Brooke Gladstone: 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.