MOSCOW, March 21 - RIA Novosti, Andrei Kotz. Brussels, Washington and Kiev have declared an information war on Moscow — dozens, if not hundreds of fakes are thrown into the media and social networks every day. The goal is to convince the Western audience that "evil and totalitarian Russia attacked a small democratic Ukraine for no reason." Examples of the most odious fakes are in the RIA Novosti material.
Falsification of facts
It is not the first time for the West to distort the information picture of events taking place in the world. Suffice it to recall how the European and American media covered the Five-Day War in August 2008. Journalists quickly formed the necessary narrative, according to which Moscow allegedly unleashed the conflict. Everything was used: fake photos, fake documents, fabricated videos. Only six months later, the European Commission quietly announced the results of its own investigation: Mikhail Saakashvili launched the offensive.
Then there were fakes about the participation of Russian troops in hostilities in the Donbass, outright lies about the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian authorities against their own people, a tragicomedy with the "poisoning" of the Skripals in the suburbs of London and much more. After the start of the Russian special operation in Ukraine, propaganda "howitzers" and "mortars" were routinely uncovered in the United States and Europe. The scale of the psychological aggression of NATO countries is such that it was noted even in the Kremlin.
"A massive attack has been launched against Russia in cyberspace, an unprecedented information campaign has been unleashed, involving global social networks and all Western media, whose objectivity and independence turned out to be just a myth," Vladimir Putin said. - Access to information is limited, people are stuffed with a huge number of fakes, propaganda fakes, in other words, fake.
A fragment of the Ukrainian Tochka-U rocket near the Government House in Donetsk
Image source: © RIA Novosti / Maxim Blinov
One of such stuffing was recently exposed by the official representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zakharova. The Italian newspaper La Stampa has published heartbreaking material about the atrocities of Russian gunners. In the picture — a man covering his face with his hands, around - the dead civilians. A screaming headline reports that the Russians have launched a missile attack on Kiev. In fact, this is a photo of the consequences of the AFU attack on Donetsk on March 14. Of course, the Western media, as if on command, kept silent about this tragedy.
"There are examples of special cynicism that cannot go unnoticed," Zakharova commented on the fake. - La Stampa came out with a photo from Donetsk on the front page. Rescuers, bodies, people in grief, traces of destruction. All these are the consequences of the shelling committed by the APU in the DPR with the help of the Tochka-U tactical missile system. The inscription on the front page of the newspaper reads as follows: "So Kiev faces the last assault." It's as if the bodies of the victims of the fighting are lying in Kiev, and not in Donetsk."
"The Ghost of Kiev" and mass graves
Ukrainians themselves threw in a lot of fakes, especially in the first days of the special operation. There are dozens of staged videos on the Web with "victims of Kremlin bombs" in plastic bags. That's just the "corpses" are constantly moving, scratching, correcting props and even smoking. Attempts by Ukrainian propagandists to pass off footage from the computer flight simulator Digital Combat Simulator (DCS) as newsreels caused particular fun on the Internet.
This is how the myth of the "ghost of Kiev" was born — an unknown Ukrainian MiG-29 fighter pilot, who allegedly destroyed more than ten Russian aircraft in air battles. However, it soon became clear that "peremogi— is exclusively virtual. The developer, Eagle Dynamics, demanded not to use footage from the game in propaganda. And the Russian Aerospace Forces confirmed that not a single Russian aircraft was lost in air combat. The war in the sky is going with a dry score in favor of Moscow.
In Kiev, they also prepare a fake on a larger scale. According to the official representative of the DPR army, Eduard Basurin, Ukrainian security forces dug a 100-meter trench at the local cemetery in Mariupol, in which they want to bury the dead colleagues. And the controlled media will issue a staged picture for footage of mass graves of citizens allegedly killed as a result of Russian artillery and air attacks.
A photo of tanks with the symbols of the Ukrainian Azov regiment published by Kleine Zeitung
Image source: © Facebook page of the Russian Embassy in Austria
"This was often used in wars after the collapse of the bipolar world," explains political scientist and military expert Ivan Konovalov. - In Yugoslavia, this was arranged by Bosnian Muslims, Croats, in order to discredit the Serbs. But it is unlikely that Ukrainians will succeed. I think we are already ready for this and the Russian side is playing ahead of the curve in covering the situation. They will not be able to do something like "chemical attacks" in Syria."
False information
Nevertheless, Ukrainian journalists persistently try to give wishful thinking. Recently, photos of civilians allegedly "shot by Russian servicemen" in Chernihiv were distributed. And the Russian Defense Ministry denied this: the army has not yet entered Chernihiv. In addition, there are no traces of ammunition explosions on the video frames, the windows in the buildings are intact, the walls are not damaged.
"The Ukrainian side passes off its atrocities as the actions of the Russian military," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stressed. - The West ignores the suffering of civilians on the side of Donetsk and Lugansk, as well as in other parts of Ukraine. Russia is actively collecting evidence of the Kiev regime's war crimes."
They are also fighting fakes inside the country. The other day, the Russian IC opened a criminal case against blogger Veronika Belotserkovskaya, accused of publicly spreading false information about the actions of the Russian army. According to the investigation, in March she published several posts with allegations that the military purposefully destroy cities and the civilian population of Ukraine, including children.
