“If that plant explodes, we’re all dead,” Maffini’s mother used to intone, looking out at the defunct Caorso station, once the largest in Italy. As Maffini rode his bike six miles across the countryside to get a closer look at the plant from a nearby overpass, his mother’s doom-laden words rang in his ears. Her warning scared him. It also made him want to learn more. When he left home to go to university, Maffini decided to work in nuclear physics. “Radioactivity is a strange thing,” he says. “You can’t see it, you can't hear it, you can't smell it. It leaves a lot of room for imagination, for speculation, for fear.”

Four decades on from Chernobyl, and Italy has some of the highest energy bills in Europe. The country is scrambling to disentangle itself from its dependence on Russian gas in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and build out its energy sovereignty. War in Iran, and a growing European consensus that turning away from nuclear power was, in the words of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, a “strategic mistake,” has given more impetus to the Italian government’s argument that the country needs to move past its qualms.

Last year, the Italian cabinet approved a new draft law reintroducing the prospect of returning to nuclear power. “The government has approved another important measure to ensure clean, safe, low-cost energy that can guarantee energy security and strategic independence,” the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced. 

Italy is already surrounded on all sides by nuclear power plants: Slovenia’s Krsko plant is 90 miles away from the border, and there are four French nuclear power plants within 110 miles. Italy is the world’s second-largest importer of electricity, with nuclear power, largely imported from France, making up 5% of its energy basket. Italy also plays host to more U.S. nuclear warheads than any other European country. An estimated 35 thermonuclear gravity bombs are stored at two NATO airbases in northern Italy, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative. 

Now, as data centers spring up in Italy’s industrial north, the country’s energy needs are expected to increase exponentially and the government is turning, albeit cautiously, to a long-held Italian taboo. Since the spring of 1986, when the most serious accident in nuclear history unfolded in Unit 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine, the Italian population has lived in fear of nuclear energy. It voted to shutter its once-burgeoning nuclear industry in 1987, and in 2011, after the Fukushima nuclear accident, when 94% of voters rejected government plans to revive the industry. 

It is a fear that has transformed Italy’s energy fortunes, making it reliant on imports and vulnerable to volatility and price shocks. 

“The international crises of recent years have clearly demonstrated the risk of excessive dependence on imported fossil fuels or vulnerable supply chains,” said Fiorella Corrado, communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “The government approaches this issue with great respect for the country's history and the democratic choices expressed by citizens. The 1987 and 2011 referendums profoundly impacted the national energy strategy at very different historical moments. Precisely for this reason, the point is not to ignore those choices, but to acknowledge that today's technological, climatic, industrial, and geopolitical context has radically changed.”

For Meloni’s government, the argument is not so much whether Italy needs to revive its nuclear industry, it’s whether the country is ready to shake its demons, to shake the cultural memory of what happened at Chernobyl forty years ago, a thousand miles away from Rome. 

In the early hours of April 28, 1986, in the control room of the Latina nuclear power plant south of Rome, a young technician called Ruggero Dell’Aquila was working the night shift. “Everything was perfectly quiet,” he recalled. As morning broke, teletype messages from Northern Europe began to rattle in. A clerk came down from the control room with reports from the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden. Their monitoring stations were registering radiation spikes far above background levels, and no one knew why. 

That evening, nuclear physicist Sergio Malossi, a director at the Latina plant responsible for monitoring radioactive risk, drove home. His mind was turning over what the clerks had been reporting. “He came in extremely agitated,” remembers his daughter, Roberta Malossi, who was 16 at the time. “We knew he was worried about something going wrong at the facility, but we didn’t understand.” Malossi says that her father’s first paranoid thought was that there had been a malfunction in his own plant, that radiation was leaching into the air, and that it was somehow his fault. 

At 9 p.m. Moscow time — aperitivo hour in Latina — the Soviet Union announced there had been an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. In the ensuing days, Italian news was full of dire warnings. 

“Television was showing these clouds that would soon reach Italy. Everyone was terrified. The only information we got was from state TV, and the news was shocking,” said Monica Tommasi, President of Friends of the Earth Italy, who was a child at the time. Radiation, the news said, would rain down on the population. “The fear from the sky,” ran one La Repubblica headline. “The cloud above us, the doubt within us,” ran another.

On the night of April 30, 1986, Italy’s nuclear monitoring stations began recording increases in radioactivity. The cloud moved over the Valley of the Po, and while the government called for calm, the country began to descend into panic. In the minds of the Italian people, the worst had happened, explained Luca Romano, a writer and activist campaigning for the return of nuclear power in Italy. “Nuclear annihilation, death by radiation, the radioactive cloud and the nuclear holocaust, had arrived,” he said. Nuclear armageddon was a fear that had gripped the West for decades. This was not a nuclear war, but in the Italian collective consciousness, that didn’t make a difference. 

The reality was, says Barbara Curli, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Turin, that “Italy was only marginally affected by the cloud.”

The cloud in northern Italy meant radioactivity levels peaked briefly, but ten days later they had fallen dramatically back down. Because this spike was short-lived, the total radiation exposure remained low. A United Nations committee report recorded that northern Italy received an additional radiation dose of about 380 microsieverts in the year following Chernobyl — less than a fifth of the normal background radiation humans absorb in a year; equivalent to taking about six transatlantic flights. It was much smaller than the doses received by neighboring countries like Bulgaria, Austria and Greece, and in the south of Italy the dose was lower still. 

Down by the Latina power plant, though, the community was shaken by events in Chernobyl, and rumors and misinformation began to spread about the fallout. The friends and family of the technician, Ruggero Dell’Aquila, started asking him if a Chernobyl-style disaster could happen at Latina, too. “Everyone was afraid, asking — ‘can it explode, can it explode?’” he recalled. 

The reality was, a Chernobyl-style explosion was not possible at Latina, because its reactor lacked the unstable characteristics of the Soviet design. But this was not such an easy concept to explain. 

“The problem was that a slew of journalists took over, telling lies,” Malossi said, recalling paranoid rumours about radioactivity causing mutations in nature. People started telling stories, Malossi said, about “frogs with three heads, animals and fish with four tails. Strange things. When in fact absolutely nothing like that was happening.”

The government advised people to avoid fresh vegetables and dairy products, particularly for children. Farmers destroyed crops and poured away milk. Sergio Malossi ignored the warnings, having measured radiation levels in the air himself. “My father and others from the plant brought the vegetables home and we ate them,” his daughter recalled.

It was these warnings — delivered amid a lack of clear information — that shifted public attitudes toward nuclear energy, said Renzo Colombo, 65, who was just beginning a career in nuclear engineering when the explosion happened. Now a member of Nucleare e Ragione, a nonprofit that promotes a rational approach to nuclear energy in Italy, he recalls how quickly fear took hold. “A real phobia was born, a panic about radioactivity,” he said. “And this panic marked the next 25 years.”

The months after the accident were a shadowy, uncertain period for Italians working in the nuclear industry. “I have to be honest, I felt a little guilty,” said Colombo. “As a nuclear engineer, I thought ‘what have we done?’ My colleagues and I always thought we were designing something useful for humanity. And at that moment we felt betrayed by our own profession.”

Outside Italy’s nuclear plants, crowds began to gather. A coalition of environmental groups and political parties started pushing for people to vote against nuclear power in an upcoming referendum.

This movement was not new. “Many years before Chernobyl, an environmentalist culture was born — and it didn’t just concern nuclear power, but risky industry in general,” explained Curli, the Turin historian. The anti-nuclear environmental movement, which spread across Europe in the 1970s, was particularly potent in Italy — a country rocked by violent political turmoil, organized crime, and corruption scandals. Public fears, explained Curli, were sharpened by the Seveso disaster, an accident at an industrial plant in the north of Italy in 1976 that exposed tens of thousands of people to a toxic cloud of chemicals. Nuclear power, she said, “was not perceived by public opinion as a credible policy because there's this underlying distrust in institutions.” 

In 1977, almost a decade before Chernobyl, a 10,000-strong crowd of protesters showed up at Montalto di Castro, to protest against a large new nuclear plant that was planned. A Time magazine correspondent described the activists as “an improbable mix of elegant members of the Italian nobility, radical students in American Indian garb, middle-class citizens and Christian Democratic and Communist politicians.”

In the wake of Chernobyl, Renzo Colombo was working at that very same plant, helping to build the thermohydraulic cycle. By then, the station was nearly complete. “It was a beautiful plant,” Colombo said. “I loved working there.”

In November 1987, 18 months after the Chernobyl accident, the Italian government held a referendum on nuclear energy. Nearly 80% of Italians voted in favor of measures that would end the country’s use of atomic energy.

One morning, following the referendum, the Montalto di Castro plant’s director called the workers to a meeting. Colombo remembers him saying: “‘Ragazzi, gather round, I need to talk to you. I’ve just been to the ministry, and Italy has decided that we are closing all nuclear activity and will focus on coal and gas instead.’” The room went silent. “I was young,” said Colombo. “But there were people there who were older and had devoted years of their life to the nuclear field. There was just this urge to cry.” 

The effect of the referendum was all-encompassing: construction was halted, and over the next three years Italy’s nuclear plants were shut down for good; its nuclear engineers scattered — many going to work abroad, or, like Colombo, re-training to work in other industries. 

It was hailed as a victory for Italian environmentalism, says Curli. But the result was that there was a push to “gasify” Italy. That is, she says, “to choose the gas route — less expensive, and less demanding than nuclear power. But this made Italy almost completely dependent on Russian gas, Libyan gas, Algerian gas.” The Montalto di Castro site was converted into a fossil-fuel powered plant, running on gas and fuel oil.

Decades on from that post-Chernobyl referendum — and a second referendum in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 — Italy remains in the process of dismantling its nuclear power stations, even as it now contemplates a return to nuclear power.

Watching them work is Enrico Bastianini, director of operations at the Latina plant. As I walk with Bastianini through the plant, we come to the old control room. When it first opened in 1963, the Latina plant was the largest nuclear power station in Europe — a feat of Italian and British engineering (the reactor was of UK design) and a symbol of Italy’s post-war industrial growth. 

“We were emerging from the destruction of the war, and this was progress. And it was what allowed us to escape the economic hardships of war, and have low-cost energy,” Bastianini says.

Now, over 60 years on from when the plant opened, more than half of its existence has been spent being taken apart. Critics of nuclear power often focus on precisely this point: the long and complex process of dismantling nuclear plants, and the problem of managing radioactive waste, some of which takes millennia to decay. 

There are two phases to the process of taking apart the plant. “The first phase allows us to dismantle everything that’s nuclear except the reactor. That’s because the reactor contains a huge amount of graphite,” Bastianini explains. “When we have a national repository, it can be removed. But for now, it’s safest if it stays in the first phase.”

Bastianini leads me into a deposit room where radioactive material is being stored in steel containers, inside an earthquake-resistant facility. These containers are only for temporary storage.

There were attempts in the early 2000s to establish a national nuclear waste repository at a salt mine in Basilicata in southern Italy, but huge protests forced the government to abandon its plans. Today, SOGIN, the state-owned Italian company in charge of decommissioning nuclear sites, is still actively searching for a suitable location for a permanent repository and faces considerable opposition. 

Rumours and anxiety swirl around the Latina plant itself — just as they did in the 1980s, when Malossi heard stories of radioactive fish with four tails. Last April, an article by the Italian magazine L’Espresso published claims that the Latina plant could leach radioactive material into the soil. The plant vigorously denies these claims — a spokesperson for SOGIN said the company periodically checks the quality of vegetables, milk and fodder as well as air, soil and groundwater for radiation and that “as always, the results of the analyses confirm radiologically negligible environmental impacts.”

In the gloaming of a summer evening in Umbria, Monica Tommasi drives me through the twilight-darkened hills surrounding the medieval city of Orvieto. This land is rich in archeological and ecological heritage — filled with ancient tunnels, Etruscan caves, untapped archeological sites, wild places where wolves and boar roam. Tommasi is the President of Amici Della Terra — "Friends of the Earth" in Italian — an organization that was once the Italian chapter of the international Friends of the Earth network before breaking away in 2014. "We left, because we argued a lot," she said of the split, describing how the network "wanted to put turbines and panels everywhere, and we couldn't be in favour of that approach." 

The International Friends of the Earth association was born from the anti-nuclear movement in America, where the group successfully lobbied to shut down two reactors, and has since 1969 made anti-nuclear campaigning a core part of its identity.

But Tommasi remembers precisely when she first began to reconsider nuclear power. “I started thinking about it in 2011, when I began to see that the government was investing heavily in solar and wind power, which would invade and industrialize the natural landscape,” she recalled. Many of these green transition projects have been fraught with problems in Italy — wind farm companies accused of corruption and profiteering, of erecting wind farms in areas where there’s little wind, and laying waste to nature. 

For the first time, Tommasi began to think about ways to decarbonize “that don’t destroy the environment where people live and the landscape around them.”. She became intrigued by the nuclear option. “We needed to start reasoning and changing our minds,” she said. 

Tommasi now advocates for a national conversation about nuclear power. “This choice must be accompanied by a public debate,” she told me, “but it isn’t happening because everyone is still afraid.” 

“The future of Italy's energy sector must lie in nuclear,” she said, adding that if Italy was to continue pursuing solar and wind energy alone, “it means destroying all the natural areas that are still left.”

I asked the government to respond to allegations about how criminality, speculation and land-grabs in the renewable energy sector might be affecting Italians’ opinions on nuclear power. 

“We do not believe it is appropriate to frame the energy debate by ideologically pitting nuclear power against renewables, nor should we use any administrative or criminal issues in certain sectors to discredit a technology as a whole,” said Fiorella Corrado, communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “Nuclear power is not an alternative to renewables, but their best ally,” she said. 

On a warm autumn day in Rome, several thousand people gathered for an annual “climate pride” march. They brandished homemade cardboard wind turbines that spun in the breeze. Vincenzo Migliucci, 83, was among them. He worked for more than three decades for ENEL, Italy’s energy corporation, and he’s been anti-nuclear for much of his life. After the Chernobyl accident, he protested outside the nuclear plant under construction in Montalto di Castro almost every day, picketing the workers as they went through the gates.

“The wrath of God happened,” he said, referring to Chernobyl. “And when a true estimate is made, we’ll one day see how many disasters Chernobyl caused.” 

Migliucci is against nuclear power plants of all types — arguing for solar panels instead — and is particularly concerned about what happens to the plants after they become obsolete and must, like the Latina plant, be slowly dismantled over decades. “The decommissioning costs a fortune; the nuclear waste repositories cost a fortune,” he said.

Subscribe to our coda currents newsletter

Insights from the Coda newsroom on the global forces that shape local crises.

Subscribe

Try again

He began telling me some of the stories that surround Italy’s shuttered nuclear plants. “Near the Garigliano power plant,” he told me, “a child was born with only one eye.” His own eyes widened as he pressed a finger into the middle of my forehead. “Sheep and cattle,” he said, “were born with six legs, or entirely red in colour. It’s not a myth, it’s real.” 

Younger generations of Italians don’t have the same collective impressions around nuclear power, nor around Chernobyl or its aftermath, explained Luca Romano, a young pro-nuclear influencer with a quarter of a million followers on Instagram. Romano makes videos with his partner, Luiza Munteanu, about the advantages of nuclear power. The main problem he runs up against, he says, is that “we have a very low scientific literacy, the level of debate is abysmal.” And culturally, he adds, “Italy has always been a country that looks backwards rather than forwards.”

In May, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency visited Italy’s Lombardy region, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the governor to cooperate on applying nuclear science for development across the region. The choice of Lombardy was significant. It is home to Milan, and is at the heart of Italy’s digital infrastructure. Speckled with no fewer than 60 data centers, with more cropping up, Lombardy has opened itself up to Silicon Valley. Microsoft is investing billions in the area to boost its AI and cloud computing infrastructure. Amazon Web Services has committed to spending over $1 billion to expand its data center operations around Milan.

How northern Italy’s growing AI infrastructure will be powered, though, is still a problem to be solved — one that cuts to the heart of Italy’s energy dependence. Since Giorgia Meloni became prime minister in October 2022 — which coincided with the launch of ChatGPT a month later — the Italian government has been broaching the topic of nuclear power as essential to Italy's energy future. “World population and economic growth will significantly increase energy demand,” Meloni said at a sustainability summit in Abu Dhabi. “Not least due to the growing requirements arising from the development of generative artificial intelligence.” 

Artificial intelligence is a “highly relevant topic,” said Corrado, the communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “As more things run on electricity, the economy goes digital, and data centers and AI expand, demand for steady, low-emissions power will rise. Nuclear energy can help as a reliable, controllable source that works alongside renewables.” 

In August, it emerged that the government had set aside €7.5 million purely for pro-nuclear communication and information campaigns directed at regions where new plants may be built. One focus of the Meloni administration is on the prospect of building small modular reactors, sometimes called “mini nukes.” They are compact fission plants, a fraction of the size of the traditional, cathedral-like nuclear power stations. They have a smaller core, and proponents argue their safety features mean there’s minimal chance of an epic, Chernobyl-scale nuclear disaster, something the government is keen to get across to voters. 

Currently, only China and Russia have these small reactors up and running, but mini nuclear plants have attracted significant attention in Silicon Valley. OpenAI’s Sam Altman was chairman of Oklo, a nuclear startup focused on SMRs, while U.S. nuclear startup Kairos has signed an agreement with Google to develop these reactors to power its data centers. This month, the European Commission unveiled a strategy for rolling out small modular reactors and bringing them “online” by the 2030s.

Soon, Italy may take the first steps towards the reconstruction of a nuclear industry that has been abandoned for decades. “I believe it won't be easy to relaunch nuclear energy,” said Barbara Curli, the Turin historian. “Knowing a little about the history of nuclear power in Italy and its political dimension, I'd be quite skeptical about the possibility of relaunching nuclear power here in Italy — but let’s see.” 

A little under 1,500 miles away, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, among wild boar, birds, and deer, radiation levels in some areas have dipped below around 0.3 microsieverts per hour, lower than background radiation levels in many European cities. Not least the eternal city of Rome.

Related Articles

As Iran burns, a new age of nuclear proliferation begins

Victoria Jensen

When deepfakes go nuclear

Sarah Scoles

Russia uses nuclear power to fuel its influence

Jonathan Brown

and

Benas Gerdziunas

The post How Italy’s Chernobyl ghosts might stop a new atomic age appeared first on Coda Story.

1. Silicon Savanna: The workers taking on Africa's digital sweatshops

Nairobi-based photographer Natalia Jidovanu shadowed social media content moderators who are fighting back against Big Tech companies like Meta Kenyan courts. Rulings in these cases could jeopardize the outsourcing model upon which tech giants have built their global empire.

2. Russian performance art in the time of Putin

What does exile mean for artists who have fled Russia? Reporter Nadia Beard met a new generation of Russian painters, performers and musicians now working outside the country, and learned about how their work is different from previous generations of exiled Russian artists. The story features photography from Elene Shengelia in Tbilisi and Lorenzo Meloni of Magnum Photos in Paris.

3. In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages

Frankie Mills captured the vast, mountainous landscape of the Swedish Arctic, where Coda’s Isobel Cockerell reported on the clash of ideologies and motivations underlying Europe’s bid to transition to green energy.

4. Watching the streets of Medellín

"I’ve never been to a place where I felt so constantly under observation," said Magnum photographer Peter van Agtmael after he travelled to Medellín to investigate the city’s complex ecosystem of police and drug trade surveillance. “I watched them all watching each other, and became a part of this circle of surveillance.”

5. The Albanian town that TikTok emptied

Louiza Vradi’s photos transported readers to Kukes, Albania, a city that has lost about half of its population since the fall of communism in 1991. In recent years, thousands of young people — mostly boys and men — have rolled the dice and journeyed to England, often on small boats and without proper paperwork, only to find themselves indebted to smugglers and criminal gangs. Together with Coda reporter Isobel Cockerell, Vradi examined the driving forces behind recent waves of migration from Albania to western Europe.

6. In Africa’s first ‘safe city,’ surveillance reigns

Magnum photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa took readers to downtown Nairobi, where 2,000 Chinese-made Huawei surveillance cameras send real-time data to police. The cameras are there to prevent terrorism and crime, but is Nairobi’s surveillance net actually making people safer? As writer and poet Njeri Wangari found, so far the answer is no. 

7. India and China draw a line in the snow

What is it like to live on the front lines of a decades-old border dispute between China and India, as the two countries vie for the spotlight on the geopolitical stage? Working alongside Coda’s senior editor Shougat Dasgupta, photographer Ishan Tankha captured cultural and economic contrasts across India’s jagged Himalayan borderlands.

8. As Ukraine doubles down on its national identity, who is left behind?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sparked a widespread embrace of Ukrainian culture and language. But Ukraine is home to more than one culture and language. Romanian photographer Andreea Campeanu accompanied reporter Amanda Coakley to western Ukraine where Romanian ethnic communities say their language and culture are suffering collateral damage in wartime.

9. How surveillance tech helped protect power — and the drug trade — in Honduras

Photographer Seth Berry gave us a window into the world of Hery Flores, one of an untold number of Hondurans caught up in the state’s complex surveillance web. Originally deployed as a weapon in the region’s ongoing drug war, police surveillance technology has been turned against opposition figures like Flores, all while the drug trade continues to thrive. The story by Anna-Catherine Brigida was shortlisted for the 2023 Fetisov Journalism Awards in the category of contribution to civil rights.

10. How 19th-century silver mines could supercharge the US green energy economy

Rachel Woolf brought readers to southern Colorado’s historic mining heartland where the U.S. is hoping it can find the silver reserves that will be essential for the green transition. The resurgence of U.S. mining is happening in the shadows of decaying infrastructure of the past.

The post Year in review: From Nairobi to Medellín, our best photography appeared first on Coda Story.

Three-quarters of a mile below the ground, miners have just detonated a massive quantity of explosives. They’re blasting out iron ore from the bedrock: around six Eiffel Towers’ worth each night.

In this northern Swedish mining town of around 23,000, most people are used to the feeling of reverberating dynamite. But a newcomer will find themselves jolted awake, night after night.

Signs of the ground being hollowed out below are everywhere. Cracks run up the brickwork of houses and apartment buildings, and nearest to the mine, the land seems to undulate. Kiruna is breaking apart.

In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages

Kiruna sits high up in the Swedish Arctic, a starkly beautiful place, surrounded by primeval forests, powerful rivers and rugged mountains. More than a century ago, industrialists named it “the land of the future” because of the rich seams of iron ore that lay beneath the earth. But today, mining has carved out so much of the land that it’s causing deeper, tectonic shifts in the Earth’s crust. Unlike the timed nightly rumblings from the mine, these are real seismic tremors that shake the town’s foundations without warning. It is as if Kiruna’s mountain, woken from its slumber, is trying to settle itself. 

Carina Sarri, 73, can barely recognize the landscape today — it has changed so much since her childhood. The Kiruna native now lives in the south of Sweden, but recently returned for a visit.

“Two, three new mountains they have built, from the remains of the mine,” she said, describing the enormous piles of waste rock the miners have dumped, forming artificial mountains that dominate the skyline to the south of the city. She told me about the lake, once a treasured summer spot for swimming and fishing brown trout. The Swedish state-owned mining company, Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag or LKAB, began draining the southern end away about a decade ago to stop water seeping into the mine. Now people are afraid that what remains is too contaminated to swim in, and the brown trout have become scarce.

Sarri is of Sami origin, a group that is indigenous to the region. Now retired, she helped found Sweden’s first Sami-language nursery school in Kiruna in the 1980s. Sarri told me she couldn’t help but think about how her hometown might look a century from now when there is nothing left to extract. “How will they leave this land?” she wondered aloud.

It’s an old question in Kiruna, where an iron mine first laid waste to the land in the early 20th century. It forever changed the lives of the Sami people — indigenous reindeer herders, native to northern Scandinavia and northwest Russia, who have lived in these lands for millennia. But today, the question has taken on new meaning.

Across northern Sweden, companies have staked claims here for pioneering new carbon-free ways to mine iron and make steel. They also want to dig up a rich treasure trove of rare earth elements and precious metals to help power our mobile phones and electric cars. In 2021, the region even became the target site for a drastic intervention that could bring down global temperatures but could also cause cataclysmic disaster — a proposal to dim the sun.

Ebba Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister and minister for business and energy, believes the region could help reduce the speed at which the world is heating up. “Sweden really has the answer to the million-dollar question of whether it’s possible to have very high set climate goals and then at the same time have a strong economic growth,” Busch told me. “The Swedish answer to that is yes.”

There’s an underlying sense here that swathes of this beautiful, resource-laden land should be turned over to industry, that it must be sacrificed at the altar of a green transition in order to phase out fossil fuels. But for local residents, the tradeoffs are more complex than simply embracing a more sustainable future. Environmentalists, Indigenous groups and academics say that what politicians and energy executives are really advocating for is a technofix for the climate crisis: simply trading out one extractive industry for another without challenging the systems that got us here in the first place. And it could bring untold collateral damage upon one of nature’s last refuges in Europe, alongside the Sami, the region’s last Indigenous culture.

In reporting this story, I met climate scientists, mining executives, Sami leaders and Swedish politicians. Among them, I found no absolute heroes or true villains. Everyone was searingly aware that the climate is in danger, but each person had drastically different ideas about how to fix it. Some politicians, like Busch, say the solutions to the climate crisis are in the ground, ready to be mined, while the Sami believe the answers have always existed in the quiet teachings of the natural world. This far-flung northern region is a crossroads of technologies, ideologies and ambitions for the planet. Kiruna is, as one scholar put it, “a microcosmos, like a magnifying glass under which you see all the problems of the world.”

This past October, I went to the mine myself. From a platform three-quarters of a mile below ground, I watched as an electrified train approached, moving autonomously along the tracks and letting out a shrill whistle. Carriages passed by filled with black rocks — some like gravel, some as big as watermelons. When they reached the loading shaft, the bottom of the carriage flew open and pieces of iron ore fell into the abyss with a screech and a roar. From there, my guide explained, they would be crushed, turned into pellets and eventually melted down into steel.

Anders Lindberg, a spokesman for LKAB, Sweden’s state-owned mining company, drove me down into the Kiruna mine in a company-owned four-wheel drive vehicle. Cheerful, bespectacled and passionate about mining, he kept up a constant stream of chatter as we rolled through the unfathomable warren of underground tunnels, caverns and railways. As we approached 4,000 feet below ground, the mine’s deepest level, my ears started to pop and it got hotter — we were getting closer to the Earth’s core.

“Whatever you do in your daily life, it has started in the mine,” he said as his headlights flashed across the roughly hewn rock of the tunnel wall. “The tools you use, the chair you’re sitting on, the bike you’re riding on your way to work. The pens you’re writing with, the computer, your mobile phone. It has all started in the mine.” 

From Kiruna, the iron is taken by train to ports in Norway and Sweden, where it is refined into steel or shipped to LKAB’s clients. At least 80% of iron ore in Europe comes from LKAB’s mines. The company says its products can be found in mobile phones, bikes, strollers, electric cars, roads and buildings all over the world.

When Lindberg took me to see some of the miners, I expected pickaxes and dusty faces, but instead I found men and women sitting in state-of-the-art underground offices — with computer screens, water coolers and even a canteen. It turns out that a lot of the mining now happens remotely. I watched as one woman, Ingela, picked up piles of rock and moved them using joysticks and an Xbox controller, before a huge curved screen.

Most iron mining and steelmaking today is otherwise not very modern: The pelleting, refining and smelting processes are typically powered by fossil fuels such as oil and coal. Globally, the steel industry is responsible for about 8% of carbon emissions. But LKAB says they can transform the whole process from mine to end-product by using electricity generated by water and wind instead.

Ahead of COP 28 — the global climate conference taking place this week in Dubai — the UN warned that we’re on track for global temperatures to rise 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. The UN estimates that an average of 21.5 million people have been displaced by climate disasters each year since 2008. Without drastic changes in the way we live, we'll see more and more hellish weather events, deadly heat waves, forest fires, drastic flooding and millions more forced to leave their homes — the world as we know it will be even further transformed.

We’re already living through these consequences, but stopping the worst effects will require overhauling nearly every industry. We must reduce our carbon emissions. But the question of how to do that hangs heavily in the Arctic air.

Until the last decade, Sweden’s northernmost county — Norrbotten, home to Kiruna — wasn’t such an exciting place. Unemployment levels were among the highest in the country, and people were moving down to Stockholm in search of work. But a new chapter began when Facebook came to town.

In 2011, Meta (then Facebook) began building an enormous data center in Lulea, a small city on the Baltic coast, about four hours south of Kiruna. Run on hydropower and cooled naturally by the frigid Arctic air, the data center called attention to northern Sweden’s potential as a place with an abundance of renewable energy. More server farms began setting up shop and wind farms were erected in the vast forestland. Within a few years, industry leaders and politicians spoke of the area’s potential to help revamp age-old, carbon-heavy steel production into new eco-friendly processes. Meanwhile, Kiruna’s space center — a rocket range and satellite station — was becoming an important European hub for monitoring climate change and space weather.

Signs of this new industry of sustainability — and its profits —  are everywhere now: LED screens on the university campus and at the airport invite people to “become the green transition.” Someone handed me a newspaper that proclaimed northern Sweden’s green transition will “save the world.”

The need for a change in the way we live and treat the Earth is also plain to see here. Every winter feels a little shorter than the last. The snow, once soft and easy for animals to dig through to reach food beneath, is now melting and refreezing as the temperature fluctuates unpredictably. The region’s reindeer are moving about ever more erratically, in constant search of food.

Alongside the “land of the future,” this place has another alias — “Europe’s last remaining wilderness.” There’s truth to the name: These vast boreal forests are home to the brown bear, golden eagle, Arctic fox, lynx, wolf and beaver. It’s one of the least inhabited places in Europe. But the Sami don’t like the term. For them, this isn’t a wilderness, and it isn’t empty. The land is replete with cultural heritage, with the traces of thousands of years of living alongside nature, herding reindeer, fishing, hunting and storytelling. 

“If you read a map now, you can see Sami names all over — every mountain, every lake, every river — all have Sami names. It’s our ancestors’ land,” said Anna Sarri, Carina Sarri’s cousin who runs a nature tourism business in a village outside Kiruna and comes from a long line of reindeer herders. “It’s a culture.”

In January of this year, the city of Kiruna laid out a lavish welcome for the European Commission to celebrate the start of Sweden’s six-month leadership of the Council of the European Union. Donning a blue LKAB hard hat and protective clothing, Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, gave a speech inside the belly of the mine to mark the occasion.

“I don’t know what comes to mind when you think of Sweden. Some of you might think of the Swedish musical miracle like ABBA, Roxette or Swedish House Mafia. Maybe you’re thinking of Astrid Lindgren or those red-painted wooden houses. Untamed wilderness,” Busch said with a smile. “But I’d like to add another entry to that list. LKAB, the Swedish mines.”

She went on to announce that in Kiruna, just north of where LKAB is currently mining, is a second enormous underground deposit of metals, containing not only iron, but also Europe's largest quantity of rare earth metals. This second deposit, she said, would be a treasure trove of much-needed materials for making magnets that power electric car engines and help convert motion into electricity in wind turbines.

Opening up a sister mine — to dig for these valuable minerals —  would be crucial, she said, for Europe’s greener, profitable future. It would wean Europe off dependence on China’s rare earth elements and help reduce dependence on fossil fuels worldwide. “Sweden is literally a goldmine,” Busch told reporters.

Anna Sarri was in her village when she first heard the news. Announcing the deposit without consulting the Sami first, and doing it on the grandest possible scale was a “dirty trick,” she said. In reality, the mining company has known about the deposit for over a century. They simply hadn’t categorized or publicly registered its geological makeup in detail until now. But the international media immediately bought the political calculus, hailing the deposit as a new “discovery.” The fanfare suddenly made it a very difficult thing for the Sami — or anyone else — to oppose the opening of a new mine. Doing so would mean being on the wrong side of the climate change debate.

“It’s a way of working which always puts the reindeer herding society in a situation where you are almost forced to say yes, and if you don't, you are an enemy to society,” said Nils Johan Labba, a Sami politician who I met in Anna Sarri’s village.

The mining company says that according to geological reporting standards, it had to make a large public announcement so all parties were notified at once.

Talk of untapped treasures lying beneath the earth in northern Sweden is nothing new, especially to Indigenous people like Sarri and Labba. In the early 20th century, a eugenicist named Herman Lundborg traveled to Kiruna to meet the Sami and classify them. He measured their skulls and photographed people naked, a project that was privately backed by the founder of Kiruna’s mine and the LKAB mining company. In 1919, Lundborg wrote that there were “dormant millions” in profits underground in northern Sweden and that because the Sami — who he believed to be racially inferior — did not extract those resources, they should “give way to clean Swedish [industrial] interests.” At the time, Lundborg’s influence served as the backdrop for the state’s displacement of Sami communities during the industrialization of the north in the early 20th century. Racial ideology — and assimilation policies forced on the Sami people — painted Sami traditions and philosophy around land use as incompatible with Sweden’s prosperity.

Sami politicians and community leaders told me that to them, the green transition feels like a continuation of what they have experienced for centuries: more extraction, more sacrifice of their land. The undeniable threats of climate change on one hand and the constant acquisition of land by mining companies on the other, feel like an existential Catch-22; they can lose their land to green development, lose it to climate change or, potentially, lose it to both.

But these rare earth metals are here. And they could help human beings keep using the tools and technologies we’ve come to depend on, without doing quite so much harm to the planet. Should the Sami have to give up their way of life to make way for these mines — when they had little to do with destroying the climate in the first place? I put the question to LKAB’s Lindberg.

“You cannot look at the Sami population and say, ‘They’re a small group that’s not part of the society,’” he said. “We have Samis working in the mine. Reindeer herders are using motorcycles, snowmobiles, helicopters, drones, mobile phones. They also need these metals. They are also using fossil fuels, being part of the climate change.”

The mineral-rich land here may contain real answers to the climate crisis. But there’s also money to be made from these rare earth metals — and a lot of it.

The state-owned mining company has not yet put a price on how much that second deposit in Kiruna’s potential sister mine — the one announced during the European Commission visit in January — might be worth. Along with 700 million tons of iron ore, LKAB believes the new deposit contains about 1.3 million tons of rare earth elements. One metric ton of neodymium, one of the elements found in the deposit used for powerful magnets and electronics, is currently priced at around $70,000. The total profits here — of iron for traditional industrial use alongside valuable mining byproducts in the form of rare earth metals that go into our phones and electric vehicles — could be astronomical.

Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, has called the newly announced Kiruna deposit as potentially fortune-changing for Sweden’s economic future as Norway’s discovery of offshore oil in the late 1960s, which led to it becoming a top global exporter of crude oil. 

But some locals are skeptical about what all this mining is really for and who really stands to gain from it. At a pub in Lulea, where locals were competing in a Swedish-style pub quiz over plates of meatballs and lingonberries, I met workers who had just flown in to lay fiber optic cable in the Baltic Sea. They chuckled when I mentioned the green transition. “Ask the companies how much electricity it will need!” one of them said.

It is a good question. LKAB, along with its partners — a steelmaking and hydropower company — is currently testing out a new way of making steel, which leaves behind the traditional blast furnace but requires a phenomenal amount of electricity. How much exactly? “We would need approximately 70 terawatt hours of electricity a year,” said LKAB’s Lindberg. He explained this would amount to roughly half the electricity that all of Sweden’s population of 10 million consumes in a year.

How could that much electricity be generated here in a planet-friendly way? Imagine 3,000 new wind turbines. That’s what must be built, according to Karl-Petter Thorwaldsson, Sweden’s former minister for business who now advises SSAB, the steelmaking company partnering with LKAB on their new fossil-free steel venture. Thorwaldsson is all for it, because the consequences of not doing it, he said, are too grave to think about. “It must, must work,” Thorwaldsson said. “There are no jobs on a dead planet.”

But wind farms come with issues of their own. “They talk about wind power,” said Johan Sandström, a mining expert at the Lulea Institute of Technology. “OK, some wind turbines might end up in the sea, but others must be on land. Whose land?"

For people in northern Sweden, this is the real million-dollar question. And it’s a hard one to raise in a place like Lulea — where almost everyone is somehow connected to the town’s industry and technology sectors. Sandström described an emerging “culture of silence” around challenging the new narrative of the green transition.

“As soon as you ask a question about it, you’re categorized as being against progress and sustainability,” said Sandström. “It’s like a silent consensus that we need to view this as a positive thing, period. And I think that's unfortunate.”

Henrik Blind, councilor of the nearby town of Jokkmokk, said he feels the green transition has been “hijacked by the industry” that has continued to take away and exploit Indigenous land, but this time with a climate-saving label slapped on top. When I met Tor Lennart Tuorda, a Sami photographer who works as an archivist at the Sami museum, he put it more bluntly.

“It’s only shit talk, this green transition,” he said. “It’s only a way to extract even more. You can call it green colonialism instead. That’s more true.”

Mining for the green transition will bring some harm to the land and the people who live on it. But its champions carry a healthy dose of realism about what drives the global economy and how our demands for everything from ballpoint pens to laptops affect the climate. They are pushing for more sustainable ways for us to keep living as we do.

Then, there’s a more radical crowd: scientists who argue that all options must be on the table, that we may need to look beyond the Earth itself to slow down climate change. They too found their way to Kiruna.

In 2021, a group of researchers at Harvard University wanted to study whether humans could one day bring down the Earth’s rising temperatures by dimming light from the sun. They predicted that if they could send a burst of mineral dust into the atmosphere, it would act like millions of tiny mirrors high in the sky, scattering sunlight back into space and potentially lowering temperatures worldwide.

The group set their sights on Esrange, the Swedish Space Corporation’s rocket launch site and space base, a 40-minute drive east of Kiruna. The sparsely populated Arctic landscape would make it an ideal testing ground.

The first step would be to come to Esrange, where they could test out flying a special mechanical balloon about 12 miles overhead. If successful, the balloon could one day be used to sprinkle the sky with those tiny mirrors.

One of the scientists on the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx for short, is David Keith, who is now a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago. He told me that the first goal was simply to test the balloon, but the longer-term goal was “to do some stratospheric science, with a focus on solar geoengineering.”

Dubbed “sunscreen for the Earth,” solar geoengineering is one of the most controversial types of climate science out there today. If it works, it could potentially reduce global temperatures and save the planet from the worst ravages of climate change. But there are huge, potentially catastrophic, risks involved. Scientists say a mistake in the process could disrupt our climate system — even erode the ozone layer — and severely impact global drought and flooding patterns.

Nevertheless, the stage was set for the SCoPEx team to come to Sweden. They even announced their plans to the media. But then word reached Åsa Larsson Blind, who lives northeast of Kiruna and is vice president of the nonprofit Saami Council, a cross-border rights group that spans the Sami region.

Larsson Blind was startled by what she saw as the mindset of geoengineering — the idea that humans might one day be able to tweak the Earth’s climate to suit our own ends. 

“Solar geoengineering is kind of the ultimate colonization,” she told me. “Not only of nature and the Earth, but also the atmosphere. Treating the Earth as machinery and saying that we’re not just entitled to control the Earth itself, we will control the whole atmosphere is to take it a step further.”

The Saami Council launched a high-profile campaign opposing the project, releasing a video that challenged not only the proposed experiment, but called for a complete global ban on geoengineering research. The video featured Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speaking alongside Larsson Blind, other Indigenous leaders, scientists and environmentalists who called geoengineering “pollution for a pollution problem” and a “false solution” to climate change.

In his work, Keith talks about a stark future where the effects of climate change get so bad that it could become urgent to research geoengineering as a potential solution. He argues that it is important to understand the risks while we still have time to consider them soberly, rather than in some future climate emergency. “The purpose of research,” he told me, “is to provide more information about how well these technologies might work and what their risks are.” But after the Saami Council campaign, the Swedish Space Corporation reneged on its commitment to the SCoPEx team — the balloon launch was called off. 

Keith recalled Space Corporation officials telling the group that “there were enough different disputes over mining and other topics in Sami land; that from the point of view of the Swedish government, they just didn't want one more irritation.”

“I think the Swedish government failed kind of abysmally on that score,” he said. “It is entirely legitimate for the Sami to oppose experiments or whole research in general,” Keith told me. “But their right to do so needs to be balanced against the rights of people in poor, hot countries.” He added that in his experience, people were more interested in geoengineering in the Global South.

Mattias Forsberg, a representative from the Esrange Space Center, said that it was not only opposition from the Sami that caused them to cancel the project. “Our core mission as a company, our reason for being in business, is to serve the sustainable development of humanity and our modern societies,” Forsberg said. “Since it quickly became clear that this whole topic around the SCoPEx project needed to be discussed more widely internationally before any related mission could be conducted, we took the decision to cancel our engagements with the project.”

I talked about the scuttled geoengineering project with Henrik Blind, the Sami politician in Jokkmokk. For him, the shutdown of SCoPEx’s balloon test in Kiruna — and the debate it sparked — seemed to capture the clash between nature-based solutions and techno-fixes to climate change.

“This is an example of how stupid it is, that we as one creature, among millions of creatures, think we can be larger than nature. It’s something that makes me laugh,” he said. “It isn’t the sun’s fault, and it isn’t the planet’s fault, that our climate is going where it’s going.”

We met by a frozen lake a few minutes’ drive from Blind’s office at city hall. He glided up to our meeting place in a pristine white Tesla, the tires squeaking on the snow. Dressed in a pink cashmere hat and bright red knitted mittens, he walked with a slight bounce, making quick progress around the lake.

Dusk was drawing in — it was October, and the nights were getting longer. Blind gestured at the twilight stillness around us, the sky turning the color of watery ink. “We call it the blue hour,” he said with a smile.

Jokkmokk lies just on the edge of the Arctic Circle, where the sun only just manages to peep over the horizon during winter. People in this part of the world have a singular relationship with the sun. It’s something that made the concept of solar geoengineering — the idea we can blunt the strength of the sun’s rays — feel particularly unsettling for Blind.

We talked about the strange reality of living mostly in the darkness for six months of the year, and with abundant light for the other six. “Of course it’s dark, but dark is also light in some way,” Blind said. “The light needs the darkness, to get the contrast.”

On the subject of contrasts, I asked Blind about the Tesla. Electric cars depend on metals and minerals often extracted in environmentally destructive conditions. “For me, it’s showing how hard it is to be a modern person. You want to do the right thing, but still, you are harming nature in one way or another,” he said. “It’s a conflict in the head. I know that an electric car has a lot of minerals in it, and it’s causing trouble in other places.”

There is trouble — plenty of trouble — in other places. In the fight for a more sustainable future, climate campaigners say those in power are trying to fix the climate in precisely the same way they destroyed it. Those least responsible for climate change are forced to relinquish their land — and in some places, even their lives — in the race to fix the damage. 

In Xinjiang, China, the Uyghur people are being forced to work in solar panel factories while millions more are surveilled, imprisoned and “re-educated” so China can consolidate control over the region’s vast resources of rare earth elements and precious metals. In Mexico, Indigenous communities say their lives and livelihoods are being threatened by wind farm company land grabs. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, cobalt mines providing 70% of the world’s supply for rechargeable batteries in cars and phones are expanding rapidly, mines run on trafficked child labor, with spartan conditions as people scrape out the metal by hand using pickaxes and shovels.

It’s a far cry from the Kiruna iron mine, which LKAB dubs the “most modern iron mine in the world.” Victoire Kabwika, a mining technician from the DRC, now works here in LKAB’s mine. I met Kabwika and his wife Angel as they came out of Sunday service at Kiruna’s church, blinking in the slanting Arctic sunlight. He too spoke of contrasts. To Kabwika, mining in Sweden is night and day compared to back home. 

“In Congo, people are working with soldiers around. And weapons. Children are working. It's not good,” he told me. Mining in the DRC to fuel the green transition is also ravaging the landscape, but there, people regularly pay for it with their lives. More than 7,000 miles south of Kiruna, the Kolwezi mine is also causing nearby houses to crack apart due to the excavation below them. But there, soldiers are forcing people to leave their homes, marking them with red Xs and burning them down. Amnesty International found they’d even torched some homes with families still inside.

All over town in Kiruna, signs proclaim that the company has “secured mineral assets that guarantee the future for ourselves and our region beyond 2060.” If the new sister mine for iron and rare earth elements — just north of the current mine — is allowed to open, “it will mean my life, because it's going to extend the time for exploration,” said Kabwika. It would mean more jobs in the region, and that he could likely stay in his job here indefinitely.

For the Sami collective that currently herds reindeer here, it would mean yet another loss of land. And for everyone in town, it could mean more earthquakes.

At 3:11 a.m. on May 18, 2020, a 4.9-magnitude earthquake shook Kiruna, triggered by ongoing mining activity. 

“I was in my bed,” said Zebastian Bohman, 51, who has lived in Kiruna for a decade. He remembers how his apartment shuddered: paintings fell off the walls and glasses tumbled from kitchen cupboards. His thoughts immediately turned to the mine: “Who’s down there? Who’s on the shift? You start to call.”

No one was killed. But the “minequake” was more evidence of how dangerously unstable the land had become — and would continue to grow if the mining company kept digging. The town is ever so slowly being pulled towards the mine, like a tablecloth dragged across a table set for breakfast. Even before “the big one,” as locals now call it, plans were made to move Kiruna for precisely this reason.

So the mining company drew a big, red line down the middle of the town. Everyone on one side, around 6,000 homes, would have to move around two miles to the east, and the mining company would pay the cost — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Most of the “old town’s” buildings are being bulldozed, replaced by new buildings in a “new town” center. But homes built in the traditional Swedish style — with painted clapboard and sloping, copper roofs — are being moved one by one, loaded onto trailers in their entirety and relocated. Residents often walk behind the houses, keeping a sort of slow-moving vigil.

In 2025 the city will move its immense Lutheran church. Made of wood, with soaring stained glass windows that bathe the congregation in Arctic sunlight, the architect constructed its pitched triangular shape to look like a Sami tent. The town will need to widen the road and demolish a railway viaduct to finish the job.

Since summer, the old town has largely emptied out. The land that’s closest to the mine has been turned into a kind of memory park, for the next few years at least, while the ground is still stable enough to be safe. It’s a place where people can go to process the loss of Kiruna as it was

“People are grieving, mourning the old city,” Bohman told me. “I would think it will take a generation. They love their old city and the new one is not in their heart yet.” Alongside his wife Cecilia, Bohman runs a food truck just outside the mine where they serve up reindeer kebabs to miners, businessmen, Kiruna’s teenagers and anyone else passing by. In between shifts, Zebastian Bohman took me to his old apartment building, where he showed me a series of cracks, big and small, running up through the block from the basement.

Bohman and his wife moved out of the apartment last year, into their newly allotted home. They were pleased with the trade and relieved to be out of their old place, away from the booming, the juddering and constant worry about seismic activity.

But a month after their move, around the holidays last year, the Bohmans were sitting on the sofa late one evening watching television, when they felt it. That familiar, sickening jolt: a mini-earthquake. The couple looked at each other as their new house shuddered around them. When the shaking stopped, they could do nothing but laugh. “We realized we were fucked,” Zebastian Bohman said with a chuckle and a shrug. “That's what we realized. This is not the end. This is not a home forever.”

The mining company says they don’t foresee the new town having to move again. But the Bohmans believed, in that moment, that this wouldn’t be the last time.

As we imagine our future on this planet, we can all expect epic upheaval in the places we call home. But the stakes of change will be much higher for some than for others. 

For people who are already seeing the worst of the climate crisis, the costs are extraordinary: their homes, their land, their lives. For those industrialists at the top of global supply chains, the fight to kick humanity’s fossil fuel habit will force a change in the source and size of their profits.

And for the people of Kiruna, the gains and the losses are as immense as the landscape itself. The fragility of this reality is felt every night, for now and for the foreseeable future, as the earth continues to shake.

The post In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages appeared first on Coda Story.

It was 1998. Olivier Rubbers, then 29 years old, came up with the idea of returning beavers to his local rivers. “My level of knowledge about nature was extremely poor,” he now confesses. But he’d read a magazine article about how the beaver was indigenous to Belgium, though it had long been nearly extinct. Bringing beavers back, he thought, “would be a great project.”

“Beaver bombing” or “beaver black ops” — as it’s become known in conservation circles — is the practice of illegally releasing the humble beaver into a waterway and leaving it to do what it does best: fell trees, build dams and construct lodges. Beavers are known as “ecosystem engineers,” or a “keystone species,” because they create an ideal habitat for all kinds of other wildlife. 

Rubbers borrowed his father’s car and drove to Germany to pick up the beavers, then crossed the border back into Belgium and dropped them in a river. Throughout 1999 and 2000, Rubbers repeated the feat with 97 more beavers, bringing them from Bavaria to Belgium in a van kitted out with homemade beaver crates. “We wanted them all,” he said.

Rubbers and his accomplices soon learned that the best time to beaver-bomb was not at night but in the middle of the afternoon, preferably on a Sunday, when everyone was having lunch.

He procured almost all the beavers from Gerhard Schwab, a wildlife manager based in Bavaria known as “the Pablo Escobar of beavers.” Over the years, Schwab has bred beavers and helped numerous communities across Europe with reintroductions — always in partnership with local wildlife management schemes. Rubbers showed Schwab some official-looking papers, all stamped and in French. Schwab had no idea that Rubbers was introducing the beavers into their new surroundings without local approval. 

“I had all the authorizations I needed,” Rubbers said. “Which, in my mind, meant no authorization.”

“He bombs quite a bit,” Schwab admitted about Rubbers. “He wanted to do something for nature.” 

Rubbers was eventually fined 500 euros for detaining and transporting a protected species, although he told me that the local administration forgot to claim the money. He has spent the following years watching with satisfaction as the beavers spread across Belgium, transforming its waterways. Frogs and fish came to lay their spawn in the slowed, dammed-up water, while bugs and beetles thrived in the rotting wood of the felled trees. Birds followed in their wake, feeding off the fish and insects. “Belgium should thank me for services rendered to the nation,” Rubbers said.

Rubbers is part of a secretive, underground network of wildlife enthusiasts who are returning species back into the landscape without asking permission first. It’s not just beavers: There are boar bombers, a “butterfly brigade” that breeds and releases rare species of butterfly and a clandestine group returning the pine marten — one of Britain’s rarest mammals — to British forests. 

Some, like Rubbers, have no background in conservation. Others have scientific credentials and feel an urgent need to restore nature’s ecosystems by taking matters into their own hands.

The movement is facing backlash from farmers who don’t want wild animals wrecking their crops and a number of scientists who believe that the reintroduction process should be regulated and controlled. They say rogue rewilding is a crime, however you dress it up. The mavericks argue that the bigger crime is not to reintroduce keystone species in a biodiversity emergency.

At the beginning of the 20th century, beavers were on the verge of extinction in Europe. They were hunted for their prized pelts and scent glands, and by 1900, there were just 1,200 left. Now, beavers are back from the brink, with the current European population estimated at about 1.5 million — and conservationists and rewilders agree that beaver bombers are partly to thank.

Floods, wildfires and droughts have become multi-trillion-dollar problems in the 21st century, ravaging the landscape from Bangladesh to Belgium. As the world burns and biodiversity hits a crisis point, rewilding — the process of letting nature restore itself — can feel like a hopeful refuge. Beavers, ecologists say, may be part of the solution.

The healthy wetland systems beavers create can sequester large amounts of carbon, according to climate scientists. Slowing down river flow helps the land act like a sponge, storing and holding more water, so it is more resilient to flooding and drought.

“Beavers work for free, they work weekends, they work round the clock increasing the groundwater and being a motor for biodiversity,” Schwab said. 

In the U.S., after Oregon’s devastating forest fires in 2021, beaver wetlands remained green and lush, acting as natural firebreaks in the land. On aerial images of the charred landscape, the beaver’s habitat stands out, a wide and verdant ribbon running through the blackened trees.

“I think beaver bombers are the heroes of our time,” said Ben Goldsmith, a British financier, writer and environmentalist who is a passionate supporter of rewilding. “A human lifetime is short — why should I not be the one that gets to see wildcats back on Dartmoor? Why should I not live in a country with beavers when they’re supposed to be there?”

I asked Goldsmith if he’d participated in rogue reintroductions. “Had I been involved in beaver bombing more widely,” he said, “I don’t think I’d tell you.” Until last year, Goldsmith served as a director for the U.K.’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. His older brother, Zac, is a former member of parliament and the U.K.’s current international environment minister.

For ecologist and author Alex Morss, the fringe of the rewilding movement and its powerful backers are a problem. “Who cleans up the bill for illegal anonymous rogue rewilding if things go wrong?” she wrote to me in an email. Alongside a number of scientists working in ecology and conservation, Morss worries about the pitfalls ahead if people are encouraged to take matters into their own hands to address species loss. 

Maverick rewilding, she says, could increase the chances of conflicts between humans and wildlife, spread disease and actively harm biodiversity by introducing the wrong animals into the wrong environments. “There are also releasers who are skirting around the law or outright breaking it,” Morss added. “Or making decisions based on personal bias rather than ecological expertise, rather than lawful, professional and evidence-based conservation done carefully and less glamorously.” 

Beavers are capable of destroying valuable trees, eating crops and flooding farmland. In Tayside, Scotland, where beavers were illegally introduced around 2006, farmers shot the animals on sight. There was no law to stop the farmers from doing so because, although the beavers were endangered, they also weren’t officially there. It was, as one ecologist explained to me, a “wild west.”

Morss said she welcomes “true” rewilding but is concerned that the movement is being co-opted by a privileged few who want to turn nature’s last refuges into “eco Disneyland.”

As rewilding and the prospect of nature restoring itself has caught the public imagination in recent years, projects have sprung up all over Europe, often led by philanthropists and enthusiastically backed by politicians. But many of these projects have also become entangled in bureaucracy and an intense debate over the scientific practicality of rewilding.

Many in the rewilding movement say that political leaders are not doing enough to restore biodiversity — leaving the mavericks with little choice but to act unilaterally and reintroduce species themselves. 

“The British government and European governments are foot-dragging,” said Tim Kendall, who wrote a book about beaver bombing with his wife, Fiona Mathews, the chair of Mammals Conservation Europe and a professor of environmental biology at Sussex University. “You can’t go through the official channels and make it work.” 

Goldsmith is vocal about what he sees as a reactionary fifth column within the nature conservation movement. “There are these gray figures that lurk in the background of government agencies and other bodies, who kill off these projects before they have a chance to happen,” he said. “These are people who are governed by caution and say, ‘We’ve got to make sure every possible angle is researched to death.’ They don’t feel the urgency.”

The rewilding fringe believes that something more radical than scientific reintroduction and conservation programs that are implemented at a sloth-like pace is necessary. According to Mathews, there is a “grudging acknowledgment” among scientists that without the maverick rewilders, “we’d just get nowhere. We’ve been talking about reintroducing beavers in many countries for years and years, and basically, nothing happens.”

Derek Gow told me that he believes change will never come if the rules are always followed. Gow, 58, worked for a decade as a sheep farmer in Devon, in southern England, but is now one of the loudest voices in the maverick rewilding movement. He had his moment of reckoning when a pair of curlews — a European wading bird species — disappeared from his farm. They died, Gow says, because there was nowhere left for them to take cover, feed or breed. “How solemn and how sad that is,” he said. “They died because we had mowed everything to a bowling green with the sheep.” 

After the birds were gone, Gow began to see his farm work as a model for perfect destruction. He observed the men alongside him, who had worked in agriculture all their lives. “They can remember the last of the gray partridge or the glow worms. And even though they’ve done nothing for nature, they’ve done nothing other than continue their destruction; when their time finishes, that’s the thing they’ll remember.”

Gow now runs a 300-acre rewilding project in Devon with financial support from Goldsmith, among others. He spends his days among wildcats, Iron-Age pigs, wild horses, beavers and storks. He wakes up every morning to a cacophony of birds singing from the trees. He describes them to me as we talk on the phone: bluetits and stonechats flit above him, a water shrew runs past his feet.

Gow is resolute: He thinks the time has passed for doing things slowly and carefully. “I do wonder how the people who administer these things — who display the most incredible caution and naivety and a lack of willingness to do anything — really feel when they finish a long, long career and have achieved absolutely fuck all.”

I ask if he sees himself as a beaver-bomber, a maverick or a rogue rewilder. “I would describe myself as a human being concerned about the fate of the natural world,” he said, “at this time of colossal extinction, crisis and ecological collapse. I’m not interested in any other titles.”

Gow recently gifted former Prime Minister Boris Johnson a beaver pelt. Johnson has been vocal and enthusiastic about rewilding. “We’re going to rewild parts of the country and consecrate a total of 30% to nature,” he said in 2021 to rousing applause during his speech at the Conservative Party conference. “Beavers that have not been seen on some rivers since Tudor times, massacred for their pelts, are now back. And if that isn’t conservatism, my friends, I don’t know what is.”

“Build Back Beaver!” he added. Johnson tried to give his father Stanley a pair of beavers for his Somerset farm but was reportedly thwarted by his own government’s regulations. 

Rewilding has become a popular activity among Britain’s landed elite. The medieval 3,500-acre Knepp Castle estate in Sussex, owned by Baronet Sir Charles Burrell, is perhaps the country’s most famous rewilding project. King Charles III has a wildlife retreat in Transylvania, a rewilding mecca known as “Europe’s Yellowstone.”

Goldsmith jokingly described an emerging black market for wildlife trade unfolding in the gentlemen’s clubs of Mayfair. “You’ve literally got conversations happening over the lunch tables of White’s where one landowner is passing beavers to another,” he said. “You know: ‘I've got beavers on my farm in Perthshire, old buddy old pal. I could bring a few to you in Herefordshire.’”

This is a sticking point for Morss. “Is it healthy that a class of elite unelected people are using their wealth and privilege and influence to make changes to places, rather than with places and their communities of ‘plebs’ who live and work there and don't get a say?” she said. “It feels like a form of ecocolonialism.”

In Scotland, a cohort of millionaires, billionaires and corporations known as the “green lairds” have bought up huge swathes of the Highlands for rewilding and carbon-offsetting nature restoration programs. Among them is fast-fashion Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, Swedish Tetra Pak heiresses Sigrid and Lisbet Rausing and pension funds Aviva and Standard Life. The green laird movement has been criticized as “a greenwashed land-grab” that’s pushing up the price of land in the country and shutting out local communities. The Scottish Land Commission has reported to the Scottish government that the ownership of land by so few people in Scotland is tantamount to a monopoly.

“It is not democratic or always particularly wise when restoration ‘'rewilding’ is led by unqualified, rich hobbyists,” said Morss.

Across Holch Povlsen’s land, forests are beginning to regenerate. The project has been praised by Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds as “Scotland’s most exciting and celebrated forest recovery project.” There have been increased reported sightings of ospreys, golden eagles, red squirrels and pine martens — all incredibly rare creatures in modern Britain. The manifesto for Holch Povlsen’s project, Wildland, says it aims to build “a culture of mutual respect with our communities” and “to support the viability of the local economy and improve quality of life.” But British online retail giant ASOS, the company that helped Holch Povlsen make his billions, has been criticized in the past for having an entirely different mission, with investigations revealing how the brand has used child sweatshops and contributed to the fast-fashion industry’s substantial carbon footprint.

Holch Povlsen and the Rausing sisters have contributed funding for a study exploring the implications of reintroducing the lynx to the Highlands, a predator that hasn’t been seen in Scotland since the Middle Ages. They’re still known in Holch Povlsen and the Rausings’ native Scandinavia as “the ghosts of the forest,” moving silently through the land while they hunt their prey. 

Reintroducing the lynx could well be in the plans of rogue rewilders too. “I wouldn't be surprised,” said Goldsmith, “if we started seeing lynx popping up in different parts of Europe where they've been absent.”

The hope in bringing back the lynx to the Highlands would be to see it help naturally control Scotland’s deer population and restore the overgrazed landscape, with minimal human interaction. 

Thomas Cameron, a senior lecturer in ecology at the University of Essex, is skeptical. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land, scientifically speaking,” he said. “It sounds nice. It's really pretty. It's a good story. It attracts lots of money, but it's not going to reduce deer numbers.” He added that it would take hundreds of years to have an effect — “and we need less deer tomorrow.”

Cameron works on an above-the-table beaver reintroduction project in Essex, which he said is already helping to reduce flooding in the local area. But he said he is wary of “false promises” made by advocates for species reintroduction. “Beavers aren't going to save biodiversity. They're not going to stop climate change by improving carbon sequestration,” he said.

Species reintroduction has limits — and it’s not going to fix the planet’s problems, he said. “The idea that that’s somehow some kind of utopia to get to is also quite dangerous.” The science, he insisted, “tells us that it's simply not true. And the science tells us we’re at a crisis point.” 

Cameron, who hails from northeastern Scotland, is also frustrated by how much Scotland, rather than England, features in the imagination of the people who want to reintroduce predators to the ecosystem. “It’s always about Scotland — ‘Oh it’s wild, let’s go to Scotland’ — despite the fact that people are poorer there than they are in the south. They lead shorter lives. Making a living from the rural environment is more challenging. We've got people with limited opportunities, and we want to put it on them.” 

In continental Europe, rifts are emerging between rewilding projects and local agricultural communities. In Asturias, in northwestern Spain, some farmers are furious about the presence of wolves among them. Spain’s wolf population, once close to being wiped out, has grown since the 1970s to become the largest in Europe at around 2,500 wolves. They kill around 11,000 livestock a year, for which farmers are compensated by the state. But when the government introduced a law banning people from shooting or hunting the wolves, it led to outrage. In May, a protest culminated with locals dumping two decapitated wolf heads on the steps of a town hall. 

“The human-wildlife conflict isn’t far away,” tweeted local wildlife photographer Luke Massey with a photo of the bloody heads. 

In Italy, the far-right government is busy dismantling hunting regulations and laws protecting wildlife. When a rewilded bear in Trentino mauled a jogger to death in April, the right-wing governor of the region took a reactionary stance: cull the bear. The governor has since embarked on a one-man mission to deport 70 more bears from the region. There were wider calls for rewilding projects to be scrapped. “We need to kill them all and close the discussion,” wrote one Twitter user when the jogger was attacked. “Fuck bears and animals,” said another. Viewers on Italian TV were invited to answer “yes” or “no” to the question, “Should the bear be put to death?” 

In May, news spread that beavers had turned up on the River Tiber, upstream from Rome. “They must be removed,” said Claudio Barbaro, the Italian undersecretary for the environment. He added that the beavers had “entered illegally,” using language that surreally echoed the government’s anti-migrant rhetoric.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, up by the Belarusian border, beavers and humans are working together. Ukrainian military commanders say beaver-made wetland systems, with their swampy terrain and waterlogged landscape, are helping to protect the country from Russian attacks, creating a natural barrier along the frontier that’s difficult for tanks and infantry to traverse.

With his bandana and grizzled white beard, Gerhard Schwab stands out among the dark-suited crowd of business travelers at the Munich airport arrivals gate. We drive straight out into the Bavarian countryside. Swinging on his keyring in the ignition is a fat little cuddly-toy beaver. 

“When I was a child, there were a lot more edges between the fields,” he says, as we drive past huge, featureless pastureland, the neat green crops rippling in the early summer sunshine. “Now it’s just fucking green. Back then you had everything. All kinds of wild plants. All the small ditches, all the small creeks — they’re all gone.” 

He takes me to a rare scrap of wilderness. The pocket of meadow, right next to a busy autobahn, has been transformed into a vibrant wetland. Bright blue dragonflies dip across the water, and the air seems to vibrate with birdsong. Schwab points to something in the distance, and I can see a pile of sticks: a beaver lodge.

We hear the two-note call of a cuckoo. I’ve never heard it before, though it was a familiar sound for my mother, who grew up in Surrey in the 1960s. Europe has lost 550 million birds since she was a child, and in Britain, cuckoo numbers have crashed by 70%. The cuckoo’s distinctive call is a traditional symbol of the start of summer. But most children in the U.K. will grow up never hearing it. 

The strange sorrow we feel when we confront this world without our fellow creatures has a name: “species loneliness.” Isolated from nature, we feel an existential loss for how the world once looked and sounded.

For Ben Goldsmith, his despair over the destruction of our wild places intersects with his own grief over the sudden loss of his teenage daughter, Iris. A lifelong lover of nature, she died, aged 15, in a farm vehicle accident in 2019. He has since given his farm over to rewilding. The spot where Iris died is marked with a stone circle. Not far off, along the stream threading through his land, a family of beavers has appeared.

“The family on my land happened to make their own way there, which is sort of a beautiful irony,” Goldsmith said. “They appeared by magic at a time in my life when I really needed and wanted that. It was one of the happiest events of my life.”

Beavers are resilient creatures. When the Khakova dam collapsed in Ukraine in May, it unleashed a torrent of chemicals and toxic oil into the surrounding landscape, with untold amounts of debris flowing into the Black Sea. But amid the waterlogged wreckage of Kherson, a lone beaver was seen wandering the streets. “OK, I’ve got work to do!” one British tabloid quipped in a caption of the video. Beavers are used to rebuilding, restoring and fixing what’s been broken.

Schwab feels sure beavers will long outlive us. After all, they have roamed the Earth far longer than humans — the oldest fossil is around 30 million years old. “When my bones and your bones are gone,” he says, “the beaver will still be here.”

Related Articles

How 19th century silver mines could supercharge the US green energy economy

Sarah Scoles

Grieving California

Erica Hellerstein

North Carolina’s notorious climate change law — the rich are ok, the poor aren’t

Caitlin Thompson

The post The secret movement bringing Europe’s wildlife back from the brink appeared first on Coda Story.

This poses problems for governments as they grapple with the prospect of integrating AI into the way they operate. It’s likely that AI will soon touch many parts of our lives, but it doesn’t need to be an AI controlled by the likes of OpenAI and Google.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, a London-based think tank, recently began advocating for the U.K. to create its own sovereign AI model — an initiative that some British media outlets have dubbed “ChatGB.” The idea is to create a British-flavored tech backbone that underpins large swaths of public services, free from the control of major U.S.-based platforms. Being “entirely dependent on external providers,” says the Institute, would be a “risk to our national security and economic competitiveness.”

Sovereign AIs stand in stark contrast to the most prominent tools of the moment. The large language models that underpin tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are built using data scraped from across the internet, and their inner workings are controlled by private enterprises.

In a 100-page “technical report” accompanying the release of GPT-4, its latest large language model, OpenAI declined to share information about how its model was trained or what information it was trained on, citing safety risks and “the competitive landscape” (read: “we don’t want competitors to see how we built our tech”). The decision was widely criticized. Indeed, the company could put its code out there and cleanse data sets to avoid posing any risk to individuals’ data privacy or safety. This kind of transparency would allow experts to audit the model and identify any risks it might pose.

Developing a sovereign AI would allow countries to know how their model was trained and what data it was trained on, according to Benedict Macon-Cooney, the chief policy strategist at the Tony Blair Institute.

“It allows you to — to some extent — instill your values in the model,” said Sasha Luccioni, a research scientist at HuggingFace, an open source AI platform and research group. “Each model does encode values.” Indeed, while 96% of the planet lives outside the United States, most big tech products are developed by a tiny, relatively elite group of people in the U.S. who tend to build technology encoded with libertarian, Silicon Valley-style ideals.

That’s been true for social media historically, and it is also coming through with AI: A 2022 academic paper by researchers from HuggingFace showed that the ghost in the AI machine has an American accent — meaning that most of the training data, and most of the people coding the model itself, are American. “The cultural stereotypes that are encoded are very, very American,” said Luccioni. But with a sovereign AI model, Luccioni says, “you can choose sources that come from your country, and you can choose the dialects that come from your country.”

That’s vital given the preponderance of English-language models and the paucity of AI models in other languages. While there are more than 7,000 languages spoken and written worldwide, the vast majority of the internet, upon which these models are trained, is written in English. “English is the dominant language, because of British imperialism and because of American trade,” said Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology, who recently published a paper on the issue. “These models are trained on a predominant model of English language data and carry over these assumptions and values that are encoded into the English language, specifically the American English language.”

A big exception, of course, is China. Models developed by Chinese companies are sovereign almost by default because they are built using data that is drawn primarily from the internet in China, where the information ecosystem is heavily influenced by the state and the Communist party. Nevertheless, China’s economy is big enough that it is able to sustain independent development of robust tools. “I think the goal isn't necessarily that everything be made in China or innovated in China, but it's to avoid reliance on foreign countries,” said Graham Webster, a research scholar and the editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center.

There are lots of ways to develop such models, according to Macon-Cooney, of the Blair Institute, some of which could become highly specific to government interests. “You can actually build large language models around specific ideas,” he explained. “One practical example where a government might want to do that is building a policy Al.” The model would be fed previously published policy papers going back decades, many of which are often scrapped only to be brought back by a successive government, thus building up the model’s understanding of policy that could then be used to reduce the workload on public servants. Similar models could be developed for education or health, says Macon-Cooney. “You just need to find a use case for your actual specific outcome, which the government needs to do,” he said. “Then begin to build up that capability, feed in the right learnings, and build that expertise up in-house.”

The European Union is a prime example of a supranational organization that could benefit from its vast data reserves to make its own sovereign AI, says Luccioni. “They have a lot of underexploited data,” she said, pointing to the multilingual corpus of the European Parliament’s hearings, for instance. The same is true of India, where the controversial Aadhaar digital identification system could put the vast volumes of data it collects to use to develop an AI model. India’s ministers have already hinted they are doing just that and have confirmed in interviews that AI will soon be layered into the Aadhaar system. In a multilingual country like India, that comes with its own problems. “We're seeing a large push towards Hindi becoming a national language, at the expense of the regional and linguistic diversity of the country,” said Bhatia.

Developing your own AI costs a lot of money — which Macon-Cooney says governments might struggle with. “If you look at the economics side of this, I think there is a deep question of whether a government can actually begin to spend, let alone actually begin to get that expertise, in house,” he said. The U.K. announced, in its March 2023 budget, a plan to spend $1.1 billion on a new exascale supercomputer that would be put to work developing AI. A month later, it topped that up with an additional $124 million to fund an AI taskforce that will be supported by the Alan Turing Institute, a government-affiliated research center that gets its name from one of the first innovators of AI.

One solution to the money problem is to collaborate. “Sovereign initiatives can’t really work because any one nation or one organization is, unless they're very, very rich, going to have trouble getting the talent to compute and the data necessary for training language models,”  Luccioni said. “It really makes a lot of sense for people to pool resources.” 

But working together can nullify the reason sovereign AIs are so attractive in the first place.

Luccioni believes that the European Union will struggle to develop a sovereign AI because of the number of stakeholders involved who would have to coalesce around a single position to develop the model in the first place. “What happens if there’s 13% Basque in the data and 21% Finnish?” she asked. “It’s going to come with a lot of red tape that companies don’t have, and so it’s going to be hard to be as agile as OpenAI.” Finland for its part has developed a sovereign AI project, called Aurora, that is meant to streamline processes for providing a range of services for citizens. But progress has been slow, mostly due to the project’s scale.

There’s also the challenge of securing the underlying hardware. While the U.K. has announced $1 billion in funding for the development of its exascale computer, it pales in comparison with what OpenAI has. “They have 27 times the size just to run ChatGPT than the whole of the British state has itself,” Macon-Cooney said. “So one private lab is many, many magnitudes bigger than the government.” That could force governments looking to develop sovereign models into the arms of the same old tech companies under the guise of supplying cloud computing to train the models — which comes with its own problems.

And even if you can bring down the computing power — and the associated costs — needed to run a sovereign AI model, you still need the expertise. Governments may struggle to attract talent in an industry dominated by private sector companies that can likely pay more and offer more opportunities to innovate.

“The U.K. will be blown out of the water unless it begins to think quite deliberately about how it builds this up,” said Macon-Cooney.

Luccioni sees some signs of promise for countries looking to develop their own AIs, with talented developers wanting to work differently. “I know a lot of my friends who are working at big research companies and big tech companies are getting really frustrated by the closed nature of them,” she said. “A lot of them are talking about going back to academia — or even government.”

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

Related Articles

Chatbots of the dead

Isobel Cockerell

Lying about your age? This AI will see right through it

Chris Stokel-Walker

Mandatory SIM card registration forces users to surrender personal data

Chris Stokel-Walker

The post Should countries build their own AIs? appeared first on Coda Story.

When he saw the Tunisian coast guard coming, Fabrice Ngo knew he wouldn’t make it to Italy that day. The young Cameroonian had pushed off from the shore of the Tunisian city of Sfax in a small metal boat with 40 others. They left under the cover of night alongside seven other boats. The small fleet motored north toward Italy, spread out, but all with the same destination. In the distance, the lights of seaside towns dotted the coastline.

The Tunisian coast guard found them two hours into their journey. As the police vessel approached, fear gave way to disbelief. The coast guards — in uniform and on an official ship — boarded the metal dinghy, dislodged and seized the boat’s motor and then sped off, motor in hand. The group of 40, most of them from West Africa, were left at sea with no motor. Panic ensued. Some began paddling with their bare hands.

“We didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t move forward. We started tearing up the fuel cans to paddle, everyone had their hands in the water,” Ngo told us. “Some brave ones undressed and jumped in the water to push the boat along.” (We have changed Ngo’s name to protect his safety.)

By mid-afternoon the following day, the boat had floated toward a small chain of islands off the coast of Sfax. Again, the Tunisian coast guard reappeared, towed the group farther out to sea and, again, left them floating at sea, still with no motor.

Then the weather started to turn — the waves grew choppy and water began to fill the dingy. 

“When we had advanced maybe 50 meters, that’s when the coast guard arrived,” Ngo told us. “They towed us back again in the middle, where the water is deep. The boat was getting weighed down by water. If it had continued to fill, we all would have died.”

Desperate for help, the group finally got the attention of a fishing boat that towed them to safety, ferrying them back to the coast near Sfax.

The Tunisian coast guard intercepted and then abandoned Ngo’s boat with the help of technology supplied by the European Union. In 2019, the EU inked a deal to provide nearly 20 million euros’ (about $21.4 million) worth of radar, undersea and airborne drones, radios and other technology, as well as training, to the government of Tunisia. EU officials made a similar agreement with Moroccan authorities. The Border Management Programme for the Maghreb region was designed to arm coast guard authorities in North Africa with new technology to be deployed along migration routes to Europe and to train them to use it. Tunisia recently surpassed Libya as the most heavily traveled route for irregular migration to Europe across the Mediterranean. 

Over the past decade, the EU has struck similar deals — exchanging hundreds of millions of euros worth of surveillance technology, other police equipment and accompanying training — with nearly every non-EU country that borders the bloc. At the center of these deals is the International Centre for Migration Policy Development, an innocuous-sounding international organization based in Vienna that has become one of the bloc’s go-to intermediaries for supplying surveillance equipment and training to police and coast guards in countries bordering the EU. 

The ICMPD’s clients are all either EU states or intergovernmental organizations — it receives more than half of its budget from the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU. Because the ICMPD is not a government institution, it can enable states to carry out operations along EU borders with much less transparency, accountability or regulation than what would be required of any EU government.

“The EU is breaking its own rules and values with the border regime we have built up: They partner with autocratic regimes and provide them with technology to use in the Mediterranean to keep people out,” said Ozlem Demirel, a member of the European Parliament from Germany. Demirel pointed to the ICMPD as an example of efforts by the European Commission to carry out this work with as little scrutiny as possible.

Hundreds of pages of documents we obtained through Freedom of Information requests, made primarily to the European Commission, shed light on the organization’s work along EU borders and go into minute detail about the ICMPD’s inner workings.

In 2019, the European Union provided top-of-the-line surveillance equipment to the state security service in Morocco, via the ICMPD, ostensibly to help the country tighten its borders and fight smuggling. But Moroccan authorities, already known for hacking the phones of independent journalists, activists and academics, could use this EU-provided technology to further perpetuate the same type of internal repression. In Libya, the ICMPD was paid by the EU to provide consulting services to Libyan migration authorities, including the Libyan Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration, which runs a network of detention centers that have been criticized by the U.N. human rights agency for the “unimaginable horrors” suffered by migrants detained there. In Bosnia, the ICMPD is building a new migration detention center. A spokesperson for Bosnia’s Ministry of Security told us that Bosnian authorities facilitated deportations to countries with which Bosnia has “good bilateral relations” but no deportation agreement. This is a dubious practice under international law.

And in Tunisia, the ICMPD is supplying technology and training to a coast guard that is increasingly being mobilized to carry out human rights abuses against migrants and refugees. The organization’s “Integrated Border Management Project” — funded by the EU and overseen by the German federal police — may look humanitarian on paper. But in practice, sources on the receiving end of the project say it is designed to prevent people from leaving Tunisia’s shores to seek refuge in Europe.

Ngo eventually made it to the other side of the Mediterranean, in another dinghy. We met him at a reception site for asylum seekers in northern Italy where he had befriended another asylum seeker — also from Cameroon. The two men fled the opposite sides of Cameroon’s civil war at more or less the same time. Ngo is from a French-speaking village and was forced to flee when his home was attacked by an English-speaking militia. His friend is an English-speaker and was a member of one of these same militias until his group was overrun by the Cameroonian military and he was forced to flee the country. But their paths have brought them together.

Both were able to flee Cameroon and make a home in Tunisia. For two years, Ngo worked as a car mechanic, while his friend worked in construction. Both lived in relative stability until, last February, they say they were forced to flee home, again.

In a televised speech on February 21, 2023, Tunisian President Kais Saied directly targeted Black Africans in Tunisia, referring to them as “hordes of illegal migrants” and charging them with carrying out “violence, crime and unacceptable actions.” Saied echoed the conspiracy theories of far-right political parties in both Tunisia and Italy, under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, that tie intracontinental immigration to a “criminal plan” to change the “demographic landscape.”

The speech triggered unrest across Tunisia, where Black people comprise about 10% to 15% of the population. Within days, many people from countries in sub-Saharan Africa who were living in Tunisia, as well as Black Tunisians, reported losing their jobs, being evicted from their homes and facing arbitrary detentions by the police and violent attacks by vigilante groups. After Saied’s speech, Ngo’s boss told him to go home and not to return. For the first time, Ngo considered leaving Tunisia.

“These attacks made many of us want to stay indoors all day, like a cat,” he said. “We couldn’t live in this condition — I was in Tunisia for two years and never imagined taking to the sea.”

“Everything changed after the president’s speech,” said Mohammed Salah, a refugee from Sudan who has lived in Tunisia since 2016. Salah hails from the Darfur region, which became the ground zero for a genocide carried out by Sudan’s notoriously brutal Janjaweed militia in the early 2000s. Granted refugee status in Tunisia two years after arriving, Salah has been working in construction ever since. But after Saied’s speech, he told us, “they fired me from my job, they kicked me out of my home. All because the president said that we don’t like Black people.”

Salah came to lead a movement of people that has, for two months, camped out in front of the offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration — in a plum neighborhood outside Tunis where many international organizations have their local headquarters. We spoke to Salah in April, just a few weeks after violence erupted in Khartoum, between the Sudanese army and the Janjaweed militia, which now calls itself the RSF. “I’ll go to Rwanda, to Europe, wherever,” Salah told us. “I just can’t go back to Sudan, especially now.”

But traveling by sea is becoming an increasingly dangerous option for people like Salah, as the European Union expands its cooperation with the authorities in Tunisia, with the ICMPD serving as a middleman. Sources at human rights and development organizations told us they were concerned that European policy in Tunisia will follow that of neighboring Libya, where the bloc began providing support for a coast guard intended to intercept migrant boats in international waters and to bring them back to the country from which they had just fled. The EU has been internationally condemned for its support of the Libyan coast guard, border police and migrant detention system, which, since 2016, has detained tens of thousands of migrants under inhumane conditions. An investigation by Amnesty International presented ample evidence of migrants being subjected to torture, sexual violence and even extrajudicial killings.

Before 2020, the Tunisian coast guard had a humanitarian focus, explained Romdhane Ben Amor, the director of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, a Tunis-based human rights organization. But in the past three years — and, Ben Amor notes, since the EU began its support for the country’s border authorities — his organization has documented extensive human rights abuses at sea by the Tunisian coast guard, similar to those seen in Libya.

In 2019, the ICMPD began supporting the Tunisian coast guard with a host of technical equipment and training, paid for by the EU. They have radar, communications equipment and drones — everything they need to stop people from leaving Tunisia’s shores or to frighten them away.

A report by Ben Amor’s organization that will be published in June, to which we were given advanced access, details a pattern of abusive behavior by the Tunisian coast guard against migrants at sea. Dozens of interviews, including with shipwreck survivors and fishermen, demonstrate a pattern of abuse by the coast guard and show that it routinely fails to perform its duty to rescue migrants in distress. Researchers documented multiple incidents in which the coast guard deliberately provoked shipwrecks or stole motors from dinghies and left boats full of people adrift — which is exactly what happened to Ngo. The report offers figures that speak to the scale of these operations: Between January and April 2023, the Tunisian coast guard intercepted 19,719 migrants at sea. During the same period, 3,512 were arrested for “illegal stay.”

“The Europeans hide behind this organization,” Ben Amor told us. “So it’s not the European Union that does this, but it’s ICMPD, it’s an independent organization.”

“There is political pressure on the coast guard to prevent people from leaving, whatever the price, whatever the damage,” Ben Amor said. “That’s how the violence started, and the coast guard is responsible for a lot of violence.”

The ICMPD was established in 1993 in response to the fall of the Soviet Union. “We in Europe feared a mass invasion of Russians,” wrote Jonas Widgren, one of the ICMPD’s founders, in a 2002 academic paper. Widgren was frustrated by the lack of a coordinated response by European states to what he saw as a “never-ending asylum crisis.” At first, the ICMPD acted as a mix of a policy think tank and a diplomatic organization, facilitating dialogue among states on issues related to borders and migration and publishing policy briefs.

The organization grew steadily over the years, but the tipping point came in 2015, when more than one million people came to Europe having fled the civil war in Syria. That same year, the ICMPD appointed a new director, Michael Spindelegger, an Austrian conservative politician. According to multiple former colleagues and development insiders, Spindelegger had the political will and the right connections to, as one former employee put it, “make the most of the crisis.”

“The European Union wanted to look like it was throwing money and equipment at the problem, basically throwing money to stop migrants,” recalled one former senior ICMPD employee, who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions. “Suddenly, there was all this funding available, which included border management training but also included equipment,” they said. “The European Commission can't just hand over equipment to, say, the Moroccan government, so they need someone like the ICMPD to do it.” If the Commission were to try to push through this type of transaction without a middleman like the ICMPD, it would need the approval of the European Parliament. This can be hard to come by even in a favorable political climate. But the grim optics of reported abuses in Libya would likely draw unwanted scrutiny to the project and potentially jeopardize its approval.

Before coming to the ICMPD, Spindelegger held a series of top government jobs in Austria, including as finance minister and foreign minister. In 2015, he went on to chair the Agency for the Modernisation of Ukraine, a NGO funded by the pro-Russian Ukrainian businessman Dmytro Firtash. The following year, Spindelegger took the helm at the ICMPD.

Known for his neoliberal approach to migration policy, Spindelegger expanded the ICMPD into new regions and began training border guards and procuring technology and equipment for the police in most countries that border the EU bloc. With that expansion came a bigger budget, increasing from 16.7 million euros (about $18 million) in 2015 to 58 million euros ($62.2 million) in 2022. In 2022, 56% of the ICMPD’s budget came from the European Commission. Just three years ago, in 2020, the Commission provided 80% of the ICMPD’s budget.

“Our aim still is to be the go-to organisation for European states on all matters related to migration,” wrote Spindelegger in 2023. The organization also began running vaguely-defined “migrant resource centers,” primarily in South Asia and the Middle East, that appear to be focused on dissuading people from pursuing migration without documents.

The ICMPD operates for the European Commission under a funding scheme called “indirect management,” whereby EU work is outsourced to external agencies and the Commission isn’t involved in how projects are carried out. Several sources told us that this means the ICMPD isn’t subject to the same transparency and accountability measures that it would be otherwise.

“By externalizing this work to an organization outside of the European Union, the Commission is making this work far less accountable, working in a sort of legal gray area,” said Demirel, the German parliamentarian. “The farther this action is from European institutions, the less we can control it — Parliament can’t look at contracts from ICMPD.”

This disconnect is practical, said Jeff Crisp, who worked for the U.N. refugee agency for decades. He pointed to “serious ethical issues that ICMPD doesn’t seem to have addressed.”

“There is a disconnect between some of the language the organization uses and the activities it’s involved in,” said Crisp. “They are making things sound very technocratic and apparently quite neutral, whereas in fact they have very specific political purposes, which are often contradictory to human rights values.” Sources also expressed concern about the overlap between the ICMPD and the EU bureaucracy when it came to staffing. Six former ICMPD employees and European development insiders all described a revolving door of former European Commission employees coming to work at the ICMPD and vice versa.

A spokesperson for the European Commission told us that ICMPD operations “continuously undergo audits, assessments and evaluations with regard to their compliance with rules and regulations of the EU, including the respect of human rights.” The spokesperson did not address allegations that these operations are contributing to human rights violations.

Outside the office of the International Organization for Migration in Tunis, Tunisia’s capital, just over 100 people were still camped out in protest when we visited in April. The headquarters is surrounded by tall white gates, with a plaza containing a small tent city stretching down one side of the building. Three people argued with the security guard at the gate, while others sat in the shade of one of the plaza’s two palm trees. 

One man from Guinea, who asked that his name be withheld for his safety, said he had been camped outside the IOM building to ask for medicine and a way out of the country. After the Tunisian president’s February speech, he was attacked by a group of locals who robbed him of all his belongings. When we met in April, his eye was still noticeably swollen.

“The first time I tried to leave, I was pulled back to shore,” he told us. “The second time, they stopped me on the shores and put me in prison for six months,” he said. He showed us a gap where his tooth once was, which he said he lost after being beaten by guards in prison. “Now I’ve lost it all.”

Ben Amor, the director of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, says this kind of indiscriminate violence has become commonplace for migrants and refugees throughout Tunisia, especially following Saied’s racist speech. 

“We are in the middle of a humanitarian crisis in Tunisia,” Ben Amor said. “And at the same time, ICMPD continues its border management project here — so they equip the Tunisian coast guard with drones, with a radar and with other surveillance systems to keep people from leaving.”

“All of this work is being masked to look like protection,” said Gabriella Sanchez, a migration expert at Georgetown University. Sanchez argues that the European Union carries out border projects with the ICMPD and other third-party organizations deliberately, as a way of avoiding responsibility and accountability. “It is the creation of this illusion that by giving work to third parties, the EU isn’t directly involved and aren’t necessarily morally responsible for the consequences,” Sanchez told us.

With a border control budget that leapt from 12 billion euros (about $12.8 billion) in 2014-2020 to more than 23 billion ($24.6 billion) in 2021-2027, the European Union is almost literally doubling down on its efforts along the border.

Back at the reception site in northern Italy, Fabrice Ngo said he is lucky to have survived his journey over the sea. On the day of his rescue, the fisherman who spotted them attached a line to their metal dinghy and brought them back to the coast. From there, Ngo remembers, the fisherman went back out to find the other boats that had departed Sfax together with Ngo’s. It was then that he found out that the other boats had also been left without motors by the coast guard. 

“They pulled back every boat except one. One boat refused the rescue, and they were left at sea,” Ngo remembered, shaking his head. “That’s how they shipwrecked. Many people died.”

Related Articles

India and China draw a line in the snow

Shougat Dasgupta

Turkey uses journalists to silence critics in exile

Frankie Vetch

When your body becomes the border

Erica Hellerstein

The post How an EU-funded agency is working to keep migrants from reaching Europe appeared first on Coda Story.

The human rights court had determined that states that are party to the European Convention on Human Rights, which includes virtually all European nations except Russia and Belarus, cannot extradite people to China unless the Chinese government can demonstrate that the extradited person will not be tortured or be subject to inhuman and degrading treatment. This shuts down extraditions to a country that does not allow international scrutiny of its penitentiaries, underscoring international concern over the Chinese government’s widening dragnet that tries to bring home dissidents and critics living in exile.

But China still has the capability to tie down its citizens in lengthy legal battles by issuing Interpol red notices — an international alert that requests other countries find and arrest suspects who have fled abroad for extradition or other legal actions — while also deploying an array of illegal tools of repression. Despite Europe's attempt to close the door on China's extradition campaigns, Beijing has ratified a spate of new extradition treaties with countries outside of Europe.

In Liu v. Poland, the human rights court, which is based in Strasbourg, France, ruled that extraditing Hung Tao Liu, a Taiwanese man who had appealed his extradition from Poland, would place him at a significant risk of ill treatment and torture. 

The judgment “substantially reduces the chances of extradition of persons to the PRC”, said Marcin Gorski, referring to the People’s Republic of China. Gorski is a Polish professor of law at the University of Ludz who represented Liu in the case.

China alleges Liu led a major telecommunications fraud. In an earlier case, the Spanish government in 2019 extradited 94 Taiwanese citizens to China as part of the same probe. The human rights court’s ruling covers anyone facing extradition to China, whether they are wanted for political reasons or for white-collar economic crimes.

China’s attempts to bring home dissidents and critics who are Chinese citizens living abroad have been intensifying over the past decade in tandem with China’s integration into the global financial system and its emergence as a world power, according to Nate Schenkkan, a senior director of research at Freedom House whose work focuses on authoritarianism.

Beijing has pursued dissidents in all corners of the world, triggering a response from the U.S. The White House has sought to control technology exports that can be used by China to conduct acts of repression while boosting the capacity of domestic law enforcement agencies to deal with the targeting of Chinese dissidents on U.S. soil. Members of Congress have introduced a bill that would define and criminalize transnational repression in federal law.

Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine last year was a wake-up call for Europe to the security threat posed not just by Moscow but by Beijing. But it has been left mostly to courts to protect people from China’s expanding reach.

European officials are failing to take action when it comes to the threat posed by China, often relying too heavily on the legal system to sort out the problem, said Laura Harth, the campaign director at the China-focused organization Safeguard Defenders.

While in many cases it is unlikely that China will be successful in its extradition attempts, the burden of defending themselves means the targets are quickly bogged down in costly legal battles, said Harth.

Europe’s human rights court has come under criticism from governments in recent years, accused of politicizing the domestic affairs of countries in Europe. The U.K. has made attempts to ignore the court’s rulings on granting prisoners the right to vote, and ministers have flirted with the idea of quitting the European Convention in response to the barriers it poses to the U.K.’s controversial plans on national immigration policy.

But for now, the court’s ruling on Chinese extraditions seems to be respected.

A Chinese businesswoman last summer was detained while passing through Italy. She was on her way to collect her kids from a holiday with their father in Greece. China had issued an Interpol red notice for her arrest and then requested her extradition.

Enrico Di Fiorino, a lawyer representing the businesswoman, said the European Court of Human Rights ruling was an important part of her defense and was likely to have played a role in winning the case.

Di Fiorino’s client is now free from extradition in Italy, but if she travels to other European countries, she is still at risk. If an Interpol red notice is issued against her while she is in a country that the Chinese government has an extradition treaty with, she risks being caught up in another lengthy legal battle. Hung Tao Liu, in the Poland case, spent five years in prison while litigating his extradition.

Formal extraditions comprise a small part of China’s larger campaign to silence and intimidate its dissidents into returning home. Coercion and harassment make up the bulk of China’s tactics. In fact, extraditions accounted for just 1% of the overall number of people returned to China. Involuntary returns, which include kidnappings, accounted for 64%.

Dissidents in Europe live in a climate of fear, frequently surveilled while their families back in China are harassed by the state. Several European countries have been investigating these more clandestine operations, most notably the use of overseas police stations, which can be used to silence Chinese dissidents living abroad.

Italy has been accused of hosting 11 overseas police stations. Chinese dissidents in the country are relieved by Italy’s court ruling while still fearful of China’s reach, said Harth.

In December, China ratified extradition treaties with Kenya, Congo, Uruguay and Armenia.

For Reinhard Butikofe, a German member of the European Parliament, this is concerning. But he cautioned that Europe should get its own house in order before European politicians can criticize other countries for cooperating with China’s extradition strategy. “I think before we can credibly approach anybody else, we have to clean up our own act first,” he said.

Related articles

Democrats want to prevent attacks on dissidents living in the US

Frankie Vetch

Sovereign borders lose meaning as Turkey’s violent campaign to intimidate Kurds reaches deep inside Sweden

Frankie Vetch

China’s crackdown on Uyghurs reaches the Arctic

Isobel Cockerell

The post Europe cracks down on China’s abuse of extradition appeared first on Coda Story.

Then the new year came, bringing with it Heger’s determination to cobble together a new parliamentary majority to see out his party’s four-year term. However, after going cap in hand to all possible partners, Heger conceded defeat on January 17 and said he would begin discussions about early elections this fall.

For Robert Fico, the former prime minister and one of Slovakia’s leading populists, a return to the ballot box couldn’t wait. Fico, who resigned from office in 2018 following the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, has said multiculturalism “is a fiction” and called for Slovakia to cease all aid to Ukraine. Now buoyed by growing support in the polls, Fico’s Smer party initiated a referendum on January 22 that would have cleared the way for early elections by amending the country’s constitution. Despite these efforts the plebiscite failed to meet the 50% turnout needed to validate the results.

Now Slovakia, a small country roughly the size of West Virginia, is holding its breath. With elections likely to be held on September 30, 2023, the race for power is expected to be rife with disinformation and old-fashioned scare tactics. The shadow of populism also looms. Fico’s Smer party is second in the polls to HLAS–SD, a social democratic party founded in 2020 by former members of Smer.

There is also a lot at stake. Slovakia is facing a cost-of-living crisis and its health care is in disrepair. The country is also on the frontline of Russian disinformation in Europe and its 5.4 million residents share a border with Ukraine. To better understand the mood in Slovakia and why the country might take another populist turn, I spoke to Juliana Sokolova, a Slovak philosopher and writer based in the eastern city of Kosice. Her key message: Slovakia’s descent is not guaranteed. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There has been a lot of political turmoil in Slovakia recently, but what is the general mood in the country?

At the moment, the political situation and the general atmosphere influence each other. To me, it feels like an intermediary period because we’re waiting for what’s going to happen. Of course, we know that there are people ready to vote because they are swayed by populist narratives but that is not something which surrounds me daily. There are also people who resist these narratives and have other views, so I wouldn’t say it’s completely bleak. It’s truly difficult to generalize at the moment because the situation is different depending on where you work or where you live.

If you look at the polls in Slovakia, there is support for populist narratives. Why is that the case?

Populism anywhere is successful because populists test issues and use ones that will resonate with people by arousing strong emotions, so it doesn’t arise randomly. It’s calculated and it’s the same in Slovakia. Of course, the issues are country-specific, but the mechanisms are the same. When I was growing up, the main nationalist and populist issue was around Slovak-Hungarian relations, they tried to create this idea of Slovak nationality away from the Hungarian minority and their language. Today, this topic no longer resonates, so they turned to the language of suspicion in relation to the LGBT community. They use the words “ideology,” or “agenda,” or “platform,” to create the idea that there is a scheme which is a threat to people.

The LGBT topic is one that has been pushed and massaged in Slovakia. It’s also a narrative across Russian disinformation media. It’s a mix of these factors, along with algorithmic targeting through the creation of sensationalist headlines, that have made the issue what it is. If you look back, 10 to 15 years ago people in Slovakia weren't saying LGBT was their main issue. It’s to an extent a created feeling.

Slovakia’s southern neighbor, Hungary, has become isolated on the world stage due to its position on Ukraine. Its Prime Minister Viktor Orban is also looking for friends. Could early Slovak elections help in this regard?

I do think Orban is waiting to see what is going to happen with Putin’s imperialist project and how it will impact the future of his own [illiberal] project. Fico dreams of being an Orban, that was always his ambition, but he wasn’t able to entrench himself in the same way Orban did in Hungary. Slovaks were also able to check Fico more than Hungarians were able to check Orban. But, yes, Fico is the same cut of populist with the same ambition. 

That said, Fico’s return to frontline politics is not a done thing. What is more likely in early elections is that the party that separated from Fico, HLAS, will make it. Now, that party is full of former Smer people who have tried to situate themselves on a more traditional spectrum, but we must remain suspicious of them. They have the ability to bend their views depending on possible power-sharing agreements. 

Slovakia is subject to a lot of Russian disinformation. Does this highly charged language and information pollution affect your work?

As a writer, you are very sensitive to the context in which you write, and even though it’s not always a conscious dialogue, it can affect your work. When the language of politics is stale and removed from life, you can feel the need to balance it out by using words that are fresh and strong. It’s also very useful to think about how we can describe the life we are living with different words. We often use clichéd or standardized sentences that block our thinking. A good example of this is the word “bubble,” as in social bubble. It has such a fixed meaning. So, we need other sentence structures and words that open new ways of speaking, and then maybe thinking. 

It’s also socially important to try and see how very manipulative and highly charged language can be neutralized or converted into something else. When it comes to Russian disinformation in Slovakia we have a big problem with the quality of education. I think our education system is not strong on fostering critical analysis of the media. This is very important. 

Given everything happening in Slovakia, a war next door, a contentious election coming up, disinformation swirling around, how do you see the country going forward?

It’s difficult because I’m not feeling gloomy, I cannot explain why. Of course, when you name all these things, our situation might not look great. But I do think that Slovak society is varied enough, that there are deeply entrenched progressive and educated groups and individuals operating throughout the country that can sustain us. The main thing for me is seeing what I can do to ensure that parties that employ controversial rhetoric have the least influence in the future government, that is a key priority. But I don’t have a sense that this country is heading to a dark place. 

Related Articles

The rise of the Obidients

Ope Adetayo

Grief and conspiracy collide in Russia’s ‘Council of Mothers and Wives’

Amanda Coakley

In Hungary, it’s Central Asia to the rescue

Katia Patin

The post A hard line Slovak nationalist plots his return to power appeared first on Coda Story.

In typical tech fashion, AI-driven tools are advancing much faster than the laws that could theoretically govern them. But the European Union, the world’s de facto tech watchdog, is working to catch up, with plans to finalize the billboard AI Act this year. 

The use of AI in surveillance and monitoring technology is one of the hot button issues that is bedeviling ongoing negotiations. Software used by law enforcement and border agencies is increasingly reliant on things like facial recognition and social media scraping tools that amass vast stores of people’s data and use this information to make decisions about whether or not they should be allowed to cross a border or how long they must remain incarcerated. 

The EU’s draft regulation is premised on the fact that systems like these can present significant risks to people’s rights and well-being. This is especially true when they’re built by private companies that like to keep their code under lock and key.

The AI Act aims to establish a framework for assessing the relative riskiness of different kinds of AI systems, dividing them into four tiers: unacceptable risk products, such as China-style social credit scores, which would be banned outright; high-risk tools like welfare subsidy systems and surveillance tech software; limited risk systems like chatbots; and minimal risk systems such as email spam filters.

But it has some surprising omissions. Dutch parliamentarian Kim Van Sparrentak, who represents the Green Party, was quick to note that the European Council has tried to create carve-outs that would allow law enforcement and immigration agencies to keep using a wide range of these tools, despite their proven risks. In early December, more than 160 civil society organizations issued a statement expressing concern that the law doesn’t account for AI use at the border and unfairly impacts those already on the margins of society, such as refugees and asylum seekers.

“The risk is that we create a world where we continue to believe in the Kool-Aid of AI, and won’t have the right system in place to make sure AI doesn’t inflict [harm] on our fundamental rights,” said Van Sparrentak. 

The AI Act may also run into enforcement challenges. The regulation will apply mainly to companies or other entities developing and designing AI systems — not to public authorities or other institutions that use them. For example, a facial recognition system could have vastly different implications depending on whether it’s used in a consumer context (i.e., to recognize your face on Instagram) or at a border crossing to scan people’s faces as they enter a country. 

“We are arguing that a lot of the potential risks or adverse impacts of AI systems depend on the context of use,” said Karolina Iwanska, a digital civic space advisor at the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law in the Hague. “That level of risk seems different in both of these circumstances, but the AI Act primarily targets the developers of AI systems and doesn’t pay enough attention to how the systems are actually going to be used,” she told me.

Although there has been plenty of discussion of how the draft regulation will — or will not — protect people’s rights, this is only part of the picture. According to Michael Veale, a University College London professor who specializes in digital rights, “the AI Act has to be understood for what it is: a legislative and market instrument.” The reason the European Commission is acting here, said Veale, is that member states have made different, varying laws at a national level around AI, which create barriers to trade in the internal market. “The concern is they won’t be able to trade AI systems because there’ll be different rules per member state,” said Veale.

Europe’s action to develop rules around AI comes with the aim of developing a “harmonized market” around the trading of AI systems. “That’s the fundamental logic of the AI Act, above all else,” Veale told me. 

Under the current draft of the Act, high-risk tools include AI used in education, employment or law enforcement. On high-risk AI, it has set requirements concerning design, labeling and documentation for any new piece of technology. On everything else — deemed non-high-risk systems — the Act forbids member states from regulating the systems at all. “That allows non-high-risk systems to move freely across the Union and be traded,” said Veale.

But Veale thinks that goal is naive. “When we say we trade AI systems, that ignores a lot of the practical reality around how business models of AI work,” he said. Nevertheless, it’s the underpinning principle of what we’re seeing. “It’s a legislative idea,” he said. “It’s not, ‘Let’s make the best human rights in the world.’ It’s, ‘Let’s remove barriers to trade for the technology industry.’”

The regulation does not establish an independent entity that will vet or evaluate these technologies — instead, companies will be expected to report on their activities in good faith. A quick look at Silicon Valley gives many people reason to believe this won’t cut it. Under the current draft, “you don’t even have to get a third-party private body to tick off your documentation,” said Veale. “You can just self-certify to a standard for the legislation, and pinky promise you did it correctly.”

Karolina Iwanska was equally worried about the certification requirements — particularly when it comes to tools in the high-risk category. The regulation will require providers to develop a risk management system and ensure their training data is relevant, representative and free of bias, an achilles heel for such tools. There’s now a decade of research on the topic, from Latanya Sweeney’s seminal 2013 study on racism in Google’s search algorithm  right up to the present day, when ChatGPT, the latest AI-powered chatbot, indulges in casual racism when opining about the value of different people’s lives based on their ethnicity.  AI tends to reflect our societies like a mirror. If it’s trained on our unjust reality, or an unrepresentative data sample, it will harm some people worse than others.

So far, experts worry that the regulation will not sufficiently acknowledge how complex these technologies are, and how difficult it can be to change them once they are up and running. “There is an assumption that you can fix the system,” said Iwanska, “but that ignores obligations on authorities that are actually going to be deploying those systems. There is no consideration of systemic biases, for example.” It’s one thing to prevent any biases being coded into the system or to ensure that systems are built using data that is representative of society and free of influence, but AI is always reflective of its creators — and that’s mostly affluent white men. 

Iwanska also says that drafters have offered little more than lip service to the real need for transparency or accountability around these tools. At present, the AI Act will require technology providers to include the intended purpose for their system, who the developer is, their contact details and their certificate number. But, “there’s nothing on the substance of how the system operates, what sort of criteria it uses, how it’s supposed to perform and so on. That’s a big fault that we feel will undermine public scrutiny of what sort of systems are developed,” she said.

The self-certification model borrows from other areas that Europe regulates, but few are as important to society as AI governance. Veale too was concerned about the pitfalls of this approach. “The rules are for fundamental rights around things like human oversight, or bias, or accuracy,” he said. “Not only are these things going to be self-certified by companies using this to try and lower the burdens on them, but they’re also going to be made up and elaborated in a completely closed-door, anti-democratic process that’s ongoing right now — even before the law is passed.”

Of course, the law is still being hashed out — it’s impossible to know for certain how it might change the way AI is used by public agencies. “The definitive answer will come in a couple of months, because the legislative process is still ongoing,” said Iwanska. She isn’t yet sure what impact the process will have. “[We] can expect that this proposal will change a lot,” she said. “But it's not clear yet in which direction — so whether it will improve or be undermined.”

Alex Engler, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, believes that where Europe leads, the world will follow. Because the European Union is a 450-million-strong market of consumers, and because it has in recent years managed to bring big tech partly to heel through its regulatory moves, he feels confident that the EU’s AI Act will shift how manufacturers of such systems operate worldwide. We’re already seeing a Europe-wide backlash against AI-powered surveillance systems that Engler expects will be bolstered by marketwide regulation from the EU. In fact, the European Data Protection Supervisor has welcomed plans to ban military-grade spyware of the type used to monitor politicians and journalists, as part of a proposed Media Freedom Act. And in November 2022, Italy’s data protection agency banned the use of facial recognition systems and other intrusive biometrics analysis until the end of 2023, or until laws covering its use are adopted, whichever comes sooner.

The EU’s legislation is part of a broader movement to try and draw boundaries around the development and use of AI systems. In the United States, the White House Office of Science and Technology has put forward a blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights following a year-long consultation with the public and experts, as well as industry. That followed the draft Algorithmic Accountability Act, which was tabled in Congress in March 2022. And in July 2022, plans for the American Data and Privacy Protection Act moved out of the committee stage with rare bipartisan support.

However, Americans shouldn’t hold their breath for anything to change soon, particularly with a new Congress convening this year. “In the U.S., you’re much less likely to see legislation,” said Engler. “There’s no evidence that anything like the Algorithmic Accountability Act is gaining momentum, and there’s a lot of skepticism around the Data and Privacy Protection Act,” he added.

In part, that’s because of the challenge of getting your arms around the morass of complications that legislating AI throws up. This is a global problem. “I don’t think you can write down a single set of rules that will apply to all algorithms,” said Engler. “Can we regulate AI? If you’re expecting a single law to come out that solves the problem, then no.” Yet he does think that governments can do better than they currently are, by adapting themselves holistically to emerging software in general. “That’s what we have to do — and in some ways that’s more daunting and less splashy, right?” Engler said. “It’s a whole-of-government change towards a deeper understanding of technology.”

Despite both the political and technological challenges that policymakers have had to grapple with in order to find consensus on the regulation, Dutch parliamentarian Van Sparrentak thinks the effort is worth it — not least because not acting allows AI’s use to grow unchecked. “What is most important is, when AI comes in place, people will never stand empty-handed anymore vis-à-vis a computer,” she said. “They’ll have an idea of why the system made a certain decision about their lives, and they’ll get transparency over that.”

Related Articles

Killer robots have arrived to Ukrainian battlefields

Ilya Gridneff

Indian police use facial recognition to persecute Muslims and other marginalized communities

Sarita Santoshini

From mythology to machine learning, a history of artificial intelligence

Katia Patin

The post Can the world’s de facto tech regulator really rein in AI? appeared first on Coda Story.

“Today, Mozambique enters the annals of world history as one of the countries that export liquefied natural gas, which, in addition to representing an alternative source of supply, contributes greatly to the energy security of the countries with the highest consumption,” declared Mozambican president Filipe Nyusi. This moment, he insisted, “must bring pride to all Mozambicans.”

Yet life in Cabo Delgado has increasingly brought pain and fear, with thousands displaced to refugee camps to the south following vicious ongoing battles between government troops and militants linked to the Islamic State, with both sides accused of war crimes. Four thousand people have been killed and more than a million people have fled their homes in the five years of fighting. The abandoned buildings bear the scars of an insurgency that the Mozambique government — even when bolstered by forces from neighboring states and mercenaries from the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group — cannot control.

TotalEnergies, one of a nexus of American and European energy companies present in gas-rich Cabo Delgado, declared force majeure at their site last year, following a nearby attack, and ceased operations. Rights groups accuse the government and its supporting forces of focusing on security for global gas exporters over the local population, amid a new worldwide urgency to find gas supplies following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. “There is a prioritization of optics for the world to see that these areas are fine and therefore investment should come, rather than a prioritization of basic conditions for people to go back,” Zenaida Machado of Human Rights Watch told CNN.

That urgency was on full display at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, the Egyptian resort town where dozens of heads of state and tens of thousands of delegates gathered to ostensibly tackle the climate crisis. European Council president Charles Michel began his address to the conference with the warning that the “Kremlin has chosen to make energy a weapon of mass destabilization.” And, he added gravely, “it is pointing this weapon directly at Europe and at Europe’s global energy markets.”

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, whose trip to Sharm el-Sheikh was punctuated by numerous energy deals, addressed the climate talks with what she presented as a solution to Europe's energy crisis. “For Europe,” she said, “the answer is RePowerEU,” the bloc’s plan to phase out its dependence on Russian fossil fuels in part by scaling up the use of renewable energy. “Let us not take the highway to hell,” Von der Leyen said somberly, seemingly quoting ancient Australian rockers AC/DC. “Let us earn the clean ticket to heaven.”

But even amidst talk of energy independence through ratcheting up renewable energy supplies within Europe, the bloc is on a renewed hunt for natural gas reserves across Africa.

Von der Leyen’s clean ticket to heaven seems to stop at Europe’s borders. It includes plans to increase cooperation to build a gas pipeline from Azerbaijan, potential new supply deals with Algeria and Qatar, as well as accelerating orders of LNG from Egypt and Israel. RePowerEU also notes the need to “explore the export potential of sub-Saharan African countries like Nigeria, Senegal and Angola.” This divide between encouraging growth in renewables as part of a green transition within Europe and what some have labeled a “dash for gas” outside the EU’s borders has provoked anger and alarm among climate advocates.

The British Court of Appeal is due to hear a legal challenge from Friends of the Earth, who argue that the British government's decision to approve $1.15 billion in financing for TotalEnergies’ LNG project in Cabo Delgado is incompatible with the commitments made in the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Exploration or broadening extraction in gas-rich countries like Mauritania, Senegal, Mozambique or Egypt put the world on a path to accelerate even faster past acceptable limits of global warming and into dangerous levels where the African continent will bear the brunt of the initial consequences. African nations are some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of global warming despite accounting for, at most, 3.8% of global carbon dioxide emissions annually.

Evidence of climate change is already visible in many places across the continent, including flooding that displaced over 1.4 million people in Nigeria, in the same months as severe drought across the Horn of Africa that has led to a growing famine that risks affecting 82 million people in eastern Africa according to the U.N. “Unfortunately, we have not yet seen the worst of this crisis. If you think 2022 is bad, beware of what is coming in 2023,” said leading World Food Programme official Michael Dunford. He added that the Horn of Africa “is experiencing the worst drought in over 40 years.”

Fears about the consequences for Africa as the world remains on track to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming have done little to stop business interests discussing the continent's gas reserves, estimated to be around 13% of the world's total. "Wind and solar are not going to help Africa industrialize,” said Joseph McMonigle, the secretary general of the International Energy Forum, at an industry gas conference in Dubai in early November. “They need to have access to hydrocarbons.” The African Union expressed a similar sentiment before COP27, pointing to natural gas as a short-term measure to solve the problem of 600 million Africans currently living without electricity.

Many of those looking to Africa as a business opportunity have prioritized gas for export over improving living conditions for those on the continent. “The energy crisis that emerged during the pandemic and that was exacerbated by the war in Ukraine has given East African gas greater appeal,” wrote Carole Nakhle, an energy economist and CEO of the London-based analysis firm Crystol Energy. She noted that countries such as Tanzania or Mozambique “may benefit over the medium term from Europe’s efforts to diversify its energy sources and thus see stronger export demand from the region, especially given the European Union’s recent decision to classify gas as sustainable.”

Gas producing nations such as the COP27 host Egypt have been part of this effort to rebrand natural gas as sustainable, claiming it will form an essential part of the transition away from fossil fuels — despite being a fossil fuel. Cairo hosted a meeting of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) in late October, shortly before COP27, welcoming officials from Russia, Iran, Qatar and nearby Algeria, a key natural gas supplier to Europe. The conference also welcomed officials from Angola and Mozambique, which sits atop an estimated one percent of the entire world's gas reserves.

Egyptian officials were keen to present gas as the solution, rather than part of the problem. “We are convening at a critical time when global efforts are dedicated towards achieving the energy trilemma for security, sustainability and affordability. As the cleanest hydrocarbon [fossil] fuel, natural gas is seen as the perfect solution that strikes the right balance, and will continue to play a key role in the future energy mix,” Egypt’s Minister for Petroleum and Mineral Resources Tarek El Molla, told the conference.

Yet even as Molla spoke to the conference, his own country provided a warning to other African nations about the consequences of prizing gas exports above domestic need. Following an August cabinet directive, the lights were switched off in public buildings in central Cairo and shoppers in the capital’s malls fanned themselves in the crushing heat as the air conditioning was cut to conserve energy so that more gas could be exported.

The Egyptian government has pledged to increase its development of solar energy projects and has publicly sought investment in renewables, all in a bid to export the maximum possible amount of gas in order to bring in desperately needed foreign currency. This has not automatically resulted in a smooth shift to burning cleaner fuels.

Instead, as the multicolored neon lights adorning the streets around Cairo Tahrir square dim, the Egyptian state has been forced to rapidly increase the burning of a heavy fuel oil named mazut in power stations nationwide in order to plug the energy gap, according to a government leak published by Climate Change News. Mazut, a blend of heavy hydrocarbons that can contain sulfites and heavy metals, is now consumed in over 20% of power stations compared to just under 4% at the same time last year.

Ministers who met at the Gas Exporting Countries Forum cautioned against “misguided calls to stop investing in natural gas projects,” in their statement following the meeting, warning that this could cause “supply-demand imbalance, which has been exacerbated by geopolitical tensions.” They applauded Egypt for hosting COP27, as well as praising the United Arab Emirates, a gas exporter, for hosting next year's COP28 and presenting “a great opportunity to make a case for gas in the energy transition as well as to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals, and in particular in Africa’s development.”

While talk of development and Africa’s wealth of untapped gas reserves proliferates in boardrooms and conference rooms around the world, Mozambique’s bid to become a major gas exporter shows how such economic ambition plays out for communities on the ground. Since an American company found gas off the coast of Cabo Delgado region in 2010, the northern province has become the scene of some of  Africa's largest private gas investments, including TotalEnergies' 20-billion Mozambique LNG. According to the French energy giant, the Mozambique LNG project represents a coalition of some of Africa's largest export loans, financed through $14.9 billion in loans from eight different export credit agencies, 19 commercial banks and a loan from the African Development Bank, saddling an already heavily indebted state with further debt repayments.

There is little evidence that the population of Cabo Delgado has felt any benefits from the multi-billion-dollar gas projects that now dominate the shoreline. Instead, according to environmental groups, an estimated 2,000 people who lived and fished in the area were evicted to make way for gas extraction infrastructure. In the past five years, Cabo Delgado became the center of an armed insurrection in which, the International Crisis Group said, “most of the Mozambican rank and file militants are motivated by their perceived socio-economic exclusion amid major mineral and hydrocarbon discoveries in the region.”

Outside Cabo Delgado, the wider population of Mozambique also appears unlikely to receive any of the alleged development benefits that could come from sitting atop this wealth of natural gas. “Despite the incredibly limited access to electricity in the country, the liquid natural gas projects will not benefit Mozambican citizens lacking access to electricity, since most of the gas will be transformed into LNG and immediately sent to other countries, in particular markets in Asia and Europe,” observed the environmental groups Justiça Ambiental and Friends of the Earth in a 2020 report. “Furthermore, in order to build and maintain needed infrastructure for this project, the government will need to divert funds that could instead be spent on other more sustainable investments such as renewable energy development, education and social programs.”

Mozambique will also have to deal with the heavy environmental impacts of gas extraction, notably increased levels of harmful methane gas, even as Europe enjoys the benefits of greater access to supplies of LNG. Justiça Ambiental and Friends of the Earth warned that the projects risk increasing Mozambique’s greenhouse gas emissions by 14%.

Charity Migwi, a regional campaigner for 350Africa.org, said that African nations buying into the idea that exporting their gas reserves will bring development are being sold a lie. “Before even a drop of gas was exported from Mozambique,” she said, “the project caused massive issues, it brought about conflict among people, and violence as well as internal displacement. Everyone wants a share [of the gas] and that need for control creates conflict."

Migwi told me that Europe's focus on hunting for fossil fuels in Africa hampers efforts at genuine energy independence, rather than spurring development. “The dash for gas in Africa threatens the potential investment and development of renewable energy in the continent. Africa has an abundance of renewable energy alternatives like solar. This is the real solution that spurs Africa's economic growth, especially when decentralized, without causing adverse climatic impacts.” Short-term thinking in Europe and knee-jerk responses to the war in Ukraine, she argued, have debilitating long-term impacts in Africa. 

“I don't even think the dash for gas in Africa can meet the European Union's energy needs in the near future,” Migwi said. “That's part of what makes it so destructive.”

Related Articles

Russian trolls and mercenaries win allies and good will in Africa

Shola Lawal

Pandemic spurs pushback against climate change regulations

Rebekah Robinson

Turkey’s drones had a bad reputation. The war in Ukraine has changed that

Ruth Michaelson

The post Europe scrambles for gas in Africa despite climate concerns appeared first on Coda Story.

As she and her staff readied themselves to welcome their first patients in Seewalchen am Attersee, an idyllic lakeside town of 5,700, she received an email that outlined in painstaking detail how its author would come to Kellermayr’s office and slaughter her and her entire staff.

That message was the start of a harrowing seven-month ordeal for Kellermayr, one which ultimately led to her shuttering her practice in late June. It was the first of hundreds of threatening messages she received because of her public comments about the coronavirus pandemic — threats she said the police largely downplayed, leaving her without the support she needed.

“This is not going to end soon,” Kellermayr told me in mid-July, her short, wavy brown hair pulled halfway back and glasses framing her face. “I don’t know if, in a few years, I can live a normal life without looking left and right before going out the door.” 

Sixteen days later, Kellermayr was found dead in her office. Austrian authorities deemed her death a suicide, which an autopsy confirmed days later. She was 36 years old.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dr. Lisa-Maria Kellermayr (@drlisa)

Kellermayr’s death on July 29 prompted an unprecedented outpouring of support from across Austria. It also sparked outrage at the lack of help she said she had received from authorities. 

To many, her case is a wake-up call in a country that has failed to adequately address both the threat posed by coronavirus conspiracy movements and the pernicious growth of online harassment and terror. Kellermayr is far from the only medical professional who has been targeted due to their stance on coronavirus vaccines or the pandemic; still, her case is a particularly vivid example of how profoundly such threats can reshape the day-to-day lives of those who receive them.

On Monday, thousands gathered at Vienna’s Stephansplatz and in half a dozen other cities to light candles in her honor. The bells of St. Stephen’s Cathedral tolled as people held up tea lights and commemorative candles and smartphone flashlights, and sang hymns. One raised a sign that read, “More Protection for Women on the Internet and in Real Life!”

Prominent politicians, including Austrian President Alexander van der Bellen and Health Minister Johannes Rauch, posted tributes to Kellermayr on social media; van der Bellen and his wife traveled to Seewalchen to lay flowers in front of Kellermayr’s practice.

Earlier this week, police in Munich announced they were investigating an Upper Bavarian man for a threatening message he sent to Kellermayr, suggesting a “tribunal of the people” would convict and execute her. And both the police and the Austrian Medical Association have come under intense scrutiny for their handling of her case. Austria’s justice ministry announced that a new EU regulation is set to strengthen its existing online hate speech laws, helping speed up investigations into threats and make it easier to track suspects across country lines.

Asked to comment on Kellermayr’s allegations that they had largely ignored her concerns, Upper Austrian police said in a statement that they had advised Kellermayr since November and addressed her and her practice’s safety in “numerous other conversations.” “The police protection measures around the practice were drastically increased,” the statement read, adding that “all legally possible measures were exhausted.”

Just weeks after closing her practice, Kellermayr had placed a mug of black tea in front of me in what was intended to be the office break room, but had instead become her kitchen. She had been effectively sequestered in the office’s small staff quarters for months, fearing for her safety outside.

For Kellermayr, the practice in Seewalchen had been a dream come true. After working in a rehabilitation clinic in the Alpine spa town of Bad Ischl and treating coronavirus patients around the Upper Austria region, she had arranged to take over a retiring doctor’s practice just a block from the bright turquoise waters of Attersee.

The lake was more than just a beautiful backdrop: It had been a solace to her in the early days of the pandemic, when she was still living in Bad Ischl. After a tough shift treating Covid patients in the early days of the pandemic, she would sometimes take the long way home and stop along the shore of Attersee; a few minutes watching the clear blue water immediately improved her mood, she said.

She had planned renovations to the office with a view to making it the kind of workplace in which she’d spend years, even decades: Covid-friendly ventilation systems in each of the exam rooms, an office overlooking the lake, and staff quarters in the back intended for a late night or occasional on-call shift.

But the death threat, emailed with the subject line “I am going to execute you,” shook her sense of security in a town where she was still new and working to establish herself. “When someone writes something like this in such detail, he’s not thinking about this for the first time in his life,” she told me. “That’s what gave me the feeling that, okay, this is serious.”

The aftermath of Kellermayr’s death offered fresh evidence of just how deeply ingrained these messages of conspiracy and hatred have become. Some users in conspiracy-minded Telegram groups celebrated Kellermayr’s demise, saying it was what she deserved for vaccinating so many people against the coronavirus; others seemingly saw it as encouragement to harass other prominent women online in similar fashion. 

“Unfortunately, Dr. Kellermayr wasn’t alone with these experiences,” said Pia Lamberty, co-director of CeMAS, a German organization that tracks online extremism and conspiracy narratives. “There are so many doctors who vaccinate people and were threatened for that, and they’re often left alone with their experiences and have to pay for security measures on their own.”

A female political scientist based in Vienna, who has also been targeted online because of her work on right-wing rhetoric, received a message telling her to “do a Kellermayr” and kill herself too. And a German doctor announced she had deleted her Twitter account this week, saying she had been deeply shaken by Kellermayr’s death and was no longer willing to deal with the “life-threatening fear” of speaking out about the pandemic on social media.

The case has impacted Kellermayr’s colleagues in Seewalchen, too. A fellow doctor in town recalled their professional interactions with shared patients as friendly and well-handled, and said more should be done to protect medical professionals, especially women, who face such threats. But she spoke only on the condition of anonymity, out of fear she could be targeted next. “A year ago it would have been different,” she told me.

Kellermayr grew up in Wels, a city of 62,000 about a 40-minute drive from Seewalchen. She trained as a paramedic and went on to study medicine in Graz and Vienna before landing her job at the rehabilitation clinic in Bad Ischl. She had never intended to become a doctor — growing up, she couldn’t stand the sight of blood — but eventually came to see it as her calling.

When the region was looking for volunteers to make house visits to Covid patients in early 2020, Kellermayr immediately signed up: She felt that young doctors like her, without families at home to put at risk, should be on the front lines of the pandemic. 

“I’m quite young, I’m single, I don’t have children or any other people I need to take care of,” she said. “That’s why I volunteered from the very beginning.”

Her experience treating Covid patients gave her an expertise many doctors didn’t yet have at the time. When she noticed a certain asthma medication reduced the need for hospitalization in her Covid patients with lung issues — a treatment later confirmed by various studies — she found herself being described as an expert by Austrian media, appearing on various coronavirus-related panels and being interviewed regularly. 

Kellermayr had never sought out the media spotlight. Before the pandemic, her Twitter account was largely filled with tributes to the comedy duo Joko & Klaas, who hosted her favorite television series. She took time off to attend a taping of their show, gleefully posting photos of her tickets. (Joko & Klaas dedicated their show to her one night earlier this week.) 

The newfound attention came with downsides — people commented about her weight and appearance — but at first it felt “completely harmless” and the normal consequence of being a woman online, she told me. None of it derailed her work or kept her from pursuing her ambition to own her own practice. And when a doctor in Seewalchen announced he was retiring and was looking for someone to take on the care of his several thousand existing patients, Kellermayr jumped at the opportunity.

But by November, just as Kellermayr was readying herself to run her practice on her own, the mood in Austria had become mutinous. Government officials announced a new lockdown to combat rising infections, and Austria became the first Western democracy to mandate vaccines for adults (a law the country has since scrapped). Across the country, the nearly-weekly coronavirus protests grew bigger and more radical, often drawing tens of thousands of people in Vienna. The situation was particularly tense in Upper Austria: Earlier that fall, a new anti-vaccine political party, “People Freedom Fundamental Rights” (MFG), had won seats in the Upper Austrian state parliament with 6.2% of the vote.

Kellermayr saw video footage of a demonstration outside a medical clinic in her hometown of Wels: Protesters had blocked the clinic’s main exit, keeping ambulances and others from getting in or out. Incensed, she tweeted about the incident — only to have the Upper Austrian Police refute her post directly, calling it a “false report.” (There was a second entrance that still allowed ambulances in and out, they said).

A screenshot of the exchange made the rounds on Telegram, which is when the more serious threats began. Kellermayr reported the first especially gruesome one to the police, who she said were helpful. They took down details and came by to check on her and the practice. But after a week passed with no real-life visit from the threat’s author, police told her they didn’t believe it was necessary to investigate further.

For Kellermayr, though, her faith in her safety and security had been broken. How could she be sure that she and her staff were in no danger when the anonymous threats continued arriving in her inbox? She reached out to politicians from all the major parties, asking for police protection or funds to help cover the cost — several thousand euros per month — of the private security officer she had engaged. In each conversation, she was told the same thing: Her situation was terrible and they wished they could help, but there was no legal structure to help her. 

Kellermayr stopped going home to her apartment in Wels when she saw bumper stickers on cars out front that alluded to a deep international coronavirus conspiracy. She had also heard her downstairs neighbors talk approvingly about conspiracy narratives on their balcony one evening. It underscored for her the insidious nature of anonymous online threats. She had no way of knowing whether those openly wishing for her death or plotting to cause her harm came from distant towns and cities or were her neighbors, or a patient, or someone she walked by every day on the street.

Eventually, the pressure of keeping up the practice became untenable. Kellermayr’s mental health and that of her staff suffered in the months that followed, and after investing $102,000 into safety renovations and a security guard, Kellermayr could no longer justify the costs of staying open. 

“Basically, it’s about my whole existence on every level — which is at stake because I’ve tried to help and do the right thing in this pandemic,” she told me. 

What’s more, she had received another message from the same person who threatened her in November, making it clear to her that the end of many coronavirus restrictions wouldn’t mean an end to the threats. “​​I hope you don't believe you can still get out of this, do you?” the message read. “That corona is over and everything is forgotten again? Not for me, oh no — I have no problem waiting longer before I strike.” 

Not long after, Kellermayr announced via Twitter that the practice would close, criticizing the authorities for their lack of action.

In response, a spokesman for the Upper Austrian police said Kellermayr was trying to “push herself into the public eye to promote her own advancement” and suggested she go see a psychologist. The head of the Upper Austrian Medical Association said he was open to the possibility of one-time payments to help doctors like Kellermayr, but seemed to suggest her outspokenness was to blame. “Sometimes it’s better to withdraw” versus continue posting on social media, he said.

To Kellermayr, there was a cruel irony in their statements. “If I’m not quiet, if I don’t keep my mouth shut, it’s all my fault — it’s too provocative to speak my mind,” she told me. “But when these anti-vaxxers go on the streets to speak their mind, they’re secured by hundreds of policemen.” It’s as if her concerns were less valid than those of the people who had been terrorizing her, she said.

Ultimately, it was not the police but a German hacker who gave Kellermayr some of the answers she had been craving. With relatively little effort, the “hacktivist,” Nella Al-Lami, found the man who wrote the first, most graphic threats in November: A neo-Nazi in the Berlin area, a man known to German authorities and who had access to weapons. (At the time of publication, no action had yet been taken against the man.)

By the time Kellmayr and I met in mid-July, life had settled into a previously unimaginable pattern. She was effectively under self-imposed house arrest. The morning she greeted me at her practice, the space was empty save for the two of us and Fraulein, the puppy she had adopted for security and companionship, who nipped at the hem of my dress and chewed on a copy of the local newspaper as we spoke.

No patients filled the two waiting rooms, one for infectious patients and one for noninfectious patients; no children played in the jungle-themed kids’ room with stools shaped like animals and a brightly-colored rug; no nurses busied themselves in the small lab or spoke with patients at the front desk. Mail and magazines were stacked in a pile on the break room’s table. 

But there were some glimmers of hope. Kellermayr felt she had recently found a receptive contact within Austria’s interior ministry, the head of the country’s state protection and domestic intelligence service, who checked in on her regularly. When we spoke, she said she believed that the practice might still open again later this summer.

Attersee lake, even if she could only see it from afar, still gave her some solace. It was the reason she had wanted to take over this practice in the first place. These days, though, it was also a reminder of her isolation, her withdrawal from social life. “You see all these people walking by, eating ice cream and having a good time,” she said, gazing out over the sun-dappled lake. “And up here it’s like a different world: For all these months, it’s felt like they’re living in a different reality than I am.”

At the end of our two-hour conversation, she gave me a warm smile as I left the 2500-square foot office that had become her entire world. She had spent the previous half a year locked in a cycle of fear and uncertainty, but managed to recount her story with clarity and conviction, even flashes of irony and humor. She was determined to reopen her practice and was, at the time, cautiously optimistic she could find a way to do it.

Four days after Kellermayr’s death, on a sunny August day, Seewalchen looked much as it had a few weeks earlier. There was little overt evidence that the town had just lost one of its few doctors in such horrific fashion, apart from the small makeshift memorial of candles and flowers in front of her practice. 

People around town seemed leery of or uninterested in discussing the situation. When I stopped by the city hall and asked if the mayor had a moment to speak with me, he appeared almost immediately — only to tell me he had no further comment on the situation, and to see the remarks he had made to Austrian media. “We are shocked by how far hate online can go,” he told local news. “We are losing an important member of our community, a doctor to whom many entrusted their health.”

Others agreed the case was “shocking” and “tragic,” but said they had not met Kellermayr personally and knew of the situation only from media reports. “It’s horrible that it came to this point,” said one woman, Karin, during her shift in a traditional clothing store in town. “She was so young; she had so much of her life ahead of her.” 

The conversations, polite, bland and noncommittal, appeared to emphasize the extent to which Kellermayr, as a relative newcomer to a close-knit town and someone without a family of her own, lacked a support system to help her cope with the harassment. That fact made it all the more difficult that she felt unheard by authorities.

When police in Austria believe a death to be a suicide, they say there was no evidence of “Fremdverschulden,” or third-party responsibility. As the first reports of Kellermayr’s suicide emerged on Friday morning, that phrase was repeated in countless news articles. 

It may be true in Kellermayr’s case that no one else was literally, directly involved in her death. But her recounting of how things unfolded, and the national discussion it has sparked, illustrate how the question of responsibility is not so easily resolved. 

Kellermayr’s fears and concerns went, time after time, unaddressed by authorities at all levels of Austrian government and law enforcement. And as a result, her case raises fundamental questions about what responsibility the state has to its citizens in times of unprecedented online hatred and abuse. “You get the feeling you need to protect yourself, because nobody’s going to help you,” she told me last month. 

“Everybody up to the chancellor knew about this case before I went public. Everybody said it’s horrifying and I should get help. But nobody helped me.”

If you are having thoughts about suicide, or know someone who might be having such thoughts, please seek professional counselling. Know that resources and help are out there. These websites contain information on suicide prevention helplines around the world: https://findahelpline.com/; https://blog.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines/

Related Articles

The medical establishment gaslights doctors, insisting long Covid is ‘psychological’

David Tuller

The real scientists on the frontlines of the anti-vaccine movement

Masho Lomashvili

The French doctors railing against vaccines and Covid-19 restrictions

Valeria Costa-Kostritsky

The post ‘Nobody helped me’: Austria shaken by suicide of doctor trolled by anti-vaccine haters appeared first on Coda Story.

Alderney itself was such a prized strategic possession, it was nicknamed “Adolf Island.” 

On this deserted island, the Germans left a fingerprint of the Holocaust: SS concentration camps run on U.K. soil.

Today, residents are finally asking: Why has the British government done nothing, when it has evidence of German war crimes on its soil?

Battling History

The Nazi concentration camps on British soil the UK government tried to forget

Most years, when the Channel Islanders of Alderney come together on May 22 to memorialize the victims of the Nazi occupation, it rains. A chilly wind whips up from the sea as a congregation gathers to pay tribute to the thousands of people who toiled and died in forced labor camps on this tiny island.

But today, it’s bright and clear.

Fluttering above us, with the sea and the sky beyond, is a blue-and-white striped flag. It represents the uniforms of the prisoners. There are plaques in Russian, Hebrew, French, Polish and Spanish to commemorate the victims of the German occupation of this island in the English Channel between 1940 and 1945. The Channel Islands, an archipelago belonging to the British Crown, were the only piece of British territory Adolf Hitler managed to conquer during the Second World War. And on Alderney, the Nazis built a series of labor camps — including two concentration camps run by the SS.

In the U.K., this story is far from common knowledge, confined to the obscure recesses of the British collective memory. Even when I ask other Channel Islanders from the nearby island of Jersey if they knew Nazi camps existed on British soil, they’re hazy on the details.

In recent months, the British Home Secretary Priti Patel declared the government’s plan to transfer asylum seekers arriving in the U.K. on small boats to detention centers in Rwanda. But before this policy was introduced, Alderney was floated by a right-wing think tank as a possible destination for detainees. “Its location and topography make it suitable in many respects,” the report read, before noting that the island was “gravely misused during World War II by the Nazis.” The think tank’s authors added that while the difficulty of the island’s tiny airfield might be overcome, “the problem of bad associations may be less tractable.”

The suggestion was quickly squashed — perhaps, some islanders thought, because international attention on Alderney would open an enormous Pandora’s box.

Now, as a £100million ($120 million) Holocaust Memorial is planned to be built next to the Parliament building in London, there’s a fight underway over precisely what happened in Alderney, and how Britain should face up to the Nazi atrocities that occured on its territory.

When the British began their investigations on the island after the war it gradually dawned on them that the scale of atrocities could warrant full-scale war crimes trials. As this realization took hold, there was a shift in the tone of the investigations, says Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist at Staffordshire University who has studied the island for more than a decade. The official narrative changed, skating over the fact that 27 different nationalities were thought to have been brought to the island, among them hundreds of French Jews. Instead, the Foreign Office simply said that “for practical purposes Russians may be considered to be the only occupants of these camps.”

“That enabled the British authorities to hand over the investigation to the Soviets. And that meant they could wash their hands of the whole cost and everything else of war crimes trials,” said Sturdy Colls. It was cleaner and easier to say the prisoners were Russian, and the Soviet Union’s responsibility. The enduring legacy of that decision was that the stories of other prisoners — Jews, other Europeans, North Africans — were largely erased from the official history of Alderney. 

At the service, the self-governed island’s President, William Tate, hit back at those who said the island of Alderney was not facing up to its past. “There are those who say that we don’t do enough. I take issue with that. I think we all live with the responsibility of ensuring that the lives of those people that were lost during that period do not go unremarked.”

Alderney is a three-mile-long slither of land that is home to some 2,000 people. Wildly beautiful, surrounded by the seething, white-crested Atlantic, the island is fringed with sandy crescent-shaped beaches. Alderney’s capital, St. Anne, a postcard-perfect, cobbled town, is covered in banners to mark Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee when I visit. Though it’s just ten miles off the coast of France, this is unmistakably British soil.

Unlike the other islands of Jersey, Guernsey and Sark, where British residents lived under German occupation, the people of Alderney collectively decided to evacuate their homes in June 1940, when the fall of France was imminent. They did not return until December 1945. On this virtually deserted island –– a mere handful of islanders remained –– the German occupiers acted with impunity, building labor camps and SS-run concentration camps.

The camps operated under the system of “Vernichtung durch Arbeit” — extermination through hard labor — and hundreds, if not thousands of prisoners died here. They were worked to death, forced to build a vast network of fortifications as part Adolf Hiter’s “Atlantic Wall,” a system of defenses along the coast of continental Europe designed to deter allied invasion. The Channel Islands were a key part of this defense structure and Alderney was such a prized strategic possession, it was nicknamed “Adolf Island.”

Eighty years later, and the island is still disfigured by concrete bunkers, firing ranges, batteries, and cement fortifications — relics of the darkest chapter of Alderney’s history. Threading through the rock deep below the island, a vast network of tunnels have been gouged out by forced laborers.

What precisely happened here, how many died here, and how they should be remembered are subjects of fierce contention. The British government has been accused of covering up Nazi atrocities on its own soil, of refusing to face up to or reconcile with the horrors of Alderney’s past and keeping it a secret for decades.

“How can Britain, in good conscience, build a £100 million memorial and education center, and become head of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2024, if we can’t come clean about one little fingertip of the Holocaust on British soil?” said Michael James, a local resident who was in attendance at the remembrance service. “It’s just wrong. It reeks.”

James believes the number of people who died in Alderney during the war is well into the thousands. “It’s staggering that we’re having to fight to get the truth. If you had died here wouldn’t you want your children to know you had died here? How many hundreds of relatives are out there that don’t know their family members died on this island?”

The islanders were told that there were four camps on Alderney. That slave laborers had worked here and built the island’s fortifications. That these laborers were Russian. That 337 of them had died. But recent studies have identified as many as nine camps and that alongside the Russian prisoners, there were also Europeans, North Africans and Jews.

In contrast to the official number of 337, the highest estimates for the number of deaths on Alderney run to 70,000. Many islanders believe the real number is somewhere in the thousands rather than the hundreds.

When the people of Alderney returned to their island after the war, they said the birds didn’t sing. The island was covered with barbed wire and concrete, and the silence suggested that something terrible had happened. The islanders were told little and asked few questions. Children knew that the gravesites were where “slave laborers were buried.” But, said Sally Bohan, who returned to Alderney after the war as an infant, she didn’t truly absorb what that meant until her late teens. “We didn’t realize the severity and — just the awfulness of it. And there was nothing here to say what had happened.” 

People relied on hearsay. Witness testimonies were routinely recounted of bodies being tipped off the breakwater, of people dying while building a vast anti-tank wall running along one of the island’s pristine beaches, their bodies simply folded into the cement. Islanders talked about finding bones on the beaches. About seeing ghosts: juddering forms dressed in the forced laborers’ distinctive striped uniform, up by Lager Sylt, the S.S. concentration camp near where the airport is now located. 

John Dalmau, a Spanish forced laborer who was taken to Alderney by the Nazis after fleeing Franco's regime, recounted being sent down as a diver in Alderney's Braye Bay to disentangle an anti-submarine net.

"Among the rocks and seaweed there were skeletons all over the place. Crabs and lobsters were having a feast on the bodies which remained intact," he wrote in the years after his release. "I watched the blown-up bodies moving with the tide."

Talk of a cover up by the British government has been rife on the island for many decades. A question has always hung in the air. Why did the British government let evidence of German war crimes on its soil — the concentration camps and those who suffered in them — remain in obscurity? Why was no one prosecuted?

Different islanders have different answers. Because Britain had other things to be getting on with — a country to rebuild. Because the atrocities weren’t significant enough to require Nuremberg-style trials. Because no one wanted to reflect on how much cooperation there was by Channel Islanders in German crimes. Because there was a collective sense of shame about letting the Channel Islands fall into enemy hands. Because no government wanted talk of Jewish murders on its soil.

In 2016, when the then-Prime Minister David Cameron announced that a Holocaust Memorial would be built in London’s iconic Victoria Tower Gardens on the banks of the Thames, right next to the Houses of Parliament, he described it “as a permanent statement of our values as a nation.”

At the outset of the Ukraine crisis, U.K. politicians praised the country’s “long, proud history of welcoming refugees.” A government cabinet minister, Tom Pursglove, cited the British 1930s “Kindertransport” policy as an example, when almost 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children were brought to Britain in the lead-up to World War II. At London’s Liverpool Street Station, a bronze statue of Jewish children arriving with their luggage silently watches over commuters.

The story of the Kindertransport is widely taught as part of the British school history curriculum. But few ask why only children — “kinder” — were given sanctuary, why their parents were left to be murdered by the Nazis.

“The thing is, if we reveal that the Holocaust happened on Alderney, and that quite a number of Jews died there, and that the government covered it up and prevented French Jews in particular getting justice, then where does it leave our program of teaching British values through the Holocaust?” said Marcus Roberts, founder of an Anglo-Jewish heritage organization called Jtrails, who has been studying the German occupation of Alderney for over a decade.

In a fiery meeting in Alderney last July, Lord Eric Pickles, Head of the UK Delegation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said the time had come for Britain to face up to its history during the Holocaust, “warts and all.” Following a presentation by the Alliance, laying out proposals for how Alderney could better safeguard the memory of the camps and grave sites dotted around the island, Lord Pickles told Alderney residents that they needed to face up to what had happened on their land.

“We can’t pretend everything was just rosy,” he said. “This is about telling the truth, the unvarnished truth, not for the titillation of others, but because you own it. It’s yours. You didn’t ask to be the custodians of the most important Holocaust site in the British Isles. It’s not what you asked. But you are the custodians and we want to support you.” The Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s eight recommendations included tasks like improving the mapping, signage and listing of the camp sites and grave areas.

The first person to stand up was Susan Allen, 77, a retired Alderney resident who had worked for the British Foreign Office for several decades. “I’m appalled by all this,” she said. “You are talking about taking over the whole island and turning it into a Holocaust — almost a Disneyland. And I’m sorry, I don’t go along with that.”

Another resident, a former Alderney politician named James Dent, said the memorialization should not be principally focused on Jewish memory. “In Alderney the prisoners were of all faith and no faith,” he said, echoing Allen’s concern that the island shouldn’t become “some macabre theme park for Holocaust tourists.”

Pickles seemed struck by the virulence of the opposition he faced at the town hall. “We’re merely suggesting there should be some small stones, just to be able to give an approximate idea of where things are,” he said a half hour into the impassioned meeting. When I spoke to him on a call last month, he said that he understood why people didn’t want their paradise tainted even by “merely improving the signage.”

“If you move to paradise, you want to see it in those terms. And I don’t think we should look down our noses at people who move to this lovely place that they’ve chosen to live in, and they don’t want to engage in its darker secrets,” he said. “Maybe I’m a little bit too tolerant by nature,” he added, after a pause.

During the town hall meeting, Dr. Gilly Carr, a Cambridge archeologist with a specialism in Holocaust heritage, suggested that the stones could simply have QR codes on them, rather than any text, so that people could find out more information about the gravesites and concentration camp remains only if they wanted to. “The beauty of an online site,” she told the Alderney residents, “is that it’s invisible.”

A spokesperson for the States of Alderney, Alistair Forrest, said the Alliance's suggestions were currently being worked through. “We pay our respect to those who suffered and died in the slave camps on our beautiful Island,” he said.

A debate over the number of people who died in Alderney has soured. “We seem to have become engaged in what I think is possibly a slightly bizarre competition,” Dent, the former politician, said during the meeting, describing how people were constantly trying to “top” each other by quoting ever-larger death tolls. “It doesn’t matter if it was 400, or 4,000, or 40,000 people who died here,” he said, adding that the victims should be memorialized “quietly, and with dignity.”

Knowing just how many died on their island, believe others on Alderney, is essential. The official number of 337 was arrived at back in the 1940s, when Britain commissioned an investigation into atrocities on the island in the aftermath of the war.

In May 1945, after Britain had taken back the island from the German occupiers, Captain Theodore “Bunny” Pantcheff was dispatched to Alderney to conduct an investigation on behalf of British intelligence. The young captain was just 24 at the time, but not inexperienced. He had been a star investigator at the London Cage, British intelligence’s secret interrogation facility during the war years. He was fluent in both German and French and — a bonus — had vacationed on Alderney as a child.

Pantcheff canvassed the experiences of some 3,000 witnesses. He produced a harrowing report, detailing what had happened at Alderney’s various concentration camps.“Crimes of a systematically callous and brutal nature were carried out — on British soil — in the past three years,” he wrote at the outset of the report, before detailing how forced laborers were tortured, starved, and worked to death.

"Workers were beaten for the most trivial offences against the harsh regulations, such as failure to execute a drill movement properly or endeavouring to acquire food from the garbage pail. On occasions workers were beaten for no reason at all."

Theodore Pantcheff, 1945

By counting the number of graves on the island, Pantcheff stated that he knew for certain that 337 people had died there, admitting that “it is impossible to say with any exactitude that the general figure of 337 could represent the full number of deaths on the island.” Pantcheff, his sons explained, was looking for bodies so that prosecutions could be made.

But no prosecutions were ever made –– an outcome that still haunts this island. Instead, the British government packaged up Pantcheff’s report, and sent it over to the Soviet Union, to, as Sturdy Colls put it, “wash their hands of it.” But as British-Soviet relations broke down in the postwar years, the chances of the two governments cooperating and sharing war crimes witnesses began to dwindle, and trials became an impossibility.

In 1947, the French War Crimes authorities requested a copy of the investigation. The British said it “was found that the majority of internees were Russians” and that the reports had been handed over to the Soviet Union. “I regret that the only information we can give you on this matter is the general statement that the Russians were treated with great cruelty,” the British letter to the French authorities read. The letter neglected to mention that held alongside Russian, Polish and Ukrainian prisoners, as well as German, Spanish, and North African inmates, were hundreds of French Jews.

Bunny Pantcheff’s report remained a secret for decades.

His son, Andrew Pantcheff, 67, said his father had dearly wanted to see those guilty of crimes against humanity on Alderney brought to justice. “Even if it’s only one,” Pantcheff pleaded to his higher-ups, according to his son. “Even if it’s only one, so that somebody who tries to do this again won’t be entirely sure that they can just walk away.” 

Perhaps the most important prosecution that never happened was that of Major Carl Hoffman, the brutal, relentless commandant in charge of coralling forced laborers into building the island’s massive fortifications.

After the war, the story ran that Hoffman had been hanged in Kyiv in 1945. But in reality, he walked free. He was held in British custody until 1948 before he was allowed to return to Germany, where he lived out the rest of his life, dying peacefully in Hamburg in 1974. It was not until the 1980s that the British Foreign Office admitted this.

In the early 1980s, Solomon H. Steckoll, a South African journalist, attempted his own investigation. “A mass of obstacles had been placed in the path of the truth,” he wrote in his book, “The Alderney Death Camp,” published in 1982. “For over three decades now,” Steckoll wrote, “the silence has rested like a heavy blanket of impenetrable fog over what took place on Alderney.”

Pantcheff wrote his own account of what happened, titled “Alderney, Fortress Island,” published ahead of Steckoll’s book, setting out “to put flesh on the concrete skeleton and try to breathe life into it.”

The blurb reads: “There was no extermination camp, no Auschwitz, nor any ‘cover up.’” In the book, Pantcheff describes how he wants to dispel speculation: “If it does nothing else, at least it may help some of the more fantastic ghosts so far raised — for example the stories of gas-ovens in the concentration camp or bodies thrown in the cement mixer.”

But the book also criticizes those who “shirk the concept of blame or feel that it all happened a long time ago and is no business of theirs. If this book has a purpose, it is to make it as hard as possible to follow any of those easy options.”

According to his sons, Pantcheff hoped to lay bare the catastrophe that had happened on Alderney, and tell the stories of those who toiled and lost their lives there. “It might have been a very small tragedy compared to Auschwitz,” his younger son Richard Pantcheff, 63, said. “But it was a tragedy nonetheless. It was appalling. He didn't want it to be sensationalized. And he didn't want it to be minimized.”

“Alderney, Fortress Island” was the first time Pantcheff’s own account of what had happened on the island was put before the public. 

For many years, the official British government line ran that the U.K. copy of the original Pantcheff report had been destroyed to create “shelf space.” Many of Pantcheff’s papers were kept in the Alderney Museum files until the early 2000s, when MI6, the British intelligence agency, requested the files back, according to the museum director Trevor Davenport. “I personally bagged them up and sent them off,” Davenport said, adding that MI6 promised to send back copies. “When we sent them, I said to the council — ‘we’ll never see them again.’ And of course we haven’t.” Davenport said MI6 simply sent back a summary.

In the late 2000s, many of the materials from Pantcheff’s report became accessible at the British Archives. There are, however, files that are not included in the papers –– particularly the full statement by George Pope, one of the only islanders who remained in Alderney during the occupation. Pope said he had seen almost 1,800 Ukrainians die, and witnessed as many as 400 Jews thrown into mass graves. His account was regarded as unreliable by Pantcheff, who suspected Pope of collaborating with the Germans. “The Pope testimony could be the key document,” said Alderney resident Michael James. 

The sheer number and size of the fortifications built in Alderney between 1940 and 1945, some argue, make the official death tally dubious.

Soviet citizens who worked on Alderney were rarely prisoners of war. Marcus Roberts, the Anglo-Jewish heritage historian, described how they were mostly press-ganged or kidnapped civilians and were described by the Germans as “volunteers.”

“You have to ask yourself realistically, what size of labor force would you have needed to complete such constructions?” said Roberts. “I can say with a high degree of certitude that at least 15,000 died there,” he said, describing how it was important to factor in the prisoners’ living conditions, and their ultra-low-calorie diet of thin cabbage soup and bread. “I wouldn't be surprised if that number could be as high as 30,000.”

Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls said her investigations gave her an estimate of between 701 and 986 deaths, but that the true number is undoubtedly higher, due to the Nazis attempts to cover up their crimes.

Two military authors, Colonel Richard Kemp and John Weigold, wrote in the Daily Mail newspaper in 2017 that they believed a minimum of 40,000 slave workers died on Alderney — and “perhaps as many as 70,000.” They said Alderney had been turned into “a secret base to launch V1 missiles with chemical warheads on the South Coast.” 

These staggering numbers dwarf even the largest estimates made by other historians, causing considerable consternation in Alderney. Trevor Davenport, the director of the Alderney museum, is incensed by the number. “Rubbish! I mean rubbish. I don't even give it any credence at all,” he said.

Davenport does not believe the word “holocaust” pertains to Alderney, and prefers to discuss the island’s wartime past without the mention of forced laborers. He spoke to me on the condition that there would be absolutely no discussion of slave labor. Davenport said the islanders were fed up of listening to “utter tripe” produced by academics parachuting into the island.

The Alderney museum has a single cabinet devoted to the laborers, featuring a sandal worn by the workers along with archival photos. Among the IHRA recommendations described to residents by Lord Pickles, was the suggestion that more be added to the museum’s on-view collection about the island’s prisoners and that a new exhibition should be put together.

In early 2016, two drill rigs arrived on Alderney. One was stationed just off shore. The other was on the fields where forced laborers’ graves are known to be.

The Alderney government had been consulting with a multi-million pound scheme to build an underground electricity link between France, Alderney and Britain, known as the “FAB project.” The cable would span the island of Alderney — and potentially carve right through Longis common, where hundreds of forced labor victims are buried. 

Alderney Renewable Energy, the energy developer behind the project, told reporters that the drilling was part of a non-intrusive geophysical survey, intended to “detect any areas of unknown archeology” in the area. Residents said that the Alderney government did not engage with them about the plans, so that when the drills arrived, many didn’t know what they were doing there.

One resident contacted the police on the neighboring island of Guernsey to report that a site of mass murder was being plundered. Britain’s Chief Rabbi, alongside academics and local historians, all aired concerns that mass graves, including those of Holocaust victims, would be disturbed by the project. After being lobbied by one onlooker, the Russian Embassy got involved, issuing a statement saying that any remains of Soviet Citizens found during construction should be identified and given a proper burial. “The Embassy has also offered help with the identification of the said remains,” the statement read.

A group of 32 islanders took legal action, requesting that the British Ministry of Justice conduct a public inquiry. They alleged that the island's government had acted corruptly in its dealings with FAB, and that people within it had a significant conflict of interest in ushering forth the project while standing to financially gain from it. The Guernsey police dismissed the matter, on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to prove the group’s allegations.

FAB Director James Dickson said FAB had “adhered to the strictest standards of professional conduct” and kept residents extensively informed about the project prior to the rigs arriving, through door-to-door flyers and public meetings. 

The States of Alderney chose not to respond to questions about FAB. 

Last week, FAB announced that the interconnector was no longer slated to run through Alderney, and would instead bypass the island. “This gives us more certainty, as we need to work with fewer permissions, approvals and licenses,” Dickson said in a statement. 

He told me FAB hoped to start construction in 2025.

The drilling was the match that lit the fire. “That’s what brought it all back up for me,” said Michael James, who grew up on the island and has spent the past four years intensively researching Alderney’s past. He described how the FAB project woke many islanders — including him — up to the pressing question of what had really during the war years and how many really lay buried on the island.

Among those to critique the project at its outset was Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls, who submitted a report about the location of the graves and which areas needed to be avoided. “I voiced my deep, deep concerns that it was going through the site of a former cemetery,” she told me.

The forensic archaeologist’s distinctive, six-syllabled name trips lightly off the tongue of almost every islander I talk to within a matter of minutes. Her work is divisive.

In 2019, Sturdy Colls released a documentary called “Adolf Island.” The film followed her efforts to try to find out precisely how many people were buried in Alderney’s mass graves, using different state-of-the-art, non-invasive techniques, including ground-penetrating radar, laser technology and drones.

But before the film was made, a leaked pitch for the documentary appeared to show another motive: to dig up Holocaust graves. “Caroline negotiates with the States Council to excavate the site. The evidence is too strong to ignore. It will be an emotional axis for everyone involved in the story,” the pitch read. Marcus Roberts of JTrails wrote to her university that her film constituted the “exploitation of Jewish human remains for commercial gain and public entertainment.” The university chose not to uphold the complaint, according to Roberts.

Sturdy Colls said the pitch had been leaked when the TV production company’s website was hacked and should never have been in the public domain. She called Roberts’s allegations unfair and unfounded. “There was no suggestion that I was ever going to go and dig without any of the permissions being in place,” she said. “My understanding of Jewish law is very thorough.”

When it was released, Sturdy Colls’s documentary dwelt on local opposition to her research. “Shrouded in decades of silence amid attempts by local authorities to prevent examination and the search for missing victims of Nazi atrocities, the team must turn to state-of-the-art technology to get the answers they seek,” read the press release for the film, released on the Smithsonian Channel.

Sturdy Colls encountered vehement opposition from some islanders, even to her non-invasive techniques. “They want to encourage all ghouls, weirdos and anybody with twisted minds to come to Alderney,” wrote one angry resident to the local paper, “to see and worship the wonderful Nazi achievements, so that they can probe with modern gear, excavate slave labor camps, and fly their little spy planes. Well, not if I can help it.”

Sturdy Colls said she has never in her career experienced the hostility she faced in Alderney. “All because they want to forget the memory of people who were brutalized and murdered on this island,” she said in her documentary. At one point, she told me, residents threatened to shoot down her drone equipment.

Nigel Dupont, 63, a lifelong Alderney resident whose family have lived on the island for six generations, does not want to forget. He believes wartime events were “all hushed up” once Britain took back the Channel Islands. We drink tea in his light-filled kitchen, which looks out across Longis Bay. An anti-tank wall the Germans built, known as the “wall of certain death” — where witnesses said they saw bodies thrown into the cement — can be seen in the distance. 

“Lots of dark things happened here,” Dupont said, remembering how he grew up in a culture of collective silence. “Local families wouldn’t sit around the table and talk about what happened.” 

In the 2000s, that attitude began to change. “As people started to die, there became more pressure to talk,” he said, referring to the passing of the last generation with a living memory of the war.

Dupont said he paid scant attention to the significance of the architecture dotting the island as a young man. He used to throw epic parties in the German bunkers — “the acoustics were fantastic.” But as he got older and became a building contractor, he began to see the architecture of the island differently. “Over the years, the more I’ve read and the older I’ve gotten, I’ve begun to look around and do the math myself,” he said. He described how real Alderney natives — who have lived there a long time — were all keen to understand what really happened during the years they were forced to leave their island home.

 “My generation is ready to know the truth.”

In 1947, two years after he visited Alderney to conduct his investigation into German atrocities, a 26-year-old Captain Theodore “Bunny” Pantcheff wrote a memorandum to himself. It was a list of sentences, written in black fountain pen, each starting with the same four, underlined words: “I must not forget.”

“I must not forget the dead who were murdered,” he wrote. “Nor the face of a corpse that has been maimed and buried alive.”

“Humanity has been and is being outraged; only the few who are whole-heartedly persuaded of that, who know, will be prepared to do anything about it.”

Related articles: Battling history

Unsolved murders and unexamined atrocities threaten Northern Ireland’s precarious social peace

Caitlin Thompson

Poland’s ministry of memory spins the Holocaust

Katia Patin

Fury and grief for Spaniards in fight to remove Franco’s murdered victims from the Valley of the Fallen

Isobel Cockerell

The post The Nazi concentration camps on British soil the UK government tried to forget appeared first on Coda Story.

Spain’s parliament is expected to discuss amendments to the law in the upcoming weeks. 

The legislation, which has sparked political controversy, echoes years of debate over transgender rights in Spain. “That transphobic orange bus, it was pretty horrible,” recalls Eric Dopazo, when in the winter of 2017 an “anti-transgender bus” took to the streets of Spain.

The bus first appeared in Madrid, decorated with a slogan claiming that the only gender is the one assigned at birth. “It’s biology. Boys are boys, girls are girls. You can’t change sex,” the bus announced. For Dopazo, a Youtuber from the northern Spanish region of Galicia who describes himself as a “Friendly Trans Man,” the bus was the most obnoxious stunt yet from conservative groups attempting to spread an anti-trans message.

The bus managed to travel unusually far for a heavy vehicle with wheels. It was brought to the front of the Washington Monument in Washingotn DC, and to the entrance of the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan and the Stonewall Inn in New York’s West Village, designated the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement in the U.S. From there, the bright orange coach crossed borders again, reaching Latin America before returning to Europe. It also made an appearance in Kenya.

The vehicle offers a metaphor for how far-right campaigns revolving around gender and sexuality have evolved to ping-pong across continents. Grassroots efforts from people who hold conservative ideas to preserve traditional religious values had been largely limited to movements focused on the countries in which they were based, with little international coordination. But LGBTQ and transgender-rights legislation has activated a powerful transatlantic accord among a series of influential right-wing organziations. 

The bright orange coach was a project of HazteOír, which nicknamed it the “Free Speech Bus.” Essentially an online petition website, HazteOír began as a platform recruiting hundreds of thousands of people to sign petitions and send emails in bulk to public figures in Spain. 

For the past twenty years, HazteOír, shepherded by its founder and CEO Ignacio Arsuaga, has supported ultra-conservative views in Spain. Its website describes its initiatives as promoting “life, family and liberty.” That translates into opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage and denialism of transgender identity and gender-based violence, among other positions. 

In 2013, HazteOír began to expand its geographical scope. It changed its English-language name to CitizenGO and became active in other countries. It maintained its founding objective to fight against “gender ideology” — the belief, widespread among ultra-religious groups, that any critique of traditional concepts of femininity and masculinity is a form of ideological indoctrination from LGBTQ groups. 

The adoption of the name CitizenGo heralded a profound shift in how right-wing tactics circulated between North America and Europe, leading to CitizenGO becoming a global force — claiming over 16 million active members. Today, its online platform is published in 12 languages. Far-right activists on both sides of the Atlantic have been able to adhere right-wing populist ideas onto local histories and concerns — a unified agenda shared from Toledo, Ohio to Toledo, Spain.

While the current Spanish government is a self-described progressive coalition between the Spanish Socialist Workers Party and the far-left group Unidas Podemos, the third political force in the country is the powerful, ultra-conservative Vox, which is closely associated with CitizenGo. 

“A party like Vox breaks in, challenges the boundaries between right and wrong, and generates this Trump-like, Bolsonaro-like discourse, but adapted to the peculiarities of Spain,” said Almudena Cabezas, a geopolitics professor who researches the far-right at Madrid Complutense University. In 2018, Vox’s leader flew to the White House to meet Steve Bannon.

While Vox gained political traction, CitizenGO worked behind the scenes. Its CEO, Ignacio Arsuaga, met with Vox leaders to discuss their agenda and touted the platform’s “indirect” support of the party by promoting campaigns that align with its ideology. Vox officials have compared CitizenGO to an American-style super-PAC and have re-purposed Trumpian slogans such as “Make Spain great again.”

Neil Datta, Secretary of the EFP, a network of members of Parliaments around Europe who work for the protection of sexual and reproductive rights, said that CitizenGO supporters are cheerleaders encouraging the implementation of far-right policies.

This is part of a strategy that Arsuaga has been developing for decades, establishing a consolidated network of international conservative figures, from the U.S. and elsewhere. “Arsuaga is like an octopus,” says Cabezas, the professor at Madrid Complutense University. “He has tentacles everywhere.”

Arsuaga’s resume states that he learned lobbying and mobilization tactics from the American political system, after he attended Fordham Law School in New York. In a 2003 interview, he described U.S. politics as a model. “We have a lot to learn from the United States. It is a young society, much more lively than the European one,” he said at the time. He described how he designed the CitizenGo website to reflect the work of American grassroots organizations.

Arsuaga is closely affiliated with the World Congress of Families, a U.S.-based conservative group with global connections. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes it as a “political power broker,” and designated it as a hate group for its openly anti-LGBTQ stances. 

The president of the World Congress of Families, Brian Brown — who raised millions of dollars to oppose same-sex marriage in the US — serves on the board of directors of CitizenGO. 

Leaders of CitizenGO and the World Congress of Families meet frequently to network and share insight on lobbying efforts and mobilization campaigns. Networking, says Raven Hodges, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a key feature of these groups. “Even when there’s no official affiliation, they’re rubbing shoulders with each other.” 

Analysts say this constant networking is an essential ingredient feeding the political polarization that has become a shared hallmark of U.S. and European democracies. 

Typical was a November 2021 panel Arsuaga was scheduled to lead on how to promote “life, family and freedom” in national parliaments at a summit for conservative leaders in Budapest. The conference would feature Brown, the World Congress of Families leader, as well as the founder of Vox, a staunchly conservative Hungarian government minister, Katalin Novak, the main supporter of a recent law to ban same-sex adoptions in Hungary, and other right-wing American leaders. The conference offered a lot of time for networking, according to the program published online.

CitizenGO launched two petitions calling on strong opposition to Spain’s proposed trans-rights law to “deal a blow to the project of social-communism where it hurts the most.” In six days, the petitions collected over 18,000 signatures — a large number in Spain. For every signature, a pre-written email is sent to members of the parliament.

The transatlantic alliance of far-right groups and their strikingly similar discourse on social media mean “these groups create media spaces where their discourse travels fast and generates a lot of action and hate,” said Almudena Cabezas, the geopolitics professor. They replicate campaigns, they replicate agendas, so that rights are no longer rights, they become opinions.”

LGBTQ groups are outgunned, said Saida García Casuso, vice president of a Spanish collective which supports transgender rights. “What we have is our imagination, and the ability to take to the streets, which we do constantly. This has been a long fight, and we’re not stopping now,” she said.

The post Anti-transgender campaigns bussed across the Atlantic transform European politics appeared first on Coda Story.

The study connects the dots between some of Europe’s most high-profile anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion campaigns of the past decade and funding from international oligarchs, aristocrats, and religious organizations.

EPF found that over $700 million in funding to the European groups in over a dozen countries came from just 54 organizations in America, Russia and the European Union between 2009-2018. Over half of that came from organizations and figures in the EU. While previous reports have cataloged the funding streams of American entities, including the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the Charles Koch Foundation, in this arena across Europe, the extent of EU-grown funding was previously unknown. 

“We're at the beginning stage where European anti-gender groups are going to internationalize in the way that American groups have done for a decade or so,” said Neil Datta, Secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights.

Datta pointed to Poland’s rightward shift over the past decade as evidence of where this spending has been most effective. The transnational Catholic movement Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), which originated in Brazil, and its Poland-based organization Ordo Iuris have been behind some of the most extreme recent anti-gender-rights initiatives, including the 2016 bill to ban abortion, a law to criminalize sexuality education, and so-called “LGBTQ-free zones.” The TFP network has raised over $113 million between 2009 and 2018, according to the report. 

The report also highlights the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation in France which is well-known for its advocacy around children’s disabilities. The report lays out how in 2013, the Foundation formalized an international anti-abortion movement called One of Us into an NGO and began organizing activities around Europe including marches and forums. One of Us has generated over $31 million between 2009 and 2018, according to the report.

“This is one that tends to go under the radar. They have a very good reputation because they do a lot of work which supports valid issues,” Datta says. 

The report concludes that these foundations, wealthy donors and religious actors are coalescing around multiple “mutually-reinforcing projects” to advance an anti-gender-rights agenda.

“What struck me was the multiple interrelationships between so many of the anti-gender movements which are really on the extremist fringe of the political discourse and aren’t grounded in values of human rights and democracy,” said Datta. “It's not normal to see these groups interact with each other, but it does look like they have been forging consensus around a common enemy.”

The post The foundations and wealthy donors funding anti-gender-rights initiatives in Europe appeared first on Coda Story.

Berg had left his home in Kirkenes, a Norwegian town of about 3,500 people near the country’s 121-mile Arctic border with Russia, a day earlier for a weekend trip to the Russian capital to visit friends and do some Christmas shopping. But he never returned.

Berg was arrested by agents from Russia’s F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., who said they found an envelope on him holding 3,000 euros in cash. They accused him of involvement in an elaborate spying operation, dating back to 2015, to obtain information about Russia’s nuclear submarine fleet in the far north.

Ten months later, Berg remains incarcerated in Moscow’s high-security Lefortovo prison, still not officially charged, but facing the possibility of 20 years in jail. Relations between Russia and Norway — a NATO member — have plunged to their lowest point since the Cold War. But many suspect there’s another level to this Arctic spy drama, and that Russia may have been just as interested in sowing distrust and divisions in its Nordic neighbor —prompted partly by the deployment of U.S. troops there — as closing down any spying on its undersea activities.

Moreover, there are new signs that the Cold War-style conflict is escalating. Recently Britain announced that it was sending 800 marine commandos to Norway (its equivalent to the U.S. Marines) and setting up a small Arctic base there as part of a wider strategy aimed at curbing Russian military maneuvers in the far north. The Russian embassy in London called the plans “unjustified” and that they would contribute to unnecessary tensions between the two countries.

Whatever the case, the fallout from Berg’s arrest has been a wake up call, making clear that the blurred battle lines of the information war between Russia and the West have now spread to the Arctic Circle — and even to a place where the emphasis has long been on working together.

The blurred battle lines of the information war between Russia and the West have now spread to the Arctic Circle

A large banner with Berg’s face and the words “Help Frode home!” hangs in the center of Kirkenes, serving as a daily reminder. But travel around the town, and the signs of cooperation are everywhere — literally, with place names in both Norwegian and Russian. Many local residents speak Russian as well as Norwegian.

In the harbor, fishing boats with Russian and Norwegian flags unload the day’s catch. Every day, buses bring Russian shoppers across the border to stock up on Western goods, thanks to a visa-free travel deal for local residents. Norwegians go the other way to fill up on cheap gasoline.

It’s the product of years of effort by both sides, since the end of the Cold War, to forge deeper relations at this local level, independent of geopolitics. And it’s been a useful boost to the economy in Kirkenes and the surrounding Finnmark county region. Berg — a retired border guard — had long been active in building these ties, volunteering in rural Russia and organizing a series of cross-border festivals.

So his arrest left many in Kirkenes wondering how a pensioner who had devoted his retirement to building closer ties with Russia could have become entangled in a cross-border espionage plot.

The F.S.B. has said little about the case, and Berg’s lawyers have had limited access to their client. But, according to the few details that have trickled out, he was allegedly mailing envelopes with cash and spying instructions to a woman called Natalia in Moscow, in return for information about Russia’s nuclear submarines in the Kola Peninsula. During an appearance in a Moscow court in February, reporters were granted the rare opportunity to ask him questions afterwards, and a tearful Berg complained that he felt “really misused” by his handlers.

The unusual access led to speculation that the display was part of a deliberate plan to amplify Berg’s impactful comments back in Norway and spark anger towards Norwegian intelligence at home for mistreating a citizen.

This spring, Berg himself added a new layer of intrigue when he admitted, through his lawyer, that he had actually been working with Norwegian military intelligence. But he said that he had only worked as a courier, and had been misled about the operation’s scope and purpose.

When his comments reached northern Norway, it sparked a backlash towards the government down south in Oslo and the intelligence agency — particularly among his fellow Kirkenes residents. The mood was further inflamed when it emerged that other people in Finnmark county had been approached and asked to serve as couriers to and from Russia.

“Everyone thought this must be some kind of mistake at first, but as people have learned more, that has changed to frustration with the intelligence service,” said Luba Kuzovnikova, the director of “Pikene på Broen,” a Kirkenes-based art organization focused on cross-border exchanges where Berg was a board member.

The case has turned into “a trial for the Norwegian people,” she said, “on how much trust they will have for their government.”

The Mayor of Kirkenes, Rune Rafaelsen, has known the retiree for decades, and is increasingly concerned about his health. He describes Berg as “a small fish” caught up in a larger game. But he has been trying to navigate a middle course, calling for his release and chastising the intelligence services for its efforts to sign up local people. Yet Rafaelsen has no illusions about Russia, and defends the intelligence agency’s work.

“They shouldn’t have recruited Frode and there is real frustration up here with Oslo and its bad line with Russia,” Rafaelsen said. “But that doesn’t mean we are clueless, we’ve all felt the change next door.”

With as many questions swirling around the case as answers, some veteran observers of border relations have concluded that Berg is being used as part of a wider Russian strategy to stir discord and doubt. “There is something missing and there is definitely more to this than we’re being told,” said Thomas Nilsen, the editor of the Kirkenes-based “Independent Barents Observer,” which publishes in English and Russian.

Why, he asked, would a spy operation rely on mailing envelopes of cash through the notoriously unreliable Russian postal system? And if the Russians really had unravelled an operation dating back three years, why had there been no news of any other arrests, or anyone being punished?

So far, the Norwegian government has done little to fill this information vacuum, largely staying quiet about Berg’s case. The Defense Ministry, which oversees the military intelligence agency, declined to comment, and the Foreign Ministry said only that the country will continue to “provide assistance” to Berg during his imprisonment.

Lt. Col. Tormod Heier, a former military intelligence officer, doubts theories that the Russians have set up Berg as part of some wider attempt to spread discord in the region, fearing instead that it’s the result of sloppy tradecraft.

“Norway’s intelligence service is a world leader when it comes to technical intelligence, but we are relatively inexperienced in human intelligence,” said Heier. “[Berg’s] case looks very amateurish to me. It looks like we were caught while trying something outside our core competence.”

Another theory about Berg’s arrest has come from a Russian singer who used to tour Norway and other Scandinavian countries. But Vladimir Martynenko’s career was cut short after he refused to comply with F.S.B. requests to provide information about his contacts while on the road, leading to a two-year jail sentence in Russia.

Now released and living abroad, Martynenko has said that he believes Berg was likely targeted by Russian security officials looking to garner the prestige of capturing a foreign spy, regardless of his true operational value.

Whatever the case, Norwegian security experts say it gives the Russian intelligence services the upper hand. “The FSB is certainly using this to undermine Norwegian intelligence and police,” said Lt. Col. Geir Hagen Karlsen, director of Strategic Communication and Psychological Operations at the Norwegian Defense University College

“It looks like the Russians are testing us,” agreed John Faerseth, author of a book on disinformation and conspiracy theories in Norway. “I wouldn’t say they’ve been overly successful so far, but it seems like they’re probing to see what kind of reaction they can get.”

Nilsen, the Barents Observer editor, knows from first-hand experience that for all the close border ties, Russia is far from a close friend. Despite the visa-free travel deal, he was barred from entering Russia last year — he believes for running articles critical of Russian foreign policy, which were also published in Russian.

And in the absence of a fuller picture, Nilsen believes that Berg’s case is having a corrosive impact. “It certainly creates some anger towards Oslo by painting the government as jeopardizing cross-border ties.”

The effects have rippled further, helping to aggravate divisions within Norway over wider policy towards Russia. Though it is not a member of the European Union, Oslo has backed sanctions imposed on Moscow in response to its annexation of Crimea in 2014. But there is growing support for a softer line, especially in the northern border regions. And even before the Berg case erupted, there were signs that Russia was trying to stoke such sentiment.

As Moscow sees it, the government in Oslo is taking an increasingly confrontational stance —belying its support for closer ties in the north. It’s not just unhappy at its continued support for sanctions and its role in conducting surveillance for NATO, but also its decision last year to allow U.S. Marines to be stationed on its soil.

Officially, they are there for training purposes, but it’s the first foreign force to be based in Norway since World World II — and a response to Russia’s more aggressive posture both in the region and further afield. The Norwegian Defense Ministry recently announced that the deployment would be more than doubled, to 700 U.S. troops, and moved further north, closer to the border with Russia.

The Russian embassy in Oslo responded with a sharp rebuke when the decision was first announced, warning that it would contribute to “rising tensions and trigger an arms race, destabilizing the situation in northern Europe.” Plans for Norway to host a major NATO military exercise later this year involving 40,000 personnel have added further strain, with the Russian Foreign Ministry saying it reserves the right to take “due countermeasures.”

Their presence could “trigger an arms race, destabilizing northern Europe.” Russian embassy statement on U.S. Marine deployment to Norway

Simultaneously, Kremlin-controlled media outlets have been targeting Norway, and the divide between north and south in particular. A story carried by the RT network (formerly known as Russia Today) earlier this year pointedly declared that “Norway fails to find new buyers for its fish after losing Russian market,” making a direct link with the country’s support for sanctions.

Long before Berg’s arrest, the Sputnik news agency was also running multiple stories highlighting opposition to sanctions in northern Norway, painting the government as out of step with its citizens and a pawn in a U.S.-led confrontation with Moscow.

Rafaelsen, the mayor of Kirkenes, has also become a favorite subject in Sputnik’s information operation, with the agency cherry-picking his quotes to suit its agenda.

His continued support for dialogue with Russia, and rolling back E.U. sanctions, is just what they want to hear. Rafaelsen has also asked Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg to invite Vladimir Putin to Kirkenes next year to mark the 75th anniversary of its liberation by the Soviet Union.

What Sputnik’s writers ignore is that Rafaelsen also praises NATO, and welcomed LGBTQ activists from across the border to march in the annual pride parade — a clear snub to the homophobic atmosphere in Russia in recent years.

“They are definitely misusing me to fit their context,” Rafaelsen said. “But I also need to keep acting according to my own principles. I can’t start choosing my words based off what I think they will do with what I say.”

In an echo of the confrontational tactics of other Russian missions around the world, its vocal embassy in Oslo has also taken to calling out Norwegian media outlets and journalists that it deems too critical of Moscow, while at the same recommending fringe voices on the far-left and right.

Last year, the country’s Labor Party — currently in opposition but a staunch supporter of Norway’s NATO membership — was targeted by hackers, and the Norwegian authorities in an attack believed to have been orchestrated from Russia.

Moscow’s goal is “to deepen the cracks — and the crack between north and south in Norway is real.”

“Look at how these attempts have worked elsewhere,” pointed out Oystein Bogen, a Norwegian television journalist and author of a book entitled “Russia’s Secret War on the West.” Moscow’s goal, he said, is not to convince others “that it is doing good,” but “to deepen the cracks — and the crack between north and south in Norway is real.”

On a hill not far from the center of Kirkenes stands a monument commemorating the soldiers who liberated the region from the Nazis in 1944. The town was an important German naval base during World War II. It’s not American or British forces who are remembered here, though, but Soviet troops from the Red Army. Local “partisans” also worked closely with Soviet units to drive the Nazis out.

Celebrations of this shared history in the Finnmark region have grown more common in recent years. This summer, representatives of both countries inaugurated a memorial honoring the role of Norwegian partisans during World War II in Vardo, a town about 50 miles north of Kirkenes.

But once the Cold War took root, Moscow exploited these past ties, recruiting Norwegians to spy on its behalf. That in turn triggered mass surveillance by the Norwegian intelligence services, focusing on anyone suspected of Communist or left-leaning tendencies. Northern communities like Kirkenes faced particular scrutiny and harassment, increasing tensions with Oslo and creating deep distrust of the country’s intelligence services — a legacy that still exists today and has been inflamed by Berg’s case.

“The trauma of the Cold War is a wound that still hasn’t fully healed in Norwegian society,” said Hilde Korsaeth, a local filmmaker and director of “For All Our Fathers Fought,” a documentary about Norwegian partisans fighting with Soviet troops in World War II.

“The trauma of the Cold War is a wound that still hasn’t fully healed in Norwegian society,” said Hilde Korsaeth, Norwegian filmmaker

In 1996, a parliamentary commission declared the surveillance had been illegal and that some of those targeted were entitled to compensation.

“No one wants those days to come back,” said Kirkenes pastor Torbjorn Brox Webber, who is also a member of a support group for Berg. “In a situation where people are talking about a new Cold War rising up, we shouldn’t let the big politics in Oslo put up more fences here.”

This view reflects wider public opinion in the north. A poll conducted last year by Norway’s “Klassekampen” newspaper found that 76 percent of northern residents — and 81 percent in Finnmark county — wanted the government to do more to improve relations with Moscow.

In late August, Ragnhild Vassvik, the leader of Finnmark county council, called on Oslo to stop enforcing E.U. sanctions on Russia. She has also resisted plans for regional boundary changes for fear it would hamper closer ties with Russia.

In the meantime, Berg remains a pawn in this complex game of information chess, where the moves are never entirely clear. This July, a Moscow judge prolonged his pre-trial detention, and earlier this week it was extended yet again, until December.

Brynjulf Risnes, Berg’s Norwegian lawyer, said he believes his client’s best hope of being released is through a prisoner exchange. That was wishful thinking until recently, because Norway had no one in custody that the Russians would be interested in.

But earlier this month, the Norwegian police arrested a Russian citizen on suspicion of spying at a parliamentary event, giving Oslo a potential new card to play. Risnes said that the arrest increases the chances for progress in securing Berg’s release, but cautioned that “we still know far too little about this new case to assess the real possibilities for an exchange.”

Kirkenes Mayor Rafaelsen is well aware of the stakes. Preserving close ties with their Russian neighbors is a priority for the people in northern Norway, but the region is also becoming a battleground in the wider fight for hearts and minds. As Berg’s trial looms, that fight looks set to continue.

“I’m not naive. For Russia and the F.S.B., this is fantastic. They have broken Frode and will use it for propaganda,” said Rafaelsen. “They are just warming up. Wait until the trial starts.”

This article was co-published in collaboration with our editorial partner Foreign Policy

The post The new cold front in Russia’s information war appeared first on Coda Story.

His hands clasped together on his knees, he was sitting on a simple wooden bench in a small public garden in The Hague, the Dutch administrative capital.

The reason why he helped place the bench here last year is because it is within sight of an elegant villa housing Russia’s embassy to the Netherlands.

On the bench’s crossbar is a small brass plate inscribed with these words: “Waiting for responsibility and full clarity. In loving memory of all 298 passengers and crew of Malaysia Airlines MH17, July 17th 2014”.

The Boeing 777 airliner was flying from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport to the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, that day, when it was blown out of the sky over eastern Ukraine by a Russian missile. More than two-thirds of the passengers were Dutch nationals, and among them was de Borst’s then-17-year-old daughter, Elsemiek.

In proportion to its population, the Netherlands suffered a heavier loss of life that day than the United States did on 9/11. But while the attacks on New York and Washington 17 years ago had a cataclysmic effect, leading the U.S. to invade two countries and deploy troops worldwide in its “war on terror,” the most striking thing about the Netherlands’ reaction has been the lack of it.

Four years later, despite an exhaustive investigation that has uncovered compelling evidence of Russia’s complicity, the Dutch authorities have still not been able to bring anyone to justice. The government imposed limited sanctions on Russia in the immediate aftermath, in conjunction with the European Union (EU). But there has been no other punishment — even after The Hague formally accused Moscow of providing the Buk surface-to-air missile that brought the plane down, to which the Kremlin responded with the equivalent of a defiant shrug.

It is partly a story of what you could call the Dutch national character, which emphasizes reserve and due process over outward emotion and impulse. It’s partly a story of economic priorities and the Netherlands’ need for Russia’s trade and energy. But it is also a case study in Russian disinformation — because of the drip-drip of falsehoods trickled out by Kremlin officials and the media outlets they control, casting blame everywhere but Moscow.

The day the bodies of the MH17 passengers (including citizens of other countries) were brought back to the Netherlands is etched in Hans de Borst’s memory. “I remember watching like it was a movie,” he told me.

“All of the Malaysian families started acting crazy, crying and throwing themselves down on the ground and I was annoyed because of the crying people. I thought, ‘What are you doing? Just be normal,’” he said.

“And then I thought, ‘Oh yeah, Elsemiek is in one of those boxes.’ But I still didn’t cry.”

I listened intrigued. Here was this gentle man, who had lost his only daughter, the person he most cherished in life, describing how he had almost recoiled from the way other people were dealing with the same depth of loss. But then de Borst continued.

“I was also annoyed maybe that I couldn’t [cry]. That’s to do with our character. We are Dutch and it’s not something the Dutch do. But the people who are lying on the floor crying are not more sad than I am.” “I was also annoyed maybe that I couldn’t [cry]. That’s to do with our character. We are Dutch and it’s not something the Dutch do.” Hans de Borst, father of MH17 victim

I vividly remember that day too, as I waited with other journalists for the military aircraft carrying the remains from the crash site to touch down at a Dutch airbase.

There was silence as the planes came into view. A lone trumpeter played the haunting notes of the Last Post. Flags representing the 10 countries of the passengers and crew on board billowed at half-mast above our heads.

Many of the coffins carried out of the planes and past the grieving crowd were infant-sized. More than 80 of the passengers on MH17 were children.

A week later, I interviewed the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte for the BBC. He vowed that whoever was responsible for firing the missile would not “escape justice.”

But what I remember most of all was Rutte’s calm, detached tone. It felt incongruous to me so soon after this moment of unspeakable national horror—an event which, I realized, had consumed me too. As soon as the Prime Minister had answered my last question, I walked out of the camera shot, worried I was going to cry.

As journalists, it is axiomatic that we should maintain professional distance from the stories we cover. It was not as if, I told myself, I knew any of the passengers. I felt as if I was trespassing on the grief of those who did.

I was conscious of the stares of a waiting Dutch television crew.

Ever since I had first got to Schiphol airport on July 17, 2014 to follow up on reports of MH17 being shot down, covering the fallout had taken over my waking hours. I remember people dashing inside the airport, through crowds of unassuming tourists, frantically looking for someone with information about relatives they had waved off just a few hours earlier.

In the following days, we visited neighborhoods where whole families would never be coming home, and filmed inside churches filled with candles and teddy bears clutching red hearts.

Prime Minister Rutte came over to the window and awkwardly extended his arm over my shoulder. He seemed bemused that I had come close to tears. For a moment, I forgot who he was and explained my reaction.

I couldn’t understand how he could be so cold and robotic, I said. He gave the impression that he didn’t care when his people were lying dead in a “faraway unknown land,” in the words of one of the relatives I had interviewed.

I remember Rutte said he understood my reaction, but he argued that the best approach was to wait and do things properly. “Then we get the truth,” he said.

But getting at the truth has meant cutting through a shifting mist of falsehoods about MH17 propagated by Russian officials and state-controlled media outlets. The more evidence has mounted pointing to its involvement, the more Moscow has doubled down on disinformation and denial.

It started within days of MH17 being shot down. Even as the Russian government and its separatist allies in eastern Ukraine were obstructing access to the crash site for investigators, the Russian military put up one of its most senior officers to implicate Ukraine for the massacre. The Kremlin-controlled RT network (formerly known as Russia Today) gave the briefing rolling coverage on its global English language channel.

Flight MH17’s course had been deliberately changed to send it over a war zone and a Ukrainian fighter jet had shot it down, claimed Lieutenant-General A.V. Kartapolov, the deputy head of the Russian armed forces.

But the satellite images the general used to make his case were shown to have been “significantly modified or altered” by a team of arms control experts who analyzed them. Later on, Russian government-controlled media put great effort into trying to prove that the plane had been brought down by a Buk missile fired by Ukrainian government forces.

The list of alternative theories grew longer and wilder — including a claim that MH17 was actually the Malaysian airliner that had disappeared over the Indian Ocean earlier that year and that it had been deliberately flown over eastern Ukraine packed with dead bodies.

The online investigation site Bellingcat has played an instrumental role in uncovering what happened to the plane, and the attempted cover-up afterwards. It was first to identify the Buk missile itself and the Russian army unit it belonged to. The team has also named potential suspects involved in firing the weapon.

By doing so, Bellingcat’s founder, Eliot Higgins, believes that it has also helped “counter the Russian disinformation around the case.” It has been a sign “to any potential witnesses, especially those who were involved with MH17, that a lot of information is being gathered,” he said.

The Dutch-led Joint International Criminal Investigation (JIT) has also put considerable effort into probing all the alternative theories, one of its officials told me, to make sure that their case is watertight if and when they bring it to trial.

But as well as antagonizing distraught relatives, the avalanche of conspiracy theories has also helped undermine trust and sow division — a central goal of Russian disinformation campaigns. And in the years since MH17, there have been more signs of fracture in the Netherlands — with evidence that Moscow has kept working on the cracks. The more evidence has mounted pointing to its involvement, the more Moscow has doubled down on disinformation and denial.

A new far-right party, the Forum for Democracy, has been gaining ground politically. Its leader, Thierry Baudet, has openly questioned allegations of Russian involvement in the shooting down of the airliner. He also played a leading role in a successful campaign against the Netherlands supporting EU plans for closer ties with Ukraine. Nearly two-thirds of Dutch voters came out against the so-called association agreement in a referendum two years ago.

Subsequent analysis showed that Russian-linked fake news and forgeries had helped influence public opinion. One example was a widely shared video purportedly recorded by Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist “Azov Battalion,” threatening violence if the Dutch didn’t back the agreement.

Even though it was debunked as a fake spread by an infamous Russian troll factory, the video helped the no-campaign, scaring voters about the potential consequences of getting closer to Ukraine, according to one academic study. The same report also found that much of the no-campaign material had come straight from RT and another Kremlin-funded site, Sputnik.

A poll conducted at the time of the referendum by the IPSOS organization found that 19 percent of those who planned to vote against the agreement cited the shooting down of MH17 as the reason.

MH17 has had some impact on Russians living in the Netherlands too, according to those who know the community, prompting them to lower their profile. A store in The Hague that used to be known as Tsarsky (“belonging to Tsar”) has changed its name to “Smak”, a derivation of the word “taste” in Dutch, which also means the same thing for some Russians and Ukrainians. And the First Russian School of The Hague has become the Spinoza International School.

I first met Hans de Borst at his home in the small town of Monster. It was a few weeks after MH17 was shot down. He seemed more concerned about me as he laid out the coffee and raisin bread he had prepared. “I’m sure you haven’t been sleeping much.”

The living room had been transformed into a shrine to his daughter, with candles, favorite quotations, and a life-size photo of her smiling from the wall.

He felt “lucky,” he told me, when he learnt that Elsemiek had been recovered intact. Many relatives only had fragments of their loved ones returned, compounding their grief.

But he chose not to view his daughter’s body when it was repatriated to the Netherlands. The mortuary took a photo of her, in case he ever changes his mind.

She was traveling with her mother and step-family that day. Elsemiek loved cycling, playing the piano and, in de Borst’s words, going on “exotic adventures.”

The bereaved father had been aware there was a conflict in Ukraine before MH17. He had heard about it on the news. But he would have struggled to identify the protagonists or where exactly it was happening. Now, suddenly, incomprehensibly, Elsemiek had become a casualty of this war — just hours after he had kissed her goodbye.

Were the Russian-backed rebels to blame? Or the Ukrainian government and its forces? Or the Russian leader? Like other relatives, De Borst had no idea what to think at first. Four days after the plane was shot down, he wrote an open letter demanding that his daughter’s murderers own up to their crime.

“Thanks a lot, Mr Putin, rebels and leaders of the Ukrainian government, for killing my sweet and only child.”

It was a rare show of anger — also directed at his own government, accusing it of being too soft in its response. “If there were Americans or Russians on board, troops would have been sent in,” he told me at the time.

Today, he has no doubt who is responsible. “Putin has blood on his hands,” he said, citing the JIT’s most recent report as proof. It specifies that the Buk missile that brought down MH17 was made in Russia, and brought to Ukraine by a Russian army unit, the 53rd anti-aircraft brigade, based in the city of Kursk. After presenting the evidence, Prime Minister Rutte publicly blamed Russia and demanded Moscow cooperate with the criminal inquiry.

But some relatives fear the momentum is fading. This year, families have been organizing an annual memorial service themselves, with minor financial support from the Dutch government, according to relatives.

“Where are they? They’re not doing anything,” said Silene Fredriksz, who lost her only child Bryce on the plane.

She talked as she sat on her son’s bed. The covers are still rumpled, just as he left them. His girlfriend Daisy Oehlers’ slippers are in the corner, a Glamour magazine dated June 2014 lies on top of a pile scattered on a sofa.

It’s a bedroom frozen in time. Untouched since the day the young lovers rushed off to catch a flight “to paradise,” as Oehlers described it. She was referring to Bali, their intended final destination.

“In Holland grief is a taboo,” said Fredriksz. “Yes you can grieve but not too long. And speaking about your emotions is strange in Holland. What I do is strange, it’s not typical Dutch.” (Although many people use Holland to refer to the country, it is actually the name of the coastal region which forms the heart of the Netherlands)

“Every morning I open the door and say, “Morning Bryce, morning Daisy.” Of course in my head I know they are not coming home, but my heart cannot accept it.”

Fredriksz has been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Counseling didn’t work, she said. “The only thing that helps is medication. That’s what I’m taking now. It numbs.”

People don’t understand, she continued. “You know in Holland you can take 16 weeks off after you have a baby. But when you lose your baby, which is far, far more painful — physically and emotionally — you are only allowed three days off work? That says it all. That’s how we deal with death in Holland.”

Pragmatic self-interest has also played a part in tempering the Netherlands’ response to MH17. It depends on economic and political ties with other, larger countries. And, as a small nation, it is hard to act alone.

To impose stiffer sanctions, the government would have required the EU’s support, including from “Putin’s friends in Europe like Viktor Orban,” said Jan Marinus Wiersma — a former member of the European parliament and now with the Clingendael Institute of International Relations.

The Netherlands also needs Russia’s gas and its consumers, for Dutch flowers and other agricultural products. As de Borst points out, “We’re angry with Russia, but we like it when our homes are warm.”

He is now one of a small group still actively campaigning for justice for the victims of MH17. Last month, they placed 298 empty chairs in the shape of an aircraft outside the Russian mission in The Hague.

But de Borst now backs the government’s strategy. Copying the American approach of a military response, as he had suggested in the immediate aftermath, would have backfired. “Then we would have had a real fight. Maybe a Third World War, for what? That wouldn’t bring our children back. I think the Dutch approach is best.”

The Netherlands’ allies have signalled their support too. On the eve of President Putin’s summit meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Finland, the foreign ministers of the G7 countries issued a statement calling on Russia “to account for its role” in the downing of MH17.

However, one politician in the Dutch ruling coalition, Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, has been arguing for tougher measures against the Russian government. He wants to see the Netherlands introduce its own version of the U.S. Magnitsky Law to punish Putin and other senior Kremlin officials for their refusal to cooperate with the investigation.

Despite the voluminous stacks of evidence prosecutors have collected, they still need more information, including from witnesses, to identify the suspects. When they released their most recent report, the JIT issued a list of 11 questions asking for help identifying those involved.

But even if suspects are identified, they would still have to be extradited—an unlikely outcome given that there is no extradition treaty between Moscow and The Hague. And in a statement this May, Russia’s veteran Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made clear that the Kremlin was sticking to its position of defiance, dismissing the evidence that had been presented, and condemning Dutch and Australian pressure on his country as “inappropriate.”

One option is for the planned tribunal near Schiphol airport to conduct trials in absentia. Another alternative being considered is an out of court settlement. The Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok has said that the Netherlands and Australia — which had 27 nationals on the plane — would seek unspecified financial damages.

But what the families really want is justice.

When they composed their message for their memorial bench, De Borst and other relatives added three more words in Russian, which translate as: “Humanity Is More Important Than Politics.”

“I felt adrenalin,” he said, recalling the day when they carried the bench here. It sent an important message from the families, he continued, looking towards the Russian mission beyond the trees. “The Russians want to make things foggy. But we know the truth.”

Yet that may still not be enough, he admitted. “We were raised in Holland to be honest. This country [Russia] is not honest. We can’t understand it. It’s something in our DNA.”

“Maybe it’s that same DNA that keeps the tears away.”

The post Holland’s struggle with its 9/11 appeared first on Coda Story.

“To be a Eurasianist should be cool, it should be stylish.”

“Cool” is not the first word you would use to describe the scene. I am in a small conference room in Minsk, at the Belarus office of a Russian government agency called “Rossotrudnichestvo.” Linked to the Foreign Ministry, you could translate it as the “Russian Cooperation Agency,” and some describe it as the soft-power arm of the Kremlin. The crowd, divided roughly evenly between Russians and Belarusians, is a wonky-looking mix of rumpled middle-aged academics and eager students.

The advocate for Eurasian cool is Yuri Kofner, a fresh-faced 20-something from Moscow. The topic is how to make the Eurasian Union more popular in Belarus. It is one of the five member states of the supranational body launched by Russia in 2014 with great fanfare. Since then, depending on your perspective, it is either becoming a Russia-centered counterweight to Western groupings like the European Union, or drifting into irrelevance,

Kofner is dedicated to making sure it’s the former. “We need to do the same thing that attracts people to Europe,” he tells his audience. A Eurasianist is “a new patriot,” he argues, loyal to the idea of Eurasia, with Russia at its heart. “Europe has become boring for us,” he continues, “but that’s what we need to develop, that style.”

The Eurasian Union did seem to have style, even swagger, in its early days. In the run-up to its launch, Russian President Vladimir Putin called it “epoch-making,” imbuing it with the grand, anti-Western ideology of Eurasianism. Hillary Clinton, then the U.S. Secretary of State, helped feed that narrative by describing the Eurasian Union as a cover for Russian efforts to “re-Sovietize the region.”

But so far, it hasn’t lived up to that billing. No more states want to join its five members — Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as Russia. There’s even a faint sense of embarrassment in Moscow over the whole project. And the West is now more concerned about Russia’s cyber-meddling and continuing war on Ukraine. Meanwhile, China’s ambitious “One Belt, One Road” program, which covers much of the Eurasian Union’s territory, seems to be advancing decisively.

Yet in the meantime the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), as it is formally known, has become a fact of life. At least 1,000 people work at its Moscow headquarters, engaged in workaday bureaucratic tasks like coordinating financial markets and standardizing pharmaceutical regulations across the five member states. It has cut red tape for Kyrgyz labor migrants in Moscow and spawned an ersatz banana export industry in Belarus. But its economic impact has been negligible, analysts say. And Putin rarely mentions the EEU these days. So rarely, in fact, that I thought he had quietly abandoned his grand geopolitical ambitions for the organization.

But when I suggested this to people studying it, I got some pushback. If the Kremlin talks about the geopolitical side, it “only makes people upset,” said one economist I met in Kazakhstan. “They’re still doing this ideological work,” he added, “just more quietly.” And the person leading this effort, I was told repeatedly, is Yuri Kofner.

So that’s how I found myself in the conference room in Minsk.

There are really two Eurasian Unions. One is economic — based on a free trade pact. The other is geopolitical and ideological, driven primarily by Russia’s desire to remain a global power.

Kofner is a standard-bearer for both. He is doing his PhD dissertation on non-tariff barriers to trade in the Eurasian Union, and is the head of a new Center for Eurasian Studies in Moscow. He also runs the Eurasian Movement of the Russian Federation, which is devoted to promoting the idea that there is a unique “Eurasian” civilization in Russia and its neighbors, distinct from both East and the West.

In the corner of the conference room hangs a purple flag with an eight-pointed star, which some Eurasianists have informally adopted as their banner. Kofner’s Eurasian Movement website explains that it is a symbol common to Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, while the colour represents “a synthesis between Europe (blue) and Asia (red), Slavs (red) and Turks (blue), tradition (blue) and revolution (red), the market (blue) and planning (red).”

Kofner explained that his initiation into Eurasianism began while he was a student at the Moscow Institute for International Relations (MGIMO), the elite university training ground for Russia’s future diplomats. Reading the writings of classical Eurasianists and Slavophiles was an eye-opener. “They expressed what I had always thought about Russia, but couldn’t put into words,” he said. “It’s not an underdeveloped Europe, but an independent, unique world — a Eurasian civilization.”

That led him to set up a student “Eurasianist Club.” It is clearly the civilizational side of the Eurasian idea that most animates him, as he repeatedly referred to its economic agenda as “boring.”

But Eurasianism can be a hard sell. For many outside Russia, talk of trying to make Eurasianism “cool” just sounds like a new way of dressing up Russian chauvinism and imperialism. That strain of Eurasianism is exemplified by Russia’s most prominent Eurasianist, the controversial philosopher Alexander Dugin, who is also known for his openly ultra-nationalist and anti-Western views. For many outside Russia, talk of trying to make Eurasianism “cool” just sounds like a new way of dressing up Russian imperialism.

Kofner knows him personally, but tells the Minsk gathering that Dugin “distorts the true ideas of Eurasianism.” He goes further in his writings, arguing that the philosopher is wrong to focus so much on the perceived threat of Western liberalism. The real divide, Kofner says, is between “Eurasian authoritarian liberalism and Western monetary fascism.”

Far from being a Russian imperialist project, Kofner argues, Eurasianism offers a way for smaller Eurasian states to protect themselves against the imposition of foreign, Western values. (He does not address the fact that this could still be seen as another kind of Russian imperialism). To support his case, he points out that the vote of each member — from tiny Armenia to giant Russia — has equal weight. Focusing on Belarus for his audience, he argues that it should maintain “an identity that looks both to the West and to the East.”

Yet even this friendly crowd is skeptical. One young Belarusian academic, Igor Avlasenko, highlights what he sees as the “contradictions” in Russia’s position, ostensibly promoting the Eurasian Union while acting very much as a lone big power. He pointed out that Putin had recently approvingly quoted Tsar Alexander III’s famous line that “Russia has only two allies, its army and its navy.” None “of the other members of the Eurasian Union were mentioned,” Avlasenko adds.

Another participant perhaps unwittingly highlights the central contradiction of the project — as he calls for other member states to have a greater role in driving the Eurasian Union and its ideology. If Russia comes up with an idea, “that is imperial ambition,” says Kirill Koktysh. “But who could accuse, say, Belarus of having imperial ambitions?” he continues. “It’s kind of funny, right?”

Outside of think tank conference rooms, it’s hard to measure the real-world impacts of the Eurasian Union. Its launch has coincided with a number of other large economic trends in the region: an economic crisis caused in large part by low oil prices, Western sanctions against Russia, and many EEU currencies seeing significant devaluations.

It is hard “to decouple” these trends from the effects of joining the EEU, said Roman Mogilevskii, an economist at the University of Central Asia in Bishkek. “If you clean out these major shocks, the effects of the Eurasian Union are not as big as everyone expects. You have some positives and some negatives.”

Adding to the confusion is the fact that the debate around the EEU is highly politicized, with proponents tending to be pro-Russia, and opponents anti-Russia. The volatile economic situation therefore makes it easy for both sides to cherry pick data to prove that the union is either a great success or a disaster.

A Russian European Union

The EEU is run day-to-day by the Eurasian Economic Commission from a nondescript office park in Moscow. Led by former Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan, the commission is developing plans to further integrate the member states’ economies — a common market for pharmaceuticals this year, electricity by 2019, and financial markets by 2025. It has signed a free trade agreement with Vietnam and has started negotiating similar pacts with Egypt, Iran, India, and Singapore.

The commision wouldn’t give me an interview. So I got a coffee at the Starbucks next to the main entrance instead, and people-watched as staff, dressed in business casual and carrying briefcases and backpacks, bustled in and out of the brick-and-glass headquarters building. The scene would not have looked out of place in, say, Brussels.

That is no coincidence. In spite of its ostensibly “Eastern” ideological orientation, the EEU is explicitly modeled on the European Union and its ethos of integration. Many of its key officials are also steeped in EU thinking, having been educated at European universities in the 1990s, according to Vasiliy Kashin of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “They know the European bureaucracy in detail,” he added. “They are not some Orientalists.”

And for all the political tumult these days over the merits of free trade and concerns about the EU’s long-term viability, its Russian counterpart is not offering anything radically different.

It is important to remember that the EEU was also borne out of rejection by Europe — as the Kremlin sees it. In the early years of his presidency, Putin tried to persuade the EU to allow Russia to integrate on its own terms, recognizing its special size and influence. This was “a really sincere” goal, according to Alexander Gabuev, a Russian foreign policy analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center.

But as the 2000s progressed, Putin decided such efforts were futile, and that the West had no intention of treating Russia as an equal. President George W. Bush’s unilateral invasion of Iraq cemented his view that the U.S. wanted to monopolize global power instead. And he saw the revolutions in neighboring states like Ukraine and Georgia — leading to anti-Russian leaders gaining power — as the start of a Western conspiracy aimed ultimately at Russia. He cracked down on domestic opposition in response, further alienating Europe.

The Kremlin concluded that Russia needed to be “the center of gravity in the post-Soviet space,” says Gabuev, enabling it “to talk on an equal footing” with the EU and the wider West. And this became the major political idea behind the EEU.

Gabuev was wearing a hoodie when we met. He is a former journalist who used to cover Russian foreign policy and speaks fluent, American-accented English. He reminded me of a 2011 piece Putin wrote for the newspaper Izvestiya — during his brief period as prime minister — in which he laid out his vision of the EEU as a “supranational union that could become one of the poles of the modern world.” It would be a bridge, he hoped, “between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific region.”

Yet even those hopes for the Eurasian Union’s role faded, as Putin saw new threats coming from the West. By 2013, he had returned to the presidency, and the EU was preparing to sign “association agreements” with Armenia and Ukraine. The Kremlin concluded that Russia needed to be “the center of gravity in the post-Soviet space,” enabling it “to talk on an equal footing” with the EU and the wider West. — Alexander Gabuev, Moscow Carnegie Center

Moscow responded by announcing a major arms deal with Armenia’s enemy, Azerbaijan, and floated rumors that it might increase the cost of gas supplies to the country. Yerevan got the hint: it abandoned the EU and said it would join the Eurasian Union instead.

Putin also began to put more emphasis on the concept of a Eurasian identity and civilization. In a landmark speech in 2013 — only two weeks after Armenia had turned its back on Western Europe — he said the EEU was not just about mutually beneficial agreements, but “a project for maintaining the identity of nations in the historical Eurasian space.” But his efforts to woo Ukraine into the Eurasian fold ended in disaster.

When Ukraine’s President, Viktor Yanukovych, announced that he, too, would turn his back on the EU in favor of the EEU, the Maidan protests erupted. That led to his ouster in 2014 and a new anti-Kremlin government taking over. Putin responded by annexing Crimea and backing the war in Eastern Ukraine, destroying relations with the West but also any hopes of luring Ukraine into the Eurasian Union.

For Eurasianists, the geographic boundaries of “Eurasia” are pretty hazy. But one thing they are sure of is that Ukraine is an integral part of it. So as they see it, a Eurasian Union without Ukraine is no Eurasian Union at all.

“We lost someone along the way,” quipped the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, when the EEU was formally launched in May 2014. “I mean the Ukraine that started this hard work together with us.” Putin was visibly annoyed. And Gabuev says he has heard some senior Kremlin officials say privately that launching the EEU at that point was “premature.”

You're browser does not support HTML5 video. You may download this video instead.

Putin still sounds bullish about the project when he mentions it—most recently in his annual marathon news conference. It is “our huge joint achievement,” he told his live audience, before adding: “there is always a lot of criticism, but the numbers show that our decisions were right and that we are moving in the right direction.” But gone now are the lofty references to identity and new civilizations.

Some believe the EEU has become as much a defense mechanism as a mask for imperialist expansion. A key reason for its launch was to prevent “another Ukraine,” according to a “Kremlin-connected insider” quoted in a study of the Eurasian Union for an EU-linked security think tank. The goal is to lock member states into a Russian orientation, even when their leaders change. Putin’s nightmare is the death or removal of Lukashenko in Belarus and Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan, the EU report’s source said. They are both strongmen leaders, but presiding over weak institutions and Putin wants to ensure their successors “have no choice” but to stay inside Moscow’s embrace.

The EEU also helps the Kremlin block member states from pursuing bilateral relationships that it regards as threatening its interests. For example, if Armenia wanted to sign a free trade deal with its neighbors Georgia or Iran, it couldn’t. That authority is now vested in the Eurasian Union. Being a member is “not allowing us to develop our economy, our ties with other countries,” complains Edmon Marukyan, an Armenian MP leading a campaign to pull out.

But by the same token, Russia’s freedom of manoeuvre is also constrained. The group operates on a consensus basis, with every state getting a veto, a concession the Kremlin agreed to because it thought that was the only way it could get Ukraine to join. It means, for instance, that Armenia has veto power over Russia’s trade policy. “For me that’s insane,” Gabuev says, before adding this telling caveat. “Ok, Armenia is not a problem because you can always pressure them and they literally never object to anything.”

Belarus, however, is different in Gabuev’s view, because it has “tough, nationalist-oriented people on the commission who are pushing the interests of Belarusian industry.” This, he says, “definitely limits Russia’s ability to do stuff it could be doing on its own.”

In fact, member states have proved frustratingly independent from Moscow at times. When the West imposed sanctions on Russia in response to its annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin tried to get the EEU to impose its own counter-sanctions. But the other member states refused to go along, forcing Russia to go it alone in blocking certain Western products. Belarus responded creatively, importing Western goods and re-exporting them, duty-free, to Russia, resulting in “Belarusian” bananas and salmon appearing in Russian supermarkets.

Even the structure of the union represents a major Russian concession to the demands of its other members, particularly Belarus and Kazakhstan. Both states demanded that it was only a free trade agreement, specifically excluding any political component, and this was enshrined in the formal name: the Eurasian Economic Union. From Russia’s point of view, Ukraine is an integral part of the historical Eurasian space. And so from a pure Eurasianist perspective, a Eurasian Union without Ukraine is no Eurasian Union at all.

But the Kremlin has not given up on turning the EEU into something bigger. One proposal that regularly comes up is to start a common currency, in spite of Belarus and Kazakhstan regularly insisting that they want to keep with their own money.

Less than three years into its existence, proponents of the Eurasian Union say it is still too early to judge its record. “The EU has existed for 60 years and only this year has it eliminated mobile phone roaming charges,” says Yuri Kofner.

His work is a sign that the Kremlin still harbors big ambitions for the union, even if they have been put on hold for the moment. Kofner is one of the Kremlin’s “intellectual entrepreneurs,” says Yuval Weber, a professor at the Higher School of Economics. They are people who can be funded relatively cheaply and kept in reserve in case they are useful one day. The government may need another “Dugin-like figure” in the future, says Weber, but someone who is “cleaner and more presentable to foreigners.”

Kofner barely hides his impatience for the Eurasian Union to move faster and be bolder. He acknowledges the anxieties of other members, but argues that working with Russia is in their long-term interests. “Russia in its bigness, in its vastness, is of course taking bigger steps than other countries,” he told me, trying to distil his thinking. Russians “want to go forward, but they know if they go forward at the normal Russian pace the other countries will say wait, it’s imperialism again. And Russia doesn’t want people to think that, Russia doesn’t need this. It just wants to go forward normally.”

And this new face of Eurasianism says he is not alone. Kofner tells the Minsk gathering that many of the EEU’s top technocrats have Eurasianist sympathies. And his Eurasianist Movement includes a cross-section of business-people, NGO staff and civil servants, as well as people working directly for the EEU.

“We have people wearing their insignia under their jackets,” Kofner says. “This is a long-term effort to promote ideologically patriotic Eurasianists, not oddballs but people who really want to make this happen.”

Eurasia may not be “cool” yet, but it still has plenty of life in it.

Illustrations by Aleksandra Krasutskaya

This piece is produced by Coda Network — a collaboration of independent newsrooms. Its partners include Coda Story, Ukrayinska Pravda, Spektr.Press, Kloop, Hetq and TOK.TV.

The post Is this Putin’s utopia? appeared first on Coda Story.

But he is also clear about his views. “Russia today has a spiritual plan to rescue Europe, with traditional values, a strong state and a multipolar world.” Given Russia’s power plays across Europe, some here in Bulgaria think Malinov and his movement have a bigger political goal — to move the country further into the Kremlin’s orbit.

Since Malinov took over as leader eight years ago, his “Russophiles” have been busily erecting plaques and statues to people they regard as heroes of past conflicts involving the Russians. That includes the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish war which liberated Bulgaria from Ottoman control, and even the 1944 Soviet invasion that put the country behind the Iron Curtain.

Monument Battle

It is also why, Malinov says, they protect old monuments, among them a giant display in central Sofia of Soviet soldiers fighting in World War II. It has often been defaced — prompting protests from Moscow — including one time when it was repainted in the colors of the Ukrainian flag in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

“Memory is very important to us,” says Malinov.

The Russian language is also important; the Russophiles have organized nationwide festivals of Russian poetry and dance for children (called “Let There Always Be Sunshine”), and helped fund Russian-language courses in more than 300 kindergartens across Bulgaria.

It’s all part of Malinov’s mission to encourage Bulgarians to embrace Russia “on the basis of historical traditions, Orthodox Christianity and Slavic ideas and values.”

This year, the Russophiles sponsored trips to Bulgaria for Russian military cadets who had won a history-essay contest overseen by Russia’s Heritage Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting the country’s history. Writers of the top three essays about the Russo-Turkish War traveled to Bulgaria to visit “sites of Russian glory.”

The Heritage Foundation is headed by a familiar name to Russia-watchers in the Balkans (of which Bulgaria is considered part). Leonid Reshetnikov, someone Malinov calls his friend, was known for his “extremely hawkish” views in his previous job at the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. He also compiles an annual ranking of “Russophobic foreign journalists, and last year Reshnetnikov said it was “time [for Russia] to return to the Balkans.” “Russia today has a spiritual plan to rescue Europe, with traditional values, a strong state and a multipolar world.”

Reshetnikov and Malinov also have a friend in common — Russian investment banker Konstantin Malofeev, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. and the European Union for alleged financial support to pro-Russian forces in Ukraine.

In 2015, Malinov and Malofeev joined forces to attempt a takeover of Bulgaria’s TV7, a privately owned entertainment station. In an interview at the time, Malofeev described his relationship with Malinov as “very close” and predicted a “brilliant future” for the Russophiles.

But that “brilliant future” has still to materialize. The TV7 takeover ultimately failed and the station has since closed. Malinov failed to win a seat in this year’s parliamentary elections, running on the far-right United Patriots list, after pulling out of the Bulgarian Socialist Party on the grounds that it was behaving like an “enemy of Russia.”

They have one guaranteed source of support — the older generation who still remember the Soviet Union. According to one recent survey by Alpha Research, a market-research agency, 95 percent of Bulgarians over 60 view Russia positively. “They are the keepers of this trend to move closer to Russia,” says Alpha’s Boryana Dimitrova. But the Russophiles have struggled to win wider support, especially among the young.

Malinov and the Russophiles can’t be counted out though. They claim 10,000 people came to their annual festival-style meeting, where they were selling T-shirts with images of Vladimir Putin, Josef Stalin and Bulgaria’s Communist-era leader, Todor Zhivkov.

The movement matters “as a legal vehicle” to spread a Kremlin-friendly point of view, argues Martin Vladimirov, an analyst at Sofia’s Center for the Study of Democracy. In that way, he says, “Malinov does have an impact.” Dimitrova echoes this, saying Moscow is more than happy to have homegrown groups like the Russophiles acting as its advocate.

And though they have admit to “financial difficulties” in their most recent annual report, the Russophiles say they’ve seen an increase in donations and sponsors over the last year, though they won’t say who from publicly.

But at the Monument to the Soviet Army, there is little sign of Malinov’s steadfast pro-Russian message connecting.

Three teenagers are perched above, drinking bottles of beer with their feet dangling down over the heroic-looking statues. For the moment, the monument is back to its usual dark, greenish-grey, but spray-painted below are three words in Bulgarian:

“Boli me fara” — “I don’t care.”

The post The monumental obsession of Bulgaria’s Russophiles appeared first on Coda Story.

Surrounded by dictionaries and reference books in Swedish and Russian, Stefan Lindgren, a translator in his late sixties, is one of a small but vocal band of Swedes who think that Swedish mainstream media has misrepresented Russia as a foe rather than a friend, and want to present an alternative view.

“If you look at developments in Russia, it by and large meets the criteria we would have for a democracy — they have elections, anyone can form a political party, and they have a media that is actually more pluralistic than our own here in Sweden,” Lindgren claimed during a recent interview.

That means, he argued, that “the same old anti-Russian propaganda” no longer makes sense.

An avowed socialist, Lindgren, like others in left-leaning circles, believes that Swedish media’s negative portrayal of Russian domestic and foreign policies is linked to Sweden’s need to justify to the population its partnership with NATO. Opposition to NATO and a commitment to neutrality run strong among Swedes.

The current government is skeptical about joining the alliance, but, with an eye on Russia’s muscle-flexing, last year signed a cooperation agreement that allows NATO operations in and around Sweden in time of war.

It also has reintroduced conscription to respond “to the security change in our neighborhood.”

Nonetheless, Lindgren, who considers himself an expert on Russia, maintains that the establishment has got it all wrong. He has set up a news site which seeks to expose “false” reporting on a range of topics, including about Russia.

He also sits on the board of the Swedish-Russian Friendship Association, a group drawn from the Russian Diaspora and “far left,” who routinely target journalists and academics who cover Russian foreign policy, the non-profit Swedish Institute for International Affairs charged earlier this year. “In Sweden, it’s like the Soviet Union, with the newspapers DN as Pravda and Svenska Dagbladet as Izvestiya,” Lindgren protested, referring to two of the largest Swedish dailies. “Bearing that in mind, I don’t think we’re in any position to go shouting at Russia.”

Lindgren did not address such a role — or the “systematic trolling” which these journalists and academics supposedly endure — but does not conceal his antipathy for mainstream Swedish media coverage of Russia.

“In Sweden, it’s like the Soviet Union, with the newspapers DN as Pravda and Svenska Dagbladet as Izvestiya,” Lindgren protested, referring to two of the largest Swedish dailies. “Bearing that in mind, I don’t think we’re in any position to go shouting at Russia.”

A common complaint from Sweden’s political fringes is about “åsiktskorridoren,” or “the opinion corridor,” a narrow space for debate in which commonly held views that diverge from establishment opinions are unwelcome and consensus encouraged.

To share their own views, Russia sympathizers don’t count only on leftists. They look also to a string of hardline conservative news sources that have emerged over the past several years since the populist Sweden Democrats, supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump, began to gain elected office. Such outlets routinely reprint Lindgren’s writing, including from his opinion blog.

One of the re-publishers is Fria Tider (Free Times), an online newspaper founded in 2009 with the slogan “Give Swedish media a swift right hook!”

With a strongly anti-EU line, it publishes op-eds by libertarians and members of the anti-immigration, isolationist right, peppered with news stories refuting mainstream reporting on crime and corruption, among other topics. Two of its favorite targets are the publicly funded TV channel SVT and Radio Sweden.

Lindgren’s latest contribution to Fria Tider, from last September, focused on “debunking” a series of media claims about the presence of Russian ground troops in Syria and the risks of Russia’s Nordstream gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea.

Nothing suggests that Fria Tider, which is registered in Estonia, is controlled by Russia. But its view of Sweden is one the Kremlin would happily endorse.

It routinely promotes content from sites such as the radical right-wing Breitbart News Network, formerly run by chief Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, that have a taste for cultural nationalism, media-bashing and sensationalist crime stats.

It actively promoted content from the Kremlin-financed news site Sputnik until 2016, when Sputnik dropped its Swedish-language coverage. (Sputnik, however, still uses Fria Tider as a source for Swedish news.)

Fria Tider’s content reaches more than a fringe. Global ranking service Alexa places the outlet among the country’s top 200 sites, with a popularity comparable to regional newspapers.

What effect, if any, outlets like Fria Tider can have on Swedish voters is not clear. But its coverage could prove of increasing interest as Sweden approaches its 2018 general election.

In January, the security services announced an operation to prevent Russian disinformation from affecting the election’s outcome. Security analysts have identified the Sweden Democrats as among the likely potential beneficiaries of any such manipulation.

Lindgren maintains, though, that even the Sweden Democrats, once positive about Putin, have begun to toe the line on Russia since entering parliament in 2010.

Others are not so sure.

Last fall, a public debate erupted over the government’s vulnerability to Russian intelligence operations after a Russia-born parliamentary aide for the Sweden Democrats was reported to have been involved in a property deal with a Russian businessman reportedly married to a Russian tax official.

Fearing a potential security risk, Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist asked the party to review the transaction, media reported. The episode, and the aide’s practice of writing op-eds under pseudonyms, also prompted the press to raise larger questions about parliamentary security.

Claiming that he had been smeared by the media, the aide eventually left his post. He denies any wrongdoing, insists that he opposes Russian President Vladimir Putin, and has remained in Sweden, running a “whistleblowing” blog.

Yet the right wing is not the only cause for controversy over alleged disinformation about Russia, according to the Swedish Institute for International Affairs. It also pointed the finger at the left-wing Aftonbladet.

The report unleashed a war of words between different branches of the media, with the national tabloid Expressen publishing a list of alleged Kremlin sympathizers.

Martin Aagård, one of the Aftonbladet culture journalists identified as pro-Russian, hit back.

“I don’t think this is an evil conspiracy. I think it is a question of sheer incompetence, and a substantial misunderstanding of journalism,” he wrote in a January 9 response in Aftonbladet to the accusations. “Whatever the cause, this witch-hunt has to stop now.”

Last July, Aagård authored an article called “The Invasion That Never Happened” about how Swedish media snap up reports about alleged Russian aggression and preparation for attacks on Sweden. He had also written about extreme Ukrainian nationalists, but said that highlighting such individuals merely reflected a commitment to pluralism.

Aftonbladet, however, now senses the need to add disclaimers that qualify all its culture reporters’ articles as “opinion content.”

Lindgren and his fellow Russophiles, though, have no issue with traditional media’s concerns about legitimacy and trustworthiness.

“We need people who know more about Russia,” Lindgren said, “and, over time, those people will change [their] opinion maybe, and make it harder to isolate Russia in the future.”

The post Searching for Putin’s Swedish friends appeared first on Coda Story.

The Russian doctrine of information war is not concerned with ideology. It is a way for the state to confuse, dismay, delay and divide. Ideas are of interest in so far as they serve a tactical purpose.

The Kremlin’s post-2012 conservative stance, which has created an environment whereby TV hosts call on citizens to “burn the hearts of gay men,” is a case in point.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was probably telling the truth when he told a TV interviewer he had no problem with homosexuals. His administration is said to contain several, and some key members of the media elite are themselves discreetly gay. Being openly gay in macho Russia has never been particularly pleasant (think of attitudes to “fags” and “benders” in the UK and US in the 1970s), but gay-bashing was never a top topic and was based more on boorishness and ignorance rather than any religious position. As anyone who has ever lived in Russia knows, social culture there is hedonistic and, if anything, somewhat libertine; rates for abortion, divorce and children born out of wedlock are high. Church attendance is low. The US Bible belt it certainly isn’t.

To understand why marginalizing gay people work for Putin it’s worth going back to the beginning of the campaign. In 2011-2012, Putin faced a mounting wave of protests focusing on bad governance and corruption among the elites. He desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere. The opposition rock group Pussy Riot’s controversial “punk prayer” in Moscow’s central cathedral came as a Godsend to the Kremlin, allowing it to shift the national conversation away from corruption to its own definition of values. On TV, Jerry Springer-like shows ranted about witches, God, Satan and anal sex. Europe, which had been used by Putin’s opposition as a cypher for the rule of law and transparency, was now labeled “Gayropa.” Putin has managed to transform the struggle in Ukraine from a battle against corrupt kleptocracies into a clash of civilizations.

Domestically the ploy only half worked. Though the Kremlin managed to change the agenda, Putin’s ratings kept on falling (it would take military victory in Crimea to boost them). Internationally, however, it has been far more successful. Unlike in Russia there really are powerful, ideologically driven anti-LGBT movements in the US and Europe, and these groups now see Putin as an ally and help undermine the Western coalition against the Kremlin’s belligerent foreign policy. The idea that Russia is a genuine defender of conservative moral values, and that these values have some sort of geopolitical expression, helps bolster Putin’s status and feeds into the idea Russia has some sort of inherent zone of influence, that countries such as Ukraine are part of its “civilizational block,” and are destined to be in the Kremlin’s orbit. Putin has managed to transform the struggle in Ukraine from a battle against corrupt kleptocracies into a clash of civilizations.

In practice, of course, Russia is economically intertwined with the West. Russian TV is an odd hybrid: “Gayropa” rants by Kremlin hosts such as Dmitry Kyselev are followed by ads for Western brands and Russian franchises of Western TV formats, and these all represent potential pressure points for LGBT rights campaigners.

As this hybridity suggests, the increased frequency with which anti-gay messages crop up in Russian media is not due to an inherent culture, values, or ideology. When Western liberal intellectuals such as Bernard-Henri Lévy describe the war in Ukraine as a fight between “conservative” Russia and “liberal Europe,” they would do well to remember that they are in fact walking right into the Kremlin’s narrative trap.

The post Europe, Putin, and the ‘Gayropa’ Bait appeared first on Coda Story.