After every terror attack, the reaction is sadly the same. Pro-Kremlin outlets all over Europe start spreading conspiracy theories accusing various European governments, or the EU, or the US of false flag operations, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu. In the upside-down world of disinformation-oriented pseudo-media, it is always someone in the West who is responsible for every tragedy of this kind – except when they claim, perversely, that the tragedy never happened and was in fact only staged by evil western governments trying to manipulate their populations.

The most recent case of this was the terror attack in Sweden. In the days after, manipulated images, false statements and conspiracy theories were spread, claiming that the attack in Stockholm was a false flag operation to hide that the US had attacked a Syrian airbase, or that it was organised by the Swedish Social democrats to ensure that the current Prime Minister would be re-elected as the leader of the party, among other things.

In the course of our Disinformation Review project, we have seen this kind of “reporting” many times. The tactics never change – the aim is to spread conflicting versions of events, sow doubt and mistrust, and create an environment where the average news consumer ends up saying: “There are too many versions of what could have happened, I will never know the truth.”

See below an overview of how various pro-Kremlin outlets (be they websites and blogs in various languages, or even major TV debates on Russian state channels) have covered the terror attacks that have happened in the last 15 months. Not a single item on this list was proven to be true. They are all deliberately spread false information.

– 12.11.2015: Western secret services, and probably Qatar, ordered the terrorist attack on the Russian Airbus. They will wait some time and repeat it. http://bit.ly/1NWwlSH
– 13.11.2015: Terrorists who caused the Russian A321 jet to crash may have received advanced anti-aircraft weapons from the CIA. http://bit.ly/21c1WVP
– 14.11.2015: the US is sponsoring ISIS and it funded terrorist attacks on Paris “to teach Europe a lesson in obedience”. http://bit.ly/1WVMPjE
– 16.11.2015: Mainstream media are lying, the Paris attacks were planned by the French government in order to strengthen its position against Marine Le Pen’s National Front. http://bit.ly/1I3uEBF
– 19.11.2015: Video shows how Paris shooter spared lives of two women – in fact his gun jammed, but the story is used to claim the attacks were staged. http://bit.ly/1T6upa3
– 02.12.2015: Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo were staged. All NATO countries lie that they fight terrorism, they sponsor and manage terrorists. http://bit.ly/1QStkDt
– 17.01.2016: The US support Islamic terrorists all over the world. http://bit.ly/1lFRPY7 (time 02:30)
– 21.01.2016: Turkey created ISIS. Last week’s terrorist attacks in Istanbul were organised in order to mask this fact and show the outside world that Turkey is a victim of ISIS, not its director. http://bit.ly/1Pfah64
– 24.01.2016: The Americans have legalised terrorism and have made it a method of world events. http://bit.ly/1QKyRwJ (time 03:57)
– 06.02.2016: In 2016, there will be terror attacks in Crimea. The leader of the Crimean Tatars Dzhemilev and Turkish President Erdogan will receive so many guns they will turn Crimea into a new Chechnya. Dzhemilev already received 3,000 ISIS fighters. Soon, these fighters will enter Crimea, organised by American “hawks” and the European Parliament. http://bit.ly/1SCzv1c
– 10.02.2016: the White House uses terrorism as a major mechanism of its foreign policy. http://bit.ly/1PHrotO
– 09.03.2016: US authorities are preparing to commit acts of terrorism against their own population to ensure the country’s geopolitical interests. http://bit.ly/1QQnov5
– 22.03.2016: The EU and Chancellor Angela Merkel are responsible for the Brussels terror attacks as the perpetrators were Muslim immigrants. http://bit.ly/1ZIvTLd
– 22.03.2016: Angela Merkel is responsible for the terrorist attacks in Brussels, because she carried out talks with Erdogan, who is the creator of Daesh. http://bit.ly/1RSGJev (time 01:13:16)
– 22.03.2016: Democracy always leads to terror. It gave birth to Hitler as well as to Muslim extremism. http://bit.ly/1RSGJev (time 01:17:56)
– 23.03.2016: The Brussels bombings were false flag operations intended to create a European police state. There is no proof that Daesh conducted the attacks. http://bit.ly/1PDgDrq
– 26.03.2016: Angela Merkel has a selfie with the suicide bomber from Brussels. http://bit.ly/1RHMSXB or http://bit.ly/1PQhuVy
– 27.03.2016: Europe is responsible for the terrorist attacks in Brussels, because EU countries are behaving arrogantly (toward Russia) and refuse to cooperate in the fight against terror. http://bit.ly/1TsUkvn (time 16:54)
– 28.03.2016: The terrorist attacks in Brussels were just theatre, they could have been planned by Turkey in cooperation with Daesh and agents amongst the Brussels elites. http://bit.ly/1ZYsJ60
– 28.03.2016: European law enforcement agencies would not have been able to identify the perpetrators of terrorist attacks if they themselves had not been involved. http://bit.ly/1WehGWt
– 29.03.2016: Most of the terrorist attacks and other incidents are staged. There was an exercise carried out in the London Underground at the end of February. Such exercises are carried out so that the elites can prepare for staging more attacks. http://bit.ly/1qpw6qt
– 30.03.2016: The attacks in Brussels were part of NATO’s so-called “Gladio plan”, which is aimed at legitimizing NATO in the eyes of US and European politicians. http://bit.ly/1UMFgdI
– 30.03.2016: The pictures of basketball player Sebastien Bellin who was allegedly injured during the Brussels attacks prove that the attacks were staged. http://bit.ly/1Tv6WlA
– 05.04.2016: The CIA is preparing terrorist attacks in the Czech Republic between 4 and 11 April 2016. http://bit.ly/1S0kt02
– 01.07.2016: All Muslims are terrorists and benefit scroungers. Paying welfare benefits for not working and paying benefits on their numerous wives has caused terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. http://bit.ly/29sobCC (time 12:02)
– 03.07.2016: ISIS terrorist Ahmed Chataev (ISIS warlord behind Istanbul attacks) is linked to Ukrainian nationalists. http://bit.ly/29dK5Io
– 15.07.2016: The terror attack in Nice is a direct consequence of France not accepting the conditions of TTIP. http://bit.ly/29Psmu3
– 11.09.2016: Bin Laden never claimed responsibility for the 9/11 terror act and it is the US that has benefited from the 9/11 attacks. http://bit.ly/2cmst0s (time 31:36, 32:50)
– 12.09.2016: The 9/11 terrorist attack in the US was organised by the security services of the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel. http://bit.ly/2cTbdPK (time 02:20)
– 09.01.2017: The latest series of terrorist attacks in Turkey (31. 12. – Istanbul, 5. 1. – Izmir) were orchestrated by agents of Western secret services. http://bit.ly/2jElXmu
– 06.03.2017: Ukraine is preparing Shahids (= term for Muslims who have died when fulfilling a religious commandment, especially jihad) for terror attacks in Russia. Ukrainian volunteer battalions are the same as moderate Syrian opposition and suicide attack terrorists from all Middle East. The Ukrainian terrorists plan to blow themselves up in the centre of Moscow. http://bit.ly/2miCaPO
– 29.03.2017: The London terrorist attack of 22 March might have been coordinated by the Brussels elites to deter Theresa May from triggering Brexit. http://bit.ly/2oJS3zI

When you switch on the TV in your home or hotel room, you might watch a channel that promises to provide alternative news. This channel will tell you that in the West, microchips are implanted under the skin of office workers to make them more submissive and passive. You will be surprised by alternative polls which reveal that a substantial number of Europeans consider Crimea a part of Russia, and that Sweden wants to leave the EU, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

This is perhaps the only TV channel which will tell you that the French President apparently regrets the sanctions imposed on Russia and that Germany’s Foreign Minister has apparently praised Russia for its “constructive role in resolving the crises in Ukraine and Syria“. Only here you will hear that the Swedish authorities have told the country’s municipalities to prepare for war and that the EU is committing a form of genocide against Russian citizens living in Crimea. You will always encounter an alternative narrative about Ukraine, for example that that Turkish instructors operate training camps for foreign mercenaries in the country.

According to this channel, the official Dutch report concerning the downing of flight MH17 was based on false facts and rigged by Ukraine to blame Russia. You will be told, too, that Russian ground forces have not operated in Syria and that Russia’s primary mission there is to fight Daesh, not to support Assad. According to this channel, the EU and its Member States never did anything to help civilians in Aleppo; indeed, all other media, which the channel consistently labels “main stream”, have been lying to you about Syria.

The Russian President’s spokesperson has access to an open microphone on this channel when he feels the need to dismiss criticism of Russia’s policy and actions in Syria as “Russophobia”. The channel also makes itself available when Russian authorities wish to spread biased reporting and disinformation about the Presidential election campaign in France, as described here and here. And you will quickly realise that it is not only the news that is alternative, but many of the commentators invited in the role of experts, who, it turns out, are marginal, or seldom have the qualifications you would expect from an expert.

The stories outlined above have all been reported over the past year and a half in different issues of the Disinformation Review. The media outlet in question is Russia Today, or RT as it now calls itself. RT is generously funded by the Russian state (around 300 million USD annually) and its ambitions are high: It wants to “question more”, as one of its slogans says, and become a global leader among those who feel in opposition to “the main stream”.

As the Russian authorities’ most expensive international prestige project, it uses sensationalist clickbait in a way which is not very different from its sister organisation, Sputnik. Obviously, the reason why RT and Sputnik prioritise tabloid style journalism is to be able to report successful viewership numbers. On Youtube for example, RT also boosts its outreach to very high numbers by systematically buying up rights to potentially viral footage of babies and pets, humoristic incidents from real life and catastrophic accidents, as Alexey Kovalev demonstrates in his analysis published by Bellingcat. The Daily Beast has in its reporting shown in detail how RT misrepresents its ratings. RT’s overall success remains modest, but it does enjoy some popularity among audiences which, as a study has shown, besides the clickbait headlines appreciates RT for being “honest about lying“.

But it is not just the spread of pro-Kremlin disinformation and artificial boosting of its own success that characterises RT. On a number of occasions, its fundamental journalistic standards have been subject to serious criticism by the communications regulator in the UK, Ofcom. With regards to a broadcast in March 2014 titled “The Truthseeker: Media ‘Staged’ Syria Chem Attack“, Ofcom criticised RT for its “materially misleading” factual content and “unfair treatment of individuals and organisations” (Bulletin 288).

Similarly, as a result of a July 2014 broadcast titled “The Truthseeker: Genocide of Eastern Ukraine“, which focused on the conflict in eastern Ukraine, including allegations that the Ukrainian Government and its supporters had a policy of genocide against the Russian-speaking population there, Ofcom found that RT had been in breach of the rule that “due impartiality must be preserved on matters of political or industrial controversy and matters relating to current public policy”. (Bulletin 288). These are just a two of more than a dozen cases when Ofcom has warned RT over its failure to comply with fundamental, internationally acknowledged rules of professional journalism.

In order to look credible against such a problematic background, RT is in dire need of one particular kind of labour force, namely talking heads which are not Russian, but who can appear on the screen relaying the pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative. RT prefers to use international journalists, and only rarely their Russian colleagues, as hosts and reporters.

Their role is to speak in English, French and other foreign languages without an accent, and they are attracted to work for a good package as well as for a media organisation known for its hi-tech production standards. On two occasions, however, international news presenters working for RT have quit their jobs during live broadcasts. Watch this video to see Liz Wahl, an American news host, telling her audience live on air why she could not legitimise Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. And this video, showing another RT anchor, Abby Martin, suddenly criticizing Russia for its occupation of Crimea.

People with no previous experience of Russian state media, who perhaps tune in to RT in hotel rooms and via cable packages, can always use their remote control to escape. It takes more courage to do so from within.

In the intervening period, strategic shocks in the Middle East and North Africa appeared to confirm Russian perceptions of a consistent Western campaign to remove regimes of which the United States disapproved – and of the use of information as the primary tool to do so, like reported by ndc.nato.int.

In early 2011, AVN President Army Gen Makhmut Gareyev pointed to “subversive information technologies of the West” being the root cause of the disorder that came to be known as the Arab Spring: “Internet networks were implanted in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya over a two-year period. It started with systematic training for communication checks, without direct calls for unlawful actions. At the right moment, a centralized order was issued across all networks for people to take to the streets.”

Comments by then-president Dmitriy Medvedev in 2011 are regularly quoted, but nonetheless indicative of Russian apprehension at the West’s eventual objectives: “Look at the situation that has unfolded in the Middle East and the Arab world. It is extremely bad. There are major difficulties ahead… We need to look the truth in the eyes. This is the kind of scenario that they were preparing for us, and now they will be trying even harder to bring it about.”

Intervention by Western powers in the resulting civil war in Libya precisely matched the pattern for “modern warfare” described by then Chief of General Staff Nikolay Makarov in published articles, including one the previous year: “use of political, economic and information pressure and subversive actions, followed by the unleashing of armed conflicts or local wars, actions that result in relatively little bloodshed” in order to achieve the aggressor’s intent.

And the disastrous longerterm consequences of destabilisation following Western interventions in Libya and elsewhere bear out Russian arguments that Western powers consistently failed to appreciate the second- and third-order effects of their actions.

Events in the Middle East and North Africa also confirmed Russian perceptions of social media as a dangerous and destabilising tool of Russia’s enemies. There had already been publicly released studies of the use of social media for political influence purposes; but even during the Arab Spring, assessments of their utility for facilitating regime change appeared to receive attention only from a narrow circle of specialists in the West.

Russian attention, however, must have been drawn to public statements by NATO regarding use of social media posts from within Libya to contribute to actionable intelligence, including targeting information.

And once again, the fact that the majority of social media platforms were foreign-owned contributed to their classification as an instrument for exploitation by Western governments: “The security and intelligence services [spetssluzhby] of the Arab states were not able to prevent the distribution of [social media] messages because they did not have access to the controlling servers of the social networks, which are located on the territory of the United States security and intelligence services.”

Social media in fact present multiple challenges to Russia, even beyond threats to the homeland itself. The experience of Russian servicemen posting to social media from eastern Ukraine – where they are officially not supposed to be – provides a clear demonstration that in the absence of strictly enforced operational security disciplines, incautious social media usage makes available valuable operational intelligence for harvesting by an adversary.

Taken together, the obvious problems presented by unrestrained and unregulated use of social media exacerbate Russian perceptions of the internet as a whole as both a tool for exercising influence abroad, and a direct vulnerability for Russia itself. Finally, virtually unrestricted freedom of expression on social media must in itself compound the impression that greater control is long overdue. In 2012, President Putin described the experience of listening to an independently-minded Russian radio station as “having diarrhoea poured over him day and night.”

Putin and those who think like him are now presented with social media disseminating widely online criticism of Russia, including prolific and highly-skilled satire exercised via Twitter. It can reasonably be assumed that their reaction to this is even more emphatic.

In the summer of 1990, at a fulcrum moment when his country was tipping from reform to dissolution, Mikhail S. Gorbachev spoke to Time magazine and declared, “I detest lies.” It was a revolutionary statement only because it came from the mouth of a Soviet leader, like reported by nytimes.com.

On the surface, he was simply embracing his own policy of glasnost, the new openness introduced alongside perestroika, the restructuring of the Soviet Union’s command economy that was meant to rescue the country from geopolitical free-fall. Mr. Gorbachev was wagering that truthful and unfettered expression — a press able to criticize and investigate, history books without redacted names, and honest, accountable government — just might save the creaking edifice of Communist rule.

For the Soviet leader, glasnost was “a blowtorch that could strip the layers of old and peeling paint from Soviet society,” wrote the Baltimore Sun’s Moscow correspondent (and now Times reporter) Scott Shane in “Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union.” “But the Communist system proved dry tinder.”

We in the West have always praised Mr. Gorbachev for his courage in taking this gamble — even though he lost an empire in the process — but he did it under pressure. The idea that a better relationship with facts might be liberating for a corrupt and ailing Soviet Union was not new. Mr. Gorbachev was echoing and appropriating the arguments of a dissident movement that, for decades, had made an insistence on truth its essential form of resistance.

If the Soviet Union was the 20th century’s greatest example of a regime that used propaganda and information to control and contain its citizens — 70 years of fake news! — the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution is an important moment to appreciate how it also produced a powerful countercurrent in the civil society undergrounds of Moscow and Leningrad.

True internal pushback against the Soviet regime began to emerge only in the 1960s, at the moment when the political temperature inside Russia was moving from post-Stalinist thaw back to chilly. The suppressions began with the trial of the satirical writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky in early 1966. As protests and further trials followed, the dissidents were faced with an interesting dilemma: how to fight back most effectively in light of the information that was coming their way. Almost daily, they would hear the details of interrogations, stories passed around about life in the labor camps, and the drumbeat of searches and arrests.

The dissidents could have presented their own form of propaganda, hyping the persecution and turning that rich Soviet lexicon of “hooligans” and “antisocial elements” into bitter screeds against the state itself. But they didn’t. They chose instead to communicate it all as dispassionately and clinically as possible. They reached for what we might call objectivity.

Generations of Soviet citizens had trained themselves to think of factuality as a highly relative concept. The newspapers were read as a narrative meant to glorify the state and not as a reflection of reality. And people likewise felt split into authentic private selves that often had nothing to do with their public faces and utterances.

Given how much of Soviet society was built on this decadeslong duplicity, it is remarkable and reassuring that speaking truly and plainly still held such power for the dissidents by the 1960s. But it did. To hear Lyudmila Alexeyeva, one of the early organizers of a key underground journal engaged in this fact-gathering, A Chronicle of Current Events, describe it, the attraction was almost religious:

“For each of us who worked for the Chronicle, it meant to pledge oneself to be faithful to the truth, it meant to cleanse oneself of the filth of double-think, which has pervaded every phase of Soviet life,” she wrote. “The effect of the Chronicle is irreversible. Each one of us went through this alone, but each of us knows others who went through this moral rebirth.”

In its meticulous commitment to holding the Soviet Union accountable to its own laws and international treaties, A Chronicle of Current Events represented also a rebirth of civil society. It was a small community, and one that existed entirely on the onion-skin-thin pages of samizdat, the illegal, self-published writing of the dissidents, but this was where they could act as citizens, witnessing and reporting on violations of human and civil rights.

The Chronicle worked in a straightforward way. Issues were produced in Moscow and then passed from hand-to-hand. If someone had some piece of information to circulate, she could write it down on a slip of paper and pass it on to the person from whom she received her copy of the journal, who in turn would then keep it going along the chain. At the source were editors like Natalya Gorbanevskaya, the journal’s first “compiler,” as they preferred to call themselves. Eventually arrested by the state security agency, the K.G.B., in 1969, she was locked up in a psychiatric institution until 1972.

Over some 65 issues, from 1968 to 1983, the Chronicle became a catalog of abuses, noted in the most sparse, neutral tone possible. It was a painstaking effort to publish information that could never be obtained through the official Soviet media. Here, a citizen could read the details of closed political trials and the stories of what the Chronicle called “extrajudicial persecution,” understand what a K.G.B. search entailed, read secret documents meant only for those in power, learn about the constant religious and cultural persecution and get updates on political prisoners in the East.

This was self-consciously an attempt to create a valid and verifiable news source. The Chronicle demanded that its contributors be “careful and accurate” with any information they passed along and even ran regular corrections to previous items (pioneering a practice some Western media organizations only adopted years later). As the scholar of Soviet dissidence Peter Reddaway, writing in 1972, put it, “the Chronicle’s aim is openness, non-secretiveness, freedom of information and expression. All these notions are subsumed in the one Russian word, glasnost.”

This was in direct opposition to the diktat the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin had issued for newspapers, back in pre-revolutionary Russia in 1901. The press was to be “not only a collective propagandist and collective agitator, but also a collective organizer” — a tool, in other words, for shoring up the power of the state. For the compiler Alexeyeva, the Chronicle represented something very different and without precedent in the Soviet Union: “A source of honest information about the hidden layers of our society.”

The K.G.B. did not take kindly to this business, and Gorbanevskaya was only the first of many editors to be arrested and imprisoned. By the 1970s, though, this fact-based evidence-gathering had become the central modus operandi of the dissidents, especially among its most prominent figures like Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. These were men and women who, in some cases, were professionally inclined toward facts — many of them were scientists, a vocation they adopted, even before they embraced dissidence, out of a conscious effort to move away from any field that could be distorted by Communist ideology.

In 1975, the Soviet Union, thinking it was outsmarting the West, signed on to the Helsinki Final Act. The pact offered international recognition of its territorial gains following World War II, but it also demanded adherence to international human rights norms. Moscow dissidents saw this as an opportunity: They could use this commitment against the apparatchiks, by claiming the right to publish every violation.

The Moscow Helsinki Watch Group, as the monitoring organization became known, followed the style of the Chronicle, producing a range of reports, all scrupulously researched and running sometimes to hundreds of pages. Among the first were investigations of the persecution of Crimean Tatars and the poor caloric intake of prisoners. The reports were delivered to Western embassies, as well as circulated in samizdat form. Soon, copycat watchdog groups popped up in other Eastern bloc countries, and even in the United States. The one based in New York, Helsinki Watch, became the organization we know today as Human Rights Watch.

Did this underground quest for truth based on scrupulous, objective reporting hasten the downfall of the Soviet Union?

That is hard to say, since so many other factors, economic ones especially, also contributed to the collapse of Russian communism in the late 1980s. But it did impact the way the Soviet Union ended. Unlike China, which also faced a major challenge to its authority in 1989, the Soviet Union could not hope to reform itself through perestroika alone. As Mr. Gorbachev’s adoption of the word “glasnost” conceded, there had to be change in civil society as well.

The dissidents had created an expectation that a different kind of language was possible, one that expressed a reality not filtered through Soviet imperatives. They craved honesty and transparency in a country where even the suicide rate was considered a state secret. Samizdat provided the outlet.

And facts, relentlessly stacked one on top of another, became the dissidents’ way of building the different Russia they hoped might one day emerge and overcome all the lying.

“How does the Rothschild family struggle to control the world?” Russian state-controlled Channel 1 (Pervy Kanal) sees no problem in asking this kind of question and illustrating it with the above image, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu . Look at the piglets in the image below to see the reach of the Rothschild conspiracy, according to Russian public television.

Pervy Kanal’s analytical programme tells us that the Rothschilds “have always looked at Russia as a place where they make a lot of money very quckly”. We learn that “there are rumours of ties to Mikhail Khodorkovsky”, and that French Presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron “is the family’s man”. Also media such as Liberation, The Economist, Daily Telegraph and the BBC are supposedly controlled by the Rothschilds. “Media under their control write only about the Rothschilds as hard-working people and philantropists”.

The Sunday issue of the popular show “Vremya”, which broadcast the story about the Rothschild conspiracy, is Russia’s most watched analytical news programme. The show is hosted by Valery Fadeev, who, according to Kommersant’s sources, is the most likely candidate for the important post of Secretary of the Russian Civic Chamber. Should he choose to go down the political path, Mr. Fadeev would follow in the footsteps of one of his predecessors as “Vremya” anchor, Pyotr Tolstoy, who, as we told last September in a story titled “Propagandists for Parliament”, now draws on his pro-Kremlin media experience as deputy speaker of the State Duma.

Disinformation in the form of conspiracy theories can generate a lot of clicks – a temptation Pervy Kanal couldn’t help falling for, especially when such theories support an overarching narrative of global conspiracies against Russian interests. Pervy Kanal’s new production was brought to our attention thanks to Julian Röpcke’s tweet, and is a part of a series that also uses the story about the Rockefeller family as a frame for presenting international politics.

RT – also known as Russia Today – is an international TV channel and online outlet, which is fully funded by the Russian government. It’s available via cable and satellite connections around the globe, with streaming on the web (https://www.rt.com/) and on Youtube in English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Russian, in addition to multiple subsidiary projects such as Ruptly and In the Now. RT is, for many people outside Russia, the only direct experience with a Russian media outlet they have ever had, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The story about RT is that of a government outlet struggling to prove it is not a government mouthpiece. Thanks to generous funding from the Russian state, (around 300 million USD annually) RT presents a dynamic output with state-of-the art production standards. This makes it look very much like a high quality media outlet, and that in turn makes some audiences assume that RT has the kind of independence we by default expect trustworthy media to have.

But there’s a problem: We will never see Russia Today criticising the Russian authorities. Subject as it is to the centralised temniki system, RT closely observes the editorial guidelines that originate in the Kremlin. RT will go very far in validating the Kremlin’s line, often inviting marginal and unqualified commentators to help it do so. Among its recent projects, a fact checking service named FakeCheck stands out as an act of classical “whataboutism”, averting accusations of disinforming by making the claim that it is the other media that produce disinformation, and not RT.

Initiatives like this won’t make the basic problem go away: in terms of editorial lines, RT is a de facto office of the Russian government. To obscure that problem, Russia Today began to call itself RT in 2009, four years after it first started broadcasting. The message was clear: it wanted to move to cover global as well as Russian affairs and obtain a global profile beyond just representing “the Russian perspective”. And yet the decision was paradoxical: The name change did not correlate with any change in RT’s observance of the Russian government’s political lines.

RT’s strategic ambition is to insist on becoming one side in a bipolar system with the main stream on one side, and RT as a flagship of alternative news media on the other side. RT strives to elevate “the Russian perspective” to becoming more than just another point of view, but a point around which global voices can rally if they feel in opposition to “the main stream”.

As therapists know, it is the issues the client fails to mention, and especially those issues the client insists on not talking about at all, that ought to be addressed most. The wish not to have its origin in Russia mentioned in the brand becomes the way in which RT indirectly admits that the relation to the Russian government is its problem: While RT struggles to position itself as a channel that will “question more”, as one of RT’s slogans says, questioning the Russian authorities, their policies and their actions, is a right RT simply does not have.

If you are Russian, but don’t agree with the authorities, you might find it problematic that your country and the nation you are a part of becomes associated with a one-sided government mouthpiece hybrid media outlet. Readers of the Disinformation Review will note that the term used is “pro-Kremlin” and not “Russian” disinformation”, for exactly that reason. There is nothing essentially Russian about the Kremlin’s ongoing disinformation campaign, and there is no reason to identify it with the Russian nation or with being Russian. Perhaps it would make sense for RT to call itself Kremlin Today? As therapists will also know, sometimes the most straightforward way of solving your problem is to be open about who you really are.

This week, Germany was in the limelight of pro-Kremlin disinformation once again. There were several reports in Czech pro-Kremlin outlets accusing Germany of being the ruler of the Czech Republic and of hindering the country from entering the Eurozone, as well as accusations that Germany controls the Czech Armed Forces, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

In a Lithuanian outlet, a German commander in NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence battalion in Lithuania was accused of being a Russian agent, although the picture meant to prove the false claim was a fake: an image of the commander’s head was pasted onto another image with the help of Photoshop, as shown here and here.

In a Slovakian outlet, it was announced that Angela Merkel is resigning – confusingly the statement was withdrawn later in the very same article, a case of a severely misleading headline. Furthermore, Berlin was accused of aiming to rule the European continent via Brussels, with a Czech outlet making parallels between the Brexit negotiations and the Munich agreement that permitted Germany to annex some Czechoslovakian territories in 1938.

Europe is everyone’s enemy
But it was not only Germany that was targeted with disinformation: The European Union, Member States and EU institutions also got their share of accusations this week. Just as last year, when after the horrific terror attacks in Brussels, pro-Kremlin outlets blamed Angela Merkel, the West, Europe – or even claimed the attacks were staged and did not happen at all; so too, after the horrifying attack in London on the 22nd of March, did a pro-Kremlin outlet claim this was orchestrated by the “Brussels elite” in order to deter Theresa May from triggering Brexit.

Meanwhile the European Parliament building in Strasbourg was claimed to have been inspired by the Tower of Babel (although it was really inspired by Roman amphitheatres) and the EU was accused of being a “satanistic project” apparently “proven” by a poster designed by the Council of Europe. This bizarre disinformation has been around since 2008 and reminds us of last year’s disinformation that that the new NATO headquarters building was inspired by Nazi symbols.

On Russian state TV we saw yet another example of historical revisionism where it was claimed that a united Europe leads to war with Russia as during WWII and that Europe started the war in Ukraine – overlooking such historical facts as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact for example or the more recent facts on the ground; Europe did not start the war in Ukraine and is not participating in it – in contrast to Russia’s activity.

Business as usual in Ukraine
Ukraine was portrayed in the usual way in pro-Kremlin outlets: as a terrorist state which conducts genocide in Donbas and which planned to build concentration camps in eastern Ukraine. A slightly new focus was to portray President Poroshenko as a dictator who does not have legitimate power and to say that the EU agrees with this description but supports him anyway – despite the obvious fact that President Poroshenko was democratically elected by the citizens of Ukraine in 2014.

Fake names and miserable wages: what it’s like to work in the Kremlin-friendly local Russian language newspaper, like reported by rebaltica.lv.

Published in Latvia, Segodnya newspaper claims to be the only Russian-language daily in the European Union. I met one of the newspaper’s journalists Yelena Slyusareva three years ago on a trip to Sweden, sponsored by the Swedish embassy. As part of the trip the group of journalists went to interview the Swedish royal couple. Yelena’s English was poor, so interpreted for her from English to Russian.  We got on alright.

While we were in Sweden, a controversial referendum on joining Russia was held in Crimea. Much like many issues involving Russia and Russians in the Baltic state of Latvia, the news coverage of this event in the Latvian-language press was vastly different from their local Russian-language counterparts. Latvians worried about the Russian aggression and did not hide their concerns that the Baltics may be the next in line Putin’s Russia may wish to “liberate”. For Segodnya, the annexation of Crimea was a happy reunification.

Yelena defended her newspaper: her colleagues really believed in what they wrote, she’d say. There was a plurality of opinions because her boss allowed her to pen an op-ed condemning Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Yelena also criticized Latvia’s Russian population, who refused thinking with “their own heads,” surrendered “their power to the Russian television” and “closed their eyes as though they didn’t understand what was happening.”

Her op-ed was published, but half year later, in October 2014. Yelena says the article caused an uproar among her colleagues and readers: “Why did you have to offer your opinion when no one asked for it?”

About the same time as the article went to press, Yelena was on a Russian embassy sponsored trip to Crimea. She insists the embassy did not issue any guidelines on the coverage.

From Crimea, Yelena brought back a series of articles. The first article stated that the trip had been paid for by the Russian embassy. The following articles didn’t.

Yelena said that the articles were not censored and she tried to show all sides of the complex story. One of them featured an interview with the editor of a newspaper in Yalta, who thanked Putin for the support. Another focused on the Crimean Tatars, who demanded the return of their homeland. However, she didn’t say anything when next to the article about the Tatars, an editor published an op-ed piece mocking their desire to become part of Europe, inviting them to visit Latvia to see how bad Europe really was.

A few months later, Yelena was laid off. The official reason was the staff downsizing, but “unofficially I have already been told: you need to understand that you cannot work in the Russian press with your viewpoints,” Yelena said. She asked to work at the newspaper for another month because she was preparing a residency permit for her mother and brother, who were fleeing to Riga from the war-torn eastern Ukraine.

“I was the only bread winner,” she says. She tried to argue with her editor, saying that the newspaper has been defending the residents of the eastern Ukraine, which was why it needed to help her, too. The editor responded, “It’s only business.” He allowed her to work until the end of the month.

Sergey Storchevoy, who worked as a publishing company manager at that time, questioned her side of the story to Re:Baltica. He said Yelena’s dismissal had nothing to do with her political views, but with the staff cuts and an opportunity to hire better journalists to replace her.

I contacted Yelena again as part of the investigation into owners of internet sites that cover events in the Baltics in a same vein as the Kremlin-controlled news media.

Journalists run to Moscow

“Putin’s women will break noses of the NATO soldiers,” screamed a headline on website vesti.lv, sister-publication to the newspaper Segondya, on Feb 21, 2017.

Under the click-bait headline was a recycled article by the Russian state-run news agency RIA Novosti, which quoted The Times (UK) report on possible use of local women to stage provocations against the NATO soldiers. The original headline of article in RIA Novosti is softer: “People in Estonia fear that Moscow will provoke NATO troops for a brawl.” The article was also reprinted by the Sputnik web site, which together with RIA Novosti makes up part of the state-run media conglomerate Rossiya Segondya.

It is a standard practice for vesti.lv to republish articles produced in Russia, slapping on more provocative headlines.

In another example rubaltic.ru, a Kaliningrad-based news site, writes that The Baltic States will close the door to guest workers. Vesti.lv re-publishes the same text under the headline Latvia is dying out. There’s no one left to work.

The article about Putin’s women was signed by Anatoly Tarasov. It was a busy day for him. It started at 6:50 a.m. with the news item about the EU preparing “a new russophobic plan”, moving on to story about a new music video by an American singer Lana del Rey. Then he filed a piece informing the audience how Latvia’s non-citizens — mostly Russian-speakers — can obtain citizenship of a Moscow-backed, internationally unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine. It was followed by an article about refugees fleeing Lithuania. The day concluded with a review of a Hollywood movie at 4:29 p.m. On that day, Tarasov wrote more than 20 articles.

You won’t find this prolific journalist on social networks or in local journalist organizations. Anatoly is a work of fiction. Journalists at vesti.lv can select one of several aliases, so to create an illusion of a team work, even though it is only one person who copies and pastes news articles from various news sources on the internet, according to several former vesti.lv journalists who requested anonymity to Re:Baltica.

Andrey Shvedov, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, couldn’t find the time to give us an interview. That’s why I started talking to his journalists.

At least two of them have moved permanently to Russia.

One is Vladimir Veretennikov, who often writes for the Russian news site lenta.ru.

Lenta.ru used to be a very popular and influential Russian news website. After the editor-in-chief was fired over the coverage of the conflict in Ukraine back in 2014, part of their old team quit in protest and moved from Moscow to Riga to build up their new news project called meduza.io.

Attempts to contact Veretennikov were unsuccessful. However, a contact with another recent Moscow transplant of Segodnya, Dmitry Mart, turned into a lengthy email exchange. He said he was tired of “reading every day about the integration and the state language inspection. When the fascist Germany existed, many moved away to live somewhere else. In Moscow, I live in harmony and free.” The salary of the Russian-language journalist in Latvia, which is almost never publicly discussed in Latvia, is smaller than the salaries of their Latvian-speaking colleagues. The journalists interviewed by Re:Baltica say they would get between 300 to 500 euros a month after taxes. Mart says life in Moscow doesn’t have to be that expensive. An apartment and potatoes are even cheaper than in Riga, he wrote.

Another Segodnya journalist, Andrey Tatarchuk, agreed to meet in person. The vigorous, smiling man of about 50 years old, Tatarchuk said that Segodnya publishes negative articles about Latvia because its audience demands it. A similar argument was put forward by other former journalists, however none of them was able to say who its target audience was. The common line was that it’s pensioners or disillusioned men of the pre-pension age, whose media diet includes Russia’s TV channels which have been available through cable TV providers in Baltics.

“At some point, the local Russian-language media got this impression that the Russian readers have this point of view,” said Slyusareva. “Readers, whenever I meet them, no longer necessary hold to these views. Yet the newspaper continues to peddle them and, as a result, continues to lose readership.”

In the early 1980s, the Aids virus seemed to emerge from nowhere.

There was no cure and its origins were a mystery. But one theory began to surface – that it was the product of secret US military research at the Fort Detrick Laboratory.

What was the source for this piece of fake news? The answer was the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service, like reported by bbc.news.

“The Aids disinformation campaign was one of the most notorious and one of the most successful Soviet disinformation campaigns during the Cold War,” argues Thomas Boghardt, a historian at the US Army Center of Military History who has studied the case in detail.

KGB political officers in the field were tasked with spending up to a quarter of their time on what were called “active measures”.

Mr Boghardt believes the KGB station in New York first came up with the idea, which played into distrust in US institutions and rumours of covert biological warfare programmes.

“Intelligence meant not only gathering but using – or weaponising – that intelligence for influence operations,” he explains.

Amateurish

The aim of these “active measures” was to sow confusion and distrust either within a country or between allies. He says that in 1980, the Soviets spent an astonishing $3bn (£2.4bn) a year on active measures.

It was not the only time the KGB successfully pushed a conspiracy theory.

Within weeks of the assassination of President Kennedy, it tried to circulate stories of official CIA involvement.

It even covertly financed a book on the subject published in America within a year of the killing.

Many attempts at disinformation were amateurish and failed. The main challenge was crafting something plausible. Those that succeeded either blended fact with fiction or worked with the grain of existing conspiracies.

When it came to targeting Britain, Moscow had help in the shape of former MI6 officer and KGB spy, Kim Philby.

“He would provide advice on how to do it,” General Oleg Kalugin – formerly of the KGB and Philby’s ex-colleague – told me. “He said ‘this would not work, that sounds too Soviet’.”

Typically this would involve taking genuine documents from Western countries which spies had stolen and then adding in a few fake paragraphs to twist the meaning.

“We preferred to work on genuine documents with some additions and changes, and Philby in that sense was [the] number one guy,” says Kalugin, now based in the US.

In the 1980s, the US tried to counter the tide of KGB disinformation by setting up an “Active Measures Working Group”, with experts from across government agencies.

“The only way you could counter active measures was by coming back with the truth,” explains David Major, a former FBI official who served on the group.

It would try and identify fake stories and then advise the media about their source. “We were saying which one of these stories turns out to be fake news.” Major says.

It tried to counter one claim that Americans were going to South America, ostensibly to adopt children but actually to harvest their body parts.

‘Agents of influence’

The challenge in the Cold War was getting out a story.

In the case of the Aids virus, it was planted in a small journal in India which was funded by the KGB.

The story – on 17 July 1983 – warned that Aids might invade India and was the product of US experiments, with an anonymous US scientist linking it to Fort Detrick.

Initially, there was not much pick-up. But two years later, Soviet news outlets ran the story, citing the Indian reports. That meant they could claim they were not the source.

The story then spread rapidly over the next few years and can still be found in the wilder edges of the internet.

The KGB placed great emphasis on not just recruiting people who had access to secrets but people who could influence opinion, so called “agents of influence”.

“The Soviet and Soviet Bloc intelligence agencies were very good at cultivating contacts with journalists for instance, or intellectuals, who sometimes knowingly and sometimes unknowingly would be used as launching platforms for fake or leaked stories,” explains Prof Thomas Rid of King’s College, London.

Sometimes documents would also be mailed anonymously to journalists.

But did active measures stop at the end of the Cold War?

“The Soviet Union may have dissolved in 1990-91 but Soviet intelligence stayed virtually intact both in terms of its organisation and the goals it pursued – and that includes active measures,” says Mr Boghardt.

‘Industrial scale hacking and dumping’

There were also new opportunities thanks to technology.

“In the 1990s when the Internet slowly emerged, it was really a no-brainer to start to use a platform that made it a lot easier to leak anonymously, to give information anonymously to the public,” argues Prof Rid.

The KGB did allegedly try and influence American elections in the past – for instance by pushing the “Reagan means War” line in the 1984 US election – and the US intelligence community believes that it did so again in 2016 through a wide-ranging influence operation.

This included hacking into organisations like the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign officials’ emails and feeding information to websites.

“What we’ve seen during the Cold War, somewhat counter-intuitively, is artisanal active measures – very labour intensive at the front end, down to using white gloves when you sign the letter in order to avoid fingerprints, the letter that you then mail anonymously,” says Prof Rid.

“It really required good tradecraft. But what we see in 2016 is the opposite: lazy industrial scale hacking and dumping.”

The leaking of real information is different from the creation of fake news stories, but they too are alleged to have appeared in 2016 although it is harder to trace their origins in the online world.

In the current environment, the term fake news has taken on many meanings. Russian intelligence’s active measures may well be part of a chaotic mix.

But in a world in which accusations of fake news and conspiracy are bandied around freely, even exposing such measures can be swept up in a whirlwind of claim and counter-claim.

The result is confusion. And more divisions which any future active measures can then exploit.

Many Russians will know what a temnik is. But only a few can claim to have seen one, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

In journalistic jargon, the temnik – a word derived from the word “theme” – means an instruction from the authorities, which is disseminated among the media. A temnik tells which themes to cover, who is to be treated positively, who should have negative coverage and who should be altogether ignored. The temnik system has replaced the old style reactive approach of censorship with a proactive approach of guidelines. A Russian editor will know from the temnik where the no-go zones are, i.e. how to avoid getting into trouble with the Russian authorities (see our timeline of government crackdowns on Russian media that have overstepped the Kremlin’s red lines).

But temnik also contains the Russian word for darkness, temnota. As opposed to Ukraine in the early 2000s where the temnik term was originally coined, the modern Russian temnik is not a written genre, but an oral practise. It is carefully kept away from plain view in the darkness of deniability, as it is spread from the political top and down through the media system in the form of oral policy briefings. Top managers attend meetings where they listen to monologues, the main points of which they then relay at meetings with their subordinates, who then share the same narrative with their teams, etc. The policy reaches the bottom from the top, and the job of those further down the chain is then to pitch proposals on how to storify the policy. Media attacks, disinformation and other kinds of propaganda appear not only as as a result of direct orders, but also – and perhaps mainly – as the bottom’s wish to create stories that satisfy the hierarchy and comply with the policies expressed in the briefings.

Being a part of this system of oral exchanges, the temnik system normally casts its shadow when we witness the high degree of coordinated messaging in pro-Kremlin media. However, the moment when the temnik becomes most evident is that rare situation when something happens which is at the same time unexpected, extraordinary and of strategic importance to the Russian authorities. Such a constellation leads to an eclipse in the form of sudden silence during the period in which the media outlets are waiting for the policy of the temnik to be formulated. The last time we saw this happening was during and in the immediate aftermath of this Sunday’s protests in Russia.

The events on Sunday were as simple as they were disturbing for Russia’s authorities. The video inquiry into Prime Minister Medvedev’s alleged corruption scheme, which opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s NGO had produced (see our story), had gone viral, and so did Navalny’s call to take to the streets in a coordinated protest, which was what happened on Sunday in 99 Russian cities. In Moscow alone, more than one thousand Russians, many of them teenagers, were detained for peacefully exercising their constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of speech and assembly.

But the pro-Kremlin media outlets were silent. Finding themselves in a waiting position for the temnik, they talked about everything but the mass protests. Propaganda expert Alexei Kovalev boiled the media’s silent reaction down to one tweet: “Russian TV right now: There’s corruption! (in South Korea) There are protests! (in France) This state is a failure! (it’s Ukraine)”. In other words, pro-Kremlin media spent their time paddling in Freudian slips of “whataboutism”, indirectly addressing the problem in Russia they knew very well about, desperately pointing at somehow similar problems abroad. But still, not a word about the events in Russia.

At one point it became evident that a policy was finally being formulated: temnik lines began to spread among pro-Kremlin media, but with a high degree of caution. Television, which is still the preferred medium among the majority of the Kremlin’s core voters, remained silent. Instead, the lines were more carefully disseminated via online media and radio. As Alexei Kovalev noted on Facebook, online outlets belonging to leading Kremlin-loyal TV stations and news agencies began to formulate “rare references to ‘arrests during the opposition’s unsanctioned protests, during which a policeman was beaten’”, but, as Kovalev noted, “nothing is told about what the protesters were protesting against.” “Morning radio has worked in strict accordance with the temnik”, Kovalev wrote on Tuesday afternoon. Here, Russians were warned that the protests were “illegal, a provocation, children were used [by the organisers], they want to return to the 90s, they want what happened in Ukraine, this is just a performance for Western TV channels”, Kovalev summarised.

Glimpses of the way the temnik system works can also be seen when top managers of pro-Kremlin media express themselves on their personal social media accounts. One of the most important sources is Margarita Simonyan, the CEO of Russia Today (RT). Although intended as an anecdote to downplay the importance of the protests, her testimony, expressed in one tweet, can be read as a report back to her Kremlin hierarchy: “My relatives from Adler [in the South of Russia] came to visit. I: How did the rallies go in your part of the country? – What rallies? – The protests. – Against whom? – Against Putin. – Against Putin? Such bastards!” Simonyan’s message is clear: The most important segments of Russian voters know very little about the protests and – what is perhaps most important – they do not care.