post to tic TOCs and videos of their army movements because they will provide too much value information to the enemy. It's to be expected it's a natural cost of waging a war in a in a hostile environment as the Russians decided to and maybe Ill advisedly because they thought they would not be hostile environment. So that's the answer. It's simple answer that question. And in terms of what kind of propaganda we we observe, from the Ukrainian side, it's it's different than the Russian one they don't need to fabricate, fabricate evidence of war crimes, because apparently it's there. And it's there in abundance. So the propaganda there is actually the motivators they call it the motor they're trying to create an exaggerate the the losses and the motivation of the Russian army. So that's where we are looking for evidence of such propaganda. I'll give you one example. There's there was a an alleged email that was sent by an FSB officer that this in the early days of the war that despite a terrible state of affairs on the Russian war front, and a terrible despair at the Kremlin, about how the war is going. And this became, like viral and a lot of journalists actually believed that it was an actual FSB officer as it turned out we looked into that and we found, first of all, that the the language and the sort of the vocabulary didn't, didn't match with what we knew was the FSB way of writing. And then we found out that it was actually Ukrainian propaganda. That was pretty good because a lot of people believe it. So that's an example. It's something unavoidable and something that you should be you don't need to justify it, but you can put it in context when that's they're trying to prevent an invasion. And that's, that's why they do that. Um, I mean, today I just before this call, I almost fell for I always assume the worst. So I assume that something that I saw was Ukrainian or Ukrainian grandfather talking to camera for about three minutes about how he's, he was walking with a with a with a, with a shovel and talking to camera. About how he's going to dig trenches because he cannot afford for his three year old, green eyed granddaughter to be killed by Putin and he was addressing Putin directly and I thought this is such a slick Ukrainian propaganda thing. And then I decided to look him up so I did the face. of search for this guy, actually found him on v k on the Russian social media account with his son and with his granddaughter. So he's a real guy, but I assumed this was improper. It's Ukrainian propaganda, because it looks so slick. But again, what we're seeing now is non sovereign actress achieving almost the quality of influence and importance of relevance to this war as sovereign actors and we have to be open eyed about this.

Meera Selva

39:10

Thank you. Again, some of the videos have been so slick that you kind of raise the question are they were they pre prepared were they pre recorded are the actors and it's, yeah, I mean, yeah.

Christo Grozev

39:21

Many of them are. Just we shouldn't assume all of them are because my daughter can make a much slicker video, then a professional director could do 20 years ago. So that's that's

Meera Selva

39:34

Keisha mom in the room. Can

Speaker 3

39:38

you remember from your way? You said that July is especially important in this world? What do you think about the media coverage of the world so far?

Meera Selva

39:48

Countries What do you think it's the media coverage of the war?

Christo Grozev

39:52

The first days we saw I saw something that in European coverage that looked like false equivalence, and it was really dangerous. It was many media outlets reporting on both claims on both sides as if they were equivalent in value. We saw a lot of that technically we sold all of that in, in Bulgaria, in Hungary in countries that are generally trying to be understanding of the Russian side for economic or other reasons as well. We saw some of that in the more unexpected countries like in Ireland and even in some Nordic countries, but then went away so on at this point, I at this point, I really don't, I cannot criticize media for the way they're covering the war. Before the war started, there was this major blunder that I think a lot of media outlets allow themselves to be dragged into. It was clearly a psychological operation by the Biden administration to to put out a specific day and a specific plan of attack and a specific plan that they had seen as the only plan in media covered that as the as the gospel they said that is the date is the 16th. And it's four in the morning. And and the problem is that yes, I could understand why you couldn't fit on that information, if it looks credible, and comes from a credible source, but you have to understand that you're putting your name out there, and for many reasons, it might not happen. And you can be the reason why it doesn't happen like that, because a pre pre announced war is likely to be a different war or a change more. So you're essentially announcing something that may have been true yesterday, but it's no longer going to be true after you announce it. So a lot of media jumped into that mistake of discrediting themselves by a CAPTCHA, captioning all caps, all caps, announcement of the time and date of start of the war. But at this moment, I think the media is doing a very, very thorough job.

Meera Selva

41:53

Good for that. There's a question from Rosa who's congeners from Bangladesh, and who asked, Do you think there's a risk that journalists are kind of glorifying the war and militarization reporting under civilian armed resistance? And the kind of flipside of that is what happens when there's armed resistance fails, as it inevitably will in certain cases, you can't withstand this giant army forever on all fronts. And, you know, what are the dangers of the media? Almost then feel giving a sense that Ukrainian civilians have failed in, in their defense?

Christo Grozev

42:29

It's a very, very good question, and I don't even there to begin to give moral advice on that. I think each of us should make some very hard choices before we start covering the war. One is, where does your bias stretch? There's definitely going to be bias but does it stretch to just being anti war, which is an easy bias for most people to accept is it does it stretch to being entitled war and anti civilian damages. And if that's the only bias then you might actually start thinking about whether you want to encourage civilian defense civilian offense, because this is likely to cause more damages. It might actually punish the Russians but it might result in more damages. Maybe your biases that you're anti dictatorship and then the civilian the civilian cost is acceptable. We all need to make these choices before we start covering and then I don't know what the right answer is, but everybody would live with an already with the awareness of why they're coming in this way and the cost will be accepted to them.

Meera Selva

43:41

Thank you. Thank you. Perfect. Good question. I'm gonna go back to the audience, the online audience and this one has remaining anonymous, but would you be able to comment on on the cyber escalation of the conflict? Firstly, where do you see the key risks? And again, what's the most effective way for journalists getting to cover this document this

Christo Grozev

44:04

this is the most cyber space more than we've ever seen. We're still learning and we don't we I don't think we've seen the big cyber escalation yet. We do see examples of what we we published last week, an article where we had identified a whole depository of fake cloned websites have government offices in Ukraine that had been prepared by Russia for for deployment at some point in time, they only deployed maybe they will never be deployed because again, this this war is being rewritten. The plan is being rewritten and we don't know how it's being written. But there was going to be essentially a cloning of the Ukrainian official internet with virus laden clones of these websites. So that's an example of what what could happen and suddenly you think that you're going to the President's site of of the presence of Ukraine and and it will not be that we see a counter offensive at the moment where a lot of hackers are destroying Russian infrastructure, cyber infrastructure, we see we see Anonymous hackers claiming that they've taken down the Russian Russian Cosmos communication with Russian spy satellites. And then you see that the Russian Space Center's a space agency saying that that's fake. Now, if that were to be true, and we haven't yet looked into that, but I'm sure others have. But if that were to be true, this will be a major, major cyber impediment to Russia to continue the war as its as it wants to. What we're seeing is the country the counter cyber is interesting as well. Apparently because of the mobilization of the global non sovereign cyber actors in this case, and the threat that it poses to Russia. Russia has decided to move to analog communication as much as possible in order to prevent digital communication from being hacked. And what we're seeing now the downside of that is 1000s and 1000s of of intercepted phone calls between Russian military officers and soldiers. That is in the analog that is, it's the same technology as American police cars that you can listen to on a scanner, and you can listen to how Russian officers are complaining about getting food not getting water, not not getting enough air support. Some of them are crying on on camera on audio. So this is again, a unforeseeable result of the cyber escalation. It's being written so I can't tell you what the next escalation will be. But it's something that is extremely fascinating and you should watch for a new layer a new level of the cyber game or databases.

Meera Selva

46:53

And then the other aspect of this war is the eighth the kind of Sunday we saw in Syria, so people traveling to the region to fight and kind of armed militias, vigilantes. What intelligence Do you have, what's your sense of where they're coming from, what their numbers are, and if they're going to have any kind of give us any significance in their presence?

Christo Grozev

47:14

Well, I mean, you have the volunteers. Let's talk on each side. So first, there's the there's the official Russian Army. Corps, call them what you want, but they're abiding by some military rules of engagement that are much better for civilian protection than what we had in Donbass, where most of the offenders were. Were actually mercenaries or volunteers that were run by by Nigeria or FSB commanders. So the majority of the people deployed by Russia are Russian soldiers. What is really scary is the desire by by the mercenaries by the Wagner's of this world to also get a play part of the name of the game and yesterday we saw an actual recruitment ad by Wagner and the original production organization, which literally said we want to be part of the of the of the World Tour and Wagner because they call themselves the orchestra. is hiring new new fiddle players new new violinists for the new concert. So it was a open recruitment of mercenaries. Now, these are people that are not abiding to any any rules of engagement. So that will be something to watch out for in the next stage, and they're willing to apparently jump into the niche that is opened by the lack of success of the official army to show that they can do it better and that that is scary. On the western side, you have volunteers that are just joining the army. You have of course you will have the occasional vigilantes, but what you have now is a huge want to be army from your from the world that wants to go there and fight mostly on the Ukrainian side, some of them on the Russian side. And I think the smartest thing that Ukraine could do is what they're doing now. They're trying to formalize that into a foreign Legion. So that there is some system of rules of engagement being imposed on these people as opposed to these people just going to on tourist visas and started and started buying a gun locally and started fighting. So there'll be a harsh control on the Ukrainian side hopefully on who gets gets to fight.

Meera Selva

49:27

Thank you. Thanks very much. I'm good. Room to Robin.

Speaker 5

49:33

Hi, yeah, I'm robbing from the UK. And I wanted so much of the work that you guys have done in Bangkok is based around tech that kind of has only become available over the last 10 years and even more recently, specifically data gathering and verification tools which you've kind of developed and pioneered, and to what extent do you think dulness covering conflict and totalitarian regimes are in a better position than then you were historically? And I always say it just a case of kind of keeping up with bad actors, increasingly sophisticated bad actors.

Speaker 4

50:16

Fit well, in our own case, we have we've seen this as a multi layer computer game where we went one level and then we teach the bad actor how to upgrade themselves. I'll share a secret i i promise not use specifics, but yesterday I was exposed to a bad actor who is under arrest now. Were they found in his computer and report a report on an article that I had written about a an assassination in Europe or assassination attempt in Europe, and this bad actor had analyzed my report. And had come up with a list of suggestions for improvement of the assassination next time around. So essentially, what we do, while it exposes a lot of the bad actors activities, they actively use it as training manuals for improvement for next time. So the transparency that we've sold in the past. It also serves to make them more sophisticated. And to come back closer to your particular question. It's, it's true in the way they sophisticated they make more sophisticated, sophisticated efforts to disguise data to hide data or to poison data. I mean, hiding data is the best from our perspective, the best thing they should do because we have old versions of databases. When we get new versions of databases, and we see missing people or missing addresses. We know that's the interesting part because they decided to delete it but they learned from that because we use this trick a few times. So now they're trying to poison data. They just changed a little bit. The name they changed a little bit the photograph to make it difficult to orient or set oneself. So it's a multiplayer game. They improve themselves. But there's always a way around it. And again, with what is happening now, at least in this conflict we is we're getting the support of so many. So many new allies that hackers that we didn't use before, the hackers that previously, were doing things hacking for money, the hackers that actually had hacked us before, because they received money from the FSB. Are now leaking to us because they see that this is an evil war. So I think, I think the downside of being too transparent is being offset by the increasing number of allies who are willing to help us get data.

Meera Selva

52:46

Thanks very much. Thank you. And we're good to go. Because the the idea of poisoning the data and again, creating misinformation question from Paola in Chile.

Speaker 6

52:58

Hello, my name is Neha from TV and I would like to ask you about this decision to act preventively against disinformation warning about these false narratives or so called fake news instead of ignoring them or underestimated them or even worse under the audience. So I would like to ask you if you think this been partially successful or successful so far, and which lessons can we get from this? We as geologists

Christo Grozev

53:35

it's always a hard choice. We and for me, it has been a hard choice. Because I've seen a false narrative come about and I know that if I start commenting on it, first of all, it will give it prominence more people will pay attention. And there's a lot of people especially in Target, in non free societies, to whom it is difficult to accept that the government's are evil. It's just not a natural thing to accept. So the moment I expose it to both sides of the story to them there, many of them will be more likely to bind to the official narrative which is the misinformation there. So that's one reason to avoid it. But it's always difficult. It's tempting to address it head on and to say, Come on, this is obviously fake. And this is where it's leading you. The other problem is what we discussed a bit earlier. You may know what's going to happen. And you may prefer you may in certain conditions prefer to let it happen. Because if you publish the information beforehand, it will. It will teach them it will train them and again, this is not what journalists should do. But But when there is a a war at stake, it's so difficult to be only a journalist and sometimes you again, as I said, you decide where your boundaries are and then you act accordingly. But I don't have the answer to you. For me, it's everyday it's a question do I do this or do I do that and and and I've made wrong choices? I'll give you an example. I mean, i i There was a lot of intelligence information last week that there were, there was a column of there were three columns of tanks approaching the key of capital cube, and that in total, there were more than 400 times. And this was valid information. We we saw objectively, that the tanks were there. And everybody in Kiev, the government was freaking out. The tanks are coming. They're coming. They're coming. Please tell the world they're coming. And I was wondering whether it's the right thing to say or to to post it or not. And I did tweet, I said there's Intel evidence that techs are coming and the tanks stopped so they didn't arrive. And it kind of provided a an attack angle to people to discredit the information saying, Well, you see, the things didn't show up there. In the same way that a lot of people are saying the times were wrong did when they said the word was out on the 16. So it's a choice. It's a risky choice, and I don't have the answer.

Meera Selva

56:14

Thanks very much. I'll come to give you remember, I just want to go back to the audience and some questions about Russia and that kind of, again, what's happening on the ground in Russia question from Youngstown, who's asking what I'm interested in the implications of the crisis on Russian civil society. You mentioned the role of Kol in spreading the information with information. How do you see this playing afternoon to be increased censorship is what's going to midterm influence here.

Christo Grozev

56:42

Right. The warning we received last year was that the full dictatorship would occur about March of this year. It's apparently happening earlier. Makes you wonder if the Biden ministration misled us all. By saying that the war starting in February, maybe it was meant for March, and maybe he just forced was just an interesting question. But what was already known back then was that there was going to be a lot of dissent within even the elite that there was preparations going on. Back then. Among the syllabics among the power structures who don't want to be living in Korea or North Korea 2.1 So there was already some thinking which had never existed before about something like a cool something like a disobedience within the Selvig structures. Now, this is going to be accelerated many fold because of the incompetent way that the war is being waged because of the huge cost under this President. Of course, again, we've been talking I've mentioned non sovereign actors many times today, but the non sovereign actors that joined the sanction game are probably much more important to cause civil unrest in Russia than the sovereign actors. Apple banning the sale of iPhones in Russia is going to have 100 times bigger effect on the Russians perception of of the importance of sanctions and, and their loss. Then swift being disabled for Russian banks. And this is happening Netflix is saying they're not going to broadcast Russian channels, which means they'll be banned out of Russia. Netflix, Netflix, local partner in Russia. Is a company run by Putin's lover, Netflix is already taking a site here and so on and so forth. See, so the just try to see the fall of the follow up. Falling effect of all of these notes are in sections. Russia will be a different society in in two weeks, then then now they're a bit shell shocked. They don't see what's happening. They can't feel it. They still have old iPhones, but it will happen it will it will strike home to them. And the one thing that was a smart thing that put in invented in 2000 and ran with it until now was the understanding that he doesn't need to control all of the media in order to control Russia. He needed to control just enough to have the passive part of the population, sort of brainwashed, and he understood that he needs to have an island of free media. In order for the Intelligencer for the elite to have a go to place so they don't explode so that there was a safety valve. They closed those media in the last month and specifically yesterday, the last remnants, TV rain and Necco were closed. This means it's an explosive situation. It's not going to be it's not going to be tolerated. And even these, these journalists were until today until they were closed on these remaining media or trying to be polite to the state. They're no longer polite. They're calling it as it is. This is a completely different version than last week.

Meera Selva

59:57

I'm going to give you I know it's gonna come to you but actually sorry, I'm gonna go to relate to this just to jump to the audience. Chris from grippy belt Blatz, which is how do you think international organizations can best help Russian language independent media covering the Ukrainian war both in the immediate and also the long term? You know, what is what type of support is useful and what is not useful?

Christo Grozev

01:00:21

There are specific ways in which the global monopoly monopolist of internet infrastructure can help Google could introduce specific algorithms that would prevent blocking of websites that are run on their servers. I know that our version partner, the insider, a very brave version publication has been lobbying for Google to implement this, this new technology and Google has been sitting on its hands so internationalization can lobby actually for the Giants to implement such ways to to disable the blocking of content for US citizens more differently in organizations can actually help by offering opinion leaders in Russia and bloggers, refugee status and asylum in order for them to be to have at least an exit option or safety. That effect if they speak their truth, speak their mind, they will have a place to go to maybe give them a place now. So they can be speaking from the comfort of of a non of a free country. So there are many things that can be done, but all of them are linked to bypassing censorship and giving courage to people who have the truth but are maybe afraid of speaking.

Meera Selva

01:01:34

I think that seems the perfect moment to end this. And I'm sorry, we did get there are so many questions. I'm sorry. We couldn't get to them. But it's been an incredible hour really, vitally important, life changing. I think for many of us, Krista, thank you so much. For your time and we wish you all the very best with work. Thank you so much. Thinking of everybody risking everything out there and yeah, just with just thinking of you and doing what we can, which is not very much at the moment, but we really are. Thank you, Krista.

Christo Grozev

01:02:13

Thank you. Have a great day.

Meera Selva

01:02:14

Thank you audiences as well.

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