Russia’s top propagandists must be tried for incitement to genocide – disinfo watchdog

This was stated by Acting Chief of the Center for Countering Disinformation at the NSDC, Andrii Shapovalov, who spoke at the final press conference on the Center’s results in 2023, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"Today, our Center’s specialists developed a complex method to detect and analyze Russian propaganda, based on which a study of the influence of propaganda on audiences in Russia, in particular, on Russian military personnel, was conducted. The main conclusion of the study is as follows: Russian POWs and those who are not yet captured use Russian propaganda narratives in the form of direct quotes and rebroadcasts, and develop Russian propaganda narratives in their own strange way. This shows that propaganda forms a motivational base for them, in particular, to join the Russian army voluntarily. I personally believe that Russia’s top propagandists should be held accountable for their ‘calls for genocide’. Today, for some reason, this topic is not covered enough and maybe it seems to them that it is all in the past, that Bucha is hardly mentioned, but we ran a study that we will present in the near future, where we found a clear connection between what Soloviov, Kiseliov, and the like say, and then we put that on the map of intercepted communications, where invaders in Bucha echo almost word for word what they heard on TV, they talk about their motives for killing and destroying Ukrainians in particular. And then we superimposed that on the map of actual murders, actual torture episodes, and these three maps coincided in many points," Shapovalov noted.

In his opinion, these data should be added to the evidence base so that Russian propagandists are held accountable over incitement to genocide.

"In fact, they are international criminals," Shapovalov concluded.

He added that the Center is constantly documenting Russia’s information crimes to confirm the genocidal nature of their warfare.

"Today, there is a group created in the General Prosecutor's Office, whom we also forward all these materials. In fact, there are many bodies involved and this work is ongoing," he assured.

According to Shapovalov, an illustrative example was when four days prior to the bombing of the Mariupol Drama Theater, Russian Telegram channels began to form an "informational alibi" for Russia, spreading messages about Ukraine allegedly preparing a strike on the theater in question.

"This is a vivid example of such efforts, where they begin to generate reports of a terrorist attack being plotted by Ukraine, as in Mariupol, supposedly to increase the level of attention of the international community to the war in Ukraine. And after that, they launch a missile strike themselves," said the head of the CCD.

Shapovalov also reported that thanks to the Center’s work, 192 hostile YouTube channels and 11 websites have already been blocked. In addition, appeals were filed to sanction 74 individuals. So far, sanctions have been imposed against five persons.

Answering the question of which smaller-scale disinformation campaigns Russia organized this year, he said it was primarily about the Ukrainian counteroffensive, the attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, and alleged conflicts among Ukraine’s military and political leadership.

"As for the most absurd fake news, the Russians did not generate anything extraordinary this year, and probably their hoaxes on combat mosquitoes and geese are hard to beat. We saw this year how a big ‘black hole’ campaign to discredit the President and First Lady developed, it was a large number of fake covers, falsified graphs, it was fake television stories from supposedly Fox News, etc.," Shapovalov said, adding that the Russians circulated fake stories about "black transplantation of organs", the sale of organs by the Ukrainian military, etc.

As Ukrinform reported earlier, the Center for Countering Disinformation at the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine monitors the activities of 449 Telegram channels, 156 foreign online resources, 101 YouTube channels, 812 speakers, and 296 organizations as part of the information war with Russia. During 2023, the Center exposed about 10,000 malign influence reports.