DISINFO: Financial Times: ‘Western governments fooled their citizens about Ukraine’
SUMMARY
‘Western governments misled their citizens about Ukraine’, says the Financial Times. This outlet thinks that public fatigue over the conflict in Ukraine was due to ‘Western leaders made their citizens feel that this would be easier than it is’, so ‘we face an increasingly public opinion increasingly tired’. It also echoed the open war between the president and the Commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and concluded that ‘the failure of the West to follow through with financial and military support has rightly attracted much attention’.
RESPONSE
This is a deliberate distortion of the original article published by Financial Times on 16 December 2023. The article never states that Western governments fooled their citizens. It also refers to the relation between president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s top general Valeryy Zaluzhny as one of “mistrust”, not of “open war”. Real quotes from the original article have been cherry-picked and rearranged to make them appear as supporting a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about Ukraine’s inevitable defeat, while the original text is actually an op-ed arguing that Western governments need to and can do more to back Ukraine.
Pro-Kremlin media frequently resort to this manipulative technique of supposedly quoting serious Western publications or journalists and then introducing a distorted message as if it were part of the original story.
The ultimate goal of this disinformation story is to portray Ukraine as hopelessly divided and its international supporters as exhausted. This aim is furthered by trying to work up a sense of defeatism among Western societies.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that Ukraine is a broken toy for the West and it is ruining its finances, that Western media recognises Ukraine’s defeat, that the West may replace Zelenskyy so investment funds don’t lose everything in Ukraine, or that general Zaluzhnyi admitted the failure of Ukraine’s war against Russia.