Anja Karadeglija
Canada and a coalition of 33 other countries have denounced Russia’s “continued onslaught of disinformation” around its invasion of Ukraine, a day after the Russian embassy in Canada issued a statement accusing Western countries of Nazi-like propaganda.
“We are witnessing an unprecedented wave of lies, fake news, distorted and fabricated facts aimed at discrediting our actions. Goebbels-style Western propaganda was predictable,” the Russian embassy said.
The statement comes as Russia has cracked down on the small amount of independent news outlets that remain in the country, with both the liberal Echo Moskvy radio station and the online TV channel Rain closing this week.
Russia has also restricted or blocked access to Facebook and Twitter. The Russian authorities have threatened to fine or block 10 Russian independent outlets, accusing them of publishing false information about the war, including referring to the conflict in Ukraine as “an attack,” “invasion,” or “declaration of war.”
Western countries have taken aim at Russian-backed outlets RT and Sputik. Both have been officially banned in the European Union, and YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok have all blocked RT and Sputnik from sharing content on the platforms. In Canada, major TV service providers have said they would drop RT from their TV offerings, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he would ask the CRTC to review RT’s “presence on Canadian airwaves.”
On Monday, he said on Twitter that “we cannot allow falsehoods, propaganda, and disinformation about Russia’s war to continue spreading in Canada.”
The Freedom Online Coalition of countries, currently chaired by Canada, said in a statement Wednesday that Russia’s “coordinated disinformation campaign has conjured false and misleading narratives intended to corrupt the information environment.”
The statement, endorsed by countries including the United States and the United Kingdom, called for “the cessation of the conducting and sponsoring of disinformation campaigns.”
It called for “the end of Internet shutdowns and the blocking or filtering of services,” and for Russia to “refrain from content restrictions on the Internet that violate international human rights laws.” The coalition also called for social media platforms to “keep taking every step possible to counter state-sponsored disinformation, including that propagated by Russia Today and Sputnik channels online,” while respecting freedom of expression.
A statement by the Russian embassy in Canada issued Tuesday evening insisted that Russia is undertaking a “special military operation” to “demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.” It said the Russian army is not occupying Ukrainian territory, and is taking “all measures to preserve the lives and safety of civilians.” Instead, it put the responsibility for the deaths of civilians on the Ukrainian side.
“The Armed Forces of Ukraine, nationalist and neo-Nazi groups use civilian infrastructure and population as human shields,” the Russian embassy said. “The Ukrainian authorities and its Western patrons are committing monstrous and inhuman provocations in order to put all the blame on Russia.”
Heidi Tworek, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, said the statement “mostly repeats” what Russian President Vladimir Putin “has already said, which historians and others have wholly debunked.” She added that at the UN General Assembly, 141 countries voted Wednesday to condemn the invasion.
“Only five countries voted against. This is not just the West,” she said.
Katharina Niemeyer, a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal, said the examples of the two statements are an indication of a “communications war.”
“Disinformation has always been part of wars. It has always been a powerful tool,” she said.
She said the vocabulary around the Nazi regime that Russia is using for Ukraine “is really an abuse of history, when people know what happened during the Holocaust.”
Niemeyer said that “when you see these two statements, they show that for the Russian government, there’s only one truth. Nothing else is accepted.”
Human rights organizations are among those who have criticized Russia’s media crackdown. Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia director Hugh Williamson said in a statement Monday that for “the past decade, Russian authorities have used a web of vague laws and flimsy pretexts to intimidate and harass independent and dissenting voices.”
“Now they are bluntly imposing censorship combined with a false narrative that they demand everyone must parrot.”
-with additional reporting from the Daily Telegraph, Bloomberg
Rob Lever, AFP USA
Wed, March 2, 2022
Online articles and social media posts claim US-funded labs in Ukraine are developing biological warfare weapons, saying this is part of the justification for the Russian attack on its eastern European neighbor. But former US officials and non-proliferation experts say the labs are working to detect and prevent the spread of bioweapons, and have also helped in containing disease outbreaks.
"Bioweapons laboratories in Ukrainian cities including Kharkiv, Luhansk, Dnipropetrovsk, and the capital Kyiv, among others locations, have been targeted by Russian troops operating under Putin’s direct orders," says an online article dated February 26, 2022.
Similar posts appeared on Twitter and on Facebook. One post on the latter site said: "Someone send PUTIN a thank you card. These labs were funded by the USA folks. The most dangerous bioweapons were in those labs." A separate one claimed that the labs "were making injectable bioweapons."
The US government as well as former officials and non-proliferation experts say the claims appear to be based on long-running Russian disinformation efforts and that Washington has for decades been working to prevent the use of bioweapons.
A US embassy statement from April 2020 took aim at what it called "Russian disinformation regarding the strong US-Ukrainian partnership to reduce biological threats."
"The US Department of Defense's Biological Threat Reduction Program works with the Ukrainian government to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern in Ukrainian government facilities, while allowing for peaceful research and vaccine development," the statement said.
"We also work with our Ukrainian partners to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats," it added.
Andrew Weber, a former assistant secretary for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks and a member of the Arms Control Association board of directors, told AFP that the US Defense Department "has never had a biological laboratory in Ukraine."
Weber noted that a 2005 treaty aimed "to improve public health laboratories whose mission is analogous to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These laboratories have recently played an important role in stopping the spread of Covid-19."
In 1969, then-president Richard Nixon renounced the use of biological weapons and the United States joined most UN member states in a global Biological Weapons Convention that entered into force in 1975.
Vickie Sutton, director of the Center for Biodefense, Law & Public Policy at Texas Tech University, said the US has for decades worked with other countries to curb biological weapons and advance research to neutralize any pathogens.
"There is a common misperception that America creates bioweapons," Sutton said, adding that Washington has worked with a number of former Soviet republics to neutralize bioweapons.
"The Soviet Union had the largest biological weapons program ever created," which explains the US presence in facilities to help respond to a bioweapons outbreak, she said.
"They (US experts) are there to help research so they can respond immediately" to an outbreak, Sutton added, noting that the bioweapons treaty does not have an inspection or verification mechanism but that countries submit reports voluntarily known as "confidence building measures."
Some researchers have said that the Soviet Union continued to expand its biological weapons despite having ratified the Biological Weapons Convention, and that the United States worked with former Soviet republics to destroy or eliminate much of the stockpile.
Filippa Lentzos, a bioweapons researcher and faculty member at King's College of London who has consulted for the United Nations and the World Health Organization, said the claims about Ukraine are the latest in a string of reports about the laboratories in these countries.
Lentzos, one of several experts who has visited a former Soviet research lab in the Republic of Georgia, said all indications from independent bioweapons researchers and officials show the United States supporting deactivation of biological agents, and that work at such centers is aimed at preventing disease outbreaks.
"These are public health labs like those of the (US) CDC or the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control," Lentzos said.
By Raphael Satter
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ukrainian officials say hackers have broken into local government websites to spread false reports that Kyiv had capitulated and signed a peace treaty with Moscow.
In a message https://twitter.com/dsszzi/status/1499421451253911556 posted to Twitter, Ukraine's State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection said that an undisclosed number of official websites of "regional authorities and local governments" had been hijacked and used to spread "lies" about a deal to end the fighting prompted by Russia's invasion.
The agency said "the enemy" was responsible for the hacking spree.
The agency didn't immediately return a message seeking further details and it wasn't immediately clear which websites it was referring to. Authorities in Kyiv have repeatedly moved quickly to debunk what they describe as Russian fabrications about the conflict.
Russia denies using hackers to go after its foes, but the Kremlin's use of cyber spies in information operations is widely documented.
Hacking official news sites or government accounts to spread misinformation has been done before. Over the past several years, researchers have tracked a hacking group dubbed "Ghostwriter" which is accused of breaking into news sites to make false claims.
Researchers and the Ukrainian government have previously linked hackers to Belarus, which has offered its territory as springboard for Russia's invasion.
(Reporting by Raphael Satter; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)
Fact check: Photo of children saluting Ukrainian troops is from 2016
Emiliano Tahui Gómez,
USA TODAY
The claim: A photo shows children saluting Ukrainian troops
Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, posts on social media have revived a photo of a young boy and girl saluting Ukrainian soldiers.
The image shows the two standing hand in hand, bundled in winter attire, watching troops on armored vehicles. Smoke and Ukrainian flags appear in the background.
“This photo brought tears to my eyes. Two young Ukranian children sending off soldiers to fight the Russians,” reads the caption of a Feb. 26 Facebook post. “This picture speaks a thousand words.”
That post amassed more than 600 shares in three days. Similar posts have also found a large audience.
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But the photo is not from the recent Russian invasion, as the posts make it seem. It first emerged online in 2016, two years after/ the Russian annexation of Crimea.
USA TODAY reached out to the Facebook user who shared the image for comment.
Photo from 2016
The photo in the post predates Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
As reported by Reuters, Ukrainian photographer Dmitry Muravsky took the photo. His watermark is visible in the bottom-left corner of the image.
Muravsky posted the image in a Facebook photo album titled “Children of War” in March 2016. That album included more than a dozen images of children in war zones or interacting with troops.
Muravsky previously worked as an official volunteer for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. The agency published his image of the children greeting Ukrainian soldiers in March 2016, as Reuters reported.
The Ministry of Defence dismissed Muravsky in August 2016 after the authenticity of his work came into question, The Washington Post reported.
Fact check roundup: What's true and what's false about the Russian invasion of Ukraine
"The Ministry of Defence recognizes the work of Dmytro Muravskiy," the agency said in a statement. "Defense Agency has received a lot of his high quality and artistic design photos that were never considered by the Ministry as documentary or real war photos."
USA TODAY reached out to Muravsky for comment.
Our rating: Missing context
Based on our research, we rate the claim that a photo shows children saluting Ukrainian troops MISSING CONTEXT, because without additional information it may be misleading. The photo was published in March 2016 by a Ukrainian photographer with former ties to the Ukraine Ministry of Defence. It is unrelated to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Our fact-check sources:
Dmitry Muravsky, accessed Feb. 28, Facebook page
Google Translate, accessed Feb. 28
Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Aug. 16, 2018, Volunteer photographer Dmytro Muravskiy dismissed from the position of the Volunteer Adviser to the Minister of Defence of Ukraine
Reuters, Feb. 26, Fact Check-Photo of children saluting Ukrainian tanks dates back to 2016
Tineye, accessed Feb. 28
The Washington Post, Aug. 29, 2016, Photographer of controversial Ukrainian combat photo ‘dismissed’ from duties
USA TODAY, March 1, Russia's 40-mile convoy appears to have bogged down en route to Kyiv; shells pound Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Live updates
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Photo of children saluting Ukrainian troops is from 2016
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