A self-styled “institution of progressive popular education” founded by a former U.S. senator and backed by top left-of-center intellectuals and leaders spent the days and weeks ahead of the bloody Russian assault on Ukraine pumping out misinformation, experts say.
Now it is desperately attempting to backtrack, in part by deleting tweets.
The Gravel Institute was born out of the 2020 presidential bid of eccentric late Alaskan Sen. Mike Gravel, and explicitly styled itself as a counterweight to right-wing YouTube phenomenon PragerU. Its stylish videos have included left-wing luminaries such as Cornel West and Slavoj Zizek and celebrities like comedian David Cross and voice actor H. Jon Benjamin. It announced a new board of directors earlier this month featuring bold-faced names like ex-Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner and Jacobin magazine founder Bhaskar Sunkara, neither of whom replied on the record to requests for comment.
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In recent days, the organization has issued multiple denunciations of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on his western neighbor, along with statements of support for anti-invasion Russian demonstrators and for Ukrainian citizens. The group hit those same points in an extensive statement to The Daily Beast on Friday.
“We stand in solidarity with Ukrainians and with the many Russians protesting the war, denounce Putin’s act of naked, horrific, and unconscionable aggression, and hope diplomacy can end the violence soon,” the group wrote. “We stand with the Ukrainian and Russian peoples against the aggression and violence of the Putin regime.”
But just as it was debuting its new leadership earlier this month, the Institute was pushing what experts called false or misleading material on its YouTube and Twitter accounts—material that sometimes aligned with narratives Putin and his proxies were simultaneously advancing.
On Feb. 18, the group published a YouTube video entitled “How America Funded Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis,” which, following online criticism, was renamed “America, Russia, and Ukraine’s Far-Right Problem.” The video reiterated several of the Kremlin’s favorite narratives: namely that Ukrainian nationalism is a Nazi-linked phenomenon born in the 1940s, and that it has taken root in Kyiv and the rest of the country, in opposition to its pro-Russian east.
“Ukrainian nationalism, formed in opposition to the Soviet Union, tended to have a strong right-wing flavor,” the video asserts. “In western Ukraine, there was more stress on a specifically Ukrainian identity, closer to Europe. In eastern Ukraine, meanwhile, people were more likely to stress their historic ties to Russia and the Russian language.”
In fact, Ukrainian national identity predates the Soviet Union by hundreds of years, stretching back to Cossack leaders who ruled the region in the 17th and 18th centuries. And in most of eastern Ukraine, more than 80 percent of voters cast ballots in favor of severing the country from Moscow in 1991; in no area did preserving the bond receive majority support.
The video also focused intensely on the supposed power of far-right parties Svoboda and Right Sector, both objects of obsession in Russian state media—and which, respectively, hold one and zero seats in the Ukrainian parliament, a fact the Institute’s documentary omitted. While emphasizing the influence these parties held in the past, and arguing the country’s neo-Nazis had become “increasingly powerful,” the documentary made no mention of the fact that current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and a native Russian speaker.
In fact, for several months in 2019, Ukraine was the only nation on Earth besides Israel to have both a Jewish president and a Jewish prime minister, when Zelensky led the country along with Volodymyr Groysman.
But most galling to Professor Yoshiko Herrera of the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia, was the video’s failure to explore Moscow’s interventions into Ukrainian affairs since independence. She described the video as “naive” and an example of the kind of “whataboutism” Putin promotes: pointing out questionable parties and pieces of legislation in other countries, and thereby reducing scrutiny on far worse abuses on the part of Russian authorities.
“It is a strategic distraction,” she said of the tactic. “Why would you put out a video like that that ignores the Russian interference into Ukrainian politics, Ukrainian elections?”
The timing of the Gravel video, released just as Putin massed armaments and regiments on the Ukrainian border and the U.S. warned of an imminent invasion, was also highly disturbing to the academic. Earlier this week, Putin characterized his unprovoked attack as an effort to “denazify” Ukraine.
"This alternative history of Ukraine, I don’t understand why an organization in good faith thinks they’re going to put out a story that is consistent with Putin propaganda at this moment and think people are going to take this seriously,” she said.
In fact, the Gravel Institute does not even mention the deployment of Russian soldiers into Ukrainian territory in the aftermath of pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovych’s ouster, instead asserting that “the far-right helped the country to fracture.”
In its statement to The Daily Beast, the Gravel Institute defended the accuracy of its video and asserted multiple experts reviewed its work before it went live on YouTube. It further maintained its video was never meant to be a comprehensive account of the situation in Ukraine, but instead a window into an under-examined aspect of the crisis. It made a similar claim in a pinned comment visible below the short film.
“The video covers a very small slice of a much broader conflict,” the group said. “The video does not claim to explain the entirety of the conflict, a point we highlighted in the video’s pinned comment, but merely to show how the American government ended up supporting and arming neo-Nazi groups that most Americans would despise.”
But this is at odds with how the group presented the video in one of its many since-deleted tweets, where it seemed to hold the production out as the real version of events precipitating the crisis.
“Everyone is talking about Ukraine. But what do we really know about it, and how it broke apart? This is the little-known story of Ukraine's civil war, and how America ended up in bed with some of its worst offenders—Ukraine’s neo-Nazis,” the memory-holed message to the nonprofit’s 375,000 followers read.
Similarly, the video’s description on YouTube characterizes the presentation as “the surprising, under-told [sic] of how Ukraine split apart, and the background to the civil war that has roiled the country since 2014.”
The video focuses heavily on the Azov Battalion, a roughly 1,000-man Ukrainian unit whose far-right roots The Daily Beast has explored in-depth. But the video makes no mention of the far-larger Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary outfit with neo-Nazi links and ties to Putin’s inner circle. The Daily Beast reported in January that one of Wagner’s most effusively neofascist units, which publicly shared grisly images of atrocities it committed during its 2014-2015 incursion into Ukraine, had announced plans to return to the battle-ravaged nation.
The Gravel production highlights the under-regulated flow of American resources to the Azov Battalion before Congress banned aid to the group in 2018. But it ignores Moscow’s eager and ongoing support for far-right organizations in Ukraine and across Europe.
In fact, when engaging with commenters who complained about the video’s bias, the Gravel Institute insisted, “Wagner is evil ofc but not known to express a neo-Nazi ideology,” a comment they would subsequently apologize for and retract.
That was one of just many claims Gravel stripped from its social media in the past week, claims that all seemed to echo Russian insistence that it had no intention to invade its neighbor. For days, the group repeatedly attacked intelligence reports that Putin would send the vast military force he had assembled on the edges of Ukraine into the country.
“It is exceptionally clear that the American media wants a war between Ukraine and Russia. It is even clearer that the American media doesn’t know the first thing about either country,” a vanished Feb. 14 post read.
The next day, in another since-disappeared tweet, it wrote: “A few days ago, the U.S. government and media said that Russia would invade Ukraine on Wednesday. Wednesday is tomorrow. Please remember that prediction when it does not come to pass.”
“Remember a few days ago, when the media said that Russia was going to invade Ukraine today? Whatever happened to that?” the group tweeted on Feb. 16.
The Institute expanded on this in a response tweet that went undeleted until The Daily Beast reached out for comment.
“They’re just printing whatever intelligence agencies tell them, and the intelligence agencies are basically making it up,” it tweeted.
The group continued to mock U.S. officials for their predictions, and blame Ukraine’s problems on “American diplomacy” right up until Putin announced his intention to unleash his forces.
Then, the erasure of the group’s statements began.
“It’s tweet-and-delete, tweet-and-delete with them,” said Sophie Fullerton, a human rights researcher at Columbia University. “It seems like they’re just spewing misinformation to see if they get a positive reaction or not. And if they get a positive reaction, they keep it up, and if they get a negative reaction, they’ll try to go back and clean it up.”
Fullerton began tracking the Gravel Institute’s activities since last October, when it posted and then removed a tweet lauding late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, infamous for persecuting dissenters and massacring prisoners before rebels brutally assassinated him in 2011.
“Under Gaddafi, Libya had free healthcare, free education for both men and women, free housing, and ultra-cheap electricity. Libya under Gaddafi had some of the highest rates of life expectancy, literacy, and per capita GDP in all Africa. Then, 10 years ago, the U.S. killed him,” the tweet read.
Fullerton pointed to Putin’s efforts to hijack legitimate criticism of U.S. foreign and domestic policy, which she suggested had deeply influenced left-wing discourse. She also noted that, despite the esteemed names that have associated themselves with the Institute, the rank-and-file of the organization consists of Sen. Gravel’s very young 2020 campaign staff, themselves Columbia undergraduates.
“People are attracted to the Gravel Institute because they assume these are legitimate people, a legitimate organization, that’s going to give them information,” Fullerton argued. “But it doesn’t delve into the complexities and nuances of these very serious issues. It’s this really simplistic view of how the world works.”
The Gravel Institute acknowledged errors, but insisted it was simply working off of Ukrainian intelligence reports and the views of some Russia experts.
“Where circumstances have proven us incorrect (i.e. on the invasion), we have removed our prior statements and publicly owned up to the mistake. That is and always has been our policy,” the group said.
But it argued that its skepticism was justified based on the U.S. government’s own history of falsehoods and misconduct, particularly since the 9/11 attacks.
“Our instinct to distrust American intelligence agencies, especially when they speak directly to public opinion, is grounded in their history of grotesque lies to justify horrific acts,” the organization wrote. “Every one of these lies has been covered extensively by your own outlet, and contributed to a very justified climate of skepticism and distrust.”
Professor Herrera, of the University of Wisconsin, agreed that suspicion and objections toward U.S. foreign and domestic policies are legitimate and warranted. Upholding a healthy democratic culture of debate while dealing with adversaries like Putin who promote division and diversion is extremely difficult. But acknowledging American and Ukrainian failures doesn’t have to mean excusing, ignoring, or downplaying Russian misdeeds.
Instead, she recommended “focusing on solving problems rather than on critique.”
“We need a movement toward addressing and solving real problems in America,” she said. “Let’s not substitute a discussion of America’s problems for calling out serious threats to us.”
