On February 10,  2022, the students of Disinformation and Propaganda Studies, the joint program of IDFI and the University of Georgia, as well as to the students of the School of Social Sciences, UG had a chance to attend the workshop.

The workshop was devoted to the matters such as debunking fake news spread by the governments and the military on the frontline. Fact-checking mainstream media and the outlets of Russian proxies in the “Grey zones” from Crimea to Abkhazia.

The main speaker, Aleksei Bobrovnikov,witnessed the Russian annexation of Crimea and a series of military crimes on the demarcation line with the occupational forces in Ukraine. Now he is working in the Caucasus on the assignment of the Nobel-prize winning “Novaya Gazeta.”

During this workshop, the participants had a chance to discuss the history of hybrid warfare from a perspective of a first-hand witness keeping in mind that in the hybrid war we are all facing nowadays, any of us could become such a witness at any given time.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: The print and television journalist Aleksei Bobrovnikov was born in Kiev. He has published numerous short stories and essays in various Ukrainian publishing houses and weekly magazines. Bobrovnikov reported on the Majdan protests in Kiev as early as the beginning of 2014, and since 2015 he has been researching smuggling routes in the embattled Eastern Ukrainian Donbas. As a result of this research, he received several threats. His editors put Bobrovnikov under pressure and finally forced him to resign in June 2016. He went into hiding in Western Ukraine and left the country in 2016. From 2017 to 2018 he was a guest of the Hamburg Foundation for Politically Persecuted People. Afterward, he became a fellow of the Writer-in-Exile programme of the German PEN.

The seminar was held with the support of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sida.