Last month’s centenary of the 1917 Russian revolution passed without significant commemoration from the side of the Russian authorities, and neither a positive nor negative official interpretation was pursued, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The only state-affiliated outlet that was allowed to elaborate on the anniversary was the Kremlin’s international mouthpiece, RT (Russia Today): RT’s 1917 multiplatform project targeted foreigners with a depoliticised message and a design in keeping with the kind of Soviet poster propaganda style that traditionally enjoys popularity among tourists visiting Russia. The potential of political messaging in RT’s project was sterile to the degree that Stalin had his own Twitter profile where he was jovially called “Joe Stalin”.

“A ritual murder”

However, just shortly after the actual anniversary date had passed, a November surprise was prepared for Russian audiences.The Russian Orthodox Church requested that federal investigators reopen the murder case concerning the killing of Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II, and his family (see photo above) in 1918. The church specifically asked investigators to answer questions as to whether the killing had been “a ritual murder”.

As independent Meduza explains in its English edition, the term “ritual” in this context has a specific history, and can only mean one thing: leaders in the Russian Orthodox Church are open to a theory that sees a secret Jewish, cabalistic ritual in the killing, which includes elements of human sacrifice.

“Paranoia-based conspiracy theory”

Concerns about these latest developments have been raised in many Russian independent media, with Novaya Gazeta covering the topic extensively in a number of articles, one of them penned by Alexander Soldatov with the title “’The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, now as evidence in a criminal case”. Soldatov describes the close ties between the Church and the Kremlin and concludes that “when the Church demands an investigation into whether the killing of the Tsar and his family on 17 July 1918 was ‘a ritual,’ then it is nothing but a translation of the official propaganda into the language of the church: external and internal enemies, which create trouble in Russia, must be found”, Soldatov says, and continues: “From the point of view of the official chauvinistic ideology, which is disseminated in Russia via brain-washing television, our history is solely a matter of pride, representing an unbroken line of great victories; and if there are dark pages in this history, then there are dubious foreigners behind them. This is the usual paranoia-based conspiracy theory. They cannot see the Russian people in the atrocities of the Revolution, only external enemies, a fifth column formed in Russia with ‘Western money’; and the Tsar was not killed by Russian revolutionaries, but by evil Talmudist enemies who sacrificed him to the devil.”

Historical revisionism and eternal “Russophobia”

When the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign turns to writing its own version of the past, it is usually an indirect way of promoting a specific narrative about the present. Last week, for example, we saw the history of the Prague Spring in 1968 used as an indirect way of speaking about Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan Revolution. Similarly, disinformation about an alleged “Jewish ritual murder” almost 100 years ago can serve to solidify and reiterate a narrative about modern conspiracies that allegedly target Russia and its interests.

At the centre of this narrative stands the notion of anti-Russian conspiracies whose keyword in modern Kremlin disinformation has become “Russophobia”; this term is traditionally used by Russian government outlets as a universal explanation when Russia’s policies and actions meet objections and concerns from the side of the international community. The idea of Russophobia is pushed  in the context of the anniversary by instilling the view that it is not just a modern problem, but that Russia has always been the target of hostile external forces.

Chauvinist trends in pro-Kremlin disinformation

It is not the first time anti-Semitism and other forms of racism and hatred towards minorities have become paramount in the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign. We have earlier described attacks Russia’s Jewish communities, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and the use of sexist, racist and homophobic hate speech live on air. REN TV, a pro-Kremlin nationwide TV channel, has devoted a whole programme to alleging that LGTB people are “sick and perverse”.

This week, we saw a continuation of the trend from two weeks ago: polishing Russia’s soviet era history. Whereas last time we saw the Russian MFA incorrectly giving credit to Soviet soldiers for saving Bulgarian Jews, this week we saw further extreme historical “creativity”, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

As explained in detail here, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was described in the official TV channel of Russia’s Ministry of Defence, Zvezda, as a way of preserving peace and harmony in the region. It was in fact a foreign hostile invasion.

Coinciding with the official Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holodomor, this man-made famine in Ukraine during 1932-33 was subjected to extensive historical revisionism by Russian state controlled TV. it is not the first time that atrocities are used for disinformation purposes. In the TV show “Vremya pokazhet” it was stated that it was a lie to claim that this was a purposeful famine, directed at Ukrainians.  And in another popular TV show on Russian state TV it was claimed that it was in fact an epidemic that claimed so may lives during those years in Ukraine, not an intentional policy of the Stalin era.

The facts are that, in a country once referred to as Europe’s bread basket, people suddenly starved to death in masses due to lack of food, caused by a deliberate policy to punish the Ukrainian peasantry, which had continued to resist the Soviet policy of collectivization. On 23 October 2008, the European Parliament adopted a resolution that recognised the Holodomor as a crime against humanity, caused by the deliberate policies of Stalin’s USSR.  And on 28 April 2010, a resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe declared the famine was caused by the “cruel and deliberate actions and policies of the Soviet regime” and was responsible for the deaths of “millions of innocent people” in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Russia.

New myths, old topic

During the past week, pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets marked the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the protests at the Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv, Ukraine. For at least four years, Ukraine has been a permanent front-line and testing ground for the multi-language pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign, in order to justify Russia’s military intervention and illegal annexation of Crimea.

This week’s disinformation gold mine was an Italian documentary that claimed it was Georgian snipers who opened fire on protesters in February 2014.  For a detailed debunk of the flaws, manipulations and inaccuracies the documentary is built on, read the analyses by Myth Detector, StopFake and the Insider.

The story was covered by the main Russian TV channels and news outlets and on news portals in English and in Georgian. Let’s look at how the disinformation was tailored to these different audiences.

• For English language readers, the credibility of an established European media outlet was of importance. The website spreading the story starts with explaining that the “TV documentary emanates from the mainstream media” from the “most watched TV channel in Italy”. In direct contradiction to this argument, though, the next statement says that “the Western corporate media remains silent” about the issue, but “independent ” ones ensure its distribution.
• For the Russian audience, disinforming reports about Georgian snipers were easier to serve. The “news” about the documentary was accompanied by the usual allegations of Ukraine being governed by Nazis and denials of Russian military presence in Ukraine. Furthermore, former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has been a top target for conspiracies and disinformation this autumn, so implicating him fitted the general disinformation picture.
•  In Georgian, the disinformation mainly followed the reporting in the Russian language, Myth Detector notes. One outlet directly accused Saakashvili of the shooting. Another made the message even simpler. It quoted the Italian journalist’s Facebook post that claimed; “snipers admitted: EU-backed opposition leaders, rather than supporters of President Yanukovych, opened fire on protesters”. As usual, no evidence for the claims was provided.

The official TV channel of Russia’s Ministry of Defence, Zvezda, published an analytical article on its website under the headline “Czechoslovakia should be grateful to the USSR for 1968: The history of ‘the Prague Spring.’” The publication coincided with the first day of the visit to Russia by the President of the Czech Republic, Miloš Zeman. As reported by Radio Prague, both the Czech President and other leading Czech politicians reacted strongly to the publication, calling its claims “outright lies” and the author “completely brainwashed”, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Taken down after Czech protests 

The independent Russian outlet Meduza’s research into the editing history on Zvezda’s website shows that after the negative reactions began to emerge, some elements in the article, including its headline, were first made more neutral, e.g. by changing the headline to “Czechoslovakia, 1968: The history of ‘the Prague Spring.” However, after the Czech President protested about the article at his meeting with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, the article was taken down completely by Zvezda. The fact that the article would stir negative reactions was apparently no surprise for Zvezda: Even its initial version includes a line at the very end that “the opinion expressed by the author might not coincide with that of Zvezda”. The orginal article in its full length can be found via this link.

The Prague Spring = The Maidan Revolution

Below we have translated a number of highlights from the article, all of which underline how, on top of the historical revisionism, the narrative about the Prague Spring can be read as a comment on current political affairs in and around Ukraine, and to current relations between Russia and the West. A central claim made by the text is that the intervention in Czechoslovakia prevented events similar to the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine from happening. In order to illustrate the way the article’s historical claims are tied to the narrative about Ukraine and Russia’s relations to the West, we have added links to relevant search results in our database of more than 3,500 examples of pro-Kremlin disinformation. The search results illustrate how closely the claims in Zvezda’s article are to key concepts in modern pro-Kremlin disinformation:

Zvezda’s article: “The entry of troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 made it impossible for the West to organise a coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia through the technology of making “velvet” revolutions and kept for more than 20 years a life of peace and harmony for all the peoples of the countries of the Warsaw Treaty Organization”.

On Friday this week the Eastern Partnership summit will take place in Brussels between the EU and Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine. In the build up, we have seen plenty of pre-emptive distortion concerning the facts about the EU’s cooperation with its Eastern Partners, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

For example, there is the claim that the new agreement between Armenia and the EU, half of which focuses on building a stronger economy, will not in fact have any affect on the economy. The EU was accused of restricting Georgian products, whereas in fact Georgia enjoys a zero customs duty policy on the import of goods into EU countries, save for one product: garlic. It was also claimed that only Europe benefits from the agreement with Georgia, whereas actually trade relations between the EU and its partner countries are mutually beneficial.

The most common myths about the Eastern Partnership have been compiled and debunked here, available in all EU languages and Russian.

As we have pointed out before, disinformation is a tool that can be used for many purposes; to confuse, to cover the facts, to discredit something or someone. Or, as Ben Nimmo explains it with the 4 D:s; dismiss, distort, distract, dismay.

What was said in pro-Kremlin channels about Theresa May after she stated that Russia seeks to weaponise information is a recent example of pro-Kremlin disinformation efforts to dismiss a critic. But as shown this week, disinformation is not always a reaction-sometimes it is rather proactive.

Disinformation – live in conflict

Another Eastern Partner, Ukraine, continued to get the usual extra attention in pro-Kremlin outlets. This week, the focus seemed to be on alleging the preparation of future atrocities to be committed by either the US or the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

On Russian state controlled TV, the US was accused of paying Ukraine to keep the conflict going, actively preventing peace in the east of Ukraine, but also of provoking the war in Ukraine in order to stop the new “Great Silk Road”. Neither theory was backed up by any evidence.

The “real” reason for the conflict in Ukraine? There is a more truthful explanation.

And Ukrainian authorities were accused of having conducted ethnic cleansing in Donbas as well as of planning, in cooperation with the US, to conduct large-scale ethnic cleansing in that area. Again, there are no indications to back these assertions up.

A similar unsubstantiated claim in pro-Kremlin disinformation was that the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council have death squads at their command. If these are simply cases of distortion, or if it is also a case of distracting the attention from something else, remains to be seen.

New revelations show that fake Russian Twitter accounts published at least 45,000 messages about Brexit ahead of the referendum, most of them calling on British voters to reject the European Union, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Data analysts from Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley, tracked down more than 156,000 fake Twitter accounts based in Russia.

According to their study, these accounts published a huge number of tweets devoted to the Brexit vote, including 45,000 messages in the 48 hours preceding the vote.

The fake accounts also included numerous tweets aimed at fanning anti-Muslim sentiment in the United Kingdom.

Imagine you could re-invent yourself. Start from the beginning, erase wrongdoings, polish your past and take credit for some good things that happened. Re-invention is usually about creating the future you want rather than erasing the history you have. That is, unless you’re in the pro-Kremlin disinformation space, where historical revisionism is a favourite tool which seems to have no boundaries, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

This week we saw plenty of historical re-inventions in pro-Kremlin outlets. For example, the staggering number of victims of communist regimes was dismissed as having been “pulled out of a hat”. It was also claimed that Georgia had joined Russia out of free will in 1801, although it was actually an annexation of the (then) Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti. The wording reminds us of a more recent annexation.

Or how about the demand made on state controlled Pervyi kanal that the EU should compensate Russia for genocide during WWII since the European armies invaded USSR and killed millions of people? This both ignores the contribution of allied European forces to defeating fascism and ignores the fact that the EU was founded after WWII.

Blaming Europe for atrocities did not stop there. In another show on state controlled Rossiya 1, it was claimed that the USSR mass famine – known in Ukraine as the Holodomor – was caused by Europe. In fact, the famine was a result of Stalin’s policies, which in the case of Ukraine has been recognised as a crime against humanity in several international resolutions.

We also saw some official polishing of Russia’s history, with the claim that it was Soviet soldiers who saved 50,000 Bulgarian Jews from deportation to Nazi Germany during WWII. It was actually the combined forces of the Bulgarian people, the Orthodox Church and Bulgarian leaders that saved around 50,000 Jews from Sofia from deportation to Nazi Germany.

Misrepresenting the facts on the ground

Another prevalent theme in pro-Kremlin disinformation this week was the war in Ukraine. Specifically, there was disinformation targeting international observers in Ukraine and made up stories about the Ukrainian Armed forces.

One story spread in pro-Kremlin outlets was that the Ukrainian Armed forces had killed a boy in Donetsk through shelling. But in fact, the tragic death of the boy was caused by an unexploded mine according to local Donetsk authorities. This was also reported by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMM) who followed up on the information and came to the same conclusion as the local authorities. The SMM were then accused of not acting independently by Russian state controlled TV; it was stated on a popular TV show that the independent monitoring mission receive instructions from Western Europe about what to report on. No evidence was presented to support the accusations. Read more about the OSCE SMM here.

The idea of a peacekeeping mission in Ukraine has been discussed lately. Russian REN TV made its contribution to the discussion by claiming that such a mission would result in … genocide.  As we have highlighted several times before, the term genocide is regularly used in pro-Kremlin disinformation to inspire fear, usually without having any connection with the actual act of genocide.

Screenshot from Russkaya Vesna. The website disinformed its readers that the Ukrainian military would have conducted a raid on a monastery looking for conscripts.

Furthermore, the Ukrainian military was accused of raiding a Catholic monastery in search of conscripts, an accusation that was refuted by the Ukrainian Catholic Church as fake and, with no apparent sense of irony, Russia was identified as the guarantor of security in Ukraine. Seeing as Russia has illegally annexed a part of Ukraine and is backing the separatists in the East of the country, we feel that this is a statement that needs some further explanation.

But the highlight of this week’s wave of pro-Kremlin disinformation was the fact that the Russian Ministry of Defence used images from a computer game as its irrefutable evidence that the US is supporting ISIS. See the full story by Bellingcat here. This is not the first time this tactic has been used, and it is encouraging to see more international media sharing the story and helping debunk this particularly puerile form of disinformation.

“Russia’s Ministry of Defence publishes irrefutable proof that the US provides cover for ISIS combat troops, using them for promoting American interests in the Middle East”. This was the message of a Facebook update and a tweet published in English, Russian and Arabic by the Russian Ministry of Defence on 14 November. The “irrefutable proof” was a series of images, which turned out to have been copied from a computer game, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The images used in the official communication were screenshots from a promotional video for a computer game called “AC-130 Gunship Simulator: Special Ops Squadron”, published on YouTube by Byte Conveyor Studios. For details, see Bellingcat’s story.

The fake images were not only published on social media. On the same day, Russian government-owned TV Rossiya-24 showed them in a news item about the situation in Syria.

It is not the first time Russia’s Ministry of Defence presents fake images. As investigations have shown, it has even presented data, which contradicts its own previously presented “proofs“. It is also not the first time Rossiya-24 and its sister channel Rossiya-1 have spread disinformation.

The incident provoked a number of parodies on the “irrefutable proof”. We picked a few below; all from the popular Russian political parody Twitter account “Lentach“:

The Russian leadership has told major companies to supply it with news stories that put its stewardship of the country in a positive light, according to documents seen by Reuters.

A seven-page document spelled out the kind of articles required, with a focus on new jobs, scientific achievements and new infrastructure, especially those involving state support. It also detailed how the stories should be presented, and gave a weekly deadline for submissions.

The instructions were sent last month by the energy ministry to 45 companies in Russia’s energy and utilities sector including Rosneft (ROSN.MM), Lukoil (LKOH.MM) and Novatek (NVTK.MM), according to a second document, a list of recipients.

The drive coincides with the run-up to a presidential election in March next year when President Vladimir Putin needs a strong mandate with high turnout to maintain his firm grip on power after dominating Russian politics for two decades.

“Life for the majority of people has become calmer, more comfortable, more attractive. But many such examples often escape the media’s attention,” said the first document.

“Our task, through a creative and painstaking approach, is to select such topics and subjects and offer them to the media.”

That document, which did not mention the election, said the news items to be supplied were to feed a “positive news wire” and should correspond to two themes: “Life is getting better” and “How things were; how they are now”.

Both documents were attached to an invitation, dated Oct. 9, sent by the energy ministry to senior executives in the public relations and government relations departments of the firms, of which 17 are state-controlled and 28 privately-held. The invitation requested they send representatives to an Oct. 12 meeting at the ministry in Moscow to discuss how to help the government’s PR effort.

Reuters saw a copy of the invitation and spoke to three executives who received it. According to the invitation, the news initiative was requested by Sergei Kiriyenko, the first deputy chief of staff in the presidential administration.

A spokesman for Kiriyenko did not respond to a request for comment. The energy ministry also did not respond, nor did Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Reuters sent requests for comment to the biggest five companies out of the 45, by market value – state-owned oil major Rosneft, state-owned gas giant Gazprom, private oil companies Lukoil and Surgutneftegaz, and private gas firm Novatek. No responses were received.

NINE-POINT LIST

Oil and gas provide Russia’s biggest source of revenue and energy firms are among the most powerful companies and biggest employers. Reuters has not found evidence that similar instructions were sent to companies in other sectors.

The Oct. 12 meeting was chaired by Deputy Energy Minister Anton Inyutsyn, and an official from the presidential administration was also present, according to one of the sources who attended. The two officials went through and explained the instructions laid out in the seven-page document, said the source, who added that the election was not mentioned.

Reuters reported in February that the ministry had enlisted energy companies to give it advance notice about developments that could influence public opinion.

The meeting last month and the guidelines circulated in preparation for it show that, since then, the initiative has stepped up into a higher gear, with companies being handed highly specific instructions on how they are expected to help.

It was not clear if the companies had acted on the instructions.

The news guidelines document said the government wanted to highlight “victories and achievements”.

It included a nine-point list of the kind of news that companies should supply. It asked, for example, for stories about business units “where it’s possible to say that state support helped lift them out of crisis, restored modern production, and re-equipped them with new equipment and gave work to local residents”.

Examples given of the kind of events of interest to the government from elsewhere in the corporate world included state lender Sberbank hiring 700 people in the Volga river city of Togliatti, a festival funded by a company in Kaliningrad region for young people with hearing difficulties and a sports centre being opened in Cherkessk, southern Russia.

The document also held up the case of Yevgeny Kosmin as an example of a positive news story, a miner in western Siberia whose team extracted 1.6 million tonnes of coal in July this year, a monthly record.

That carried echoes of Alexey Stakhanov, a miner who in 1935 extracted almost 15 times more coal during a shift than his quota required. Communist propaganda held Stakhanov up as a symbol of Soviet industrial prowess.

MONDAY DEADLINE

The instructions stipulated that companies should submit positive news stories every week – on the Monday, or Tuesday morning at the latest.

They said the companies should present their items in the format of a table, with new additions highlighted in a coloured font, and accompanied by a press release that could be passed on to journalists with minimal editing from government officials.

The document also required each company to provide a contact person who could provide extra information to journalists, tell TV news crews how to reach the venue to report on an event, and organise access for news crews to the company’s sites.

Reuters was not able to establish if the Kremlin had made similarly specific demands of companies in the past.

Putin has not yet declared his intention to seek re-election. Most Kremlin observers say he will. Opinion polls show he will win comfortably, with many voters crediting him with restoring national pride.

The Kremlin’s biggest headache with the election, scheduled for next March, is ensuring a strong turnout, say many political analysts.

With the economy weak and many people viewing the result as a foregone conclusion, voters may be tempted to stay away from polling stations. A low turnout could undermine Putin’s legitimacy in his next term, the analysts say.

Is the complainant always right? TV channel Rossiya 1 laughs at the allegations of sexual harassment in the US., like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

1. Catalonia through the prism of “weak and cowardly” European politics

When the aim is to discredit the opponent as a hypocritical liar, the denigrator faces a problem: where to get the evidence from to support the blackmailing efforts?  The producers of pro-Kremlin disinformation have several answers that we saw in action this week, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

First, do not underestimate the effect of the almost endless circulation and reuse of a false online image. A photo showing Hillary Clinton shaking hands with the founder of al-Qaeda Osama bin Laden has been circulating for ten years on the internet since it was first created for a Photoshop contest held by the website FreakingNews.

Last year, the photo was recycled by pro-Kremlin Twitter accounts, and at the end of October the spokesperson of Russian Foreign Ministry – despite the fact that the image had been shown to be fake many times before – referred to “fantastic, mind-boggling photographs of how Bin Laden was hosted in the White House” to explain how the lobbying culture works in the US.  Well, the original photo documented Mrs Clinton meeting musician Shubhashish Mukherjee.

To actually create false evidence about the target’s opinions is more time consuming. Then, a fake Facebook profile is an easy option. This week, we heard that a Czech Parliamentarian would prefer to see five million Muslim migrants in the Czech Republic than five million voters for the Czech president. But the statement was made from a fake Facebook profile disguising itself as belonging to the MP in question.

A more challenging disinformation tactic is to write a false letter and spread it. In October, a fake letter allegedly written by the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and addressed to the Secretary of State of European affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland appeared. It was first published on Reddit in English and quickly spread in Russian language websites with headlines like “Mogherini allowed human rights to be violated in Ukraine” and on social media claiming “Mogherini openly supports the Nazis” It did not spread to the established media. See the debunk here.

This week we also saw official claims that it was Finland that wants Russia to join the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. No such proposal was ever made, and in fact participation in the centre is open only to EU Member States and Nato Allies – and the centre counters hybrid threats coming from Russia, among other actors.

Biological weapons here, there, and everywhere

One of the key themes of the past two weeks of disinformation was biological weapons. We heard that the US is collecting biological material in Russia to create a biological weapon of the next generation, which will specifically act on Russians. The shortcoming in this conspiracy theory is that both international and Russian experts stated that it is not possible to create such a weapon.

A similar narrative about biological weapons has been spread particularly regarding Georgia, Armenia, and Ukraine, for years. Besides Russia, it was now time for Georgia again. The conspiracies stated that both deadly pathogens and insects are being planted by the West in Georgia.

And just to cheer you up for the conclusion: We can tell you that the British government is not, in fact, planning to replace the term “pregnant women” with “pregnant people”!