 So, ladies and gentlemen, let me welcome you to the Institute of Peace. My name is Bill Taylor. I'm the executive vice president here at the Institute. Most of you have been here before, some of you many times, but let me just remind those of you who are first time that while we've been in this building since 2011, we've been going, working, looking to ways to solve conflicts around the world since 1984. So this is what we do. We focus on conflict. And today, we're focusing on conflict war by other means. This is a great opportunity for us, in particular, with Anne Applebaum. No one has thought longer or harder about this issue. I think this is fair to say. She's been thinking about this for a long time, writing about it for a long time, started writing her book, which I highly recommend, Red Famine on Stalin's War on Ukraine. She started writing this in 2010, but only when it was not a main topic, let's say. Now it is. Now it's a very, very topical. This book just came out last year. Anne has written for many publications, including yesterday on the opinion page of the Washington Post, and we'll get to this article in a minute, and I suspect. On these topics, Pulitzer Prize winner for previous books. Also now at the London School of Economics, and she's done some thinking about this topic at the London School of Economics and runs a program there on disinformation. So we are very pleased to have you and Anne, and Anne will start off with a couple of remarks about the work she's been doing, how to think about this kind of a problem. That will probably suggest a couple of questions that I will pose. I will be very interested to turn it over to you to ask her questions that are on your mind on this topic. So Anne. All right, so thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation. It's nice to be back at this great institution again. I should say my book about Ukraine is about a much earlier version of Russian disinformation. It's about the 1920s and 1930s. It is. And you will find parallels to the present, some of which I lay out in the book, particularly the last part of the book. Right at the end. You'll notice these parallels, right? Right. So what I'm going to talk about today is not that, although if you want to ask me questions about the Ukrainian famine in 1932-33, I'm really more than delighted to talk about it. So this topic of Russian disinformation, I've been around Washington before speaking about it at different times. And almost each time I do it, there's a greater understanding. I think when I would first bring this up three or four years ago, people would look at me a little oddly and say, okay, well that kind of thing, maybe that's important for Poland, but really why, I don't know why it's of interest to us. I think we all now, after having watched both the Russian reaction to the change, the follow up to the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and then Russian involvement in a series of elections, including our own, people feel a little bit differently about it now. I really have a lot to say about this issue. I run a small program now in London, which does some research around it. I can talk a little bit about it if you want more specifically, different kinds of research. But so I'll just offer at the beginning just a few different ways to think about both what it is and what we can do about it. First of all, I think it's important to understand that it's part of a larger ecosystem. These are what these really are, is political influence operations. And because this is a U.S. Institute of Peace, I think it's important to say some of them are also connected to current or future military operations. As an example, I just met, I met with some people last week who work in the Baltic states and who were talking about Russian work with these kind of paramilitary organizations in Latvia and Estonia. These are paintball groups or airsoft groups, or they are, they're places where young people can meet and shoot at targets. And the use that these have been, I've written a column about this in the past, and the use of those as a way to, and some of them now have used FSB insignia on their uniforms, so this is one way in which the Russians are seeking to create friends and allies in Latvia. And the point of it was, as they said to me, one of them said to me was, well, you know, what we, the way we understand this is that this is simply the Russians creating options for themselves. It doesn't mean they're going to invade Latvia next week. It doesn't mean they may ever invade Latvia, but just in case the possibility came through, they're doing an advance recruitment and information campaign around, you know, in Latvia to prepare that. I think that's one of the ways in which to think about what the purpose of this is, that it's part of a larger ecosystem. There's, there in, there it's connected to cyber hacking and cybersecurity. It's connected to economic, you know, a search for economic influence, political influence, political influence buying, as well as legitimate political influence and diplomacy and so on. So it's a piece of larger operations and it's a piece of a larger strategy. The difficulty, I should also say it's customized to particular countries. So Russian influence campaigns in Germany look a lot different from Russian influence campaigns in Latvia, which look, again, different from them in Bolivia and look different from South Africa. And they often have different pieces and different goals. In Europe, the strategy in general, and this is, you don't have to be screemily legoriginal to say this, is Russia has a clear interest in breaking up NATO and in persuading the United States to leave Europe, create, as well as in breaking up the European Union and undermining. This is for a variety of reasons of their own. The Russian sea, the European Union as a competitor and even an ideological competitor, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's an organization that is interested in democracy, you know, democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech. Whether or not you think it's, it's good or bad, those are its stated goals and for, these are, these are ideas and values that are, the Russians see as threatening to them. And so they seek to, so it's not very hard to understand what the general strategy is, and of course, had I said this a year or two ago, it sounded ridiculous, how could the Russians possibly break up the European Union. More recently, you can begin to see how it could be done, you know, by aligning themselves with far right and far left anti-European parties in each European country, and so in Greece that might be the far left and Germany it might be the far right, in another country it might be somebody else, and seeking to promote and amplify those narratives inside those countries. So that's, so you need to understand it as part of a bigger strategy and as one tactic among many, but it is the one tactic that we're not used to and we were very unprepared for when it began to function. There are a lot of reasons why it's quite difficult to think about and why difficult to respond to, partly because it breaks down the line between a domestic and a foreign issue for many countries. So if you are, I don't know, the Swedish government and you're thinking about Swedish elections in September and you're thinking, well, you're worried about, your security services are worried about, you know, the Russians attempting to amplify the language of the Swedish far right in your country, well, what do you do about that? Because the Swedish far right is, I mean, other than the, you know, violent, it's not we're not talking about violent extremism, because this is a legitimate part of Swedish politics, you're hardly going to ban it, you know, just because it's pro-Russian, you know, it's not illegal to be pro-Russian, it's not illegal to like some things the Russian government does, it's not, and so the line between what is foreign and what is domestic policy is particularly different for Europeans and actually indeed for us to sort out and that makes it difficult to think about and difficult to act against. It's also the motivations for people who participate in Russian disinformation campaigns are also very various, some of them are financial, so we did a project looking specifically at the German elections and Russian involvement and also international alt-right involvement in the German elections. We discovered, and I'll make a long story short, one of the things we discovered was a, okay, it's a botnet based in Nizhny Novgorod that was promoting the German far-right, the alternative for Deutschland. So what else was this botnet doing? It was promoting the AFD, the German far-right, it was also promoting an escort service in Dubai. It was also, I think it was promoting some companies based in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, so in other words, this was a multi-purpose organization that was created, somebody was doing it for money, somebody had paid them to work for, so understanding the motivations of these different actors can be difficult, so that's a financial one. We also discovered what were clearly volunteers, it looked like American and Swedish and other alt-right trolls who were voluntarily amplifying Russian narratives, so trying to understand who are they and what their motivations are, so these are different actors in this space and they have different motivations, you can't think of, it's not as if they're all KGB agents, it's a much more complicated picture in a more complicated world and it's more difficult to think about and one of the conclusions that we came to is that fighting Russian influence in Germany is going to look a lot like fighting the extreme right, it's going to be a similar way of thinking. So that's just a few words about what it is, how to think about pushing back against it, there is no silver bullet, sadly there is no thing I can say, if only the US government would solve it, would fund X then we would fix the problem, I don't think it's going to work like that, I don't even think that some of the traditional ways in which we fought disinformation in the past or we used to call it propaganda will work quite as well now because the nature of the information world has changed, but we can think in some broad categories, we can talk about, you know, fighting its influence in Europe, we can talk about defense, we can talk about empowering the people who are already doing this well, whether that's networks of fact checkers, networks of counter extremists, actually counter jihadists and counter extremists are often the same people and they act in very similar ways. Another piece of the defense is making sure that independent media exists, there are a lot of countries in which media has become almost a parody of, I mean, in smaller European countries, media is often very, very weak, you know, it's been captured by one group of oligarchs or another group of oligarchs and is very easily captured and pushed in one direction or another and so empowering, finding ways of empowering independent media is part of the solution. There may also be, you know, I'll be careful how I talk about this, but there may also be ways in which we should think about engaging Russian audiences. So Russian disinformation in Russia is every bit as loud and vociferous as it is in Europe and possibly, you know, just as dangerous, even more dangerous. I just wrote a piece that I think you were holding that was in the Washington Post today, yesterday. Yesterday, I can't remember when my pieces are published, but pointing out that somebody has recently done a study of how Europe is portrayed in the Russian press and it is, of course, overwhelmingly negative, Europe is falling apart, Europe is decadent, Europe is dying and at the same time, Europe is aggressive, the Europeans are trying to, you know, they're about to invade Russia, they're about, they're aimed to cause us trouble and difficulty. It is really important from, and by the way, I should say that although this was, there's a, one would have to find a different study. They haven't, the same group who did that study is now doing one on the image of America in Russia, believe me, it is equally toxic. The United States is for enemy, the United States is trying to destroy us. Don't rule out nuclear weapons because they're still part of the mix. Remember that we still have them, this will protect us against the dangerous United States. So this kind of language is could also, I mean, one of the things that it could be used for is to lay the groundwork or to prepare Russians to accept greater Russian aggression in Europe as well. So we have a clear interest in finding ways of reaching Russian audiences and speaking directly to Russians if that's possible to do and finding some new ways to do it and we can talk about what that might be. The other, I'll conclude by saying one of the things that happens to everybody I know who's worked on the question of Russian disinformation is pretty quickly, for historical reasons, the Russians were doing this first and they were doing it more. They understood the flaws of the internet, they understood how to use anonymity and how to use the ease with which you can create fake websites and so on to multiply false news as well as create false identities and false audiences, but the techniques are open to anybody. Some of them are created just by the nature of Facebook. I mean, you can use Facebook now to do, to reach different kinds of targeted audiences. They could be used by the Chinese, they could be used by the Iranians, they could be used by people in Texas. I mean, it doesn't really, it's not, there's no particular reason why this should be a Russian specialty. And beginning to think in deeper ways about the structure of the internet, how do we, how do we responsibly manage anonymity? How do we, how do we end the proliferation of dark ads? How do we, you know, give people some kind of reliable, I didn't ever, in some way, verifying information or verifying videos, for example, online. Creating a watermark is one of the expressions that I've heard people use in Silicon Valley, so that, for example, when you see a picture of, whether it's President Obama or President Trump saying something, you know that as we get into the world of easily faked videos, which we're getting closer to, how can you identify that that one's real or that's really him speaking? Is there some system we can create? So beginning to think about the structure of the internet itself and this particular structure of social media and how we prevent these campaigns at a much deeper level, I think, also has to be part of the conversation and that's really not, that's a conversation for Washington and Congress to have with the tech companies and with the public in which you don't even need to involve Russia at all. So I'll finish by saying that, you know, there are different ways of thinking about the problem, there are different kinds of solutions and one of them may be, you know, might involve our, you know, American companies that have created these spectacular and amazing platforms and finding ways to make sure that they don't discredit or undermine the internet altogether. I'll finish there. And you're not finished there, we're going to continue this. Thank you, that's a great opening. I'm gonna, there are a couple things that I'd like to just pursue and then I'd look to the people in this room. You said that this war by other means is a good topic for the Institute of Peace. And we're reminded of course by that or is the continuation of politics by other means. Right. And so if we work it backwards, if we're concerned as we are about conflict, violent conflict and we go back to the hybrid warfare of which this information war is a piece, it's the politics and there's a policy there and you alluded to some of this things. The Russian government and maybe the Kremlin and Mr. Putin has something in mind and you mentioned a couple of those kinds of things to get you to elaborate on those, break up NATO, break up the EU. Occupy Eastern Ukraine. Occupy Eastern Ukraine, which again goes back to your point here on Red Famine on Stalin's war on Ukraine. Stalin was real concerned about Ukraine as well. The concern that the Kremlin had in 2014 that Ukraine was going towards Europe triggered this thing. So how do you describe, how do you think about the policy that extend into hybrid warfare and into war? So 2014 is an interesting moment because a lot of what, whether it's both the overt propaganda and RT and Sputnik and all these kind of tools as well as the covert influence buying and so on had been going on in Europe for a while, I mean for a decade. We saw plenty of it in Ukraine before. I saw it in Poland, I've seen it in lots of other places. It wasn't brand new at all in 2014 but it's true that in 2014 it was dialed up in a way that it became much more visible to everybody else. I mean I was kind of, as I said, I was banging on about the subject earlier and people would kind of say, oh well that's very interesting and it's very sad for Poland and 2014 is an interesting moment because that's when you could see how in a specific conflict situation it could be used. And so what happened, first of all, why did the Russians invade Crimea and second of all, how was it done and why is this, what did the Russians see in 2014 at the moment of the Maidan Revolution? They saw, Putin saw kind of his nightmare. There were young Ukrainians waving EU flags saying we want an end to corruption and we want democracy and rule of law. I mean this is exactly the kind of movement and the kind of demonstration that he worries most about at home. And this is exactly the, whether you call it, it wasn't a color revolution, whether whatever you call it, however you describe it, this kind of movement that links together people who want a different kind of political system different to his own, which is kleptocratic and oligarchic rather than democratic and is based on very profoundly cynical ideas about government, so what he feared most was this. So how does he undermine this? What was the language they used? If you remember they started talking about Nazis. These are the enemies of Russia. These people, they claim to be wearing the EU flag but actually this is a Nazi movement led by, and for those of you who don't know Ukrainian history, it's a Benderites which means a Nazi era Ukrainian independence movement and he sought both inside Russia and outside Russia to portray this as a far right fascist movement. And let's not get into the details of it but as we know the Maidan was actually a very complicated, complex group of people. There were gay and lesbian groups demonstrating there were people from all walks of Ukrainian society, you could find Nazis if you wanted to find them or anyone not Nazis but fascists, but the Kremlin idea was this is how we're characterizing it and they sought very hard to sell that both inside Russia, inside Ukraine and inside Europe and to some degree they had some success. I mean there were parts of the American Left who bought this narrative. Stephen Cohen writing The Nation wrote more or less this, and these are legitimate people. I mean this is not a very legitimate writer and a legitimate magazine so it's not like. And that was one piece of it, it was attempt to characterize this as an evil anti-Russian government and both to make Russians not want to not be attracted by those people waving EU flags and also to denigrate Ukraine and the ideas and ideas of the West. Second piece of disinformation you saw is that when the Russians finally began their invasion of Crimea which was what was the first thing that happened? They said there is no invasion of Crimea. You all, this is now too famous a story for everybody in this room not to know but these aren't real. They have nothing to do with Russia, they're just volunteers, they're just soldiers, they bought their weapons in a local store. I don't know where they got their armored personnel carriers, can't you just buy that in a local safe way. It sounds now ridiculous in retrospect because after a few weeks it became clear what it was and actually now Putin has given medals to the people who led that invasion and so on but I actually remember quite well the first two or three days people were confused and people said what is this? Is this separatists? Are these Ukrainians? Are they Russians? What is it? And there was a moment of international paralysis which was quite key for the occupation of Crimea to take place. It actually was a very, very successful information operation as ridiculous as it seems in retrospect so these are just two examples of how you can use language and you can use media in order to shape how people perceive a conflict to perceive their willingness or otherwise to intervene in it, to stop it, to negotiate it or to participate in it and of course in Ukraine there was an effort to inspire Russian speaking Ukrainians to fight the new government after the old president of Ukraine fled the country. And this is an interesting example where I think Putin's strategy was quite weak because I think what he thought would happen was that Russian speaking Ukrainians were Russians and that therefore they would rise up against what was perceived to be a nationalist government in Kiev and they would defeat it and actually Russian speaking Ukrainians are Ukrainians or at least some of them are or they feel themselves to be or anyway they did not see themselves as wanted to be part of Putin's Russia or and certainly not part of not to be run by gangs of mercenaries controlled by the FSB in some unclear way as which is how those kind of rogue provinces in Eastern Ukraine are now governed and so that disinformation campaign failed but it was certainly they put a lot of effort into it they continued to push those lines in Eastern Ukraine I mean in a way Ukraine is a kind of petri dish for a lot of these issues both for the Russians experimenting with different ways to shape the political conversation and Ukrainians experimenting with different ways to fight back against it which is a whole other interesting thing it's not an accident that one of the first organizations conceived as an anti-fake news or anti-disinformation NGO is the group called Stop Fake which was created in Kiev precisely for this reason at that moment because the Ukrainians saw exactly how this worked and how I mean there was literally face photographs, fake video fake stories were being used to tell and give an incorrect version of what happens in Ukraine but so yes Ukraine is an important place to look both because as I said that's where it was dialed up in a way that was most visible to us for the first time and also I think it's a you know it's a you know I don't think we have I don't think we're at the end of this story in Ukraine or anywhere else by now I mean there's a there's an ongoing okay I should also the Ukraine is also useful because you can then understand how this issue connects to others it can connect to kinetic military operations to economic operations to cyber operations to hacking operations I mean the idea of hacking someone's email and then using it or taping them to a conversation and then using that sort of private material and turning into a thousand different conspiracy theories and then kind of blasting them all over social media this has been done now about 10 times you know this is not a new idea it's been done lots of times the Russians figured it out sort of earlier than other people but that doesn't mean lots of other people won't do it so you know the fact that we saw that in our election doesn't mean it was invented here sticking for a moment with the purpose with the policy that this is an extension you in your article yesterday in your in the post could be a more sinister purpose you've suggested that they would be doing this one reason they may be doing it because it has something else in mind it may be diplomatic maybe economic it may be military without being alarmist you had said that this is maybe something you have I said this already I mean so that as I would I would characterize this as the Russians creating options for themselves okay so the fact that they're just you know portraying Europe as simultaneously weak and degenerate and falling apart and also very aggressive and anti-Russian could be useful in all kinds of ways but among other things it could be useful if there was ever a war with Europe I mean if you're fighting against a weak and degenerate and aggressive place you know then you're you know you would have motivation to fight against them so in the case that there would be some kind of conflict which I'm not saying is being planned or you know it's gonna happen tomorrow or it's being executed or if the opportunity arose to you know whether in Estonian Latvia or whether somewhere else you're in the Balkans or somewhere in you know along some fault line in Ukraine to fight that you know having prepared the ground this way might prove to be very useful so watching the Russian narratives and understanding what's being said and this is the argument about what they're saying inside Russia this is nothing to do with us I think is very important for people who are interested in you know conflict prevention because this you know this is a these are the kinds of narratives you would use and this is the kind of propaganda you would conduct if you were considering that there might be a conflict at some point in the future yeah that conflict prevention a big part of this this building's work I know that's why I'm here and thank you for being here okay let me give you an opportunity to ask and and questions when you do please just raise your hand I will call on you I think we will have a couple of people with mics that are moving in the back and if you will stand and state your name and then fire away so who will go first here yes sir right here there we go yeah hey Dan Arnato from the National Democratic Institute so I'm working in different contexts internationally on this problem and specifically collaborating with local groups who are attempting to do fact-checking and media literacy and other programs I'm curious from your perspective you've found other examples of Russian influence campaigns outside of the former Soviet Union and Europe and what you are expecting for 2018 in terms of potential influence campaigns I'm thinking particularly of Mexico as a potential opportunity but even Brazil is a major election coming up and has repercussions certainly in the region but I'm curious if you have other examples in mind in terms of ways Russia's attempting to project their influence outside of traditional spheres right so that's that's a great question I mean you probably know the the fact that you asked the question leads me to believe you probably know the answer better than me intervening in an election and by the way I should just as a kind of parentheses it's easiest to talk about elections because those are the most spectacular moments you know when power changes in a democracy and when you can influence who gets to win but a lot of these influence campaigns are very long-term I mean for example you know the the the campaign to persuade you know the German nation that NATO is a bad idea has been ongoing for a long time and will continue whether or not there are elections or not elections so it's a little bit of a mistake to just look at elections although I understand why people do it because it's the most spectacular that you know the second thing I will say is that do all of this stuff you know is technologically speaking you know by comparison to cyber hacking or other forms of or cyber you know is technologically very easy you don't actually have to be in Mexico in order to mess around with the Mexican internet I mean this is one of the most amazing things about global media and global information systems all you need is a few people who understand Mexican politics and you don't even need maybe even that many and you need a few people who have the time to to to get involved in it and this is just the online piece of it I mean there could also be political influence buying which requires a bit more money or you know or there could be economic influence which is okay so I would not count Russian you know or indeed Chinese or other influence covert you know disinformation campaigns out of any election I have not personally worked on Mexico but I am told there is that lots and lots of people are involved in trying to swing the Mexican elections one way or the other including narco groups including Russians including maybe others so you know so I'm you know I would say that I am aware of that I'm certainly aware that they're interested in other Latin American countries as I've heard Columbia mentioned I was in South Africa a year or two ago and was told about Russian influence buying there as well as there's a big Russian power investment there as well so that may be another place where they're you know in those kinds of countries my guess is their interests are economic more than political I mean although of course they're connected you know if you want a big power plant or nuclear power deal then it helps to have the right people you know in the government whereas in Europe I think they do have a big you know they have a big and pretty clear strategy that involves undermining the current security order and I don't know if that's this I wouldn't say that that's the same over the you know in other places but certainly Latin America certainly resource rich bits of Africa you know I think the Chinese probably have a lot more invested in Asia but I wouldn't discount anything I mean again it's very easy it's relatively very cheap it's not very high-tech you know why wouldn't you do it what would be the goal of that in Latin America putting someone you know in charge of a country who is going to be friendly to Russian economic interests or alternatively you know again Latin Americanists in the room are going to know more than me putting someone in charge of a country who is you know in you know anti-American interests and you can think you can imagine in Mexico and Brazil and lots of other places where that would be that would make sense sure that's ma'am hi I'm Elizabeth Wilson with Rutgers Law School I am aware of a study that was done by the Oxford computational propaganda program that was showing that you know fake news they called it junk news in that in that report everybody hates the expression fake news so is mainly a problem on the far right and the far right media in this in this country responded well this is this is not disinformation this is conservative mainstream you know far right right wing media this is our media it's not disinformation so what it seems to me there's also disinformation that is indigenous disinformation sure and that this requires a different kind of strategy for dealing with and I'm just wondering what your opinion so this is this is where you get to the difficulty of defining the problem this you know the the line that we're used to thinking of between what is domestic domestic policy issue and what is a foreign policy issue has become blurred the nature of information now is that it's global and anybody can intervene in it and you can be sitting in Moscow and you can participate you know with you know with gusto in the Mexican election campaign so this is a new you know it's a change in the way we're used to thinking about these kinds of problems and this is one of the reasons I think why we've stumbled so hard and trying to figure out what to do about it for exactly the reason that you just suggested you know the Swedish government is very interested in thinking about Russian intervention in their elections which are in September but you know if what that's going to look like is a Russian attempt to amplify legitimate Swedish political parties then what is the Swedish government gonna do about it I mean nothing how can they do anything about it it's not in there it's not in the security services remit to block legitimate politics or as you say you know you can find far right narratives in lots of places that have nothing to do with Russia I mean a very the maybe the best example of that is Marine Le Pen's party in France or the National Front has been around in France you know for many decades it has a direct lineage back to Vichy you know it's a it's a it's been part of French politics for a long time Marine Le Pen's father was involved in French politics for many decades you know she herself has legitimate followers in front you know and has been a political actor in France all of her life the fact that her party is now funded by Putin and you know openly and we there's there's no secret about that that it was its election campaign was funded by loans from these kind of Russian check banks you know during the middle of the rush of the French election campaign she actually went to Moscow and met with Putin during her during the camp no secret about that there's no you know nobody's denying these links the the the you know the fact that there was a Russian trolling operation during the French campaign that was meant to help bring it so all of this is a this is a difficult problem for the French to think about I mean there is no question that Marine Le Pen is a legitimate French political force and nobody could deny that and that is why paying into you know understanding how the how you know you know what is it that Russian operation you know Russian influence is doing it seeking to amplify those voices who are the most whom they prefer and there are going to be people who say this is legitimate you know why not you know it's that's just part of life and it's just a little bit easier now that it used to be and then there are you know there's a second set of answers that are well do we think foreign you know can should we should we look at advertising should we look at foreign funding you know should there be you know are there ways of changing the electoral system or the electoral you know electoral regulation to you know to block that kind of I would say in almost every country you need to look at specifically what's happening the the the tactics are customized to each place and there's some places where you could see how changing electoral laws or you know could fix the problem in other places you need to think much more broadly about narratives but I'll I'll turn to something I said before fighting Russian influence so-called Russian influence in Europe is going to look a lot like in a lot of places like fighting the extreme right and different countries have different views about the extreme right I mean in Germany it's illegal so it's not that hard to think about how you would fight it you know in Britain not not so clear they have different you know they have different kinds of hate speech laws and you know this country we don't have hate speech laws at all or not not you know we we don't have we have a much different attitude towards towards freedom of speech so each country is going to have to come up with a different set of I can't I can't give you a single answer that will explain what you do everywhere because these are these are the you know these are answers that have to do with the nature of a particular given country in its political system it's a good question it's the it's it's not the there isn't a single answer there's a there are multiple answers sir my name is Karwan Zabari let me chef to Syria a two-part question one President Putin was just sworn in today for another four years can you give us what the outlook looks like do we expect the status quo to continue do we used to expect the more aggressive Putin and I'll just get out my crystal ball back here and then second simply put what's in it for Russia to do what it's doing in Syria so I can't I mean I don't I don't like doing predictions I mean I have no reason to think that anything in particular is going to change in Russia I don't have any you know on the contrary Putin seems to have been reinforced and and so on having said that you know there is a tradition in Russian history that everything is the same until suddenly it all falls apart so you know we'll see I don't I don't have a good answer to that question so Syria again I'm guessing there are probably people here who know more about this than me I think there as in all these cases I think there is a there is a I think there's a Russian strict I should have answered this when you asked about Mexico actually I was thinking about Mexico I was thinking about Latin America but there is clearly a Russian strategy in the Middle East maybe not one as carefully worked out as there is as the as the European strategy part of the Russian strategy is about making Russia a presence there again and giving Russia a role in deciding what happens occasionally you hear these hints from Russian officials about some kind of Yalta agreement redrawing the borders whatever that's going to look like and making sure that Russia has a seat at that table in the Middle East so I think that's part of it's part of that's part I think there's a domestic political reason why Russia is involved in Syria in particular which is you could see the the Ukraine narrative began to go bad at a certain point when they didn't weren't winning in eastern Ukraine and it was clear that the Ukrainian the idea of dividing Ukraine had failed and actually the war in Ukraine is not that popular in Russia you know the Russians and don't hate the Ukrainians as a general rule and there's tons of intermarriage and these are profoundly connected countries that have been you know part of the same empires and you know fought on the same sides and lots of wars for many years and it wasn't going that well and the Syrian invasion Russia's entry into the Syrian conflict happened right at that moment it was a change of narrative you know look we're fighting the jihadis you know we're you know we've made Russia great again and we're on this other stage it was a it was it's been a useful narrative for Putin to have this and you know this other other conflict that he's you know that he's winning I think that's the second reason I mean the third reason I think there is a I mean I hear again you may have a better sense of this than me there is an argument that they feel some genuine link to the Assad regime because they've been supporting it for many years and it's they've got bases there and so on so you could say there's a there's a piece of genuine strategy they really don't know how true that is and there's a fourth thing which is that after the fall of Qaddafi Putin who does think in terms of global narratives was worried about the fate of dictatorships and again he's almost said this on a number of occasions as other Russian officials and the need to prevent a dictator from falling you know this this site of falling dictators again this is his domestic political concern you know he doesn't want you know it's you know he you know he does the idea that there could be a people's revolution that could overthrow the dictator and establish democracy you know this is a bad idea for him he would like to defeat the I make sure you know that that's not so and that can never happen and I think Syria was a case where you know again he intervened in this area another reason for the timing of it was it was at a moment if you'll remember when it looked like Assad really might lose and so it was an attempt to prevent Assad from losing and have those bad pictures of the dictator falling and being replaced by I don't know whether even just a even a different kind of government taking place so I think you can look at all those reasons I mean I I should add that the Russian disinformation campaign in Syria is remarkably similar in a lot of ways to the Russian disinformation campaign in Ukraine I mean there's you know I don't know that if there's this yeah I know there's lots of comparative politics courses I don't know if anybody's ever done comparative disinformation campaigns but it's a very interesting one so the way the Ukraine one worked was by polarizing the conflict it's the Nazis against you know against the good guys you know you there was no nuance in Ukrainian politics in the Syrian narrative in the same there's on the one side there's Assad and on the other side of the jihadis and we're fighting and everybody's against Assad is a jihadis so it's this creation of a profoundly polarized narrative and in which nuance is destroyed and there's there are only two sides and whoever's the group in the middle is eliminated from the conversation that's part of what they've done there which is again very similar to Ukraine and just you know as an aside lots of scientific studies have shown that polarization is what very highly polarized audiences are much more susceptible to believing false stories than than than otherwise so it's an interesting you know and the other you know the other some of the tools and technologies that have been used in Syria are also very similar to what's been done in Ukraine the most remarkable one again I'm guessing you all know this too but I'll just mention it to as a reminder is the extraordinary campaign that's been conducted against the white helmets I actually looked I look at it periodically and it changes because these algorithms change over time if you on the YouTube page if you put white helmets into the little search box on a get on a day a couple of weeks ago I did this and I got you know results one two three and four were from RT and they were attacks on the white helmets done by by Russian television I think number five was a link to a Netflix show about you know about the white helmets and then numbers kind of six seven one of them was Al Jazeera and then other than that kind of six seven eight nine and ten of the first ten results were also RT so the you know the the attempt to flood the YouTube algorithm with video about a humanitarian organization which you know literally these are people who rescue children from the rubble is a really extraordinary and I think has been probably also very successful disinformation campaign you know you tell me how well it works in Syria but it's the same techniques and the same technology that have been tried in Ukraine are are being used there as well so I think you know seeing you know Syria because of its prominence on Russian television because its prominence in the domestic narrative is also clearly something that's very important for Putin sir hello Christian Kaffasoff LSE alumni it's great to see you again I'm an LSE alumni too yes I remember I remember when you taught about four years ago this was at 2014 and your your message was considered not as relevant as it is today so I have a question it's in two parts one is how do you consider the recent NATO reaction against what happened in Britain as a loss for Putin considering especially since the former spy is still alive and the diplomatic reaction has kind of unified Europe more and how does the Russian propaganda address this reaction by by basically Russian Russians not being able to invest in London as much as or at least that being scrutinized and the other question I was wondering is to what extent does Putin also consider a propaganda victory the disinformation campaign against the United States in the 2016 election so I was wondering what your thoughts are on those two issues so the NATO the reaction to the this the poisoning of Skripal is a very interesting one because this I think was and I mean I know this was that the British Foreign Office immediately understood as soon as that happened first of all they immediately understood what it was because they knew who he was as soon as he was found picked up by an ambulance but they also immediately anticipated that there would be a disinformation campaign around it and one of the one of the points I should have made is that not all responses to disinformation are information campaigns like it's not necessarily that you know that you respond to a lie with a fact check that's not necessarily the correct answer and sometimes the answer is in a different sphere and so one of the first things the British said is that we're gonna need we're gonna need a kind of allied response to this you know we need a real to demonstrate in real life not just you know in a newspaper article or in a social media campaign that we all know what happened and that the knowledge is shared by a number of British governments and that it's you know that we're you know we you know that we're reacting as a group and so it was very important to the British from the beginning to get buy-in from other governments and the way they did what they immediately they had some they had some intelligence about how the operation this is not a secret because they've now said this they had some intelligence about how the operation was done and they I mean literally that day or the next day they took it to Paris and and I was about to say Bonn that sounds old I am anyway they took it to Paris and Berlin and Washington and they you know and they immediately said this is we know what's happened we know what what what was used and we know how it was done and will you support us on this and they immediately tried to build so in other words their response to the event was immediately a kind of alliance building exercise they also I don't know that they knew this would happen but once they saw it they understood it so one of the things that people have learned one of the ways we now know that Russians react to an event that they want to deny or distance themselves around from is to they produce millions of narratives so the famous one now is when the MH 17 when the when the Malaysian plane crashed in eastern Ukraine the Russian response was not just to say no we didn't do it but to produce like 5,000 different narratives about who might have done it ranging from plausible to implausible to you know a plane took off from Amsterdam and it already contained dead bodies and it was exploded deliberately over eastern Ukraine in order to you know in order to smear Putin that I mean literally that was one of the things that was put out and so and this the Skripal thing has been very similar you know there been you know it the British did it the Dutch did it the Czechs did it you know the Skripal did it to himself it was suicide it was you know it was the British Secret Services who were trying to discredit her you know so that this process of putting out a thousands of narratives was something that happened right away and one of the ways the British dealt with that was actually it was you know it was quite funny they made a little video showing the different narratives and they also had this the foreign office to had it created a you know to people who write about this subject they produce these emails where every day they would say well yesterday it was 17 narratives now we're up to 19 and they would they would they would list the various narratives and pass them out to people and so on so they they again anticipated this is what the reaction would look like and they they produced responses to it was it you know so I think it was successful in that most people both in Britain and in Europe believed believed the British government version of story in the end of today that's what it's about is who do you believe the British government or do you believe somebody else but the numbers who didn't believe it were still are still pretty surprisingly high I saw a poll and I don't know how good a poll it was that showed something like 70% of Europeans believe the British government and 30% don't and and the and the the person who showed me this poll was a was somebody in the British government and he was very cheered by this he was like look we won this argument I thought my god 30% you know that's very high and again the way it the places in which the counter you know the you know oh maybe it was the British who did it worked was again on the very often on the extreme left both in Britain or the extreme right so you know we're still learning how to cope with them I think the British feel so far that it was a successful you know that they pushed back and they and they created some you know real arguments and so on but I think the jury is still out on what on what happens next so 2016 you know I don't have you know I don't I don't have any access to the deep thinking of you know people in the Kremlin about whether this was a success or failure I mean in that in that merely the use of those tactics and the you know the fact that they became part of the discussion about the US election regardless of the result I think they would see that as having been a success you know look we proved that there are things you can do to manipulate US democracy and I think that was so in that sense it was success whether they like the outcome or not I mean I don't know they're there you can hear different versions of that from different people so we're gonna take last two questions here one here and one there right you'll take them both at the same time and that's okay with you yeah and then let's yeah yeah Mirko Kuns I'm a former Fulbright scholar from Kyrgyzstan so my question is I mean both are very short and I know that for the first one there's no simple answer but is there anything that could stop Putin make him to back a step back with all his strategic endeavors and my second one I like the point when you said on that we need to work with media that are able to be independent although it's almost impossible to be independent in Russia but how to help them to stay independent longer than they normally do and also gain popularity especially in post-soviet republics where we know that historic bonds are so strong that majority do not even believe to anything more what I guess Putin's Kremlin proper Putin's Kremlin dictates thank you thank you very good good questions right here yes sir thank you my name is Crispin Clark from a new peace initiative out of the San Francisco tech and VC community that's yet to be launched my question is just around more novel methods maybe we haven't heard about on countering the misinformation but particularly interested in the NGO approach and then you know reaching directly you know that the Russian people so the the reaching directly the Russian people and the question about the previous question about supporting independent media and making it work better are actually related so the question is I mean you could almost think of this as sort of reverse engineering this you know the polarization I mean very good one of the problems of the subject is very quickly you get from what is Russia doing in this foreign policy problem to much more fundamental problems about politics and how you reach people and the ways in which social media has created these divided audiences and so I would argue for a major research program to better understand Russian audiences and and Kyrgyz audiences and Kazakh audiences we really don't know that much about them I was involved in a very small project that looks at that did some audience analysis on the Russian Internet and it's actually very interesting you know there are many different kinds of views and we tend to think about you know liberals versus pro-Putin people actually it's a lot more complicated than that there are different groups it may be that we need different messages for different groups and just telling people what democracy is good and Putin is bad is maybe not the way to reach people and we many of the cruder tech techniques from Cold War era aren't going to work in our era and just I mean remember that the US you know in the 1970s and the 1980s had there was a whole arsenal of arguments that we had actually the arguments were you know blue jeans abstract art you know pop music you know prosperity and sort of five other things plus democracy and some of those things just don't work anymore I mean there's plenty of pop music in Russia I mean and there's plenty of abstract art you know so some of the some of the arguments weren't artists artists you know we don't have the cultural power that they once did but more understanding of Russian audiences more work with media in those countries and in other countries trying to do the same I mean I keep thinking is there a way to okay so we now have these fragmented audiences is there a way to reverse engineer that you know are there you know are there ways we can reinvent journalism to to breach polarized divides are there ways of writing to get better to convince people to read better information I don't really have any good answers to that that I can give you right now but I would like to see American universities and actually and European universities and you know it's not a really question of government Monday although there does need to be more funding for more research into that how do we reach people how do we understand these audiences what you know what is the Kyrgyz internet look like you know who are the people likely to want to read you know you know pro-american even pro-american messaging so that we get through this you know this really hateful language about the United States who we've only begun to look at how to do that we've been very slow and lax about trying to understand how these issues work in other countries and I think that you know I keeps again I keep saying the Russians but I'm sure there are plenty of the whereas understanding our own society has been something that's been very easy for for others to do so divide you know we're very divided others are divided as well having a much deeper research base was kind of the beginning of the answer to some of these questions and I'll just sorry that's not very satisfying it's very satisfying and let me thank you on behalf of the crew here you have helped us understand the problem you've given us ideas about what can be done we're close to the folks across the street we have a couple representatives from across the street and we will be using this kind of ideas you've made the point a couple times the Russians are pretty good at this they've been doing it longer than we have it's not hard that is people anywhere can do it and it's not inevitable that we win this one we there's a lot of work that we need to do and you've helped us do that so please join me in thanking and thank you for your time