To navigate through the rampant rainforest of pro-Kremlin disinformation, a special compass comes in handy. But in the disinformation world, instead of pointing to the Earth’s magnetic north pole, the needle points judgmentally to the West, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.
Thus, with the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea approaching, sport comes high on the propagandists’ agenda. The new message is that international sports organisations have been captured by the “Anglo-Saxon sports mafia”.
Russia, the logic goes, with its doping scandals serves as a scapegoat for the Western powers who “turn a blind eye to their own doping terminators”. Here, we hear an echo of the more than a year-old disinformation campaign accusing the West of conspiring against Russia and using a doping agency for that.
The story travelled from the English language page of Katehon.com to the Czech disinformation outlet Zvedavec.org. The President of the supervisory board of Katehon is Russian businessman Konstantin Malofeev, who is on both the EU and US sanctions lists for supporting and funding the separatists in Eastern Ukraine.
Malofeev is also the founder of the pro-Kremlin media group Tsargrad that promotes “Orthodox values” and frequently spreads disinformation. Its previous masterpieces include a report of the CIA planning the “physical elimination” of the Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Katehon, for its part, ran a scoop in July that there was a coup in the US and that the US Congress had declared an economic war both on Russia and the EU.
Haven’t heard about it? Neither have we.
