Front Burner CBC

Peering inside Russia – and it’s complex web of state propaganda – presents a very different view of the war in Ukraine and who the real victims are.

As nations around the world condemn Russia’s invasion, many within Russia are supporting Russian president Vladimir Putin. How is Putin selling the war to the Russian people? Will thousands of anti-war protesters challenging the Kremlin make a difference to the government?

This week, Nothing is Foreign takes you inside the alternate reality being created by Russian state propaganda, explores how fear and new laws have choked off dissenting voices and listen in on the difficult conversations between a Ukrainian son and a Russian father in the war over disinformation.

Featuring:
Alexey Kovalev, investigative editor of Meduza.
Sergey Utkin, researcher and head of strategic assessment at Primakov Institute of World Economy and International relations.
Misha Katsurin, Kyiv resident and creator of Papapover.com.
Yulia Zhivtsova, anti-war protester in Moscow.

Oil prices in Canada skyrocketed this week as sanctions on Russian energy effectively shut the world’s third largest oil supplier out of the market following its invasion of Ukraine. The United States and the United Kingdom moved to ban Russian oil imports. Even the European Union, Russia’s biggest oil customer, announced its plan to slash Russian oil imports by two-thirds this year.


Although Canada has never really relied on Russian oil, the impact of sky-high oil prices is already being felt in Canada, as prices at the pumps remain at record highs across the country. It’s forcing a moment of reckoning inside Canada’s oilpatch, an industry facing a choice — transition away from fossil fuels or ramp up production. Today on Front Burner, we speak with CBC’s Kyle Bakx about the fork in the road for Canada’s energy future.

As he declared his war on Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin made an odd promise to a country with a Jewish president and an annual Pride parade: He said he was doing this to "de-Nazify" the country.

Sam Sokol, a reporter with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was taken back to a time moments eight years ago — when Russian media advanced fictitious stories about Jewish communities targeted in Ukraine, around the time that Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula.

Sokol is the author of Putin's Hybrid War and the Jews: Antisemitism, Propaganda, and the Displacement of Ukrainian Jewry. He has covered Ukrainian far-right movements in depth — and explained how those groups have been weaponized by Russian propaganda to legitimize the mass violence we are seeing today.

He's joining us to separate Putin's rhetoric from Ukraine's reality, and to break down what all this means for Ukrainian Jewish communities.

As pandemic restrictions continue to lift across the country, we’re joined by Zain Chagla, an infectious diseases physician at St. Joseph's Healthcare in Hamilton, for a look at where we are with COVID-19 in Canada, and how to weigh the risk factors for yourself. (And we promise — there’s plenty of good news!)

In a flash, a view of Ukrainian civilians fleeing down a street in Irpin becomes only concrete dust.


The scene captured in a video Sunday shows a mortar shell falling in the street, killing three family members and a family friend — including two children.

This is the kind of danger looming over the people of Ukraine. Some have decided to leave their homes and loved ones behind to risk an escape. Others who must stay are helping to ready a resistance to the overwhelming Russian military power.

CBC senior correspondent Susan Ormiston is in the city of Lviv in Western Ukraine, where she’s been talking to Ukrainians, both those who are fleeing and those getting ready to fight. Today, she brings us to a train station, a border crossing, a bomb shelter and a barricade, and explains how Ukrainians have made these impossible choices — if they had any choice at all.

A new battlefield in Ukraine has opened up as each side fights to control the narrative of the ongoing war.

Some experts say Ukraine and its allies are winning the information war by implementing a multifaceted strategy that includes pushing David and Goliath stories – even ones that may not be true – and creating a phone line where Russian parents can check in on their conscripted sons.

On the other side, Russia – a country known for its relative success in shaping international media narratives – is clamping down.

Today on Front Burner, Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow with the New America think tank, takes us to the front lines of the information war and explains why this fight matters.