Weaponised Information and the Ukraine Crisis: The OW Lecture 2018

On Thursday 5 July, Daniel Sandford (OW 1984) gave an enthralling talk on the disparate nature of how the Ukraine Crisis of 2014 was reported.

The Oxford Festival of the Arts hosts an annual OW lecture, given by a prominent member of the school’s alumni community. Last year, John Leighfield CBE (OW 1957) analysed maps of Oxford for his talk, this year, it was the turn of BBC Home Affairs Correspondent Daniel Sandford, who turned his astute gaze to the recent revolution and referendum in Ukraine, during which he’d been reporting from the front as the BBC’s man in Moscow.

Daniel’s lecture focused primarily on the differences between the Russian media’s coverage of the crisis, and the rest of the world’s. He argued that Russia news channels, characteristically polished and professional in aesthetic, pumped out unverified findings that Daniel claimed could be called nothing else but propaganda.

With this in mind, Daniel considered information as a ‘weapon’, a vital tool in Russian’s campaign to annexe historically pro-Russian areas of Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, the questions that followed his talk centred around the modern phenomenon of ‘fake news’, and its place in the electoral campaigns of recent Western Leaders, and in the EU referendum.

The school would like to thank Daniel for taking time out of his busy schedule to talk on his experiences.