Not a job for linguists

Why prosecutors’ case against Sasha Skochilenko, who used supermarket price tags to protest the war, doesn’t hold water

Story by Bumaga. Abridged translation by Alexandra Cole.

St. Petersburg artist Sasha Skochilenko, who was arrested in April for replacing supermarket price tags with stickers containing information about civilian deaths in Mariupol, Ukraine, is being tried under Russia’s law against “disinformation” — and facing up to 10 years in prison. The prosecution is relying on witness testimony and linguistic analysis. The analysts claim that the statements on the "price tags" are false (though this isn’t within their area of expertise), and have argued that the Russian army’s treatment of civilians in Ukraine is “exceptionally humane.” Journalists from the independent news outlet Bumaga have examined the court’s linguistic analysis, discussed it with independent experts, and found it insufficient to support the charges. With permission, Meduza is publishing an abridged version of Bumaga’s findings.

The analysis

The linguists hired by prosecutors examined the following phrases:

• “The Russian army bombed an art school in Mariupol. Approximately 400 people were inside it, hiding from shelling”;
• “Russian conscripts are being sent to Ukraine. The price of this war is the lives of our children”;
• "Stop the war! 4,300 Russian soldiers died in the first three days. Why aren't we hearing about this on television?”;
• “Putin has been lying to us from TV screens for 20 years. The result of this lie is our readiness to justify war and senseless deaths”;
• “My great-grandfather did not fight in the Great Patriotic War for 4 years for Russia to become a fascist state and attack Ukraine.”

The prosecution’s experts

• Anastasia Grishanina — Doctor of Philology, Associate Professor, Department of Theory of Journalism and Mass Communications, St. Petersburg State University. In March 2022, she signed an open letter from St. Petersburg University staff to the Russian president in support of his "policy aimed at the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine."
• Olga Safonova — Doctor of Political Sciences, Associate Professor, Department of Political Institutions and Applied Political Research, St. Petersburg State University.

Why the examination was commissioned

The linguistic analysis for Sasha Skochilenko’s case was requested by investigator Ilya Proskuryakov. According to lawyer Stanislav Seleznev, this is standard practice for all cases that hinge on statements made by defendants: “The judges require an appropriate examination, pointing out the impossibility of establishing any facts indicating the existence of a crime in its absence.”

Human rights activist Alexander Verkhovsky confirms that “If this is a criminal case, the prosecutor will simply not accept materials from the investigator if there is no academic conclusion.”

Stanislav Seleznev

Senior partner at the Net Freedoms Project

As the Ministry of Justice points out in its manual, one of the key elements of the offense associated with the spread of "disinformation" is to establish whether the statement under investigation is made in the form of a statement about some verifiable fact. In that case, you can talk about whether the information is reliable or not, or if the speech is about expressing a value, judgment, or question. In this case, it is not possible to verify the authenticity of such a statement. So there will be no legal basis for prosecution. And whether the defendant made a factual judgement can only be established by an expert linguist who has undergone special training.

These kinds of examinations have played a role in many high-profile cases of extremism, justification of terrorism, and "inciting hatred or hostility." Often, they've been performed with gross violations of academic norms and standards of scientific ethics.

The experts concluded that the leaflets ‘discredited’ and expressed ‘hatred’ towards the military

Investigator Ilya Proskuryakov asked the experts to answer six questions regarding the statements on the “price tags," including whether there were signs of “discrediting the army" or signs of religious, political or other hatred and hostility towards a social group, among other things.

It remains unclear why the investigator asks about “discrediting," as it's not mentioned in the indictment. The rest of the questions were directly related to the section of the article of the Criminal Code that Sasha Skochilenko is being charged with. According to investigators, the motive for disseminating the information was hatred or hostility (political or towards a social group).

Anastasia Grishanina and Olga Safonova, the authors of the analysis, affirm all of the above.

The justification for “discrediting” in the examination reads as follows: “The meaning of the statements is aimed at causing readers (listeners) to distrust the actions of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and undermining the reputation of Russian military personnel, thereby discrediting the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”

From Grishanina and Safonova’s analysis:

The following was revealed: the signs and motives of political hatred and hostility in relation to a social group united by belonging to the military personnel of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, as well as in relation to state authorities of the Russian Federation and the President of the Russian Federation [Vladimir] Putin.

Seleznev noted that public employees have previously not been classified as a “social group” in court.

Stanislav Seleznev

Senior partner at the Net Freedoms Project

From 2009-2018, the courts listened to the opinion of sociological experts, who pointed out that, for example, law enforcement officers (FSB, prosecutors, deputies, and so on) are not a social group, but a professional group. This has led to the dismissal of many cases of extremism.

Experts for the state are trying to prove that the information on the ‘price tags’ is a lie. But it's not in their area of expertise.

When asked by investigators whether the texts contain negative information about the RF Armed Forces in the form of facts that can be verified, the prosecutor's experts also answered affirmatively.

In their justification, they write: "The information is expressed in the form of reports of reliable facts, but is false." And also: "The texts contain unreliable negative information about the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, distributed in the form of statements about facts, the authenticity of which [...] could be verified."

According to independent experts, the authors of the opinion are not entitled to judge whether the information on the price tags is true or false.

Alexander Verkhovsky

Director of the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis

For cases of "disinformation about the military," there is a very understandable manual that says that a linguistic examination is not carried out in order to find out whether the statement was true or false, because this obviously goes beyond the qualification of the expert. Frankly, if this recommendation were used, then I suspect that some cases of “disinformation about the military” would not exist, because there is no statement of fact. But manuals are not the law, so they are not always applied.

Expert from the Institute of Russian Literature at the Russian Academy of Sciences

Anonymous for security reasons

The analysis in Sasha Skochilenko’s case [...] seems completely untenable to me for several reasons.

One of them: proving the falsity of information on price tags is not a linguistic task. Linguistic tasks include identifying information about the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and searching for linguistic signs of their discrediting or signs of inciting hatred.

For the prosecutors' experts, everything that 'is not confirmed by the official sources of the Russian Federation' is a lie

The experts' conclusion that the information on the price tags is false is supported only by the fact that the Russian authorities and pro-government media do not recognize it as true.

For example, Grishanina and Safonova's analysis of whether the statement “The Russian army bombed an art school in Mariupol" is factual reads as follows:

“The information given in the statement contradicts the actual circumstances [...] and does not align with the goals of a mentioned operation."

“In carrying out the tasks of a special military operation, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation treat the civilian population exceptionally humanely and do not strike civilian infrastructure," the authors write, citing a July 29th meeting of the interdepartmental coordination staff for the humanitarian response in Ukraine.

“In fact, the information given in the statement in question is false. The information disseminated by Ukrainian and Western media that art school No. 12 in Mariupol was allegedly subjected to an airstrike by the Russian Armed Forces was neither at the time of publication nor subsequently confirmed by the publication of data recorded by means of objective control, and were not verified by official sources of information."

The authors include very few sources in this section, and the sources they do cite include the anonymous Telegram channel “War against Fakes," which claims that the art school bombing is Ukrainian disinformation.

The experts are also trying to refute the statement that “in the first three days [of the war] 4,300 Russian soldiers died.” They write that according to the Russian Defense Ministry, on March 25, 1,351 soldiers from Russia died in Ukraine. Thus, they conclude, straying from the purview of linguistic analysis, the information on the price tag is false.

True or false

The authors of the examination claim that the phrase “Russian conscripts are being sent to Ukraine” is false.

Grishanina and Safonova note that on March 9, the Russia Defense Ministry admitted that Russian conscripts participated in the war. “However, by the time the message was published [on the day of Skochilenko’s action on March 31], all of these soldiers had been withdrawn to Russia,” they say without citing evidence.

But at the same March 9 briefing the experts refer to, the Defense Ministry also admitted that some conscripts remained in Ukrainian captivity: “Practically all such soldiers have already been withdrawn to Russian territory. At the same time, a sabotage group of the national battalion attacked one of the units performing logistical support tasks. A number of soldiers, including conscripts, were captured.”

Since some of the conscripts were captured, it means that they were not "brought to Russia." Based on the logic of Grishanina and Safonova, who equate the Defense Ministry's reports with the truth, the experts themselves are reporting false information in this paragraph.

Some of the conclusions from the examination contradict the prosecution

In the statute under which Sasha Skochilenko is being charged, the “deliberate falsification” of the information is of great importance. The prosecutor's office explains: "The sign of deliberate falsification is excluded in situations where a person, distributing certain information, is honestly mistaken about its falsehood."

The prosecutors' linguists do not address the question of whether the defendant was aware of the alleged “falsehood” of her statements or whether she believed she was telling the truth. That means that in this section, the prosecution cannot refer to Grishanina and Safonova’s analysis.

Nonetheless, they draw attention to the fact that the texts on the "price tags" did not have references to sources. From this they conclude: “Under the guise of reliable information, the author reports her personal opinion on the actions of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.” But expressing an opinion does not fall under the “disinformation” article.

The Russian Constitution, even after its amendments in 2020, allows citizens to freely express opinions if they do not contain state secrets or propaganda of social, racial, national, religious, or linguistic superiority or the incitement of enmity. Paragraph 3 states, "No one shall be forced to express or renounce their opinions and beliefs."

Even if the “personal opinion” of Skochilenko, according to the examination, contains signs of hatred and hostility, this is not related to the criminal article on “disinformation about the military.” It only deals with the reporting of facts.

According to independent linguists, the analysis is biased and unscientific

The fact that Anastasia Grishanina signed a letter from St Petersburg University in support of the “special operation” confirms her bias and violates academic standards, according to a linguist from the Pushkin Institute and other independent experts.

Expert from the Institute of Russian Literature at the Russian Academy of Sciences

Anonymous for security reasons

The analysis in the Skochilenko case does not meet scientific criteria. It starts with small things: a lack of citations, incorrect citations, citations to non-authoritative works. Most of the standard methods are not used. Instead, there are lots of empty words." All this leads to a logically unstructured text, in which the expert bias clearly comes through.

At the beginning of their text, Grishanina and Safonova give a list of 46 sources used in drawing up the conclusion. But some of them do not appear in the text itself, and some are mentioned incorrectly. “The list of terms contains “information” with reference to Galyashina, but Galyashina does not have such a definition in the specified work,” one of the independent experts notes.

Instead of proving individual statements, the authors of the examination simply write, "It seems obvious that [...].” Grishanina and Safonova name intent analysis and content analysis among the methods that they use, but in fact they don’t. In a conversation with Bumaga, independent experts say that the other methods used by the experts in their analysis are unknown to professional linguists.

Similarly unscientific analyses allowed prosecutors to convict Pussy Riot, Svetlana Prokopeva and Yegor Zhukov

Linguistic analysis is a standard prosecution tool for articles on “thought crimes.” It was also used in the 2012 Pussy Riot case. The conclusions of the experts formed the basis of the charges against Yegor Zhukov and Svetlana Prokopieva”

Seleznev and Verkhovsky noted that defense teams also resort to linguistic analysis, but in recent years, judges have increasingly begun ignoring such arguments, persecuting experts brought by the defense.

Alexander Verkhovsky

Director of the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis

Linguistic examinations are written by a variety of people from highly qualified to under qualified. According to the law, there is only one criterion: the person must have an educational qualification, in the broadest sense. The expert may not even have a degree. Myriad examinations are written by people who have only attended courses for several hours.

There are also questions regarding the qualifications of the experts in the Skochilenko case. One of the experts, Olga Safonova, is not a professional linguistic; her field is political science. Her colleague Anastasia Grishanina is a social psychologist by training.

Grishanina has a PhD in Philology, and her linguistics qualifications consist of advanced training courses as part of a program called “Methodology of Psycholinguistic Analysis of Conflict (Extremist) Texts." In 2018, Grishanina wrote one section of a book called Extremism in the Modern World that was edited by Russian Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin.

If the examination is performed poorly and one of the parties does not agree with it, this party can submit another expert opinion to the court, Seleznev and Verkhovsky explain. And the court, having familiarized itself with both examinations, decides whether it is necessary to conduct a final, forensic examination in the institution that it itself appoints.

Story by Bumaga

Abridged translation by Alexandra Cole