China, Iran and Russia are using the coronavirus crisis to launch a propaganda and disinformation onslaught against the United States, the State Department warns in a new report, like reported by politico.com.

The three governments are pushing a host of matching messages: that the novel coronavirus was an American bioweapon, that the U.S. was scoring political points off the crisis, that the virus didn’t come from China, that U.S. troops spread it, that America’s sanctions are killing Iranians, that China’s response was great while the U.S.’s was negligent, that all three governments are managing the crisis well, and that the U.S. economy can’t bear the toll of the virus.

The report, which is not public, was produced by the department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) — a fledgling office focused on the global information wars — and reviewed by POLITICO. It makes the case that propaganda and disinformation narratives from those country’s governments have converged as coronavirus has spread. And it says that while the three governments have pushed out the same messages in the past, the global pandemic has seen the convergence of their messaging accelerate.

Some of the disinformation is produced by state-run media outlets, and some has been put out by the governments themselves. A website run by Russia’s Defense Ministry, for instance, highlighted the conspiracy theory that billionaire Bill Gates played a role in creating the virus.

Before the virus spread outside of China, per the report, the overlap between the three governments’ messaging was fairly narrow: They all defended President Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela, which the U.S. and other Western powers do not recognize as legitimate; and argued the U.S. fails to uphold its commitments to international agreements.

But by February 2020, according to the report, the messaging began to converge. The report argues this came and accelerated as those governments have struggled to keep public opinion in their own countries on their side.

One core message has been that China is a strong global health leader and that the United States, meanwhile, is a weak ally. Lea Gabrielle, who helms the GEC, told POLITICO that China has also let Russia’s propaganda efforts targeting the U.S. spread through its country — where the Beijing government’s internet censorship is notorious and relentless.

“What we saw as the health crisis started to come under control in China is that the CCP really started pushing a concerted effort to try to re-shape that narrative,” she said, using the acronym for the Chinese Communist Party. “So in a short period of time the CCP went from letting Russian disinformation claiming the U.S. was the source of the virus proliferate in Chinese social media, to raising questions on state media about the origin’s source, to promoting disinformation that the U.S. was the source of the virus.”

The Chinese government’s messaging is both defensive and offensive, she said.

“At the same time, we saw Beijing unleashing a steady drumbeat of pro-PRC content across its global media networks and also from its overseas missions and that included increasingly vocal criticism of how democratic countries were responding to the crisis,” she said.

In response to a comment request, a Chinese embassy spokesperson pointed to an interview between the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. and Axios on HBO. In the interview, the ambassador declined to explain why a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs promoted the claim the the U.S. was responsible for the virus. The spokesperson also flagged an interview the ambassador did with Ian Bremmer where he intimated the United States is trying to take “political advantage of other people’s sufferings.”

A spokesperson for Iran’s mission to the U.N. said the U.S. is responsible for any propaganda or disinformation about the pandemic, not Iran.

“It seems, it became a part of the U.S.’s domestic campaign, and unfortunately the U.S. medias are full with stories of lies and disinformation spread by the administration in the lead up to the virus creating a tragic pandemic in almost every state in America,” the spokesperson emailed. “Blaming others for its own mistakes is a hallmark of this U.S. administration.”

A spokesperson for Russia’s embassy in the U.S. flagged an embassy tweet claiming the country has not spread disinformation, as well as a Facebook post criticizing the Department of Defense for accusing Russia of disinformation efforts. “In these conditions, frantic #Russophobia persists in American mainstream media, obtaining inaccurate information from such a briefings by the Pentagon and the U.S. Department of State,” the post added.

The State Department report pointed to a March 10 article in the Global Times, a property of Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily. The article argued that China’s “image as a responsible world power has been further strengthened, rather than dented” by the pandemic. Two weeks later, the Iran-based Tasnim News Agency — which describes its mission as “[d]efending the Islamic Revolution against negative media propaganda campaign” — highlighted comments from the country’s top general thanking China for “humanitarian moves” related to the pandemic.

Who’s helping fight the virus — and who isn’t — has been a core focus for governments and citizens around the world. On March 3, a media company controlled by Russia’s armed forces ZVEZDA ran a story headlined “Bill Gates, a secret laboratory and a conspiracy of pharmaceutical companies: who can benefit from coronavirus.”

The piece intimates that Gates had foreknowledge of the virus and claims that only people of “the Mongoloid race” can contract Covid-19.

There are many theories about the origin of coronavirus and the further development of events. The most popular one concerns the monstrous prediction of Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. Last year, he said that 33 million people could die from such a coronavirus in 250 days. The calculations are purely mathematical, but true, the IT tycoon is sure.

After such statements, adherents of conspiracy theories literally have no doubt that the virus is of artificial origin, and Bill Gates is one of its main sponsors. Another fact adds weight to this theory – a few months ago, the head of Microsoft held a conditional exercise called Event 201, which simulated an outbreak of a new virus that killed 65 million people in 18 months. The idea of the teachings is simple – globalization in the name of salvation.

It is noteworthy that the famous pharmaceutical giants and the Pentagon leadership participated in this theater of cruel cynicism.
The fact is that while the disease affects only the representatives of the Mongoloid race, such suspicious selectivity raises questions from experts.

In addition to flagging the Russian government’s intimation that Gates may have been read in on the virus’s spread, the report cited material from all three governments calling coronavirus a U.S. bioweapon. It noted the infamous tweet from Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lijian Zhao touting an article claiming the novel coronavirus could have come from the U.S., as well as a Russia Today article highlighting a claim from the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that the virus could be an American bioweapon. The RT story noted that there’s “still no official proof” of that conspiracy theory.

Analysts outside the U.S. government are also tracking the global message wars. Camille Francois, the chief innovation officer at the network analysis firm Graphika, said her company has seen one of the same major themes that the State Department report highlighted.

“We have observed both public diplomacy and covert campaigns originating from Iran, China, and Russia converge around Covid-19 narratives, particularly in blaming the U.S. for its own response to the crisis and current role in geopolitical affairs,” she said.

And Joel Meyer of Predata, a predictive analytics firm with government and private sector clients, said their team has seen growing attention to narratives about Chinese and American foreign aid, as well as content about alternative medicine — two topics being boosted by foreign governments. Rather than monitoring messaging that governments push out, Predata follows global internet traffic trends to see how internet users’ focuses shift, shrink, and grow.

Of particular interest: dueling messages about whether the U.S. or China is a better ally.

“There’s a big increase in attention recently in Arabic language to Western foreign aid, interestingly, where there had been hardly any attention focused on that at all,” he said. “It sticks out like a sore thumb.”

And since the pandemic’s start, Meyer said the firm has seen heightened interest from Hindi and Persian-language internet users in websites that denigrate Western medicine and tout alternatives, including energy therapies and questionable supplements.

Meanwhile, he said, material promoting medical conspiracy theories and criticizing vaccines has drawn substantially more interest in Western Europe.

“In European languages, including French, German, and Italian, anti-vaxxer attention has really spiked recently,” he said.

Meyer said this newly high interest correlates with reports of government disinformation on those topics.

“We’re seeing interest rise to unprecedented levels in alternative medicines and treatments,” he said. “So from our analytics, we would look at that and say that type of disinformation is sinking in, it’s having an effect.”

The Russian federal budget draft for 2020 is in and it shows that state-owned media will receive 1.3 billion euros next year; a big jump from the current almost 1 billion, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The single biggest beneficiary is the TV News channel RT (Russia Today), which will receive almost 23 billion roubles or 325 million euros, according to the draft. Needless to say, RT’s funding has been growing for years and so has the number of cases connected to RT in our disinformation cases database.

Pervyi Kanal will receive 92 million euros, which will cover producing, acquiring and broadcasting content. The subsidy will be very welcome, as the channel’s losses last year reached 96 million euros.

Zvezda (“The Star”) is owned by the Russia’s Ministry of Defence and broadcasts television, produces online stories and radio programmes. This successor to the official newspaper of the Soviet armed forces, Krasnaya Zvezda (“Red Star”) will receive 29 million euros.

The Russian Ministry of Finance also proposes to allocate 339 million euros to finance the VGTRK, which is short for the “All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company”. Amongst many radio and TV channels, the state media giant owns Rossiya 1.

Another flagship in the media landscape under the Kremlin’s control is the “Rossiya Segodnya” holding, which, even if the name translates as “Russia Today” is not the same as RT. Rossiya Segodnya, whose CEO is the EU-sanctioned Dmitry Kiselyov, includes the news agency RIA Novosti, InoSMI and the multilingual international outlet Sputnik. Their subsidy will amount to 106 million euros.

Finally, a state media outlet, which has survived with its Soviet name, TASS, will receive 41 million euros in support of its news agency services.

All in all, as Interfax also notes, the share of media subsidies in Russia’s new draft budget has grown with a dramatic third; a figure which confirms the central place the control over the media narrative holds in the Kremlin’s political priorities.

Up to 6.2 million Syrians have fled their homes inside Syria since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, and 5.6 million have been forced to take refuge in neighbouring countries. Of the 6.2 million refugees, only about 3 per cent – 170,000 people – have returned to Syria since 2016, according to UN records, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The returns of Syrian refugees and displaced people have been making headlines in Russian outlets over the past few months. The reporting seeks to speculate about and to justify the factors prompting the low level as well as the declining pace of returns.

Among the latest examples, the most striking ones have been pertaining to the Al Rukban camp located in south-east Syria. The camp was established in 2014 in the demilitarised area close to the Jordanian border to host internally displaced Syrians.

Coordinated disinformation across languages

While the humanitarian situation and the living conditions of the residents of Al Rukban camp are known as dire with the camp being targeted by Assad’s forces, Russian outlets in different languages keep on demonising the United States for the situation inside the camp. See the EUvsDisinfo database for examples in English, Spanish, French and Russian here.

The Arabic language coverage repeats the same pattern. For instance, Sputnik has been presenting the families residing in the Al Rukban camp as “being held for years by US forces and armed allies”, and has been claiming that “the United States seeks to keep them [inside the camp] as human shields”.

In the same vein, RT echoed the words of Major General Viktor Kupchishin, the Head of the “Russian Reconciliation Centre for Syria”, who claimed that “the [alleged] growing financial dues imposed by pro-US militants on anyone who wants to leave the camp – up to $1,000 per person” were among the reasons for the decline in the number of displaced Syrians leaving the camp of Al Rukban to return to what is left of their homes.

But the demonising tone of the Russian coverage against the US about Al Rukban camp did not stop there. It reached an all-time high when Sputnik compared the camp to the Nazi German Auschwitz concentration camp. The article claimed that “according to the testimonies of the people who fled the Al Rukban camp, a great resemblance of life’s conditions can be seen with the Auschwitz concentration camp set up by Germany during the occupation of Poland, before being liberated by Soviet soldiers in 1945”.

“Syrian Auschwitz”

In such a context where the vocabulary employed by Russian outlets to describe the camp of Al Rukban has evolved from “a prison that people can escape only after paying $ 1,500 to the US-backed ‘Revolutionary Commando’ factions” to the “Syrian Auschwitz“, Russia emerges as the only one seeking to end the suffering of the camp’s residents, according to the Russian media.

It is needless to elaborate indefinitely on how much such a portrait in praise of Russia does not reflect the reality on the field. Among the testimonies emerging from the field that are compelling enough to correct the portrait of Russia drawn by the Russian media is the one of the Head of a Syrian policy research group based in Amman, which gathers information from civil and military sources. He has stated that the “conditions are currently the worst in the history of the camp with the Syrian regime and its Russian ally continuing to implement a starve or surrender strategy to force the camp’s occupants to leave”.

Sputnik Latvia brings forward a quote by George Orwell from his novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four, commenting on the European Parliament’s resolution on the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe: “Who controls the past, controls the future”. Sputnik’s columnist suggests that the parliamentarians have been inspired by the methods outlined in the novel’s Ministry of Truth and compare the European Parliament’s resolution with the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact of Germany, Italy and Japan, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The Kremlin disinformation outlets are vehemently attacking the European Parliament for the resolution “allows the destructions of monuments of the fight against Fascism“; it is “a political hatchet job for Poland“; it “ignores fascism in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia”. Russian state media actually say that the European Parliament has joined forces with Fascism.

War is Peace

Using Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four for suggesting a looming dictatorship is not terribly original, but a key element of the novel is the distant, but perpetual war between the super-states that control the world. The alliances between the powers change, but the state propaganda retains that the alliances are eternal and stable: “Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia”.

This model is mirrored in today’s pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets. “Russia was always at war with Nazism”. We learn, for instance, that the Soviet Union started the liberation of Nazi Occupied Poland on 17 September 1939. “Who controls the past, controls the future”.

The pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets are certainly working hard to assume control over the past. The decision to move 1980 statue in Prague to a museum from a public square has become a top story in Sputnik for several weeks, broadcasting various attacks on the Czech Republic: The statue is removed to provoke hatred against Russia. The local leadership is branded “Gauleiter“, hinting of Nazi connections to the decision. And moving the statue is called a violation of Czech international obligations. Which it isn’t.

Freedom is Slavery

This week’s Disinformation Review contains pro-Kremlin disinformation attacks in almost all possible directions: We’ve mentioned the European Parliament, Estonia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic. Poland is, of course, a target. The Kremlin’s Polonophobia shows no signs of receding – roughly one out of ten cases this week is devoted to Poland, suggesting, for instance, that it was Poland’s fault that Stalin attacked the country. Or that current Poland wants to dictate its will to EU. Ukraine and the US is also attacked; the US supporting ISIS terrorists; Ukraine applying to be a US State and generally being Nazi.

This week shows no shortage of cases of conspiracies. Some old ones, like the 9/11 false flag conspiracy, or suggesting the Rothschilds preparing an attack on Donald Trump; some not very original, suggesting the drone attack on Saudi oil facilities a false flag operation and some new ones: the EU Army might be sent suppress dissident member states, attempting to leave the Union. Most conspiracies boil down to Russophobia eventually: Foreign powers interfered in the election to the Moscow City Duma recently. The West, run by mad people, has set 2021 as the year to erase Russia from the face of the Earth.

Ignorance is Strength

The Kremlin disinformation outlets set forth on teaching the European Parliament history, ignoring historical facts, as earlier Russian/Soviet statements on the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact:

24 December 1989, the Parliament of the USSR, the Congress of the People’s Deputies, adopted a resolution, denouncing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. An English translation of the full text here:

From the standpoint of law, territorial division into Soviet and German spheres of interest and other actions were in conflict with the sovereignty and independence of several third countries.

The Congress notes that during this period the relations of the USSR with Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were regulated by a system of treaties. Pursuant to the 1920 Peace Treaties and 1926-1933 Non-Aggression Treaties, the signatories were obliged to honour each other’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability under any circumstances. The Soviet Union had assumed similar obligations to Poland and Finland.

The perestroika was an attempt to cope with Soviet Russia’s totalitarian past; searching to correct mistakes; moving forward to denouncing Imperialism and Stalinism. Democracy and human rights were supposed to replace party dictatorship and corruption; dialogue was about to replace lies and propaganda.

The Soviet parliamentarians had only recently been given the opportunity to read George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. The novel was forbidden to own, read or quote in Soviet Russia until 1988.

Like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu, 207 years ago Moscow burst into flames. It was September 1812, Russia was fighting against Napoleon and his coalition – and it won. Its win was essential in stopping Napoleon’s dominance in Europe.

Part of Russia’s eventual success in the war was the so-called scorched-earth tactics, which consisted of burning Moscow to the ground, so that its enemy could use neither the resources nor property in place. As French troops were arriving in Moscow, the Kremlin and major public buildings were blown up or burnt, and the inhabitants ran away. Approximately two-thirds of the city were destroyed, making it really difficult for Napoleon to celebrate his (temporary, as it turned out) advancement in the war.

As warfare vocabulary and methods were transferred to the information world, so were the scorched-earth tactics. Nowadays pro-Kremlin outlets use them to ruthlessly portray its enemies as degenerate, evil and obsessed with the idea of destruction. They are igniting the disinformation fire with the hope of making their targets as unattractive and unappealing as possible.

This week was no different. Pro-Kremlin outlets used fear to play with our emotions, and there were plenty of assumed threats to choose from; for example, Ukraine was allegedly laying ground for a new Chernobyl catastrophe with its new nuclear plant. In fact, the plant is processing radioactive waste actually resulting from the disaster in 1986. It may sound scary if you don’t get your facts straight. And if you’re not scared yet, maybe this case will do the trick: a Swedish professor is encouraging everybody to convert to cannibalism – a clear sign for pro-Kremlin outlets that the West, with its infamous liberal thought, has fallen morally and its values are degrading. The professor’s original presentation was much more nuanced – but disinformation outlets failed to bother with that.

Speaking of biased reporting, you may also find it interesting that European rule of law has ceased to exist – pro-Kremlin outlets based this claim on a single ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that happened to be inconvenient for Russian government and its focus on preserving Soviet legacy. Coincidence? We don’t think so. Using one case to paint the whole picture is another common tactics of pro-Kremlin outlets that serves the purpose of depicting the world as they see fit.

Who’s Afraid Of..? 

The narrative about the degenerate West brings us to another disinformation case, proving (sic!) that there is an old, multi-faceted Zionist-anti-Christian-Luciferian-Rothschild conspiracy behind the global financial power structure and the Western media. This is a common tactic of pro-Kremlin disinformation, aimed not only at showing that the West is collapsing in various fields, but also using unprovable conspiracy theories to back it. If you’re not scared of Zionists, maybe Lucifer will do the trick?

As if all those threats were too abstract, the scorched-earth tactics were also used in reports about military issues. President Zelenskyy was reported to double Ukraine’s military spending, which pro-Kremlin outlets used as a clear sign of preparations for an aggressive war, again without any evidence. But that was nothing compared to the US, which, as pro-Kremlin media reported, was extremely busy this week, backing Russian opposition in order to destroy Russia with one hand, colonising Poland with the other, and further militarising the outer space with the third hand. At the same time, authors of these conspiracy theories have not informed us how many hands the US actually has.

In the eyes of pro-Kremlin outlets, the Western world is far from beautiful and its allies –  far from being  honest partners. They keep scorching the Western earth with their conspiracy theories, stories without evidence, manipulations of official statements, and the whole wide array of other instruments which you can read through in this week’s set of disinformation cases. All of them are employed with one aim: to portray the West as weak, unappealing and degenerate.

The scorched-earth tactics sometimes prove successful in conventional warfare. It’s up to you if it’s successful in the information war. Here’s a set of new disinformation cases and our response to them, which can help you build your resilience.

The Estonian Defence Forces are caught in the crosshairs of the pro-Kremlin disinformation machine, covered by outlets that are primarily local – for example Sputnik, Baltnews and Rubaltic, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

In addition to news pieces that typically consist of the defence forces’ press releases equipped with provocative headlines, there are also opinion pieces consisting of heavy criticism on the defence policy of the Baltic states.

One such article in the Estonian language Sputnik  claims that Russia is not a threat, even though it continues to aim at its neighbours with disinformation and ballistic missiles, and encircles them with army bases. The aim of using such illogical logic seems to be that Russia’s neighbours are paranoid about the Russian threat – and, since Russians have a superior military and weapons, it’s pointless to defend your diminutive self.

Ridiculing

The text begins with something that could be called hahaganda, claiming that the recently purchased anti-tank missile has “become a favourite toy” and a “symbol of self-calming” for Estonia.

According to the article, buying those missiles is actually pointless because they don’t change the balance in military power (also a link to the Global Firepower list is provided) and instead, the 1.3 million Estonians with a 586 million euro defence budget should buy “tanks, attack aircraft, ships and submarines”.

Threatening

In addition to ridiculing, the article also seeks to dismay readers by describing that the stockpile of missiles can be damaged due to “errors in storing”, “international terror organizations”, “forest fires” and “real combat”.

And while the text does claim there’s nothing to worry about as there have been no sightings of adversary tanks in the neighbourhood, the following might raise an eyebrow: “During intensive combat, the priority targets for Kalibr and Iskander missiles will be NATO’s command centres and its capacity to perform air raids. GPS navigation and military bases close to Russia will cease to exist, thus rendering anti-tank missiles like Mapats, Milan, Spike and Javelin into useless tools.”

But they go on: “As a response to NATO’s actions near the Russian borders, Moscow created 70 new army bases and units in the Western part of the country.”

Distorting figures

The torpedoing of procurement continues with numbers, but sadly they’re just plain wrong. The article claims that the state budget is in deficit by 1.3 billion euros, while in reality the government exceeded the 2018 revenues by 120 million euros. The 586 million budget of the Department of Defence was off by 4 million euros.

The bigger picture

Considering those examples, this article fits into the stream of similar texts emitted by pro-Kremlin media. For example: another article in Sputnik ridicules arms procurement by claiming that “Russian tanks will not come to Estonia”. Only to conclude that if a war should happen, anti-tank missiles will be useless and expensive toys.

But what about texts that are defence related, but not focusing on procurement? Well, an article in the Estonian Defence Forces magazine called Sõdur claims that the most common pro-Kremlin defence related narratives are:

– NATO is an aggressor – that’s usually used during military exercises deemed provocative by Kremlin;

– NATO won’t defend Estonia – when this narrative is published in the Western countries, it is heavily exploited by pro-Kremlin media;

– locals are against NATO – citizens are either against NATO troops on the ground or excessive military spending that’s crippling social expenditures;

– Estonia lacks credibility – used when the Global Firepower list is published or there is news about armament procurement that’s covered in ironic terms;

– Russophobia and hysteria – the pro-Kremlin media claims that the Baltic states sow panic about the Russian threat to receive more allied forces that would keep the Baltic economies hit by Russian sanctions afloat.

The aim of the disinformers

The aim of these pro-Kremlin narratives is to sow discord in society and depict Estonia as a failed state that had its “Golden Age” in the Soviet Union. The reason for publishing on minor web-based disinformation sites is likely to provide articles that can be “laundered” on larger pro-Kremlin sites and guarantee an auditorium for pro-Kremlin activists who can be used as interviewees for Russian TV stations.

But do these tiny web-based pro-Kremlin outlets actually have any quality content to share? Well, they do reach certain heights, sometimes even poetic: “The unfillable war-machine has chosen a tiny spot of land called Estonia and is spreading there like poisonous mould. It contaminates water and land. It blurs the vision of politicians and thoughs of citizens who like brave men in uniforms. People with extra strong imagination can even hear the sound of freedom in the noise of fighter aircraft. (….) It’s so simple – those thousands of rifles will not be needed in a global military conflict. They will be trapped under the debris of the storage facilities destroyed by rockets. Our soldiers will have no one to shoot at, or if, then at themselves, out of hopelessness and the sudden realisation that the enemy is out of reach.”

As a conclusion it should be noted that Estonia is not alone in the crosshairs of the pro-Kremlin disinformation machine. In 2017 an article was published about Finnish military using tunnels and the pro-Kremlin reaction went ballistic by diagnosing “anti-Russian psychosis” and claiming that Russian bunker busters would reach Finns underground. But the crème de la crème has to be the idea to turn not only one city, but the whole country into dust with ballistic missiles.

On the other hand it’s hardly surprising, as an article from 2016 argues that it’s very unlikely a war between NATO and Russia would happen, but if it does, the reason will be provocations by the satellites of the US and the result will be “short” and “nuclear”.

Is it possible for media to be a little bit free? Russian lawmakers vow to introduce a new law that will further limit the reach of independent voices and consolidate the dominance of the Kremlin-controlled and Kremlin-loyal, disinformation-oriented media, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

As the spread of pro-Kremlin disinformation attracts increased attention as a global problem, it is important to also keep an eye how the same state-sponsored influence campaign develops inside Russia.

Russia’s parliament, the State Duma, is currently drafting new legislation, which shows that the authorities do not plan to loosen their grip on the domestic media scene; on the contrary, it becomes clear that in the Kremlin’s playbook, state-sponsored disinformation goes hand in hand with a desire to gain total control of the media.

The main target is Yandex

Members of the State Duma told media they planned to introduce a bill putting a limit on foreign ownership of Russian internet companies to 20%.

As reported by, among others, The Bell, RFE/RL and Meduza, the initiative could deliver a significant blow to Yandex, an internet company often referred to as “Russia’s Google” with its head office in the Netherlands and most of whose shares are traded at the Nasdaq Stock Exchange in New York.

Among several other services, Yandex runs Russia’s widely used news aggregator, Yandex Novosti, with 34 million unique users in July 2019, Meduza reports. According to the independent business outlet The Bell, one of the co-sponsors of the bill made it clear that the main targets are Yandex and its competitor, Mail.ru.

Should Yandex fall under increased dependency of the Kremlin, it would significantly disempower the company, especially as a channel for delivering online news and information. In that case, Yandex would suffer the fate of Russia’s largest social media platform, Vkontakte, whose previous owner and founder of Vkontakte, Pavel Durov, sold his share in the platform and chose exile in 2014, following what was seen as politically motivated pressure.

In an timeline also published in English, Meduza shows how this new development is just the latest in a three year long series of moves to specifically stress Yandex’s news aggregator service. Previously imposed pressure has already forced Yandex to e.g. exclude a number of media outlets from its aggregator, including the independent, Riga-based Meduza.

From TV to online dominance

The Kremlin already enjoys almost total dominance on the Russian television market with all three of Russia’s leading TV channels being state-controlled (Rossiya 1, Pervy Kanal, NTV).

However, Russian media consumption gradually changes: While TV remains in a dominating position, the share of online media use follows a global trend by growing steadily – especially among the younger audiences and audiences in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The losers in the competition among media formats are radio and, in particular, print media.

The practice of tolerating the existence of some independent media, but removing them from the important news aggregators, resembles the case from 2014 when Russia’s only independent TV channel TV Rain (Dozhd’) was forced to be removed from Russia’s cable TV packages. Since then, TV Rain has only been available through online transmission and satellite dishes.

In this light, it becomes difficult not to see the new draft law as a way of ensuring Kremlin-controlled and Kremlin-loyal media a leading position also on the online media scene.

Disinformation as mainstream

The Kremlin’s two international mouthpieces, RT and Sputnik, present themselves with the slogans “Question More” and “Telling the Untold.” Their message is unmistakable: In the West, Russian state media wish to be perceived as real alternatives to what RT and Sputnik rarely miss a chance to refer to as “the mainstream media”.

In Russia, this relationship is turned upside down: Here, the Kremlin-controlled and Kremlin-loyal media outlets dominate the media scene; and, as the new draft law shows, Russian authorities facilitate this dominance and want to leave less and less room for media that question more of what goes on inside Russia and tell otherwise untold stories to Russian audiences.

Clearly, the Kremlin thinks that media should only be allowed to be a little bit free – at least in Russia, which ranks as low as #149 out of the 180 countries listed in the 2019 World Press Freedom Index. By keeping independent media in a marginal position and by taking control over the channels they use to reach audiences, such as Yandex, Russian authorities can allow state-sponsored disinformation to remain Russia’s mainstream.

News Front has always been a reliable source of disinformation. The site, operated from illegally annexed Crimea, is ambitiously publishing lies in eight languages, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The site has been praising Hitler, it has claimed that Britain is becoming Islamic and hinted that the yellow vests movement in France is a US project to get rid of Macron. For years, we have counted on News Front to tell lies, nothing but lies and all the lies. And suddenly we read this:

With President Bashar Assad on the verge of complete victory in Syria, we can expect his regime to follow a similar trajectory of engineering the historical narrative to paint him as the greatest statesman, and the civilian uprising as nothing but a plot by dark foreign powers and Islamists.

In fact, much of this groundwork has already been laid by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cyber warriors, with the demonisation of the White Helmets and declaring all opposition to Assad as Al-Qaeda and Daesh.

Wait? Aren’t you guys supposed to support Syria’s dictator? Not describing in detail how his army, with intense support from Russia, is performing war crimes:

This handbook for beating a civilian population into submission will become a must-read for any authoritarian regime facing a popular uprising within its territory. Militarily, first encircle the target area and block all supplies of food. Then bomb hospitals to ensure insufficient medical facilities when casualties start mounting. Last, use munitions with the highest psychological impact, such as cluster bombs and chemical weapons, to break the targets into surrendering. In case you were not certain, all three of these tactics are explicit war crimes.

And finally, News Front details how the Kremlin disinformation outlets work:

What used to happen is that the Russian propaganda machine would obfuscate and confuse evidence for war crimes committed by Assad and the Kremlin either during the acts or immediately after. This has now changed, and the Kremlin has moved onto the next logical evolution of its propaganda capabilities: Pre-emptive misinformation.

Prior to any offensive, Kremlin-backed “media” channels started pushing the narrative that the rebels are acquiring and planning to use chemical weapons. This did two things: It supposedly gave Assad and Putin cause and urgency to step up their offensive against the rebels; and if chemical weapons were to be deployed, this time “we know” that it was the rebels who had them.

Translation: An all-out military assault is necessary even if it will be an utter bloodbath, complete with liberal deployment of chemical weapons and any other illegal weapons against civilian targets deemed necessary to shatter the psyche of the local population.

In News Front’s usual fashion, the article is ripped from an outside source. In this case, the article was originally published at the Saudi English language site Arab News. The author of the article, Dr Azeem Ibrahim, is a research professor with the US Army War College and is the founder of a US think tank; the Center for Global Policy. The article was published later by the Eurasia Reviewwebsite; a site frequently supporting Russian narratives. From there, it seems to have appeared at the News Front.

So what is going on at the News Front newsroom? Are we witnessing a change in Russia’s attitude towards Bashar Assad’s regime, or are the editors just struggling to fill the website with content, and just takes anything in English? In any case, it is always confusing when a seasoned liar occasionally changes its narrative.

Moscow is protesting. Against the abuse of power. For free and fair elections.

Global audiences are watching disturbing footage of the Russian government’s physical crackdowns on the protesters, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

A parallel clash between authorities and civil society has taken place in Russia’s media sphere. Here, independent journalists and media have challenged the wave of disinformation that has been directed against the protest movement.

TV Rain

One of these outlets is TV Rain, which broadcasts television online. TV Rain has been offering live coverage of the protests in Moscow. In addition, the channel has devoted an entire episode of its weekly anti-disinformation programme, Fake News, to describing and debunking pro-Kremlin disinformation about the protests.

One of the cases TV Rain has addressed is a letter shown by NTV, a network owned by sate-controlled Gazprom (see above). In this letter, anonymous law enforcement officials threaten Russians with physical punishment if they publish personal information about officers or their family members. No proof of the letter’s authenticity is provided in NTV’s report. The story is clearly intended to instigate fear and thereby demotivate Russians from challenging the government’s policies and using their constitutionally protected freedom of peaceful assembly.

TV Rain’s Fake News broadcast also highlights a case when the state TV channel Rossiya 1 showed footage of a raid at opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s NGO, the Anti-Corruption Foundation. In this video, the raiding investigators are wearing masks to conceal their faces; however, in Rossiya 1’s coverage, the masked individuals are presented  as employees of the Anti-corruption Foundation.

Meduza

From its base in Riga, Latvia, but with a network of correspondents working on the ground in Russia, including Moscow, the online news portal Meduza has also offered independent coverage of the protests to Russian audiences.

In a separate article, Meduza describes how Russian authorities have used the media they control to steer the narrative about the protests. The article, which is also available in English, factchecks a whole series of “lies and logical fallacies”, disseminated by Russian state TV in its coverage of the protests.

Among the manipulations highlighted by Meduza are the claims that the protest was intentionally disguised as a stroll around the city; that police officers have acted “carefully”; that protesters have beaten and thrown bottles at police officers; that the candidates the protesters have marched to support submitted fake signatures on their petitions; that a significant number of independent candidates will after all be allowed to run for the Moscow City Duma; and that Western governments take harsher measures against protesters than Russia’s authorities. Read Meduza’s article in English here.

The Insider

With a separate section on its website called “anti-fake,” The Insider is one of Russia’s leading sources for countering pro-Kremlin disinformation.

In this section, The Insider challenges one of the central narratives in the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign, namely that the protests in Moscow should be the result of foreign interference.

An example of this theory of foreign conspiracy appeared in top propagandist Vladimir Solovyov’s talk show on the state TV channel Rossiya 1 on 4 August. In an interview with foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, she accused the US embassy in Moscow of  “involvement” in the protests through an announcement of the place and time of the unsanctioned march. As The Insider shows, the embassy’s announcement was in fact a warning to US citizens in Moscow against the risk of clashes between police and protesters in the part of Moscow where the march was expected to take place.

Similarly, Ms Zakharova accused Germany’s public international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle (DW), of “interference”: DW’s Russian service had quoted statements by popular public figures, youtuber Yury Dud’ and rapper Oxxxymiron, that they planned to attend the march and called on followers and fans to join them, The Insider reports. In addition, DW had run a news story which included a tweet by opposition activists showing the route of the planned march. To illustrate what some would see as the Russian government’s double standards, The Insider also highlights examples of cases when RT’s French channel has published detailed information about the time and place of planned yellow vest protests in France.

State media challenged on their home ground

Russian authorities have tried to manage the current crisis with a disinformation ABC approach: Alienate. Belittle. Criminate. As the case from NTV shows, the letter D should be added for deter: Disinformation can be used to instigate fear and thereby as a means to control the behaviour of a critical public.

Nevertheless, this push from the side of the authorities to gain control over the situation with disinformation has been met with a pushback by media outlets outside the authorities’ control, which continue to do their work in the pockets of oxygen that remain in Russia’s shrinking free media space.

Russian independent journalists thereby show how traditional journalistic virtues can challenge a coordinated, global and state-sponsored disinformation campaign – even on that state’s home ground.

Pro-Kremlin disinformation increasingly exploits Belarusians’ trust in local news to question sovereignty of Belarus and undermine its people, language and culture, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu. 

“Over 40 crews of harvester operators reached the  milestone of 1 thousand tons of grain” – a proud headline informs the readers of a regional news website in the Grodno region in the west of Belarus. But beyond the impressive achievements of Grodno harvester operators the website provides more sinister reports claiming that Western embassies impose same-sex marriages to divide Belarusian society.

In the same vein, a regional online outlet in the Mahilioŭ region cheerfully informs its 170,000  monthly visitors about the  summer festival for families, but browsing further one stumbles upon an alarming piece of “news” according to which the OSCE wants to fill the Belarusian internet with terrorists and anarchists

These are traces of the pro-Kremlin disinformation network in Belarus, which according to the researchers of the Eurasian States in Transition (EAST) Centre  is rapidly growing.

From bad to worse

Back in 2016, the researchers found that from sporadic attacks in marginal online sources, pro-Kremlin disinformation campaigns targeting Belarus had moved to high-profile media, including Russian federal TV channels and mainstream websites (unsettling news for a country where over 70 percent of the population trust messages carried by the Russian media).

Now the researchers warn that in the past two years there have been significant changes for the worse: the number of online sources regularly publishing disinformation about Belarus increased several-fold to about 40 active sites, while new websites devoted entirely to Belarus and publishing both disinformation and hate speech have appeared. The absolute majority of those websites publish in Russian.

One of the defining features of pro-Kremlin disinformation in Belarus is that it heavily relies on a co-coordinated network of regional websites seemingly created to report local news. This is a good illustration of the well-known “Trojan horse” tactic used by the pro-Kremlin disinformation. Ahead of the 2016 US presidential elections, the Russian influence campaign created a number of Twitter accounts which posted as America’s home town outlets, to exploit people’s trust in local news.

Today, pro-Kremlin disinformation websites in Belarus use content from regional government and independent websites as well as national portals, to disguise as run-of-the-mill regional news outlets. They hide under neutral design and images referencing historical emblems of the regional centres or memorial buildings. But while their design might be neutral, their language is not. The websites frequently use hate speech against independent journalists and anyone who does not consider the Belarusian nation as “one” with the Russian people. Chauvinistic, pseudo-scientific content, historical revisionism and conspiracy theories are often posted under pseudonyms and shared with other pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets.

Insidiously, the pro-Kremlin disinformation network is trying to convince the Belarusian people that their language is artificial, their history is fake and their country only has a future as a part of the union state with Russia

Russian connection

Even though the websites pretend to be regional outlets in Belarus, the Russian trail is not hard to find. Researchers from the  EAST Centre  discovered that the domains of four regional disinformation websites were purchased in February 2019 by the same person based in Moscow region.

The owner of the domains shares the same first and last names with an employee of CIS-EMO, an organisation that claims to monitor elections across the Commonwealth of Independent States. As such, it served as an umbrella organisation for the so-called international observers of the 2014 “referendum” in Crimea, which is recognized neither by the EU nor the UN. The organization also claims to have observed  “elections” in the Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where  Russian military continues its illegal presence, as well as in Moldova’s breakaway region of Transdniester, whose Russian-backed  authorities are under  EU sanctions.

The regional pro-Kremlin disinformation network in Belarus posts publications about CIS-EMO activities. Its executive director, who appears to control at least 4 domains of pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets in Belarus, is also a contributor to Sputnik, and  Teleskop – one of the most aggressive disinformation sites that serve as a nationwide resource in Belarus.

Just as the clothes do not make the man, the packaging does not make the website. And Belarus is no exception.