Russia's efforts to spread fake news about the war in Ukraine

2024-01-17 16:52:21, Kosova & Bota CNA

Since Russia launched its full-scale attack on Ukraine, experts say Moscow has stepped up its spread of fake news about Ukraine. As part of its disinformation campaign against Ukraine, Russia has made some very strange claims.

Experts say that Russia has published a large number of fake news about Ukraine, such as:

"Kiev is sending children to war. Ukraine has produced bulletproof vests for pregnant women. Ukrainian refugees give birth to children in Swiss bunkers and then sell them. A concentration camp was set up near Odesa for those who do not want to fight against Russia."

These headlines were published in the Russian media, say the leaders of the Ukrainian portal "StopFake.org", which deals with fact-checking.

The co-founder of the portal, Yevhen Fedchenko, says that even the most outlandish fake news must be checked and discredited, as the wave of disinformation continues unabated.

"Their main goal is to publish as much fake news as possible, to bombard their audience with this fake news on all platforms, not giving them the opportunity to breathe and understand what is really happening. The goal is to flood the media landscape with fake news."

Mr. Fedchenko says that in 2023, Russia's fake news was focused on the front line and Western aid to Ukraine.

"Some were created to undermine the West's confidence in Ukraine, this was the biggest category. It is clear that this is consistent with Russia's political and military goals to undermine confidence in Ukraine and curb any kind of aid to Kiev."

Mr. Fedchenko says Moscow has also released countless articles claiming that the West is sending broken machines to Ukraine, that Ukrainians don't know how to use them, and that Russia is successfully destroying them.

"We have seen articles claiming that Russia has destroyed the first F-16 fighter jets, although previously Russia had published information claiming that the Ukrainians did not know how to fly the F-16s. Even if they knew how to use them, it wouldn't change a thing! Then, this was followed by news of how Russia destroyed these planes before they arrived in Ukraine," Ukrainian expert Yevhen Fedchenko told VOA.

Russia has been using artificial intelligence to produce fake news for the past year. Mr. Fedchenko mentions two videos with fake content spread by Russia, one that purports to portray the head of Ukraine's armed forces calling for a coup d'état and another video that shows a conversation between President Zelensky and his wife. None of these videos were real.

"This video showed us that the artificial intelligence was able to analyze and 'recreate' President Zelenski's speech quite well, but failed to do the same with his wife, because she hasn't made that many speeches. Therefore, in the video we can see Mr. Zelensky speaking in Russian and his wife answering him in a strange Ukrainian dialect. Obviously, these videos didn't work.”

Mr. Fedchenko says that he and his team are doing everything to stop the flood of Russian propaganda, but it is impossible to catch all the disinformation./ VOA