Media: reckless misinformation

By Richard North - February 6, 2022

For the second week, it seems to have been the Saturday papers that have made the running, with little new to report today in the fast-developing story of Johnson’s decline and fall. And as Mr Putin has, at the time of writing, declined to launch an invasion of Ukraine, this leaves the Sunday coverage rather flat.

However, I might have been a tad premature in yesterday’s piece, in suggesting restraint on the part of the Conservative Party. The Sunday Times is reporting that Johnson is determined to stay on at No 10, with one (anonymous) senior adviser claiming: “He’s making very clear that they’ll have to send a Panzer division to get him out of there”.

If we actually had an armoured division any more, I suppose the Conservative Party might be tempted to use it. But, in the event – just supposing Dick of the Yard can get her act together (there is a first time for everything) – the Met’s equivalent of a SWAT team might suffice – formally known as CO19.

For the moment – with the political process paralysed – most of today’s papers have had to make do with another instalment of the Royal soap opera, always a good, and reliably cheap standby when there is not much news about. This leaves the Mail on Sunday to promote the thesis that the person really in charge at No 10 is the former Miss Carrie, with only the Observer banging the drum for Johnson’s “inevitable” removal.

Despite Mr Putin’s lack of cooperation, though, the media (and the politicians on whom they report) have managed to keep up a steady trickle of bellicose copy, the latest offering coming from the Reuters news agency, so recent (at the time of writing) that the rest of the media haven’t had time to absorb it.

Headed “Russian forces at 70% of level needed for full Ukraine invasion, U.S. officials say”, this relies on a briefing from two anonymous US officials, who assert that, during the last two weeks, the number of battalion tactical groups in the border region has risen to 83 from 60 as of Friday. They say that 14 more are in transit.

As to the timing of an invasion, the officials say that the ground is expected to reach peak freeze around 15 February, allowing for off-road mechanised transit by Russian military units. Such conditions, we are told, will continue until the end of March.

These officials say that Putin is putting in place a force that can execute all scenarios and, if Russia were to invade Kiev, they assert that it could fall within a couple of days.

Interestingly, it was also the Reuters news agency which, just over a week ago, published an exclusive report claiming that Russia’s military build-up near Ukraine had expanded to include supplies of blood along with other medical materials.

This time, the agency was relying on three anonymous US officials who argued that this new capacity would allow the Russians to treat casualties, thus furnishing “another key indicator of Moscow’s military readiness”.

It took nearly a week for a stiff rebuttal to find its was in the Guardian tucked into the end of another blood-curdling story, which had Russia planning a “very graphic” fake video as pretext for a Ukraine invasion – another US claim.

The naysayers though were not the Russians but the Ukrainians, specifically deputy defence minister, Hanna Maliar. She denounced the blood supply claim, calling it a provocation designed “to spread panic and fear in our society”.

Maliar said she had checked that claim with Ukrainian intelligence agencies, which had their own sources, telling the Guardian that it was simply not true. “We found no information to back this up”, she said. “We did not see any blood supplies moved to the front or even in the civilian hospitals around the front”.

And, in a comment which really should have had wider traction, she added: “It’s really important to look at the sources. These sources were anonymous, and I don’t think it’s right to use anonymous sources that cannot be checked”.

To illustrate its latest anonymously-sourced report, Reuters relies on a Russian Defence Ministry handout, showing mid-picture a gaggle of BMP-2s and what looks to be a T-72B3 in the foreground, conducting “joint exercises” at a firing range in the Brest region of Belarus.

The Mail incidentally, uses as photograph from the same location, in a report covering Ukrainian Army exercises in the abandoned city of Pripyat, part of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, north of Kiev.

This photograph shows what appear to be a group of eight BMP-1s (perhaps explaining the earlier sighting), described as “Belarusian tanks”. These, we are told, are “part of huge joint war games with Russia which observers fear could be used to disguise an invasion”.

And yet, the Belarussian city of Brest lies on the country’s western border with Poland, over 360 road miles from Kiev, the route served by one cross-border road, mostly a single carriageway, breaking through heavily wooded country in some sections. If the Russians had any intention of invading Ukraine, they surely would not start from there.

No better in its own way is the Telegraph which offers an appallingly superficial (to say nothing of misleading) piece purporting to tell us: “How Vladimir Putin turned Russia’s dilapidated military into a modern, lethal machine”.

The Russian Army modernisation programme is, of course, unfinished business and plans to introduce 21st Century armoured vehicles has stalled. None of the new generation has so far been introduced into service. The Armata T-14 programme, for instance – despite original plans to equip units with 2,300 of these revolutionary new tanks between 2015 and 2020 – has been shunted to 2025.

The Russian Defence Ministry itself recently announced its equipment plans for 2022, promising that more than 400 armoured vehicles would be supplied to ground forces. But these comprise T-72B3M, T-80BVM and T-90M tanks, plus BMP-3, and modernised BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles, as well as BTR-82A armoured personnel carriers – all based on 20th Century designs of some antiquity.

With the move to an all-professional army having failed, and the ground forces still reliant for a third of its numbers on conscripts retained for only a single year, and with much of its equipment antiquated and obsolete, Putin’s “New Model Army” has a long way to go before it catches up.

As Mary Dejevsky in the Spectator remarks – without even referring to the technology – “Western warnings of an ‘imminent’ Russian invasion of Ukraine have grown more insistent in recent weeks with different voices, from the media to politicians, needlessly stoking the fires of war with their aggressive and inaccurate rhetoric”.

Bluntly, nothing we are reading or seeing in the media can be relied upon and those media organs which cannot even tell the difference between an MICV and a tank lack any authority whatsoever to inform us of developments.

Dejevsky argues – not without justice – that the Ukraine crisis has allowed the US and UK governments to use a “compliant and often poorly informed media” to magnify the Russia scare, foster Nato solidarity and present themselves as noble protectors of Ukraine.

Far from fending off a war, she writes, “this hype recklessly brought the prospect of war closer – thankfully, not yet to the point of no return”. And this is but one topic which is being served up to us. On how many other issues are we being recklessly misinformed?