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The Dogs of War
One night, while sitting alone in my hotel room, I clicked on a link posted by a Russian American blogger. He was, like me, also following the story of Ukraine’s fight for independence. The link connected me to a short video shot in a small town in Eastern Ukraine. The raw footage depicted a young newswoman surveying the damage of a recent shelling and then chasing after an armed man in fatigues. The man covered his face and said “outta my face, outta my face please” as he hurried past. Many readers posted comments that sought to establish the nationality of the speaker but none were definitive. The blend of American idiom and British accent had everyone confused.
Over the course of the next few days, I repeatedly circled back to the lively debate taking place in the comments section. There were hundreds of remarks that sought to identify the soldier’s accent, but few that called into question the source of the video. According to those who did question the provenance of the controversial video, the audio could have been dubbed, or the entire thing could have been staged.
I decided to dig a little deeper. Russia Today, otherwise known as RT, was the only major news site that had focused on the video. It was the basis of a news segment featuring commentary by Nebosja Malic, a Foreign Affairs analyst based in Washington, DC. Malic’s writing has been published in Russian Insider News…
