Information attacks and fake reports have long been an integral part of the information war waged by Ukraine against the Republics of Donbass. Today, on the air of the Donetsk Radio TV radio station, Alexei Akutin, a correspondent of the Official Website of the Donetsk People’s Republic, spoke about the practical methods for distinguishing the true from the false and the details of a new round of information war round which unfolded when President Zelensky came to power.
“Even in his first keynote address, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky promised to launch of a new round of “struggle for the minds” of Donbass residents. And we fully experienced the first practical steps to implement this promise back in August 2019. It was then, mainly in the VKontakte social network, that various fake messages aimed at destabilizing the situation in the Republic began to massively appear.
I would like to note that the stove-piping is mostly carried out by means of one-day accounts created specifically to perform this or that dirty work. The subject of such reports is also of interest. Ukrainian propagandists often simply find some negative news of local significance that happened in Ukraine, and reverse it, invert the situation, applying it to the DPR or LPR.
That is exactly how the fakes on increasing meals payment in kindergartens were created in October 2019, or let’s take a more recent one — about a girl who was allegedly beaten in Gorlovka on New Year’s Eve. When monitoring the media, it was established that the meals payment had been increased not in Donetsk, but in Mariupol, in the temporarily Ukraine-controlled territory. And the girl was beaten in Dnepropetrovsk (Dnipro), and not in January 2020, but in March 2018. Employees of Ukrainian Information and Psychological Special Operations Centers are trying to mislead Donbass residents by such dirty tricks,” Alexey Akutin said.