A covert Kremlin disinformation campaign targeted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with the aim of dividing Ukrainian society, documents show.

When news first emerged last month that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was preparing to fire his top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, officials in Moscow seemed jubilant. They had been trying to orchestrate just such a split for many months, documents show.

“We need to strengthen the conflict between Zaluzhny and Zelensky, along the lines of ‘he intends to fire him,’” one Kremlin political strategist wrote a year ago, after a meeting of senior Russian officials and Moscow spin doctors, according to internal Kremlin documents.

. . .

The Kremlin instruction resulted in thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles, created by troll farms and circulated in Ukraine and across Europe, that tried to exploit what were then rumored tensions between the two Ukrainian leaders, according to a trove of Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The files, numbering more than 100 documents, were shared with The Post to expose for the first time the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Zelensky with the aim of dividing and destabilizing Ukrainian society — efforts that Moscow dubbed “information psychological operations.”

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  • PugJesus@kbin.social
    161·
    9 months ago

    Gambashidze, Tupikin and their colleagues proposed narratives they hoped would destroy Zelensky’s image in the West as “the hero of a small country fighting a global evil,” one of the documents sent in April shows. They suggested portraying Zelensky as an actor only capable of following a script written for him by the United States and NATO, and his Western backers as tiring of him. They proposed distributing fake Ukrainian government documents as evidence of corrupt military procurement schemes, and suggesting that Zelensky and his family had Western bank accounts, the document shows.

    The plans led to hundreds of articles and thousands of social media posts translated into French, German and English that targeted Zelensky, the document trove shows.

    I think I know a few who have been repeating these talking points.