In May, Ukrainians woke up to an avalanche of posts about hundreds of thousands of migrants flooding into their country, exempt from the draft, replacing Ukrainians, even renaming their cities. Influencers made TikToks about it. Public broadcasters ran explainers debunking it. Within four days it was the number one topic in the country. None of it was true.
Roman Osadchuk is Head of Threat Intelligence at LetsData, where he investigates information operations, and he has co-authored research on Russian influence campaigns with the Atlantic Council's DFRLab. He joins Jonathan in Riga to walk through what he actually sees in the data: leaked Russian internal documents with content quotas and performance dashboards, cloned news sites that check your IP address before letting you in, and a strategy that no longer bothers trying to make you believe anything in particular.
In this episode:
How a fabricated migration wave became Ukraine's top story in four days
Why "does it feel true" has replaced "is it true," and what that does to a society
Inside Russia's leaked playbook: 300,000 comments a month, quotas, dashboards
How doppelganger sites steal the credibility of the Washington Post and Fox News
Why Russia's own doctrine has no word for "offensive," only "counter campaigns"
What AI genuinely changed in influence operations, and what it still can't do
The one question Roman says protects you better than any media literacy course
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