Reality Check Commentary: The Kremlin’s Disinformation Campaign Against Its Own People
"Last week’s horrific terrorist attack on a concert venue near Moscow gives a rare glimpse into how the Kremlin also uses disinformation against its own people," writes NewsGuard Co-CEO Gordon Crovitz
Welcome to a special edition of NewsGuard's Reality Check, a report on how misinformation online is undermining trust — and who’s behind it.
The Kremlin’s Disinformation Campaign Against Its Own People
By Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard Co-CEO
NewsGuard analysts routinely monitor how Vladimir Putin’s government deploys falsehoods and divisive narratives abroad as a key weapon of its foreign policy, both to justify Russia’s actions, such as its invasion of Ukraine, and to drive wedges between people in the various democracies. Last week’s horrific terrorist attack on a concert venue near Moscow gives a rare glimpse into how the Kremlin also uses disinformation against its own people.
Russian news broadcasts soon after the attack instantly blamed Ukraine, an accusation Putin himself made in his first public comments before eventually admitting that the perpetrators were Islamists. He pointed at Ukraine despite U.S. intelligence earlier this month sharing specific information with the Kremlin that ISIS affiliates planned to attack large gatherings in Russia. A measure of the Kremlin’s tight control over domestic media is that Putin apparently was not concerned that Russians might criticize him for blaming Ukraine after ignoring the U.S. warnings about ISIS.
Russia disinforming Russians: Domestic Russian media quickly spread the Kremlin-approved claim that Ukraine was to blame. Even after ISIS took responsibility and shared video footage from the attack, top propagandists denied the claim. The editor-in-chief of Kremlin-operated RT, Margarita Simonyan, posted on Telegram, “ISIS was nowhere near there.”
According to reporting by NewsGuard analysts, Russian disinformation claims targeting Russians were manufactured soon after the attack, but would appear persuasive to people who don’t have access to reliable sources:
The day of the attack, a popular Russian TV channel and the Russian defense ministry spread a deepfake video purporting to show Ukrainian defense official Oleksiy Danilov admitting that Ukraine played a role in the Moscow concert hall attack. NewsGuard analysts concluded that the video was spliced from two separate YouTube interview videos about other topics from earlier this month (see NewsGuard’s Misinformation Fingerprint here).
Also the day of the attack, Russian state TV host Vladimir Solovyov spread the claim on Telegram that a van that carried the four alleged gunmen had a Ukrainian license plate. On close inspection, it’s clear the license plate is in fact Belarusian (see NewsGuard’s MisinformationFingerprint here), but the false claim generated millions of views.
RT used the attack to recycle false claims it originally made in 2022 that Ukraine recruits ISIS terrorists to fight in the war, who are supposedly trained at an American military base in Syria (see NewsGuard’s Misinformation Fingerprint here).
Don’t trust. Do verify: In all the reporting on Russian disinformation targeting people abroad through outlets, such as the local-language versions of RT targeting the U.S., France, and Spain, it’s easy to overlook that the government-controlled media targeting Russians in Russia also operates on false claims and other propaganda. People outside Russia at least have the option to rely instead on reliable sources and not let themselves be made victims of the Kremlin’s attacks on truth.
Gordon Crovitz is the Co-CEO and Co-Editor-In-Chief of NewsGuard. Previously, he was publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
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