Russian Disinformation From the Ground in Ukraine With Journalist Chris Sampson: An American journalist in Ukraine on active measures, AI pollution, and bottom-up resistance

Russian disinformation no longer feels like a foreign problem you read about in long articles. It shapes what you see when you open your phone, what your relatives believe about a war they have never visited, and what large language models tell you when you ask a sincere question about world events. My guest this week on Cults, Culture & Coercion, Chris Sampson, journalist, terrorism analyst, and extremism researcher, publisher of The Wiretap, has spent more than four years reporting from Ukraine. He wakes up to drones and missiles, then opens his laptop to read online claims about the country he lives in describing a place he does not recognize. Few people are positioned to explain this gap with the precision he brings. He sorts Russian information into three streams: state propaganda, general pro-Kremlin bloggers, and military-security bloggers. The third stream sometimes fractures, and analysts who watch carefully see fissures open. Living in Ukraine has given Chris a daily lesson in cognitive dissonance, the discomfort a person feels when they hold two contradictory beliefs and resolve it by changing one of them. He walks through a Ukrainian city the morning after Russian drones strike it, then opens a feed full of Russian disinformation claiming the strikes never happened or accusing Ukrainians of staging them. The flood of falsehoods is the point. Putin and the KGB long ago refined what researchers call the firehose of falsehood, in which an overwhelming volume of contradictory claims exhausts your ability to sort signal from noise. He warned me about a newer escalation. Russia has been seeding pseudo-academic papers and propaganda articles into the training data of large language models. Ask one of the major AI tools a sincere question about the war or about the kidnapped Ukrainian children, and the model has been trained on material with Russian framing baked in. Chris named Kateryna Rashevska, a leading Ukrainian expert on the abducted children, as one of those raising the alarm about academic-looking papers planted to muddy the legal and historical record. This is active measures, the Russian intelligence tradition of psychological and information warfare, applied to a new generation of tools. The mechanism is brainwashing, the systematic use of deception, repetition, and emotional manipulation to shape what a person believes. The kidnapped children case is one of the most painful expressions of this doctrine. 

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