Rage against the Kremlin propaganda machine

This article was produced in the framework of the "Unprejudiced" project with the support of the Eastern Partnership Programme and the German Federal Foreign Office in spring 2022.
Author: Keti Khutsishvili

Russia began its full-scale military intervention on February 24th, but the war on Ukraine started much earlier. One of the actions was an information war conducted through Kremlin controlled media and social media platforms of various Russian and pro-Russian actors.

Fact-checkers have been waging this war against Kremlin propaganda for years. They have been adapting to deal with the increasing amount of false and manipulative narratives to get the truth to the public. This article will examine the work of Ukrainian and Georgian fact-checkers. How they operate, what are the Kremlin tactics, who are the actors spreading fake news and who is it aimed at? - article will offer the look on these subjects from people on the forefront of the information war against the Kremlin propaganda machine.

Fact-checking before and after the war

Ukrainian and Georgian fact-checkers, particularly 4 organizations: VoxCheck and StopFake in Ukraine and Myth Detector and Factcheck in Georgia have been monitoring and debunking fake news and propaganda coming from Russian and pro-Russian actors for years. These organizations are members of Facebook's 3rd party fact-checking program. This includes monitoring the spread of disinformation on their platforms, preparing argumentative articles debunking these claims and marking false and misleading posts with appropriate labels to limit their reach and the damage they can do. The collaboration covered their respective countries, but since the beginning of the war in Ukraine Facebook has extended the program to cover not only their home countries, but also Russia and Belarus.

Svitlana Slipchenko, acting head of VoxCheck says, that on the first day of the war they understood, that they had to switch all their usual activities, such as analyzing reforms, economics and even fact-checking different topics, like pandemic and vaccines, to the war related topics. Since then, VoxCheck has started 3 ongoing articles that are being updated constantly. One of the articles contains main false narratives spread by Russian propaganda about the war, while others summarize main topics in Ukrainian media and victories against Russia.

“We see much more Russian disinformation right now, we see it in Telegram, in Facebook, in Instagram, in messengers like Viber or WhatsApp. To fight these fakes that Russia creates every day about the ongoing war, we debunk them, not only in our articles published on the website and the overview of Russian disinformation, but we also make videos with national broadcaster Suspilne. We understand that we are fighters too, but on the information front. It motivates us and it helps us work without resting on weekends”. - Says Svitlana Slipchenko.
This regime is shared by another Ukrainian fact-checking organization StopFake. They say nothing much has changed as countering Russian propaganda has been their main goal since the Maidan uprising and their subsequent creation in 2014. They have also put aside other topics and focused entirely on debunking war related fake news. Olena Churanova, fact-checker at StopFake explains that because of the overwhelming amount of disinformation coming from Russian and pro-Russian media, they hold discussions and focus on the fakes that could harm people or have the most impact on their way of thinking.

“It is happening with our country and it is happening with our families, each tragedy is our own tragedy so of course this gives us motivation. For our work we do not need an office, we just need some safe place, access to the internet and working mobile phone. My colleagues have found some safe places in Ukraine, some of us for example still stay in Kyiv. There are cyber-attacks coming from Russia. It caused some problems for several days. Russia is trying to attack our website, they are doing it actively, but we have very good specialists and they cover it, so our website is safe right now”. - says Olena Churanova.

Georgian fact-checkers have also seen a dramatic increase in disinformation, especially relating to the war. Their workload was increased by broadening partnership with Facebook to monitor Russian language posts in Russia and Belarus as well.

“The volume of disinformation has increased, but this helps us better observe what is happening inside our own country, because we can see clear correlations between the wave of disinformation coming from Russian sources and the disinformation being spread locally.” - says Tamar Kintsurashvili, Editor-in-chief of Myth Detector.

Main tactics of Kremlin propaganda

“Russian propaganda is like a broken mirror. Everything in it is completely different from the actual facts”. - says Svitlana Slipchenko. She talks about the false flag operations by Russia, to conceal their attacks on Ukraine and its civilian population and shift the blame on Ukrainian forces. This type of disinformation has been observed and debunked by fact-checkers in both countries several times. For example, Russia has been trying to deny its attacks on civilians, blame Ukraine for them and accuse them of using civilians as human shields. (see examples on VoxCheck, StopFake, Myth Detector, FactCheck).

Even the whole premise of the war is based on this type of propaganda. Russian and Belarusian authorities blamed Ukraine for the escalation and planning an attack on them. This false claim, that Ukraine was preparing an attack, has been repeated many times before the invasion, when Putin claimed, that Ukraine was planning to return Crimea by military force and again when pro-Kremlin publications alleged that Ukraine was arming one of the branches of its armed forces to begin carnage in Donbas. Since the beginning of the war these lies were repeated by Russian propagandist media, offering as proof falsified documents.

Another tactic used by Russian propaganda is aimed at its internal audience, claiming made up victories in the war that is clearly not going as the Kremlin planned and portraying occupation forces as liberators.

At the same time, Russian propaganda is also trying to demoralize Ukrainians, especially in the territories that they have occupied since the invasion.

“Russia claims that Ukrainian authorities are not interested in de-occupying these territories and they are going to leave them under Russian occupation. At the same time, Russia makes it impossible in these occupied territories for people to hear what Ukrainian authorities say. There is no connection to Ukrainian TV broadcasters, radio, sometimes they don't even have the internet connection to check the information. But in fact Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly stated, that they are not forgetting about these people and they are trying to de-occupy these territories”. - Says Svitlana Slipchenko.

Tactics for spreading propaganda also vary. Among them are alleged foreign experts appearing on Russian and pro-Russian media and repeating the lies spread by Kremlin propagandists.

“Their message is used to justify Russia's actions and underline Russian superiority. It is delivered as a point of view that is coming from foreign experts, who are supposedly free from Putin’s influence”. - Says Tamar Kintsurashvili.

According to her, another discourse that is more active in Georgia is connected to identity. This has been observed by Myth Detector before the beginning of the war, when at end of January, while Russia was mobilizing its military at the borders of Ukraine, a fabricated video was spread in Georgian-language social media showing a gay soldier meeting his boyfriend. The original video from 2017 belongs to the UK Coalition for equal marriage, but in this case UK flags were removed and excerpts from the video of the Ukrainian army were added in. One of the actors spreading the fabricated video was openly pro-Russian platform Alt-info, as well as other pro-Russian, anti-liberal accounts on Facebook, both authentic and fake. Fake video came with homophobic slurs attempting to discredit Ukrainian armed forces. Myth detector discovered that since 2020 the fabricated video has been published by the representative of the self-proclaimed Luhansk republic, as well as several Russian media outlets. Russia has been using homophobia as its political tool for many years. Homophobic narratives are not new form Russian and pro-Russian actors to discredit activist, politicians, organizations and the West in general. Recent attacks on LGBT activists and journalists on July 5th, 2021 in Tbilisi by the mob organized by aforementioned pro-Russian organization Alt-Info is just one of the examples in this long list.
 

Target audience for Russian propaganda

Even though Facebook has imposed restrictions and Russia itself restricted Facebook inside the country, Kremlin’s propaganda outlets are continuing their activities on social media platforms, including those belonging to Meta. Opinions differ on the reasons behind this seemingly incompatible behavior.

Olena Churanova of StopFake believes that one part of the target audience in this case are those Russians, who can use VPN, or those Russian speakers, who live outside the country. Another part of it are those who do not have a clear opinion on the events that are going on.

Russian diaspora is one of the target audiences mentioned by Tamar Kintsurashvili as well. She points out that these groups have been used to share disinformation and mobilize local communities against Ukrainians.

“We found a video that was spread as a protest held by Germans in Dresden against Ukrainian refugees, when in fact people present at the protest were from biker group Night wolves that is a Kremlin project”. - says Kintsurashvili.

Ukrainian refugees have been another target of disinformation aiming to portray them as ungrateful debauchees.

“There are new narratives about Refugees, claiming that they just harm the European economy and they are not thankful for all the help and support that they receive from Europe. It is a really interesting method used by Russia, when they take just one example of one person who was really ungrateful for all the help and exaggerate it to expand on all Ukrainians”. - says Svitlana Slipchenko.

She believes that among the target audience that the Kremlin is working on one of the most important is the European audience.

“Russia is trying to change Europeans' minds about their authorities. Because of this propaganda about Ukraine and Russia people in Europe make wrong choices about their own authorities. We can see such situation in France where people are ready to vote for Marine Le Pen, who is in fact just repeating some Russian propaganda narratives. And we can see that even some international organizations can be affected by Russian propaganda, for example when the international organization that should be working for nuclear security is not sure that Russia is able to carry out provocations and cause danger at the nuclear plants it has occupied”. - says Slipchenko.

Who is spreading the lies?

There are obvious culprits of course. These are Russian authorities, representatives of separatist forces in occupied territories, official Kremlin propagandists, state owned media companies, such as RT and Sputnik with their branches in different countries and languages and openly pro-Russian actors, like the aforementioned Alt-Info and other pro-Russian political parties in Georgia advocating for the dialogue with Russia, neutrality and rejecting Georgia’s Western aspirations. But there are other actors, who are actively involved in spreading the same disinformation on social media. A research conducted by Myth Detector showed that since the beginning of the war, many anti vaxxers, who in the previous years were actively spreading disinformation about the pandemic and especially Western vaccines, had now turned to repeating the lies coming from the Kremlin propaganda machine.

“Pro-Russian groups act with different aims, be it vaccines or Russian politics. On the other hand, part of anti vaxxers is under the influence of the church and we have heard from them statements that this is not a war between Ukraine and Russia, that the West provoked this war and instigated a fight between brothers, that Ukrainians and Russians are the same nation. These messages are coming actively from the representatives of the Georgian orthodox church and these people, apart from openly pro-Russian groups, were involved in an anti vaxxer campaign.” - says Tamar Kintsurashvili.

The same tendency has been observed in these groups in Ukraine. VoxCheck has been debunking disinformation about pandemic and vaccines actively before the war broke out, but now they have seen many accounts of anti vaxxers shift to the topic of war.

“A few days before the war started, we saw that some anti vaxxer’s accounts who produced many fakes about vaccines just published nothing. They were quiet and we saw no new fakes about Covid-19 vaccination. Since the war started, they started to create war related fakes. I guess they just took some days for requalification from Covid-19 to war related topics”. - says Svitlana Slipchenko.

In Ukraine another source of disinformation is coming from the occupied territories. VoxCheck has observed fake accounts working from occupied Lugansk and Donetsk regions, sharing Russian propaganda and disinformation. According to StopFake such pages are launched from Ukrainian territories occupied after the war as well, claiming that these regions are part of Russia. These accounts are suspected to be operated and financed from Russia.

Some of the Russian narratives have appeared in European media as well. A research by VoxCheck has shown that some Italian and German publications have spread disinformation about Russian politics and NATO. These narratives are used by Russia to justify its military aggression against Ukraine.

“These are narratives about Nazism, about the West forcing Ukraine to start the war against Russia or Donbas, that Russia should just protect itself from Ukraine. Russia has cultivated these narratives for years before the war started and still uses it”. - says Svitlana Slipchenko.

Her advice on how not to fall victim to Russian propaganda is to look not at the separate cases of disinformation, but at a larger picture, to understand the overarching narrative and the aim it serves.

“You should understand the timeline of how this narrative was continually shared by Russia. These fakes were repeated in previous years, even since 2014, when the part of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea were occupied by Russia. If you understand the narratives that Russia is repeating and the cases that are part of these narratives, you can resist them and counter them and will not share it with your audience and will not make your choices based on them”. - says Slipchenko.

StopFake’s Olena Churanova believes that banning Russian propaganda channels in Europe was a right decision, as one of their aims is to undermine democracy and western institutions.

“It is really important to call what is going on right names. For example, not to call Russian media - media and Russian journalists actually journalists, because they are not journalists, they are agents, working for the Ministry of Propaganda of Russia. This will be fair, because their work is just discrediting our work. Now they are discrediting fact checkers as well. They launched lots of pseudo fact checking channels spreading so-called debunks about what is going on here”. - says Churanova.

How does the Ukrainian and Georgian government deal with the wave of disinformation?

When fact-checkers are debunking the fake news, they are first of all relying on open-source information, but there are times when their research requires official confirmation from authorities. This can drag in time, when time is of essence. The longer fake news stays unchecked and unrestricted on Facebook, the more people might come across it and believe the lie. Ukrainian fact-checkers have expressed satisfaction with the work that their government is doing in providing information and countering fake news.

“Before the war started, we often criticized the government for the lack of attention towards media literacy of the Ukrainians. One of the main steps that the Ukrainian government took before the war was the creation of two centers for fighting disinformation. First is the center for countering disinformation of national security and another is the center for informational security that is a part of the ministry of culture and informational policy. These two centers can now debunk fakes really quickly because they have strong connections with the authorities, and access to all the official information”. - says Svitlana Slipchenko.

She says that since the war resistance of Ukrainians against Russian disinformation has increased, more and more people started checking information before believing it and it is partly due to the government's actions. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the Georgian government, which does not seem too eager to cooperate with fact-checkers and share official information. This was especially apparent when Russian disinformation about the alleged existence of biolaboratories working on biological weapons in Ukraine was turned to Georgia as well. The Lugar laboratory, located in Georgia, which played a major role during the pandemic in testing and preventing the spread of the virus, has often become a target of Russian disinformation in the past.
Since the war started these allegations resurfaced and threats were made but there has been no reaction from the Georgian government.

“Policy of the Georgian government is not to irritate Russia. Through different online publications they try to indirectly answer Russian accusations, but the political will to tackle this issue, especially in the context of the events unfolding in Ukraine, does not exist. Government is sometimes obliged to share the information, but they do not use the resources of fact-checkers to conduct active information campaigns on this issue”. - says Tamar Kintsurashvili.

How effective is fact-checkers' work?

StopFake, VoxCheck, Myth Detector and FactCheck are the members of the International Fact-checking network at Poynter institute. IFCN has set up a new platform #Ukrainefacts, where fact-checks done on the topic of war in Ukraine by member fact-checking organizations all around the world are collected. At the beginning of May this database contained 1550 fact-checks in dozens of countries.
 
The platform helps fact-checkers themselves, to share information and findings of their research with colleagues.

“We save resources this way, by using the research done by our colleagues and not spending time debunking the same disinformation, especially when the torrent is so big. First such fruitful collaboration was during the pandemic. On the other hand, it is good to see what kind of vulnerability exists in which country, what type of disinformation works there”. - says Tamar Kintsurashvili.

The platform also helps journalists and other interested parties to have access to checked information, observe the similarities between the fake news being spread in different countries and the patterns of Russian propaganda. Fact-checkers believe that the impact of fact-checking against the spread of disinformation has yet to be measured, but despite criticism, it is important to continue their work.

“Some people think that fighting disinformation is inefficient, you should not debunk fakes, you should do something else, but no one knows what you should do if not debunking fakes. I think it is false. We have to carry on debunking fakes and explaining why disinformation is disinformation, why it is harmful, not only for Ukraine but for the whole world”. - says Svitlana Slipchenko.

She believes that these efforts are helping in getting Ukrainian voices heard in the world and garnering more support in its resistance against Russian aggression. Hopefully, ultimately these efforts will result in truth prevailing in the information war against Kremlin propaganda machine.