← Ukraine: The Latest
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The telegraph.
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I'm Adelie Pushman Ponte and this is Ukraine. The latest today, as Russia refused to follow Kyiv's proposed ceasefire, killing at least 26 civilians, Kyiv responded by hitting targets 1,500 kilometers into Russia's territory. Meanwhile, the corruption scandal uncovered in Ukraine last summer continues to send shockwaves, possibly touching Zelenskyy himself. Ukraine's chief negotiator, Rustem Umarov, himself under investigation in the probe, arrives in Miami for the first time talks since the beginning of the war against Iran. Finally, we get to the bottom of Russia's latest online disinformation campaign.
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Bravery takes you through the most unimaginable hardships to finally reward you with victory.
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Russia does not want peace.
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If I'm president, I will have that war settled in 124 hours.
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We are with you not just Today or tomorrow. But for a hundred years,
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Nobody's going to break us.
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We're strong, we're.
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Ukraine is.
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It's Thursday the 7th of May, four years and 72 days since the full scale invasion began. Today I'm joined by my colleague, associate editor for Defence, Dom Nichols, and senior writer at Bloomberg and friend of the podcast, Stephanie Baker. But first, let's go to Dom for the latest updates in the military realm.
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C
Well, hi, Adelaide. Hello, everybody. So, as President Zelenskyy said, Ukrainian forces have matched Russia's actions regarding any potential ceasefire. Last night, Ukrainian drones reportedly struck a military logistics facility in narofemysk. That's about 70k southwest of Moscow. This comes from the independent telegram outlet Exelonova plus, reported by Kyiv Independent. Now, it was yet another reminder to Putin of quite how vulnerable his parade on Saturday might be. It comes after Oleksandr Merezhko, who's the head of the Russian occupation authorities in Crimea, has cancelled his victory day celebrations due to what he said are safety concerns. Bit of an understatement. Now, his mind may have been focused by a reported Ukrainian drone strike late on Tuesday night, just before Ukraine's suggested ceasefire had come into effect. Took place on a reported FSB building, Russia's Federal Security Service building in occupied Crimea, in Armansk. That's right at the northern tip of the Crimean Peninsula. Crimean Wind. That's a pro. Ukrainian telegram channel said half of the FSB building is completely gone, according to our subscribers. Now, Mr. Axionov, who's, as I said, the head of the Russian occupation authorities there channeling his inner Frank Drebben. No, I won't ask you to name who that is. He said, I urge everyone to remain calm and to rely only on official sources of information.
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You laugh, but I did try and Google him when I was reading your script before the recording.
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And did it work?
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No, I did it. Still don't know who that is.
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Not that our gags are scripted. Now, in case there's any doubt at all about Ukraine's view on any observance of a ceasefire, a Ukrainian official speaking to our chums at the Kyiv Independence said, we just don't see the point for the parade as we don't see the point of a ceasefire for the parade. As I said on Tuesday, when I was on, I think this was very clever diplomacy by Ukraine. They made it clear that they would observe a ceasefire. Russia suggested over 8th and 9th and they said, well, why 8th or 9th? Why not before that? And they suggested 5th to 6th. So Tuesday midnight Tuesday, Wednesday. And obviously Russia's answer to that came in the mass attack yesterday, details of which President Zelensky gave yesterday. He said Russia had violated that ceasefire 1,820 times by 10am local yesterday. Just in the last 24 hours, Russian attacks have killed 13 people, injured 54 across the country. Six were killed in Donetsk, five in Sumy, two in Zaporizhzhia. 102 drones fired at Ukraine, 92 brought down. Now, of those drones fired, several of them entered Latvian airspace, one of them crashing near an oil storage facility close to the border. This comes from Latvia's national Armed forces. Officials in Latvia said the drones were not shot down because authorities could not guarantee the safety of civilians and infrastructure. Russian mod, because I do go and have a look at these guys occasionally. Well, you know, want a bit of Frank Drebben action. So, across the whole of Russia, this is air defenses intercepted and destroyed 347 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions last night. TASS, the state media organization, said drones were shot down over the following regions. Okay, take a breath. Belgorod, Bryansk, Volgograd, Varnish, Kaluga, Kursk, Lepets, Novgorod. Loads of place, basically draw a line down the middle of Russia. Everything west of that got visited last night, as well as the Azov, Caspian and Black Seas. So basically, I mean, it's huge. Sat with this, all that, all of that, loads of oblasts, which I started Googling to find out where they were and there's just so many. But basically I said, draw a line. Everything west of there got some sort of visitation in the night. So amid all this potential damage, Tass chose to zoom into Dewar Oblast and they, they reported Governor Vitaly Korolev, who had specified that in his oblast a roof slab on one building had been damaged. That's all that Tass said? Yeah, just that of all. Of all the potential damage. I mean, they say 347 drones shot down, so, you know, God knows how many others got through. They chose to say a roof slab had been damaged into their oblast. That's the only quote they had on Tass, which makes me think if they're trying to say, look at these rubbish, Ukrainian drones, all they can do is damage a roof slab in one of the. One of our oblasts. So if they are that rubbish, got nothing to worry about on Saturday then. So I don't know why they're making a big song and dance about needing a ceasefire if all that Ukraine can manage to do is to damage a roof slab somewhere in TVER oblast. Anyway, never mind now Russia, because they're absolutely, totally, definitely 100% not absolutely terrified about Saturday, has warned foreign governments to evacuate staff from Kyiv ahead of, as they say, inevitable retaliatory strikes. Remember, it's always retaliatory with Russia. They are never the indicators of the violence, so always they are retaliating to this escalation. Retaliatory strikes in the event Ukraine attacks Moscow during the mayday parade. This is clearly an attempt Russian Foreign Ministry, the Kremlin trying to pressure other governments to themselves, pressure Kyiv to say, oh, come on lads, you've got to observe this ceasefire. I don't think it's going to work. It certainly hasn't worked on Ukraine in the last few hours. President Zelensky has said today Ukraine's long range sanctions have once again reached Perm, which is more than 1,500 kilometers from our border. He goes on every day Russia can make a choice and end its war. And not for a few hours in order to receive our permission to hold a parade in Moscow. But in a way that protects human lives. People must be valued, not parades. There is a need to establish peace rather than running around the world's capitals begging for a pause on May 9th. Interesting messaging there about receiving our permission, begging. I mean, they are laying it on thick on the old comms. Ukrainians and fair play on the ground. No obvious move on the front. 890 Russian casualties yesterday. A number of Russian infiltration, so called infiltration events being reported as in twos, threes, fours individuals rushing forward trying to, trying to hold some ground. It was reported that Ukraine has reclaimed small amounts of land in the Donbass in the vicinity of Konstantinivka, although there's huge, huge pressure still on that, on that city. Also reclaimed a very small amount of land south of Zaporizhzhia city. But really not, not a lot, virtually nothing. I mean, it's in the, it's in the margin of error really, the amount of land that's changing hands. Last one for me, shout out to the United nations and no, don't fall off your chair. The UN Human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine, they say the reported civilian toll across Ukraine since 1 May is at least 70 killed, more than 500 injured. They say 28 people were reportedly killed, 194 injured just on May 5 in a wave of attacks. These are their words, a wave of attacks by the Russian Federation. You know, I'm often bashing the un so I do like to give them a shout out when I see that they're sort of attending to this massive global crisis that seemingly they don't every now and again. Anyway, today's not the day for bashing the un. They put a report out yesterday in which the head of mission, Danielle Bell, said what is particularly alarming is both the scale of civilian casualties and the extent of territory affected. In only a few days, more than 570 civilians have been reported killed and injured across 14 regions of Ukraine since 1 May. The UN report highlights how emergency workers and first responders have been amongst those killed and injured. When sites have been struck. Well, sites struck earlier were hit a second time, the so called double tap attacks. They highlight Poltava region where two emergency workers were among those killed overnight 4th or 5th of May in a so called double tap. Also a strike in Kherson City where medical personnel came under attack by drones on 3 May, having arrived at a site to provide medical assistance to people who had been impacted by a previous drone attack. Now, Ms. Bell says many of the civilians killed and injured were carrying out ordinary civilian activities, commuting, working, shopping, walking or responding to earlier strikes. In such circumstances, civilian harm is foreseeable. That point is important because as the UN report finishes, it says under international humanitarian law, an attacking party is under the obligation to take all feasible measures to minimise civilian casualties, including considering both the time of the attacks and the type of weapon to use. So, well done to the un and that's us up to date.
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Adli, thanks, Dom. Let's go to the diplomatic update. So, as we were just going into the studio, Rustem Umarov, Kyiv's chief negotiator, has just arrived in Miami for the talks with Steve Witkoff, the first ones since the beginning of the war with Iran. It's just worth reminding ourselves of the context here. It's coming about a week after Trump and Putin spoke on the phone in a 90 minute phone call, which was deemed by Trump very good, and where Putin again rejected the idea of unconditional ceasefire and proposing temporary truces, which he apparently isn't very keen to do. As you've reported widely, as far as we know, there are no plans for a similar phone call with Zelensky and Trump. So we'll have to see what the next few days bring in terms of negotiations. And we'll talk about this tomorrow and on Monday internally in Ukraine, because the corruption scandal that we've been talking about for the last six months, and that started last autumn in Ukraine after, remember, Zelensky tried to shut down Nabu and sapo, the anti corruption agencies. And then it came out that a lot of Zelensky's close circle were implicated in a massive corruption scheme with Ukraine's main energy company, Energoatom, targeting not only Yermak, but also the Minister for Justice, the Minister for Energy. Both of them had to resign, as well as Mindich, who is one of Zelenskyy's close friends and allies, and a businessman in Ukraine. So that is again sending more shockwaves throughout Ukraine. It is also targeting Rustem Umarov, as we said in the Introduct, Kyiv's chief negotiator, who's just landed in Miami, because he's under investigation himself, although he's not been charged yet, just like Yermak. So let's dive into what's happened in the last 24 hours and in the last week since yesterday. A top official at Sensei bank, one of Ukraine's most important bank and financial institutions, suspended himself after there was a publication last week of the transcript of audiotapes that were published by Nabu as well as by the Ukrainian media that were implicating the bank in the corruption scandal. The transcripts that were published last week for the very first time since the beginning of the investigation and of the scandal have hints of Zelenskyy's potential involvement in the scandal. So far, he's been quite protected by sacking a number of ministers as well as Andrew Yermak. But now it looks like it could close down on him. The transcripts reveal that the money was allegedly used to finance the construction of luxury villas near Kyiv. So what are the hints? Well, in the tape, Mindich, Zelensky's close ally and one of Ukraine's main businessmen, appears to be speaking with a woman named Natalia. And they refer to Zelenskyy's head of security, who they say is expected to arrive for a meeting. There's also in the tapes apparently a mention of someone named Vova, which in Ukrainian is a common nickname for Volodymyr. That's all there is so far. Every. That's all that's come through. But everybody's kind of being very cautious and looking at what that could mean and what new doors it opens in the investigation. So so far there has been no responses from the president's office. What could be the consequences for Zelenskyy if it came to close down on him? Well, an incumbent president cannot be investigated by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies, but they can be impeached based on evidence of wrongdoing, which There isn't at the moment. A former president, however, can indeed be investigated and charged. So this is likely to ramifications in the next few years. The tapes also contain several references to Andrew Yermak, who is currently under investigation but also has not been charged. And finally, they point to a link between Mindich and Firepoint. Remember, Firepoint is one of Ukraine's leading weapons company which makes the Flamingo missiles. Well, last week the Defense Ministry anti corruption watchdog called for nationalizing Firepoint following these new revelations. So, as the Kyiv Independent points out during the last presidential race in 2019, what's really interesting is that Zelenskyy had built momentum by accusing then President Petroproshenko of corruption and nepotism. And now he finds himself in a similar position which could potentially weaken his political position. And let's turn now to elsewhere in Europe and especially to Ukraine's neighbours. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslav Sikorski said that he would consider maybe forgiving Slovakian Prime Minister Fico, that's the quote, maybe forgiving if he approved EU support for Ukraine. Since Orban lost the election in Hungary last month, all eyes have been on Slovakia and whether it will take after Orban in blocking aid to Ukraine or EU sanctions against Russia. So we'll have to see what the answer from Slovakia is. Meanwhile, Hungary de escalated tensions with Ukraine by returning the assets from Ukraine's state owned Oshat bank, which they had taken a few weeks ago and that we've reported largely. So that's about $40 million and roughly 9 kg of gold. Zelenskyy has called that a civilized step. And that's it for me for the diplomatic updates today. And now joining us in the studio is Stephanie Baker, senior writer at Bloomberg and friend of the podcast. Welcome back, Stephanie. You've just published an amazing investigation looking at disinformation coming out of Russia targeting, well, Zelenskyy, but also a number of other countries and a number of other political personalities across Europe and the us. Let's dive into it. I think you identified up to 190 fabricated stories over the last year. It's been a year's worth of work. Do you want to take us through how this all started?
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D
Yeah, it started when I was spending a lot of time in Germany last year reporting on another Russian hybrid operation that was the attempted assassination of the Rheinmetall CEO Armin Popperger. And while I was in Germany, people were talking, talking about this Russian disinformation operation targeting the German election. And you actually had German authorities attributing some of the activities that they saw to this Russian disinformation operation called Storm 1516. Now, this is an operation that was identified first at the end of 2023 by a Clemson University researcher out of the US who spotted a number of narratives on X targeting Zelenskyy, making false accusations about Zelenskyy. The first one he saw was the false story that Olena zelenska had spent 1.1 million at Cartier on luxury jewelry when she was in New York. So he started digging, identified another 11 similar narratives, all targeting Ukraine, making similar allegations of corruption, misuse of Western aid money. And they fit a similar pattern. They were often seeded on either YouTube or Instagram. Then they were placed often on a website in Africa, picked up by fake websites, purpose built websites run out of Moscow that used AI to populate the websites with real content and these fake stories and then were pushed out on X where they infiltrated the conversation. They were picked up by real people, often influencers with huge followings. And he identified it as a distinct operation. Microsoft then came in. Microsoft does a lot of this work identifying cyber actors. Named it Storm 1516 and then eventually elevated it, saying, we identify this as a nation state, Russian state backed operation. They all have very similar characteristics. They tend to be presented as whistleblowers. They're sometimes presented in the format of news reports. They often, you know, pretend to be legitimate news outlets, but slightly altered by name. And they make, you know, wild accusations, often about Zelenskyy. Of the almost 200 narratives that we identified, 40% were about Ukraine. And almost all of them were targeted at Zelenskyy making, you know, outlandish claims that he had spent money on a penthouse in Dubai, bought a ranch in Wyoming. I mean, it goes on and on and on. And, you know, the difficulty is assessing the impact of that. Right? X, the platform X seems to be the main venue for what is called narrative laundering. These are fake stories generated in Russia. They make their way onto X and then they become part of the mainstream conversation. And they're often picked up by politicians in the West. We've documented several instances of US politicians repeating these stories, often using them as justification for, for their opposition to continued aid to Ukraine.
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A
So what's the process of linking them back to Russia? How do you identify where they come from?
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D
Yeah, we went through a systematic approach. We developed a methodology to determine what was storm 1516 and what was perhaps another Russian disinformation campaign. Because there are multiple different approaches from Moscow to this storm 1516 is usually it has a pro Kremlin narrative. It's often produced in a whistleblower format. This is someone purporting to have documents or other evidence that the mainstream news outlets will not provide. But those claims are unverifiable and are often easily debunked. They often use actors. Frequently members of the West African diaspora in St. Petersburg often appear in some of their videos. They appeared in several videos that were pushed out in the run up to the 2024 US election, generally pushed out by a network of identifiable influencers on X who frequently share these stories. So we were tracking a long list of these influencers on X who repeatedly shared these stories and identified some of the worst offenders. A lot of them are anonymous accounts, so we don't know if they are real people. We don't know if they are Russian intelligence operatives. We don't know how many are actually getting paid. We did approach a number of them as part of the reporting. It did kick off a bit of a fight, let's say on X, about the fact that we had outed them as sharing these fake stories.
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A
What's the fight?
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D
Well, there was one influencer who has almost 800,000 followers on X, called My Lord Bebo. We don't know his real name. He would not tell me his real name. And he claimed that he had been shopped various videos by other influencers who had documented ties to the Kremlin to post on his account, including one influencer who had been banned from X called Osi Kosak. His real name is Semyon Boikove's been holed up in the Russian Consulate in Sydney since 2022 for allegedly assaulting a pro Ukrainian protester. So he's been given refuge by the Kremlin. And he had been, according to My Lord Bieber, who he had been shopping a lot of this content around and had been posting some of it prior to his ban from X.
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A
So he was aware of what he was doing.
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D
They all claimed that they weren't aware that what they were posting was fake. And I leave it to you to decide whether or not you think that's valid.
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C
Can I ask. Narrative laundering, a fascinating topic. I've not heard that phrase before, but in this, in this area, I thought up till now, we, we in the west were under the impression that Russian disinformation came from a point of not trying to make you believe something, but just trying to make you doubt everything. But this sounds as if it is actually trying to push a line and try to make it as believable as possible and then get picked up by, you know, useful idiots, as you just described, to actually push it and make it part of the, of the, the regular. So do you think, have I got that correct? And is that a shift from what they're actually trying to do to try to make us believe something?
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D
On one level, Russia is acting as chaos agent here, there's no doubt about that. They want everyone to question the reliability of any kind of information so that these conspiracy theories can thrive. I think the narrative laundering concept, I found it quite interesting because it's somewhat akin to money laundering, right? You use layers of accounts to hide the origin of a narrative, just like you use shell companies to layer transactions to move money into the legitimate financial sphere. I think with this, their top target is definitely Ukraine. That is, you can see that consistently. And I don't think they're necessarily trying to change people's minds. They're trying to feed a general suspicion or a general point of view and reinforce people's beliefs on certain issues. So the whole question of Ukraine aid in particular, I think, was one that they've been hammering home again and again and again, because the biggest threat that Putin faces is a well financed, well funded Ukrainian army, and that has been a key target for them. They targeted the US elections in the run up to 2024, making all sorts of false claims about, you know, immigrants voting illegally in the state of Georgia. You know, about 30% of the narratives we identified were targeting elections in the west, raising questions about the legitimacy of elections in the West. So that's another sort of chaos agent theme that they're hitting on. But after Trump was elected, they really turned their focus to Europe, where the support for Ukraine remained, and they were hitting both Germany and France hard because those were two leading European supporters of continued financial and military aid to Ukraine. So when I started out doing this, I think I had become desensitized to the idea of disinformation, misinformation online. We sort of think, oh, yeah, of course it's out there and there's all these false stories circulating. But once I started to dig into it, you realize that actually this is much more damaging than we realize because it's being done on an industrial scale and there were so many of these stories that people believed. And you can tell it from the comments. Of course, there are bots on X that are inflating views and the like, but there are a lot of. You could tell from looking at who was retweeting and responding to Some of these stories that they believed them and they wanted to believe them. And I think that reinforced beliefs and I think does do damage by shifting the discourse at the margins. And in a way, it's kind of like small doses of poison that you don't realize how damaging they are until you wake up one day and you realize, I don't feel well in this case. Small doses of misinformation until we realize, wait, there's this perception that Zelenskyy's misusing Western aid money, but there's been absolutely no proof of it. Of course there's been a ongoing Ukrainian corruption story. We all know about that. But curiously they never focused. And I think I only found one video of them pivoting off of that real Ukrainian corruption story and makingtrying to tie Zelensky directly to it in a way that the Ukrainian investigators have not. So I think it is far more dangerous than we realize and it needs to be called out because the social media platforms and the US government are not doing anything about it at the moment.
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A
Yeah, I was going to ask what are some of the options to fight against it and what sort of responsibility acts as the main social media platform propagating these stories is taking against that? You've mentioned Microsoft, it's targeting EU countries. What are some of the tools available?
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D
Well, X before Elon Musk took over. And I do think there's an interesting timeline here because Musk takes over X at the end of 2022 and the Storm 1516 campaign really gets going in August 2023 and really just takes off in a way that I think no previous Russian disinformation operation has in terms of capturing eyeballs. Before Musk took over, they did have a fairly robust trust and safety team and content moderation. It wasn't perfect, but they were pretty good at spotting some of this and labeling it or taking it down. But Musk fired huge numbers of content moderators and dismantled a lot of their trust and safety measures. They're now relying principally on what's called community notes. So that is a user generated system whereby if enough users come together and they have to be from opposing viewpoints, they have to have disagreed before. If enough of those come together and say this is a false report, then it will get a community note so that a user can see that this might not be a true story. But what we found was that less than 20% of the narratives that we identified as this Russian disinformation operation had a community note attached and not all posts carrying some of these videos or narratives would have a note. So the community note system is not working and X is not taking action and taking some of this stuff down.
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A
What about coming from institutions like the EU or coming from the U.S. you said the U.S. wasn't doing anything, is that right?
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D
Yeah, I mean, another important shift happened in the past year and a half, which is that after Trump came in, the US basically dismantled all the initiatives the government agencies they had set up to monitor covert nation state actions to influence US opinion that were set up after 2016 when it was documented that Russia did tried to interfere in the US election. So the FBI had a foreign influence task force, they dismantled that. The US intelligence agencies had something called the Foreign Malign Influence center that was also dismantled. And the State Department also had something called the Global Engagement center, which would call out and issue reports on disinformation from nation state actors. And that was defunded by Congress at the end of 2024. So the US has no government agency monitoring this stuff or calling it out. And that really leaves Europe as the only one watching. And we did see that Brussels, the European Commission issued a fine against X in December of 120 million euros, which is really chicken feed in the greater scheme of things for X or Elon Musk as part of a broader investigation into misinformation and their handling of misinformation. And that was for a very narrow issue and it was specifically for not allowing researchers access to content on X and for its blue check policy saying that X was misleading users by implying that users accounts with blue check marks, their identities had been verified, which of course we know they have not. So there could be more action on the EU front on that. But I think the Digital Services act in Europe is probably the main tool to try to influence and regulate the social media giants on this front.
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A
But not very efficient then.
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D
Not now, no.
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A
So looking at Russia, you said it was an industrial scale operation. It's all very coordinated, all very thought through. Who are the people? What do we know about the efforts from the Kremlin coming from Russia to organize this? Who's behind this?
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D
Well, from my reporting, we believe that overall it's overseen from the Kremlin by Putin's first deputy chief of the presidential administration, a man named Sergey Kirienko, who's been around since the 1990s. When I was living in Moscow, he was a technocrat, the youngest prime minister. As I understand, he holds regular meetings setting the agenda. He's not sitting there doing the granular work that is farmed out through other agencies. Western officials believe that this operation is backed by the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, and specifically by its unit 29155, which is its sabotage unit. And they believe it's led by the Ukrainian officials that I spoke to, who I think are tracking this very carefully, as they would, because they're being targeted by it. The Ukrainian officials I spoke to said they believe that it's. It's led by the same man who is in charge of an infamous hacking operation called UAC50 Ember Bear. So there's a certain overlap between the cyber operations that they're running as well as these disinformation operations. It's very murky, and I think we in the west try to impose our own order on what is probably a very chaotic operation within Moscow by giving it these crazy names like Storm 1516. In fact, I think it's probably far more fluid than that in terms of how it operates. There is a Florida deputy sheriff from Palm Beach, Florida, named John Mark Dugan who is a US citizen who fled to Russia in 2016 after an indictment for extortion. And he's been living in Russia since then. And we believe he is cooperating in help pushing these narratives out. He, of course, denied that, saying he has nothing to do with any Russian disinformation operations. That's a contradiction to what he said previously when he has admitted to it, and he was awarded a medal by Russia for what he said was his efforts in the information war.
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C
Can I ask just why the US Is dismantling these structures? I mean, the clue is in the title. Is it not something like foreign malign influence, task force and what have you? I mean, they've all got foreign in there somewhere, making it clear that, I guess their remit, their constitution, is not to look at US Citizens or inside the US Geographically. So why are they being dismantled?
- [35:01]
D
Well, I think it goes back to the fact that Trump called the US intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in the US election in 2016. He called that a hoax, and he's never believed that because he believes that that undermines the legitimacy of his election. And I think there had been a perception in the US in particular, that all these efforts were a form of censorship of US Citizens. Whereas I think the officials that were involved in running those operations, who I've spoken to, they viewed their main mission was to call these operations out, call out these false stories that there is no way to fight this unless you exposed it. There was a lot of controversy over the Twitter files a couple of years ago where there was some disclosures made. I think a lot of it was taken out of context. I think there's a perception that this was an attempt to muzzle the voices, the freedom of expression by US Citizens instead of just calling out and labeling this stuff as false. And I think that obviously is going to have huge consequences. I mean, I personally am worried about the US Midterms, which are really high stakes, as we all know, not just the US Government agencies that were set up to monitor it, but you have a lot of NGOs that have been kind of quashed or not really operating. And I think it's going to be very hard for people to sort out what's true and what's fabricated. Because you saw in 2024, the US agencies, the FBI, the intelligence agencies, they made very public announcements saying these stories that you're seeing, we believe are part of a Russian disinformation campaign. Please do not believe them. And I don't know if that will happen this time.
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C
And just last one for me, if I may. These actions that we think go back to Russia, have any of them been trying to push the narrative or keep the conversation going, generate new conversations around the Epstein files and any link to Trump?
- [37:05]
D
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the ones that I cover. It was a video that was pushed out in March alleging that Zelensky had ties to Epstein through an alleged casting agency that he used. And they fabricated emails between this Ukrainian owner of a casting agency that he allegedly used, which is not true, but that he allegedly used when he was, you know, a comedian, between him and Epstein allegedly procuring some young girl from Ukraine and that got millions of views on X. And it was not labeled as such. That's not the only one. There have been several others trying to allege some kind of connection between Epstein and Zelenskyy. I mean, there has been a lot of disinformation around Epstein, broadly speaking, but this has been a very targeted, we believe, Russian campaign.
- [37:57]
C
But they've not also targeted Trump and Epstein, tried to make that link. Or have they?
- [38:01]
D
We didn't see. I don't recall a specific Trump Epstein, one that we saw. And we were pretty careful about, you know, what we would determine as this storm. 15, 16. There were stuff that we thought was borderline and we ruled out.
- [38:16]
C
Strange that something that potentially so damaging to the US President. The Russian disinformation campaign doesn't really take an interest.
- [38:23]
D
They did with Macron. They tried to tie Macron and Epstein.
- [38:28]
C
Macron Zelenskyy, but not Trump.
- [38:29]
D
Yeah, exactly. I think they've been very careful about Trump. Very careful about Trump. Yeah.
- [38:34]
A
You've mentioned Ukraine is 40% of the stories you identified. It's also targeted France and Germany. What are the other theaters? We need to pay attention to the other countries that it may target in the coming months or a couple of years.
- [38:46]
D
Right. So they turned their attention to Hungary, for instance, pretty late in the game. We documented 12 false narratives videos that they targeted Petar Magyar, then opposition leader, now leader of Hungary. They targeted Moldova, and they have been targeting Armenia a lot. I think there were 24 narratives we discovered targeting Armenia, specifically making false allegations about Prime Minister Nicole Pashinyan. And I expect them to double down on that in the run up to the June election in Armenia. This is really important to Putin. Armenia has pivoted towards Europe. And I think that this is a high stakes election for the Kremlin to try to make sure that Armenia stays within its sphere of influence. So I think we should all be monitoring that. And they're coming up with pretty convincing deep fake videos making, again, wild, snarky allegations against Armenia, alleging corruption and the like.
- [39:53]
A
And also, the less you know about a country, and Armenia is a small country that I would assume not many people know about, you see something coming onto your feed on X, it's even easier to latch onto it and not see that it's a fake news and not have the sort of bandwidth to be able to look it up and identify it. So it gets into people's minds a lot more easily, I think.
- [40:11]
D
Yeah. And they've used AI quite effectively. Sometimes it's crude AI, but even crude AI, if you're scrolling looks pretty convincing. They'll use actors and superimpose a face on an actor and using sort of animated software, create some sort of video testimonial about some alleged corruption or scandal. And I think that's why it's so dangerous. And the AI is only getting more sophisticated and I think that's. That's enabled them to kind of lower the cost and speed up the product generation. So, you know, yeah, I think we should be watching Armenia. And then of course, the US Midterm elections.
- [40:58]
B
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- [41:31]
A
Well, thank you very much for taking us deep into that year long reporting, a massive effort. Let's go to our final thoughts. Dom, do you want to start?
- [41:38]
C
Thank you. Firstly thanks to Hitch who this morning answered some of my more stupid questions of the week for story coming out in a couple of weeks time. So thanks Hitch. Also thanks to Matt, Australian geologist I hear who's listening to us from the Falkland Islands. So thanks Matt. I would like to leave folks with so he mentioned this yesterday, but he will, he will duff him up if I don't mention it again. Francis, tonight he's in Oxford. He's at the Oxford Union for a debate. The title which is this house would go to war with Russia rather than lose Ukraine. So I know he would be delighted if folks went along to that if you had a spare couple of hours this evening at the Oxford Union. So go and catch Francis Darnley in all his Technicolor glory tonight in Oxford.
- [42:21]
A
Thank you. Two very small notes for me. We still have the survey for our listeners about the podcast, your listening habits, what you like, what you don't like. We'll put the link in the show notes. And as for my own personal advertisement, I'll be doing a talk and moderating a conference tomorrow with the Ukrainian Institute in London with a former Ukrainian soldier, now demobilized, who's also an acclaimed war poet. And that you'll hear more about on this very podcast in the next few weeks, a month. So if you're in London, want to say hello, come to the talk tomorrow night. Stephanie, where would you like to leave us?
- [42:57]
D
Well, I'm going to leave you on a note about sanctions. As you know, I wrote a book called Punishing Putin about the Western sanctions campaign against Russia. And obviously the war in Iran has basically bailed Putin out of a very tough financial crunch that he was facing in February. I think the latest reporting that we have done that my colleagues at Bloomberg have done that Russia collected almost $10 billion in tax from Russian oil in April alone and that's the highest since October. So I am still monitoring this, obviously that it's a windfall for Putin, the Iran war, and the longer it drags out, the more he's going to benefit.
- [43:39]
A
Thank you very much. Thank you all for listening. We'll be back tomorrow someplace sometime. Thanks very much. Bye Bye. Ukraine the Latest is an original podcast from the Telegraph created by David Knowles. Every episode featuring us in the studio. Maps and battlefield footage is now available to watch on our YouTube channel. Subscribe@www.YouTube.com crane the latest there's a link in the description. If you appreciate our work, please consider following Ukraine the Latest on your preferred Pot app. Leave us a review as it helps others find the show and please also share it with those who may not be aware we exist. You can also get in touch directly and ask questions or give comments by emailing ukrainepodelegraph.co.uk we promise we continue to read every message even if we can't reply to you all. You can also contact us on X. You'll find our handles in the description. As ever, we're especially interested in interested to hear where you're listening from around the world. And finally, to support our work and stay on top of all of our Ukraine news, analysis and dispatches from the ground, please subscribe to the Telegraph. You can get one month for free, then two months for just one pound at www.telegraph.co.uk Ukraine the latest Ukraine the Latest was today produced by Phil Atkins in Audio and Sophie o' Sullivan in Video. The Executive Editor is Francis Dernley. The series creator is David Knowles.
- [45:11]
D
My name is David Knowles.
- [45:12]
C
Thank you all for listening.
- [45:14]
D
Goodbye.
- [45:29]
B
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- [46:06]
D
I sold my car in Carvana last night.
- [46:08]
A
Well that's cool.
- [46:08]
D
No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong.
- [46:14]
A
So what's the problem? That is the problem.
- [46:17]
D
Nothing in my life goes to smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.
- [46:23]
A
Wow, you need to relax.
- [46:25]
D
I need a knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood? I think it's laminate. Okay.
- [46:29]
A
Yeah, that's good. That's close.
- [46:29]
D
Close enough. Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana.
- [46:34]
A
Pick up fees may apply.
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C
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A
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D
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A
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D
Asian American life and the stories they reveal.
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A
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C
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