The same tactics that were observed in the wake of the Skripal poisoning have been employed multiple times since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, in each case following roughly the same script. When pro-Russian separatists shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 passengers and crew members, Russian officials and media outlets sought to pin the blame on the Ukrainian government, suggesting at one point that corpses had been trucked to the crash site to make the death toll appear higher.
State-controlled Russian media unleashed a fusillade of falsehoods after the assassination of reformist politician Boris Nemtsov in Moscow in 2015 and after at least three deadly chemical weapons attacks against civilians by Syria’s pro-Russian government.
And apart from these concerted campaigns, there is a daily churn of false or distorted reports that seem designed to exploit the divisions in Western society and politics, especially on issues such as race, violence and sexual rights, and that are pushed by droves of operatives posing as ordinary citizens on social media accounts.
While many of the individual stories are easily debunked, the campaigns have had a discernible impact, as measured by opinion polls and, occasionally, public statements by Western politicians casting doubt on the findings of the intelligence agencies of their own governments. In October 2015, months after U.S. and European investigators concluded that Flight 17 had been brought down by a Russian missile fired by separatists, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump told CNN that the culprit was “probably Russia” but suggested that the truth was unknowable. “To be honest with you, you’ll probably never know for sure,” he said.
Results such as these have encouraged what private groups say is a massive and ever-increasing investment by Moscow, which has placed numerous news outlets fully or partly on its payroll and operates at least one troll factory in which scores of employees disseminate pro-Kremlin messages using thousands of fake social media accounts.
The cost of this matrix is about $1.3 billion a year, according to Russian budget documents — a modest sum, considering the benefits, said Jakub Kalensky, until recently an official with the East StratCom Task Force, a rapid-response team created by the European Union to counter Russian disinformation….
ons. On March 6, two days after the poisoning, the Russian news agency RIA Novosti was already quoting an anesthesiologist saying that the manner of Skripal’s poisoning suggested he was a drug addict and had overdosed.
On March 8 alone, pro-Kremlin news outlets published five phony narratives about the events in Salisbury, offering explanations for Skripal’s illness that included an attempted suicide by Skripal and his daughter and a chemical-weapons leak at the nearby military laboratory at Porton Down.
Dmitry Kiselyov — the host of the program "Vesti Nedeli" (“News of the Week”) on the Rossiya network and a leading figure in the country’s propaganda hierarchy — picked up the baton on March 11. He said that because Skripal was already “completely wrung out and of little interest” as a source, his poisoning was only advantageous to the British to “nourish their Russophobia” and organize a boycott of the summer’s World Cup soccer tournament in Russia.
Then it was the Skripals’ pets turn in the spotlight — two guinea pigs and a fluffy Persian cat named Nesh Van Drake. The lack of information about their condition, Russian officials said in remarks that were broadcast on state TV, showed the British were surely covering something up. “Where are these pets now?” Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, asked at a Security Council meeting on April 5. “What has happened to them? Why has nobody said anything about them? Their condition is very important evidence.”
The theories kept coming: was it someone from the Baltics? Was Skripal poisoned on MI5-sponsored trips to chemical labs in the Czech Republic and Spain? Could it be a British government plot to distract attention from Brexit — or even from a pedophilia scandal in the western English town of Telford?
The Skripal affair, RIA Novosti columnist Ivan Danilov wrote, “will continue as long as the government of Theresa May needs it to resolve its own internal problems.”
British officials and experts who studied the events say the false narratives emerged from a Russian information ecosystem in which news outlets and social media networks are increasingly intertwined with the country’s intelligence apparatus and official communications organs. While independent media voices flourished briefly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Putin years have been marked by assassinations of prominent journalists and the silencing or muting of dissent.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/national-security/russian-propaganda-skripal-salisbury/?utm_term=.4fff42096295
.........................................................
-Altai Range on north side of Xinjiang/East Turkestan
No comments:
Post a Comment