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Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath. Trump's comments at an Ohio rally set the stage for a did he or didn't he debate in the press. He is often giving the wink wink nod that denies the thing that he says that he's saying.
From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Onger. Also on the show, the Kremlin is likely cooking up fake journalists to spread fake stories about corruption in Ukraine. The Russians have this idea that if you just flood the zone with this stuff, it doesn't matter if it's true. It's just to create noise that can drown out the truth.
Plus, a glimpse into an occupied region of Ukraine where voting in Russia's so-called presidential election often involved... Election officials coming into people's home with a ballot box and accompanied by a soldier carrying a machine gun. It's all coming up after this.
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At a rally in Ohio last weekend, Donald Trump made some threats and promises with regard to the state of the auto industry. Or did he? If you're listening, President Xi, those big monster car manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now, we're going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line. And you're not going to be able to sell those cars. If I get elected...
Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath. That's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country. That'll be the least of it. The Biden campaign immediately condemned Trump for inciting political violence. Trump responded that he was merely referring to the economy.
For days, the discourse was consumed with the, it's a blue dress, no, it's a gold dress, like quarrel. He was obviously talking about the auto sector. The mainstream media took the remarks out of context. What I heard was a continuation of the same rhetoric, the same endorsement of political violence that we've seen from Donald Trump. I think what he was saying at the rally reflects what most of the American people understand and believe, a bloodbath in the auto industry. This is violence, violence, violence.
While you may be tempted to ignore the latest viral moment, there will be plenty more till November, we think now is as good a time as any to review our notes from the last eight years of watching Trump do politics.
because not only do we need to hear what he's saying, we need to remember how to listen to him. Jennifer Murcia is a scholar of rhetoric and professor of communications at Texas A&M University and the author of the book Demagogue for President, The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump. Lately, she says, his language has intensified.
It's a disjointed speech. He's sort of moving from topic to topic, stream of consciousness style. So it's difficult as an audience member to know if he's threatening the U.S. as a whole, the auto industry, the economy. But in the end, I think it doesn't matter because he's
In all instances, it's anti-democratic. You don't run for political power by making threats. In a recent interview with Aaron Ruppar in public notice, you said that Trump's used many of the same strategies for years. In your book, you analyze half a dozen of them. Can we start with a tactic you call reification? Sure. Reification is treating people as objects.
It comes from the Latin word for res, which means thing. So you reify when you treat people as dangerous objects that have less rights than real people do. In 2016, Trump called immigrants snakes. They were objects. They were reified as less than human.
What he's done this time is he calls them vermin. And vermin are not just animals. They are objects of disgust. And crossing the line from treating people as objects to objects of disgust is noteworthy in the history of genocidal rhetoric. The classic example is, of course, Hitler calling Jews vermin. In Rwanda, we saw the same kind of reification leading to genocide.
Let's move on to some of the other strategies you've analyzed. There's ad populum, and there's also American exceptionalism. You say they work in tandem to explain his appeal to his followers. Ad populum is appealing to the wisdom of the crowd, his crowd. Donald Trump constantly praises them. Now we have some special people here.
You know, the special people are all of you. Ad Populum fundamentally boils down to praising the people who love you. That's right. American exceptionalism is something that he claims to have and that he shares with his followers.
American exceptionalism historians and political scientists would tell you that America is just different. We have a certain set of values and ways of being that just make us fundamentally different from other nations. American exceptionalism can be seen as a goal. Reagan's city on a hill is a sort of classic example of American exceptionalism. But when Donald Trump uses it, it's very different. He uses it to say,
He uses it to speak about himself personally. He says, On June 14th, Flag Day, my birthday. As the apotheosis of American exceptionalism, he is a winner. He boils down American exceptionalism to the question of winning or losing. And we're going to be unpacking that a bit more in a couple of minutes. First, I want to hit another strategy, one of our favorites, Paralypsis.
It is colloquially understood as, I'm not saying, I'm just saying. The translation in ancient Greek is to leave to the side. It's a way to say two things at once. Like, for instance, we'll just leave to the side the criticisms we might lodge against my opponent for being an alcoholic. It's not saying the thing that he's actually saying. But how does Trump use it?
So he gave a speech in Ohio where he had the governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, come up on stage. She said a couple of nice things about Trump. And then after she left the stage, Trump said, And you're not allowed to say it, so I will not. You know, you're not allowed to say she's beautiful, so I'm not going to say that. I will not say it. And that works for Trump in a couple of ways. One, it's funny and, you know, his audience loves to laugh.
Two, it makes it appear as though he is a real truth teller because he's telling you this obvious truth, even though he knows that's not politically correct. If he's willing to say this, then of course he will say all kinds of other truths. And it also lets you feel connected to him. It feels like you know the real Trump.
But he uses that same strategy when he incites violence, when he circulates rumor, conspiracy. And Louisville was at a rally and he said, Don't hurt him. Don't hurt him. See, if I say go get him, I get in trouble with the press, the most dishonest human beings in the world. The rally attendees beat up the protesters. The protesters filed lawsuits against Trump.
The judge allowed the case, but when it was decided, they used the transcript of what Trump said. He said, don't hurt them, even though he clearly didn't mean it. So the case was dismissed. And that's how plausible deniability works. There's ambiguity and that perhaps he didn't mean what it appears that he meant.
Going back to the question of bloodbath, did he really mean that there would be a bloodbath if he's not elected? Or was he using language metaphorically? As he did in the speech prior to the January 6th insurrection, you suggest that this use of paralipsis actually kind of reveals his whole rhetorical strategy? Yes.
It does. To me, it's such a great example because he tells you that he knows he's doing it. Donald Trump is often saying two things at once. He is often giving the wink wink nod that denies the thing that he says that he's saying.
Now I want to return to this business of being a winner or a loser. And it's in the context of Biden's rhetoric. In Virginia this past February, at a retreat for House Democrats, Biden called Trump a loser. Quote, in 2023, we won every close race. When voters had a choice between what we stand for and what Trump and MAGA Republicans stand for, we win. And he's been repeating that over and over. But the legal path...
just took Trump back to the truth, that I'd won the election and he was a loser. The only loser I see is Donald Trump. He's a loser. You said you were actually waiting for the day when Biden finally would call Trump a loser. Autocrats seize power over nations by telling the nation that there is massive chaos and that they alone can fix it. They are strong autocrats.
It's an act. And so Donald Trump is constantly trying to show the nation how strong he is, constantly building himself up as a winner. He has a long track record of losing, but he's convinced his followers he's an authentic winner. That's right. And being a winner is important to those followers.
What scholars in political psychology have found is that Donald Trump supporters uniquely have what's called a right-wing authoritarian personality. They've been studying right-wing authoritarianism as a personality since World War II. And what they found is that those folks are very defensive of group norms, very attached to hierarchy.
do not like change. They want things to be simplified, black and white, and look to a strong leader. And so when Biden points out, actually, Donald Trump is pretty weak. He's not very healthy. He can't run a marathon. He can't lift weights. It seems childish to point out that he's a loser and indecorous. People wouldn't normally do that in American politics.
But this isn't a normal moment in American politics. So how many people in the electorate actually have right-wing authoritarian tendencies?
Scholars estimate that about 40%, not all of the 40% are actively using that to make decisions, but that their tendencies can be activated as a response to threat. Status threat, hierarchy threat, group norm threat. And you wonder like, why are we doing this culture war stuff?
Like, who cares if a transgender person endorses a beer product? Like, you know, is that really a thing? But it is a thing for activating right-wing authoritarianism because it's destabilizing for how they understand the world. So...
Aside from pointing out that Trump is a loser, what would Biden's most effective rhetorical strategies be? For Biden voters, the argument is that Donald Trump was a calamitous failure of a president.
He said, I don't want to be presidential. That's boring. I want to be modern day presidential is what he called it. He wanted to be outrageous, to attract our attention, to polarize us so that we were always arguing about him. That was all that mattered to Trump was that we were talking about him. And he constantly offered a hero narrative, steeped himself in the language of exceptionalism and us versus them and so on.
All presidents use a hero narrative. They all say that the world is in crisis and I'm the right hero for the moment. Joe Biden has an opportunity to be another leader like that. When he took office, he promised in his inaugural address to defend the Constitution and defend democracy.
He used the word democracy 11 times in that speech. That's a heroic moment. You observed that Joe Biden has framed this election as democracy versus autocracy. And Trump has had to reckon with that, which you say is really unusual. He is a master at controlling the frames that we use to talk about things. He's being investigated. It's a witch hunt.
He frames his opposition, they're crooked. He's excellent at frame warfare. Joe Biden has since 2020 defined his whole motive for running for president as his goal is to save democracy from autocracy. Donald Trump has stepped into that frame and is arguing within it now. So at first,
He's saying, right, democracy is not important. He said the role of the president is to defend the border, not democracy, not the Constitution.
Then he gets criticism for that. And so now he is agreeing with the frame that says that it's democracy versus autocracy, that fascism is a threat in America. But he says that Joe Biden is actually the threat. They're willing to violate the U.S. Constitution at levels never seen before. Joe Biden is a threat to democracy. Which is classic Trump.
It is. So accusing the accuser, it's a figure of speech called tu quoque. It's an appeal to hypocrisy, saying you have no standing to enter this debate. You are not a credible source. In fact, anything you accuse me of doing is actually what you do. So final words in this rhetorical arena. We've gone through a bunch of Trump's strategies. What can be Biden's response?
I would say framing this as a moment of choosing democracy versus autocracy and then not holding back from pointing out that Donald Trump's a loser. Thank you so much. It's been my pleasure. Thank you. Jennifer Murcia is a scholar of rhetoric and a professor of communication at Texas A&M University and author of the book Demagogue for President, The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.
Coming up, the fake journalists employed in Putin's propaganda war. This is On The Media. This episode is brought to you by Progressive. Most of you aren't just listening right now. You're driving, cleaning, and even exercising. But what if you could be saving money by switching to Progressive?
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Hello again, WNYC. It's Andrea Bernstein. I co-hosted the podcast Trump Inc. This August, I'm guest hosting The Law According to Trump, a special series on amicus from Slate. Long before this year's historic Supreme Court term, Donald Trump created a blueprint for shielding himself from legal accountability on everything from taxes to fraud to discrimination. Listen now on amicus as we explore Trump's history of bending the law to his will. Search amicus wherever you're listening.
This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger.
More than two years into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, U.S. political support appears to be showing signs of fatigue. The Biden administration is putting pressure on Congress to pass further aid, but the effort has now stalled. $60 billion of assistance for Ukraine, which sailed through the Senate last month, has been collecting dust in the House. Some Democrats want to see it uncoupled from Israeli aid, and some Republicans want Ukraine to pay it back.
I'm all in for helping Ukraine, but we have to do it in a form of a loan. I think it will get more public support back home. This is coming as Congress is trying to pass a funding package before Friday's deadline. This could delay a vote on Ukraine aid even further.
It seems as though the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, isn't going to bring new Ukraine aid to the House floor until April after both Easter and Passover. The fact of the matter is for the last couple of months, the United States has been failing Ukraine. And thanks to the inability of the Republican majority House to bring up Ukraine,
This protracted stalemate is the culmination of months of GOP infighting, stoked in part by Congress's hard right flank. We're getting easily a half a trillion dollars in the hole for the Ukraine conflict by the time this is done. J.D. Vance, Republican senator from Ohio, on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast in December. Why? So that one of Zelensky's ministers can buy a bigger yacht? Kiss my ass.
Steve, it's not happening. This claim about yachts and officials close to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is completely bogus. It's circulated on social media since November. Stephen Lee Myers, a disinformation reporter for the New York Times, suspected a Russia propaganda operation. When he went looking for the origin of the yacht story, he found a fishy article by a man named Shehzad Nasir.
He couldn't find much on this guy except for a profile on X, which identified him as a journalist with Emirates 24-7, an English-language news outlet in Dubai. The first thing to say is I don't think he exists, but he's a character who appears online. There is video of him, but he appeared in a YouTube video last year claiming to have a big scoop online.
that there are these two yachts for sale. Lucky me and my legacy. According to this agreement I have managed to acquire, this vessel was purchased for almost 25 million dollars. Now here's where it gets interesting.
and claimed that he had a document purchase agreement proving that two cronies of Zelensky's had purchased these two yachts for $75 million. It appeared on YouTube and then began to spread on social media. And from social media, it was picked up in various outlets. And then eventually it ends up in Russian state media, which is then reported by others. Each time amplifying this information,
accusation as though it were fact without doing any of the investigation into it. It turns out that these yachts actually weren't for sale, but it had entered the ecosystem and people apparently like the senator, you know, end up hearing it and then repeating it as fact. People make up dumb stories on the internet all the time. Clearly this one serves a pro-Russian narrative, but how do we know that this story was Russian propaganda?
It's an excellent question. And there are researchers who specialize in tracking this stuff. There's a team at Clemson University, the media forensics hub, that looks at this and had, in fact, wrote a long report about Shehzad Nasir. But often you don't know, to be honest. Usually you see the pattern in the outlets that pick it up.
also in the sites that amplify it. Often these sites have no following. They're created specifically to float these ideas.
This bogus story even made its way all the way into the halls of Congress. Here's Republican Tom Tillis of North Carolina on the Senate floor last month calling out his colleague J.D. Vance for referencing the lie. They've heard somebody say that if we pass this bill that we're all going to go ride to Kiev with buckets full of money and let oligarchs buy yachts.
It's alarming that it was cited multiple times by senators, but it's not so clear that it really shaped the debate around greenlighting more aid for Ukraine, right?
Well, it's hard to measure sometimes, but the fact that it's able to reach that level in the public discourse is already a success. The same is true in Europe. These narratives, I mean, we focus on the ones in the United States, but they're all over European media as well, in German and French. Some of these characters that I've followed and have written about are...
are also appearing in other languages across Europe. One of the other characters that you wrote about in your piece is a journalist in Egypt named Mohammed Al Alawi. Could you explain to me who this guy is? So last August, a video appeared on a YouTube channel that had very few followers. I think at the time, maybe nine. A man introduces himself as an investigative journalist.
And, you know, again, he doesn't seem to actually exist, but outlines a similar story describing this big scoop he had uncovered. In this case, Zelensky's, president of Ukraine's mother-in-law,
has purchased a villa in El Juna, which is a resort on the Red Sea in Egypt. And in fact, he includes great details that it's near a villa that's owned by Angelina Jolie, showed contracts that purported to be the purchase agreement for this villa for nearly $5 million, suggesting that this is, again, some kind of corruption, that he's hiding, you know, assets. Just a couple days later, a Nigerian outlet picked up
picked it up. What was going on there? It took a long time to trace this and I turned to some researchers and asked them for help in trying to trace how this rumor, as it were, spread. And it seems to have started at a newspaper in Nigeria, which exists, called Punch, and sponsored content.
The article carried the byline of Arthur Nakono, and it quotes a political scientist who talked about the fact that this was obviously corruption. The political scientist's name is Abdul Rahman al-Abbasi. And the curious thing is that neither of these two appear anywhere except Russia.
in accounts related to this story. The fact that neither of these two seem to exist should be a red flag. But, you know, again, it's a paid article, which Punch later took down. But when I reached out to them, they didn't respond to try to explain how this had happened. Just a day after Punch released its piece, a Dutch activist started helping spread the claim on X.
Sonia Van Den Ende, she's a fairly prominent political activist in the Netherlands. She's previously appeared on propaganda outlets of the Kremlin, taking a very pro-Russian position. She also served as an election observer in the occupied parts of Ukraine during last year's parliamentary election. So this is somebody who's obviously very close to Russia. She was the first to post this on X, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
but soon after that it began appearing in other languages.
On X in French and Romanian. And English, yeah. And English. And then a little over a week after our friend Mohamed Al-Alawi first posted to YouTube, it finally made its way to Russian state television. This is what the researchers called narrative laundering. A seed is planted somewhere, and not immediately because that might be too suspicious. But once it's reported online in several places, including in Russian social media sites,
The state media will pick it up as though this has been, you know, a reported fact and fact-checked already. But then, on X...
A member of the Egyptian family that owned the development that Zelensky's mother-in-law allegedly bought a villa in said on X, no, this sale never happened. And so the story stopped there. It did. These kinds of narratives, if you do a minimum amount of work, are usually pretty easy to debunk. That's the end of it, usually. But this case, in particular, took a different twist.
So tell me what happened. A few months later, it was in December, there was a new video that appeared on YouTube, two in fact, on a channel that had just been created. And it had this shocking report that Muhammad Al-Alawi had been killed. Dun-dun! Exactly. And then from there, it showed the scene of the crime that you couldn't really make anything out. But then it shows a man who claimed to be Muhammad's brother, Ahmed,
And, you know, Ahmed looking very distressed, his, you know, had his hand over his eyes looking down so that his face couldn't be seen. Talks about how his family is afraid. He tried to fill in some of the obvious holes in the story that his brother was an investigative reporter, but this was his first big assignment, which is maybe why we couldn't find any other record of this supposed journalist. And that, you know, the police...
told the family that he was beaten to death on the orders of Ukraine. And then once again, in almost the same way, this story began to go viral again, sort of gave the old lie a new life. You mentioned one of the obscure websites that picked it up last year. Tell me about that site. What made it interesting to you?
It appeared on this site called El Mastakbal, which is a name that is very similar to an actual news organization based in Lebanon that appeared to be mirroring or mimicking the site or at least confusing people, which is another tactic you often see. And then as the story spread from there, again amplified on social media accounts, people were dropping the subtleties of mysterious circumstances and just saying he'd been killed by the Ukrainians.
And that was picked up by people who should have known better. Like who? The Middle East Monitor, which is a nonprofit organization in London, which, you know, tracks news from the region. There was a journalist who used to work in Moscow for the Telegraph who picked it up and reported it as though it were
fact on his site simply were amplifying these reports of a murder even though it took and it took a few days the Egyptians came out and said that there had been no murder Egypt's Ministry of the Interior said there were no reports or evidence that anyone resembling the man in the video had been subjected to harm exactly they say that at the heart of any good conspiracy theory is a kernel of truth
There have been credible corruption scandals among Ukrainian officials, right? This is a problem that President Zelenskyy campaigned on rooting out in 2019. It's a problem that the European Union has said it's considering when trying to decide whether it will admit Ukraine into the EU. Last month...
Reuters and other outlets reported on a thwarted fraudulent arms deal featuring Ukrainian defense minister officials and employees of a Ukrainian weapons company. These particular examples may be made up in an effort to exaggerate the problem, but there has been corruption in Ukraine in the past, right? Yeah, and in every, especially Russia, but in every former Soviet republic after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
It's a rampant problem. Absolutely. But as you just pointed out, Zelensky won the presidency largely on the idea that he would fight it. And he has taken steps to do that. It's no secret that the Russian government is well trained in propaganda. But you wrote that its campaign alongside this invasion of Ukraine was unique because
for constructing, quote, a narrative built online around a fictitious character embellished with seemingly realistic detail and a plot twist worthy of Netflix.
Is this a new disinformation tactic or is there a history of, you know, made up journalists sharing made up stories who get made up killed along the way? That seems pretty unique. The circumstances in this case, as one of the researchers I talked to said, they've never brought a character back before. But having said that, you know, obviously going back to Soviet times,
planting false stories in foreign newspapers is an old tactic. They did it during the civil rights movement in America. Famously, in a letter to the editor in India, they planted the rumor that the CIA had created AIDS, and that eventually spread extensively around the world to the point that some people still believe that that's true. You know, what's changed, I think, even just in the last decade
couple years since the war began is they now have new tools to quickly disseminate information, obviously online, but also with artificial intelligence. They can create entire websites. They can write these articles more convincingly, I think, than they could before and at scale. That said, I'm a little wary of overstating Russia's ability to influence American discourse.
If we go back to the Steve Manning example from the beginning of our conversation, you described it as a success. I mean, getting a U.S. senator on one of the biggest right-wing podcasts to repeat a lie, that's a win. Yeah. But there are likely many other Russian disinfo stories happening.
haven't really been amplified in the same way. So how do we talk about Russian disinformation without overstating its effect on American news or American politics? That's a great question, and I wrestle with this a lot. And, you know, the fact is it doesn't have to have an enormous impact. It doesn't have to tip an election or tip a vote in the Senate. It simply has to enter the discourse.
You know, even the way you phrased the question about corruption in Ukraine is kind of a reflection of the fact that the narrative has succeeded. You referred to my question about corruption in Ukraine. I'm not trying to suggest that there's credible evidence that like a large portion of Western aid is definitely going to be used unethically or dishonestly or illegally. I guess I just I don't want to suggest to listeners that, you know,
There isn't a well-documented history of corruption in Ukraine.
No, I get it. I wasn't picking on you or anything. But, I mean, you pointed out that Zelensky ran on a platform to fight corruption. So obviously it is a problem. I mean, your question is totally valid. The Russians are playing on that narrative. And believe me, the Russians know corruption. I mean, you could frame it like saying Zelensky came in to fight corruption. So they're using it to show that he's a hypocrite. If you start it that way, rather than saying Ukraine has a history of corruption...
then it's like, aha, well, maybe this villa wasn't true, but he must have other villas. And in fact, we didn't even mention it, but there have been reports he bought Goebbels' villa outside of Berlin, that he bought a place in Vero Beach, Florida. I mean, none of these are true, and obviously at a certain point you're like, how many villas does this guy own, supposedly? The Russians have this idea that if you just flood the zone with this stuff, it doesn't matter if it's true or if it's fact-checked. It's just to create...
noise that, you know, can drown out the truth. And, you know, truth is subtle. Usually it's never black and white. You know, the question of corruption in Ukraine is very much like that. You know, it's something that they have worked on and they're trying to get better at. And of course, you know, it's all been knocked sideways by this war. Stephen, thank you very much. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Stephen Lee Myers is a disinformation reporter with the New York Times. His latest piece is titled From Russia, Elaborate Tales of Fake Journalists. Coming up, Russia's brutal hearts and minds campaign in Ukraine. This is On the Media.
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Hello again, WNYC. It's Andrea Bernstein. I co-hosted the podcast Trump Inc. This August, I'm guest hosting The Law According to Trump, a special series on amicus from Slate. Long before this year's historic Supreme Court term, Donald Trump created a blueprint for shielding himself from legal accountability on everything from taxes to fraud to discrimination. Listen now on amicus as we explore Trump's history of bending the law to his will. Search amicus wherever you're listening.
This is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This weekend, Russians lined up to cast their votes in a so-called presidential election. President Vladimir Putin declaring he's been re-elected for a fifth term after only token oppositions.
It certainly wasn't a contest. It was stage managed so that Vladimir Putin was the only real candidate on the ballot. Russian officials say he won the election with 87% of the vote. Western countries have condemned the election as neither free nor fair. The US has just called it incredibly undemocratic. In Russian state media, a different story. Interviews with election observers saying the vote had gone smoothly with no violations.
and boasts about Putin as an example of how it's done. We saw pictures of happy voters queuing up in the four regions of Ukraine illegally occupied by Russia since the full-scale invasion in 2022. Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Teperyshchia.
Authorities say that Putin won huge victories in the territories that he now calls New Russia, 88% in Kherson, 93% in Zaporizhia, 94% in Luhansk, and more than 95% in Donetsk.
Early voting in these regions started in late February, and according to reporting in the Washington Post, election officials accompanied by armed soldiers went door-to-door threatening repercussions for those who refused to vote. Those tactics were a replay of Russia's illegal 2022 referendum on whether those four occupied territories wanted to be annexed by Russia.
State TV showed scripted and staged celebrations, and some retail politicking. But this is the reality of what the U.S. and allies today called a sham: a soldier precedes a poll worker carrying a box of ballots, the occupied literally voting at gunpoint.
Across the four regions, between 87 and 99 percent voted to be annexed. It was obviously a fairly farcical way to conduct a vote. Sean Walker is The Guardian's Central and Eastern Europe correspondent.
He led an investigation into life under Russian occupation in Zaporizhia. Through dozens of interviews and leaked papers from the Kremlin, he traced the battle for hearts and minds in Zaporizhia, including the effort to get out the vote.
The first pictures of the voting, which is election officials coming into people's home with a ballot box and accompanied by a soldier in full camouflage equipment carrying a machine gun, kind of tells you everything you need to know about this elections. You went to Zaporizhia, which is the capital of an area that is largely Russian-occupied, but this capital is not Russian.
What did the Russian army do to local leaders when they took each town they took in the Zaporizhia region? Generally, what happened was that the army and the FSB would detain the head of the town and make a combination of an offer and a threat.
"You should work with us, you should declare that you are in support of Russian power, otherwise bad things will happen." I met with the mayor of a small town called Molochansk, which had about 12,000 residents prior to the war.
The mayor there, who's Irina Lipka, told me that, you know, for the first few weeks, there were some soldiers around. They could see that there was a military presence, but the Russians were busy in the bigger towns. And essentially, they just carried on working, trying to get food to people. You know, the Ukrainian flag was still flying outside the council. And there was this strange double power period where the Ukrainian mayor was in charge and the Russian army was sort of stationed on the outskirts.
And then after a few weeks, the Russians got around to working out what to do with these smaller towns. So she was essentially kidnapped from her office. Not just her, but her driver, her secretary, her assistants. And she was held in an airless cell for 24 days. The way she told this story, she was taken upstairs every night for interrogations. There was a group of guys in balaclavas, and they would basically say, we want you to publicly say you're going to work with us.
She had no access to the internet or to a telephone or to news, so she had no idea what was happening. And these Russians said to her, "Look, Kyiv has fallen, Ukraine has fallen, the whole country is controlled by Russia now. You've got nothing to lose by working with us. But if you reject us, we will send you to Siberia, you'll be put on trial for anti-Russian agitation, and you can spend the rest of your life in prison, if you like."
Your article quotes her saying, I had hallucinations. I started hearing my children's voices. She was thinking, what would I do if my son was tortured in front of me? She was hearing the sound of torture all around her in this jail after torture.
After 24 days, she was released and then she fled for the Ukrainian-controlled territory. Eventually they realized they weren't going to be able to turn her. They told her they would release her if she signed a couple of papers promising that she wouldn't do anything anti-Russian,
which she signed. She said, I figured that I would just stay there and live quietly. But after two weeks, she said she realized that she just couldn't live under this occupation. And so she left. And she's now sitting in this office with some of her staff, which is in one room of a college in the city of Zaporizhia, where you have a whole bunch of these exiled towns.
Mayors in exile. Exactly. If the local mayors didn't agree to cooperate, the Russians would find someone else. But who would they find?
Yeah, this is one of the very interesting parts of the occupation. And it's really a repeat of the Russian playbook from Crimea 10 years ago, where in the majority of public facing roles, they will find local Ukrainian collaborators. So the mayors, the people who appear on TV, the people who talk about their plans for the region, they're usually Ukrainians, anyone from former politicians to completely random people. But then when
When you dig a bit deeper, you see the people that are really making the decisions, the people that are rounding up the so-called hostile elements are brought in from Russia. So the FSB security services, the investigative committee, which is a very powerful body that in some ways a bit like the FBI in the US, police,
senior judges, all of these people are coming from different regions of Russia. And this is not always public. Some of these figures do appear publicly. But what we did as part of our investigation was to sort of run through some of the stories on the new local propaganda news sites that the Russians have set up and to run the photos of people that appeared there through facial recognition software
So whenever we saw people who were from the investigative committee or from the FSB, we could never trace them to Ukraine and we could often trace them to Russia. You wrote about the deportations and kidnappings in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. There was an official deportation policy between July 2022 and May 2023. What did it look like?
You have these very chilling videos where you see a military guy with his face fully covered standing at a military checkpoint talking to somebody. Often quite an elderly person, middle-aged woman, middle-aged man, pensioners even.
basically reading them from a piece of paper that you've been accused of being a threat to Russian organs of power. The punishment is you're being deported from the territory of Zaporizhia region. And then they send these people to walk across the front line without any possessions. And, you know, if they're lucky, they made it to Ukrainian controlled territory.
And the Russians were proud of this policy. They made the videos public, perhaps partly to scare other people into being quiet. When the Russian-installed governor of Zaporizhia region was talking about this policy a few weeks ago,
he actually portrayed it as a humanitarian measure. He said, well, if you have a woman with three kids and she doesn't support Russian rule, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to kill her? We decided the best thing to do to avoid bloodshed would be simply to deport these people. Amazing way to talk about your own war crimes. This policy stopped in the summer of 2023.
not necessarily out of any notions that it may be inhumane, but because they said, you know, we're losing a valuable resource here. It would be much better for us to arrest them and use them in prisoner exchanges. You say that the Russians have really caused huge scars by doing this. It's a story that often gets lost in the military reporting and the talk about territory.
the psychological scars that this leaves. Because yeah, you have clear cases of people who collaborated, perhaps put Ukrainian lives at risk, and by Ukrainian law are criminals. And then you have clear cases of people who staunchly supported Ukraine, maybe survived torture or came out to protest during the occupation. And then you have a lot of people in the middle,
And this will be a particularly tricky question if and when Ukraine regains control of sort of where are those blurry lines between surviving and collaborating? What is a crime? What is something that can be morally judged? And what is a totally normal action for a person living in their hometown and trying to survive now that Russia's appeared and told you it's part of Russia?
You've been documenting a battle for hearts and minds in Zaporizhzhia. You got your hands on a cache of internal Kremlin financial documents. What did that tell you about the deployment of propaganda efforts there?
There were two parts to this. One was to block the previous Ukrainian sources, and there was also money allocated to Roskomnadzor, which is the Russian internet watchdog in these new regions, to block undesirable websites. And then there was a whole tranche of money that was allocated to set up new outlets. So in the Zaporizhia region, there was four outlets specified. I focused on one of them, which was a website called zaporozhia.ru.
And these documents had the budget down to the last ruble for three journalists, for setting up Telegram channels, which is a big way that people communicate in Ukraine, for paying influencers to put content on Instagram.
These are mostly Russians coming in? The journalists come from Russia. The news is all about how happy everybody is to be part of Russia. Just to give you one example, I was reading an article on this website, zaporozhye.ru. The Zaporozhye head of the Russian Journalists' Union said,
was expressing her delight that they'd received a delivery of 10 sets of body armor, flak jackets. And she said, "Our local journalists will be able to work in much more safe conditions." I decided to go and look at the background of this woman who's being quoted about our local journalists in Zaporizhia.
Until two years ago, she was the editor of a very small newspaper in the Russian provinces. One of these many people that have been shipped in since this annexation, whether it's journalists, teachers, judges, police, etc. Basically part of an occupying authority.
So in the weeks leading up to this election, Russian officials were going house to house to check on whether some were empty and could be resettled and pressuring Ukrainians who hadn't done so to take up Russian citizenship.
When you're living on occupied territory, the longer that you go without having a Russian passport, the harder it is to do anything. We've seen this in Crimea. For the first few years, there were some people who were refusing to take those passports but wanted to stay living there. And at a certain point, it became impossible because you can't access healthcare, you can't access education, you can't get a pension, you can't do anything without having the citizenship.
Of course, in these newly occupied territories, we're at an earlier stage. And there are many people who are sort of sitting and hoping that the Ukrainians are going to retake the territory soon. Why would I need to get a Russian passport? As the time ticks on and Russia remains in control, it's again getting harder and harder to be able to function there.
It's even harder to leave the territory now if you don't have a Russian passport. There was a woman that I met denied permission to leave with her Ukrainian passport. So she'd taken a Russian passport in order to be able to leave. And, you know, to get that, she'd had to go and stand underneath a portrait of Vladimir Putin and sing the Russian national anthem.
There's this real pressure that people should take these Russian passports. That, of course, also means that the Kremlin can then say that these are Russian citizens and that if Ukraine starts taking back territory on the battlefield, it has another argument why it needs to, quote unquote, defend these people because...
The Kremlin is now defending Russian citizens. You wrote that the four partially occupied Ukrainian regions played a special role in the messaging for Putin's regime. The Kremlin has found it really difficult to get the messaging right about this war. And if you follow the way they talk about it, it's quite sort of up and down. Well,
Well, it was a war against the Nazis in Ukraine. It was a war against NATO. It was a war against the godless West in general. And it's a war to protect Russia from the forces gathering on its borders.
The original reason for starting this war, aside from all of the NATO and existential and fight with the West, was to protect the Russian speakers living in the east and south of Ukraine. That was always nonsense, but that was technically the reason this war started. So for Russians who might be sitting at home and thinking, what the hell are we doing in the third year of a war in Ukraine, Russian soldiers dying all the time?
okay, actually, look, I just watched TV and it turns out there are hundreds of thousands of people who are living in this terrible, oppressive Ukrainian regime and now they're delighted to be part of Russia. I think that's the message.
Putin is still reportedly a very popular leader. Why does he need to do all of this messaging? Why does he need to employ these regions that you reported on in this way? It's undeniable, yes, Putin is very popular, but untangling...
how much of that popularity is down to exactly the fact that he controls the message so intensely in Russia and that that's something that in the last few years has really escalated from this sort of soft, selective authoritarianism that characterized the first years of his reign to something much, much more aggressive, darker, more sinister, more all-embracing.
Let's not forget that Putin made this pretty dramatic decision in September 2022 that he was going to say that these four regions, none of which Russia fully controlled militarily then, and none of them he fully controls militarily now, are part of Russia. So I mean, it's now in the constitution that these regions are part of Russia, even though Zaporizhia, the city, Kherson, the city, they've never been controlled by Russia.
So I think it's important to show that things are under control, that this war that was meant to last a few days and is now lasting more than two years is for a good reason, that these territories are part of Russia, that people there are happy, and that if you're wondering why your cousin or your father or your friend or the guy you knew from work has been sent to sit in a trench in Ukraine, well, here at least is some reason. ♪
is an important element of showing that this is not a futile war. Sean, thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me. Sean Walker reports on Ukraine for The Guardian.
That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondio, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, and Candice Wong, with help from Sean Merchant. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week are Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger.
