An Alternate Reality: How Russia's State TV Spins the Ukraine War
Leaked emails detail how Russia's biggest state broadcaster, working
with the nation's security services, mined right-wing American news
and Chinese media to craft a narrative that Moscow was winning.
As Russian tanks were stuck in the mud outside Kyiv earlier this year
and the economic fallout of war with Ukraine took hold, one part
of Russia's government hummed with precision: television propaganda.
Spinning together a counternarrative for tens of millions of viewers,
Russian propagandists plucked clips from American cable news,
right-wing social media and Chinese officials. They latched onto
claims that Western embargoes of Russian oil would be self-defeating,
that the United States was hiding secret bioweapon research labs
in Ukraine and that China was a loyal ally against a fragmenting
West.
Day by day, state media journalists sharpened those themes in emails.
They sometimes broadcast battlefield videos and other information
sent to them by the successor agency to the K.G.B. And they excerpted
and translated footage from favorite pundits, like the Fox News host
Tucker Carlson, whose remarks about the war were shown to millions
of Russians.
"Be sure to take Tucker," one Russian news producer wrote to
a colleague. The email referred to a clip in which Mr. Carlson
described the power of the Chinese-Russian partnership that had
emerged under Mr. Biden - and how American economic policies
targeting Russia could undermine the dollar's status as
a world-reserve currency.
The correspondence was one of thousands of email exchanges stored
within a leaked database from Russia's largest state-owned media
company, the All-Russia State Television and Radio Company, known
as V.G.T.R.K. The data was made publicly available online by
DDoSecrets, a group that publishes hacked documents.
The New York Times created a search tool to identify material from
the 750 gigabytes of files related to the buildup to the war and its
earliest stages from January to March 2022, when the available
documents ended. The Times verified the documents by confirming
email addresses and people's identities. In many instances, matters
discussed in the emails led to content broadcast on the air.
The emails provide a rare glimpse into a propaganda machine that
is perhaps Russia's greatest wartime success. Even as the country
faces battlefield losses, mounting casualties, economic isolation and
international condemnation, state-run television channels have spun
a version of the war in which Russia is winning, Ukraine is in
shambles and Western alliances are fraying. Along with a fierce
crackdown on dissent, the propaganda apparatus has helped President
Vladimir V. Putin maintain domestic support for a war that many
in the West had hoped would weaken his hold on power the longer
it dragged on.
To create this narrative, producers at the state media company
cherry-picked from conservative Western media outlets like Fox News
and the Daily Caller, as well as obscure social media accounts on
Telegram and YouTube, according to the records. Russian security
agencies like the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the successor
to the K.G.B., fed other information, creating an alternative version
of events such as the bombing of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
In other instances, V.G.T.R.K. workers shared clips, sometimes from
little-known American media, that appeared to show opposition to the
war rising in the West or how sanctions were backfiring against the
United States.
The clip showed how some in the area were pasting stickers on the
pump with a photo of President Biden saying, "I did that." It quoted
a local gas station manager, who worried the stickers could cause
trouble during corporate inspections.
Two days later, the broadcast was featured in an email roundup
of video clips from across the United States sent to V.G.T.R.K.
journalists.
The clip had picked up a modest 30,000 views on YouTube. It noted
the sticker protest, which had appeared elsewhere in the United
States, had "gained a second wind" as prices rose over the conflict
in Ukraine.
That same day, the clip appeared dubbed into Russian on Russian
national news.
The segment covered the ways discontent over inflation was rising
in the United States. The reporter concludes: "Because of Ukraine,
Biden can't or doesn't want to focus on domestic issues in the U.S."
[Russian] "Indignant drivers decorate gas stations with these Biden
stickers that say, I did it.'"
"I peel off 5-6 of these every day. They appear on all of our pumps."
Other material showed an organization grappling with Russia's growing
isolation. V.G.T.R.K. employees tracked how their broadcasts were
received overseas and talked about how to react when their channels
were being blocked in neighboring European countries. They even
discussed a response to Russia being dropped from the popular
Eurovision singing competition, a major television event.
China was used to bolster Russian story lines, according to the
records, with producers pulling from Chinese media for potential
story ideas. In another instance, they discussed currying favor with
a top Chinese propaganda official.
V.G.T.R.K. did not respond to requests for comment. A Fox News
spokeswoman didn't provide a comment.
V.G.T.R.K. has roughly 3,500 employees and operates some of the
country's most-watched channels, including Russia 1 and Russia 24,
as well as a robust online operation. With national and regional
networks, it reaches nearly the entire Russian population, from urban
hubs to rural areas, and its dominance has grown as the government
has restricted access to social media and independent news. The
company receives about $500 million a year from the Russian
government, analysts estimated.
"Besides the political machine of what the Kremlin operates directly,
V.G.T.R.K. is the second-most important part of propaganda in
Russia," said Vasily Gatov, a Russian media researcher at the
University of Southern California's Annenberg Center on
Communication Leadership and Policy.
The company, created in 1990 and now run by the Kremlin ally Oleg
Dobrodeyev, sets the news agenda and shapes public opinion, Mr.
Gatov said. About two-thirds of Russians count television as their
main source of news, according to a recent survey. And V.G.T.R.K.'s
influence extends to other media outlets, with its former Kremlin
correspondent, Margarita Simonyan, now the top editor of RT, Russia's
English-language news channel.
Collaboration between the Kremlin and state broadcasters dates
back more than two decades, said Mr. Gatov, a former Russian
journalist and an expert on state propaganda. Each day, the Kremlin
provides a list of talking points for broadcasters. The closely
guarded document, known as the "temnik," is delivered to senior
officials at V.G.T.R.K. and other organizations, outlining issues the
Kremlin wants covered, positively or negatively, along with views
to endorse and people to criticize, said Mr. Gatov, who has seen
copies.
The Kremlin's tight control of the media has increased since the
invasion of Ukraine, but people's trust in what they are watching is
falling the longer the war goes on and its violent realities become
harder to hide, said Vera Tolz, a professor at the University
of Manchester who has studied Russian media for the British
Parliament and European Union. "There are cracks," she said.
In the early days of the war, what was not explicitly outlined in
Kremlin orders was left to television producers to fill in.
The United States was a frequent target, according to the documents.
Each day, emails circulated with long lists of news clips and viral
posts that served as a palette to paint a darkening picture of the
United States.
In early February, weeks before the invasion of Ukraine, producers
flagged a clip of President Biden declining to answer questions about
sending troops to Poland, bolstering the idea that America was eager
for a fight. A New York Times story about Ukraine's aggressive
information war against Russia was also recast as evidence of the
country's dishonesty. Another, pulled from Britain's Daily Mail,
showed Mr. Biden picking his teeth.
As the war dragged on, producers sought clips about the fallout in
the United States. One came from a local news program in northern
Alabama about stickers being placed on gas pumps that showed
Mr. Biden saying, "I did that." Another video, showing a U.S. grocery
store emptied of food, came from a viral Telegram post. It seemed
to inspire a broadcast soon after titled, "Oil shock and empty
shelves: Trump's grim prophecy is coming true."
In March, Denis Davydov, a V.G.T.R.K. reporter in Washington,
flagged a seven-year-old YouTube post, gaining newfound popularity,
that claimed that the United States and NATO had fueled Russia's
hostility toward Ukraine.
"The Western viewer is looking for alternative information," Mr.
Davydov wrote in an email. (He did not respond to a request for
comment.)
As Russia became isolated, China's importance grew. V.G.T.R.K.
reporters reworked reports from Chinese state media, conveying the
image of a powerful country at Russia's side whose people backed
a just war in Ukraine. One email that led to a broadcast identified
a refrain said to be circulating on the Chinese internet: "By buying
a Russian candy, you can turn it into a bullet against Nazism."
When the birthday of Shen Haixiong, a top Chinese propagandist, was
coming up, V.G.T.R.K. leaders planned to ensure that a gift - an
album containing reproductions of masterpieces by Russian
artists - would get through China's lengthy Covid quarantine in time,
according to one email.
V.G.T.R.K. used Chinese officials and state media to build support
for a conspiracy theory that the United States maintained secret labs
to build biological weapons in Ukraine. In March, producers broke
down footage from Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China's Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, saying the U.S. research was "aimed at creating
a mechanism for the covert spread of deadly pathogens."
To add an American voice to the biolab claims, producers discussed
and then aired remarks by Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser,
from the far-right television channel Real America's Voice.
Fox News and other conservative outlets were fixtures of internal
news roundups, scripts and broadcasts. Producers circulated a clip
of a Fox News commentator discussing Russia's "sanction-proof"
economy and a Breitbart article about the effect on oil prices.
Mr. Carlson's broadcasts were passed around V.G.T.R.K., according
to emails.
"Anything less than hating Putin is treason."
In one clip from early February, the Fox News host attributed
American distrust for Russia to partisan anger about former President
Trump.
V.G.T.R.K. watched how it was perceived abroad.
Reports tracked the foreign media coverage of a leading V.G.T.R.K.
presenter, Dmitri Kiselyov, noting pickups by global newspapers and
categorizing them as positive, negative or neutral. Mr. Kiselyov is
a firebrand known for inflammatory statements - in May, he threatened
Britain with nuclear annihilation - and his negative press mentions
jumped in 2022, according to the reports. Outlets in Germany, Nigeria
and Canada all had critical things to say. One quote, marked red for
negative from the German magazine Stern, described the state
of Russian television under "propagandists" like Mr. Kiselyov:
"A poisonous mixture of lies, hatred and absurdity."
Emails showed close ties between state media and Russia's security
apparatus, which provided information that was quickly put on the air
that gave a rosy picture of a war that was in reality deteriorating.
On Feb. 24, the day of the invasion, the F.S.B. sent emails to state
media calling them "colleagues" and claiming that Ukrainian soldiers
were abandoning their posts. Another message noted a supposed
attack by Ukraine on a civilian cargo ship.
In March, the F.S.B. sent dossiers about two Ukrainian officers
killed in combat, making unverifiable claims that they had killed
civilians and were terrorists. In the email, the security service
said not to attribute the information to the F.S.B., orders that were
followed in the ensuing broadcast.
State media took cues from the F.S.B. and the Ministry of Defense
about how to cover events that drew international outrage, according
to the documents. After the March bombing of a theater in Mariupol,
where civilians were believed to be seeking cover, the military sent
an email to V.G.T.R.K. and other state media with the subject
"Important!" It provided a video of a woman who said members
of a Ukrainian nationalist group had blown up the theater, not the
Russian military. "Please use in stories," the note said.
