For many years Russia has been mobilising the resources at its disposal to discredit Ukraine and other enemies, both through media outlets in Russia and abroad. Since 2014, Russian state-linked media outlets have been spreading disinformation to influence people’s minds and distort the truth about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. From the start of the full-scale war in 2022, the tactics became as aggressive as ever before. 

A year ago the Russian propaganda machine faced a stiff and unprecedented rebuke in Europe. The West imposed sanctions on Russian outlets to protect their societies from manipulations. The European Union banned Russian state media such as Russia Today and Sputnik. Journalists, governments and disinformation experts have been working on analysing the Russian fake news system and manipulations to effectively counteract it. 

Russian propaganda has so far failed to win over hearts and minds of most Europeans – or to scare them into tacit acceptance of Russia’s war against Ukraine – but it hasn’t stopped trying.

The European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU’s diplomatic service which manages foreign communication and crisis response, presented its first report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) in February. They analysed a sample of 100 information manipulation attempts; 88 of them were orchestrated by Russian state actors. 

The Fix summarised key points of the report.

Targets

Russian propaganda has a few sets of targets they focus on. The analysis divides propaganda’s targets in three groups: countries, organisations, and individuals. Unsurprisingly, the most common are Ukraine, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian government, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and Ukrainian allies, such as the European Union and international institutions like NATO.

Source: “1st EEAS Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats”

Narratives 

One of the goals of the EEAS report was to define narratives that Russia uses in media outlets. The report established five of the most popular ones:

  • “The West is the aggressor towards Russia”. It stands on the point that the West is responsible for the growing tension between Russia and Ukraine, profiting from the war, and is the main reason why the invasion is continuing. 
  • “Ukraine is the aggressor towards Russia”. Unlike the previous one, this notion portrays Ukraine as the main antagonist and provoker. Russia blames Ukrainians for causing and wanting war, committing war crimes, and having intentions of using chemical and nuclear weapons. After the government in Ukraine changed in 2014, Russia has been constantly stating that the presidential election was illegal and named Ukraine’s government “Kyiv regime”. Russian media used this agenda in their messages to demonise Ukraine. (For instance, Russian media Ukraina.ru published an article “The Kyiv’s regime wants to provoke a war between Russia and NATO”. That way, Ukraine is demonstrated as the aggressor and Russian actions are only a warranted response).  
  • “The sanctions against Russia backfire”. That’s Russian manipulation around how sanctions have an impact on Western countries, especially in the fields of food, energy and finances. To give an example – which is not directly mentioned in the EEAS report – the Russian channel Russia Today created a video “Merry anti-Russian Christmas”. The video is about a family celebrating Christmas in Europe. The holiday is changing in three years from full of light, warmth, and wellness in 2021 to cold, hungry, and poor in 2023. The culmination of the plot is that a family is eating soup made with their daughter’s hamster. The main narrative is that European sanctions on Russian energy will have a much stronger effect on Europe than on Russia. Russia Today manipulates to convince the audience that they will lose their comfortable lives without Russia (and encourages viewers to access RT via VPN).
  • “The West is hypocritical”. The message emphasises the supposed hypocrisy of the Western world. That European countries are corrupted, colonialists, spreading Russophobic takes and abusing fundamental rights, the narrative goes, but they don’t admit that and condemn Russia instead. 
  • “Ukraine is a Nazi and terrorist state”. It’s a common idea that Russia actively has been promoting since the Revolution of Dignity – Ukraine’s pro-European protests in late 2013 and early 2014 that ousted pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. Kremlin’s politicians and media claimed that the change of president hadn’t been legitime and it was a terrorist act. Also, the popular narrative has been that the Revolution of Dignity was led by “Ukrainian nazi groups”. Now, the “The country full of terrorists and Nazis” narrative is one of the excuses for the Russian invasion. From this narrative comes up another point: Russian aggression against Ukraine is so-called “denazification”. 

Russian media ecosystem and tools

Russia uses different types of media to spread its narratives. The EEAS report divided online media outlets into three groups: official communication channels, state-controlled channels, and state-linked media channels. Diplomatic channels are widely used by the Russian government to propagate ideas to online audiences.

Apart from the three previous groups of channels, the Russian media ecosystem also relies on non-attributed channels. These channels do not have an obvious connection between them and do not have clear attribution. Non-attributed channels could be linked by other pieces of evidence. The channels can be interlinked by similar media content, linguistic, political context, follows, cross-posting, economic ties etc.    

Threat actors choose popular social media platforms to distribute content: Telegram, Twitter, and Facebook. Also, they are using news outlets and websites of public bodies, discussion, and video-sharing platforms. They fabricate images and video-based content to distribute material across multiple platforms to maximise coverage. (For instance, Russia created a deep fake video with President Volodymyr Zelensky telling Ukrainian troops to surrender).

Russian state propaganda creates content in different languages to reach different audiences abroad. Most widespread are Russian and English, but there are also about 30 different languages analysed in the EEAS report.  

Impersonation techniques 

Russian propagandist media outlets use impersonation as a tool to add legitimacy to their messages.

False covers imitate the style of European satirical magazines such as Charlie Hebdo (France), Titanic (Germany), and EL Jueves (Spain). As an example (not mentioned directly in the report), the fake cover of Charlie Hebdo magazine was shared on the internet, especially by Russians, as a real one. The magazine has an archive of all covers and after checking the journalists found out that this one was never made by Charlie Hebdo.

Source: DisinfoChronicle “Fake: On the cover of Charlie Hebdo, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the form of a dog with a torn-off arm of Azov’s soldier”

Furthermore, two videos copy international media Aljazeera and Euronews. There is a case where a fake animated video pretends to be an official one by the European Security and Defence College. It listed disadvantages of Ukraine joining NATO using an AI-generated voice.

An investigation of these cases showed that one was originally published by non-attributed channels and one by a Russian-attributed channel which seemed to be the original publisher of Euronews’ impersonating video. In all incidents, threat actors mainly aimed to discredit Ukraine and the Ukrainian government.

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