Dietmar Pichler: I’m shocked by what I saw in the Serbian tabloids, it was a copy paste of Russian tabloids

Dietmar Pichler, program director, trainer and co-founder of Zentrum für digitale Medienkompetenz, spoke in an interview with The Geopost about the chronology of the conflict in Ukraine, the start of the war there and its escalation. He said that Russian propaganda and misinformation through the media were a destabilizing element and drew a parallel with Serbia in this context, saying that during a visit to Serbia he was very shocked by what he had seen in the Serbian tabloids, because it was completely like a copy paste of Russian tabloids. Pichler also notes other similarities and connections between Serbia and Russia, and this, according to him, is more noticeable in the Serbian support and trust that Serbs have in Russia. He also spoke about the role of Europe in this war and its relations with Putin, emphasizing that they have changed over time. Concerned about Ukraine’s future Pichler admits it is difficult to predict now, but thinks it should be part of the European Union.

You can read the full interview below:

What do you think about the war that’s happening in Ukraine now?

If we speak about the war in Ukraine, especially the escalation of the war … because, actually, there is a war since 2014, but it’s on a completely different scale, since 2021 and the end of February, we see that the Russian disinformation, mostly, it’s about what happened in last 8 years. So, they justify the war, especially for the domestic audience and also for the international audience. If you ask them why are you attacking your neighbor country, then they say because Ukrainians attacked Donbass for 8 years, they attacked our people there.

And this is a problem because if journalists are usually not very educated about Ukrainian issues about the whole situation since 2014 and then you have situations like a Russian diplomat says, yeah but you were not caring what happened in Ukraine for the last eight years, they attacked Donbas and then the journalists usually and I saw a lot of examples also from the U.K. But especially in Austria they say yes of course, but that does not justify a full scale war. So first of all it doesn’t justify a war at all because it’s not true.

Yes, it’s disinformation, it’s a Russian narrative about the last eight years. And everything I see since the end of February is mostly based on lies about what happened since 2014, because Russia wants to justify the war, but it justifies the war with disinformation.

For instance, they claim that Donbas or this so called DNR or LNR People’s Republics founded by locals by coal miners or something like that. But actually, Russian nationalists, Igor Gurkin for instance, or Alexander Borodai, they were from Moscow and they had leading positions and they were also transferring fighters from Russia, volunteers, mercenaries and usual soldiers on holidays they called it, and they were fighting an expansion war.

They wanted to conquer eastern Ukraine completely, and especially the southern parts, they attacked Mariopol already in 2015 and nobody’s talking about it anymore. But they attacked, not the Ukrainians, and the Ukrainians were actually defending themselves.

I would never say that the Ukrainian side did everything perfect in the last eight years, and there were of course mistakes here and there, but the main thing that happened was the worst, there were the so called Russian, Pro-Russian Republics, they wanted to expand their territory and this is the reason for the war and nothing else.

And the problem is, and this is the main core, this is also my main work at the moment for awareness about what actually happened in the last 8 years, because this is what Russia tries us to confuse us about, to justify the full scale invasion of Ukraine.

Igor Girkin was very active in the 90’s here in the Balkans, and Bosnia especially, what can you tell us about Russian propaganda and influence in the Balkans?

First of all, thank you very much because there is so much to tell that I’m usually not able to structure all the points and you mentioned a very important point. Igor Girkin is not only a Russian nationalist, but he was also a warlord already. He is also from the Russian military intelligence by the way, but he was also active in the Balkan wars as a war criminal. He was also active in Transnistria in the fight against Moldova, also a so called separatist republic.

So, he is notorious for his world lord activities. He has nothing to do with Donbas, nothing to do with Ukraine actually, he’s just somebody who makes trouble and he’s also responsible or he’s one of the people who got prosecuted for the shutdown of MH 17, the passenger flight who crashed in 2014.

About the Balkans, I think that Russia is very active here because they have a very close relationship of course with Serbia historically.

When I was in in Belgrade, I saw many Russian flags and I did not confuse them with the Serbian flags, they were Russian flags. They had memorials for the Russian emperor, they had this huge world war one exhibition on the Danube river. And European flags, not so many I didn’t see a lot, there is no commitment it seems.

So, these were the impressions when I visited Belgrade two times and they sold even these “Krim Nas” which means “Crimea is ours”, pro-Russian souvenirs and of course abut Kosovo, you can imagine, you all know their slogans,

So they also tried to propagate this Slavic union thing, Slavic brothers, Orthodox brothers, but Ukraine is not included.

Ukraine for them is an enemy because in Ukraine there is really a majority of people, now there are 90% in favor of EU membership, Ukraine is a pro NATO country, Ukraine is a pro-western country and above all, Ukraine has a very difficult relationship with Russia and we know why, because Russia annexed Crimea, Russia started to go in 2014 in Eastern Ukraine in the Donbass region. And Russia also tries to destabilize Ukraine by disinformation since many years.

And in Serbia there is no huge empathy for Ukraine, It’s all about this friendship with Russia. I find it very interesting because in in 2015 I was in Belgrade for one night on my way to Russia, and when I was in Russia I tried to speak with people it was a kind of research journey and I’m I told them about Belgrade and that I was there and I showed them my souvenirs, and they said, yeah of course there is something that somehow belongs to us or there is some little country that is close to us but we don’t care a lot.

So usual people in Russia, they have no special relationship to Serbia. It’s a very disbalanced relationship in the hearts of the people I would say, because in Serbia everybody loves Russia but they don’t know why actually.

I mean historical things World War One and something like that, Okay. But there is not a really close relationship like It would be if you think how strongly Serbian politics is supporting Russia, how well received Russian disinformation propaganda is at the Serbian audience, because they have this tradition to believe everything that Russia says.

The problem with this disinformation is, you believe it if you want to believe it.

For instance, I really wish that Ukraine is able to defend itself against the Russian aggression because it’s a democratic country, the European country, and it should remain free, and it should not be turned into a kind of, fake republic. But, of course, I need to check out the information I find online. And if they say we want this in this territory, I need to check and I need to recheck. But usually people, if they want to believe in some narrative or some information, some news, then they don’t re check it, they just swallow it, because they like it, It’s compatible with their world view.

And this is, when nations have a close historical ties, then it’s very difficult, and we see that in Serbia there is a huge influence by the Russian Federation propaganda influence and also by China, and I also have to mention that China is not neutral in this conflict. Disinformation Machine of China, for instance, bots and trolls online and also the, international Chinese state media, they are basically supporting Russian narratives against Ukraine. So this makes the whole situation very difficult. And there are also pro-Russian rallies in Belgrade where they used this, sad symbol.

And I think it’s a little bit of mistake by the Ukrainians, they could have done more lobbying, more information campaigning all over Europe and especially in Serbia, because, when I speak to Ukrainians, basically they have no clue about this little country in the Balkans, they know more about Russia, and I think that makes it very difficult for them to counter the disinformation because they are sometimes even surprised.

But now we also see in Vienna there are a lot of Serbian people supporting the Russian position and it has a kind of tradition and I think it’s very difficult to debunk the lies.

Do you agree that the Serbian propaganda has more Russian than European presence in the media and in the politics?

I would say I’m very shocked by what I saw in the Serbian tabloids, because it was completely like a copy paste of Russian tabloids.

So, what they said about Ukraine or also about international politics, I think that is very influential.

I don’t think that their media is influencing us, but of course, Serbian media can influence all the people internationally that are part of the diaspora, and, even Croats and all the people who are Bosnian Serbs, for instance, they understand it, they can read it, it’s online It’s a connected world and that makes this content more toxic for the information environment.

Do you think Russian aggression in Ukraine has united Europe, how do you see war in Ukraine generally?

I think we are quite united, but there are some, I would say complicated countries, especially Hungary, has a very close relationship to Russia and Viktor Orban, we know that he’s playing some kind of double games. He wants to influence the Hungarian minority in Ukraine.

He creates problems where there are no problems. He does that since many years and this is dangerous.

So, Hungary has a very close relationship with Russia and with china and this influences the Hungarian politics and other countries as well.

Germany is not so sure kind of balancing between this friendly relation with Russia, but also a clear democratic European approach. But I think Eastern Europe and Central Europe is quite united, so there are a lot of politicians who say we need to rethink what we have done. But also, there are other politicians who pretend that, we just didn’t know that Putin is like that, and I cannot believe it because it was quite obvious. If you take a look at the Russian domestic media, if you take a look at the speeches in the Duma’s in the Russian parliament, then it was quite obvious since years what the actual plans of the Russian elite and the Kremlin were.

We have real war and war on social media in Ukraine crisis. What are differences and similarities?

Every action has a reaction. And for instance, if there are war crimes and war crimes by the Russian Federation, and you saw what’s happening in Bucha, by the way a city I visited, so it’s terrible for me to see how it looks now and what happened there, this terrible destruction and so many people were killed. And then there is a reaction.

There’s a reaction by the Ukrainians, they communicate what happened, the journalists are reporting, eyewitnesses are reporting. And then on social media, what you always can see, there are people who say, but, did this really happen?

Was this maybe staged by the Ukrainians or whether these are corpses or are people still alive? So there were a lot of conspiracy theories, and other accusations that the Ukrainians staged it somehow and that the Russians didn’t commit war crimes. And I think this is always when something big happens, when there is a big event in the war, then there’s, this counter reaction in the propaganda and I think the difference is that there is the crime and the one who committed the crime is once again active by denying the crime.

So it’s like if I kill somebody and then I even hurt the victims more because I denied it and I will not get punished for it, and what is even more hurtful for the people, for the fathers and mothers of the victims, that, there are so many people that do not believe that I did this crime, and this is, what I think, is a reaction we can see since many years, also when there’s a terrorist attack.

But Russia is not only spreading such theories, they are also initiating it, they are creating this content and they are very good, unfortunately with this strategy. They have this troll factory, they have thousands of people already spreading and creating and typing on social networks to convince us that everything is completely different than international media observes.

Russian propaganda and disinformation are very popular today, has Europe found concrete measures to stop this kind of hostile Russian attack?

I think we have not done enough, I have to be very harsh on my response, because I am not very satisfied with what we have done. Years ago we had this STRATCOM Force, and we had this project, EU vs Disinformation, but is not very well founded, it’s a very little project, but they do very good work, I like what they do, they are fact checkers, they are publishing, they provide a lot of content. They are a good source, I use the source as well, but it’s not enough. We need to not only educate academics, journalists, we don’t even do that at the moment, unfortunately, especially if it’s about Russian disinformation, but what I think is we need, and this is also what the center for Digital Media literacy wants. We need to educate everybody about disinformation, we don’t need to do a study like a master degree or postgraduate studies, but it’s okay if we speak about disinformation, how it works, how to troll profile works what Russian narratives is, it’s okay to speak about to receive a briefing two hours, politicians, stakeholders.

If you speak to them for two hours, if you describe the situation then they are very well prepared not to fall for Russian disinformation, but unfortunately it didn’t happen and very educated people in Europe, still believing Putin’s version of the world Putin’s version of events and that is very unfortunate because we had so much time.

I think Russian disinformation has a long history, it was also the Soviet disinformation already during the 80s and also by Stalin much earlier. So I think we need to build a shield against disinformation and we need to create a society that is media literate. We need to work on media literacy because if we don’t do this we have a problem and we cannot preserve freedom of expression, freedom of the press and that it’s the core of any democracies or basically if I want to put it into one sentence, democracies under attack by disinformation, and if you want to keep democracy, we need to protect ourselves from disinformation.

Do you think hatred for Putin is growing in Europe?

We need to wait, we don’t have data so, I can only say opinions or observation I made or what I heard from people who are observing, but I think there was a time when the war started that people were very angry with Putin, many of them were already angry before the huge full scale invasion started. So they knew what Putin is about and knew he’s a semi dictator, now it’s a full scale dictator, but they knew what he is about. I think there are some new people who say oh, this topic Russia should be more on my radar.

There are terrible things happening within the country and especially of course what he is doing to Ukraine, this is terrible because war is terrible. And then there are people that are not even focusing on Russia. They don’t care about what Russia is doing, they just care about our reaction. They say, no, Zelensky should not provoke so much. He should maybe stop defending himself or Ukraine should stop defending and it was all Europe’s fault, US fault NATO fault.

Unfortunately, these voices are growing and I think it’s maybe it’s a psychological reason because they are afraid and they think that appeasement policy towards Russia will help to contain the conflict. But I don’t agree because the containment did not work for eight years and Russia is expanding, it’s getting bigger. They also have their interests in Georgia, Abkhazia, they are Based in Transnistria maybe they will enact it as well. And we did not even mention Belarus because Putin actually is controlling Belarus. Lukashenko was not elected in 2020, Putin does notice.

So Russia is getting bigger and bigger and appeasement policy did not work for the last eight years, because Europe was not hostile towards Russia. It was reacting and I think the reaction was not precise or maybe not strong enough, especially if it’s about disinformation, I’m not talking about military response, this is very difficult topic, there are lot of risks. But for disinformation, I have no tolerance for Europeans who said that we should not contain this problem because it’s hostile. Russia is supporting far right groups in Europe, sometimes far left groups if they are close to soviet ideas.

Take a look at the elections in France, Madame Le Pen, maybe she will not win but there is at least a chance which is already very dangerous for European security. We talk about military, we talk about bigger funding for the military in in Western Europe, in Germany, there are talks about 100 billion dollars, and about disinformation, unfortunately, there is not much happening.

How do you see the future of Ukraine?

That’s a really tough question, it’s very difficult to answer it. What I really hope for and what I wish to Ukrainians, is for them to be part of the European Union because they deserve it, because they fight for European values and not only since 2022. I believe in public opinion and we see that more than 90% of Ukrainians support EU access and this is really, really huge, also compared on European or western European levels. And I know many people there from civil society, from European organization associations. They believe in democracy and they know that when Russia will win that war, when Russia will occupy, their life is on stake basically.

So in the best case they get tortured or detained, but in the worst case people like that got killed. I think Ukraine can have a democratic European future, but of course only if Russia is going to leave their territory. So that means if the Russian forces are defeated or retreating and that’s a really tough situation and if you ask me for a prognosis or what I think the next weeks will bring um I have no clue to be honest, but I hope for the best.