7 years ago, Boris Nemtsov, the most popular of Russian oppo leaders, was gunned down on a Moscow bridge, the day before he was to lead a "march for peace" protesting Putin's first war in Ukraine. The impact of that murder echoes today...
In the aftermath of the murder, a troll at the shadowy Internet Research Agency, Lyudmila Savchuk, was ordered to churn out messages blaming the crime on "Ukrainian oligarchs." She refused. "I don't want to do their dirty work," she said, adding about Nemtsov's assassination...
"It was the moment I realized that they could kill anyone they could kill all of us." Savchuk turned whistleblower and reached out to a Russian investigative journalist, Andrei @soshnikoff, turning over internal emails & other docs documenting what the IRA was up to...
using fake names and bots to plant disinformation on social media platforms advancing Putin's interests and smearing his critics. @soshnikoff exposed the IRA in an independent Russian newspaper, Moi Raion, giving the world the first look at an operation that a year later...
played a critical role in Russia's intervention in the 2016 presidential election. As laid out by @DavidCornDC & me in #RussianRoulette, the story by @soshnikoff showed, even under Putin's authoritarian regime, brave journalists could still challenge the powers that be...
But all that changed when last week Putin signed a new law making it a crime-punishable by up to 15 years in prison- to publish "false information," including calling the Ukraine action as a "war." "It's Orwellian," @soshnikoff says on new @SkullduggeryPod explaining why ...
many Russian investigative journalists are fleeing the country. (@soshnikoff left for Prague a year ago.) The result, he explains, the Russian public is being cut off from truthful information about what's going on in Ukraine which Putin calls a "special operation," prompting....
.@vbass to ask, will we now have a new edition of Tolstoy's epic, renamed "Special Operation and Peace." You can listen to the full episode here...play.acast.com/s/skullduggery…
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