It is very hard to bring Russian propagandists to justice, but I think we can - Peter Pomerantsev

This is reported on Spotlight Ukraine | Espreso TV Channel. 

The latest data from the Russian Levada Center show that more that 74% of respondents support military aggression against Ukraine. Peter Pomerantsev believes these data are not reliable because of the conditions in which the survey was conducted.

“The Levada Center is a respected organization for many reasons, but it's not the one that can avoid the difficulties of working under a dictatorship. Often, when you ask people directly about a subject like war, they'll be reluctant to say what they really think. So, from a methodological point of view, it can be hard to take the results of a poll like this very seriously,” he said. 

The British journalist is convinced that any survey in Russia has no sense as such. 

“I personally don't believe that we can talk about public opinion in Russia, because it's a culture where public opinion doesn't really matter. People just go along with whatever the Kremlin wants. This is an authoritarian culture, not a democratic one. Today, the Kremlin says it wants war, and people say they want war. Tomorrow the Kremlin will say it wants peace, and people will say that they want peace. This is not a culture that creates individuals with strong personal opinions. This is a culture of mass agreements. In that sense, any kind of public opinion polling in a dictatorship is just not very interesting in a way. What's interesting is looking at many other factors. There are no protests against the war. There are no protests against the war outside of Russia. This is a culture that shows that it goes along with what the Kremlin wants. And maybe some of them take pleasure in what the Kremlin is doing. And others just agree that whatever the Kremlin does is the right thing to do,” he believes. 

Conducting one of the surveys, Peter Pomerantsev discovered a certain regularity in how Russians perceive the truth.

“The closer people were to supporting the Kremlin and to watching state media, the more likely they were to think that truth is subjective and that objective facts don't exist. And the less they watched state media and the further away they were from identifying with the Kremlin, the more they thought objective truth does exist. So, one of the main lines of the Kremlin propaganda has been to say that the truth is not objective,” he noted. 

Answering a question about whether Kremlin propagandists will be brought to justice, he said: 

“Usually propagandists escape the trial. Usually they say “these were just words” or “we had no power and we were being told what to do.” So, if you want to find them guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes, you have to show that Russian propagandists are not just saying nasty things. What you have to show is that they know they are the accomplices in war crimes, crimes against humanity, the crime of aggression and maybe genocide. Propaganda is not just nasty people on TV, it's the troll farms, it's the search engine optimization, it's the systemic use of information campaigns to help facilitate war crimes. It is very very hard to get the propagandists, but I think we can.”

https://youtu.be/Veej6epwCaU