Freezing out my Russian friend is the only way I can fight Putin’s propaganda
On the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while doomscrolling on social media, I noticed a Facebook post by a Russian friend of mine in Moscow, expressing the hope that “all the fascists will be exterminated in my homeland”. She was referring to Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia’s “special military operation” aimed to “denazify” Ukraine.
I was stunned that this was her take on the Ukraine war. We had been friends for more than 30 years, and during my time as a foreign correspondent in Moscow in the Soviet era, she had been my sounding board and guide. I remember the evenings spent with her and her husband, quaffing Soviet champagne and mocking the nightly TV news, Vremya, with its statecontrolled version of events. How could she now be so uncritical of Putin’s staterun media?
Like most of the Russians I knew in the Gorbachev years, she was westernleaning – although she never visited my flat in a guarded compound for fear of being considered a dissident for associating with foreigners. When I went to their home in the outer Moscow suburbs, I would either take the metro and then a roundabout route to their building, or park my car several streets away and hope that I hadn’t been followed. In those days, the KGB was ever-present, and ready to intimidate journalists with low-level harassment.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, my friend took advantage of the novelty of foreign travel. Staring at her Facebook post, I was reminded of a trip she’d made to Paris with her sister in 2014. Over steak and chips in a cafe in Les Halles, we had a heated argument about the Russian annexation of Crimea. We both got upset. She accused me of being brainwashed by the Americans and I couldn’t understand how she’d been brainwashed by Putin, who had already systematically shut down opposition parties and the majority of independent media in Russia. I’d covered the aftermath of the killing of former spy Alexander Litvinenko with a highly radioactive isotope in central London in 2006, and was only too aware of how far Putin was prepared to go.
Since our last meeting in Paris, our exchanges had dwindled to Christmas messages and the occasional phone call in which we steered clear of politics. So I wondered whether to challenge my friend over her Facebook post about Ukraine. I considered sending video links of captured Russian soldiers who said they’d been deceived and had no idea they were on a mission to kill their
fellow Slavs. But I feared a repeat of our 2014 slanging match. What was the point? It would be like trying to argue with a Trump supporter with each of us attacking the other for “fake news”.
So I did nothing. Then last week, she posted again on Facebook, asking, “Why is the west so tolerant of fascists?” This time I unfriended her.
I’m saddened by the sudden end of our long friendship, but I realise I’m not alone. The war in Ukraine has torn Russian families apart. Another friend from Moscow, now living in America, told me that she’d fallen out with her next-door neighbour, who comes from the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. The neighbour accuses the Ukrainian “bandits” of the neo-Nazi Azov battalion of bombing the maternity hospital in Mariupol, which was in fact hit in a Russian strike. She believes that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is a drug addict, that the US has more than 28 biological weapon labs in Ukraine that may also have been responsible for the spread of Covid. When I asked how anyone living in America could hold such views, my friend replied that there is plenty of Russian propaganda on YouTube and Facebook and of course on Russian TV, which is available in the US. The images of the deliberate targeting of civilians by Russian forces, as broadcast by the US TV networks, is dismissed by her neighbour as “fake news”.
In the west, we understand that this is Putin’s war, decided by a despot and a tiny band of yes men. But the longer the conflict persists, the more the faultlines will deepen between us and ordinary Russians who have bought into the official lie. I fear that in this era of fake news put out by governments – including our own – in which rational argument is no longer possible, many of us will take refuge inside our echo chambers. But our lives will be undoubtedly the poorer.
I feel like a coward for pulling the plug without explanation on more than 30 years of friendship, but in my own small way I also feel that I had to take a stand in Putin’s propaganda war.
Anne Penketh is a journalist and author