Washington (AP)-When horrific videos and photos of corpses surfaced from the Kiev suburb, the Kremlin-backed media criticized their subtle lies, a narrative that has proven journalists in Ukraine wrong.
False news reporting or spreading false information to sow confusion and eliminate its opponents is a tactic Moscow has used in recent years and made perfect with the advent of social media in places like Syria.
In a detailed broadcast, hosts of millions of Russian viewers, correspondents and state TV channels said on Tuesday that some photos and videos of the killings were fake, while others showed that Ukrainians were responsible for in bloodshed.
“Among the first to appear was Ukrainian footage showing how a lifeless body suddenly moved in the hands,” Russia-1 reported on Monday night. “And in the rearview mirror you can see that the dead are starting to rise again.”
But satellite images from early March show the dead left on the streets of Bucha for weeks. On April 2, a video from the moving car of a Ukrainian lawyer was posted on the Internet showing both bodies scattered on Bucha Jablonska Street. High-resolution Bucha satellite imagery from commercial vendor Maxar Technology, reviewed by The Associated Press, independently matched the position of the bodies to separate the video from the scene. Other Western media have similar information.
Over the weekend, AP reporters saw the bodies of dozens of people in Bucha, many of whom were shot at close range, some with their hands tied behind their backs. At least 13 bodies were in and around the building, which residents say was used as a base by Russian troops before retreating last week.
However, Russian officials and state media continue to popularize their fiction, in newspapers, on radio and television. The main article on the website of the popular pro-Kremlin newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, featured a massacre in Ukraine, with the headline: “Another strong evidence that the Bucha genocide was carried out by Ukrainian forces.”
Opinions published on Tuesday by the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti suggest that Bucha’s murder was a plot by the West to impose tougher sanctions on Russia.
Analysts note that this is not the first time in the six-week invasion of Ukraine that the Kremlin has used such an information warfare strategy to deny any crime and spread disinformation in a concerted campaign around the world.
“This is what Russia does whenever it recognizes that it has suffered from a lack of public relations because of its atrocities,” said Carey Giles, chief consultant for Russia and Eurasia at the Chatham House think tank. So the system almost works on autopilot.
Prior to the war, Russia denied U.S. intelligence reports detailing plans to attack Ukraine. Russian officials tried last month. The AP leaked photos and reported on the results of the attack on a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, in which a pregnant woman and her unborn child were killed.
Bucha’s photos and videos caused a new wave of global condemnation and disgust.
Following his video appearance at the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky listed the killings in Bucha by Russian soldiers and showed a graphic video of carbonaceous and decomposing bodies there and other cities. Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzia, dismissed them as staged.
On social media, a team of more than a dozen official Russian Twitter and Telegram teams, as well as a state-backed media Facebook page, reiterated the Kremlin’s line that photos and videos of the dead have been staged or have been staged they lied. Complaints were presented in English, Spanish and Arabic to Russian officials or Russian -backed news accounts Sputnik and RT. RT en Español in Spanish sent more than ten posts to its 18 million followers.
“Russia denies allegations of civilian killings in Bucha, near Kiev,” RT en Español reported on Sunday.
Many of the same reports tried to refute allegations that the killings were committed by Russian troops in a video by Bucha Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk taken on March 31, in which he discussed the liberation of the suburbs from occupation. Russia.
“Confirm that Russian troops have left Bucha.” There was no mention of the dead on the streets, “a senior Russian official, Mikhail Ulyanov, wrote on Twitter on Monday.
But Fedoruk publicly commented on the violence before the departure of Russian troops, in an interview with Italian news agency Adnkronos on March 28, in which he accused them of murder and rape in Bucha.
Satellite images from Maxar Technologies when Russian troops occupied Bucha on March 18 and 19 confirm Fedoruk’s report about corpses in the streets, showing at least five corpses on one street.
Some social media platforms have tried to prevent propaganda and disinformation from the Kremlin. Google blocked RT accounts, while in Europe RT and Sputnik were banned by tech company Meta, which also stopped promoting or promoting Russia’s state media sites on its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
Russia has found a way to prevent the attack on dozens of Russia’s official social media accounts through posts in various languages.
“It’s a massive messaging device that Russia controls – whether it’s official embassy accounts, bot or paid accounts, or anti -Western influencers – they have a long way to go to cope with platform restrictions, “said Brett. Schaefer, who leads the Alliance’s information management team. To guarantee democracy, a non-partisan think tank in Washington.
Associated Press writer Colin Barry contributed to Milan.
Source: Huffpost
