The US as the main actor behind the ‘yellow vests’ protests. Ukraine as the provocateur of war, preparing a chemical attack. Both got their part in the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign this week. What a convenient way of shifting focus from the actors performing disinformation, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Yellow vests – words and deeds

The attention of pro-Kremlin outlets was focused on the ‘yellow vests’ movement, with different disinformation angles having one aim: to sow confusion and a narrative about Europe in chaos.

Many of our readers might have seen a video of French policemen taking off their helmets in front of the protesters in the city of Pau, in an attempt to calm the mood. The move was described by Newsfront, RT and Sputnik as a solidarity gesture with the protesters, with RT going further and saying that the police were now siding with them. The disinforming reports were based on the video and on a statement by a representative of the unions. In reaction, Bloombergoutlined that the union’s representative, while voicing support for protesters, was speaking for a minor French union. The disinformation about the solidarity gesture was debunked by several media, including the AFP. Only after that did disinforming outlets correct their reports.

Another case from this week, about an armoured EU vehicle allegedly suppressing French protesters, perfectly fits the narrative about Europe in chaos (and possibly on the brink of civil war). The ‘news’ was debunked by Le Monde, saying that the EU flag on one of the vehicles had to do with its previous participation in European trainings.

We have also witnessed a well-known blame game, with the US shown as the one provoking the ‘yellow vests’ protests, in the hope of weakening Europe’s position in the world. A classical move of pro-Kremlin disinformation, strengthening the picture of Europe in weakness, chaos and disarray.

Unsurprisingly, the disinforming outlets do not report extensively about the related findings described by The Times and Bloomberg. Hundreds of social media accounts linked to Russia were extremely active last week, circulating messages focused on violence and (again!) chaos during the protests. Possible Russian involvement in amplifying the protests – denied by Russia itself – is now being investigated by the French authorities.

“You always place me between two foreigners”

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What just happened? Did Russian state media decide to drop disinformation and replace it with democratic debate? Since when has criticism of the authorities been allowed on prime-time Kremlin TV?

Click to watch the video below and see how the talk show host and other discussants giggle towards the end of the video when Leonid Gozman, a well-known opposition politician, openly criticises the Kremlin and its media, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Judging from the reactions in the studio, Mr Gozman could just as well have told a dirty joke or reminded the others of an embarrassing secret.

Mr Gozman can in fact be said to have reminded the audience of a secret: Like the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, he breaks the spell of disinformation, points at the “emperor” – state propaganda – and reminds his fellow Russians that it is in fact “naked”, i.e. just an illusion:

“Once this show ends, everyone in the audience who has been ordered to clap, will come up to me and say, ‘actually, you’re right, we support what you say.’”

The aim is to show dissenters as disloyal citizens

But why this sudden deviation from the norm on state TV talk shows?

Leonid Gozman himself points out in the clip that the role of talk show propaganda is not necessarily to try to prove people wrong if they disagree with the official, Kremlin-approved line. Instead, the overarching aim is to discredit dissenters as disloyal citizens:

“Whenever I’m on your show, you always place me between two foreigners, to ‘show’ that I stand against Russia”.

Worth noting is also that not all dissenters are as lucky as Mr Gozman when the only consequence he faces is smirking and giggling. Click here to watch examples of how e.g. foreign guests on Russian state TV talk shows have been interrupted, shouted at and even physically attacked live on air.

The recording is from the talk show “60 Minutes” broadcast on 29 November. Click here for examples in our database of disinformation broadcast on state TV Rossiya 1.

As the confrontation around the Azov Sea and the Kerch Strait has escalated, so has the disinformation as well as the rhetoric denigrating Ukrainians and their country in Russian state-controlled media, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Denigrating language can, however, also include disinformation; one does not exclude the other.

Belittling Ukraine’s navy

Last Sunday two of Russia’s most viewed TV channels told their audiences that the three Ukrainian vessels, which had been captured by the Russian side in the naval clash in the Azov Sea, represented one-third of Ukraine’s entire navy.

State TV Pervy Kanal host Pyotr Tolstoy, who is also the deputy speaker of the Russian parliament, told his audience the following:

“This week, we learned two important things. The first. Ukraine, it turns out, has a navy. More precisely – it used to have a navy, but lost a third of it, but more on that later … “

On the same Sunday evening, but on another large state TV channel, Rossiya 1, the EU-sanctioned host Dmitry Kiselyov echoed his colleague with these words:

“Our border guards coped brilliantly with the task. As a result, everyone is alive, and now almost a third of the active Ukrainian fleet is kept under arrest in [the Russian port of] Kerch. Ridiculous. Although it did create a lot of noise”.

Fact-checked by independent journalists

The independent Russian online outlet The Insider fact-checked these attempts to belittle Ukraine’s navy.

Even if Ukraine lost 80% of its navy as a result of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, it did not lose one-third of its remaining navy in the Azov Sea clash, but only one third of a particular type of vessels, The Insider points out.

The Insider also found the wording in the two statements on Russian state TV oddly similar; this suggests it could be a result of the practice of disseminating centrally coordinated narratives from the Kremlin.

Ridiculing and dehumanising Ukrainians

This ridiculing of Ukraine’s navy echoes other cases when disinformation has been used to show Ukraine as weak and dependent.

We have seen disinformation about the captured Ukrainian vessels being a gift from the US, which is not true, as well as a story about children in Mariupol being forced to dig trenches for Ukraine’s soldiers.

Ukraine has been described as not a country, but a mere territory, and a Nazi state. Statements such as “there is no Ukraine” and that Ukraine “cannot be regarded as a serious state” have been articulated on Russian state TV:

We have earlier described examples of dehumanising disinformation; allegations that Ukrainians steal food from pigeons in order to survive, stories about trade with human organs and about how students in Ukraine are allegedly forced to reject relatives who live in Russia are among the examples.

The combination of disinformation and denigrating language serves as an example of how Russia uses communication as a hybrid form of aggression, which it in this case integrates into a military confrontation with a foreign country.

The moment when the disinformation campaign around the Azov Sea started was not when Russia seized three Ukrainian vessels and their crews after opening fire at them on November 25, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

In fact the campaign had been launched much earlier.

More than a year ago, Russian media started publishing claims of “Ukraine deepening the seabed for a NATO fleet at the Azov Sea”. In fact no evidence to any such “NATO fleet” can be found.

During the last summer and autumn the disinformation campaign intensified. We heard that Ukraine had suddenly “infected the Azov Sea with cholera” (the World Health Organisation reported that they have no data of any cholera cases there). In September the messaging was already preparing the ground for later disinformation, forecasting “West-inspired provocations on the Azov Sea shore” and that the US has been “planning for clashes between Ukrainian and Russian naval forces in the Black Sea since 1990s”. The “evidence” is based on a video game a former Russian soldier claims to have seen 15 years ago.

All these disinformation messages have the same objective: to show that Ukraine is the aggressor and that it takes orders for its “provocations” from the West. Always a convenient message for Russia’s disinformation; when we look at the illegal annexation of Crimea, or consecutive false claims that the Azov Sea is a Russian “inland sea” – or Russia’s celebration of the use of military force against Ukraine.

During the last week there was also a shift in the focus: to Ukrainians themselves. The aim seems to be to spread mistrust in the Ukrainian government and Western partners with lines like “The West hoped to paint the Azov Sea with the blood of Ukrainian citizens” and how “children in Mariupol are forced to dig trenches for soldiers”.

The English-language conspiracy sphere invented one more theory to justify Russia’s actions. The impeccable logic goes that Russian special forces actually managed to stop a provocation that might have led to World War III – as UK and Ukraine secret services were apparently transporting a portable nuclear device to explode the Crimea bridge. No efforts were made by the authors to even try and offer some proof.

The notion that Western countries themselves run state-orchestrated disinformation campaigns is a popular pro-Kremlin defensive line, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

In an apparent attempt to produce evidence in support of this claim, Russian state TV Pervy Kanal decided to portray the British armed forces 77th Brigade, which defends the UK against different kinds of hybrid threats out of barracks in Hermitage, Berkshire.

However, Pervy Kanal’s report, which was broadcast in the evening news programme Vremya on 22 November, ended up more like not just one, but a total of three own goals.

Here’s how the journalists at Russia’s independent TV Rain challenged their government-controlled colleagues’ narrative.

1. As an illustration in the report about the 77th Brigade, Pervy Kanal showed British military personnel at work. However, the footage is taken from a British Army recruiting video and does not show the 77th Brigade, but a Royal Signals unit, as also noted by Daily Mail. In order to make the footage look secretive, Pervy Kanal blurred the faces of the soldiers and officers in the video; in the original recruitment video, the faces were shown openly (see the above illustration and TV Rain’s report from 03:34).

2. Pervy Kanal’s report is largely based on an article about the 77th Brigade published by the magazine Wired, which the Pervy Kanal also references. However, TV Rain underlines that Pervy Kanal’s claims that the 77th Brigade produces and spreads “fake news”connected to e.g. the downing of Flight MH17 or chemical attacks in Syria are not confirmed in Wired’s material.

3. Finally, TV Rain has looked at how Pervy Kanal reacted to an alert notice from the British Army, warning its personnel against talking to its reporter following his video recordings outside the 77th Brigade’s barracks for Pervy Kanal’s news broadcast. TV Rain criticises their state TV colleagues for overselling this as a major national sensation in the UK (“even Brexit has faded into the background”, Pervy Kanal reported in a follow-up article to the news brodcast) and as a violation of the correspondent’s rights, when he has in fact, at least so far, not been formally charged by British authorities.

TV Rain ends its report about Pervy Kanal’s news item by reminding its audience that “sometimes desperate adversaries of the British crown, who work for Russian state TV channels, themselves become subjects of Her Majesty” – a fact we also took note of a week ago.

It’s been described as a “death factory,” an “impregnable fortress” where the United States is conducting secret experiments on humans to create biological weapons aimed at exterminating Russians, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Meet the Central Public Health Reference Laboratory, aka the Lugar lab, established in Tbilisi in 2011 under a U.S.-Georgian agreement to deepen bilateral cooperation on the fight against biological weapons.

The laboratory has been in Moscow’s crosshairs since its foundation.

And although Georgia is now fully in charge of its financing and operations, Russian media and authorities have tirelessly portrayed the facility as a cover for hostile U.S. activity in the region.

From killer mosquitoes to genetic mutations, we have identified the top 12 narratives used so far against the Lugar lab:

1) The laboratory is in fact a “military biological base” run by the U.S. Army. Georgian specialists have only limited access to the premises and no access whatsoever to information about the centre’s activities.

2) The lab is developing chemical weapons against Russia. The pathogens are powerful enough to kill 70 percent of the population in areas of Russia targeted by a potential U.S. chemical attack.

3) The lab was built close to the Tbilisi airport so that viruses can swiftly be loaded into planes and deployed as weapons.

4) U.S. diplomats are involved in transporting samples of viruses and infected blood to the Lugar laboratory. This allegation was made by Russia’s Zvezda TV, citing a Bulgarian journalist who describes the claim as her “own conclusions.”

5) The laboratory conducts secret experiments on humans and animals. The experiments have already killed 73 people.

6) People living close to the facility are at high risk of contamination from dangerous pathogens. As many as 5,000 residents are directly at risk.

7) Oncological diseases are on the rise in the area surrounding the laboratory and increasing number of babies are born with anomalies.

8) Contamination has already spread beyond Georgian borders. The lab has caused an epidemic of African swine fever in Russia. In September 2017, authorities in the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia — which Russia recognised following its brief war with Georgia in 2008 — expressed concerns about the lab and alleged a spike in “epidemic outbreaks of dangerous diseases” in South Ossetia. Russian state media, including Sputnik, have also accused the facility of spreading the H1N1 virus and other infectious diseases to neighbouring Armenia.

9) The drugs developed at the Lugar laboratory are able to trigger genetic changes in whole generations based on ethnicity. The incriminated medication, Solvadi, is in fact a treatment against Hepatitis C that has been registered in Russia since 2016.

10) The lab may be linked to a U.S.-patented device intended to release infected mosquitoes in targeted areas.

11) One of the reasons why the United States built the lab in Georgia is to fuel tensions between Tbilisi and Moscow.

12) And because conspiracies often complement each other, the Lugar lab has been accused of involvement in the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter on British soil.

Independent journalists from Russia gathered in Prague on 24 November to celebrate their profession and its achievements during the past year with an awards ceremony, like reported by  euvsdisinfo.eu

Six prizes were handed out in the following categories: investigative journalism, panorama, interview, regional publication, new media and the jury’s special prize.

Among the winning projects were examples of how independent Russian journalists have been able to successfully challenge disinformation narratives in the Kremlin’s dominating official line.

The Salisbury Reports

In the investigative journalism category, the prize was awarded to Roman Dobrokhotov for his four-part investigation into the Salisbury chemical attack. The articles were published by the small independent online outlet The Insider, where Mr Dobrokhotov is also the chief editor.

The Insider’s series was a poser of a larger joint project with the open source investigators at Bellingcat. Working on the ground in Russia, Mr Dobrokhotov and his team contributed to the successful unmasking of numerous falsehoods that were spread by the Kremlin and its loyal media following the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

The Insider’s work can be read in English as part of Bellingcat’s series on the Salisbury attacks in which i.a. the true identities of the GRU agents behind the deathly attack in Salisbury were revealed.

Protecting the history of Stalinism from disinformation

In the category “regional media”, a special prize handed out to local reporting from Russia’s many regions, journalist Anna Yarova was awarded for her project “Rewriting Stalin Terror in Sandarmokh”, which was published by the independent online outlet 7×7.

The publication describes measures taken to revise the history of execution sites in the region of Karelia near Russia’s border with Finland, as well as the authorities’ attempts to silence Russian civil society actors who investigate this tragic piece of history with use of fabricated charges and imprisonment.

Also other journalists won awards for stories with human rights angles, including “The head of the Grozny Memorial Oyub Titiev is being tried on drug charges”, authored by Shura Burtin for Meduza; and Olga Alferova’s piece: “I’m over it. A special project about domestic abuse; It’s all rather complicated”, an interactive film published by Takiye Dela. Mediazona won the Jury’s Special Prize for its coverage of human rights violations in Russian prisons.

Olga Gerasimenko was awarded the Interview prize for her feature titled “I am the Perfect Russian: The rapper Face from ‘Burgers’ to Mandelstam”, published on BBC Russian Service.

Working under pressure

Russian independent journalism has played a key role in the international pushback on disinformation; the examples of The Insider’s and 7×7’s investigations do not stand alone.

It was e.g. thanks to work carried out by fearless reporters working inside Russia that facts about the St. Petersburg troll factory began to surface.

The important work of these journalists is carried out under the pressure of a number of different factors limiting Russia’s press freedom. Independent media organisations are punished when their reporting becomes too successful. Some Russian journalists are killed for their work.

Russian independent journalists and other civil society members themselves become targets of disinformation and various forms of intimidation. This was e.g. seen in the recent case where Novaya Gazeta was harassed following its investigation into a series of poison attacks and the killing of a Kremlin-critical blogger, allegedly carried out by a group of thugs working for “Putin’s chef”, the owner of the St. Petersburg “troll factory”, Evgeny Prigozhin.

The Journalism as a Profession Awards prize ceremony is an annual event organised by Open Russia – an NGO founded by the exiled Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

A three-series multimedia project by the New York Times reveals how current Kremlin disinformation campaigns stem from a long tradition of weaponizing information. Titled “Operation Infektion”, the series tells the story of a “political virus”, invented decades ago by the KGB to “slowly and methodically destroy its enemies from the inside”, and which the Kremlin continues to deliberately spread to this day.

EU vs Disinfo takes a closer look at each of the episodes and encourages you to watch them yourselves.

“A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has even got its boots on” said Mark Twain. Or perhaps it was Winston Churchill? As the New York Times points out, this quote has been attributed to many different authors. However, its main point is firmly supported by scientific research: lies spread faster than facts.

In the final episode of its “Operation Infektion” series, the New York Times documents the world-wide war on truth and asks the question which is rising higher and higher up the political agenda: how do we defend ourselves against disinformation?

While there is no simple cure for the disinformation virus, exposing it is a start.

Since its inception in 2015, the East Stratcom Task Force has identified and collected over 4,500 cases of pro-Kremlin disinformation. And we are not alone in this.

There is Estonian Propamon – a monitoring robot which looks for news related to Estonia in Russian media, and an AI driven myth-debunking initiative in Lithuania. But robots are not enough. That’s why there are also a lot of humans who dedicate their time and efforts to exposing disinformation.

Created by a university professor and his students, StopFake became a go-to resource to learn about Russian disinformation tactics in Ukraine. MythDetector tracks and debunks anti-Western disinformation. Digital Sherlocks identify, expose, and explain disinformation at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research lab. Polygraph verifies quotes, stories, and reports of government officials, state media and other high-profile individuals in English, while Factographdoes it in Russian. Using open sources, Bellingcat investigates online information and disinformation. TjekDet does fact-checking in Danish, Faktiskt in Swedish and Les Décodeurs – in French.

If disinformation is a virus, then public awareness is a vaccine. Examples of such a vaccine include, among others,  Sweden, that took measures to increase social resilience in the run-up of the 2018 elections, Finland – home to the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats and Poland, where NGOs created a platform to raise awareness and educate society about information security.

However, as we are increasingly connected by social media, the risk of disinformation contagionis growing. To curb it, the European Union introduced the Code of Practise on Disinformation  – the first of its kind in the world. The Code, signed by such online giants as Facebook, Twitter, Mozilla and Google, sets self-regulatory standards in order to fight disinformation and address the spread of fake news online.

In the meantime France is debating a new law that would oblige platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to disclose the funding sources for sponsored content in the three months that precede elections. And Germany is already enforcing a law which demands that social media sites quickly remove hate speech, fake news and illegal material.

Is that enough?

Disinformation appears to be becoming a global pandemic, or, as the New York Times puts it – we are witnessing the worldwide war on truth. So while states, media and civil societies are still finding ways to strengthen collective defence, our individual efforts matter more than ever.

Use these online resources to verify content you read on internet.

And here are some simple tips to make sure your news feed is not infected with disinformation:

1. Check the source: Is this the source I think it is? Have I heard of it before?
2. Check the author: Are they who they say they are? Are they a real person?
3. Check with others: has this been reported somewhere else?
4. Check beyond the headline: could this be a clickbait?
5. Check intention: could this be a joke, satire or parody?

Say one thing but do the opposite; the hypocrite is one of the most classical characters in comedy, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Imagine, for example, how awkward and funny it would look if a Kremlin state TV propagandist made a living out of denigrating European countries as morally degrading and hostile to Russians, but at the same time owned property in a European country, travelled there with his family for leisure and perhaps even held an undisclosed European citizenship.

This is precisely what happened to Sergei Brilyov, the famous host of a weekly current affairs programme on Rossiya 1 TV where he also holds the job as deputy director and has the privilege of interviewing President Putin, prime minister Medvedev and other top figures.

First opposition politician and corruption hunter Alexey Navalny published a video disclosing the London apartment allegedly owned by Brilyov and his wife. Navalny also claimed that Mr Brilyov holds a parallel British citizenship. The video has so far been watched 2,3 million times on Youtube.

Mr Brilyov’s wife Irina first denied Mr Navalny’s claims about the property.

However, things didn’t get better for the couple when TV Rain, an independent Russian broadcaster, hired a London-based freelance journalist who went to see the apartment and talk to neighbours – only to run into Mr and Mrs Brilyov in person. They decided to pay the free-lancer off with 250 pounds in exchange for not sharing her video recording with the TV channel – at least this is what she said in a correspondence, which TV Rain later made public. The journalist later withdrew her statement about having met Mr and Mrs Brilyov in London.

On 27 November, five days after the publication of Mr Navalny’s investigation, Mr Brilyov finally confirmed owning the London apartment and that he is indeed a British citizen is correct. He also underlined that the claim that he had met and paid off TV Rain’s stringer had not been correct.

Earlier another famous state TV propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov, who also has his own show on Rossiya 1 TV, was subject to an investigation by Mr Navalny’s anti-corruption team, which disclosed his ownership of an Italian villa.

All the Brilyovs and Solovyovs of Russian state propaganda remember very well how one of their most famous colleagues, Dmitry Kiselyov, was banned from travelling to the EU, holding accounts or owning property there because of his role as a “central figure of the government propaganda supporting the deployment of Russian forces in Ukraine“.

As an example of anti-European disinformation on Sergei Brilyov’s TV programme, see the reference in our database to a case from June when his viewers were informed that the EU finances the construction of “concentration camps” for refugees.

In Russia, the “red lines” which define the limits to what journalists can write or say, are often referred to as the “double white lines”. Like in traffic, if media outlets cross the double white lines, they put themselves in danger and may be punished, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Novaya Gazeta vs. the trolls

Two weeks ago, we described how the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta was targeted with harassment and intimidation ahead of its publication of an investigation into a series of poison attacks and the killing of a Kremlin-critical blogger.

According to the newspaper’s sources, these attacks were carried out by a special team in the security service of Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the owner of the “troll factory”, and popularly known as “Putin’s chef”.

The lines Novaya Gazeta in this case had crossed were in other words not the government’s, but those of a privately owned organisation with close ties to the Russian authorities, and which is already known for supporting the government’s disinformation agenda with online trolling.

Slander and fake news 

The punishment for Novaya Gazeta’s crossing the lines took the form of a funeral wreath with the name of the journalist behind the investigation and a severed goat’s head delivered to Novaya Gazeta’s newsroom.

The newspaper issued a statement after it received these threats and after the wave of harassment it had experienced following reporting about Russian military involvement in Syria.

The newspaper’s statement clearly identifies disinformation, trolling and harassment of journalists as parts of one cluster of problems.

Disinformation and intimidation outsourced

In Russia, the spread of disinformation is supported by instructions from the Kremlin: a narrative that trickles down through the media organisations controlled by and loyal to the authorities.

However, some of the more dirty work is carried out by private actors with close financial ties to the authorities.

As the case of Novaya Gazeta suggests, the sanctions imposed on Russian journalists that disrespect the narrative and cross “double white lines” can also be carried out by private actors.

When journalism is controlled in this way with intimidation and crackdowns, state-controlled and state-loyal disinformation has much more free play and its impact on society becomes larger.

Novaya Gazeta’s statement reminds us that the fight against disinformation is also a fight for free and independent media.