Infoguerre

Less than three weeks after Prigozhin and his Wagnerite lackeys marched toward Moscow with rebellious if somewhat unclear demands, the pro-Kremlin disinformation ecosystem is still careful to tiptoe around this issue. When confronted with uncomfortable reality, Kremlin disinformation outlets often resort to one of their go-to information manipu-lation tactics – distraction. Kremlin disinformation outlets seek to distract from the Ukrainian counter-offensive and the aftermath of Prigozhin’s rebellion, setting their sights on the NATO Summit in Vilnius and the US decision to deliver cluster munitions to Ukraine. Their aim is clear – divide Ukraine’s allies and distract from the trouble brewing at home.

Ever since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February, Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, has been a hot-button issue. Understandably so. Given Russia’s track record of sabotage and subversion, it is not far-fetched to believe that it might deliberately target the power plant, which would bring about a major humanitarian catastrophe. Destroying the Kakhovka dam did not really mitigate those fears. Neither did recent signals that Russia is reducing its presence in Zaporizhzhia. Moreover, last week, Ukrainian intelligence publicly claimed that Russia is planning a terrorist strike against the plant both to unleash critical levels of radiation and to pin the blame on Ukraine. Since Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014 and the subsequent decision by EU leaders to set up the East StratCom Task Force, EUvsDiSiNFO has been 8 years long countering Russian disinformation and information manipulation…

While Russia’s war against Ukraine is ongoing, it has been an extraordinary few days inside Russia, with the weekend mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner force. In this edition of the Disinformation Review, we take a closer look at how developments were labelled, documented, and spun as they unfolded. We now see the Russian disinformation machinery re-writing the mutiny’s chronology and re-branding its events. In the early phase on Friday-Saturday, Russian state-controlled outlets had difficulty taking a firm stance on Prigozhin. Instead, they just reported on events before switching to over-the-top loyalty towards Putin. So how has the campaign to restore Putin’s authority, smear Prigozhin, and regain a firmer control of the public space developed? What happens when a fragile political system shows cracks?

A delegation of African leaders, hailing from Senegal, Egypt, Zambia, Uganda, Congo Republic, Comoros, and South Africa, embarked on a mission to Kyiv and St. Petersburg, seeking ways to find and agree on ‘confidence building measures’ between Ukraine and Russia. An opportunity for Putin to interrupt the African delegation’s presentation and embark on a lie-filled and mind-numbing monologue…

It has been more than 15 months since Russia launched its 3-day “special military operation” against Ukraine. As Russia’s war keeps dragging on with no victory in sight for the invaders, the Kremlin needs to keep coming up with new excuses on why nothing is going to plan… One of the juicier claims that recently came out of the pro-Kremlin disinformation eco-system is an idea that Ukrainian soldiers use drugs that turn them into modern-day berserkers: “The substances made the soldiers imperceptible to small arms bullet strikes. A bullet knocks him off his feet, but he gets up and carries on walking like there is no pain – so powerful are the drugs”. This came hand-in-hand with a claim that Ukraine has been running military pharmaceutical programs and developing psychoactive drugs for combat use for years.

The Kremlin reflexively turns to its favoured manipulation tactics of denial and aggressor/victim role reversal, but its propagandists have been pre-paring the information environment and spreading disinformation about the Kakhovka dam for months. On the early hours of 6 June, horrifying images depicting the collapse of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro river in the Russian-occupied territories in the Kherson region of Ukraine quickly spread across media globally. The destruction of the dam unleashed the 18 billion cubic meters of water held by the enormous Kakhovka Reservoir down-stream, causing both a humanitarian catastrophe and an ecological disaster. The EU condemned this unpre-cedented attack on civilian infrastructure in the strongest terms The EU condemned this unprecedented attack.

One and half years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and constant attacks against Ukrainian civilians, the Kremlin has the nerve to claim that ‘a war is being waged against it’. History is full of despots who, having provoked and antagonised all neighbours, claim with increasing paranoia, ‘the world is against me’. Russia as of summer 2023 has become another example. The Kremlin ecosystem tries to form the perception in global media that, after 15 months of full-scale war, Russian attacks are regarded as the ‘new normal’ and kind of ‘just the way the war goes nowadays’, while small Ukrainian counter-strikes are seen as the direct way to Armageddon, highly dangerous, crossing a ‘red line’ or ‘provoking’ Russia.

For over a year, Russian state-controlled outlets and pro-Kremlin pundits have been trying to convince themselves and the world that the forcible transfer and unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia or territories temporarily occupied by Russia were ‘humanitarian’, ‘voluntary’ and served the needs of the children. Russian state-controlled media spat out feel-good stories about hundreds of Russian families lining up to adopt orphans of Donbas and Ukraine, while some of the Ukrainian children from Mariupol were used as a prop by the Kremlin’s propagandists and had to thank and hug their ‘liberators’ in a choreographed appearance at a pro-war rally in Moscow.

Kremlin propagandists have declared Bakhmut ‘liberated’ even though it has been reduced to rubble. Plumes of smoke rising across a homeland left undefended may yet turn their premature joy into mourning. As the Russian illegal invasion of Ukraine persists, Russian disinformation outlets have been manipulatively lauding the ‘liberation‘ of Bakhmut, despite its resemblance to a post-apocalyptic film set. Their jubilation based on selective use of information from the field may be short-lived, given Ukrainian forces continue to operate nearby. In the meantime, Russia’s decision to throw resources into the Bakhmut meat grinder might just come back to haunt them.