this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
184 points (96.5% liked)

World News

38530 readers
1536 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world

Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
quinten@lemmy.world
NewsAutoMod@lemmy.world
jordanlund@lemmy.world
Tenthrow@lemmy.world
little_cow@lemmy.world
lemmyAtom@lemmy.world
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world
184
Kremlin runs disinformation campaign to undermine Zelensky, documents show (www.washingtonpost.com)
submitted 7 months ago by breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca to c/world@lemmy.world
14 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

When news first emerged last month that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was preparing to fire his top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, officials in Moscow seemed jubilant. They had been trying to orchestrate just such a split for many months, documents show.

“We need to strengthen the conflict between Zaluzhny and Zelensky, along the lines of ‘he intends to fire him,’” one Kremlin political strategist wrote a year ago, after a meeting of senior Russian officials and Moscow spin doctors, according to internal Kremlin documents.

. . .

The Kremlin instruction resulted in thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles, created by troll farms and circulated in Ukraine and across Europe, that tried to exploit what were then rumored tensions between the two Ukrainian leaders, according to a trove of Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The files, numbering more than 100 documents, were shared with The Post to expose for the first time the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Zelensky with the aim of dividing and destabilizing Ukrainian society — efforts that Moscow dubbed “information psychological operations.”

Archive

top 14 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] PugJesus@kbin.social 15 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Gambashidze, Tupikin and their colleagues proposed narratives they hoped would destroy Zelensky’s image in the West as “the hero of a small country fighting a global evil,” one of the documents sent in April shows. They suggested portraying Zelensky as an actor only capable of following a script written for him by the United States and NATO, and his Western backers as tiring of him. They proposed distributing fake Ukrainian government documents as evidence of corrupt military procurement schemes, and suggesting that Zelensky and his family had Western bank accounts, the document shows.

The plans led to hundreds of articles and thousands of social media posts translated into French, German and English that targeted Zelensky, the document trove shows.

I think I know a few who have been repeating these talking points.

[–] Zipitydew@sh.itjust.works 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Gee like some terminally online .ml accounts?

[–] DdCno1@kbin.social 2 points 7 months ago

Tankies gonna tank, even if those tanks are older than the tanks that originally gave them that name.

[–] Chadus_Maximus@lemm.ee 3 points 7 months ago

Those would be my Eastern European parents :(

[–] ndsvw@feddit.de 12 points 7 months ago

Russia, the largest country, is only rank 11 if you compare BIPs...

Pretty much a failure... But instead of improving, they rather sabotage the others...

[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 1 points 7 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The files, numbering more than 100 documents, were shared with The Post to expose for the first time the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Zelensky with the aim of dividing and destabilizing Ukrainian society — efforts that Moscow dubbed “information psychological operations.”

But with Gen. Zaluzhny now out, the front lines frozen and further military and financial support from the United States uncertain, some in Kyiv are concerned that Russia’s covert propaganda efforts could begin to erode national cohesion and morale.

The documents show how in January 2023 the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, tasked a team of officials and political strategists with establishing a presence on Ukrainian social media to distribute disinformation.

The effort built on an earlier project that Kiriyenko, a longtime Putin aide, had been running to subvert Western support for Ukraine, including in France and Germany, previous reporting by The Post shows.

The documents show that progress was monitored at near-weekly Kremlin meetings, where the strategists gave dashboard presentations showcasing the most widely read posts they’d planted in Ukrainian social media and tallying the overall distribution of their output.

The Kremlin then issued orders to create similar posts or “additional reality” — a term used by Russian officials for fake news — including reports that Western leaders were looking for a replacement for Zelensky and that Zaluzhny intended to halt the counteroffensive.

The original article contains 2,331 words, the summary contains 229 words. Saved 90%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!