As the world awaited the Dutch Safety Board’s
official report on the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, Russia’s
oft-criticized state-run RT launched a smear campaign that experts say reveals nothing
more than desperation.
Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, a
collective of self-taught open-source intelligence analysts,
has earned perhaps the most ire for his research on the MH17 tragedy, which has
consistently offered evidence that pro-Russian separatists were responsible for
shooting down the civilian airliner on July 17, 2014.
Attacks on Higgins and Bellingcat by Russian
state-run media are nothing new, but after Higgins published a new report last
week, an RT reporter literally tried to hunt him down in London – even going so
far as to show up on his mother’s doorstep.
Higgins responded to the move by writing on
Twitter: “Russia Today is acting like an obsessive ex, God help me.”
The resulting
RT piece on Higgins focused not on his research and findings on MH17, but
entirely on the fact that he had supposedly “ducked” an interview.
The article’s video segment saw Anastasia Churkina –
daughter of Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations Vitaly
Churkin – identify Higgins as a “laid-off office worker” with no “higher
education” before cutting to a scene of another RT contributor visiting various
addresses in London in the hopes of surprising Higgins.
In the end, the only conclusion of the article seemed
to be that Higgins was not available for an interview.
“I
think RT’s behavior was really an act of desperation, and all they’ve really
done is made most people believe my work is more credible, otherwise why would
they have spent so much time and effort attacking a ‘clerk?’” Higgins told the
Kyiv Post on Oct. 11.
The
RT article in question derided Higgins as a “clerk” and “former admin worker”
with “no background or training in weapons.”
RT’s
coverage on Higgins has focused largely on attacking him personally –
questioning his credentials, and focusing on his personal background. Yet, as
Higgins noted, the attacks never question his research on MH17, and “they fail to directly address any specific points
we’ve made in our final report.”
“Then
they do the usual trick of using out-of-context quotes and ‘experts’ which they
generally find on conspiracy blogs to try to bolster the attack, but ultimately
to any reasonable person it looks like a crass smear campaign,” he said.
By
lashing out at Higgins, Russian media seems to be attempting to discredit the
entire Western narrative regarding MH17, which has focused on evidence that the
plane was shot down by pro-Russian separatists using an anti-aircraft weapon
provided by the Russian military.
Media
expert Vasily Gatov agreed with Higgins that the smear campaign had really only
succeeded in exposing one thing: that RT had no way to counter Higgins’findings.
“This is a classic method of propaganda … when
you cannot build a sensible, rational argument, attack the opponent with
personal insults and accusations. This attack at least destabilizes him as an
entity, engages emotions and, in most cases, requires ‘comments on the issue’
(meaning that the insulted opponent should spare some time and words to explain
that he is not guilty),” Gatov said.
“The
reason they spend the effort on such things is simple – they
“interpret” the mission they have (or orders from the Kremlin that
they perceive as a mission). The MH-17 report and sequential accusations are by
far the most damaging event to Russia’s ‘national interests’; if the report’s
conclusions coincide with the Bellingcat report, this justifies the existing
sanctions and perplexes the future ones,” he said.
The
MH17 investigation has always been a sore spot for Russia, which has
consistently fought back against the widely accepted Western narrative of
events with its own versions – versions that have largely been dismissed as
conspiracy theories in the international community. The Russian Defense
Ministry has insisted that a Ukrainian SU-25 jet shot down MH17; a media outlet
tied to the Defense Ministry claimed a CIA agent posing as a BBC reporter had
orchestrated the whole thing; and, most recently, Kremlin-friendly media
claimed a bomb had been on board the plane at the time of the catastrophe.
Russian
media have traditionally boosted their surge of conspiracy theories ahead of
major international events, like in July, when they went into propaganda
overdrive ahead of the United Nations Security Council’s vote on setting up an
international tribunal into MH17.
This
time around, RT’s frantic smear campaigns against Higgins seem to come as
retaliation for his MH17 reporting and a pre-emptive strike against the
findings of the Dutch Safety Board, which plans to release the results of its
own investigation on Oct. 13.
Russia
has repeatedly expressed its distrust of the Dutch Safety Board’s findings, as
well as the international community’s handling of the investigation as a whole.
Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov on Oct. 13 lashed
out at the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Ukraine, and the United States for
their “irregularities” in handling the catastrophe.
“Initially, they did not invite Malaysia, the owner of the
plane and the airline’s register location… They did not invite ICAO, which is
common. They adopted a UN Security Council resolution, ignored it and never
reported on its implementation. They did not remove plane debris and
bodies for a long time,” Lavrov was quoted as saying in Russian
media.
Dmitry
Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told journalists in Moscow a day before the
report’s release that “facts” provided to investigators by the Russian side
were being ignored “for unclear reasons.”
Staff writer
Allison Quinn can be reached at [email protected].
