After Putin’s soldiers brutally massacred hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, you might expect the Russian government would do its utmost to keep the overwhelming visible evidence of those crimes hidden from the Russian people. What they are actually doing, however, is something significantly more sinister (if creative): Rather than censoring the images of tortured corpses strewn throughout the town and in mass graves, they’ve enlisted a cadre of established media personalities and pundits to bolster a wholly fictional alternative narrative, characterizing the video footage of all those dead bodies as part of an elaborate hoax devised by Ukrainian officials and their Western allies to “frame” Russian soldiers as war criminals.
As Mackey writes:
To sustain the deception that the killings in Bucha happened after Russia’s four-week occupation ended, news broadcasts and discussion programs have rigorously avoided mentioning that the government’s story has been contradicted by drone footage, satellite images, and witness testimony. But the most surprising element of the coordinated effort to keep the Russian public from learning the truth is that the state television channels most Russians rely on for their news have reported incessantly on the video — showing dead bodies lining a street in the Kyiv suburb hour after hour.
Russian viewers, instead of being discouraged from seeing videos that implicate their soldiers in war crimes, have instead been forced to watch the brutal images of dead bodies lining the street of Bucha over and over — but always accompanied by conspiratorial claims that the victims were either actors, pretending to be dead, or people who were killed by Ukrainian forces after Russian forces left. In most cases, the video of more than a dozen bodies sprawled on the pavement along Bucha’s Yablonska Street was also stamped with the word “fake,” written in red letters in English and Russian.
The images of the massacred civilians along Bucha’s Yablonsky street, for example, are accompanied by an admonishment delivered by a state television anchor for viewers to “pay attention,” as he points out (in a matter-of-fact tone of voice) that one of the bodies in the video footage can be seen raising its arm (the implication being that an “actor” is portraying the dead body; the Russian anchor refers to him as an “extra”). In another segment of the same clip the same Russian anchor points to another body that appears to sit upright as the car passes.
As Mackey explains, the reality is that the first body does not “move.” What is seen as moving is actually a droplet of water on the window of the cameraman’s vehicle. The other body’s “motion” is actually a distortion created by the vehicle’s convex rear-view mirror as the vehicle moves past. Mackey references open-source investigators who reviewed the video. The Russian claims had been debunked almost immediately, but because Twitter is no longer accessible in Russia the vast majority of Russians are only aware of the state-sanctioned broadcast.
As Mackey notes, the Russian propaganda effort is constantly shifting (a tactic deliberately intended to confuse viewers and thereby instill a sense of hopelessness and resignation). In this regard, Olga Skabeyeva’s face is well-known to Russian television viewers. A trusted Putin ally, she has been enlisted as one of the primary faces of Russia’s revisionist history, claiming on state television that the bodies in Bucha—those who were not actors, at least—were actually killed by Ukrainian forces for their failure to resist the Russians. Mackey cites the reporting of the BBC’s Francis Scarr, who tweeted about Skabeyeva’s ”alternative facts” presentations.
It’s important to remember that as a prominent state TV anchor, Skabeyeva enjoys the same type of reputation in Russia as many well-known news anchors in the U.S. As Mackey notes, as seen in the clip above, the video footage of Bucha’s victims is nearly always emblazoned or boundaried with the word “Fake” as it is presented to Russian viewers.
Mackey cites another familiar staple of Russian state TV called “Time Will Tell,” in which a well-known Russian host helpfully points out that the town of “Bucha” was specifically singled out to perpetrate the “provocation” since U.S. president Joe Biden had previously referred to Putin as a “butcher.” But even as this preposterous theory sank in for its credulous viewership, (as Mackey points out) another well-known pundit chimed in with the assertion that “British” agents were responsible for staging the incident.
(If the repartee between these Russian media apparatchiks seems vaguely familiar, it should. It’s the same general type of multi-person bantering format used in Fox & Friends).
Mackey also reports that a wholly new television show has appeared on Russian state TV in the last month: titled “Antifake,” it is ostensibly devoted in its entirety to “debunking” Western claims of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. As Mackey observes however, it appears to been lost on producers that the show is itself part of a “hoax.” Among the panoply of lies perpetrated on this particular show was the assertion that Ukrainian video of the bodies was recorded later than it actually was, in order to foster the impression that Ukrainians used the time between the Russians’ departure and their own arrival to “stage” a hoax. Again, the fact that these claims were debunked within minutes on Western media remains almost wholly unknown to the Russians who view this propaganda.
And as Mackey notes, all of this is standard practice for Russia, echoing similar tactics it employed when it defended the actions of its murderous Syrian allies in 2018.
[T]he Russian government’s response to the evidence that its soldiers committed atrocities in Bucha echoes its response to the evidence that its Syrian allies did so in 2018. Russia has a long track record of promoting what are essentially versions of the same conspiracy theory — that whatever crime its government is implicated in was actually an elaborate hoax set up by its enemies.
Having lived under the yoke of communism and its constant barrage of state propaganda for decades, it might be expected that the Russian people would be cynical to these efforts. But under Putin those techniques were taken to an entirely new level, utilizing the tools of modern technology, multiple sources, and ceaseless repetition. The Rand Corporation calls it the “Firehose of Falsehood” propaganda model:
We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”2
Contemporary Russian propaganda has at least two other distinctive features. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency.
Again, if that seems familiar, it should. It is the same model of continuous, shameless, and repetitive propaganda employed by Donald Trump, most visibly when he was using Twitter. The idea is to follow one outrageous assertion with another—and then another—so that few will spend the time critically analyzing any of them. What is truthful soon ceases to matter when you can simply overwhelm your audience with lies piled up on more lies.
In March, Steven Zeitchik of the Washington Post interviewed Russian-American filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin about the sheer ubiquity of propaganda in Russia and why it is so effective at this particular time. Pozdorovin observes:
I don’t think Americans fully understand what’s been fed to Russians about the U.S. and the West for literally the past decade. It’s been an information war — a totally one-sided information war — and it has been waged so fully and artfully that it’s made a lot of what’s happening now preemptively possible. What this information war boils down to is this: “The West is completely against us and trying to stifle and destroy our way of life.” It’s a simple message. But people are told this over and over, in so many different ways. [...]
The Western sanctions back in 2014 over the war in the Donbas? An attempt to destroy the Russian way of life. The backlash to the Russian disinformation campaign in the 2016 U.S. election? An attempt to destroy the Russian way of life. Russian-doping punishments at the Olympics? Same thing. You name it, if it has involved Russia and the West, it was the West trying to destroy the Russian way of life. [...]
If you ingrain this message of victimhood so completely, what it does is when there’s any kind of [President Vladimir] Putin aggressive action, as there is now, a lot of people in Russia don’t see it as aggressive — they just see it as standing up for their way of life. That’s why the nuclear threat computes.
For anyone who might—in their Western perspective—expect the benumbed Russian people to muster any significant popular opposition to Putin’s war of choice, or for anyone who expects Russian losses on the ground to materially sway that public opinion, the clear subtext of Pozdorovin’s advice (as illustrated by Mackey’s reporting here)—seems clear: It’s not likely.
