One in every three news items is about the war or its consequences for Russia. Monitoring of the Russian mass media for April 4-10.

In order to do this, we analyzed more than 14k of news items from Russian state media and manipulative websites that purposefully spread Russian disinformation.

Russia against sanctions

Sanctions have a serious impact on the Russian economy. This is shown at least by the fact that over the last week, less than 1,500 Russian news items contained references to the sanctions pressure or on attempts of the Russian economy to resist them.

Russian propagandists continue to search for the areas, which do not depend on imports". They convince their population (and the whole world at the same time) that the Russian economy is not affected by sanctions, the rouble is a stable currency, and the desire of the U.S. to "lead Russia into default or depletion of remaining reserves" is unsuccessful.

"For the second consecutive day, the Russian currency has been recovering consistently, even though the major risks remain valid, new sanctions are being discussed, the end of the military operation in Ukraine is not yet in sight, and global commodity prices continue to decrease"

Disinformers are trying to evoke pity for "innocent" athletes ("because Russian athletes have done nothing wrong to anyone, other than moving sports forward throughout their lives") and continue convincing [its own population and other countries] that the countries that have imposed the sanctions are suffering from them — "they are now crippling themselves more than they are crippling Russia and the Russian economy".

"Russia has enough food to meet the country's domestic needs, while the Western countries should expect problems with food."

Russia against Ukronazis

Writing about Russia's aggression in Ukraine, Russian newsmakers continue to intimidate their readers with "Ukronazis". The Russian propaganda justifies the hostile actions by reasons like "We could not have done otherwise" and is threatening Ukraine with the "Nuremberg Tribunal". Russian state media vividly recount "atrocities of the National Battalions" against civilians and prisoners of war. However, they are trying not to go into too much detail when reporting on the fighting. Usually they are reprinting reports from the Russian General Staff or the occupying authorities in the so-called "republics". They do occasionally report about the deaths of their own soldiers or about their captivity. Of course, they do not forget to write about the development of mass destruction weapons in secret "bio-laboratories" and the preparation of "inhumane provocations with mass poisoning of people with toxic chemicals."

At the same time, Russian military ‘experts’ continue to discuss the prospects of a new Russian offensive in the Donbas and dream of storming of Sumy and Mykolayiv. "Negotiations are useless in any case. Because [Ukraine] is failed state, impossible to negotiate with" they said in their interviews. Moreover, Russian desinformers like to praise their own armor and overestimate losses of Ukrainian equipment. Sometimes this can reach the point of absurdity. For example, last week the Russian military observer Viktor Litovkin reported about loss to Ukraine over 400 Bayraktars. This is ridiculous, because now the Turkish company Baykar Tech has produced only about 300 of these machines.

Furthermore, Russian manipulative and propaganda websites have published a lot of materials that denying any Russia's malicious actions in Buchа. Various photos and videos were called fakes: "photos and video footage from Bucha — yet another directing by the Kiev regime for the Western media as was the case in Mariupol with the maternity hospital, as well as in other cities", "...the bodies on the recording were moving, which allows us to talk about the staging the video". It is noteworthy that the victims of the Russian genocide in Chernihiv region and other cities and villages of Kyiv region were not mentioned in these texts even once. Also, the Russian media denied that the RF involvement of the rocket attacks on the Kramatorsk train station with Tochka-U. Disinformers demanded for an "independent investigation" and asserted that the Russian army has no "obsolete Soviet ballistic missile complex". But that's not true. OSINT investigators say that the Russians were demonstrating these missile systems at the beginning 2021.

Russia against the Western threat

The main feature of russian news about foreign policy and diplomacy is the combination of two seemingly completely incompatible narratives. On the one hand, the russian authorities makes compliance with the modern system of international relations — they have a extensive branches of institutions, hold negotiations and congratulate on winning the elections. On the other hand, they promote aggressive anti-Western propaganda or inverted conspiracy delusion.

Neutral journalistic reports about the elections in the European countries are available in the russian news (although with "correct" accents such as "according to Serbian experts, Aleksandar Vucic will try to delay [...the process of forming a new government] as long as possible while the solution to the question of Ukraine continued to be pending. This is his way to justify himself to the West, which expect Serbia to join the sanctions against Russia".

And then there will be a quote from a member of the Russian International Affairs Council "As a rule, Russia has good relations with those states which have ever received a very powerful blow from Russia," with reference to the World War II and an explanation of its good relations with Hungary, which was defeated by the Hungarian army 70 years ago and suppression of the uprising in 1956.

"We saved the Czechs, we were ready to save them in 1938, we saved them as a result of World War II, we returned their statehood, just like we saved the Poles. We also gave the Poles territory as a gift, up to 25 percent of their territory of Germany, together with all the infrastructure that existed there. But we have had no conflict before with the Poles or the Czechs, so they do not appreciate what they were given. That's why such a strong russophobic policy and rhetoric. When they receive some powerful blow from Russia — then, perhaps, they will begin to appreciate friendship with our country."

The russian newsmakers are outraged by Russia's expulsion from the UN Human Rights Council and continue to pump up

their readers with aggressive anti-Western rhetoric: "Western actions have always resulted in mass casualties among civilians, destruction of statehood and civil wars, and terrorism"

"It is no secret that the goal of the United States was to build a Russophobic alliance of pro-Western states along Russia's borders. States that were supposed to create tension near Russia's borders and turn into a kind of "liberal-democratic curtain" that isolated Moscow from the rest of the world. As a result, the Americans managed to promote to Maidan and 'Euro-Atlantic turn' in three post-Soviet countries — Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine."

At the same time, the disinformers insist on maintaining diplomatic relations with Western countries and rejoice when they find "allies" in the West: "At the same time, NATO countries such as France, Germany and Turkey have advocated continued contacts with Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite charges of war crimes against Russia"

Methodology

We searched all materials from the Russian and occupation sites, that have been used to traditional monitoring disinformation.

The algorithm is automatically determining topics was applied to each paragraph. Among these topics (groups of similar materials) were those related to the invasion. Then we received data for each material on the site regarding mentions of a particular topic. Conclusions were built on these data and examples of paragraphs on the topic.

Sites: regnum.ru, life.ru, kommersant.ru, naspravdi.info, lenta.ru, pravda.ru, antifashist.com, c-inform.info, kafanews.com, dni.ru, sevastopol.su, newc.info, vz.ru, ruinformer.com, sobytiya.info, meridian.in.ua, newsland.com, xvesti.ru, odnarodyna.org, nefakt.info, pravdanews.info, ukraina.ru, aif.ru

disinfomonitor english