Russian Disinformation: Strong Tool Since 1923 Used by Putin and Denied by Many Republicans

Highly skilled disinformation purveyor

Good informational article from Yahoo.News with this headline (formatted to fit the blog):

“Russian war disinformation — from the Bucha massacre to the sinking of the Moskva battleship — keeps growing”

From the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and throughout the conflict, Moscow has pursued a strategy of aggressive public dissembling, prevarication, and disinformation aimed at creating an alternative reality to explain how events have unfolded on the ground.

In Russia itself, the rules for even talking about Ukraine have become Orwellian, with citizens now facing lengthy potential prison sentences for simply stating that their country is at war, let alone expressing opposition. (Kremlin-approved term is “special military operation” not war.)

While Ukraine has also focused on using social media to showcase its military victories in the conflict and to spread the hortatory powers of president Zelensky, the information war fought by Kyiv has been largely reflective of that which can actually be documented.

1. The most-flagrant falsehoods advanced by Moscow:

Russia’s attack on Ukraine as Russian state media and top Russian officials repeatedly propagate an entirely false reality in which Moscow, not Kyiv, is faced with an existential military threat; where Ukrainians, not Russians, are committing horrific war crimes against Ukrainian civilians; where Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis; and where Russia’s war aims are proceeding entirely according to plan.

Beginning last summer, a spike in Russian military personnel and equipment amassing on Ukraine’s border set off alarm bells in Western capitals. Russia repeatedly and strenuously denied that the buildup was for anything other than routine military exercises. 

Moscow even continued denying its aim to invade Ukraine after troops it had sent to Belarus for joint military drills did not return to Russia after the drills' conclusion.

As roughly 200,000 Russian troops swelled on Ukraine’s northern, eastern and southern borders, and an invasion appeared imminent, Russian officials called U.S. warnings about an attack “absurd” and “hysterical” just a few short weeks before Moscow’s aggression sparked the biggest land war in Europe since World War II.

2. Russia’s invasion is operating on schedule and according to plan:

Moscow has repeatedly claimed that its “special military operation” in Ukraine is proceeding as planned. 

But this is demonstrably false. Russia’s original plan was to make a lightning strike on the capital, Kyiv, capture or kill Ukrainian leadership, and force Ukrainian legislators to vote in a pro-Russia puppet government.

That plan disintegrated amid fierce Ukrainian resistance, including a critical victory at an airport near Kyiv that foiled Russian troops from establishing a beachhead near the capital. Buoyed by these early victories, Ukrainians have managed to beat back Russia’s assault on Kyiv and other major cities such as Kharkiv, preventing Moscow’s forces, so far, from taking those major population centers.

Further undercutting the claim that the war is proceeding to plan, up to 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed so far, according to NATO estimates, including over half a dozen Russian Generals.

Ukraine has also claimed responsibility, via rocket attack, for sinking Russia’s Moskva cruiser, the flagship vessel of Russia’s Black Sea fleet and the largest military ship sunk since World War II. (Russia has said the vessel sank because of a storm after catching fire.)

Russia, having pulled its troops back entirely from Kyiv and its environs, has refocused its assault on Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. 

Moscow now claims that carving that region out of Ukraine to create an independent “Statelet” — in reality a Russia puppet regime — was always its primary war aim.

3. The Ukrainian government is run by neo-Nazis:

This is a wholesale rewriting of very recent history in which Putin asserted that the central goal was the “de-Nazification” of the whole of Ukraine. Putin’s attempts to link Ukraine with Nazism have also proved a stretch. 

Russia has claimed that the Ukrainian government is an outlaw state run by neo-Nazi extremists. In fact, Zelensky is Jewish and won election in 2019 as a moderate. 

And though Ukraine has struggled with corruption, its government is squarely mainstream in nature — and, in fact, far less right-wing than some European states like Hungary.

Russia’s reference to “neo-Nazis” seems to spring from the activities of the Azov Battalian, a Ukrainian militant group with neo-fascist leanings that was integrated into Ukraine’s national guard in 2014. 

But Azov affiliates make up a tiny percentage of Ukraine’s total military forces, and Azov’s own leadership has sought to distance the organization from its more overtly neo-fascist past.

Moreover, Russia’s purported “de-Nazification” objectives ring particularly hollow since Russia has employed its own neo-fascist paramilitary operatives to fight in Ukraine, including the Wagner Group, which is closely connected to the Russian government, and the Russian Imperial Movement, which the U.S. designated a terrorist group in 2020.

4. The massacre in Bucha was staged (and if it's not, Ukraine is to blame):

After Russian troops retreated from the Kyiv region, Ukrainian forces fanned out across the city’s suburbs, which had seen some of the heaviest fighting of the war. What the Ukrainians discovered shocked them as well as much of the world.

They found widespread evidence of war crimes and atrocities committed by Russian forces who appeared to have wantonly executed people it knew to be civilians, including women and children, and forced women into sex slavery.

Russia immediately offered a series of contradictory explanations for the scenes in Bucha: (1) that Russian troops had left the town before the killings began (which was false); (2) that the killings were staged (false); and (3) that if the killings were real, the massacre was a “false flag” by the Ukrainians (also false).

In fact, the transference of blame to Ukraine for Russia’s own heinous actions has been a hallmark of the war. Russia also claimed that its attack on the Kramatorsk train station, which killed over 50 civilians trying to flee violence in Ukraine’s east, was committed by the Ukrainians themselves.

Russia has a history of attempting to commit false flag operations to blame others for war. In the run-up to the invasion, these included:

1. Plans for a staged, or even real, chemical attack perpetrated by Russia in eastern Ukraine that U.S. officials warned was going to be made to look like the work of Kyiv’s forces, in order to provide Moscow with a casus belli.

2. Moscow claims without any evidence that the U.S. is planning on using infected birds to send bioweapons into Russia. 

Conversely, U.S. officials continue to worry that Russia will use chemical weapons (like they did in Syria 2013-2018 and elsewhere), and then blame Ukraine, but never themselves.

My 2 cents: Yet in our own country there are many who cheer for or brush off Putin’s horrible acts – even many in our own Congress (names and face you know and hear and see on FOX) – no need to mention them here to give them any more limelight. 

They believe or trust Putin (like Trump did or maybe still does). Some Republicans do not understand or care to know what Russian disinformation means, and worse, many falsely accept the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection and its impact as no biggie.

Many Republicans out of their raw hatred for our system and government in general (except run by their side), or for anyone who is a Democrat and especially for President Biden (but not Trump), are blasted 24/7 as they do, say, pay, try, lie, or deny anything to regain control since they like Trump lost in 2020, and they still cannot accept that loss.

They are in my view a “clear and present danger” here at home just as Putin is in Ukraine and possibly elsewhere, or so it seems may be his plan.

Disinformation campaigns are bad and they seem to mirror these classic lines from George Orwell’s 1984:

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“War is peace; Freedom is slavery; Ignorance is strength.”

Thanks for stopping by.