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The West cheats on Ukraine with Russia. Disinformation monitor #101

  • Ukraine mounts information attack on the occupied territories
  • Nuland and the US betray Ukraine for the sake of Russia
  • Putin intimidates the EU and Ukraine with energy disaster
  • Quotes from Medvedev’s article about Ukraine as a vassal
  • Ukraine steals “Cossack tradition” from Russia
  • Learn how different topics raised by Russian disinformation have evolved over time with our interactive visualization

Period: October 11 — 17, 2021

Disinfo topics

% of news related to the topic among all mews from the group of sites

What’s new in disinformation?

Along with the return and strengthening of the topic of the coronavirus, the old propaganda theses returned to Russian texts. Almost the only "novelty" is the recognition by Russian targeting Ukrainian issues of the tragic situation due to the rapid increase in the incidence of covid in the occupied territories. Which they accompanied by accusations against Ukraine, which allegedly exaggerates the scale of the disaster.

The propagandists also significantly intensified their narrative about the alleged disappointment of Western partners in Ukraine. This time, their main argument was the visit of Victoria Nuland to Moscow and the absence of any strong statements from the American side after the visit.

The celebration of the Day of Defenders of Ukraine was not overlooked, combining it with classic scarecrows about Ukrainian neo-Nazis and telling how Ukraine steals "Cossack tradition" from Russia.

Coronavirus

The spread of the Delta strain in Ukraine and in the occupied territories of the Donbas continues to be reflected in the texts of disinformers. Ukrainian garbage sites have resumed Medvedchuk's thesis on the production of Ukrainian vaccine (meaning Russian): “If the Ukrainian authorities would accept the agreement (...) of Viktor Medvedchuk on the transfer of technologies for the production of a vaccine against coronavirus, then Ukraine would produce its own drug already, and would not plan to do so in 2022”. And they did not fail to emotionally pump up their readers (both on the sites and in their Telegram channels): “In Ukraine, the situation with coronavirus rushes into the abyss”.

Russian sites targeting Ukraine recognize the critical situation with the disease in the occupied territories: “DPR Ministry of Health calls the situation with coronavirus extremely tense” and at the same time they blame “Ukrainian information and psychological operatives” in flaming the panic.

“Folks, it's time to learn. In addition to a direct war with Ukraine, we still have an information war, so it is rather strange that when Ukrainian shells fly through residential quarters of cities, we know for sure from whom the “hello” came. But when informational shells arrive at us, we seem to take the blows with great joy and undermine the situation for the "Ukrops" [derogatory for Ukrainians - TEXTY.org.ua] delight. You need to understand what kind of world we live in now and filter the information at least a little.”

Meanwhile, Russian mainstream sites ridicule minister of health Lyashko's statement about how Russian propaganda in Ukraine affects the low level of vaccination against coronavirus: "Everything can be blamed on Russia!" "Kyiv blames the Russian Federation for the low rate of vaccination." At the same time, they are quoting reactions from social networks, in which unknown people broadcast most of those fakes and manipulations, which, in fact, are dispelled by Russian propaganda to spread anti-vaccination sentiments. Among them: "there is simply no trust in the Ministry of Health", "low-quality vaccines that lead to thrombosis", and just mixed all their manipulations and fakes to the heap: "And the theft of ventilators, oxygen? vaccines? And "Pfizer" without a refrigerator? Enemies are not needed with such authorities. " You can read about the main arguments of those who do not want to be vaccinated and the refutation of those arguments in our article.

"The devil in a skirt" Nuland betrays Ukraine

Victoria Nuland, the US Deputy Secretary of State, paid a several-day visit to Moscow last week. The American diplomat held a series of meetings with representatives of the Russian Foreign Ministry, during which they discussed the normalization of the work of the embassies of both countries. Victoria Nuland also met with Dmitry Kozak, a Russian high-ranking official responsible for the Kremlin's aggressive policy in Ukraine. The US did not make any strong statements after Nuland's visit, but said it was "useful" and "productive". Instead, Russian propaganda spread a lot of different (dis)information about Nuland's visit. The main purpose of this barrage of messages was to create an information picture in which the allies once again betrayed Ukraine and negotiated with the Kremlin.

“Victoria Nuland put Ukraine back on the hook”, disinformers wrote, implying that Ukraine would be forced to grant the occupied territories some autonomy as soon as possible. At the same time, Nuland was called "Woland [devil in Russian writer Blugakov’s novel - TEXTY.org.ua] of American politics" and "American diplomatic devil", and the main purpose of her visit was allegedly "to maintain a certain degree of confrontation, but not bring the situation to a boiling point."

Some Russian disinformation media did not shy away from good old conspiracy theories with hints of anti-Semitism:

“Let's start with the fact that, according to my information, Mrs. Nuland, overseeing the Ukrainian sector of work in the State Department, has never felt any piety and love for anything Ukrainian, unlike for Russia, for which she has deep respect. For one simple reason, nationalists of all stripes are anti-Semitic by nature and are prone to pogroms, and due to her ethnic origin, Mrs. Nuland, to put it mildly, cannot accept and understand this, of course. She, of course, handed out cookies on the Maidan, but she did it, I assure you, gritting her teeth, solely because of her, so to speak, professional duty.”

Putin intimidates the EU and Ukraine with energy disaster

While cutting gas supplies to Europe, Russia is accompanying these actions with a wave of disinformation and propaganda in mass media. For example, Russian state media have been spreading Putin's strong and unsubstantiated allegations that Ukraine's gas transportation system will "burst" if gas transit increases.

Putin's quotes were picked up by propagandist Telegram channels, manipulative sites writing about Ukraine, and even some leading and regional Ukrainian online media. Against the background of this massive information attack, Russian propaganda continued to intimidate Ukrainians with cold, economic and energy disasters. "A new price tag every month", "This is just the beginning", "If the transit stops, the south and east of Ukraine may be left without gas".

Medvedev's article. "It's pointless to deal with vassals"

Medvedev's article can be called an aggregator of Ukrainophobic quotes. It (as, in fact, Putin's recent article) consists of the main theses and narratives, which we have been describing in our monitoring for more than a year. So, as expected, quotes from this text were disseminated by Russian sites. Disinformers liked the emotional phrases that abound in Medvedev's text the most: Zelensky is a "man turned inside out," a characteristic of the Ukrainian government: “Contacts with such weak people are unproductive. They will sell at any time for five rubles” and constant mentions of so-called external governance of Ukraine: "It is pointless to deal with vassals. Things need to be done with the suzerain."

Western puppet Ukraine and its Russophobia

The most productive (in terms of Ukrainophobic quotes) topic of the past week was the contemplation about Ukraine's dependence on the West, the West's disappointment in Ukraine, and how the West is pushing Ukraine toward war with Russia. Below are the brightest of the quotes.

“In fact, the United States needs Ukraine only to meddle with Russia, to try to destroy the geopolitical and gas plans of the Russian Federation. For seven years, the Americans have not been able to do this, so cooperation with Ukraine is becoming increasingly undesirable and annoying.”

“They paid off the "independent one" [derogatory for Ukraine - TEXTY.org.ua] as one pays off an annoying mistress, but this country should not count on more. Ukraine is one of many whom the States and the entire Western world use for their own purposes”.

“Yes, it seems to us that state-sponsored Russophobia is a rotten commodity that Russia's neighbors are trying to push on the, let’s say, West. (...) But neither Georgia nor Ukraine has any other product, they have nothing to offer, except for this discounted trash”.

“The West can push Ukraine toward war with Russia, but the war will not last long, since the West itself will not dare to openly confront a nuclear power and will not support Ukraine, science fiction writers say”.

Celebrating October 14th. Ukraine glorifies murderers and steals Cossacks from Russia

Russian websites targeting Ukraine actively commented on the October 14th celebrations. For the Day of Defenders of Ukraine, news was published under headlines like “Defenders of Ukraine, I do not congratulate you. You're murderers to me." And the celebration of the Day of the Ukrainian Cossacks was used as an excuse to accusations that "Ukraine is again trying to steal the Cossack tradition."

“The Ukrainian national myth claims that all Ukrainians are the descendants of the Zaporizhia Cossacks. Well, a myth is a myth. After all, it is known that the real descendants of the Zaporizhia Cossacks, led by Zakhary Chepiga and Anton Golovaty, moved to the Kuban region  in 1791”.

Also this week: 

Russian websites continued to write about the investigation of Zelensky's offshore account in a way that is favorable to them. They wrote that, on the one hand, "Kolomoisky is diming Zelensky over to Washington," and on the other, "the United States has thrown Ukrainians to be eaten by wolves" (that is, they have allegedly stopped helping).

Medvedchuk's websites and controlled ‘experts’ added a new thesis to the classic theses about the political repressions of the opposition, which different garbage sites disseminated under almost identical headlines: “Medvedchuk's new case: diverting attention from offshore scandals or blackmailing the Kremlin?”

Summary

Lately, Russian propagandists have significantly intensified their theses about the alleged disappointment of Western partners (especially the United States) in Ukraine. Disinformers advance their arguments for the thesis using any convenient current events: the study of offshores of Zelensky, Nuland's visit to Russia, and the low level of vaccination against coronavirus. Disinformers even manage to combine this thesis with the seemingly opposite statement: "The United States is throwing billions of dollars for the war between Ukraine and the Donbas and Russia." After all, the latter argument helps to achieve another goal, namely to portray Russia as the strongest state in the region, so that the United States and other countries of the abstract West use "vassal" Ukraine to weaken and destroy Russia.

Limitations of the study:

In this study, we only regarded the topics which are in line with Russian disinformation campaigns. Most of them are based on real events, as disinformation works more effectively this way. Topic names reflect manipulations used in the topic. Accordingly, news stories on Ukrainian mainstream sites on the same topic may have completely different content from that of manipulative materials.

We take the topics of Russian propaganda in Ukraine from the following groups of materials:

In the first and second groups of news, the materials were selected by the AI classifier of manipulative news.

Methodology

We searched for topics in 16018 materials in the Russian language from:

Manipulation in news was singled out by our improved AI classifier developed in the project We’ve got bad news. In the monitoring, we only regarded materials about social and political life which are about Ukraine.

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