When news first emerged last month that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was preparing to fire his top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, officials in Moscow seemed jubilant. They had been trying to orchestrate just such a split for many months, documents show.
“We need to strengthen the conflict between Zaluzhny and Zelensky, along the lines of ‘he intends to fire him,’” one Kremlin political strategist wrote a year ago, after a meeting of senior Russian officials and Moscow spin doctors, according to internal Kremlin documents.
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The Kremlin instruction resulted in thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles, created by troll farms and circulated in Ukraine and across Europe, that tried to exploit what were then rumored tensions between the two Ukrainian leaders, according to a trove of Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The files, numbering more than 100 documents, were shared with The Post to expose for the first time the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Zelensky with the aim of dividing and destabilizing Ukrainian society — efforts that Moscow dubbed “information psychological operations.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The files, numbering more than 100 documents, were shared with The Post to expose for the first time the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Zelensky with the aim of dividing and destabilizing Ukrainian society — efforts that Moscow dubbed “information psychological operations.”
But with Gen. Zaluzhny now out, the front lines frozen and further military and financial support from the United States uncertain, some in Kyiv are concerned that Russia’s covert propaganda efforts could begin to erode national cohesion and morale.
The documents show how in January 2023 the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, tasked a team of officials and political strategists with establishing a presence on Ukrainian social media to distribute disinformation.
The effort built on an earlier project that Kiriyenko, a longtime Putin aide, had been running to subvert Western support for Ukraine, including in France and Germany, previous reporting by The Post shows.
The documents show that progress was monitored at near-weekly Kremlin meetings, where the strategists gave dashboard presentations showcasing the most widely read posts they’d planted in Ukrainian social media and tallying the overall distribution of their output.
The Kremlin then issued orders to create similar posts or “additional reality” — a term used by Russian officials for fake news — including reports that Western leaders were looking for a replacement for Zelensky and that Zaluzhny intended to halt the counteroffensive.
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