I'm Gregory Warner. This is Rough Translation. Our episode this week comes out Friday. It's a collaboration. So in the meantime, we're just going to revisit a story from last season that feels even more relevant today.

It's about a country where fake news might have triggered a real war. But it's also about how life with fake facts makes it harder for us to talk to each other.

Makes us think differently about the divisions in our own country and what we can hope to do about them.

Hello, Ruslan.

Ruslan is a journalist.

Ruslan Dainichenko.

In Kiev, Ukraine.

And he spent thousands of hours watching Russian TV, trying to sort the real from the fake.

My family members, they are complaining that, oh, you watch Russian television all the time.

They lie all the time, and we have to listen all these lies about Ukraine.

I'd first heard about Ruslan's project three years ago when I was in Ukraine for NPR.

One of the stories I was reporting was about how fake news from Russia was streaming over the border into Ukraine.

I, though, was not using the words fake news in 2014.

Americans were not using that phrase.

But Ruslan was.

And so what do you think Americans can learn from Ukraine example?

What's the lesson for us?

Yeah, the very first lesson do not ignore this problem.

Because it allowed Russian media to influence local people to kill each other.

Rough Translation is a show from NPR where we follow a conversation that we are having in the United States

and hear out it's playing out in some other corner of the world. Today we're going to go to a place where some of Russia's fake news

tactics were first developed and tested and rolled out. Ukraine has dealt with fake news in higher

...