Democracy & Elections

The Lawfare Podcast: The Information War in Ukraine

Jen Patja, Evelyn Douek, Quinta Jurecic, Shane Harris, Olga Lautman
Thursday, February 24, 2022, 12:00 PM

Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Olga Lautman, a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis—who has been tracking Russian disinformation in Ukraine—and Shane Harris, a reporter at the Washington Post—who has been reporting on the crisis.

Kyiv, Ukraine. (Trey Ratcliff, https://flic.kr/p/zBugL; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/)

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Over the last several weeks, Russian aggression toward Ukraine has escalated dramatically. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Feb. 21 that Russia would recognize the sovereignty of two breakaway regions in Ukraine’s east, Donetsk and Luhansk, whose years-long effort to secede from Ukraine has been engineered by Russia. Russian troops have entered eastern Ukraine as supposed “peacekeepers,” and the Russian military has taken up positions along a broad stretch of Ukraine’s border.

Along with the military dimensions of the crisis, there’s also the question of how various actors are using information to provoke or defuse violence. Russia has been spreading disinformation about supposed violence against ethnic Russians in Ukraine. The United States and its Western partners, meanwhile, have been releasing intelligence about Russia’s plans—and about Russian disinformation—at a rapid and maybe even unprecedented clip.

So today on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, we’re bringing you an episode about the role of truth and falsehoods in the Russian attack on Ukraine. Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Olga Lautman, a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis—who has been tracking Russian disinformation in Ukraine—and Shane Harris, a reporter at the Washington Post—who has been reporting on the crisis.


Jen Patja is the editor and producer of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.
Evelyn Douek is an Assistant Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. She holds a doctorate from Harvard Law School on the topic of private and public regulation of online speech. Prior to attending HLS, Evelyn was an Associate (clerk) to the Honourable Chief Justice Susan Kiefel of the High Court of Australia. She received her LL.B. from UNSW Sydney, where she was Executive Editor of the UNSW Law Journal.
Quinta Jurecic is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare. She previously served as Lawfare's managing editor and as an editorial writer for the Washington Post.
Shane Harris has written about intelligence, security and foreign policy for more than two decades. He is a staff writer with The Washington Post, covering U.S. intelligence agencies and national security. He was part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, for stories about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and efforts to overturn the presidential election. In 2019, he was part of the team that was a finalist for the Public Service award for coverage of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Shane has previously been a staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, and National Journal. He is the author of two books, "The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State" (Penguin Press, 2010) and "@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex" (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). He frequently appears on national and international television and radio. He is also a co-host of the weekly podcast "Chatter." Shane graduated from Wake Forest University in 1998. He lives in Washington.
Olga Lautman is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis focused on tracking Russian disinformation in Ukraine.

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