Lying in Russian: new technologies

The Kremlin is creating a world where nothing is true and anything is possible

A photo that traveled the world on March 9, 2022: Ukrainian rescuers carry a wounded pregnant woman from a shelled maternity hospital in Mariupol. The child was stillborn, and the mother died soon after.

The Israeli FakeReporter, a non-profit organization that monitors fake social networks, says that at least 20 posts of the Russian embassy on official Twitter, Facebook and Telegram accounts linked the story, calling the tragedy a "Ukrainian fraud." "Uncovering" the story. The link was to a publication called "War on Fake", which, according to FakeReporter, is the latest weapon in Russia's arsenal of information warfare: a website, which is a paradox! - promotes disinformation under the pretext of fighting disinformation. The propaganda "anti-fake" newspaper site was created after the failure of Putin's blitzkrieg in Ukraine in early March, and he was the first to publish statements in which he denied an air strike on the maternity hospital, and the photo of pregnant women fleeing was called "acting production". The propagandists also wrote that the maternity hospital had not worked since the beginning of the war (as they say "special operations"), and that the doctors were allegedly dispersed by militants from the Azov Nationalist Battalion.

Currently, "War against fakes" is active in Russia on the popular messaging application Telegram: its main channel has more than 18 million subscribers. A link to refute the information about the air attacks was placed there, and it was distributed by at least 150 other groups. "War on Fake" is also actively present in TikTok and Reddit. It has de facto become a key source of information for many Russians, after the Kremlin shut down independent media and Western social networks.

The story was also widely circulated on YouTube (while still working in Russia), the Russian-language TVNZ, which has more than 400,000 subscribers, released a video with the question "Was there an air attack on Mariupol?" "And attached the hashtag" #fake ".

“This new kind of misinformation can be defined as a broad conspiracy. Peter Pomerantsev, a British journalist of Soviet descent, described it as a world in which "nothing is true and anything is possible", writes the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

FakeReporter calls a clear example of the spread of disinformation the use of propaganda by "superdistributors" - official government accounts, officials or state media, to challenge Western statements and create a profitable narrative.

An analysis conducted by FakeReporter showed that misinformation about the air attack on the hospital in Mariupol simultaneously spread dozens of official orders of Russian embassies, which forced Facebook to delete posts.

Old new forgeries

A FakeReporter study also shows that Russia has used misinformation dating back to the 1980s and is now adapting to the Ukrainian context. We are talking about a network of biolabs allegedly created by the United States in Ukraine. This fake dates back to the KGB's 1980 disinformation campaign, known as Operation Infection or Operation Denver: propaganda at the time claimed that HIV / AIDS was created by the US military as part of a secret biological warfare project in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The statement was first published in 1983 in an Indian newspaper called The Patriot, which the KGB created in the 1960s to spread misinformation.

False stories about US-run laboratory networks have been used in the recent past: In 2009, Kremlin propaganda blamed Georgia, which Russia also invaded.

Russia later published a false claim that the United States had created Covid-19. In fact, both China and Russia made such a statement during the pandemic - even in the context of Ukraine. For example, in April 2021, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijiang wrote on Twitter that “U.S. bio-military activities are not transparent, secure, or justified. In Ukraine alone, the United States has established 16 biolaboratories. Why does the US have so many labs around the world? What activities are carried out in these laboratories? "

And in early March 2022, after the Russians began invading Ukraine, the same official made the same remark. "This Russian military operation has revealed the secret of American laboratories in Ukraine, and that is not something that can be ignored," Zhao Lijiang said, as reported by the AP.

Again, a huge number of Russian embassies published statements about biolaboratories in Ukraine. For example, the Russian diplomatic mission in India published an infographic, which "in detail" shows the location of about 30 such laboratories.

The base for the fakes is prepared in advance. Back in 2018, journalist Dilyana Gaitandzhieva spread misinformation on Twitter that there are more than 10 secret American laboratories in Ukraine. She also published material about that on one of the sites, and for the next few years, a link to her text "circulated" on the Internet.

The disinformation of this journalist was already presented in 2020 in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the sources of the virus were called… Ukraine and Georgia. Such stories of misinformation are interconnected and help to create deep doubts about a wide range of topics.

After the start of the war in Ukraine, Russian propaganda again decided to use stories about biolabs and use Russian "superdistributors" for that. Thus, a high-ranking Russian diplomat shared a tweet in which he claims that the information about biolabs on the Internet is "clean".

Of course, vigilant Ukrainians, especially in the first week of the war, continued to send messages of this kind to their friends and acquaintances to warn them of the danger. In fact, they spread misinformation and inadvertently contributed to the spread of panic.

Another characteristic of propaganda rhetoric is the depersonalization of Ukrainians and their identification with absolute evil. "Pay attention to the informative message of the Russian media:" They make and will use biological weapons. "Who are they? Propaganda does not specify who exactly, it's about" Ukrainians in general. "Who among the recipients of this information knows what biological weapons are "No one or almost no one. But a biological attack is something invisible, a weapon of mass destruction, something that is not seen and something that is associated with ruthless, absolute evil," Filonenko commented.

In turn, a specialist from the Faculty of Systems and Mass Media of the Dnieper National University, Oles Honchar, highlights the following characteristics of Russian propaganda in the war:

- more and more often the occupiers use hacking of official orders with subsequent publication of false information;

- perform cognitive operations (appearance of Ovsyannikov in the show "Time") in order to humanize the image of the enemy;

- bot farms are widely used to promote divisions in Ukrainian society;

- launching dipfeys - video capitulation, but low technological quality allows you to quickly neutralize their impact;

- Many lies are repeated.

"Among the key topics of falsifying Russian propaganda are accusations of Russophobia (complex lies), criticism of the Ukrainian government and its institutions. Numerous household fakes (disconnection of gas, electricity, water), misinformation about losses among the Armed Forces and the civilian population, during the war, etc. are sent to the Ukrainian public, "said experts.

There is no time for humanism

The other day, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar spoke in detail about attempts to humanize the image of the enemy.

"Russia uses information weapons in parallel with military weapons. They are strengthening each other, "said the deputy minister.

She noted that Ukrainians are emotional and compassionate, sensitive to those who sympathize with us, and it is easy to catch us on this informative hook. In Western society, there are also hooks that Russia uses.

"It is useful for Russia to create a visible opposition, a movement against Putin and against the war. Because this is a serious argument for justifying Western campaigns in front of their Western consumers ... Believe that Western society will accept this excuse. As far as Ukraine is concerned, in our info space, the Russian opposition and Russian opponents of the Russian war are being used to split our unity, ”Malyar said.

"The more trust we have in their" opposition "and" opponents of the war ", the more Russia will use them against us. And at a very important moment, when we need to take a united firm stand against Russia, it turns out that part of our society will not be able to do that, because there are "conscious people who are against the war" in Russia. That is, in fact, the purpose of Russian informative special operations during the war - to divide us according to different views of the world, "Malyar said. The Deputy Minister of Defense called: do not read and do not discuss the posts of "good" Russians, do not thank them for their support!