Kiss killers and punish the innocent

Pro-Kremlin propagandists spoke much about their twisted interpretations of loyalty, patriotism, equal rights, and fair play to mask the complete lack of morals of the Putin regime.

Eight Russian citizens convicted in Western countries for crimes including murder, money laundering, fraud, and cybercrime were exchanged for 16 arbitrarily imprisoned persons in Russian jails on 1 August. These included persons with Western passports who had been held hostage using invented charges, but also Russian citizens who had been persecuted for opposition to the Putin regime and protesting its invasion of Ukraine. At Vnukovo airport near Moscow, an enthusiastic Putin greeted returning criminals, spies, and a convicted murderer who were exchanged for hostages, journalists, opposition politicians, and human rights defenders.

The Kremlin spent years denying any Russian state involvement in the murder of Georgian citizen Zelimkhan Khangoshvili for which Vadim Krasikov was convicted in Germany. Now, when Putin publicly embraced the convicted killer, pro-Kremlin outlets were compelled to put their own spin on his homecoming.

Dehumanising the victims and glorifying the guilty

Pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets immediately and falsely claimed that the persons released from Russia were CIA spies. This may have been an attempt to establish some kind of parity, since Russia received actual spies in exchange. Then on his infamous TV show, the odious Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov said: ‘We returned our heroes and gave back a number of spies and foreign criminals and traitors serving countries who set for themselves one goal – the destruction of Russia.’ This was a rather elegant, if notorious, two-for-one spin. Russia gets its ‘heroes’ back and expels ‘foreign threats’ and political opposition in the process.

Other pro-Kremlin mouthpieces quickly picked up on the same cue and RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan sung a similar tune(opens in a new tab): ‘People who have returned to us, they are genuine people, for whom loyalty to the oath, which the president mentioned when meeting them, is not empty words. These are true people. Those who left us were little animals. Good riddance to them.’

Heroes and good people on the one hand, traitors, and animals on the other. The propagandists tried to ridicule, belittle, and dehumanise the victims of authoritarian persecution and state hostage-taking. Once again, in the Kremlin’s hall of mirrors, the criminals became the heroes to distract from the obvious – the Kremlin exchanged real criminals for arbitrarily imprisoned, innocent people.

Twisting patriotism and loyalty

In trying to justify injustice, pro-Kremlin outlets were quick to hijack the values of patriotism and loyalty. Surely, working for the benefit of one’s country is a good thing. However, state-sanctioned murder and espionage on Putin’s behalf is something quite different. Putin’s presence on the tarmac was designed to communicate one thing – if you’re willing to break laws and commit murder to protect Putin’s regime, the head honcho in the Kremlin will not abandon you.

Relying on the ‘threatened values’ narrative

Hijacking the vocabulary of values in the service of disinformation is an established technique of pro-Kremlin outlets. It relies on creating an artificial contrast between the imagined defenders of ‘threatened traditional values’ and targets of disinformation. In the case of the prisoner exchange, this narrative was deployed to contrast ‘heroes’ with ‘traitors’. Another favourite topic of pro-Kremlin outlets is ridiculing Western attitudes towards the rights of women and other groups, including LGBTQI+ communities, as signs of moral decay and perversion. We have identified dozens of disinformation cases building on this narrative over the years.

It was not a surprise, therefore, that outlets in the pro-Kremlin disinformation ecosystem fuelled heated discussions about the gender of Algerian Imane Khelif by claiming that she is a biological man. Khelif, and fellow boxer Lin Yu-ting from Taiwan, are neither men nor transgender persons. They were born as women and have always competed as women, as was confirmed by IOC President Thomas Bach(opens in a new tab).

Simonyan’s women’s rights hypocrisy

As one of the Kremlin’s leading disinformation mouthpieces, Margarita Simonyan pounced on the opportunity to re-cast herself as a champion of women’s rights and fair play in sports. She quickly pointed to the seeming ‘double standards’ of the West, asking why ‘liberals and feminists’ in the West were not rallying in defence of the Italian boxer defeated by Khelif. The Kremlin had a ready answer to this disinformation-laden rhetorical question. Because, as Simonyan claimed, gender has become the ‘new anti-Semitism’ in the West. Finally, she finished with her characteristic disregard for human life(opens in a new tab): ‘It would be great if Iman Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, or whatever their names are, reach the final and kill each other. To the delight of true fans of women’s sports.’

Misogyny, racism, and attacks against minorities are staples of Russian disinformation. Simonyan used vocabulary about the protection of women’s rights and fair play in sports to engage in state-sponsored cyber-bullying against female athletes. Besides feeding into established narratives designed to attack the West, it also served the purpose of contributing to creating a scandal involving the Paris Olympics.

Russian athletes in the military or those publicly supporting the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine were banned from the Olympics. As a consequence, just 15 athletes from Russia are competing as ‘neutrals’. This clearly hurt the Kremlin, and, unsurprisingly, the number of disinformation attacks against the event ballooned. Despite Russian attempts at interference, the Olympics are proceeding successfully. So the Kremlin’s disinformation peddlers have raised the bar, with some outlets going so far as to claim that the Olympic Opening ceremony announced the Apocalypse, that the director of that ceremony was struck by lightning as divine punishment, and that all medals should look like inverted Satanic crosses.