‘Deny, deflect, distract’: How Russia spreads disinformation about the war in Ukraine

When a missile struck a nine-story apartment building in the southern Ukrainian city of Dnipro last week, Yevhen Fedchenko knew what to expect from Russian news coverage of the attack.

“They immediately started creating a disinformation narrative on top of the story, first of all accusing Ukraine of doing it,” Fedchenko told CBC Radio. House in an interview that aired Saturday.

Fedchenko said Russian disinformation was aimed at convincing audiences that Ukrainians bombed their own infrastructure to discredit Russia in the eyes of the world. Russian media also accused Ukrainian forces of being unable to operate military equipment provided by its western ally.

“On the one hand, it’s not a unique incident,” Fedchenko said of Russia’s coverage of the attack on the apartment building, which killed at least 45 people.

“But on the other hand, you still can’t understand how bad this system is.”

Fedchenko is one of the founders of StopFake.org, an organization made up of journalists, professors and students working at the Mohyla School of Journalism in Kyiv. The group was formed nine years ago, after Russia annexed Crimea.

Since then, StopFake.org has debunked thousands of stories – including Russian claims that Ukraine and its allies carried out a massacre of civilians in Bucha early last year, using crisis actors and photos of doctors.

Many human rights organizations have reported that Russian forces committed war crimes in Bucha and the International Criminal Court has opened an investigation into the events there, based on the reports they received.

Stopfake.org also focuses on stories that haven’t made it into the international press – such as a recent post that appeared on a Russian Telegram channel claiming that Ukrainians bought Christmas tree ornaments decorated with swastikas.

Stopfake.org says the image was taken at a German museum that once displayed Hitler-era Christmas decorations.

Fedchenko said this story fits one of the common narratives repeatedly pushed by the Russian media and propaganda machine – that Ukraine is run by the Nazis.

“This narrative was heavily promoted by Russian disinformation prior to its invasion of Ukraine in February [2022] and became one of the pretexts of the war – liberating Ukraine from the Nazis. So we have hundreds [of examples] where Ukraine and Ukrainians are mistaken for Nazis,” he said.

Fedchenko said his group has identified about 20 main “themes” promoted by Russian propaganda.

“We’ve seen it all and, to some extent, the narrative is repeating itself,” he said. “But every disinformation finds a different angle on promotion [those narratives] and find a different audience.”

Russian disinformation efforts reach Canada

While Russia has long been known for using propaganda as a military strategy, the Internet age has put its information operations “on steroids,” said Anatoliy Gruzd, director of research at the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University.

The operation targets an audience beyond Ukraine and Russia.

Russia’s troll farm – a coordinated network that sends provocative or misleading information to drive political opinion or fuel division abroad – is widely acknowledged to have tried to disrupt the results of the 2016 American presidential election. Gruzd said their work also affected Canadians.

In a study last year, Gruzd and fellow researchers found that about half of Canadians had been exposed to “at least one persistent false claim” about the war in Ukraine. Nearly half of Canadians believe “to some extent” false claims that NATO has surrounded Russia with more military bases since the end of the Cold War, the study found.

“We may think the Kremlin is distant and may not care about Canadians, but in fact the message is spreading through different channels to Canadians,” Gruzd said in an interview on House.

He said that while platforms like Twitter and Facebook proactively banned some Russian state media accounts, official accounts — such as those run by the Russian embassy — also contributed to disinformation operations.

Last year, the Russian Embassy in Canada posted a homophobic tweet.

While the content wasn’t about the war in Ukraine, Gruzd said the post tried to distract from what’s happening in eastern Europe and spread division in Canada. It was part of an overall strategy to “deny, distract and distract” through disinformation and provocative posts, he said.

“This is an information strategy to polarize the Canadian public and perhaps touch some of the population in our country that may align with these views,” he said.