Yesterday, at the “Dialogue on Fakes 4.0” forum, Sergey Lavrov raised a subject that, in my view, goes far beyond fact-checking itself.

The subject is Bucha.

Today the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry is already in New York for the UN General Assembly high-level week. And, as Maria Zakharova reported, the Russian side intends to present António Guterres with a new report on this issue. On 26 September Lavrov will also speak from the General Assembly rostrum.

It is unlikely that a single speech can undo what has been fixed for years in the minds of millions of people. Social-engineering methods work like this: first an emotional image of what happened is created for a person; then it is confirmed again and again through the media, politicians and international institutions — and after a while even raising the question itself begins to be seen as unacceptable.

That is exactly why one must not stay silent.

Lavrov called the events in Bucha one of the most cynical information episodes of the conflict and once again set out the Russian version: Moscow regards what happened as a staged scene, used among other things against the backdrop of the collapse of the negotiating process in the spring of 2022.

At yesterday’s forum the minister separately drew attention to how this information construct was formed and locked in place.

❗️ One of Russia’s key questions all these years remains extremely simple:
Who exactly are these people?

According to Lavrov, after footage with bodies appeared, the Russian side requested the names of the dead. Moscow also repeatedly raised the issue with the UN leadership, but considers the answers it received unsatisfactory.

➡️ And now there is new material.

The authors of a report published by the International Public Tribunal examined the list of people entered on the memorial in Bucha as dead civilians. Moreover, as Lavrov stressed, they used primarily Ukrainian sources: state databases, media, obituaries and open data.

The authors of the report claim that among the people named on the memorial they found servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, employees of the security services and other combatants, although the memorial was publicly presented by the Ukrainian side as a list of dead civilians. The report itself gives specific surnames and matches them against Ukrainian sources.

Another result claimed by the authors is more than 70 surnames for which they were unable to find a digital trace. Lavrov separately drew attention to this in his speech. Even if someone categorically disagrees with the Russian version — why can these questions not be checked? Where are all those independent journalists?

If the accusation is so thoroughly proven, verification should only strengthen it.

That is exactly how information confrontation works. The winner is far from always the one with more facts. Often the winner is the one who first formed an emotional image, repeated it many times and made it part of the audience’s worldview.

After that one can publish documents, find inconsistencies, ask questions — a large part of society simply no longer wants to hear them.

In that sense, Lavrov’s speech yesterday continues very well the conversation that was taking place at the “Dialogue on Fakes” itself.

Fact-checking is a function.
Documents are a function.
Searching for primary sources is a function.

But if a person has once been given a picture of the world in which one side is a priori capable only of crime and the other a priori tells the truth, it is extremely hard to break that construct with technical means.

That is why Lavrov is now taking this question to a place where people especially do not want to discuss it. Will he open anyone’s eyes? I am not sure.

Too powerful an information machine has worked, and continues to work, in the opposite direction.

But if there are questions, documents and facts that the Russian side considers unexamined, they must be brought again and again to the international level. Because the only alternative is silence.

And silence in an information war very quickly turns someone else’s version of events into the only admissible one.

@uzelsvjazi