Yuri Kobzar18:08, 02/16/24

At the same time, a separate campaign is being carried out in the West to discredit the Ukrainian leadership.

Russia has launched a large-scale information and psychological campaign aimed at discrediting Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and splitting Ukrainian society. The Washington Post writes about this , citing documents received by journalists.

Documents show that in January 2023, First Deputy Head of the Kremlin Administration Sergei Kiriyenko instructed a group of officials and political strategists to create a presence on Ukrainian social networks to spread disinformation. These efforts were based on the experience of previous similar campaigns.

At a meeting with subordinates on January 16, 2023, Kiriyenko outlined four key goals for this campaign: 

• discrediting the military-political leadership of Ukraine, 
• split of the Ukrainian elite, 
• demoralization of Ukrainian troops, 
• disorientation of the Ukrainian population.

The success of this information campaign was to be measured by key indicators: 

• decrease in the rating of key figures in the military-political leadership of Ukraine, 
• increasing belief among the Ukrainian population that elites care only about their own interests,
• increase in the number of resignations in the government, 
• an increase in the number of public conflicts in Ukraine.

The documents show that the Kremlin tracked progress toward these targets in nearly weekly meetings, analyzing the most popular social media posts and calculating the overall distribution of the results. The Kremlin also conducted weekly polls regarding the level of trust in Zelensky and Ukraine’s military leadership.

Among the most successful materials that were dropped into the Ukrainian information space was a fabricated post on Facebook stating that the family of the deceased soldier did not receive any help from the state. This post has received over 2 million views. Another top is a post-fake video on Telegram that the Ukrainian government intends to “fight until the last Ukrainian.”

Documents show that dozens of hired trolls produced more than 1,300 messages and 37,000 comments on Ukrainian social networks every week. For writing 100 comments a day, such trolls received 60,000 rubles a month, or about $660.

“Most of the strategists’ reports to their political leaders focused on the volume of content created and total views, but during the first five months they provided no evidence that these efforts had any impact on Ukrainians,” WP notes.

At the same time, Moscow strategists themselves admitted that they needed to avoid overt pro-Russian propaganda in order to gain the trust of their audience. Therefore, instead of the old narratives, the Russians in particular promoted the topic that Valery Zaluzhny could become the next president of Ukraine and that the West was allegedly looking for a replacement for Zelensky.

At the same time, the Kremlin waged a separate information campaign in the West, trying to discredit Vladimir Zelensky in the eyes of Europeans and Americans. Propagandists sought out and planted narratives that they hoped would destroy the image of the Ukrainian president as “the hero of a small country fighting global evil,” one of the documents reads. For this purpose, in particular, fake Ukrainian government documents were distributed with pseudo-evidence of corruption schemes in procurement for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Those plans led to hundreds of articles and thousands of social media posts, translated into French, German and English, targeting Zelensky, documents show. However, an additional goal was to create a situation where such fake news would come back to Ukraine through reposts of Ukrainian bloggers and politicians who are chasing “hype.”

(C)UNIAN 2024