Disinfolklore (15)
Disinfolklore (15)
Fog of War - Disinfolklore is a new analytical method for parsing disinformation.
On an otherwise “normal” day patrolling Stanitsia Luhanska bridge in July 2016, I heard three explosions in the woods.
I was close to the Russia-occupied part of the one-and-a-half-kilometre stretch of roadway that ran between the Ukrainian army’s checkpoint and the Russian-occupiers checkpoint just south of the Donets river.
As colleagues and I took cover, and tried to assess the situation, a uniformed Colonel popped up unexpectedly in the manner of the way trolls pop up in Scandinavian folklore. He had apparently come from the direction of the Russian occupied side of the river. The Russian Occupier Colonel told me his callsign was “Eustace.”
The Russian Colonel had an oven-ready explanation for the explosions. He reeled off an elaborate story of Ukrainian saboteurs. The Diversionary Group, as he called them, had been sneaking through the forest. They triggered their own mine, according to the Colonel. It was a typical trope in Russian Disinfolklore, whether delivered in the U.N. Security Council, in Russian media or in person on that bridge, to represent Ukraine as completely incompetent. Now, according to the Colonel, the “saboteurs” were dead in the midst of the mined woods.
Since I was the Patrol Group Leader, the Colonel led me off away from my colleagues on a tour. He invited me to peer into the woods either side of the bridge.
“What am I looking at here?” I asked of the Russian Colonel.
The Colonel pointed to a clearing. It looked no different from any other kind of bee-loud glade. I expected to see the dead bodies of the Ukrainian soldiers he had said had triggered the mine. I couldn’t see anything of note, except for the beauty of this wonderful biosphere reserve.
Before Russia started occupying the Ukrainian territory south of the Donets River in April 2014, Stanitsia Luhanska had been an Arcadian idyll. Although the Colonel replied that the space in the tree cover was a result of the explosions, I couldn’t see any difference between it and dozens of other openings in the verdant Steppe either side of the bridge. Finally, the officer brought me to a part of the iron bridge where he showed me an indent. He said it had just been created by shrapnel. I took a photograph of it, while he hovered over me. I was being trolled.
This is how I reported the event in that day’s patrol report:
“The Russian Colonel indicated what he said was blood from two women who had been hit by the shrapnel that had dented the bridge. He informed
that one of the women had had her leg seriously wounded by shrapnel (Comment: noted that many people were transporting blackberries across the bridge at this time of year and that there were stains from blackberries all over the ground as tonnes of produce was moved in substandard cardboard boxes and on carts which were apt to collapse. Such detritus might be mistaken for blood. Ends Comment). He informed that, in his view, the whole event was a “provocation” by Ukrainian government armed forces’ personnel. The Ukrainians were trying to kill or maim and his colleagues. Then, according to the Colonel's understanding of his enemies' plans, Russia would be blamed for the "provocation", which was the word the Colonel described the three explosions intended to kill or maim . The Russian officer told that he himself had heard the “Voga” shot. This meant, he said, that it had been shot two-to-three-hundred-metres away from the bridge. If the explosions had been any further away, according to the Colonel, we would not have been able to hear them. He informed that the seriously injured woman and another injured woman had been sent by ambulance to a hospital in Russia-controlled Luhansk. The Colonel asked to do a better job at keeping him informed about his movements. The Russian Colonel told that if he knows where is, at all times, then he would make sure that is not accidentally hit by munitions. thanked the Russian Colonel for his solicitude. The Colonel invited to visit him anytime in occupied Luhansk, where, he said, he would demonstrate the damage caused by the war. Another of the Russian occupier’s armed militants then chipped in that: [according to his information] Ukrainian armed forces had recently placed 2 2B9 mortars in the vicinty of Stanytsia Luhanska hospital. @DecodingTrolls was tasked to seek out these weapons in the vicinity of the hospital. As expected, there did not appear to be any Ukrainian armed forces or weapons in the vicinity of the hospital.
After the hour or so I had spent being trolled by the Russian occupier Colonel, I walked northwards back towards the Ukrainian controlled area. I passed by a Ukrainian armed forces member. He was calmly polishing his Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher system by the side of the pedestrianised road. I asked if he had heard the explosions.
and other colleagues, separately, followed up on the explosions over the following days. My reports of my findings, along with other members of the Mission who had carried out their own investigations, went to our reporting unit. Their job was to synthesise around thirty daily reports by teams of colleagues made up of the two-hundred-and-fifty peace-keepers in occupied and non-occupied Luhansk into one daily report. That daily precis of our respective patrol reports would go, each evening, to workmates in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv - one-thousand-kilometres away from the bridge. Finally, my Kyiv co-workers’ resume of our already fused and abridged chronicle was sent to colleagues in Vienna. The following is how the entire incident was represented in a final report to the foreign ministers of fifty-seven states a few days after the explosions:“No,” he replied, before adding, “if there were any explosions it was probably a wild boar, deer, dog or cow who tripped over a mine in the woods. Maybe even a rabbit.”
The Mission followed up on reports of a woman (thirty-four-years-old) being wounded at the Stanytsia Luhanska bridge on 1 July. Two sources connected with medical services informed the Mission that they had treated a woman who had been wounded on the bridge on 1 July. On the morning of 1 July,
had heard three explosions assessed as impacts of automatic grenade launcher (AGS-17) rounds near Stanytsia Luhanska bridge. Afterwards, observed blood stains near the “LPR” position north of the bridge.
I, too, had spoken to these “medical services.” Each of the doctors, paramedics, and assistants that I spoke to on the days following 1st July had a different and contradictory story to tell. One said it was three women. Another that a man and a woman had been injured. Then, evidently, another colleague had reported a separate conversation in which they had been told that only one woman had been injured. That was the version that had made its way into the final mosaic of a report drafted by people one-thousand-kilometres away who had no idea of what had truly happened.
Meanwhile, the Russian Colonel had, not very credibly I had thought at the time, told me it had been two women injured. The quickness of the alleged victims’ exfiltration by an ambulance team had struck me as an entirely fictional construction. I was used to such trolling by the Russian Occupiers. They were always keen to anchor the idea of the administrative competence of the Russian occupiers in my mind. Since I had heard the explosions and I was at the scene within ten minutes of the incident, had there been anyone actually injured and tended to by medical staff, I believed I would have seen them.
Apart from our reports of the incident to the foreign ministries of the fifty-seven member states of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe for whom we worked, reports about our reports appeared in the Russian occupier’s media. Sometimes, as was normal, these reports about our reports would be scathing critiques of how we had gotten the facts wrong. Others would seem to be straight reporting of the “facts.” Yet, they would often publish a variety of different accounts, as was the case here. The only constant was the denigration of Ukrainian armed forces. They impute barbarous intentions to Ukraine. They would tell heroic Disinfolklore about how without the Russian occupiers intercession,
and his colleagues would have been sacrificed by Ukraine in pursuit of Ukraine’s alleged overriding desire to portray Russia in a bad light. It was a similar pattern as I wrote about in the Cut Into Tiny Pieces episode begun in Disinfolklore (4), as well as in the Luxury Sausage Troll Saga begun in Disinfolklore (9).Some days and nights I witnessed thousands of explosions by that bridge - particularly during that summer of 2016. As this sole incident of the three explosions illustrates, it was very hard to understand what had happened, even if I had witnessed it. This phenomenon reminded me of a trope my criminal law professor at Cambridge University law school often repeated: No-one lies like an eye witness.
While at the micro-level, the truth of such incidents was often hard to discern, I never lost sight of the macro-level truth: Russia was unlawfully occupying Ukraine. And Russia was responsible morally and legally for all of the events that flowed from its invasion. All of Russia’s promotion of confusing Disinfolklore and days like that one with the Russian colonel couldn’t distract me from that overriding truth.
