Imagine you could re-invent yourself. Start from the beginning, erase wrongdoings, polish your past and take credit for some good things that happened. Re-invention is usually about creating the future you want rather than erasing the history you have. That is, unless you’re in the pro-Kremlin disinformation space, where historical revisionism is a favorite tool which seems to have no boundaries.
Misrepresenting the facts on the ground
Another prevalent theme in pro-Kremlin disinformation this week was the war in Ukraine. Specifically, there was disinformation targeting international observers in Ukraine and made up stories about the Ukrainian Armed forces.
As we have highlighted several times before, the term genocide is regularly used in pro-Kremlin disinformation to inspire fear, usually without having any connection with the actual act of genocide.

Read also: BBC: How the “DNR” special services & troll factory scare Russians with terror attacks
But the highlight of this week’s wave of pro-Kremlin disinformation was the fact that the Russian Ministry of Defence used images from a computer game as its irrefutable evidence that the US is supporting ISIS. See the full story by Bellingcat here. This is not the first time this tactic has been used, and it is encouraging to see more international media sharing the story and helping debunk this particularly puerile form of disinformation. The list of the instances of pro-Kremlin disinformation has been published in the latest Disinformation Review.Read more:
- Russian proxy republic leader in Donbas threatens to attack UN peacekeeper mission
- Ukrainian civil resistance to Russian occupation in Donbas
- “DNR leader” Zakharchenko orders confiscation of local crops
- Seven things you should know about pro-Kremlin disinformation
- Three things you should know about RT and Sputnik
- Inside RT and Sputnik: What is it like to work for Kremlin’s propaganda media
- Inside RT’s world of alternative news
- Democracies should prepare for the long fight against Russian disinformation warfare: study
- In the depths of disinformation: this is how RT propaganda works
- Former RT anchor: I became the target of a Russian propaganda conspiracy theory
- “Russia’s bunker busters will reach Finns underground” – how to ridicule and threaten at once
- Kremlin disinformation campaign extremely successful – EU East Stratcom
- Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russia Today – leading outlets for anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda, Israeli researchers say
- 25 ways of combatting propaganda without doing counter-propaganda
- How Russian TV-channels promote pro-Kremlin narratives in talk shows
- Russian media forge more papers to blame Ukraine of downing MH17, make bad grammar mistakes