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When news first emerged last month that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was preparing to fire his top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, officials in Moscow seemed jubilant. They had been trying to orchestrate just such a split for many months, documents show.
“We need to strengthen the conflict between Zaluzhny and Zelensky, along the lines of ‘he intends to fire him,’” one Kremlin political strategist wrote a year ago, after a meeting of senior Russian officials and Moscow spin doctors, according to internal Kremlin documents.
. . .
The Kremlin instruction resulted in thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles, created by troll farms and circulated in Ukraine and across Europe, that tried to exploit what were then rumored tensions between the two Ukrainian leaders, according to a trove of Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The files, numbering more than 100 documents, were shared with The Post to expose for the first time the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Zelensky with the aim of dividing and destabilizing Ukrainian society — efforts that Moscow dubbed “information psychological operations.”
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Gambashidze, Tupikin and their colleagues proposed narratives they hoped would destroy Zelensky’s image in the West as “the hero of a small country fighting a global evil,” one of the documents sent in April shows. They suggested portraying Zelensky as an actor only capable of following a script written for him by the United States and NATO, and his Western backers as tiring of him. They proposed distributing fake Ukrainian government documents as evidence of corrupt military procurement schemes, and suggesting that Zelensky and his family had Western bank accounts, the document shows.
The plans led to hundreds of articles and thousands of social media posts translated into French, German and English that targeted Zelensky, the document trove shows.
I think I know a few who have been repeating these talking points.
Gee like some terminally online .ml accounts?
Tankies gonna tank, even if those tanks are older than the tanks that originally gave them that name.
Those would be my Eastern European parents :(
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
The files, numbering more than 100 documents, were shared with The Post to expose for the first time the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Zelensky with the aim of dividing and destabilizing Ukrainian society — efforts that Moscow dubbed “information psychological operations.”
But with Gen. Zaluzhny now out, the front lines frozen and further military and financial support from the United States uncertain, some in Kyiv are concerned that Russia’s covert propaganda efforts could begin to erode national cohesion and morale.
The documents show how in January 2023 the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, tasked a team of officials and political strategists with establishing a presence on Ukrainian social media to distribute disinformation.
The effort built on an earlier project that Kiriyenko, a longtime Putin aide, had been running to subvert Western support for Ukraine, including in France and Germany, previous reporting by The Post shows.
The documents show that progress was monitored at near-weekly Kremlin meetings, where the strategists gave dashboard presentations showcasing the most widely read posts they’d planted in Ukrainian social media and tallying the overall distribution of their output.
The Kremlin then issued orders to create similar posts or “additional reality” — a term used by Russian officials for fake news — including reports that Western leaders were looking for a replacement for Zelensky and that Zaluzhny intended to halt the counteroffensive.
The original article contains 2,331 words, the summary contains 229 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Zelensky was already in the middle of some corruption scandals before the war, but with or without lies contaminating the subject, it is now taboo.
Russian propaganda campaign against Ukraine did not just start when the latest invasion began. Why would you assume said timing to be indicative of anything?
Also, a source for your claim would be appreciated. I do not remember reading anything of the kind before the current phase of the war.
Ok, so let’s go further back, do you think russia has been boycotting zelensky even before he was presient? Why would they make such an effort, and why hasn’t anyone managed to dismantle so many old ruses?
I didn’t save any links but it seems easy to find sources, for example:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/4/pandora-papers-ukraine-leader-seeks-to-justify-offshore-accountsdo you think russia has been boycotting zelensky even before he was presient? Why would they make such an effort
Your example is from two years after he became president. Not from the time before.
But the files obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and published on Sunday claimed that Zelenskyy and his partners established a network of offshore companies back in 2012.
The report also found that Zelenskyy, just before he was elected, transferred his stake in one of the offshore companies to his top aide Serhiy Shefir – the target of a shooting attack last month.
That is the relevant date, isn’t it? This news piece was written after he became president.
Fair point, unfortunately I doubt it is easy to find international news prior to his notoriety.
This is already reliable news, but I guess it will be popularly dismissed anyway. I find it worrying that corruption cases (with solid evidence) are dismissed by easily using russia as a scapegoat.
I think people underestimate the difficulty of forging a convincing case, and overestimate russian agents.
