StopFake

Scores of Russian media reported this week that the Ukrainian military fired on a passenger bus in Donbas. The alleged shooting, they report, took place in the gray zone, the swathe of neutral territory between the Ukrainian army and the Russian backed separatists.

Are Western actions to blame for the steady deterioration in U.S.-Russia relations? While the Kremlin’s view of the West has long been hostile, the spread of “color revolutions” in the early 2000s acted as a catalyst.

The situation in the Baltic region militarily is “quite stable,” Andis Kudors says, not only because NATO has beefed up its defenses there but because Vladimir Putin is interested in the first instance in…

(PONARS Policy Memo) The weaknesses and inconsistencies of Russia’s recent actions toward the United States need to be explained.

On 15 December, Lithuania’s floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal at Klaipeda began trucking LNG to Polish, Estonian, and Lithuanian consumers.

Scores of Russian and Ukrainian media featured stories last month claiming the war in the eastern Ukrainian Donbas region, was causing a huge spike in AIDS.

Fakes: Crimean Tatars to support Putin in Russia’s March presidential election; Kyiv residents want Russian social media back; Ukrainian train arrives in Russia carrying grenades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYvh72RoJDA&t=1s

Plus: Lessons from Bolivia and Slovakia, and what’s the reach of fake news in the EU? By Laura Hazard Owen, for Nieman Lab The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with.

Most people in the West continue to make two “fatal” mistakes about the media in Putin’s Russia, Igor Yakovenko says.

In the first round of the Czech presidential election earlier this month, Jiri Drahos was variously portrayed -- without substantiation -- as a pedophile, a thief, and a communist collaborator.