Disinformation In The 2021–2022 Russo-Ukrainian Crisis

During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the media of both sides, both Russian and Ukrainian, waged an information war and actively spread disinformation. Disinformation has been distributed by governmental agencies and web brigades of the Russian Federation, the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), and the Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) separatist areas of Ukraine in relation to the 2021–2022 Russo-Ukrainian crisis and the subsequent Russian invasion. Russian disinformation and fake news stories have focused on themes such as false flags claims of Ukrainian and NATO aggression, claims of human rights violations and even genocide carried out by Ukrainians on Russian speakers (such claims often attempt to attribute Russian war crimes to the Ukrainian side), claims that NATO and Ukraine develop biological weapons targeted at Russia, and claims of widespread local populace support for the Russian "liberation". Some of the disinformation has been aimed at promoting hostility towards Ukrainian refugees, intending to weaken international support for Ukraine.

Russian disinformation has been particularly pervasive and successful in Russia itself, due to censorship of war news and state control of most media. While due to the extent of misinformation, Russian media have been restricted from operation and suffered from reputation loss in many Western and developed countries, they have met with more success spreading their point of view in many developing countries. In particular, Chinese state media has been very sympathetic to the Russian side, and has repeatedly censored war news or reproduced Russian fake news and disinformation.

Ukrainian media has also been accused of using propaganda stories, such as the Ghost of Kyiv myth, although such efforts have been much more limited than Russia's disinformation campaign. Both sides have been accused of exaggerating the military losses of the opposing side while minimizing their own.

Aims and attribution

Disinformation largely attributed to Russia (both state agencies and web brigades) since the 2014 beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War aimed to generate support for Russia, for example by alleging Ukrainian involvement in serious human rights violations.

In January 2022, aims of disinformation ( misinformation intended to deliberately deceive) distributed by Russian authorities included using "wedge issues" to encourage disunity among Western countries in support for Ukraine; to counter themes promoted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); to create plausible deniability for human rights violations carried out by Russian forces; and to create a casus belli for further invading Ukraine.

Facebook uncovered a Russian campaign using fake accounts, and attempts to hack the accounts of high-profile Ukrainians. There are reports of paid Russian government staff searching for "organic content" posted by genuine users in support of the Kremlin, while making sure that these do not run afoul of platform guidelines, then amplifying these posts. Researchers have found that the Internet Research Agency (IRA) has operated numerous troll farms who spam critics of the Kremlin with pro-Putin and pro-war comments.

China state media has largely used Russian state media stories and information from Russian officials, including echoing misinformation and conspiracy theories. In March 2022, China Global Television Network (CGTN) paid for digital ads on Facebook targeting global users with briefings and newscasts featuring pro-Kremlin talking points about the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine after Meta Platforms banned Russian state media advertisement buys. The same month, CGTN repeated unsubstantiated Russian claims of biological weapons labs in Ukraine. A leaked internal directive from Beijing News ordered its employees not to publish news reports that were "negative about Russia or pro-West." An analysis found that nearly half of Weibo's social media posts used Russia sources which were pro-Putin or described Ukraine in negative terms, while another third of posts were anti-West and blamed the expansion of NATO, while very few posts described the war in neutral terms. Several history professors have penned an open letter that strongly opposed China's support for "Russia's war against Ukraine" but their post was quickly deleted by censors, while a celebrity who criticized Russia over the invasion had her account suspended.

Due to Russian fake news laws, Facebook and Twitter were blocked by Russia authorities while TikTok banned new uploads. However a study by ''Tracking Exposed'' found out that TikTok had blocked all non-Russian content, but has continued to host old videos uploaded by Russia-based accounts and permitted Russian state media to continue posting, described as establishing a "splinternet" within a global social media platform. TikTok's vague censorship has permitted pro-Kremlin news but blocked foreign accounts and critics of the war, as a result "Russians are left with a frozen TikTok, dominated by pro-war content".

Effects

In February 2022, Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat judged that the quality of Russian misinformation videos had weakened, but remained especially effective for the older generation of Russians.

Some observers noted what they described as a "generational struggle" among Russians over perception of the war, with younger Russians generally opposed to the war and older Russians more likely to accept the narrative presented by state-controlled mass media in Russia. Kataryna Wolczuk, an associate fellow of Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia programme, said that " lderRussians are inclined to think in line with the official 'narrative' that Russia is defending Russian speakers in Ukraine, so it's about offering protection rather than aggression." About two-thirds of Russians use television as their primary source of daily news.

Many Ukrainians say that their relatives and friends in Russia trust what the state-controlled media tells them and refuse to believe that there is a war in Ukraine and that the Russian army is shelling Ukrainian cities.

Some Western commentators have claimed that the main reason many Russians have supported Putin and the "special military operation" in Ukraine has to do with the propaganda and disinformation. At the end of March, a poll conducted in Russia by the Levada Center concluded the following: When asked why they think the military operation is taking place, respondents said it was to protect and defend civilians, ethnic Russians or Russian speakers in Ukraine (43%), to prevent an attack on Russia (25%), to get rid of nationalists and "denazify" Ukraine (21%), and to incorporate Ukraine and/or the Donbas region into Russia (3%)."

In China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Africa, the Arab world, and Latin America, some social media users trended towards showing sympathy for Russian narratives. A study performed by Airlangga University revealed that 71% of Indonesian netizens supported the invasion. This support was due to affection for Putin's strongman leadership, as well as anti-US and anti-Western political alignments. Additionally, many Indonesians supported Russia due to positive reports of Ramzan Kadyrov and claims of the Azov Battalion covering their bullets with lard to be used against Chechen troops in the invasion.

A series of four online polls by Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation found that between 25 February and 3 March, the share of respondents in Moscow who considered Russia an "aggressor" increased from 29% to 53%, while the share of those who considered Russia a "peacemaker" fell by half from 25% to 12%. On 5 April 2022, Alexei Navalny said the "monstrosity of lies" in the Russian state media "is unimaginable. And, unfortunately, so is its persuasiveness for those who have no access to alternative information." He tweeted that "warmongers" among Russian state media personalities "should be treated as war criminals. From the editors-in-chief to the talk show hosts to the news editors, heyshould be sanctioned now and tried someday."

Russian themes

Numerous themes of disinformation either originated in Russia or favoring the Russian point of view have been reported.

Delegitimization of Ukraine as a nation and state

Russian imperialist, ultranationalist, and pejorative themes about Ukrainians as " Little Russians", "part of an all-Russian nation", or "junior partner in a triune Russian nation" have been part of official Russian imperial rhetoric since the seventeenth century, as well as Soviet policy in the twentieth century. Russian president Vladimir Putin has questioned the Ukrainians people's identity and the country's legitimacy for years and spread conspiratorial views of Ukraine's national identity as an "anti-Russian project" in his 2021 essay " On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians".

After the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, Russian rhetoric delegitimized successive Ukrainian governments as the "Kyiv regime", or as a "Nazi/fascist junta", denigrated it as "led by a band of drug addicts and neo-Nazis", and claimed that it is "under external control" by the West or the United States.

Such denial of nationhood has been cited as part of a campaign of incitement to genocide by Russian state authorities.

Allegations of Nazism

Among others, as a pretext given by Putin for starting the invasion were unfounded comparisons of the Ukrainian government to Nazis while announcing that one of his objectives is "de-Nazification of Ukraine". These allegations were widely rejected by many experts throughout the world as false and as part of an wider Russian disinformation campaign to justify the war in Ukraine, with many pointing out that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum denounced the Russian invasion, saying that "once again, innocent people are being killed purely because of insane pseudo-imperial megalomania", and called for the International Court of Justice to put Russia on trial. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem condemned Putin's misuse of Holocaust history.

A '' New York Times'' analysis of 8,000 Russian websites recorded a sudden spike of allegations of Nazism in Ukraine on the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Many analysts pointed out that far-right parties in Ukraine combined received only 2% of the 2019 parliamentary votes in Ukraine, well below the 5% threshold for representation. One expert explained the unfounded allegation about Nazism in Ukraine as an attempt to calm down Russian cognitive dissonance when faced with Russian war crimes, such as the Bucha massacre, "It helps them justify these atrocities", he said. Others have called these allegations as an attempt to incite hatred against Ukraine through establishment of a "fake threat scenario". The Jews of Ukraine similarly rejected Putin's propaganda about Nazism in Ukraine today and in the past.

Statements of denazification continued to permeate throughout Russian media and justification for the war. On 1 March, a large number of diplomats at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva staged a walkout in protest of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov began his prepared remarks to the assembly via video from Moscow, in which he echoed the statements of denazification in Putin's speech: "The goal of our actions is to save people by fulfilling our allied obligations, as well as to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine so that such things never happen again." In a ''RIA Novosti'' op-ed published in early April, " What Russia should do with Ukraine", Timofey Sergeytsev argued strongly for the full destruction of Ukraine as a state and the Ukrainian national identity in the ambit of the denazification of the latter. The Ukrainian state was, according to Sergeytsev, to be renamed after the war. The op-ed attracted criticism from as far afield as Slavoj Žižek. In an analysis of the article, American historian Timothy Snyder pointed out that the use of words "Nazi" and "denazification" by the Russian regime was historically inaccurate.

By early May, usage of the term in Russian media appeared to be on a decline, reportedly because it had not gained traction with the Russian public, although the term experienced a slight resurgence when United Russia party member Oleg Viktorovich Morozov called in the Duma for the denazification of Poland later that month. The Russian ambassador to Bulgaria, Eleonora Mitrofanova, has used the moniker "Nazi regime in Kyiv" to refer to the post- Revolution of Dignity administrations of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

In May 2022, Aleksandr Dugin, frustrated by "strange and convoluted arguments" used by Lavrov to explain the Russian meaning of "denazification", proposed that it is necessary to simply "identify Ukrainian Nazism with Russophobia". Dugin argued that in the same way as Jews have a "monopoly" of definition of antisemitism, in this way Russia holds a "monopoly" on the definition of Russophobia and "Ukrainian Nazism".

According to Ukrainian-American journalist Natalia Antonova, "Russia's present-day war of aggression is refashioned by propaganda into a direct continuation of the legacy of the millions of Russian soldiers who died to stop" Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War.

Claims of Ukrainian and NATO aggression

Spokesmen of Russian state media, the breakaway Donetsk People Republic, or Vladimir Putin have made unsubstantiated claims of aggression by NATO or Ukraine against Russian citizens, including assassination, sabotage, genocide, and the development of bio-weapons including birds carrying fatal diseases.

Assassination attempts

According to Bellingcat, a supposed bombing of a "separatist police chief" by a "Ukrainian spy", broadcast on Russian state television, showed visual evidence of the bombing of an old "green army vehicle". The old car's registration plate was that of the separatist police chief, but the same licence plate was also seen on a different, new SUV.

On 18 February 2022, the Luhansk People's Republic showed video appearing to show the removal of a car full of explosives that had been prepared for blowing up a train full of women and children evacuating to Russia. The video's metadata showed that it had been recorded on 12 June 2019.

Sabotage attempts

The breakaway Donetsk People's Republic released a video on 18 February 2022 that claimed to show Poles trying to blow up a chlorine tank. The video was distributed further by Russian media. The video's metadata showed that it was created on 8 February 2022, and included a mix of different pieces of audio or video, including a 2010 YouTube video from a military firing range in Finland.

Ukrainian intelligence attributed responsibility for the video to the Russian intelligence service GRU.

Genocide in Donbas

In mid February 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin baselessly claimed that Ukraine was carrying out genocide in Donbas. He said the purpose of the military "operation" in Ukraine was to "protect the people" in the predominantly Russian-speaking region of Donbas who, according to him, "for eight years now, adbeen facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime". Putin's claims were dismissed by the international community, and Russian claims of genocide have been widely rejected as baseless. More than 3,000 civilians were killed as a result of the war in Donbas, but there is no evidence to support the claim that Ukraine committed the genocide of Russian-speaking people. The European Commission has also rejected the allegations as "Russian disinformation". The US embassy in Ukraine called the Russian genocide claim a "reprehensible falsehood". Ned Price, a spokesperson for the US State Department, said that Moscow was making such claims as an excuse for invading Ukraine.

In March and April 2022, propaganda in the state-controlled media and on pro-Kremlin Telegram channels has falsely accused Ukrainian troops of attacking civilian targets in Mariupol and bombing Ukrainian cities.

Moreover, the fatality rate of the War in Donbass was actually falling prior to the 2022 Russian invasion: in 2017, there were 117 conflict-related civilian deaths, while in 2020 this was down to 26 deaths, and further down to 25 deaths in 2021.

Biological weapons labs

In March 2022, Russia made unsubstantiated allegations that Ukraine was developing biological weapons in a network of labs linked to the US. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China and Chinese state media amplified Russian claims. QAnon promoters were also echoing the disinformation. BBC Reality Check found no evidence supporting the claims. The United Nations also refuted the claim. Russian biologists in and outside of Russia have debunked the claims, stating that the allegations are "transparently false".

According to researcher Adam Rawnsley, the Kremlin has a history of discrediting ordinary biology labs in former Soviet republics, having previously spread conspiracy theories about Georgia and Kazakhstan similar to the accusations deployed against Ukraine.

Birds as bio-weapons

Prior to March 2022, the Russian Ministry of Defense had made unsubstantiated accusations that the United States was manufacturing bio-weapons in Ukraine. In March, the Ministry followed up with another conspiracy theory, which claims that the U.S. is training birds in Ukraine to spread disease among Russian citizens, according to a statement given by Major General Igor Konashenkov, spokesman of the Ministry to Russian state-controlled media. Specific details were given about diseases involved, including the name of a specific strain of flu with 50% mortality, as well as Newcastle disease. Media reports included maps, documents, and photos of birds with American military insignia, and also claimed that live, infected birds had been captured in eastern Ukraine.

The claims were laughed off by U.S. State Department spokesman, who called them "outright lies", "total nonsense", "absurd", "laughable" and "propaganda". Director of the CIA William Burns told the U.S. Senate that Russia was using such claims to prepare the terrain for a biological or chemical attack by Russian forces against Ukraine, which they would then blame on the United States and Ukraine.

Combat-mosquitoes

On 28 October 2022, Vasily Nebenzya, the Permanent Representative of Russia to the United Nations, accused Ukraine of using drones with "combat mosquitoes" which spread "dangerous viruses". Andrii Yermak

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