Last week there was a big show in town: the Kremlin and its information manipulation and disinformation apparatus worked around the clock to proclaim the dawn of a multipolar world order from the proverbial rooftops. The town was Kazan, Russia, and the show was the 16th annual BRICS Summit. Since the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin alleging his responsibility for war crimes in Ukraine, it has become more than a little difficult for the Kremlin’s master to travel abroad. Hence, the pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets now spared no effort to portray the Summit as an extraordinary diplomatic feat by Russia and in their nauseatingly flattering praises elevated Putin to the role of chief architect of a new world order to come.
For all the pomp and circumstance of the BRICS Summit conjured by the Kremlin’s disinformation-steeped showrunners, the contentious election in neighbouring Georgia also did not escape the pro-Kremlin disinformation treatment. The Kremlin’s disinformation apparatus has been targeting Georgia for a long time. Even after the ostensibly pro-Kremlin Georgian Dream party claimed victory, Moscow’s well-oiled disinformation machine continues to spin its lies. That comes no surprise since the political opposition is openly contesting results, while international organisations and other bodies report violations observed during the campaign and on election day. So, the pro-Kremlin outlets now try to depict popular protests and increasing calls for a transparent inquiry into the violations as ‘foreign interference’.
Bricklayer-in-chief hard at work
The core narrative about the BRICS Summit in Kazan coming from the pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets focused on depicting Russia, and by extension Putin, as the prime driving force behind creating a new, multipolar world order, and the Summit as a testament to global acquiescence to the Russian worldview. Some even called it a ‘historical milestone’ that will ‘steer humanity toward a new development path’ and claimed to represent the global majority, even if the math did not quite add up.
The Kremlin’s pundits focused their messaging on claims that BRICS is a symbol of unification of the ‘Global South’ and depicted the expansion of the BRICS format as the result of Putin’s tireless work and diplomatic prowess. Some were also keen to cast Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine as Russia’s noble quest to end Western hegemony and create a better world for everyone. Invariably, the drummed-up success of the Summit was juxtaposed with snide comments ridiculing the West as weak and ineffective in the face of the growing importance of BRICS.
But at the end of the day, the limelight was cast on Putin himself, as the bricklayer-in-chief creating a better world. The pro-Kremlin disinformation ecosystem portrayed him as nothing short of a knight in shining armour, even if the style of such reporting left a bad aftertaste of Stalin-era personality cult.
Time to whitewash
While most pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets went out of their way to reinforce Putin’s point that discussing Russia’s war against Ukraine was left off the BRICS agenda because Russia wants to focus on peace (!), the Summit was also an occasion to whitewash Russia’s crimes and deny any responsibility for destabilising the global security situation. In this context, Putin’s meeting with UN Secretary General António Guterres played an important role, as the pro-Kremlin disinformation ecosystem latched onto this high-visibility tête-à-tête to imply that the UN (and therefore the world) is fully on board with Russia’s proposals-cum-ultimatums for peace. To drive the point home, some pro-Kremlin outlets also focused on depicting Ukraine’s reactions to the Putin-Guterres meeting as rabid and paranoid, thus ‘proving’ that Ukraine is not really interested in peace.
Disinformation follow-through targeting Georgian elections
As the pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets’ self-inflicted euphoria about the BRICS Summit was slowly subsiding, they refocused their gaze on neighbouring Georgia, where the pro-Kremlin outlets have been pushing disinformation for years, laying the groundwork for the recent contentious and ultimately contested election. Some of the more creative disinformation peddlers even tried to bridge the two events by claiming that new BRICS members were flocking around Russia because they did not want to be treated the way the EU allegedly treats Georgia, that European integration is a thing of the past, and that countries now desire to be with the wealthy winner – meaning Russia.
The Kremlin’s disinformation outlets have had Georgia in their sights for quite some time, pushing narratives about ‘Western-instigated colour revolutions’ and ‘eroding traditional values’, all to undermine legitimate civic action and attempt to overrule the will of the Georgian people. The more vocally the people of Georgia expressed their European aspirations, the more the ruling party espoused anti-EU and anti-Western narratives, increasingly converging with the Kremlin.
According to the OCSE international election observers, the elections were ‘marked by high polarisation of the political and media landscape, hate speech against the opposition and the civil society’ and ‘marred by an uneven playing field’. Local civil society organisations in Georgia were far more scathing in their assessment of the elections, citing grave violations and calling for the annulment of the results.
Recycle, recycle, recycle
Seeing that the Georgian people were not yet fully duped by disinformation, the pro-Kremlin information manipulators have now opened their bag of old tricks and are actively recycling previously seeded disinformation tropes. From accusations about ‘colour revolutions’ to claiming that the West wants to start a war in Georgia, to denigrating Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili as a ‘foreign agent’ due to her vocal calls on the West to support a transparent review of the election results, to pushing the narrative that the pro-EU opposition are eroding traditional values because Georgian pro-EU political actors are Satanists.
But a particularly telling example of the Kremlin’s affinity for recycling disinformation is the claim that the opposition protests are a Western-curated Maidan and that Ukrainian snipers are arriving in Georgia to start provocations. This is truly telling, because in 2014 the same pro-Kremlin disinformation apparatus falsely claimed that Georgian snipers were starting provocations in Ukraine. It seems that the Kremlin’s machine of lies has now gone full circle. Don’t be deceived.
Also on the EUvsDisinfo radar this week:
- The Kremlin’s knee-jerk reaction when confronted with uncomfortable truths is often flat-out denial. In the latest cold-blooded information manipulation attempt, the Kremlin postulated that the EU HR/VP Josep Borrell’s claims about executed Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) are disinformatio This is beyond cynical because there is credible evidence of multiple instances of executions of unarmed Ukrainian prisoners of war, including pictures and footage filmed by drones or by Russian soldiers themselves, including the heinous on-camera execution of Ukrainian POW Oleksandr Matsievskyi. These executions, which constitute a war crime under international humanitarian law, appear to be on the rise in the last months.
- Always on the lookout for news to vilify its perceived adversaries in the West, the Kremlin is ready to exploit just about any topic to sling unfounded accusations about alleged Western designs against Russia. Case in point – claiming that a fitness trend known as quadrobics is part of a Western anti-Russian strategy. This is an example of a conspiracy which suggests that quadrobics was started by the ‘morally corrupt’ West to undermine Russia. Similarly to the LGBTIQ+ community, which is often targeted by the Kremlin, disinformation claims about quadrobics seek to juxtapose the ‘decadent Western culture’ with ‘traditional Russian values’, which are portrayed as superior.
- The Kremlin never seems to get tired of taking the ‘Nazi brush’ and applying outlandish accusations with gusto, no matter how incongruous they might be. And if ‘Nazis’ can be conflated with ‘terrorists’, even better. Hence, a number of Arabic-speaking pro-Kremlin outlets pushed the claim that Ukrainian Nazis coordinate with the Al-Nusra Front. This is a real disinformation ‘two-for-one’ – use alleged association with the Syrian terrorist organisation Al-Nusra to portray the Ukrainian government as terrorists, while also invoking the Kremlin’s favourite vilification tactic of accusing its perceived adversaries of ‘Nazism’. Except, there are a few plot holes in this story. The terrorist organisation Al-Nusra Front no longer exists. It was succeeded in 2017 by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). There is no evidence to support the allegation that Ukraine has any links to this Syrian terrorist organisation. Ukrainian fact-checkers have disproved the existence of any such link. And even the HTS itself has also denied these links.
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