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From war propaganda to aggression: recognizing a new crime

Disinformation has become an effective weapon in Russia’s ongoing assault against Ukraine. However, there is currently little that can be done to prosecute those guilty of spreading such dangerous narratives. A new framework is needed in order to effectively challenge this key part of Moscow’s war.

The brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine, the full-scale stage of which began in February 2022, was both preceded and further accompanied by a rampant propaganda campaign that reached new heights of cynicism, bloodthirstiness and warmongering in just a matter of days. The propaganda machine spent immense resources on justifying Moscow’s heinous acts of aggression by employing a combination of manipulative and selective reporting on the hostilities in eastern Ukraine.

February 7, 2024 - Maksym Popovych - AnalysisIssue 1-2 2024Magazine

Photo: Zhenya Voevodina/ Shutterstock

In an infamous quote from May 2022, the chief Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov referred to Ukraine as “a Nazi tumour, similar to brain cancer that turned the population into zombies, which needed to be liberated from German, Anglo-Saxon, and Jewish colonizers”. It was just a hint of the warmongering rhetoric and lurid claims in store, from conspiracy theories about American biological weapon laboratories in Ukraine to the development of Ukrainian attack birds that were supposed to spread viruses over the territory of Russia.

Absurdity of falsehoods

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