What are the routes that Russia uses to spread disinformation? Which channels are they using? Who are the protagonists?
Oleksandr Zamkovoi, fact-checker at StopFake, was a guest at a digital meeting within the REALIES project and shared insights on sources and routes of Russian disinformation. We have recapped his presentation for you.
Russian propaganda - obvious and hidden
Oleksandr Zamkovoi classifies Russian propaganda as obvious and hidden. The first is the official propaganda spread by various heads of state institutions besides Putin and Lavrov. Additionally, media, war correspondents, and cultural and educational institutions around the world support Russia by spreading its narratives.
Hidden propaganda is spread via puppet organisations and politicians from the ultra-right and ultra-left spectrum in all EU countries - particularly presenters are the AfD in Germany, the Austrian FPÖ, Greece's Chrysi Avgi and Syriza, Hungary's Jobbik, France's Front National and Italy's Lega Nord. In addition to political actors, there are individual influencers, who are active in the area of pro-Russian propaganda. Social media channels also play an important role, where trolls and bots are involved.
Russian propaganda narratives: Ukraine does not exist, the dangerous West and the Nazi regime in Kiev
Most of you would know Putin's favourite story: Ukraine never existed, it has always been part of Russia. If we believe him, the basis of the conflict is actually the idea of Western states to create an independent Ukrainian state with the intention of defeating and destroying Russia.
But the dictator is not the only one pushing the propaganda machine. A lot of other people are involved: from the Foreign Minister and the representatives of the Ministry of Defence to the foreign intelligence service, the parliamentarians and former president Medvedev. In the Russian-occupied territories there are also already propagandists constructing a parallel reality, in which the population there has long been Russian. They blame Ukraine for war crimes and tell the story of the Nazi state.
Mikhail Yevgenyevich Misintsev, for example, pretends that the Ukrainian armed forces are terrorising the people of Kharkiv, as if there is a forced mobilisation there and people are afraid to take to the streets.
A new form of slavery is predicted by the head of the Russian State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, as if the US Lend-Lease Act would lead Ukraine to collapse because of the big burden for Ukrainians who would have to pay too much for land lease over decades. According to Oleksandr Zamkovoi, all these stories have already been debunked by various fact-checkers.
Russian institutions and organisations in foreign countries
As a 'soft power' Oleksandr Zamkovoi describes what happens in other countries under the influence of the Kremlin and how the support from there is used again to create more and more fake news. One of the examples he shared relates to the Russian Centre for Science and Culture, which is equivalent to Germany's Goethe Institute. Under the short name 'Russian House', cultural programmes and Russian language courses are offered in various places around the world.
News by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti caused irritation in October 2022 because their wording suggested that people in Finland and Luxembourg were coming to these Russian houses to keep themselves warm. According to Oleksandr Zamkovoi, Russia is using this story in its own country to present itself as a saviour for the suffering Western Europeans, who have to survive the energy crisis. Fun Fact: There were summer temperatures at the time.
By the way, it is a question why Russotrudnitschestwo, owner of the Berlin Russian House in Friedrichstraße, is allowed to sell tickets. Aren't income from the cultural sector contrary to sanctions?
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Foto: Sven Wolter / Lizenz: Creative Commons BY-SA-3.0 de
The fact-checker outlines another scandal: During a seminar for the Vienna police by the "Coordination Council of the Organisation of Russian Compatriots" (KSORS), the participants were expected to get profound information about Ukraine, but instead they were "enlightened" about the country's non-existence. In addition, they were warned about the immigrant Nazis and instructed to check the immigrants precisely. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine was described by the "experts" as a preventive measure against the NATO threat.
Oleksandr Zamkovoi mentions that the organisation "Russkiy Mir" and the Russian Orthodox Church with affiliated 400 organisations as further actors in the field of "soft power". Both are present in various European countries and spread the worldview of the Russian regime. However, he also clearly points out that not all organisations working with Russian cultural and educational institutions in Europe are pro-Kremlin and that, fortunately, there is definitely also support for Ukraine.
Made-up stories distributed by the media
Whether the content is distributed by the four media groups that are state-funded or by those that are in private hands no longer matters. Since the private ones are controlled by the state, they tell the same story. Critical reporting is only possible via YouTube or from exile.
The made-up news shared through the media, for example, underpins the story of Ukraine as a Nazi state. Thereby, the media companies refer to statements of former pro-Russian members of parliament of Ukraine, because finally they would know Ukraine and what is going on there.
The major role of them is to spread the anger and to maintain the heated discussion all the time and to feed the audience with the anger. Because propaganda without emotions won't work. That's why they make up fake news. Or they provide their audience with outrageous statements like ‘Burn the constitution and conquer Ukraine.‘ and also ‘We will kill Ukrainians.’ Before 2022, maybe you could really think that this is fake, but this is not a fake and with these statements we work every day.
The role of war reporters
According to Oleksandr Zamkovoi, the "journalists" who are in the war zones mostly work for the Ministry of Defence or the Russian secret forces, because no one from the Russian side of the front line can really have access. Their job is to find material that would help to support the Russian narratives. „The sad thing about them is that they also do the war crimes and they also don't act as someone who is really upset about the war. The war correspondent should not really feed the fire of war with the reportages. At least you need to try to calm down the conflict and to show the suffering from both sides. But they never do that.
Oleksandr Zamkovoi describes how war reporters discover their own war crimes because they are not clever enough. The information they produce in that way for Russian propaganda can be well used as a piece of evidence for fact-checkers and investigative journalists to understand what really happened based on the pictures.
Dmitry Steshin, war correspondent, when we had the missile attack of the Russian Federation on Kramatorsk railway station, he was publishing the information that actually these missiles killed a lot of the Ukrainian soldiers. In nearly 30 minutes, when they started getting the information that a lot of local citizens were killed on this railway station and zero Ukrainian soldiers. We had like 30 deaths, I think there. They started deleting those messages. But of course they were already screenshotted by us and by others. This is like the evidence, this was a planned attack by Russia.
How Russia is being supported from abroad
Oleksandr Zamkovoi speaks of almost 300 puppet organisations with close relations to Russia and almost 700 politicians who have played into Russia's hands with their statements. Since 2014, Russia has spent more than 300 million US dollars on influencing elections abroad. In his opinion, this could be "a very good explanation for why so many politicians in Europe have supported Russia in a special way over the last eight years”.
As one of the members of the European Parliament supporting the Kremlin, he names Latvian Tatiana Zdanek, who not only demands that the impact of anti-Russian sanctions be better calculated, but also reproduces Russian propaganda narratives by portraying Ukraine as a failed state full of Nazis. There would be terror suffered by Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine and Russia would restore justice
Oleksandr Zamkovoi describes the Alternative for Germany as "one of the strongest pro-Russian parties in the European Union". Apart from the parties and politicians, there are also other actors outside Russia who support propaganda. The Anti-Spiegel in Germany, for example, is a blog for freelance journalists where they publish a lot of fake news about Ukraine, fake news about US and European Union policies and a lot of conspiracy theories. There are various institutes and think tanks all over Europe that work for the Kremlin by producing misinformation, reports and fake surveys. All this that is published there is in turn reproduced all over Europe by different media.
Influencers, Social Media, Trolls & Bots
Oleksandr Zamkovoi presented a couple of influencers who were exposed by StopFake. "One of them, the Frenchman Adrien Bouquet, claimed that he had been in Bucha and had seen the war crimes committed by the Ukrainian Nazis. I proved that he was not in Bucha and that the only city he visited was Lviv. He never managed to go to Bucha because it was quite impossible during that period."
As we have already read in the article about the changes in the media landscape since 24.2.2022, the bigger part of Ukrainians informs itself via social media. The preferred channel is Telegram. Pro-Russian content is also consumed, but mainly with the aim of being informed about the other side.
The big Russian Telegram channels have popped up like mushrooms in the occupied Ukrainian territories since February.
Since February the biggest Russian telegram channels in the occupied Ukrainian territories began to flourish. Most of them are now closed and work only on those territories which are still occupied by Russia. But you may see how Russia established its Telegram channels infrastructure. At once when they entered with their military, they at once started the informational intervention and they created plenty of telegram channels all over the territories, where they were present.
Most of them are now closed and only work in the areas still occupied by Russia.
The pro-Russian content, which is also shared by trolls and bots on Ukrainian social media sites, such as discussions on losses in the Ukrainian army or news about refugees or missile threats, tries to demoralise and confuse Ukrainians.
Oleksandr Zamkovoi remembers the missile incident on Polish territory. On the pro-Russian Telegram groups there were immediately loud statements about what had actually happened, when the missile hit Polish territory. They started feeding the public different versions of events from the very beginning. This makes one of the main goals of Russian propaganda tangible: To obfuscate and destroy the truth so that people do not know what to believe in.
The fact-checking site StopFake.org has been around since 2014 and has now uncovered more than 6000 fakes in 14 languages. StopFake is Meta's third-party fact-checking partner, which means that when StopFake exposes fakes on Instagram or Facebook, they are displayed with the missing context or misinformation or a fake news tag. StopFake is also certified by the Poynter Institute in the United States.
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Stopfake.orgis not supported financially or otherwise by any official Ukrainian organisation or government agency. The media professionals work on a volunteer basis and are supported by crowdfunding and donations from readers. The project was funded by the International Renaissance Foundation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, the Embassy of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Ukraine and the Sigrid Rausing Trust.
The project investigates and analyses all aspects of Kremlin propaganda, looking not only at how propaganda affects Ukraine, but also how it affects outside, both in European Union countries and in former Soviet territories.
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For those who want to keep up to date on Russian disinformation, the TV channel Arte provides the international weekly edition of the format "Fake News" - Propaganda Easily Debunked by the Russian Kremlin-critical channel Doschd TV.
REALIES - Strong civil society for a healthy information ecology. is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office.
Quotations do not automatically represent the view of the German Federal Foreign Office and the betterplace lab.