Thread by @leonidragozin

A surreal aspect of the ridiculously blatant fake about me produced by a Ukrainian infowar unit is that it was circulated by @Facebook’s official fact checker Stop Fake. I welcome inquiries from journalists/experts interested in this story, detailed here.
intellinews.com/comment-disinf…

The organization’s official account on Twitter as well as its editor-in-chief Yevhen Fedchenko shared not just one, but several language versions of the fake as well as slanderous comments about me that appeared in its wake.

The fake was also endorsed by former Estonian president Henryk Ilves and by several Latvian far right politicians. Among numerous lies and insinuations the hit piece they helped spreading contained personal data related to my close relatives in Russia.

I’ve never been attracted by the business of debunking, partly because it is overpopulated by seedy characters like Fedchenko, but this time I’ve decided that over some days I will a build thread unpacking all those lies for the benefit of other journalists and disinfo experts.

So, THREAD

EXHIBIT ONE - Arrest Photo

In its hit piece, Informnapalm suggests that the picture taken when I got arrested during the clampdown on Bolotnaya protest on May 6, 2012 is a fake. Little did they know how many people saw it happen.

The photo was taken by British journalist @howardamos whom I had never met prior to that incident.

Literally one minute before it happened, I was talking to @juliaioffe, a famous US journalist.

Once in a paddy waggon, I befriended @pelizarov, an associate of Boris Nemtsov.

EXHIBIT TWO - Latvian stories

Informnapalm’s hit piece claimed that two stories that I did for a leading Baltic investigative publication @rebaltica, together with its award-winning editor @jemberga, were “fraught with propaganda” or “coming from Russian intelligence agencies”

Originally, Informnapalm piece referred to Re:Baltica as a “pro-Russian” publication - blatant lie, given that the publication is heavily involved in debunking Kremlin’s misinformation in the Baltic. That qualifier was later removed with a ridiculously in-“sincere” apology.

But the piece continues to slander @jemberga, one of the country’s most celebrated journalists, by putting her profession in inverted commas.

Now for something ridiculous - see that line about the athletes and the “national movement”?

You’d think these are some kind of hardcore Latvian nationalists that we have offended on the orders from Moscow?

In reality, these are politically active Russian-speaking bodybuilders who represented a party widely known in Latvia as pro-Russian.

In another piece of slander, Informnapalm claims that our second story with my celebrated co-author, was a “libel” making “far-fetched claims” about the friendship between Latvian nationalists and Ukrainian neo-nazis. Moreover, “it prepared ground for a Russian special operation”

Well, read this piece, which I am very proud of, and judge for yourself. Not a single fact in it has been disproved, but the main character lost his post.

Well, sending a party delegation to a concert organized by a Russian nazi is never a good idea.
en.rebaltica.lv/2019/12/azov-m…

EXHIBIT 3

Perhaps the most bizarre one. Informnapalm claims they’ve conducted a “linguistic analysis” of my texts and concluded I might not be a real person, but a collective of ghost-writers.

Guys… I am not sure what’s going on in your heads, but you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that a person, who worked in Western media for 20 years would have spoken to hundreds of Western colleagues and editors, not to mention appeared live on BBC, DW, ABC, etc

I mean English is not my native language and it’s far from perfect, but somehow it was tolerated by the BBC for over a decade.

Guess whose voice you are hearing in like half of English-language voiceovers featuring in BBC’s reports from Russia between 2010 and 2013?

Mine.

Speaking of which, EXHIBIT 4

Informnapalm claims that I am a spy because I “studied English professionally in the Soviet times”.

The very premises of this claim is mind-bogglingly idiotic. Millions of people studied English in Soviet universities and vast majority of them weren’t KGB agents.

But you know what? I didn’t study English at a university in the Soviet times.

The department of foreign languages at the MSU started teaching for the first time in 1992, after the USSR collapsed.

It was a new and exemplarily non-Soviet department swarming with native speakers from all English-speaking countries.

So I jumped on a chance to get 2nd major.

My main teachers were veteran British Council expert Bruce Monk and Heidi Hollinger who would become a well-known Canadian journalist.

I guess I had better chances of being recruited by MI6 or CIA, but that didn’t happen. You know why? Because I talk too much and hate spooks.

I mean all these “OSINT experts” had to do is go check Wikipedia page about my department at the MSU.

Which speaks volumes about the quality of their other research.

EXHIBIT 5

According to Informnapalm, I am a spy because I worked in a travel agency in the late 1990s, when traveling abroad was “an exception”.

Should I even comment on that? Are these people even Ukrainians, if they don’t understand basic facts about Russia’s recent history?

There was an explosion on travel market at the time after floodgates opened - everyone wanted to go abroad. I was selling Interrail tickets, Youth Hostelling cards and Lonely Planet books at a student travel outfit. This is where I nurtured a dream of becoming LP author.

Going throughInformnapalm’s hit piece, specifically with regards to my English-language studies and travel business, I can’t avoid the feeling that the authors simply messed up the date of Soviet collapse. I reads as if they believe the USSR was still there in 1998.