It has been an eventful couple of weeks for the Kremlin’s disinformation machine, with several inconvenient topics – from the United States’ withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, to Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony, to RT’s £200,000 regulatory fine in the UK – all making international headlines and not looking good for the Kremlin. Besides seeking to manipulate the debate on these topics, the pro-Kremlin also produced an unusually diverse (and at times truly bizarre) set of disinformation cases, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu. Was it the heatwave, or a full moon? Who knows. But put on your seatbelt, because this is going to be a wild ride!

The INF Treaty

On August 2nd, the United States officially withdrew from the INF Treaty, following Russia’s deployment of the SSC-8 missile system, which is nuclear-capable, mobile, hard to detect, and lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict. In a press conference on the day, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stressed that “all NATO Allies agree that these missiles violate the INF Treaty”, and that Russia has pursued the development and fielding of these systems despite years of engagement by the US and other Allies. He added that all NATO Allies support the US decision to withdraw given Russia’s continued violations, and that Russia therefore “bears the sole responsibility for the demise of the Treaty.”

But the pro-Kremlin media dutifully spins a completely different reality. In this alternate universe, nothing is ever Russia’s fault – on the contrary, the Kremlin actively tries to act in good faith and do the right thing, but is constantly victimised and scapegoated by the evil, power-hungry West.

This week, the pro-Kremlin media predictably dedicated its efforts to spinning just such an alternate reality about the demise of the INF Treaty. Apparently, there is no evidence that Russia violated its terms – in “fact”, the missile in question has a range of less than 500km, and is therefore compliant with the Treaty. The United States is thus solely to blame – Washington withdrew from the Treaty unilaterally, abandoning a fundamental agreement for global stability and security. It was the US, not Russia, which persistently avoided a dialogue to resolve problems within the INF framework. Washington specifically wanted to end the Treaty because it is developing its own novel missile system in order to boost the American military-industrial complex!

Disinfo Hall of Fame

If you’ve read this far, here’s your reward – the ten wildest cases from the last two weeks.

1. The Skripal case was invented to distract from British paedophilia scandals, which Theresa May covered up when she was Home Secretary!

2. All high-ranking politicians in the Baltic states are implicated in paedophilia. Makes them easier to control.

3. Tinder is planning to warn its users that Poland is dangerous for the LGBT community. Even though earlier this year, Warsaw held one of its largest ever pride marches, with another major LGBT demonstration just a few weeks ago.

4. The US controls Al-Qaeda and ISIS/Daesh. Don’t look so surprised! Everyone knows the Americans have been managing global terrorism since the end of the 20th century.

5. NATO is planning to attack and occupy Turkey. It was behind all the coup attempts, too!

6. A Romanian murder suspect was trafficking girls to NATO soldiers stationed at the Deveselu base. Better hide yo kids, hide yo wife!

7. The US and Anglo-Saxons are promoting a global totalitarian caste system. It’s disguised as “liberalism”!

8. Stalin established the independent Polish state after WWII. Same with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania – these countries all owe their independence to Stalin!

9. The US and NATO are involved in organ trafficking. Apparently invading and occupying an ally isn’t their only criminal pursuit (see #5).

And finally, we saved the best for last:

10. Russia is the most liberal country, where everyone who isn’t lazy has the opportunity to speak!

This is where sarcasm fails. Tell that to the hundreds of peaceful protesters arrested in Moscowover the last week for demanding fair elections. To Boris and Inga, the young couple viciously beaten by riot police. To the parents who face losing custody of their toddler for bringing him to an opposition rally. And to Olga Misik, the teenage girl arrested for reading aloud Russia’s constitution – which affirms the right to peaceful gatherings.

The EUvsDisinfo database has surpassed 6000 cases of pro-Kremlin disinformation since its founding in November 2015, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Of these, 1000 have been collected only in the span of the last four months. While this is partly due to the increased resources the EU is dedicating to monitoring and countering disinformation, it also shows that the Kremlin’s efforts to destabilise Europe and the West are most definitely not slowing down.

On the contrary, the evidence collected by EUvsDisinfo reveals an ongoing and multifaceted disinformation campaign by the Russian state media and its satellites, which serves several related goals: to weaken Western alliances and institutions (namely NATO and the EU), exacerbate societal frictions and polarisation, undermine international support for Ukraine, and dilute support and Western political will to continue sanctioning Russia for its violations of international law and other transgressions. The word cloud below visualises the themes and topics most frequently exploited to this end.

The database’s 6000th case is an illustrative example of how these goals are pursued in practice in the pro-Kremlin disinformation ecosystem: Sputnik claimed that NATO is preparing colour revolutions in a number of post-Soviet states, which will result in coups d’état and the installation of regimes friendly to the West. One story weaves together multiple common narratives, inventing an absurd conspiracy to accuse the West of imperialism and paint NATO as expansionist and aggressive; a threat to other states’ national sovereignty. It also plays into the favoured pro-Kremlin tropes of Western “Russophobia” and “encirclement” of Russia – claiming that Russia is merely the victim of unfounded Western hostility, the goal of which is to see Russia as weak, submissive, and humiliated. In this (mis)interpretation, Russia is never the aggressor but rather perpetually on the defensive, merely protecting its interests against the West’s malign intentions.

Indeed, a significant portion of the Kremlin’s disinformation campaign is based on accusing the West of the very sins Russia itself commits with shameless audacity. But the great irony, as we know, is that it is Russia, not NATO, which habitually violates the territorial integrity of other states (Ukraine, Georgia), pursues its imperialistic goals with little to no regard for human life (Syria, MH17), conducts brazen assassination attempts with chemical weapons on foreign soil (the Skripal poisoning). By no stretch of the imagination does this track record qualify as “defensive” behaviour. The Kremlin is an aggressor, and it uses disinformation campaigns to distract from and camouflage this reality.

Breaking down the database

Let’s take a look at some of the trends and numbers of the 6000+ cases. By a large margin, Ukraine continues to be the leading disinformation topic, with more than 2600 cases in the database. The U.S. and EU take second and third place, respectively, followed by “The West” and NATO. Other favoured topics include Russian victimhood, the war in Syria, conspiracies and alleged false flag operations, hysteria about non-existent fascism, and fearmongering related to migration. Following the top 10, Georgia, the Skripal case, and MH17 are also major topics.

Sometimes, however, the pro-Kremlin disinformation machine deviates from its predictable stream of content and produces some truly outlandish stories. Check out our most recent favourites below:

Hall of Fame:

Hitler was a failed American experiment. Apparently, Hitler not only followed policies learned from America but was also funded by Americans! (This gem courtesy of New Eastern Outlook.)

Aliens caused the Notre Dame fire. UFOs were noticed during the fire in Notre Dame. Envoys from Nibiru are preparing an attack on a new cathedral – Europe is in grave danger!

Nazis are still in power in Ukraine. Nazis everywhere!

The West could have organised Lukashenka’s killing. Belarus’s president skipped the Eastern Partnership summit in Brussels due to the risk of being “physically eliminated”.

MH17 was a carefully planned operation against Russia. Ukraine did it, and not by accident. It was a carefully pre-planned and multifaceted domestic operation.

Russiagate is a hoax invented by the American Deep State. Obviously, since Russia has never interfered in any country’s elections!

The protests in Georgia is a part of a larger programme of CIA destabilisation. Public protests are never organic; they are only ever calculated machinations by destructive forces. In Georgia, the CIA is clearly weaponising gay pride as part of a larger programme of destabilisation.

The Belarusian opposition has become an LGBT community to get financial assistance from the UK. What, you thought the West’s weaponisation of LGBT issues is unique to Georgia?

NATO bombed Serbia in order to make it its member. Obviously true, regardless of the fact that Serbia isn’t actually in NATO.

Strache-scandal: Security services of Austria, Germany or US might be behind it. We’re not sure which one, but absent any evidence, the logical conclusion is that it was definitely a false flag operation.

This Wednesday, July 17th, marked the five-year anniversary of the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 and the death of all 298 people on board, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

An extensive international investigation – comprising Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Malaysia, and Ukraine – has determined that it was a Buk missile belonging to the Russian army that shot down the airliner over eastern Ukraine. Specifically, the Buk missile system belonged to the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade – a Russian army unit from Kursk. The system was transported illegally from Russia to territory in eastern Ukraine controlled by Russia-backed armed formations. After firing at the MH17 airliner, the system was transported back to the Russian Federation.

On 19 June 2019, the Joint Investigation Team charged four suspects for their role in the MH17 attack: three active or former agents of the Russian special services and one Ukrainian citizen, who led a separatist military combat unit in the city of Donetsk. Investigators said the men “formed a chain linking the DNR with the Russian Federation”, and through this link obtained heavy equipment from Russia for use in eastern Ukraine. Their court trial will commence in March 2020 in the Netherlands.

The evidence of Russia’s role in the downing of MH17 is irrefutable. The Dutch chief prosecutor himself did not mince words about it, saying “We now have proof Russia was involved in this tragedy, this crime. One day after 17 July [2014] they were in a position to tell us exactly what happened. They knew. The Buk was used in eastern Ukraine and they knew this. They didn’t give us this information.”

Since the very beginning, the Kremlin has been shameless in its denial of responsibility for the tragedy, instead claiming to be the victim of a Russophobic witch hunt. Responding to the JIT’s latest announcement, the Russian Foreign Ministry again claimed that “absolutely groundless accusations are put forward against the Russian side, which are aimed at discrediting Russia in the eyes of the international community.”

Accompanying these official denials, the pro-Kremlin disinformation machine has dutifully spun conspiracies and obfuscations to muddy the facts around the MH17 case, just as it did with Crimea and the Skripal poisoning.

To illustrate the scope of the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign regarding MH17, the infographic below traces the evolution of the narratives from the immediate aftermath of the crash to the present day. Beginning with claims that MH17 had already been filled with dead bodies prior to take-off and that Putin’s personal plane was in fact been the real target, the disinformation strategy predictably devolved to blaming everyone but Russia for the tragedy, claiming that the truth can never be known (yes, it can), and that the JIT investigation was rigged against Russia from the start.

New Eastern Outlook, NEO, is an English-language website, managed by the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute for Oriental Studies, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

It is a frequent contributor to the EUvsDisinfo database. Here we can read about the US controlling thousands of NGOs, flooding Armenia, or about 50 tonnes of gold stolen in Syria by the US military. NEO has also fabricated stories about US senior intelligence officers admitting Washington’s responsibility for the attempted coup in Turkey in 2016.

NEO is, to put it shortly, a hardworking disinformation portal. And apparently, the site isn’t content with lying about subject matter; it even lies about its contributors. A substantial portion of the site’s content is produced by authors with fake names – by authors that do not exist outside the editorial office of New Eastern Outlook at 12 Rozhdestvenka Street in Moscow.

The Mission Statement

NEOs founders describe the Mission of the New Eastern Outlook like this:

New Eastern Outlook aims at reflecting current events of the vast area from Japan and the South-East Asian countries to the Southern and Western shores of the African Continent. The Journal is covering political, economic and religious issues, regional security challenges and the social conditions of the peoples, populating the East. The Journal aims at depicting current affairs in an objective manner. The publications are prepared by experts from Russia, the neighbouring countries and also well-known foreign authors. NEO publishes regularly digests on the most urgent International issues.

Of the 36 latest articles (as of 17 June 2019), 8 are written by contributors, never seen anywhere else but at the NEO: Jean Périer, Ulson Gunnar, Valery Kulikov, Dmitry Bokarev, and Henry Kamens.

A further look into the content of the site discloses even more ghosts among its writers. Going through the list of contributors, we see that 33 writers have appeared regularly in 2019. Most of these can be found elsewhere: universities, think-tanks, NGOs. Some appear in interviews on TV or other media. But the rest are ghosts: the following writers appear regularly on NEO. Exclusively. Nowhere else.

• Martin Berger https://journal-neo.org/author/martin-berger/               
• Dmitry Bokarev https://journal-neo.org/author/dmitry-bokarev/            
• Seth Ferris https://journal-neo.org/author/seth-ferris/                      
• Henry Kamens https://journal-neo.org/author/henry-kamens/              
• Valery Kulikov https://journal-neo.org/author/valery-kulikov/
• Vladimir Mashin https://journal-neo.org/author/vladimir-mashin/
• Grete Mautner https://journal-neo.org/author/grete-mautner/             
• Jean Périer https://journal-neo.org/author/jean-perier/    
• Ulson Gunnar https://journal-neo.org/author/ulson-gunnar/     

All have bios formulated in similarly vague fashion:

• Martin Berger is a freelance journalist and geopolitical analyst, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
• Dmitry Bokarev, political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
• Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
• Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
• Valeriy Kulikov, expert politologist, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
• Vladimir Mashin, Ph.D. in History and a political commentator, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
• Grete Mautner is an independent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
• Jean Périer is an independent researcher an analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
• Gunnar Ulson, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

The Ghost

Looking into the production of one of these ghosts, Grete Mautner, discloses a writer with impressive expertise in virtually every topic. So far in 2019, she has written a Christmas story about Donald Trump, about imperial delusion among US diplomats, British propaganda, The Yellow vests, Washington being forced to pay reparations to a US journalist, Brexit, the British economy, Trump’s chances of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, US-Uzbek relations, British energy issues, US techniques for colour revolutions, US-Turkey relations, the Lithuanian presidential election, US foreign policy, Armenian religion and once more on British propaganda. More or less an article a week.

And how do we come to the conclusion that Ms. Mautner does not exist?

First – Grete Mautner managed to stay invisible until 2016. The only result for a search on “Grete Mautner”, outside New Eastern Outlook, is a record of a Grete Mautner, saved in France during the Holocaust. Not a single publication, tweet, or reference on any search engine before October 2016. Bang – and suddenly she starts writing articles at an impressive pace. During her first month at the Journal of New Eastern Outlook, she wrote eight lengthy articles on topics ranging from drug abuse in the United States to British war crimes in Afghanistan.

Second – Grete Mautner, always referred to as a journalist from Germany, writes exclusively in English. Search engines, Google, Yandex, Duckduckgo.com fail to produce one single text written by her in German. Which is a little strange for a German journo.

Third – The really interesting stuff appears when you apply her articles to various systems for text analysis. A branch of linguistics is called stylometry; which analyses the unique style of a given author. Stylometry has been applied to texts for hundreds of years, but the work can obviously be done much faster via computing tools. The writing style of any author is individual; we all have little habits that make our texts unique. Spelling mistakes, favourite words, punctuation.

The Voice of the Ghost

One simple, online tool for such analysis has been developed by Canadian Software Company AICBT. This tool uses Python programming language and machine learning algorithms to compare texts. Two texts by known authors – for instance Grete Mautner (in the picture below “Author 1”) and EUvsDisinfo (Author 2) – are compared to a third, unknown text: in this exercise – another one by Grete Mautner. The result discloses that the second Mautner text is actually moresimilar to our text than the one published on New Eastern Outlook under Mautner’s name, except when it comes to punctuation. But that might be a consequence of an editor at New Eastern Outlook, carefully putting all the commas in place. The software here cannot establish a definitive conclusion, but it can support the hypothesis that the articles published under Ms. Mautner’s name have been written by different people.

Her writing style varies, she’s writing on all possible topics, but strictly follows the pro-Kremlin line. If other English language contributors to New Eastern Outlook have certain favourite topics, Mautner writes with equal authority about Armenia as about the Arctic, Queen Elizabeth’s potential destinations as a political refugee, and Lithuanian politics. A similar pattern was disclosed by US online magazine The Intercept: several texts written by an Iranian opposition activist appear to be written by a collective of anonymous writers, creating a single online persona.

A real journalist has passions and flaws and idiosyncracies; a synthetic journalist, like Grete Mautner, is loyal and consistent to a hundred per cent and never creates problems for the editors. In Grete Mautner’s case, the editors of New Eastern Outlook seem to have decided that a European, German reporter has credibility. If a German reporter says it – wow, then it must be true!

New Eastern Outlook has created an entire stable of Franken-Journos. All with vaguely impressive titles like “renowned experts”, “independent researchers” and “investigative journalists”, but in reality merely fake personas, writing along the Kremlin party line. Artificially created writers who write anything to please their masters.

New Eastern Outlook offers – together with other English-language sites like South Front, Oriental Review, and Strategic Culture Foundation – a platform for certain idealists; people passionate about particular societal issues, ranging from Colonialism to Conspiracies. Disinformation outlets are happy to have contributors, but occasionally there is a need for someone to raise issues dear to the Men in the Moscow Kremlin. And no reporter can be more loyal to the Kremlin’s cause than a journalist who exists only on paper.

In 1909, a group of British colonialists took the initiative to create a group, called the Society of the Round Table. Since then, the group has managed to take over decision making in the United States, turning the US into a dumb giant, executing the orders of the British rulers. This, according to pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu. For the rest of us, the stories about The Round Table end with King Arthur.

Generally, in the view of pro-Kremlin disinformation operatives, everything is ruled by someone else. Ukraine is under external control;  Poland is kept on a short leash by the US; Romania is marred by street protests, sponsored by George Soros and the West is engineering the anti-Russian protests in Georgia. Nothing in the world ever happens, unless someone in the shadows makes it happen. Strings are carefully attached to the Western leaders, strings pulled skilfully by Puppet Masters.

The Obsolete Liberalism

Recently, Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, granted Financial Times an interview in the Moscow Kremlin. Mr. Putin followed the Kremlin talking points on most of the usual topics, but at one point, Mr. Putin expressed a surprisingly blunt view on the liberal democracy:

Liberal democracy is based on the idea of citizens’ active participation in the governance of the society. The society is subject to the choice of the citizens, as expressed in elections, through the freedom of expression, through free media.  Putin’s statement on the end of liberalism, echoes an article, published in February 2019 by a Kremlin aide, Vladislav Surkov. Mr. Surkov describes the advantage of Putin as an enlightened ruler, before democracy – or “the battle of bastards” as Mr. Surkov has it:

[Putin’s] ability to hear and understand the people, see it right to its depths and act accordingly – this is the unique and most important characteristic of the State of Putin. This corresponds with the people and is in line with its ambitions and is not subject to any of history’s counter currents. This is efficient and lasting.

We see how pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets are busy describing any expression of popular discontent as staged protests, results of the scheming of the shadow rulers. Sometimes NATO is the culprit, at other occasions, George Soros is to blame. Of course it can also be the West in general, that ignites protests, or Global Influence Groups. The Society of the Round Table is just a fresh addition to the selection of Puppet Masters, featured in pro-Kremlin media.

Old Lies

Conspiracies are all about disempowering the citizens. “There’s no point in voting; there’s no point in protesting, the Deep State, the Corporations, George Soros, the Lobbyists control it all”. Well, better to have it the Surkov way, with a benevolent ruler, only working for the good of his people.

But the disinformation operatives do not really dare to rely entirely on complicated and intriguing conspiracy theories. Common, straight-forward lying is still employed. Using screen shots from five year old videos is one way to spice up the news in the absence of facts. Or pretending an interview from 2014 with a US intelligence official is about current events in Georgia. Distorted statements by officials, persistent repeating old, refuted, lies… The entire disinformation toolbox is put at work.

It is obvious that the Kremlin is genuinely afraid of the concept of democracy, transparency, pluralism, rule of law and human rights. When you are afraid, fairy tales, like the stories about The Round Table, is comforting.

Pro-Kremlin disinformation is not only heavily state-funded (for example, financial support for RT goes as high as nine figures), but also, thanks to its online presence, earns vast amounts of money through its YouTube channels. How much exactly? New research by Omelas tries to answer this question, like reported euvsdisinfo.eu.

With over 1.9 bn registered users every month, YouTube has become a battlefield for audience attention. Pro-Kremlin outlets take part in this battle, too. Whenever you watch something on YouTube, advertisements appear. This is how money is earned – both by YouTube (which takes 55% of the revenue) and by the authors of the content you are watching (who take the remaining 45%). In order to profit, YouTube channels need to have at least one thousand subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time; they also need to be qualified by YouTube. The scheme is simple: the more views, the more money.

Between 2017 and 2018, pro-Kremlin outlets researched by Omelas (including NTV, different language versions of RT, Russia 1, Ruptly TV, TV Zvezda, and others) earned at least 6 million USD (whereas YouTube earned 7.2 million). The number comes as a result of research based on costs per view, the results of which were then normalised to account for possible different costs in different languages or countries. Unsurprisingly, the biggest revenues came from Russian and English versions, as the main languages of pro-Kremlin channels. Spanish and Arabic versions of RT contributed to the overall 6 m dollars, too.

Interestingly, when the research only used the global cost per view model (without referring to particular languages or countries), the figure for revenues grew dramatically, to more than 26.5 million dollars. It shows that revenues flowing to pro-Kremlin outlets can in fact be bigger than estimated.

Of course, everybody is free to watch anything they like. However, the problem with RT and other pro-Kremlin channels is that they do not offer an alternative point of view, as they call themselves, nor do they work as independent media. They spread conspiracies, lies, half-truths, manipulations. And as Omelas research shows, they earn a lot of money by operating this way.

Pro-Kremlin outlets use disinformation narratives to create or deepen divisions and advance the Kremlin’s agenda. Only in January this year the British media regulator, Ofcom, found (not for the first time) that RT had been in “serious failure of compliance” with the rules of “due impartiality” in a total of seven cases (out of ten analysed between March and May 2018). Moreover, RT’s chief editor Margarita Simonyan said on the record that RT is capable of “conducting information war against the whole Western world,” using “the information weapon”. In France, the broadcasting regulator Conseil Supérieur de ’Audiovisuel (CSA) accused RT of displaying a ”lack of honesty, rigour, and diversity of points of view”, and RT and Sputnik were denounced by President Emmanuel Macron as ”spreading lying propaganda”.

What do you do when your disinformation campaign is running both out of time and oxygen?

You start artificial respiration, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

As we head toward the trial of four suspects for downing MH17 and murdering all 298 people on board, set to start in March next year, there is increasingly less room for the Kremlin’s disinformation campaign to mislead audiences about Russia’s responsibility for the tragedy.

Yet we can see that pro-Kremlin actors are persistently trying to use every opportunity to keep disinformation high on the agenda, promoting its lies with the help of social media channels.

The latest round of disinformation, after the Dutch-led international investigation team announced that the suspects will be prosecuted, has focused on recycling old claims how “all the evidence points to Russia’s non-involvement”, about the “information dumps designed” to accuse Russia, and that the missile could have been fired only from an area controlled by Ukraine. All these disinformation messages were already debunked four years ago – see the respective links.

Disinformation agenda on social media

Artificially boosted or not, pro-Kremlin sources seem to be successful in their disinformation promotion task. Let’s take a step back and see how they have performed during the past year.

Data from Buzzsumo shows that, altogether, 12,759 articles on MH17 were publicly posted on social media between June 2018 and June 2019, gathering 1.6 million engagements on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.

Of the top 30 most engaging domains covering MH17 over the given period, five pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets appear on the list: RT in English, Russian and German, news agency RIA Novosti, and Sputnik in English.

Russia Today (RT.com) is the fifth most engaging outlet on social media (to compare: BBC is the second, The Daily Beast is the first).

Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor-in-chief, announced on Twitter that the Spanish RT website received 11 120 000 unique visitors in May, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

But what are the 11 120 000 people reading on actualidad.rt.com? Well, the EUvsDisinfo database has some rather intriguing answers. For example, RT Spanish claimed that the Mueller report is just further proof of how Russia is always falsely accused. RT has also tried to discredit the OPCW and paint the White Helmets as terrorists. And then there is the disinformation narrative about the US sending a hospital ship to the Caribbean as preparation for military intervention in Venezuela.

But what about the numbers? Well, everyone can go and have a look themselves, only to see the figure of total, but not unique visitors. Nevertheless, the number of total visitors can also be used to compare RT to other sites and, according to Similarweb, actualidad.rt.com received a total of 36 million visitors in May. Just for context, the Spanish-language daily newspaper El País has been doing a bit better, with 151 million total visits in May.

What’s also noteworthy is the time readers spend on Spanish RT. According to Similarweb, people spend an average of 2 minutes and 40 seconds on the site. By contrast, the average for the homepage of El País is 7 minutes and 3 seconds.

So what’s the takeaway? As history has shown us, sometimes numbers can be wrong and even with specific tools, it’s still difficult to know the exact number of people visiting a website. As the internet knows no boundaries, many RT Spanish’s visitors come from Latin America. Yes, some Spanish and Mexican outlets have more visitors than RT, but in the end, those are just numbers. So what’s left? The narratives of course. They are out there, for everyone to read and evaluate. And sadly, there is plenty of disinformation narratives in Spanish coming not only from RT but Sputnik as well.

Russian disinformation outlet News Front is a regular provider of content for our database on disinformation, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

From them we have got the case of Finnish politicians suggesting Ukrainian traces in the Skripal poisoning, and that the US is staging a colour revolution in France to get rid of Macron, or that Britain is becoming Islamic, and dozens more. it’s a reliable source – for disinformation. If you want lies – go to News Front. News Front is registered by a resident of the illegally annexed Crimea, Konstantin Knyryk. Knyryk owns half of the stocks of the company; the other half belongs to a Mikhail Sinelin. Mr. Sinelin is a member of the board of directors of the Export Insurance Agency of Russia and has previously held management positions in state companies and official structures, close to the Kremlin. The Digital Forensic Research Lab describes News Front as an important amplifier of Kremlin agendas.

The site has strong ambitions and publishes articles in several languages, tailoring the content for the target audience. But it is not always an easy task to supply a hungry audience with new, fresh stories, so, luckily, one can simply publish stuff from other sites. This is particularly visible in the case of the English version of News Front. Most of the content is brought in from other pro-Kremlin sites, producing articles in English: South Front, Strategic Culture Foundation, New Eastern Outlook… We also find a text, attacking George Soros.

A face slapping bout has broken out between Jewish financial speculator, George Soros, and Italy’s anti-immigrant League party, which on Friday formed a populist movement in coalition with the 5-Star party.

George Soros is the bogeyman of the pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets and a popular “bad guy” in their usual conspiracy theories, so attacking Soros isn’t very new and unexpected. What might raise an eyebrow is that the News Front article is copied from a site, devoted to glorifying Nazism, with the site owner’s books and articles bearing titles like “Odyssey Adolf Hitler: The Remarkable Life of Europe’s Redeemer“, “The Programme of the N.S.D.A.P.: Blueprint for National Survival” and “The Holy Book of Adolf Hitler: Like Jesus Christ the name of Adolf Hitler Refuses to Die“.. 

Strange company for a Russian site, almost constantly referring to Ukraine and EU as “Nazi”.

OK, maybe it was a mistake? After all, it is easy to share articles you like without really looking into the context. But we find several “mistakes” like this. On Goebbels, with an eight year old article from the Holocaust denying “Institute for Historical Review“. And this one, an article questioning the Holocaust, from the same source as above. Or what about this one, on how Jews were pioneering “sexual degeneracy” in pre-Nazi Germany.

News Front finds it appropriate to underscore the German Nazi party’s contribution to fighting “moral sickness”, describing how the Berlin Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, founded by Magnus Hirschfeldt, was offering “a multitude of degenerate services“:

Hirschfeld’s institute was a monument to moral sickness and represented everything the NSDAP stood against. In May 1933, the Deutsche Studentenschaft (German Students Union) stormed this den of debauchery shouting Brenne Hirschfeld (Burn Hirschfeld) and began beating the staff and smashing the premises. The Institute was permanently closed and its extensive lists of names and addresses were seized.

A few days later the entire library was famously burned in the streets, some 20,000 books and images, along with Marxist literature and other subversive material. Ever since, without background or explanation, corporate media and palace publishers have protested against the German students emptying their swamp.

Yes, Corporate Media have really given Book burning a bad rep.

Since March 31 2019, News Front has published over 20 articles with the tag “Jews“; and much of this – from openly Nazi sites. One can notice that none of the articles, tagged “Jews” are tagged with anything like “Nazism” or “Fascism”. These terms are reserved for current Ukrainian or European affairs.

If we continue to search through the content of News Front, we find open praise to Adolf Hitler, the statesman:

Hitler was a man of the people. He acted for the German people. The Versailles Treaty had dismembered Germany. Parts of Germany were confiscated and given to France, Belgium, Denmark, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. As Germany had not actually lost the war, being the occupiers of foreign territory when Germany agreed to a deceptive armistice, the loss of approximately 7 million German people to Poland and Czechoslovakia, where Germans were abused, was not considered a fair outcome.

Hitler’s program was to put Germany back together again. He succeeded without war until it came to Poland. Hitler’s demands were fair and realistic, but Churchill, financed by the Focus Group with Jewish money, put such pressure on British prime minister Chamberlain that Chamberlain intervened in the Polish-German negotiations and issued a British guarantee to the Polish military dictatorship should Poland refuse to release German territory and populations.

It is interesting to notice how all this demonstrates how the terms “Fascism” and “Nazism” in the current pro-Kremlin political terminology have assumed the meaning “being mean to Russia”. As long as the Nazis were attacking groups, (Jews, LGBTQ) or countries, undesirable by the Kremlin, they were not that bad. And when Moscow  is looking for allies, a little glorifying Hitler is fine, as long as they are supporting Pro-Kremlin narratives.

Pro-Kremlin disinformation seemingly has no limits. In Russia’s war on truth, no topic is too taboo, no claim too outrageous. But even so, amid the endless web of lies and misrepresentations, the disinformation campaign surrounding Russia’s downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 – a crime that took 289 innocent lives – stands out for its viciousness, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Since 2015, EUvsDisinfo has collected over 120 pro-Kremlin disinformation cases on MH17. The disinformation ranges from blatant insults to the memory of the deceased – claiming that the dead bodies didn’t look “fresh” and had been loaded onto the plane prior to its departure from Amsterdam – to outlandish conspiracies, like that MH17 was in fact Flight MH370, which had mysteriously disappeared over the South Pacific a few months earlier.

Above all, the relentless stream of pro-Kremlin disinformation sought to blame Ukraine and cover up the truth of Russia’s responsibility for the tragedy. And when this did not work in face of hard evidence meticulously collected by international investigators and independent journalists, Russia’s disinformation machine turned to trusty narratives invoking Russophobia (see: Russia is demonised by being blamed for the downing of MH17), moral superiority (see: Russia could not have shot down the flight MH17 because of the moral imperatives of its authorities), truth relativization  (see: It is unlikely that the truth about the downing of MH17 will soon be found), and counter-accusations (see: the investigators were silent following new Russian claims on MH17).

This week is significant for everyone who wants truth and justice to prevail in the MH17 case. On Wednesday, the Joint Investigation Team announced that it will issue international arrest warrants for three Russian military and intelligence officers – Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy, Oleg Pulatov – and Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko, commander of the military combat unit in Donetsk. They will be prosecuted for their involvement in the murder of the 289 passengers aboard MH17, which was brought down by a Russian Buk missile. The trial will begin next March. In the meantime, the disinformation campaign surrounding MH17 is unlikely to abate, and we will be there to expose it. Pro-Kremlin outlets are already claiming that the investigation’s evidence is based on a lie, that the suspects’ names were randomly taken from social media, and that the missile type was only used in Ukraine.