DISINFO: US administration supports Ukraine at the expense of hurricane relief to its own people
SUMMARY
As Hurricane Helene-related deaths grow and officials in the most affected states are trying to airdrop supplies, restore power, and clear roads, the administration of US President Joe Biden has put together yet another bulky package of military assistance for Ukraine. Americans on social media are calling into question how stingy US relief funds for victims of the devastating hurricane Helene are compared with the vast amounts of aid channelled to Ukraine.
RESPONSE
This is part of a wider pro-Kremlin influence campaign aiming to undermine US and international support for Ukraine.
The arrival of Hurricane Helene to the US in September 2024 was accompanied by significant misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories, forcing US authorities to warn citizens about this situation and address and debunk false rumors. Against this background, US fact-checkers also discovered multiple social media accounts pushing misleading content about Hurricane Helene and Ukraine.
While at the moment of the publication of this disinformation story it was not possible to conclude that these accounts belonged to a pro-Russian network, the content they produced was being exploited opportunistically by pro-Kremlin outlets, as in this case on the global Sputnik network which is run by the Russian state.
A similar pattern targeting Ukraine was detected in 2023 during wildfires in Hawaii, in what turned out to be a disinformation campaign pushed at least partially by Russian state outlets.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that fuelling the proxy war in Ukraine only depletes the West’s own stocks of air defence systems, that Western military aid to Ukraine only will cause more suffering, that Western weapons supplies to Ukraine are exacerbating the conflict, that the West kills Ukrainians by sending them weapons they don’t know how to use, that the US is prolonging war in Ukraine to benefit from weapons sales or that the weapons supplied by the West to Ukraine are actually useless.