Censorship In February 2017, the Russian
Minister of Defence acknowledged the existence of "information operations forces" in Russia. In 2021,
Open Media,
The Moscow Times, and the Moscow bureau of
Deutsche Welle were also shut down. Russian schools would have to follow the official curriculum. After the 2022 legislation made it illegal to publish information on the Ukrainian war that the Kremlin deems "false", some Western media withdrew their reporters, due to safety concerns. Independent Russian media outlets shut down, including
TV Rain and
Novaya Gazeta, whose editor had received the
Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. News website
Znak announced its closing, and
Ekho Moskvy, owned by Kremlin-linked
Gazprom, also shut down. The websites of
Deutsche Welle, the
BBC,
Meduza and
Radio Free Europe became inaccessible from within Russia without a
VPN. Russia also jammed commercial broadcast signals and penetrated both civilian and military communications networks.
Oleksandr Danylyuk, former secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, said that "Russia, they own or operate Ukrainian cellular companies, banks, electricity. They don't need to hack anything. It's a secret war conducted by agents of influence."
Telecommunications Russia's Leer-3 drone system can listen to, or suppress, cellular communications, and even send text messages to front-line soldiers. Ukrainian soldiers have received texted jeers and threats from the Russians on their cell phones, and family members of Ukrainian soldiers have also reported receiving calls saying that those soldiers were dead. Lack of tactical communications have been an issue for the Russian military, to the point where some troops in Georgia received their orders from an Air Force officer who arrived by helicopter. Then-president
Dmitry Medvedev ordered an expansion of the military's radio system in 2009, with a contract to a manufacturer partially owned by a former Medvedev advisor.
Internet infrastructure On 9 March 2022, Internet service provider suffered an outage in
Kharkiv and other cities caused by a factory reset of several of its devices. Recovery efforts were hampered by shelling in the area at the time, which made it dangerous to go on-site and may have damaged internet connectivity. Attackers had previously disrupted its connectivity and
DNS routing on 24 February. National telecoms operator
Ukrtelecom in late March also suffered, then recovered from, a major cyber-attack. In Russia, as of 14 March 2022,
peering agreements were still in place but a new regulation was expected that would ban web hosting outside Russia and require the use of official DNS servers. In early March,
Transit providers
Lumen and
Cogent both left Russia, but this had a limited effect on the Russian internet connectivity because they continued to peer with some of the larger Russian ISPs, such as
Rostelecom and Rascom, at exchanges outside Russia.
War propaganda ,
Crimea, 29 April 2022 Information warfare has deep roots in Russia. In addition to presenting a Russian narrative and version of events, it strives to cause confusion and cast doubt on the idea of truth. Russia transmits war propaganda through news media in its ongoing war against Ukraine. As early as September 2008,
Alexander Dugin, a Russian
fascist known as "Putin's brain", advocated an invasion of Ukraine and other countries that had previously been part of the USSR: On 14 March,
Marina Ovsyannikova, an editor at Channel One, interrupted a live broadcast to protest the Russian invasion of Ukraine, carrying a poster that said in Russian and English: "Stop the war, don't believe the propaganda, here you are being lied to."
RT, a Russian
state-controlled television network, was officially banned in the
European Union and suspended by television service providers in several other countries. YouTube blocked RT and
Sputnik across Europe to prevent Russian disinformation. Many RT journalists resigned after Russia invaded Ukraine. ,
Saky, Crimea, 9 May 2022 Russian teachers received detailed instructions on teaching about the invasion of Ukraine. The
Mayakovsky Theatre in Moscow received a government email "to refrain from any comments on the course of military actions in Ukraine", warning that any negative comments would be "regarded as treason against the Motherland". According to Pjotr Sauer of
The Guardian, many Russians still support Putin and don't believe that the "special military operation" in Ukraine is related to Russian propaganda and disinformation. Polls conducted by the
Levada Center, between 17 and 21 February, found that 60% of respondents blamed the US and NATO for escalating tensions, while only 4% blamed Russia. Similarly, an independent telephone survey from 28 February to 1 March found that 58% of Russian respondents approved of the military operation. However, a series of four online polls by Alexei Navalny's
Anti-Corruption Foundation found that, between 25 February and 3 March, the share of respondents in Moscow who considered Russia an "aggressor" increased from 29% to 53%, while the share of those who considered Russia a "peacemaker" fell by half, from 25% to 12%. and
Margarita Simonyan. Most reports in the Russian media about the war in Ukraine focus on alleged atrocities of Ukrainian "fascists" against the people of Donbas. with younger Russians generally opposed to it and older Russians more likely to accept the narrative presented by state-controlled
media in Russia. Kataryna Wolczuk of
Chatham House said, "[Older] Russians are inclined to believe the official narrative that Russia is defending Russian speakers in Ukraine, so it's offering protection rather than aggression." On 12 March,
YouTube blocked an unspecified number of media outlets controlled by the Russian state, including
RT and
Sputnik, citing its policy against content that "
denies, minimizes, or trivializes well-documented violent events". presented the invasion as a liberation mission and accused Ukrainian troops of attacking civilian targets.
Mediazona, an independent Russian media outlet, reported that the
FSB had fabricated a video of a woman accusing Ukraine of war crimes in
Mariupol, and shared screenshots of emails instructing media outlets not to reveal the source of the video.
Alexei Navalny tweeted in April 2022 that "warmongers" among Russian state media personalities "should be treated as war criminals". On 13 April 2014, NATO Secretary-General
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in a statement posted on the alliance's website, accused Russia of promoting war and wanting to overthrow Ukraine. In early 2022, the United States government warned that Russia was planning a
false flag operation to invade Ukraine, pointing to "a pattern of Russian behavior" that included invading and occupying parts of Georgia in 2008, and noting Russia's "failure to honor its 1999 commitment to withdraw its troops and munitions from
Moldova, where they remain without the government's consent." In 2014, Vladimir Putin called opponents of the war nothing more than "traitors" and a "
fifth column". The throttling of information into Russia also starves the Kremlin's own information diet. The
Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in 2022 that the Ukrainian invasion "bears an eerie resemblance to Soviet decision making in 1979 to invade Afghanistan": poor intelligence, misreading the international reaction, over-optimism, and an incomprehension of the costs.
Propaganda in other countries Chinese diplomats, government agencies, and state-controlled
media in China have used the war as an opportunity to deploy anti-American propaganda, and they have amplified conspiracy theories created by Russia, such as the false claims that public health facilities in Ukraine are "secret US biolabs". Such conspiracy theories have also been promoted by Cuban state media. Russian propaganda has also been repeated by the state-controlled outlets of other countries, such as Serbia, and also Iran. In Iran, the state media criticised the
British embassy in Tehran after it raised the Ukrainian flag in support of Ukraine. Reports from Sputnik have been actively republished by Iran's pro-regime media. In Latin America,
RT Actualidad is a popular channel that has spread disinformation about the war. Authorities in Vietnam have instructed reporters not to use the word "invasion" and to minimize coverage of the war. In South Africa, the governing
African National Congress published an article, in its weekly newsletter
ANC Today, endorsing the notion that Russia had invaded Ukraine to denazify it.
Control of news outlets Public relations Russia has learned to use respected Western media—such as BBC News, Reuters, and AFP—to promote anti-Ukrainian propaganda. These media outlets were unprepared for the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014, and often became unintentional distributors of Russian anti-Ukrainian propaganda. Russia has also learned to skillfully use Western
public relations (PR) companies to disseminate narratives that serve the interests of various Russian government institutions and private corporations. The Kremlin has instructed official Russian television outlets to rebroadcast clips of
Tucker Carlson's television shows "as much as possible".
Marjorie Taylor Greene has also received favorable coverage on Kremlin media, as when she said that the US was responsible for the 2014 overthrow of the Russian puppet government in the Ukrainian
Revolution of Dignity.
Ukraine Many Ukrainian news outlets are financed by wealthy investors. Some of these investors have close ties to Russian political power. Four financial-political groups control nearly all broadcasting in Ukraine. The top 20 most-viewed TV channels almost all belong to Ukraine's wealthiest oligarchs: •
Rinat Akhmetov, richest man in Ukraine, who supports the
Opposition Bloc, the successor to the
Party of Regions, the party of President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014. •
Yevhen Murayev's
NewsOne and Nash TV essentially replaced Medvedchuk's pro-Russian outlets and received the same funding. A decline in advertising revenues has left media outlets even more dependent on support from politicised owners, hence hindering their editorial independence. Paid content disguised as news (known as
jeansa) remains widespread in the Ukrainian media, weakening their and their journalists' credibility, especially during electoral campaigns. Media ownership remains opaque, despite a February 2014 bill requiring full disclosure of ownership structures. •
StarLightMedia is linked to the billionaire
Viktor Pinchuk and includes six television and several other media and advertising companies. Oligarch-owned media outlets under the control of Rinat Akhmetov: •
Media Group Ukraine owns the following subsidiaries: • youth entertainment TV channel NLO-TV • News channel Ukraine 24, national
FTA TV channel • Thematic TV channels Football 1, Football 2, Football 3 • Regional TV channel Channel 34 •
Segodnya Multimedia • Telecom
Ukrtelecom •
SCM Holdings, which holds the following subsidiaries: Akhmetov has been its
sole proprietor since 2009. • Landline business Vega Telecom. • Russian-language newspaper
Segodnya, which has drawn criticism for coverage allegedly favoring certain politicians and public figures according to journalists at the paper.
Russia , chief of Russia's main state-controlled TV station
Channel One. About 85% of Russians get most of their information from Russian state media. Russian media have been used for propaganda to persuade domestic and world audiences. Among the best-known are
Sputnik,
RT (formerly RussiaToday),
RIA Novosti, and
Life (formerly
LifeNews). Employees of Russian news outlets have been resigning since the 2022 incursion into Ukraine: "English-language RT staff member and one frequent RT contributor in Moscow have quit the network in recent days over the editorial position on the war, the
Guardian has learned." Liliya Gildeyeva, an anchor on the state-run channel NTV, also resigned. Marina Ovsyannikova has been hired by the German media company Die Welt, a month after she drew worldwide attention for bursting onto the set of a live broadcast on Russian state television to protest the war in Ukraine.
RT RT is an important Russian weapon in the information war. In 2014,
John Kerry, then
United States Secretary of State, called it a state-sponsored "propaganda bullhorn". Its audience in 2015 was 700 million people in more than 100 countries. In 2012, RT had the highest government spending per employee in the world, $183 thousand per person. As of 2014, Russia had spent more than $9 billion on its propaganda. In 2021, it increased the state media budget to 211 billion rubles (about $2.8 billion), 34 billion rubles ($460 million) more than the previous year.
Russian interference with Ukrainian media On 6 March 2014, "
1 + 1" and
Channel 5 in the territory of the
Autonomous Republic of Crimea were turned off and
Russia 24 captured the broadcasting frequencies of Crimea's private "Chernomorskaya TV and Radio Company". In
Simferopol, state television and radio broadcaster Krym was surrounded by people in camouflage uniforms. General Director Stepan Gulevaty called the police, but they did not respond. On 6 March 2014, an Internet poll on the
ATR TV website found that most respondents opposed the annexation of Crimea. The next day the Russian military in Crimea disconnected the ATR website. They also shut down the analogue broadcast signal of the Ukrainian TV channel
Inter, on whose frequencies
NTV is broadcast. In July 2019, Hetzner Online warned
The Ukrainian Week that the site would be blocked until "extremist content" was removed. The provider had received a request to do this from Roskomnadzor, which considers the website's 2015 material on
Right Sector a violation of Russian legislation. For several months,
distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) were carried out against Ukrainian information sites—Censor.NET, Tizhden.ua,
Ukrayinska Pravda, and others, as well as the website of the
Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine—during which ads for former-president Yanukovych were broadcast. Similarly, in January 2022 Ukrainian cyber official Victor Zhora reported attacks on over 90 websites of 22 government groups on 14 January 2022. About 50 websites were vandalized while the remainder suffered some damage.
Methods and resources Disinformation Russia uses disinformation: to support an image of its greatness and importance or of the weakness of its enemies, or sometimes to deny its own actions. Kyiv "hasn't been bombed by anyone",
Channel One pundit
Artyom Sheynin assured viewers on 24 February 2022, for example. Also on 24 February, "explosions and gunfire were heard through the day in Ukraine's capital and elsewhere in the country, with at least 70 people reported killed", according to Reuters. Most Russians get their information from television, The untethering of Russian news sources from facts does not just affect the populace. The Kremlin has been described as "a bunch of old men who can't quite get over the fact that they're no longer running a superpower, and who also are increasingly surrounded by people who tell them what they want to hear".
Falsehoods and adamant denials Greg Pryatt, former US ambassador to Ukraine, said: "You could spend every hour of every day trying to bat down every lie, to the point where you don't achieve anything else. And that's exactly what the Kremlin wants.":59
2014 In November 2013, the pro-Russian Ukrainian president
Viktor Yanukovych blocked the legislatively-approved (in the
Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament) course towards
European integration, and the
Revolution of Dignity began. Putin "used disinformation to lay the groundwork to annex
Crimea in 2014, and to support continued fighting in Ukraine's Eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk", wrote
Forbes contributor Jill Goldenziel. In 2014, Putin denied for quite some time sending troops into Ukraine. He later said Russia was "protecting" the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine. When Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, it gave many alternative explanations for its actions there as well, and denied having plans to attack it. That same year, Putin again denied his invasion, despite photos of military vehicles there from the
North Caucasus Military District. The soldiers had forgotten to camouflage an icon of the Guards Division on one vehicle. They also carried the
Dragunov self-loading sniper rifle), which is only used by the Russian military. In 2022, Kremlin propaganda had the goal of preparing world public opinion for the invasion of Ukraine. In March 2022, Russians said they had found evidence at the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear power plant that Ukraine was working on a nuclear bomb. Experts scoffed at the claim, which they said was both impossible with the fuel there and not how anyone would run a secret weapons program.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 The most fake tweets in a day, or on a single topic, by Russian disinformation agency
Internet Research Agency (IRA), followed the
shooting down of the Malaysian MH17 airliner. Russia took extensive measures and gave many narratives to hide its involvement. In the three days after the crash, the Russian
Internet Research Agency posted 111,486 tweets from fake accounts, mostly in Russian. At first they said that Russian-backed rebels downed a Ukrainian plane; later tweets said Ukraine had shot the airliner down. RT quoted a Twitter account purportedly of an air traffic controller named Carlos who said he had seen Ukrainian fighter jets following the airliner. Supposedly, Ukraine mistook the airliner for the Russian presidential jet. In August 2015,
Komsomoloskaya Pravda published a wiretap transcript of two named
CIA operatives planning the MH17 attack, a transcript ridiculed for its poor English that recalled "Google translated Russian phrases read from a script". On 20 December 2017, a report by the Intelligence and Security Committee of the
British Parliament specifically emphasized that Russia had waged a massive information war, using intense, multi-channel propaganda to convince the world that Russia did not shoot down the plane.
2022 in
Donbas, a state-sponsored event in Kursk in July 2023 In 2022 Russia insisted it was merely conducting military exercises on the Ukrainian borders, then declared that it needed to protect Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. Russia also amassed troops at the Ukrainian border with Belarus and held naval exercises in the
Black Sea and
Sea of Azov that made navigation "virtually impossible" and which Kyiv called "an unjustified complication of international shipping". On 15 February 2022, Russia said it would "partially pull back" from Ukraine's borders, but, according to the US, in fact sent additional troops. "We can't really take the Russians for their word" said Canadian ambassador to the United Nations
Bob Rae, after Russia resumed shelling within hours of announcing a ceasefire for civilian evacuation. After shelling a nuclear power plant complex in
Zaporizhzhia during the invasion, the Kremlin said its military seized it "to prevent Ukrainians and neo-Nazis from 'organizing provocations'". On 21 September 2022, Putin announced a
partial mobilisation, following a successful Ukrainian
counteroffensive in Kharkiv. In his address to the Russian audience, Putin claimed that the "Policy of intimidation, terror and violence" against the Ukrainian people by the pro-Western "Nazi" regime in Kyiv "has taken on ever more terrible barbaric forms", Ukrainians have been turned into "cannon fodder", and therefore Russia has no choice but to defend "our loved ones in Ukraine." In October 2022, Russian-American writer and professor
Nina Khrushcheva said, alluding to
George Orwell's novel
1984, that in "Putin's Russia, war is peace, slavery is freedom, ignorance is strength and illegally annexing a sovereign country’s territory is fighting colonialism." British historian
Jade McGlynn wrote that in occupied Ukrainian territories in 2022, after seizing control over mobile internet offices and equipment and installing their own networks, Russian first unrolled propaganda of the same type as in 2014. In the first six months of occupation, the goal of propaganda was to convince Ukrainians living at the occupied territories that the Russian official version of the war is correct and the Ukrainian one is false. This propaganda was of low quality and failed to convince the population. After the initial six months, they switched to a different propaganda mode, in which the war was mentioned as rarely as possible, and the propagandists behaved as if the occupied territories had always been Russian. They instead referred to Ukrainians as occupiers, and to the territories claimed but not controlled by Russia, such as the city of
Zaporizhzhia, as "temporarily occupied by Ukrainian militants". This narrative has been consistently advanced by the federal, local, and social media.
Tropes , described "as a fanatical pro-Putin propagandist", voiced support for his country's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In 2015, he had publicly claimed that "all of Ukraine is going to be ours". Since the collapse of the USSR, Russia has circulated propaganda and disinformation to demonize Ukrainians. The need for protection from neo-Nazis plays a recurring role in Russian propaganda, such as justifying the 2022 invasion as a necessary "denazification". Russia "has an extensive network of allies and front organizations, and reconstructs reality and rewrites history to legitimize itself and undermine others", said a 2018 article in
Nature. In the early 1990s, the first such propaganda tropes presented events with the phrases "after the collapse of the USSR", and "with the collapse of the USSR", to create the impression that these phenomena arose because of the collapse of the USSR, and not the reverse. Propaganda tried to portray Ukraine as economically and politically bankrupt as a state. In 2009, Russia accused Ukraine of "
stealing Russian gas". Ukrainian figures have been quoted making allegedly provocative statements. A criminal case was brought against the leader of the Ukrainian
Right Sector,
Dmytro Yarosh, for supposedly publishing an appeal to
Dokka Umarov to carry out terrorist attacks in the Russian Federation. A day later, authorities announced that the "appeal" had been the work of hackers. In the same way as Russian propaganda sought to portray its swift victory as inevitable against incompetent Ukrainian commanders, Russian media also sought to create fear by propagating stereotypes of the savagery of its own Chechen fighters.
Social media In 2022, Russian government groups posed as independent news entities and created fake personas on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram, as well as on the Russian-language social media sites
Odnoklassniki and
V Kontakte, to disseminate Russian narratives, such as the alleged helplessness of Ukrainians and videos of their fighters surrendering. According to
The Washington Post, in 2014 the Russian military intelligence service (
GRU) created more than 30 pseudo-Ukrainian groups and social media accounts, as well as 25 "leading English-language" publications. Posing as ordinary Ukrainians, intelligence operatives concocted news and disseminated comments to turn pro-Russian citizens against anti-Russian protesters. In early 2016, Ukrainian journalists discovered a network of dozens of social media groups, run from Moscow on multiple social media, that used nationalist rhetoric to undermine the Ukrainian government and mobilize pro-Russian protesters.
Access to social media • In October 2017,
MSNBC reported that Russian information warfare operatives "reported" the
Facebook posts of Ukrainian activists, baselessly claiming that they were pornography or another regulated type of message. • On 14 July 2014, Facebook blocked the page "Book of Memory of the Fallen for Ukraine", after warning that the content of some messages "violate(d) Facebook standards". They were primarily messages about the death of Ukrainian soldiers from the Special Operations Detachment (OZSP) "
Azov", of the
Popular Resistance of Ukraine (NSU). A few days later Russia announced it would block access to Instagram.
Attempts to censor Russian Wikipedia Ever since the early 2010s, Russian Wikipedia and its editors have experienced numerous and increasing threats of
nationwide blocks and country-wide enforcement of
blacklisting by the
Russian government, as well as several attempts at
Internet censorship, propaganda, and disinformation, more recently during the
2014 Russo-Ukrainian war in the Donbas region and the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War. In February and March 2022, In April–July 2022, the Russian authorities put several Wikipedia articles on their list of forbidden sites, and then ordered search engines to mark Wikipedia as a violator of Russian laws. ==Timeline==