I am being fact checked

A Russian disinformation expert from a “Russian-Ukraine Disinformation Tracking Center” is reviewing the site for, ahem, disinformation. It’s been an interesting and cordial conversation so far, with some important points made. That’s why I decided to share it here for anyone else who might have the same questions. In the name of free speech I won’t disclose the name of the disinformation expert or the fact checking
organization.

I posted this as a Q&A (she gave specific examples of each point, I’ve shortened her prompts for brevity)

Hello [Redacted],

Thank you for reaching out! I see that you are an expert in Russian disinformation. It’s great to meet someone who has visited and studied Russia extensively enough to be an expert on their news, military, and social culture. I’ve also visited this country a few times, which puts me in a unique position for research purposes, though I am in no danger of being an expert on Russia. I’m just a humble tourist.

1.) One of our other criteria is that websites handle the difference between news and opinion responsibly.

Can you comment on ReadingJunkie.com’s handling of news and opinion?

Reading Junkie is my blog. As someone with a background in military and corporate public relations, I often opine on topics surrounding information warfare. As I mentioned previously, I am visiting Russia too!

The blogosphere is a crucial tool for sharing information in a world dominated by the instant gratification of short-form social media, and the increasingly hegemonic nature of news outlets worldwide. Regarding the question of “news” and “opinion,” I am simply interested in the truth.

2.) One of our criteria is that a website does not publish false information. However, I found several examples of information on ReadingJunkie.com that appeared to be false.

War is the most murky human activity possible, especially this one. It’s a civil war, brother against brother, father against son. There are families with civilians and soldiers on both sides of the conflict, and it’s reminiscent of our own civil war in America, or the previous Russian civil war. If you haven’t experienced it already, I would recommend reading or watching the film adaption of Quiet Flows the Don, about a small Cossack community torn apart by World War I and the Civil War. I bring this story up specifically because it beautifully and tragically illustrates just how painful and venomous fraternal violence is, and why discerning the truth can be so difficult.

What is true is that the average Ukrainian isn’t a nazi, and he doesn’t think Zelensky is a nazi, or that Kiev is a puppet of NATO. He’s just defending his country against what he considers an unprovoked invasion by an evil aggressor. That makes the situation even more tragic, not less.

In a war, each side is peddling their own “truth.” In this war in Ukraine, there are two main sides, NATO and her allies, and Russia and her allies. There is also a cloud of people and parties with their own agendas and grift adding to the confusion. Even journalists on the front lines do not truly know what is happening because they only see one small piece of it, and that piece might be distorted or an outright lie. Almost any event can be faked, and any photo or video should actually be taken with a grain of salt.

There’s an additional layer of uncertainty and danger to this situation. Many writers and analysts, myself included, speculated about the goals and motivations of senior military and civilian leaders on both sides. But by now, it should be clear to any observer that even these leaders are uncertain about how this war will play out, and are incrementally escalating and playing “tit for tat.” One misstep made out of folly or anger could result in disaster for us all. Meeting Russia in the middle to seriously and honestly discuss her security needs is the only surefire way to avoid escalation potentially leading to nuclear armageddon.

We will not have a complete picture of what happened in Ukraine for the last 20+ years until this war is over. And even then, there will be new pieces of the puzzle coming out for months, years, perhaps decades afterward as documents are released (or leaked). It’s one thing to try our best to research the subject and present the most substantiated and balanced statement possible. But fact checking in black and white terms what is truth and what is fiction is much more difficult. It is possible to make judgements and perceive the war in broad strokes, and that’s it. Anything deeper than that is perilous.

When measuring both sides for truth, here’s what it boils down to. The Russian MoD engages in classic propaganda. They hype their successes and downplay their failures. I mean this in the most complimentary way possible, for I have never seen an official statement from them that I would consider to be an outright lie, but consistent with a cautious military intelligence bureau. For example, they’re hesitant to confirm the success of Ukrainian weapons. That’s common sense. If an enemy carries out an attack against you, it’s not a good idea to immediately confirm that it worked and specify what damage it caused.

The Ukrainian mouthpieces, unfortunately, discredited themselves almost immediately. Examples: Zelensky declaring his own soldiers dead and giving them posthumous awards when they were still alive, or the Ukrainian government repeatedly accusing Russian soldiers of “weaponized rape” with no evidence, and later definitively proven to be false. The Pentagon, State Dept., BBC and MI6 (I repeat myself) I only take slightly more seriously.

However, while there is some neo-Nazi presence in Ukraine, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Nazism is rampant in Ukrainian politics or culture. Can you comment on these claims?

What would you consider rampant? 1%? 5%? 10%? If an organization tolerates nazism, or outright endorses it and uses nazi and nazi-inspired imagery, can we safely say that nazism is “rampant?” Where do you personally draw the line? Here’s a simple test. Wear a swastika shirt in Kiev for a day. Then repeat the same experiment in Moscow. I for one can tell you that I if I tried such a thing in Moscow, or any other Russian city, I wouldn’t even make it down the street without being stopped by police or concerned citizens.

In the past when American service members posed with the nazi SS symbol, they were investigated and disciplined, and rightly so. Tiny numbers of American soldiers engage in purported extremist activity, some of which can be something as mundane as sharing memes of a cartoon frog, and this is enough to warrant widespread media coverage, legislation, and massive Pentagon campaigns to crack down on it. But when Ukrainians go to much greater extremes, such as having entire nazi-themed battalions, media outlets carry water for them and make up excuses.

What’s particularly shameful is that it all started late February. The same media outlets like the Guardian who previously condemned Ukraine for their right sector are now whitewashing the entire history of Ukrainian Nazism and the Banderist movement. Ukrainian nazi and extremist organizations that were previously sanctioned by the USA + allies are now reconciled, and for no other reason except they’re useful tools against Russia. Like the “moderate rebels” in Syria.

This is racism of low expectations. Ukraine should be held to the same standard as anyone else. Instead, western legacy media invent excuses for them and western governments continue shoveling military arms into formations full of nazi militants.

However, while the United States supported the revolution, there is no evidence to suggest that the U.S. orchestrated it. Can you comment on this claim?

This sounds like hair-splitting. Orchestrating. Supporting. Participated in. Wanted to happen. Can you say with absolute honesty, that the outcome would have been the same without the interested presence of the USG, including Biden and Nuland? Can you honestly say that, on their own without foreign encouragement, Ukrainians would have taken the extraordinary and unprecedented step of sending troops to open fire on people in Donbass, or burning protesters in Odessa, or executing Mariupol police officers in cold blood? Human beings are violent creatures, but fratricide is a huge step to take without the intervention of an outside party.

Ultimately, war happens when diplomacy failed. Why did diplomacy fail in the Ukraine? From the 2019 Rand report Extending Russia:

“The Ukrainian military already is bleeding Russia in the Donbass region (and vice versa). Providing more U.S. military equipment and advice could lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it. Russia might respond by mounting a new offensive and seizing more Ukrainian territory. While this might increase Russia’s costs, it would also represent a setback for the United States, as well as for Ukraine”

Does this sound like someone interested in ending the violence… or using it to his advantage?

However, reports indicate that both Ukraine and Russia have and use the Tochka-U. Can you comment on this claim?

You are referencing a post I made in March. Now 4-5 months later, I would caution against any absolute statements about the weaponry used by either side (Russia has never used this, Ukraine has never used that). It’s a war of logistical attrition. Russia not only has to maintain fire superiority, they have to keep an acceptable stockpile of ammunition on hand in case war breaks out on another front. This issue is further complicated by the fact that Russia and Ukraine have large inventories of the same weapons, like the Tochka-U, so both have the option of using it. So now in a 6 month war, would I say with absolute certainty that Russia has never used a Tochka-U? No. But I will say that the handful of highly-publicized allegations that I’m aware of, like the Kramatorsk train station attack, are, at best, contested.

That said, there are some simple rules of thumb every observer should bear in mind when reading news:

-There are, in two very broad categories, relatively indiscriminate area-effect weapons, and precision weapons. The Tochka-U is a Cold War era weapon designed to annihilate large, concentrated formations of soldiers and equipment. There are limited opportunities to safely use such a weapon: AFU troops are mostly entrenched in populated areas. There’s the additional problem that unexploded cluster munitions, mines, and white phosphorus weapons pose a threat to civilians as well as friendly troops entering the area later. For the advancing army, these weapons have to be used sparingly because of their tendency to leave residual hazards that need to be cleaned up. The defending army on the retreat can use such weapons without worrying about their consequences.

-Russia will be left to clean up the mess, so there is an obvious motivation for them to keep destruction down to a minimum. And based on how much Russia invested into Chechnya and Crimea, that’s a responsibility we can safely expect them to take seriously. Just about every single person in Ukraine qualifies for Russian citizenship, and Russian pensions. Aside from humanitarian concerns, there’s obvious pragmatic reasons for Russia to refrain from indiscriminate destruction.

All postwar territory of the former Ukraine, regardless of how it is divided up between Russia, the West, and independent states, will need healthy workers, not crippled soldiers and civilians. Almost all of the fighting is happening in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, where a large portion of the population are enthusiastic supporters of Russia so it makes sense to not alienate them with excessive violence. Insisting that Russians are barbarians who indiscriminately kill for no logical reason isn’t fact checking, it’s propaganda.

-Any honest person has to acknowledge that the Ukrainians have a huge motivation to conduct false flag attacks. Western news sources reprint these accusations of “atrocities” without question. Again, these are population centers full of people who actively support Russia or indifferent to it, so Ukraine doesn’t lose anything by bombing them.

While media has certainly reported that Russia was responsible for the theater bombing, so have various human rights organizations and munitions experts. Can you comment on this claim?

Things like munitions and crater analysis are not rare skills. There are literally millions of military and law enforcement veterans who have knowledge of these fields and are willing to make a bold statement for media attention. The theater bombing happened when there was a huge amount of propaganda depicting the Russians as being brutal in Mariupol because they were an undisciplined horde being defeated by heroic Azov battalion. Mariupol is now in Russian hands and they’re responsible for rebuilding it. Are we really going to continue believing propaganda from March and April?

However, the International Criminal Court, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe have all said they have found no evidence of genocide in the Donbass. While there were reported acts of violence by Ukrainian forces against civilians in 2013 and 2014, there is no evidence that those instances constituted a genocide. Can you comment on these claims?

One simply has to look at the definition of genocide, per the UN:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Cutting off an entire population’s access to water, electricity, and medical care, and inflicting violence on them continually for 8 years absolutely qualifies as a genocide, by the UN’s own statements. This type of violence would not be tolerated in any civilized country, but again, this is racism of low expectations. A blind eye is turned to the violence perpetrated by the Kiev regime because of the perception that they’re silly and don’t know any better.

3.) One of our other criteria is that websites regularly correct and clarify errors. However, while I did find one correction, I didn’t see any others, and we typically look for at least two corrections in the past year. Can you please provide me with examples of corrections that I might have missed/Can you comment on your site’s approach to corrections?

My two main predictions in the past year 1) What would happen in Ukraine and 2) the outcome of the Biden Administration’s hunt for extremism in the DOD ranks – I’ve followed up on these issues, but both are “ongoing” news, so a proper after-action review or assessment of either of them isn’t possible yet. I hope and pray the war will end soon and we will have peace again, then will be the time to look back at all past statements and predictions about the Ukrainian civil war and how accurate they turned out to be.

Correction: Spelling error in first paragraph fixed, and I further mphasized that this is a Q&A format.

Ian Kummer

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