“We are at the Finnish Gestapo. Russia, help us.” “Finnish government’s policy against Russian kids – genocide or fascism?” And “Finland – a concentration camp for kids”, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

These headlines are examples of Russia’s years-long, coordinated and persistent disinformation campaign targeting Finland. And this is a story of how Russia has over the years developed its capacity in influence operations, creating campaigns that artificially generate narratives to manipulate public opinion, and using a vast variety of channels, tools and policy instruments to achieve its goals.

Finland, an EU country and Russia’s neighbour with a 5,5 million population, is usually almost absent from the agenda of the Russian state controlled TV channels. Therefore, the peaks in the visibility are easy to detect.

To understand the motives of this disinformation, we need to step back in time.

It was in the autumn of 2012 – well before the war in Ukraine or the 2016 US elections – that Finland faced an information operation unseen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. For almost a month, day after day, all the Russian main TV channels followed the story of a Russian citizen living in Finland whose children the Finnish social authorities had put in an emergency placement.

In reality such a measure is only taken when the health or development of a child is in immediate danger were they to stay with their parents. But the coverage in Russian media suggested just the opposite: that children had been taken from their parents and put into prison without any reason, among other claims. Lists were shared with the media offering distorted figures of the number of Russian speaking children allegedly taken away from their parents and announced to be “victims of the Finnish fascism”.

Wide range of tools

Since 2009, these campaigns have come as waves, sometimes more frequent, sometimes less. The latest smaller campaign appeared at the end of 2017. The campaigns are not limited in making use of TV, which is one of the most powerful tools the Kremlin has in its hands to direct the flows of information space. They aim to politicise the issue further: Russia has attempted to raise the topic in the Council of Europe and has demanded that Finland set up a bilateral committee on the topic. Finnish pro-Kremlin propagandists have also played a central role in organising the disinformation campaigns, and even Russian diplomats have been involved, for example taking children from emergency care – without the permission of the Finnish authorities, which is illegal – with a diplomatic car. After the incident, the Russian ambassador was called to the Finnish Foreign Ministry to explain.

The motives and goals behind this disinformation campaign are various, and the same narrative has been used also against France and Norway. The goal seems to be about provoking tensions within the 75 000 Russian speaking community in Finland, by eroding their trust in local officials, which is traditionally high in Finland, and to test the resilience of Finnish officials, who according to Finland privacy legislation can’t publicly argue why an emergency placement has been necessary in a specific situation.

Another aim seems to be to wear down the overwhelmingly positive image of Finland internally in Russia. There it largely corresponds with the international rankings, which place Finland as having the second lowest inequality rates in the world among children and the third most secure childhood. Finland is also ranked as the second best country to be a girl in the world, the third best country in the world in adhering to the rule of law, and the best country in protecting fundamental human rights.

For years, Finland has been one of the most popular countries for Russian tourists to travel to. Last year it was the second most visited country after Turkey. But Russia seems to view it as in its interest to take some measures to limit foreign travel: After Russia annexed Crimea, reportedlymillions of employees of law enforcement offices were prohibited from travelling abroad.  At the same time, Russia is heavily campaigning for domestic travel, especially to occupied Crimea.

Even if the TV and internet are Russians’ major sources for information, 18 percent of people still give most to first-hand sources: relatives and friends. Here the power of travelling steps into the picture: it is much more difficult to influence the opinions of people who have experienced the everyday reality of Europe themselves rather than perceived it from Russian TV.

In this context, Russia’s former children’s rights commissioner, the politician, celebrity lawyer and TV propagandist Pavel Astakhov, has called for declaring Finland a “dangerous country for families with children”.

Travel warnings and alerts are a common tool that is further used to disinform and to create an image of Europe suffering of moral degradation while Russia supports the “traditional family values”.

There is no reliable way to measure the impact of disinformation on actual holiday planning. But posts on Russian discussion forums still ask: Is it safe to travel to Finland with kids?

Building up defence

What has been the Finnish response to this and other disinformation campaigns that have now a stable position in Russia’s toolkit of influencing abroad?

It has been a combination of proactive public diplomacy and communication, relying on international agreements such as the Hague Convention, rejecting the idea to set up a bilateral commission, and treating the issue as part of the daily work of the local officials and experts, thus avoiding politicising it. Finland has reached out to reliable media in Russia and organised visits for the journalists to Finland, communicating the facts of the Finnish childcare system in Russian and stepping up the capacity to do so immediately when a new campaign starts.

And in 2014 Finland set up a network of government officials to address influence operations and started training officials. In 2016, the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE), open to EU member states and NATO allies, was established in Helsinki. This spring Finland appointed its first Ambassador for Hybrid Affairs.

The story of Russia’s disinformation campaign around the child disputes has revealed some of the mechanisms behind the spread of disinformation, thus in the end resulting in more awareness of pro-Kremlin disinformation both among journalists and the general public in Finland.

Meanwhile in Russia, according to a poll conducted by the Russian independent pollster Levada for the Finnish Foreign Ministry in 2017, 68 % of Russians describe their attitude towards Finland as “good”, the first things that come to their mind being sauna, Nordic countries, Helsinki, nature, high living standards and the welfare state.

55 percent of respondents had never heard of the child custody cases regarding Finland.

But 10 percent had heard a lot about these problems, and 26 percent had heard something but couldn’t remember any details.

So is 36 % a lot?

Overall these figures indicate that the disinformation campaign has not had a definitive role when Russians form their views about Finland. But when you put the figures into the context – when Finland in general has very little visibility on Russian TV, and when the topic would be non-existent were it not for disinformation – 36 % of Russians over the age of 14 years actually equates to 43 million people. That is quite a lot of people to be, potentially, basing their opinions about Finland on disinformation.

That press freedom is limited in Russia comes as no surprise, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu. The situation is described as ‘difficult’ by Reporters without Borders in their annual World Press Freedom Index for 2018, putting the country at a lowly number 148 in the ranking of 180 countries. We have also returned to the topic on several occasions; we have described the special role of the ‘temnik’ – an instruction from the authorities, which is disseminated in Russian media; we have also reported the crackdown on Russian media who were not willing to adhere to the instructions of the authorities; and finally we have described how the situation limits the role of journalists trying to do their job in the country.

So what happens in such a system when the authorities make an unpopular decision? Meduza highlighted an interesting example earlier in July when Russian lawmakers voted to adopt the first reading of the law raising the retirement age (from 60 to 65 for men by 2028, and from 55 to 63 for women by 2034). The measures were announced on the World Cup opening day, in an attempt to bury the news according to the Financial Times. Away from the World Cup host cities — where protests were banned — demonstrators rallied in 45 towns against the announcement. The Moscow Times reported in June that local authorities had seized copies of a local newspaper covering the proposal, an action allegedly also accompanied with a strong recommendation that local newspaper editors avoid covering the topic.

But once the vote had taken place, Kremlin-loyal outlets successfully avoided the controversial part about the decision – the fact that the retirement age would be raised. Instead, as reported by Meduza, they spoke only of a new law, bill, reform and development in their headlines, thus diverting attention from the issue causing public criticism of the Russian government.

Over the last couple of years, online disinformation has risen on the international scene as an ever-growing problem, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu. At the forefront of the battle for the value of facts are journalists, upholding one of the most important pillars of a free and democratic society: free and independent media.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and their partners launched an initiative earlier this year aiming at combatting disinformation: #JournalismTrustInitiative. RSF also recently published a new report called “Online Harassment of Journalists – Attack of the Trolls”, on the topic of online attacks against journalists, in which they present 25 recommendations directed at governments, international institutions, online platforms, media organizations and advertisers.

In the report, the modus operandi of the press freedom predators who orchestrate their online attacks against journalists are defined in three stages by RSF:

1. Disinformation: journalistic content on social networks is drowned in a flood of fake news and pro-government content;
2. Amplification: the impact of pro-government content is artificially enhanced by commentators who are paid by the government to post messages on social networks or by bots, computer programs that automatically generate posts;
3. Intimidation: journalists are personally targeted, insulted and threatened, in order to discredit them and reduce them to silence.

The report also includes a tutorial for journalists on how to deal with troll armies, and gives an overview of the authoritarian regimes that make use of them. RSF also concludes that female journalists are more likely than male journalists to be targeted with harassment, and the harassment targeting women is often degrading and contains threats of a sexual nature. The 25 recommendations are formulated with the aim of addressing these new digital threats.

To governments:

1. Strengthen laws authorizing prosecution for online harassment of journalists
2. Strengthen the responsibility of online platforms in regard to content shared on their networks
3. Implement systems for alert and rapid intervention in harassment cases
4. Guarantee that the rules for fighting hateful content are applied fairly and consistently
5. Implement recovery procedures for cyber harassment victims (e.g financial restitution, medical and psychological aid, relocation assistance)
6. Prohibit resorting to online influence and destabilization agents – trolls – in order to manipulate public opinion and harass journalists
7. At the United Nations, governments must urge creation of a Special Representative for the Safety of Journalists
8. European governments must sign and ratify the Additional Protocol to the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercriminality
9. Governments must encourage multidisciplinary international research on censorship techniques
10. Governments must strengthen digital education
11. All public policies concerning online violence must take into account its gender-specific nature

To international organizations:

12. Continue to urge governments to uphold the principle that “the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression”
13. Contribute to research on methods of online harassment
14. International and regional human rights protective systems must include online harassment in their monitoring of abuses against journalists

To online platforms:

15. Online platforms must be transparent concerning their rules for moderating online content
16. They must ensure that these rules are not turned into methods to silence journalists
17. Establish a victim-centred emergency alert system for journalists who are targeted by online threats and attacks
18. Cooperate actively with law enforcement authorities in investigations of cyber violence against journalists, with measures including public release of the perpetrators’ names
19. Combat online harassment campaigns that are orchestrated by troll factories or bots
20. Develop communication and awareness campaigns concerning online violence

To media organizations:

21. Acknowledge the threat and learn to anticipate attacks
22. Encourage the creation of networks to exchange best practices by developing a holistic approach
23. Make online harassment of journalists a major issue

To advertisers:

24. Refuse to advertise on sites that participate in dissemination of hate content
25. Develop ethics codes and best practices for online advertising

Since the US election in 2016, the social media giants have been stepping up their action against disinformation and fake accounts in their networks. Facebook has recognized the use of its platform for information operations and the Mueller report showed the scale of Russia’s operation aimed at influencing public opinion on social media before the 2016 US Presidential elections, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Another study has shown that over 156,000 Russian-based Twitter accounts had massively tweeted about Brexit in the days leading up to the June 2016 referendum.

One response by the platforms has been to suspend suspicious accounts. According to an article by the Washington Post, Twitter suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June, and the pace has continued in July. 

Del Harvey, the vice president for trust and safety at Twitter explains the shift in how the company defines its role in public debate. “One of the biggest shifts is in how we think about balancing free expression versus the potential for free expression to chill someone else’s speech,” Harvey said. “Free expression doesn’t really mean much if people don’t feel safe.”

It’s been just over six months since RT, the controversial Russian channel funded by the Kremlin, aired its first French broadcast from a sleek green-and-white studio in the outskirts of Paris, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Despite what RT boss Margarita Simonyan claims is a “strong demand for an alternative perspective” among French-speaking audiences, RT’s launch on French airwaves has been anything but smooth.

Now, a formal warning from France’s broadcasting authority and a new law cracking down on disinformation have poured cold water on the channel’s French ambitions.

‘Lack of Honesty’

French lawmakers adopted the draft law in the night of 4 July after deliberating for eight hours. Several weeks earlier, a first heated debate in parliament had ended at 1am with the vote being postponed amid concern about potential infringements on freedom of expression.

The bill will allow judges to remove or block content deemed to be “false” during a period of up to five weeks before elections.

It will also force platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to disclose the source of funding for sponsored content, in an effort to fight what the text describes as “any attempt at destabilization” by foreign-funded organisations.

The proposal was announced in January by President Emmanuel Macron, who famously accused RT and Sputnik of spreading “lying propaganda” during a press conference with Vladimir Putin last year. Macron’s government still routinely denies the two Russian outlets accreditation for covering official events.

The bill could still be challenged by France’s Constitutional Council.

Its approval in parliament comes just days after the French broadcasting regulator, the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA), issued a warning to RT over a falsified report contesting the use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians.

The April report wrongly dubbed the voices of Syrian civilians, making them say things they didn’t say — a well-honed tactic on Russian state television.

The report also included a number of factual distortions.

In a statement on 28 June, the CSA accused RT of displaying a “lack of honesty, rigour, and diversity of points of view.” The regulator imposed no sanctions on RT over the incident, although it has the authority to fine a broadcaster or suspend its license.

RT France denied any wrongdoing, claiming the mistranslation was due to a technical error.

One day after the CSA’s warning, Russia’s own communications regulator, the state Roskomnadzor, accused French broadcaster France 24 of violating Russian law on foreign media ownership and threatened to revoke its Russian license.

Pushback against RT 

The anti-disinformation bill and the CSA’s warning against RT illustrate the broader dilemma faced by Western governments in handling Russian state-owned media that promote the Kremlin’s agenda while pouring scorn on the institutions and values of the Western world, often through distorted and false information.

France is indeed not the only country grappling with the question of whether, and how to tackle pro-Kremlin disinformation.

As RT and Sputnik seek to build their presence in Europe and the United States, a number of countries are divided between their wish to fight disinformation and their commitment to safeguarding freedom of speech.

In Germany, a new law intended to curb fake news, hate speech, and online threats on social networks — where Russians bots and trolls are accusing of seeking to influence several Western elections — came into force last year despite criticism that it could lead to censorship.

RT is in hot waters in Britain, whose media regulator is probing the channel over breaches of impartiality rules since the March poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal on British soil. The regulator has launched a total of 11 investigations into RT but has so far stopped short of forcing the channel off British airwaves.

And in the United States, RT was forced to register as an agent of the Russian government after being accused by U.S. intelligence agencies of spreading anti-American propaganda. Its accreditation to cover Congress was subsequently revoked.

A Chilly Welcome

Before its first French broadcast in December 2017, RT already had a foothold in France through a French-language website run from Moscow

The Russian state network, however, is viewed with scepticism in France, a country that prides itself on having a strong tradition of independent journalism.

Another reason for this scepticism is the French president’s open war on pro-Kremlin disinformation.

Before denouncing RT and Sputnik as liars and “agents of propaganda,” Macron had banned them from his headquarters during his 2017 presidential campaign. The two outlets were accused of spreading lies about him, including allegations of an extra-marital gay relationship.

Understandably, RT’s début on French airwaves received a rather chilly welcome.

Despite its comfortable 20-million-euro budget and its announced plans to hire 150 people, including 50 journalists, French media reported that RT was having difficulty recruiting any prominent journalists in France.

In the months that preceded the launch of RT France, a string of French journalists and public figures had expressed concern about the channel’s arrival in their country.

Some of the strongest criticism came from Christophe Deloire, the secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders, who denounced RT and Sputnik as “enemies of journalism.”

Deloire’s comments drew a particularly spiteful response from RT chief Margarita Simonyan, who published an open letter urging Reporters Without Borders to “quietly dissolve itself.”

Meanwhile, a group of French experts of Russia published its own open letter calling on the CSA to deny RT a license to broadcast in France on the grounds that the network’s objective was to “sow chaos and undermine democracies.”

Sharp Scrutiny

In line with French law, RT France was also asked to put together a five-person “ethics committee” to monitor its content and report any violations of journalistic principles to the CSA.

The committee is composed of former diplomat Anne Gazeau-Secret, journalists Jacques-Marie Bourget and Majed Nehmé, Radio France’s ex-president Jean-Luc Hees, and Thierry Marianni, a former senator and fervent admirer of Vladimir Putin who paid a controversial visit to Crimea in 2015 following its illegal annexation by Russia.

CSA head Olivier Schrameck also said his agency would keep a close eye on RT and would “react promptly to any anomaly.”

Probably mindful of the sharp public scrutiny, RT France had so far steered clear of the cruder disinformation it is known for peddling elsewhere. The network also broadcasts in English, Spanish, and Arabic, and it has announced plans to open a German-language channel.

Its French programming mostly stuck to RT’s usual cocktail of slanted news about the Syrian war, sensationalist reports on crises in the EU, and Russian news extolling the virtues of Vladimir Putin.

Despite the CSA’s watchful eye, it took just four months for RT France to commit its first major slip-up and receive a warning.

The Russian network is no stranger to controversy; to a certain extent, it thrives on it.

In France, like in other countries where it is implanted, RT has consistently played the victim and brushed off any criticism as part of a repression campaign it claims is being waged against the channel.

But with the new anti-disinformation bill gaining ground and the CSA ruthlessly picking through its programmes, France is giving RT more trouble than it bargained for.

RT France director Xenia Fedorova certainly seems to be bracing for the worst.

“I’m responsible for the staff I hired, I want to protect them,” Fedorova lamented in a recent interview.

As for the channel’s ambitious plans to extend broadcasts to 24 hours daily by the end of 2018, Fedorova says RT France first needs to make sure the channel “won’t be shut down before then.”

Russian television viewers were recently told that Ukraine is solely responsible for all the casualties in the country’s war-torn east.

The groundless accusation was made on 21 June during one of Russia’s most popular political talk shows, “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov,” on the state-run TV channel Rossiya 24, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

In an angry tirade against Ukraine, show host Vladimir Solovyov told his Ukrainian guest that “you already killed 10,000 people in Donbas.”

“Who killed 10,000 people?” asked Ukrainian political analyst Vadim Karasyov, who is regularly invited on Russian TV channels to represent his country.

“You!” Solovyov snapped at him. “You killed, you shot civilians!”

According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the conflict in eastern Ukraine killed 10,303 people, many of them civilians, between 14 April 2014 and 15 November 2017.

The figure, however, is a general death toll from the conflict and does not specify which side is responsible for casualties.

Like Solovyov, Russian authorities have sought to cast the conflict pitting Ukrainian armed forces against Russian-backed separatists as an attack on Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

Moscow has consistently denied Russian involvement despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

EU restrictive measures against Russia are currently in force over the illegal annexation of Crimea and the deliberate destabilisation of Ukraine.

Factory of Lies is the name of a new television documentary introducing a number of journalists who have uncovered the hidden processes of the disinformation campaigns coming from Russia, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Some of these journalists are themselves Russians who have not been afraid of doing this kind of investigative work in the difficult conditions of their country’s highly controlled media environment.

Andrey Soshnikov

In Factory of Lies, we follow Andrey Soshnikov – a Russian journalist working in Russia for BBC’s Russian service – in his investigation of a fake video, which was spread by the famous St. Petersburg troll factory and purported to show an American soldier shooting at a copy of the Quran with his automatic rifle.

Soshnikov also tells the story about how he worked for almost a year to identify the exact location of a building that was used for recording another famous fake video, which claimed to show ISIS members fighting on the Ukrainian side in Donbas.

Roman Dobrokhotov

The chief editor of the Russian online magazine The Insider, Roman Dobrokhotov, is also portrayed in Factory of Lies. We hear how The Insider made a Russian national living in Germany admit in a telephone conversation that she had received money from two leading Russian state media, Zvezda and Pervy Kanal, for appearing as an actor in staged productions with disinformation stories about violence and chaos in Germany due to the arrival of immigrants.

Dobrokhotov also describes his team’s work with using voice recognition and open sources to reveal the identity of a Russian Colonel General who, according to The Insider’s and Bellingcat’s joint investigation, was in command of the BUK missile launcher which downed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 innocent passengers.

An international co-production

Factory of Lies premiered on 5 June and is a co-production between Danish and Swedish public service television (DR and STV), Israel’s Channel 8 and the Danish Film Institute.

Producer and director Jakob Gottschau was also behind Facebookistan – a documentary from 2015 which took a critical look at Facebook as a form of a state with its own citizens and set of laws.

Dehumanization is a quite common trait in conflict situations, where the opponents usually intend to build support for their own actions as well as lessen the support for their adversary through harsh rhetoric and disinformation about the other side, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Within the pro-Kremlin disinformation machinery, dehumanization is often used as a tool to denigrate in particular the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF). This despite the fact that the official line from the Kremlin (contrary to the evidence) is that Russia is not involved in the war in Eastern Ukraine.

In the light of new claims about the UAF this week, we found it fitting to look back at some past disinformation about the Ukrainian Army. No evidence has been provided to support any of these claims.

First, this week’s story, which conveyed a dual message of both the cruelty of the UAF and the low level of morality in the West (another favourite topic in the pro-Kremlin disinformation sphere);

”Rich people from Western countries can buy the right to kill civilians in Donbas, this “safari” is provided by the Ukrainian Army.”

This gruesome and unsubstantiated claim originates from one of the official parties to the conflict, a spokesperson for the self proclaimed Donetsk Peoples Republic.

Second, an absurd claim that has nevertheless been repeated several times, namely;

”Zombies are fighting within the Ukrainian forces in Donbas. They continue to fight even after being shot in the head.”

That is indeed some scary stuff. But what could be even scarier? Ask TV Zvezda, the official TV channel of the Russian Ministry of Defence, and they will come up with the answer – Nazi zombies!

”There are Nazi zombies fighting in the Ukrainian army.”

A further past unsubstantiated story reported something fishy going on in Ukrainian military hospitals:

”French customs officers at Paris Orly airport confiscated a shipment of human organs from Ukraine. The intercepted organs were “200 nasal septums and sphincters” and were sent from Dnipro Military Hospital.”

Also, according to disinformation narratives, the UAF has no respect for the church and religion, as claimed in the next story:

”Ukraine’s military conducted a night raid on a Ukrainian Catholic monastery looking for conscripts. The monastery was surrounded and searched, the military were trying to find young men evading service in the army.”

This claim was quickly debunked by the monastery in question, which denied any raids on its premises.

There are also stories that aim to belittle the UAF rather than incite fear of them, for example one claiming that the plague has broken out among the UAF or that there are not enough willing conscripts so the UAF has to enlist criminals.

Although this is not an exhaustive list, it does serve to illustrate how dehumanization and alienation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is being used within the pro-Kremlin disinformation universe in order to lessen support for and sympathy with Ukraine.

The provocation game 2.0

On June 11, a targeted disinformation campaign was launched around an EU delegation’s visit to Ukraine. This week, we decided to dive deeper into this specific information operation.

The disinformation claimed that Ukrainian security forces were preparing a provocation in Donbas; they allegedly planned to shoot down the EU delegation’s helicopter in order to blame the pro-Russian separatists for the attack. As we have highlighted earlier, this is a typical way of pro-Kremlin disinformation: to warn of “provocations” to sow distrust and disruption among partners.

The disinformation again came from a party to the conflict: it was first published on the website of the so called Ministry of State Security of the self proclaimed Donetsk Peoples Republic. The story was aggressively pushed during the first day after publication when the volume of its spread peaked, whereas the next day it quickly slowed down and almost stopped after three days.

The same story was published at least in Russian, English, Spanish, German and French, on over 70 different websites; it was posted on Twitter, Russian social media Vkontakte, blogs, forums, YouTube and even on Bloomberg’s commentary section below a news article.

According to Brandwatch analytics tool, the disinformation gained over 600 000 impressions on Twitter. It succeeded in getting extensive media coverage in Russia, but it did not get into the mainstream media in the EU – at least not in the analysed languages. Sputnik took care of the spread in the EU languages.

The pattern of dissemination was different in English and in Russian. As of 7 AM on June 11, dozens of Russian-language disinformation outlets published the story in short intervals. In English, the story first only appeared in South Front. Then, it was heavily pushed on Twitter by accounts whose activity is similar to the behaviour of bots. The first Twitter account that mentioned the story has an average of 250 daily Tweets. On the first day, the story reached more than 200.000 people in English on Twitter.

Luckily, the disinformation campaign did not succeed in disrupting the visit, but it proved to be able to get wide media coverage in Russia, limited coverage within the EU and a relatively good reach on social media. All this for a disinformation where no evidence of the supposed threat of “provocation” was ever provided.

Social media has been abuzz since Germany’s shock defeat to Mexico in their opening World Cup match on 17 June, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu. For Russian spectators, the match yielded an additional surprise that has sparked a flurry of online jokes and memes.

“Navalny football’

Commenting the match live on Pervy Kanal — Russia’s main state-run television channel and the Kremlin’s mouthpiece — journalist Kirill Dementyev said it was time for the embattled German team to adopt a more assertive game plan.

The term he used included the rather uncommon adjective “navalny,” which in this context roughly translates as “forceful” or “high-pressure.”

Incidentally, this adjective is also the surname of Vladimir Putin’s most prominent foe, anti-corruption campaigner Aleksei Navalny, whose name is all but banned on Pervy Kanal airwaves unless followed by a disparaging diatribe.

Dementyev’s fellow commentator, former Russia coach Leonid Slutsky, was obviously not aware of this important editorial rule.

Seizing on Dementyev’s blunder – if it was a blunder — Slutsky jokingly asked about the opposition leader’s skill on the pitch.

“Navalny plays football?” he quipped. “That would be interesting to see.”

After an awkward silence, the two commentators prudently went back to discussing the match.

All fun and (football) games

The pun, however, was not lost on viewers, many of whom took to social media to share their incredulity.

Some, starting with the opposition leader himself, marvelled at the fact that the word “Navalny” could ever be pronounced on Pervy Kanal.

“This moment when censorship fell and I found myself on Pervy Kanal. Well almost,” Aleksei Navalny joked on Twitter.

Others couldn’t resist revisiting previous photos of Navalny, including this picture of him leaving a Moscow jail on 14 June after serving 30 days for organising anti-Putin protests..

The incident has been an opportunity for Russians to poke fun at the increasing government pressure exerted on Navalny, who attempted to run for the March 2018 presidential election.

“Navalny football is when you enter the field and the referee immediately removes you from the field for 30 matches,” reads this post on Twitter. “No, Navalny football is when you are leaving the changing room and the referee removes you from the field for 30 matches,” a reader commented.

As for Slutsky, some observers are voicing concern for his future as sports commentator.

“Farewell to the fantastic expert Slutsky on Pervy,” joked one tweet.