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DISINFO: West preparing large-scale smear campaign against Russian vaccine, including fake footage of mass patient deaths

DISINFORMATION CASE DETAILS

Tags:

Propaganda Anti-Russian George Soros USAID Mainstream media Russophobia vaccination coronavirus Provocation Sputnik V fake news BBC

DISINFO: West preparing large-scale smear campaign against Russian vaccine, including fake footage of mass patient deaths

SUMMARY

The US and its allies are preparing a large-scale disinformation campaign targeting Russia's Sputnik V vaccine.

The campaign is a coordinated effort involving USAID, George Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the BBC, and the Reuters agency, and seeks to belittle Russia's achievements in the global fight against COVID-19. Among other things, the provocation will involve fake video footage of mass fatalities allegedly caused by Sputnik V.

RESPONSE

The report advances recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative of being 'encircled', 'under attack' casting Western actors as inherently biased against Russia; Western media as subservient to their respective governments; and Russia as a constant target of foreign "provocations."

Made without evidence, the assertion can be dismissed.

Russian officials and state media routinely prophesy oddly specific Western "provocations" against Russia which, for reasons unknown, never come to fruition. In 2019 alone, pro-Kremlin outlets said that NATO would kill its own officers to provoke a new conflict in Ukraine; that the UK would use its chemical labs to kill even more Russians; that the US was planning an anti-Russian operation in the Black Sea; that Canada was also planning an anti-Russian operation in the Black Sea; that NATO would intervene in Crimea to rig the Ukrainian presidential election.

In 2020, the "provocation" trope was used to explain away the arrest of Russian mercenaries in Belarus, the Moscow-sanctioned poisoning of Alexei Navalny, and the downing of MH17.

The specific allegation that Western actors fabricate video footage in the course of media "campaigns" against Russia and its allies is also seen in pro-Kremlin coverage of the Syrian civil war. In this context, chemical attacks known to have been perpetrated by the Assad regime are dismissed as "false-flag" operations by the White Helmets, Western governments, or Western-sponsored "terrorists."

See here for our explainer on the importance of paranoia in disinformation.

Disclaimer

Cases in the EUvsDisinfo database focus on messages in the international information space that are identified as providing a partial, distorted, or false depiction of reality and spread key pro-Kremlin messages. This does not necessarily imply, however, that a given outlet is linked to the Kremlin or editorially pro-Kremlin, or that it has intentionally sought to disinform. EUvsDisinfo publications do not represent an official EU position, as the information and opinions expressed are based on media reporting and analysis of the East Stratcom Task Force.

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