Four years have passed since the protests and subsequent violence on Maidan square in Kyiv, and also another anniversary is soon upon us; that of the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia. It is therefore no surprise that we see a focus on these events in pro-Kremlin disinformation this week: anniversaries are often used as a hook to reinforce the disinformation narratives constructed to obscure the facts about what happened, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

If we go through the disinformation narratives we have seen this week in a chronological order, firstly we notice the narrative that the events in Ukraine were initiated by a Western-backed coup. This is a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation theme. The demonstrations which began on Maidan square in Kyiv in November 2013 were not provoked from outside but were a result of the Ukrainian people’s frustration with former President Yanukovych’s last minute U-turn when, after seven years of negotiation, he refused to sign the EU–Ukraine Association Agreement and halted progress towards Ukraine’s closer relationship with the EU as a result of Russian pressure.

Secondly, we find the disinformation narrative that tries to blame anyone but the Yanukovych government for the killing of unarmed protesters during a couple of dark days in February 2014. This week, as we have seen often before, the snipers were suggested to have been instructed variously by the leaders of the protests, by the then US-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland or by former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. This is one of the most common disinformation tactics:  to confuse the audience with a number of contradictory (and unproven) conspiracy theories.

Thirdly, we see disinforming narratives about the illegal annexation of Crimea spread again, claiming that Crimea is Russian territory, that Crimea smoothly separated from Ukraine or that Crimea simply “reunited” with Russia in 2014. In fact, Russia illegally annexed the Ukrainian peninsula in violation of international law.

This leads us to another prevalent theme lately; disinformation about sanctions.

A case of the chicken or the egg?

In response to Russia violating international law and appropriating parts of a sovereign country, the EU and the US imposed sanctions on Russia. But in pro-Kremlin disinformation, it is those very sanctions  – and not the illegal action they respond to – that are referred to as undermining global stability. This is confusing cause and effect: a case of the chicken or the egg.

But here we actually do have an exact starting point to the problem. In the end of February 2014, “little green men” later known to be Russian soldiers, seized key buildings in Crimea. On the 18th of March 2014, President Putin signed a bill that absorbed Crimea into the Russian Federation. Cause and effect.

Last time it was Russia’s Ministry of Defence. This time it was the state TV channel Pervy Kanal that couldn’t resist the temptation to include screenshots from a computer game to spice up alleged reporting from Syria, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The Pervy Kanal report titled “Case File: Syria” was aired in a prime time Sunday evening news programme on 25 February. It celebrated the heroism of a Russian soldier who was killed in battle in Syria during the spring of 2016. However, at 02:35 in the video below, attentive members of the TV channel’s audience spotted a screenshot from a computer game called “Arma 3”.

In a comment to the Russian daily RBC, a representative of the computer game’s producers, Bohemia Interactive, stated that “no kind of permission has been given to use this material from our game in this way”. RBC also spoke to Pervy Kanal, where a representative blamed the video editors for having used material from the channel’s archives, “which was previously used for an item about computer games.”

In November 2017, Russia’s Ministry of Defence published sequences taken from the computer game “AC-130 Gunship Simulator: Special Ops Squadron” as what the Ministry labelled “irrefutable proof that the US provides cover for ISIS combat troops”.

Facebook has pledged to have 20,000 employees monitoring harmful content on its platform by the end of 2018. The tech giant currently employs about 10,000 people for this task.

Facebook is under growing pressure to crack down on trolls, bots, disinformation, and hate speech, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Although the company has taken a number of measures, including changing its algorithm, public concern is growing over the role of Facebook and Twitter in helping malicious users spread disinformation.

U.S. authorities recently charged 13 Russian citizens and three Russian companies with conspiring to “sow discord in the U.S. political system,” in particular the 2016 presidential election.

One of the three charged companies is the notorious Internet Research Agency, a troll factory based in St. Petersburg believed to have conducted large-scale disinformation campaigns in the United States and Europe.

A new program to counter Russian meddling in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections will be unveiled Monday, according to a senior State Department official, like reported by usatoday.com.

The $40 million initiative will battle state-sponsored disinformation and propaganda targeting the U.S. and its interests, Steve Goldstein, under secretariat for public diplomacy at the State Department, told USA TODAY on Sunday.

An official announcement, including details about the program that will be run from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, will be made later Monday.

The effort was ordered by Congress last summer in response to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election — and to counter Russian efforts to impact U.S. politics that continue to this day — but was awaiting funding from the Defense Department.

Goldstein acknowledged that the funding took longer than expected, but insisted the delay “hasn’t inhibited the Global Engagement Center from doing its job” of countering state-based efforts to change the U.S. political conversation.

“This administration takes that very seriously,” he said.

Thirteen Russian citizens have been criminally charged in the United States for conspiring to “sow discord in the U.S. political system,” including the 2016 presidential election, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Three Russian companies were also indicted by a federal grand jury. One of them is the infamous Internet Research Agency, a troll factory based in St. Petersburg.

According to the 37-page indictment, the defendants created false U.S. profiles and stole the identities of American citizens on social media to spread divisive messages, buy advertisements, and organise political rallies.

All the defendants are charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. Five defendants are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and five defendants are charged with aggravated identity theft.

One of the defendants is Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian businessman close to the Kremlin and believed to be behind Russia’s internet troll factories. Nicknamed “Putin’s chef,” Prigozhin once ran President Vladimir Putin’s favourite restaurant in St Petersburg before being awarded state catering contracts worth billions of euros. He has also been linked to the Wagner Group, a Kremlin-tied private military contractor said to be operating in Syria, and was included on a U.S. sanctions list in 2017.

More and more often, the word ‘genocide’ is used by pro-Kremlin outlets and communicators to describe things that have nothing to do with genocide. Besides the lack of respect for victims of real genocides, this abuse of terminology undermines the very concept of genocide as a large-scale violation of human rights, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Ukrainian ‘genocide’

Ukraine is probably the most frequent target of this alternative use of the genocide term. In a deliberate course of action which is bound to alienate Ukraine as much as possible, the word ‘genocide’ will often appear in pro-Kremlin outlets when Kyiv’s policies towards Russian speakers in Crimea and in the country’s East are discussed. One of many examples was in a talk show on Russian state TV Pervy Kanal in September 2017. Here it was said that  “Nobody in Kyiv wants to negotiate peacefully. They are going to conduct a genocide in Donetsk and Luhansk”. To watch this clip with English subtitles, click on the video below. It is worth noting that human rights missions that travelled to Ukraine in 2014 did not find evidence that the Russian minority would have been in danger.

Latvian ‘genocide’

In a case from December 2017, a commentator on Russia’s state-controlled NTV said the following: “What is now happening in Latvia is a linguistic genocide of Russian-speakers, moving towards an ethnic genocide” (watch the Russian quote with English subtitles in the video above).

‘Visa genocide’

In official Russian government communications, the term “visa genocide” has been used to refer to the fact that the EU wants people who live on the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea (currently subject to illegal Russian annexation) to apply for visas to EU countries in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, rather than in Russia.

‘Culinary genocide’

Finally, even the novel construction of a “culinary genocide” was used by the Russian state propaganda outlet Sputnik to misrepresent an EU policy as allegedly aimed at banning kebabs. We described this case from Sputnik’s Serbian language website in the Disinformation Review in December 2017.

Undermining human rights

The abuse of the concept of genocide in pro-Kremlin communication is more than just occasional; it is systematic, and tracking of the recent cases above and others like them suggest that it is on the rise. By attributing the genocide term to situations that have nothing to do with genocide, the word loses its value by way of inflation. Ironically, the abuse of the word turns it into a weapon against the very values the word is supposed to defend: the values of human rights and human dignity as alternative to the large-scale human rights violations we call genocide.

A new bill countering of dissemination of fake news implies the deprivation of accreditation for mass media, like reported by neweurope.eu

French Culture Minister Francoise Nyssen said Tuesday that a new bill on countering the spread of fake news in mass media and social networks is “almost ready” and will be presented in the next few days.

As France goes to war against the spread of bogus information and propaganda in the mass media and on social platforms, the government is planning to introduce a set of reforms which will directly concern the work of the media in the country. The new bill, if adopted, will particularly target the period around election campaigns and comprised of three main parts.

The first part of the bill mainly concerns multimedia mass media. It allows the Higher Council for the Audiovisual Sector to withdraw a broadcast license from foreign mass media or media “controlled by a foreign state” if an independent body finds that media guilty of intentionally spreading fallacious material.

The document also addresses concerns about digital platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. During election campaigns these and other similar sites will be obliged to reveal who and how much was paid for “sponsored” information – allowing users the ability to track the origin on the material and whether it might be connected to a hostile government or rival intelligence service.

The core tenant of the new draft bill gives France’s executive bodies the right to react swiftly to the dissemination of fake news. According to Nyssen, French residents will be able to send to the courts links to materials that they classify as ‘fake news’. An appointed judge will then decide whether the information is classified as being false and if the material must be removed from the web.

In drafting the anti-fake news bill, the French government drew on the experience of its German and British colleagues. In the next few months the text of the bill will be discussed with specialists and regulators and by the end of April should be submitted to the National Assembly of France.

Russia may be cutting spending on healthcare and education, but its state-run media have never been in better shape, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

RT’s budget for 2017 was a whopping 18.7 billion rubles, or 261 million euros – a tenfold increase since the Kremlin-backed television channel was founded in 2005.

RT, which has been widely accused of spreading disinformation and was recently asked to register as a foreign agent in the United States, is spending 20 million euros alone on the launch of a French-language channel based in Paris.

“Brothels for zoophiles have existed for a long time in Copenhagen. Local animal rights defenders, whose voices, however, are almost never heard, have told me that the animals are put in special machines and even have their limbs broken so that they cannot harm those who enjoy such unusual pleasures”.

The paragraph quoted above was part of a longer piece describing different aspects of the alleged perversion of traditional values in the West, published in December by RIA Novosti, a state-owned Russian news agency, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Before looking at the developments that have let RIA Novosti to the point when it publishes articles of this kind, let’s turn the discussion around and ask if there are any mitigating circumstances in RIA’s story. Is there anything that prevents us from concluding that RIA, which used to enjoy international respect for accuracy and unbiased, timely reporting, has simply sold out and become an anti-Western propaganda outlet?

Is an undocumented claim an “opinion”?

The incorrect notion that Denmark tolerates zoophilia – people having sex with animals – is not new to the pro-Kremlin narrative. As we reported in September, it has a history among marginal outlets in Russia, Georgia and other countries. In Russia, the narrative can also be traced back to a news item broadcast by the state-controlled TV station NTV in October 2013, in which it was claimed that Denmark had become a destination of international animal sex tourism.

However, RIA’s story does not go as far as to claim that Denmark has legalised animal brothels; the author simply brings forward a rumour about cruelty to animals, which she claims to have heard from a friend.

RIA’s piece is also not presented as a news item; instead, it is published in a section headlined “Opinion”. It could be argued that this frame introduces an element of deniability for RIA, so that, if asked, the news agency can simply say that the claim is the author’s, and in no way RIA’s.

But can an undocumented and, mildly speaking, controversial claim be considered “an opinion”? And will those employees at RIA who want to enjoy recognition for their journalistic work, appreciate this kind of text appearing on RIA’s website?

RIA under pressure

The newswire agency RIA Novosti, or simply “RIA”, is part of the state-owned media house “Rossiya Segodnya”. RIA works in the same building as one of the Kremlin’s international flagship propaganda outlets, Sputnik, and has the same Director General as Sputnik, the EU-sanctioned Dmitry Kiselev (see top photo). The agency has a wide network of correspondents across the globe, including reporters accredited at the EU institutions in Brussels.

Since the merger with Sputnik (the former Voice of Russia/Radio Moscow) in 2013 under the “Rossiya Segodnya” umbrella, RIA’s staff has struggled to maintain pockets of propaganda-free oxygen in spite of pressure from top managers who are on the record as claiming that “the period of impartial journalism is over. Objectivity is a myth”.

By reserving an “opinion” section for the most openly propagandistic texts, those editors and journalists at RIA who remember the time when RIA enjoyed international respect, and who cherish their professional integrity, perhaps hope to protect RIA’s core business, the newswire, from disinformation and other kinds of propaganda. However, as our database shows, more and more examples of disinformation have begun to appear also in RIA’s newswire reporting.

Amid the noise of disinformation, one of the regular techniques that comes through again and again is the repetition of extreme language to criticise, abuse or denigrate. And one of the favourite accusations is that of Nazism, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

This week we saw several such examples. The continued claim that Ukraine is governed by Nazis is a regular tool in the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign to discredit the country. This week we saw accusations levelled at Italian politicians – by an outlet in the Italian language – that they support Nazi Ukrainian troops in Donbas and at an Armenian monument.

In addition, last week we saw the US releasing a list of names that include 210 Russian top officials and billionaires. The list itself does not impose new sanctions on Russia. Publishing the list was required by the Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act, which was meant to respond to Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election.

Russian TV’s response was to compare the list to the Holocaust. The strongly emotional message was that “any citizen of Russia could end up on this list”, “every one of us is bad only because we live in Russia”, and finally: a comparison to segregation, Nazism and the Holocaust.

Focus on Crimea

Two disinformation narratives linked to Germany were present this week. “Harems for refugees paid by the German tax-money” continued a well catalogued trend of stoking concerns over the country’s migration policy. The catchy headline is based on anonymous quotations from social media.

And the visit of German regional deputies to Crimea was described by the Russian defense ministry’s TV channel Zvezda as “official”, in line with ongoing efforts to normalise the peninsula’s illegal annexation, not recognised by the EU. Pro-Kremlin media duly amplified the story.

However, the German government swiftly debunked this claim, stating that, “We are fundamentally critical of such visits, but private travel does not fall under sanctions.” Germany also said that it adheres to the non-recognition policy due to the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia and that Germany warns those who decide to travel about the legal consequences from the Ukrainian side.