The torrent of social media posts during Thursday’s attack on Ukraine harked back to the first live T.V. broadcasts of the Persian Gulf War, when visceral video of missile strikes helped usher in a new era of military reporting — and brought a foreign war into our living rooms.
But the modern combination of smartphones, social media and high-speed data links now are providing images that are almost certainly faster, more visual and more voluminous than in any previous major military conflict.
Disinformation by FSB
While Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized two breakaway regions of Ukraine as independent this week, pro-Russia online disinformation campaigners unleashed numerous images and videos depicting Ukraine as the aggressor. Their often crude efforts were promptly dismantled by experts and fact-checkers. But for Moscow, quantity overrides quality concerns.
It was not the first time that fact-checkers have called out the efforts of pro-Russian propagandists in recent days. “Lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy,” taunted Aric Toler, a researcher at Bellingcat, who monitors “made in Kremlin” disinformation.
The image of an alleged Ukrainian armored vehicle supposedly advancing into Russian territory was also promptly and effectively debunked. The Soviet-era vehicle in the photo does not belong to the Ukrainian arsenal, according to investigators at Oryx, an open-source platform specialized in military equipment and technology. “They couldn’t even get that right,” said the group in a Twitter post.
Russian spy agency Federal Security Service (FSB) is going after youtube and Twitter accounts posting actual footage of the “Ukraine Invasion” and started mass reporting against those users who are posting true story of Ukraine and suffering of the people of Ukraine.
The goal is to confuse the public and shape the narrative toward Russian interests. And it works when well-intentioned people, glued to the news and eager to contribute but confused about what’s right, inadvertently help spread propaganda to their own followers.
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolded in the early hours of Thursday morning, van Linge and hundreds of other OSINT researchers pored over the thousands of videos emerging from Ukraine.
Britain believes that Russia’s powerful FSB spy agency has been given the task of trying to engineer coups in Ukraine’s major cities in the immediate aftermath of an invasion launched by the Kremlin.
Ghost of Kyiv
Since Global Defense Corp uploaded the video of “GHOST OF KYIV: UKRAINE SHOT DOWN SU-35, MIG-29 AND IL-76 AIRCRAFT”, Global Defense Corp came under attack from Russian spy agencies tried to mass report against Global Defense Corp’s youtube channel. Global Defense Corp reported about the Ghost of Kyiv following the Twitter message from the former president of Ukraine Petro Oleksiyovych Poroshenko.
It’s a known fact that Russian spy agencies are known to fabricate stores and produce propaganda news through R.T. News and Sputnik news channel. R.T. news has been banned using as a reference in Wikipedia due to its ties with Kremlin and Vladmir Putin regime.
The U.S. will join the EU and UK in freezing the assets of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov under a new sanctions package intended to stiffen the west’s response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
According to secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, NATO members will continue supplying military weapons to Ukraine, including air defense systems.
Once the narrative of war is going against Russia, a slipping military timetable and stronger resistance than Russia expected may lead Moscow to unleash indiscriminate force in Ukraine, western officials and analysts have warned, including the use of thermobaric bombs.
Former KGB Putin instructed his trolls and spy agencies to go after Twitter accounts and Youtube channels which broadcast Russian losses such as destroyed Russian Tanks, helicopters, fighter jets, armored vehicles and surrender of Russian soldiers.
During the 2016 U.S. election campaign, Videos posted to the YouTube channel, which was live until earlier this week, apparently focused on criticizing and abusing Hillary Clinton, including accusing her of being a racist and spreading various conspiracy theories about the Clintons, along with pro-Trump commentary.
A YouTube channel implicated in Russian disinformation operations to target the U.S. 2016 election has been taken down by Google.
The Kremlin’s media goal is to create a false narrative for invasion. As part of this strategy, Russian TV has begun actively promoting information that suggests Russia is the victim and Ukraine is the aggressor. It has been claimed that Russian residents have come under heavy Ukrainian shelling, which Kyiv says is not true.
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