Teaching Resources to Help Students Make Sense of the War in Ukraine

From The New York Times, I’m Sabrina Tavernise. This is The Daily.

As Russia steps up its bombing campaign against Ukrainian cities, it’s also waging another battle— over the truth about the war. My colleague, Valerie Hopkins, on why so many people in Russia are in denial about what is happening, even as it wrecks the lives of their own family members in Ukraine.

It’s Monday, March 14.

Valerie, you’ve been reporting on the war in Ukraine since the beginning. And you’ve been hearing stories, again and again, of this pretty shocking misinformation campaign coming from Russia. Can you describe what you’ve been hearing and seeing?

You know, I’ve been talking to a lot of people here in Ukraine, first when I was in Kyiv, and then on the road. And a lot of them have pretty shocking stories about their relatives in Russia. You know, Ukraine and Russia are really well connected. Millions of Ukrainians have relatives in Russia. Some of them used to live there.

But now, as some of Ukraine’s cities are being bombed, as millions of people are being forced to flee, people are trying to tell their relatives in Russia what’s going on, and they’re being met with denial, resistance, and kind of a refusal to believe what their family members, their blood relatives are telling them. And one person whose story really stuck out to me was this guy, Misha Katsurin.

Misha is 33 years old. He lives with his wife and kids in Kyiv, and actually owns a really trendy chain of Asian restaurants.

And he said, the fourth morning of the war—

He woke up and realized that he hadn’t heard from his dad at all since the war started.

His father lives in Russia in a city called Nizhny Novgorod.

So he gave his dad a call and told them what was going on.

But he said his father had a really different version of events and didn’t really believe him.

He said his father basically said, no, no, no, and that he denied what Misha was telling him that he sees with his own eyes.

And anyways, he said, the government there, they’re all Nazis.

So Valerie, I’m going to stop for a second on this Nazi reference, because it keeps coming up. This is an idea that Russian President Vladimir Putin has often repeated, right? But why is he doing that?

I mean, it doesn’t really make sense. But for Putin, it’s this weird multi-layered argument. He is trying to piggyback on the proud legacy of the Soviet defeat of the Nazis in World War II, and he also cannot really deal with the fact that Ukraine wants to have a separate country and a separate identity from Russia 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Right.

And Putin sort of sees this Ukrainian rejection of Russia, which has only gotten stronger since Russia invaded Crimea, and now gotten even stronger— he sees all of this as nationalism. And that nationalism, he kind of immediately starts to equate with Nazism, in order to get support for this invasion.

So essentially, when he says this, he’s trying to paint Ukrainians as crazy nationalists.

Yeah. And I mean, he’s actually used those words to refer to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who’s actually Jewish and also a native Russian speaker. And President Putin has referred to him and the people around him as, quote, “drug-addled Nazis,” on Russian TV, even though this is just a completely outlandish, intentional distortion of the truth.

So Misha’s dad is getting this idea from Putin’s messaging, which is carried by Russian television. What else did Misha’s dad say that he believes about the war in Ukraine?

Well, he certainly doesn’t think a full-scale war is actually happening.

Misha’s dad thinks it’s essentially a rescue operation conducted by the Russian military.

And not only that. He believes that Russian soldiers are liberating Ukrainians from this repressive Nazi government, and that the majority of the people want them there.

So it’s pretty unbelievable that a father is denying his own son’s reality. But how pervasive is this? Is this most Russians’ view of the war right now?

So we actually have seen some pretty significant street protests in Russia, mostly in large cities, since the invasion started— actually, more than in Russia’s recent history. These people are out in the streets chanting, no to war, even though they know that they’ll likely be taken away by the police and detained.

But we’ve also seen reports from Russian cities, including one done by this independent media outlet, Nastoyashcheye Vremya, or Current Time, which went out and spoke to Russian citizens and showed them pictures of the war in Ukraine.

And their responses were—

“No, that’s not happening. These photos are fake.”

“Ukraine was preparing for an attack on Russia. I’m absolutely convinced of that.” And—

And “I’m for Putin.” They’re essentially repeating what they’ve been hearing from Putin and from talk show hosts on state TV. So you know, it’s really hard to get an accurate picture of public sentiment in Russia.

For a pollster now, just asking that question could land them in jail or shut their organization down. But what this video and what my reporting suggests is that this essential, complete denial of what’s happening in Ukraine is actually pretty common in Russia.

Valerie, what did you think as you were watching these man-on-the-street interviews? What was going through your mind?

I was really sad, but I guess I wasn’t so surprised. I mean, this is the product of years and years of clamping down on free press and increasingly escalating rhetoric in media, demonizing the other, and slowly building the case for something exactly like this.

I think I was most shocked, actually, when there was a guy who literally looked into the camera, looked at the photos, and said, Russia’s not bombing Kyiv. It’s like this alternate reality for so many people. And it’s fascinating for me to try and understand why and how that can be.

We’ll be right back.

So Valerie, we’re talking about Russians who don’t believe what’s happening to their own relatives, who don’t believe and don’t want to look at these photographs of bombings in Ukrainian cities. And I think that this leads us to the question of why. What do you think it has to do with?

Well, I think it has a lot to do with Vladimir Putin and Russians’ relationship to him. Putin came to power at this really critical time for Russia— in 2000, a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in the intervening period, there was just this total economic upheaval.

You know, people knew what to expect in the Soviet period, even if they didn’t love it. And now, there was just this period of total uncertainty.

Prices skyrocketed, and people just couldn’t afford basic necessities.

Half of the economy disappeared.

People were living in lawlessness.

There was a lack of trust in the government.

And there was also this really major loss of national pride that I think a lot of people discount.

So I think that many people, especially in the West, saw this moment as Russia’s chance to create democratic institutions.

But many Russians associated this period in the ‘90s with instability, economic fear, and this rampant capitalism that didn’t really help them.

Right. I remember that time, because I was there then. I started in 1994 in Russia, and I remember we saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as a chance to be free, a wonderful thing. And I think that by the end of the 1990s, many Russians had experienced it as a tragedy.

Yeah, I think we have to recognize that that wasn’t people’s priority back then. It was putting food on the table, and not getting mugged by hooligans in the street, and being able to trust the police and the law enforcement and the institutions again. And through all of this, the personal and national shame and difficulty—

Into that situation walks Vladimir V. Putin.

Promising to take control and just promising stability, which is what people craved the most.

The economy started to stabilize and a middle class actually emerged that was substantially better off in the years after Putin came to power.

He got massively lucky with oil prices, and that sort of allowed the standard of living to rise and cemented the trust that many ordinary Russians were living better under Putin than they ever had before.

And sent inequality soaring.

And Putin continues to exert ever more control over Russian society.

He starts to bring the national media to heel, to make sure that things that he doesn’t like or criticism of him don’t appear in the media.

And while some people were concerned, more or less, from the beginning of his rise, the majority of the people really accepted it.

Right. I mean, this is the social contract that Putin made. He said to the Russian people, I’m going to bring you order. I’m going to crack down on the oligarchs. I’m going to make it so that your life is stable, your salary is reliable. But at the same time, you’re not going to mess with politics, and you’re going to be OK with a media that is not free.

Exactly. And while Putin largely consolidated his power over the last two decades, he did leave some pockets— mostly online media, some radio— spaces where people who didn’t support the government, who were free-thinking and independent-minded could air their views and hear people who mostly thought like them. You know, it wasn’t mainstream national news on the airwaves, but you could find it if you looked for it.

So bring us up to the war, Valerie. I mean, if Putin has been doing this for years, chipping away at independent media, what’s different now?

Well, now, it’s not chipping anymore. It’s a sledgehammer.

He’s been trying very hard to control the narrative around the war—

—which he refers to only as a, quote, “special military operation.”

And most of the official communications about it don’t even mention the Russian military.

The state orders some of the few remaining independent media in Russia to stop broadcasting, including the BBC’s Russian service, and the German broadcaster, Deutsche Welle. And then, it bans Facebook, and on the same day—

—the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, approves a law forbidding the invasion from being referred to as anything besides a special military operation.

And it essentially criminalizes independent reporting on the war.

And because of this law, the few remaining media outlets left in Russia are being forced to make really hard decisions.

Which means that right now, there’s only one version of events that Russians are seeing in their country— Putin’s.

This is a fundamentally different level of censorship. It’s something we haven’t seen since Soviet times.

That’s right, Sabrina. And while it’s not clear just how long Putin can sustain his attempts to seal off Russians’ access to information about the war, for now, he’s been able to dramatically shape their beliefs.

And that’s forced people like Misha to try to convince his dad of the brutal truth of what’s happening in Ukraine.

Valerie, thank you.

Thank you, Sabrina.

On Monday, the Associated Press reported that one of the pregnant women photographed in last week’s attack by Russia on a maternity hospital in the city of Mariupol has died. Her baby was delivered but died, too. The attack and Russia’s response to it is an example of Russia presenting an alternate reality in the face of facts about the war.

After the bombing, Russia’s defense ministry denied having done it, accusing Ukraine of a, quote, “staged provocation.” Then Russia began to criticize the reaction with its foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, calling the international response to the bombing, quote, “pathetic,” and that global public opinion had been, quote, “manipulated.”

Finally, Russia’s embassy in London tweeted photographs of one of the women and claimed that she was a crisis actor who had played several of the women photographed in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Twitter eventually removed the post.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

On Sunday, Russia attacked a Ukrainian military base 12 miles from Ukraine’s border with Poland, bringing the war dangerously close to NATO’s doorstep. The target was a base used to train foreign fighters who flocked to Ukraine to help defend the country against Russia.

The missile attack killed at least 35 people and wounded at least 134. Meanwhile, the death count has risen sharply in the city of Mariupol, which has been encircled and bombed by Russian troops and has been without power, water, or phone connection for more than 10 days.

So far, city officials said, the Russian attacks have killed 2,187 residents. Finally, Russian forces have kidnapped a second Ukrainian mayor in what appears to be a strategy of removing local officials and replacing them with Russian puppets. The abduction of the mayor from the town of Dniprorudne follows the dramatic capture of the mayor of Melitopol, who was reportedly taken from a government building with a bag over his head.

In a video message, the mayor’s replacement, a Russian appointee, instructed the residents of Melitopol, to adjust to, quote, “the new reality,” and to end their resistance to Russian occupation.

Today’s episode was produced by Asthaa Chaturvedi, Diana Nguyen and Kaitlin Roberts, with help from Rob Szypko and Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Marc Georges and Lisa Chow, contains original music by Marion Lozano and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for The Daily. I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.