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Russia is waging war in Ukraine not only with missiles and tanks, but also with disinformation and false reports. The Kremlin sold the march before the attack as a maneuver and to this day discredits the Ukrainian government as Nazis.
“The first victim of every war is the truth” – this is a much-quoted saying by US Senator Hiram Johnson from the time of the First World War. In the case of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, however, the truth had long since been eliminated when Putin’s troops invaded the neighboring country en masse on February 24, 2022.
Through state broadcasters at home and abroad, with the help of paid claqueurs and voluntary supporters, as well as through propaganda at the diplomatic level, Russia has covered its own population and the international community with misleading reports, false claims and pure disinformation – until today.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warns that the Kremlin has built a powerful manipulation industry. According to Borrell, people should no longer be able to understand what is actually happening, so that the question of guilt can no longer be clarified.
“Not a threat to anyone”
In fact, many propaganda claims are easy to identify as misleading or false. Many are also contradicted by Russia’s actual actions. In the weeks before the invasion of Ukraine, Western secret services and many experts had warned of the impending attack. The evidence was clear: Russia had gathered troops on the border with Ukraine and held a joint maneuver with Belarus – with 30,000 Russian soldiers.
The Kremlin dismissed the fact that a large-scale attack was imminent as supposed Western propaganda. It is Russia’s business where to deploy troops within its own borders. Reports of warnings about an impending attack “only fuel senseless and groundless tensions. Russia does not pose a threat to anyone,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
In Germany, it was Sahra Wagenknecht, among others, who did not want to see any Russian plans for an attack in the demonstration on the border with Ukraine. This is what the left-wing politician said in the newspaper a few days before the attack ARD-Show “Anne Will”, Russia has “actually no interest in invading Ukraine. Of course not.” Rather, Wagenknecht complained about the “aggressiveness with which the American side was practically encouraging an invasion.”
Pretexts created
The narrative that Russia is essentially being driven into war is a prime example of how blame for a war of aggression can be deflected and even reversed. In fact, Russia has been providing massive military support to separatists since 2014; Russian soldiers without emblems have also been deployed in Ukraine, and Putin also annexed Crimea.
The Kremlin had systematically built up narratives to create pretexts for an invasion and to prepare for a perpetrator-victim reversal. For example, there was talk of an alleged genocide in eastern Ukraine, but there is no evidence of this. In fact, it was Russian soldiers who committed numerous alleged war crimes in Ukraine; Incidents that still need to be dealt with legally – even if the hurdles are high.
Fake covers
What is noteworthy in the context of such statements about the alleged aggressiveness with which an invasion by the US is being encouraged is one Current EU report on Russian disinformation strategies. To do this, experts analyzed a sample of 100 pieces of disinformation of Russian and Chinese origin on the Internet from October to December 2022. The authors of the report documented forgeries of covers of European magazines that were distributed online – including “Titanic”, the French satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo” and the Spanish “El Jueves”.
One goal of the disinformation is to sow doubt about who the aggressor in the Ukraine war is, the report says. The message is that Russia is threatened and surrounded by the West.
“Final solution to the Russian question”
The Kremlin is pushing this horror scenario further and further, the rhetoric is becoming more and more radical, so that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently even spoke of a “final solution to the Russian question” that was being prepared. Not a linguistic slip-up, but part of the grand narrative that Russia must “denazify” Ukraine. This claim has also been appearing in Germany for years. The right-wing radical journalist Jürgen Elsässer spoke of “NATO fascism” at a “Monday demonstration” in Berlin in 2014 and warned that the “final solution to the Russian question” was being prepared in Ukraine.
The fact that Putin is celebrated by many right-wingers around the world as a kind of patron saint against Western values, that the President of Ukraine is Jewish, that survivors of the Holocaust were also killed in Russian attacks on Ukraine – none of this fits into the narrative of the “Nazi Ukraine”, which had to be liberated from fascism. For this reason, for example, fake images are being spread that show Zelenskyj wearing a jersey with a swastika. A blatant fake.
Also manipulated was a picture of Zelenskyj in one Shirt with Nazi symbol should show.
The Russian embassy in South Africa made even less effort and tweeted a video on February 14th that purported to show a Ukrainian soldier giving a Hitler salute on a “Leopard” tank. However, one click on the video is enough to see that the soldier does not give a Nazi salute. Twitter added a warning to the tweet because it contained misleading content. One user commented: “Every turning gesture I make while riding my bike looks more like a Hitler salute than this.”
Constant repetitions
A single misleading tweet certainly has little impact. However, Russia relies on constantly repeating claims – regardless of how plausible they are. A data analysis from January shows: In 2022, Putin spoke more frequently than ever before about “genocide” and “neo-Nazis,” i.e. the myths with which the Kremlin and state propaganda justified the invasion of Ukraine.
Russian propaganda always follows a double strategy: on the one hand, all guilt is always denied and a forward defense is put in place. At the same time, numerous “alternative” explanations are being spread, however absurd they may be. These strategies have been observed again and again in recent years, be it in connection with war crimes in Syria, the shooting down of flight MH17, the assassination attempt in the Tiergarten, the attack on ex-agent Skripal or after war crimes in Ukraine or the war of aggression itself – in the style of the Kremlin, euphemistically a “special operation”.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution emphasizedRussia “accompanies its military aggressions with a flood of disinformation and propaganda. These aim to legitimize its own war actions, but also to open lines of division within German society and to stir up mistrust in the actions of the state in this country.”
EU chief diplomat Borrell warned at a recent conference: “Putin’s bombs are killing people in Ukraine, while his manipulation industry is attacking the minds of people in Russia and around the world, trying to prevent them from seeing who is responsible for the murders, the electricity bills, the cannot pay them, the economic hardship and hunger that has been worsened by the war launched by Russia.”
According to the Spanish Social Democrat, Putin is “cynically trying to make people believe that the law of the strongest applies and that autocrats can get away with atrocities.” The Kremlin once again wants to make crime disappear in a haze of disinformation.
Editor’s note: Patrick Gensing was senior editor of the ARD fact finder until 2022 and now works part-time as a freelance journalist.