Professor stands by attending controversial Russian conference
CBC
A University of Manitoba professor is under fire for participating in an event organized by a Russian think-tank on Canada's sanctions list for spreading disinformation — during which, critics say, she helped Moscow's propaganda efforts against Ukraine.
Radhika Desai and her husband attended the Valdai Discussion Club, all expenses paid, in Sochi, Russia, earlier this month. The forum is billed as a wide-ranging conference about international issues. Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at it every year.
Desai then made international headlines when she asked Putin for his opinion on the scandal involving the Ukrainian veteran of a notorious Nazi unit, who was honoured in the House of Commons during a Sept. 22 visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The exchange played into Putin's oft-repeated but unsupported claim that Russia is trying to "de-Nazify" Ukraine.
"Her actions are morally reprehensible," said Andres Kasekamp, chair of Estonian studies at the University of Toronto and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
"She gave [Putin] the big gift," of being able to say Canada has further justified the invasion, he said. "Which is pretty horrendous."
The forum was founded in 2004 by the Russian government, NGOs and others as a meet-up for academics, politicians and diplomats — but has since lost much of its legitimacy, Kasekamp says.
Since Russia's seizure of Crimea in 2014 and last year's invasion of Ukraine, participation is "basically a sign of agreement with Russian brutality," he said.
The forum was sanctioned by Ottawa in September for "generating and disseminating disinformation and propaganda."
"It is basically a Putin-curated, Kremlin-curated propaganda-fest," said Marcus Kolga, founder and director of DisinfoWatch and a senior fellow at both the Macdonald-Laurier and CDA institutes.
It has "descended into a cesspool of Russian disinformation," he said.
But Desai rejects those descriptions of Valdai.
She says it's a privilege for an academic "to meet such people, to be able to converse with them, to understand what was happening in such key moments."
"If I thought it was wrong of me to go, I would not go," she said last week from her university office.