What do the MH17 investigation and coronavirus have in common? According to pro-Kremlin disinformation, both are apparently nothing more than Russophobic attacks by the West against an innocent Russia.
This week’s cases are a useful lesson in the opportunism and adaptability of the Kremlin’s disinformation machine, as well as its remarkable coordination across a number of different topics. Particularly striking was the synchronised messaging on two entirely unrelated topics: MH17 and the coronavirus outbreak. For the Kremlin, which is always eager to exploit a crisis for its own ends, the two topics apparently have much in common: both are evidence of Western “Russophobia”, “imperialism”, and a host of other evils.
This messaging was patently consistent across the range of disinformation outlets covered by our monitoring, once again demonstrating the high degree of narrative harmonisation within the pro-Kremlin media ecosystem. It’s hardly surprising, of course: a core principle of disinformation is the adaptation of predetermined conclusions to any topic or issue in question, thereby constructing an alternate reality in which everything is twisted and manipulated to promote a particular (pro-Kremlin) worldview. It’s this principle that explains how an outlet can shamelessly mash two wholly unrelated topics into a grand anti-Western conspiracy theory, claiming that the coronavirus may be used to commit frauds against Russia in the MH17 trial.
MH17: Not quite cookie crumbs
MH17 was again in the spotlight this week thanks to the pre-trial hearings that began in Amsterdam on Monday. The four defendants – Russians Sergey Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov, and Igor Girkin and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko – face charges of shooting down the airliner and murdering all 298 people on board while holding senior posts in pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Dutch prosecutors have accused the Russian government of attempting to thwart the investigation of the crash. The list of over 200 disinformation cases on MH17 in our database corroborates this claim, with a new push this week to delegitimise the trial and JIT investigation as an anti-Russian witch hunt. Case in point: pro-Kremlin outlets complained that not only did MH17 investigators consistently ignore irrefutable evidence of Russia’s innocence, they were even planning to violate Russia’s sovereignty! And the outcome of the trial, they whined, is predetermined – intended to whitewash Ukraine and make Russia the culprit at all costs. There were some more creative conspiracy theories, too, like that Ukrainian security services shot down MH17 while under CIA control or that three homemade bombs were on board and somehow activated from a distance.
As the trial proceeds, expect the pro-Kremlin media to become increasingly hysterical in its denials and obfuscations. If the stakes were different, these antics would almost be cute – like a child caught stealing from the cookie jar. Unfortunately, we’re not talking about a precocious child with crumbs on his shirt but large-scale attempts to distort the findings of an international investigation into the downing of an airliner that killed 298 innocent civilians. And in light of the evidence produced by the JIT that the plane was brought down by a missile belonging to the Russian military, the pro-Kremlin media’s howls of “Russophobia” ring worse than hollow – they are outright vile.
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