Imperial Russia saw the nation as the sea into which all the other Slavic cultures flowed. The idea persists today not only in Russia’s attitude towards its neighbourhood, but also in the way eastern Europe is studied in the West.
The truth about MH17
An interview with Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins
In this episode of the Eurozine podcast ‘Gagarin’, we talk to Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins about the ongoing MH17 trial and the recent OPCW report on the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria. Higgins describes how disinformation works in both cases, who is behind it and what motivates them, and how Bellingcat remains objective in a hyper-partisan media field.
At the beginning of June, Eurozine editor Simon Garnett interviewed Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins about the ongoing trial in Amsterdam of four men charged with murder in connection with the shooting down of MH17 . Higgins also talked about a recent report of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons on chemical weapons attacks at Al Lataminah, northern Syria, in 2017. We were particularly interested in hearing about Higgins’s experience with pro-Russian and pro-Syrian disinformation, and how Bellingcat navigates this hyper-partisan online terrain. The interview was published in Eurozine on 4 June 2020.
Gagarin, the Eurozine podcast is a series of conversations with authors and editors from throughout Europe and beyond. Our 90+ partners are journals, magazines and associates from Belgium to Belarus, from Norway to Bulgaria, publishing literature and analyzing politics, reflecting on culture and bringing diverse voices to a joint conversation.
Please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review so that more people can find us. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, so you’ll always know what’s worth thinking about.
Published 19 August 2020
Original in English
First published by Eurozine
© Eliot Higgins / Eurozine
PDF/PRINT
Invest in insight!
After over 20 years of publishing for free, Eurozine needs your support to get through an exceptionally lean year.
Become a Patron and get exciting perks for your help!
Want to hear a human voice?
Listen and subscribe wherever
you get your podcasts.
Newsletter
Subscribe to know what’s worth thinking about.
Related Articles
Intellectual violence
The militarization of education in Russia
Related Articles
Instrumentalizing summer camps
From the Soviet Union to Russia’s war against Ukraine
Ex-USSR youth pioneer camps – once heavily supervised yet remembered surprisingly positively – have become sites of trauma, where Ukrainian children are being deported en masse, incarcerated and re-educated. The complex legacy that Russia is exploiting encompasses infrastructure, ideology and personal memory, raising questions about the role of individuals in implementing state policy.