Donald Trump: Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath.

Brooke Gladstone: Trump's comments at an Ohio rally set the stage for a 'did he or didn't he' debate in the press.

Jennifer Mercieca: He is often giving the wink-wink nod that denies the thing that he says that he's saying.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on the show, the Kremlin is likely cooking up fake journalists to spread fake stories about corruption in Ukraine.

Steven Lee Myers: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, a glimpse into an occupied region of Ukraine where voting in Russia's so-called presidential election often involved-

Shaun Walker: Election officials coming into people's homes with a ballot box and accompanied by a soldier carrying a machine gun.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: Before we get to the podcast, I need to say, On the Media has been around for a long time. We have a loyal and pretty sizable audience, but only 2% of our listeners donate, 2%. Are you part of that tiny group or are you sitting in the sidelines with the other 98%? How about joining the ranks of We Proud, We Few, We Happy Few? If you've been waiting for the right moment to offer your financial support for this show, now is really good.

You know all too well because we say it a lot, that listeners' support is the most important source of funding for our show. It's more stable and predictable than the other sources.

Donations from you, that's what keeps the show on the air. So, if we can get just a few more of you, just 1% more, that means more resources for the show you probably count on for clarity and not feeling crazy week after week, and for some of you, the entire third millennium. So do it. Jump out of the 98% club and become a supporter of this show. Help us out today by going to onthemedia.org and clicking the donate button. Thank you one and all for just listening, but especially for helping us out today. Now, back to the show.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media, I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. 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?

Donald Trump: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Jennifer Mercieca: He was obviously talking about the auto sector. The mainstream media took the remarks out of context.

?Speaker 3: What I heard was a continuation of the same rhetoric, the same endorsement of political violence that we've seen from Donald Trump.

?Speaker 4: 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.

?Speaker 5: This is violence, violence, violence.

Brooke Gladstone: 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 Mercieca 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."

Jennifer Mercieca: It's a disjointed speech. He's moving from topic to topic, stream-of-consciousness style. It's difficult as an audience member to know if he's threatening the US as a whole, the auto industry, the economy. In the end, I think it doesn't matter because, in all instances, it's anti-democratic. You don't run for political power by making threats.

Brooke Gladstone: In a recent interview with Aaron Rupar 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?

Jennifer Mercieca: Sure. Reification is treating people as objects. It comes from the Latin word for res, which means thing. You reify when you treat people as dangerous objects that have less rights than real people do.

Brooke Gladstone: In 2016, Trump called immigrants 'snakes.'

Jennifer Mercieca: They were objects. They were reified as less than human. What he's done this time is he calls them vermin. Vermin are not just animals, they are objects of disgust. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Jennifer Mercieca: Ad Populum is appealing to the wisdom of the crowd, his crowd. Donald Trump constantly praises them.

Donald Trump: Now we have some special people here. You know who the special people are? All of you. That's who the special-

Brooke Gladstone: Ad Populum fundamentally boils down to praising the people who love you.

Jennifer Mercieca: That's right.

Brooke Gladstone: American exceptionalism is something that he claims to have and that he shares with his followers.

Jennifer Mercieca: 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 classic example of American exceptionalism. When Donald Trump uses it, it's very different. He uses it to speak about himself personally. He says-

Donald Trump: On June 14th, Flag Day, my birthday.

Jennifer Mercieca: -as the apotheosis of American exceptionalism, he is a winner. He boils down American exceptionalism to the question of winning or losing.

Brooke Gladstone: 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, paralipsis.

Jennifer Mercieca: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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. How does Trump use it?

Jennifer Mercieca: 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. Then after she left the stage, Trump said-

Donald Trump: You're not allowed to say it, so I will not. You're not allowed to say she's beautiful so I'm not going to say that. I will not say it.

Jennifer Mercieca: That works for Trump in a couple of ways. One, it's funny and 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: In Louisville was at a rally and he said-

Donald Trump: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Jennifer Mercieca: 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?

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Jennifer Mercieca: It does. To me, it's just 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Now I want to return to this business of being a winner or a loser. 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, "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." He's been repeating that over and over.

Joe Biden: 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.

[applause]

Brooke Gladstone: You said you were actually waiting for the day when Biden finally would call Trump a loser.

Jennifer Mercieca: Autocrats seize power over nations by telling the nation that there is massive chaos and that they alone can fix it. They are strong. It's an act. So Donald Trump is constantly trying to show the nation how strong he is, constantly building himself up as a winner.

Brooke Gladstone: He has a long track record of losing, but he's convinced his followers he's an authentic winner.

Jennifer Mercieca: That's right.

Brooke Gladstone: Being a winner is important to those followers.

Jennifer Mercieca: 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. 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.

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. In decorous, people wouldn't normally do that in American politics, but this isn't a normal moment in American politics.

Brooke Gladstone: How many people in the electorate actually have right-wing authoritarian tendencies?

Jennifer Mercieca: 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. You wonder, "Why are we doing this culture war stuff? Who cares if a transgender person endorses a beer product? Is that really a thing?" It is a thing for activating right-wing authoritarianism because it's destabilizing for how they understand the world.

Brooke Gladstone: Aside from pointing out that Trump is a loser, what would Biden's most effective rhetorical strategies be?

Jennifer Mercieca: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: He constantly offered a hero narrative, steeped himself in the language of exceptionalism and us versus them, and so on.

Jennifer Mercieca: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Jennifer Mercieca: He's 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.

At first, he's saying 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. Now he's 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.

Donald Trump: They're willing to violate the US Constitution at levels never seen before. Joe Biden is a threat to democracy.

Brooke Gladstone: Which was classic Trump.

Jennifer Mercieca: It is. 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."

Brooke Gladstone: Final words in this rhetorical arena, we've gone through a bunch of Trump's strategies. What can be Biden's response?

Jennifer Mercieca: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Thank you so much.

Jennifer Mercieca: It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Jennifer Mercieca 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.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, the fake journalists employed in Putin's propaganda war.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. More than two years into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, US political support appears to be showing signs of fatigue.

News Anchor 1: The Biden administration is putting pressure on Congress to pass further aid, but the effort has now stalled.

Micah Loewinger: $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.

Senator Lindsey Graham: I'm all in for helping Ukraine, but we have to do it in the form of a loan. I think it will get more public support back home.

News Anchor 1: 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.

Wolf Blitzer: 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.

?Speaker 6: The fact of the matter is for the last couple of months, the United States has been failing Ukraine. Thanks to the inability of the Republican majority House to bring up a-

Micah Loewinger: This protracted stalemate is the culmination of months of GOP infighting, stocked in part by Congress's hard-right flank.

Senator J.D. Vance: We're Getting easily $0.5 trillion in the hole for the Ukraine conflict by the time this is done.

Micah Loewinger: J.D. Vance, Republican Senator from Ohio on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast in December.

Senator J.D. Vance: Why? So that one of Zelenskyy's ministers can buy a bigger yacht? Kiss my [beep], Steve. It's not happening.

Micah Loewinger: This claim about yachts and officials close to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is completely bogus. It's circulated on social media since November. Steven 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 Shahzad 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.

Steven Lee Myers: 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 that there are these two yachts for sale, Lucky Me and My Legacy.

Shahzad Nasir: According to this agreement I have managed to acquire, this vessel was purchased for almost $25 million. Now, here's where it gets interesting.

Steven Lee Myers: And claimed that he had a document, a purchase agreement, proving that two cronies of Zelenskyy's had purchased these two yachts for $75 million. It appeared on YouTube and then began to spread on social media. From social media it was picked up in various outlets. Then eventually it ends up in Russian State media, which is then reported by others each time amplifying this 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, end up hearing it and then repeating it as fact.

Micah Loewinger: 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?

Steven Lee Myers: It's an excellent question. There are researchers who specialize in tracking these 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 Shahzad 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 were created specifically to float these ideas.

Micah Loewinger: This bogus story even made its way all the way into the halls of Congress. Here's Republican Thom Tillis of North Carolina on the Senate floor last month calling out his colleague J.D. Vance for referencing the lie.

Senator Thom Tillis: They've heard somebody say that if we pass this bill, that we're all going to go ride to Kyiv with buckets full of money and let oligarchs buy yachts.

Micah Loewinger: 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?

Steven Lee Myers: 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, that these narratives 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 also appearing in other languages across Europe.

Micah Loewinger: 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?

Steven Lee Myers: 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. Again, he doesn't seem to actually exist but outlines a similar story describing this big scoop he had uncovered.

In this case, Zelenskyy, president of Ukraine's mother-in-law, has purchased a villa in El-Gouna, which is a resort on the Red Sea in Egypt. 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 assets.

Micah Loewinger: Just a couple days later, a Nigerian outlet picked it up. What was going on there?

Steven Lee Myers: 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. It seems to have started at a newspaper in Nigeria, which exists, called Punch, ad-sponsored content. The article carried the byline of Arthur Nkono, and it quotes a political scientist who talked about the fact that this was obviously corruption. The political scientist's name is Abdulrahman Alabbassy.

The curious thing is that neither of these two appear anywhere except in accounts related to this story. The fact that neither of these two seem to exist should be a red flag, but 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.

Micah Loewinger: Just a day after Punch released its piece, a Dutch activist started helping spread the claim on X.

Steven Lee Myers: Sonja 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. 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.

Micah Loewinger: On X in French and Romanian-

Steven Lee Myers: And English.

Micah Loewinger: -and English, and then a little over a week after our friend Mohammed Al-Alawi first posted to YouTube, it finally made its way to Russian state television.

Steven Lee Myers: This is what the researchers call 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, the state media will pick it up as though this has been a reported fact and fact-checked already.

Micah Loewinger: Then, on X, [chuckles] a member of the Egyptian family that owned the development that Zelenskyy's mother-in-law allegedly bought a villa in said on X, "No, this sale never happened," and so the story stopped there.

Steven Lee Myers: 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.

Micah Loewinger: Tell me what happened.

Steven Lee Myers: 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 the shocking report that Mohammed Al-Alawi had been killed.

Micah Loewinger: Dah-dan.

Steven Lee Myers: Exactly. 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 Mohammed's brother, Ahmad. Ahmad looking very distressed, had his hand over his eyes looking down so 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. That the police told the family that he was beaten to death on the orders of Ukraine. Then, once again, in almost the same way, the story began to go viral, again, sort of gave the old lie a new life.

Micah Loewinger: You mentioned one of the obscure websites that picked it up last year. Tell me about that site. What made it interesting to you?

Steven Lee Myers: It appeared on this site called El Mostaqbal, 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. 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 had been killed by the Ukrainians, and that was picked up by people who should have known better.

Micah Loewinger: Like who?

Steven Lee Myers: The Middle East Monitor, which is a nonprofit organization in London which 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 murderer. It took a few days, the Egyptians came out and said there had been murder.

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Steven Lee Myers: Exactly.

Micah Loewinger: 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. 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?

Steven Lee Myers: Yes. In every, especially Russia, but in every former Soviet republic, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it's a rampant problem, absolutely. As you just pointed out, Zelenskyy won the presidency largely on the idea that he would fight it, and he has taken steps to do that.

Micah Loewinger: 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 for constructing, "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 made-up journalists sharing made-up stories who get made-up killed along the way?

Steven Lee Myers: 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." Having said that, obviously going back to Soviet times, planting false stories in foreign news papers 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.

What's changed, I think, even just in the last couple of 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.

Micah Loewinger: That said, I'm a little wary of overstating Russia's ability to influence American discourse. If we go back to the Steve Bannon example from the beginning of our conversation, you describe that as a success. Getting a US senator on one of the biggest right-wing podcasts to repeat a lie, that's a win.

Steven Lee Myers: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: There are likely many other Russian dis-info stories that haven't really been amplified in the same way. How do we talk about Russian disinformation without overstating its effect on American news or American politics?

Steven Lee Myers: That's a great question. I wrestle with this a lot. 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. Even the way you phrase the question about corruption in Ukraine is kind of a reflection of the fact that the narrative has succeeded.

Micah Loewinger: You refer to my question about corruption in Ukraine, I'm not trying to suggest that there's credible evidence that a large portion of Western aid is definitely going to be used unethically, or dishonestly, or illegally. I don't want to suggest to listeners that. There isn't a well-documented history of corruption in Ukraine.

Steven Lee Myers: No, I get it. I wasn't picking on you or anything, but you pointed out that Zelenskyy ran on a platform to fight corruption, so obviously it is a problem. Your question is totally valid, the Russians are playing on that narrative, and believe me, the Russians know corruption. You could frame it like saying Zelenskyy 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."

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. None of these are true. 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 can drown out the truth. Truth is subtle, usually, it's never black and white. The question of corruption in Ukraine is very much like that. It's something that they have worked on and they're trying to get better at, and of course, it's all been knocked sideways by this war.

Micah Loewinger: Steven, thank you very much.

Steven Lee Myers: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Micah Loewinger: Steven Lee Myers is a disinformation reporter with The New York Times. His latest piece is titled From Russia, Elaborate Tales of Fake Journalists.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, Russia's brutal hearts and minds campaign in Ukraine.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. This weekend, Russians lined up to cast their votes in a so-called presidential election.

Reporter 1: President Vladimir Putin declaring he's been re-elected for a fifth term after only token opposition.

Reporter 2: It certainly wasn't a contest, it was stage-managed so that Vladimir Putin was the only real candidate on the ballot.

Reporter 3: Russian officials say, he won the election with 87% of the votes.

Reporter 4: Western countries have condemned the election as neither free nor fair. The US has just called it incredibly undemocratic.

Brooke Gladstone: 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, Zaporizhzhia.

Authorities say that Putin won huge victories in the territories that he now calls New Russia, 88% in Kherson, 93% in Zaporizhzhia, 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.

Micah Loewinger: State TV showed scripted and staged celebrations and some retail politicking, but this is the reality of what the US and allies today called a sham. A soldier precedes a poll worker carrying a box of ballots. The occupied literally voting at gunpoint.

Brooke Gladstone: Across the four regions, between 87% and 99% voted to be annexed.

Shaun Walker: Was obviously a fairly farcical way to conduct a vote.

Brooke Gladstone: Shaun Walker is The Guardian's Central and Eastern Europe correspondent. He led an investigation into life under Russian occupation in Zaporizhzhia. Through dozens of interviews and leaked papers from the Kremlin, he traced the battle for hearts and minds in Zaporizhzhia, including the effort to get out the vote.

Shaun Walker: 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, tells you everything you need to know about these elections.

Brooke Gladstone: You went to Zaporizhzhia, which is the capital of an area that is largely Russian-occupied, but this capital is not. What did the Russian army do to local leaders when they took each town they took in the Zaporizhzhia region?

Shaun Walker: 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 Iryna Lypka, told me that 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. 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 stationed on the outskirts. Then after a few weeks the Russians got around to working out what to do with these smaller towns. She was essentially kidnapped from her office.

Brooke Gladstone: Not just her but her driver, her secretary, her assistants, and she was held in an airless cell for 24 days.

Shaun Walker: The way she told this story, she was taken upstairs every night for interrogations. There was a group of guys in balclavas 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. 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."

Brooke Gladstone: 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 24 days, she was released, and then she fled for the Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Shaun Walker: 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. She's now sitting in this office with some of her staff, which has been one room of a college in the city of Zaporizhzhia where you have a whole bunch of these exiled towns.

Brooke Gladstone: Mayors in exile.

Shaun Walker: Exactly.

Brooke Gladstone: If the local mayors didn't agree to cooperate, the Russians would find someone else, but who would they find?

Shaun Walker: 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, or in the majority of public-facing roles, they will find local Ukrainian collaborators. 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.

Then 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. The FSB security services, the Investigative Committee, which is a very powerful body that in some way is a bit like the FBI in the US, police, senior judges, all of these people are coming from different regions of Russia.

This is not always public. Some of these figures do appear publicly, but what we did as part of our investigation was to 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Shaun Walker: You have these very chilling videos where you see a military guy with his face fully covered, standing in a military checkpoint, talking to somebody.

Military Guy: [foreign language]

Shaun Walker: 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 Zaporizhzhia region. Then they send these people to walk across the front line-

Military Guy: [foreign language]

Shaun Walker: -without any possessions, and if they're lucky, they made it to Ukrainian-controlled territory. The Russians were proud of this policy. They made the videos public. It was perhaps partly to scare other people into being quiet. When the Russian-installed governor of Zaporizhzhia 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, "We're losing a valuable resource here, it'll be much better for us to arrest them and use them in prisoner exchanges."

Brooke Gladstone: You say that the Russians have really caused huge scars by doing this.

Shaun Walker: It's a story that often gets lost in the military reporting and the talk about territory, the psychological scars that this leaves. Because yes, you have clear cases of people who collaborated, perhaps put Ukrainian lives at risk, and by Ukrainian law are criminals. Then you have clear cases of people who staunchly supported Ukraine, maybe survived torture, or came out to protest during the occupation.

Then you have a lot of people in the middle. This will be a particularly tricky question if and when Ukraine regains control of where are those blurry lines between surviving and collaborating. What is a crime, what is something that could 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?

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Shaun Walker: 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. Then there was a whole tranche of money that was allocated to set up new outlets. In the Zaporizhzhia region, there was four outlets specified. I focused on one of them, which was a website called zaporizhzhia.ru.

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.

Brooke Gladstone: These are mostly Russians coming in?

Shaun Walker: 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, zaporizhzhia.ru. The Zaporizhzhia head of the Russian Journalists Union was expressing her delights 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 been quoted about our local journalists in Zaporizhzhia. 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, et cetera. Basically, part of an occupying authority.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Shaun Walker: 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. 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 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. She'd taken a Russian passport in order to be able to leave. 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 "defend" these people because the Kremlin is now defending Russian citizens.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that the four partially occupied Ukrainian regions played a special role in the messaging for Putin's regime.

Shaun Walker: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Shaun Walker: 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Shaun Walker: 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 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. 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.

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. It's an important element of showing that this is not a futile war.

Brooke Gladstone: Shaun, thank you very much.

Shaun Walker: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Shaun Walker reports on Ukraine for The Guardian.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media's produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director's Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

[00:52:07] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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