“Are you ready?”. The Russian journalist nods. You begin to hear the whistle of bullets in the distance. The reporter, wearing a bulletproof vest, runs over and explains breathlessly that he is witnessing live “sabotage” against a pro-Russian position in eastern Ukraine.
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“Russian propaganda in full action before your eyes,” says a network channel Telegram covering the events in Ukraine, publishing a video clip to try to prove that this report is a fiction.
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In the “hybrid war” that Moscow has been waging for years against its neighbor, the information battle is revealed as a key front. In this, all resources are allowed, including crude manipulations.
The disinformation campaign accelerated after the concentration of 150,000 Russian soldiers on its eastern and northern borders with Ukraine. Both Westerners and Ukrainians fear that it will be used to create a pretext for a Russian offensive.especially since Moscow evokes a genocide against the Russian-speakers in the Ukraine.
For Sergey Kvit, former Ukrainian Minister of Education and director of the Mohila journalism school in Kiev, “most of these ‘fake news’ is aimed above all at the Russian diaspora” in Ukraine. The goal of such a strategy would be prepare public opinion, both internal and external, for the outbreak of a conflict on a large scale, continues.
But, this Russian operation in the network provokes an intense counteroffensive. With online verification tools, which allow authenticating images, comparing maps or extracting data, used by a self-proclaimed army of “reinformers”.
The signs of the “war”
Last Friday, the disturbing video posted online by separatist leader Denis Pushilin, in which he ordered the evacuation of residents of the Donetsk region to Russia that same day, “Friday February 18”, quickly lost credibility.
The metadata of the original video file revealed that it had been pre-filmed two days ago, on February 16. “What happened that day was a clear and unequivocal fictional set-up,” investigative journalist Mark Krutov tweeted.
bellingcata platform specializing in investigation using digital tools and which has dissected suspected Russian intelligence operations, such as the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal and opponent Alexei Navalni, has spent the last few weeks ‘demining’ the virtual field of the conflict in around Ukraine.
His latest coup: “unmasking” an attack on a separatist police chief’s car. Russian public television broadcast an alleged confession of a “Ukrainian agent” involved in the attack, taking up the image of a traffic accident in which the license plate of said police car could be seen. The plate was correct.
But according to analysts bellingcat, had been removed from the Separatist leader’s gleaming SUV for photo purposes. On the Ukrainian side, media and social networks are not exempt from manipulations of the truth, such as when they broadcast images of demonstrations in Moscow against the war. They date from 2014.
During the last two months we have reached a particularly high level of panic.
On this media front, Moscow has already claimed its first victims. This high-anxiety blitz has devastating effects on mental health of the Ukrainians, indicates the psychologist Katerina Goltsberg, president of the Association of child psychology of this country.
“Possibly it is linked to the intensity of these media attacks,” he analyzes. “People are really very worried (…) for themselves, their children and their loved ones,” adds this psychologist.
The Ukrainian population has already come to terms with a possible large-scale war scenario, and is intensifying its preparations, from evacuation plans to the provision of basic foodstuffs. He is also aware that this war of nerves may have only just begun.
“An ‘existential’ threat that we will have to live with in the coming months, perhaps years,” summed up an editorialist for the Ukrainian site Pravda.
AFP
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