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Issue 29 - 7 June 2016

Russia is not aggressive. Ukraine and Belarus simply belong there!

Pro-Kremlin media continue to focus heavily on NATO, especially given the upcoming summit in Warsaw and military drills in Eastern countries of the Alliance. The exercises were called unjustified by thenation.com (http://bit.ly/1WAV3N6), which stated that the threat of Russian aggression is merely a product of the imagination. The English language article was multiplied in several other languages, including Russian (http://bit.ly/1Ur1CeP) and Czech (http://bit.ly/1r8xaPa). In analysing the "non-existent threat", however, none mentioned Russian military aggression in Ukraine, or President Putin's comments last week, that Poland and Romania might now be in

Russia’s cross-hairs (http://reut.rs/1sCRv04).

The supposedly non-aggressive attitude of the Kremlin was underlined by several other official institutions and outlets. A Belarusian website multiplied a conclusion made by the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies, the official think tank of the Kremlin, that the Belarusian nation was artificially created by the Soviet Union, and should now be returned to Russia (http://bit.ly/1WxRYh3). We heard (yet again) that Ukrainians are in fact Russians (http://bit.ly/24reUOi). In Vladimir Solovyov’s show, we were told that the Russian empire still exists and is part of Russian traditions (http://bit.ly/1PdWgSU). In Pyotr Tolstoy’s show, the audience even received a list of countries that are an integral part of the Russian world which must be reconstructed - Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Ossetia (http://bit.ly/1r9o4BY). Strange, then, that another official channel, REN TV, calls all Western neighbours of Russia “Russophobic countries” (http://bit.ly/1XuqWaU).

A number of articles in various languages condemn NATO military exercises in the Eastern countries of the Alliance. So it's worth taking another look at Radio Free Europe's thorough comparison of Russian and NATO military exercises in the period of more than two years: http://bit.ly/1ZuUXVz. There you can see that Russia’s military exercises are far, far bigger than those of the whole of NATO:

Nazis, paedophiles, zoophiles… What else can we say about Europeans?

Outlets specialized in disinformation also repeated some of their most notorious attacks on Europeans this week - the number of insults was unusually high during the recent period. Pravda.ru blamed Angela Merkel for the rise of nazism in Germany and somehow managed to link her alleged pro-nazism to her pro-refugee policy (http://bit.ly/1X04ZzQ). The same article also announced that Europe is going to legalise paedophilia in the near future. And a programme on the state channel REN TV went even further: according to Igor Prokopenko’s show, Westerners now marry dogs, pigs and crocodiles (http://bit.ly/1Y1d9Hm).

It was into a media space such as this that a Kommersant article echoed statements that HIV and AIDS are just another component of the information war the West is waging against Russia (http://bit.ly/285bkxI). History repeats itself, and in this particular disinformation, we can see a reverberation of the famous “Operation INFEKTION” from the 1980’s - a KGB disinformation campaign spreading information that HIV/AIDS was created by the USA as part of a biological weapons research (http://1.usa.gov/28hUMmp).

The tasteless misuse of children

As usual, Ukraine received a great portion of disinformation again this week. But some of the pieces were even more scandalous than usual. A separatist’s Youtube Channel announced that the Aydar battalion fighters raped 12 orphan children two years ago (http://bit.ly/1Ur8qZX). In Pyotr Tolstoy’s show, we heard that it was the Ukrainian President Petro Proshenko himself, who authorised the killings of children in Donbass (http://bit.ly/1TVU4Xs).

The tasteless misuse of children in pro-Kremlin outlets is sadly nothing new. One of the most notorious disinformation attempts from “Channel One” claimed that a small boy was crucified in Slavyansk in 2014 (http://bit.ly/1RGBQWO). And earlier this year, the same TV channel lied about a 13-year-old girl having been raped by migrants in Germany (http://bit.ly/23em8HE) - the latter disinformation used even by Foreign Minister Lavrov to attack the German authorities (http://cnn.it/1Snq82i). This week's story seems have plumbed even lower depths.

READ THE LATEST DISINFORMATION REVIEW: ISSUE TWENTY-NINE

Thank you very much for your reports, we are looking forward to new ones.

East StratCom Task Force
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