Since the Kremlin launched a full-scale invasion of his country five weeks ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government have used every available social media channel to rally Western support. In Facebook photos, they show Russian bombings of apartment buildings and hospitals in Ukraine. In Telegram videos, they speak passionately about the value of democracy. On Twitter, they praise the triumphs of Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield. Almost all content is translated into English. After years of US shaking hands over the power of Russian misinformation, Ukraine is showing how to drown out a Moscow propaganda drone. Live Russia-Ukraine updates For those in Mr Zelensky’s trajectory, it is an internationalization of the communication skills he has demonstrated since 2019, when he effectively used social media in his electoral victory from behind. “He rules the war by making public statements, he rules the country with his public statements,” said Serhiy Lushchenko, a former member of the Ukrainian parliament who advises the president’s chief of staff on Russian misinformation. “This is Zelensky’s standard approach, with the skills he showed during the election campaign.” The Ukrainian government has teams working on various aspects of the information operation, he said. One handles Mr Zelensky’s speeches, which include videos twice a day and regular speeches to parliaments around the world. Other groups manage his social media and produce videos from the front lines of the war. The on-site updates of the Ukrainian army have struck a particularly characteristic tone. They often combine images of cremated Russian military equipment – and occasionally, corpses of Russian soldiers – with aircraft. In a series of English-language tweets earlier this week, for example, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense shared an “Oscar” for videos of its troops defeating Russian units. “Best Actor: Javelin for Strong Performance in Burning Orcs,” read the caption of a clip of Ukrainian soldiers launching an anti-tank missile. Biden warns Xi of “consequences” if China provides military or financial support for Russian invasion of Ukraine Biden orders release of record oil reserves to address effects of Russia-Ukraine war By comparison, the Kremlin’s efforts to blame Kyiv and NATO for the war have fallen steadily among American voters. A Pew Research poll this week found that 72 percent of those polled trusted Zelensky to do the right thing, while 92 percent have no confidence in Russian President Vladimir Putin. Such results were consistent across the political spectrum. It’s a sharp blow to a propaganda campaign that was once believed to have helped overthrow the US presidential election. In 2016, hundreds of Russian trolls working for a Kremlin-linked company posed as Americans to bombard the Internet with memes and ads attacking Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. A Russian intelligence service, meanwhile, has cracked down on emailed emails sent by Democratic Party officials. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a book on the intervention, said the difference was also largely due to efforts by US President Joe Biden and other officials to “rebuild” the Russian language. propaganda. . Since late last year, Biden, his cabinet and staff have repeatedly warned that the Kremlin is gathering troops on Ukraine’s border and planning an invasion. They also reported that Moscow was planning a “false flag” operation – organizing an attack on Russia and accusing it of Ukraine. This ensured that, when Russia finally invaded, the Americans saw the war for Russian aggression as it really was. “The Biden government regularly telegraphed in anticipation of what the Russians would do, thus minimizing the possibility of Russian misinformation finding a receptive audience,” said Professor Jamieson. Another factor is that the US is not the main target of the Kremlin misinformation this time. Christopher Paul, an expert on Russian propaganda at the think tank RAND Corporation, said Moscow was now more interested in reaching out to a domestic audience, people “near abroad” in neighboring countries and Europeans in general, rather than targeting Americans. . “We are like the fourth tier audience for that,” he said. It is also unclear whether Russian misinformation has ever been particularly effective. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that Twitter users who inadvertently interacted with Russian troll accounts in 2017 did not change their political stance. The study argued that trolls interacted mainly with hyper-political social media users whose views were already polarized. And no matter how extensive the misinformation efforts, the real product was often laughable. A Facebook post created by Russia, for example, showed Jesus Christ fighting the devil with his hand under the caption “Hillary is Satan and her crimes and lies have shown how evil she is.” An Instagram post aimed at discouraging black voters leaning towards Democrats to go to the polls used a similarly awkward syntax. “We can not resort to the lesser of two devils. “Then we would definitely be better off without voting AT ALL,” he wrote. “Troll farms employed people with English skills ranging from very poor to quite good, but without much of a Western cultural conscience,” said Paul. You would look at the copy and say, ‘Wait a minute, there’s no way anyone in Texas wrote that.’ However, even though Russia’s narratives about Ukraine have not yet moved the US public, they have begun to gain some traction. Last month, the pro-Trump and pro-QAnon Telegram channels and Twitter accounts were filled with a Russian conspiracy theory: that Ukraine has secret “bio-weapons labs” controlled by the Pentagon. Tucker Carlson, the popular Fox News presenter, and Republican spokeswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene have also promoted the narrative. The Russian military added a new twist last week, claiming that the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and liberal financier George Soros were behind the workshops, linking the story to two prominent haters of the American right. Conspiracy theories can telegraph something about how far Russia is willing to go as it fights on the battlefield and in the information war. “Will they just use this argument to explain the current barbarity?” said Mr. Lusenko. “Or will they use this argument for future steps, such as the use of chemical weapons in Ukraine?” The Morning and Afternoon Newsletters are compiled by Globe editors, giving you a brief overview of the day’s most important headlines. Register today.
