Russian propaganda often uses a victim-blaming strategy to push desirable narratives out to their target audiences.
Back in 2014, Russia had invaded Ukraine, but according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, "Ukraine invaded the Donbas," despite the obvious fact that the Donbas has always been an integral part of Ukraine.
When the Malaysian Flight MH17 crashed, one of Russia's TV channels boasted that the "Donbas rebels" shot down a Ukrainian military cargo plane, but when it emerged that it was a passenger airliner, Russia invented the vast number of conspiracy theories to blame anyone but itself of the crime.
The Russian Investigative Committee launched a number of criminal cases against Ukrainian servicemen charging them of “genocide of an ethnic group of Russian-speaking people” in the Donbas to blame Ukraine of civilian casualties while still denying the Russian role in the conflict.
The strategy is simple, "deny any wrongdoing, blame your opponent of it."
In fact, Russia accuses Ukraine of anything and everything, using its propaganda machine to spread narratives to whitewash Russia or, at least, to add ambiguousness to interpretations of unambiguous events.
Any tools may be involved, from rumors on social media and TV discussions on down to the statements delivered by top Russian officials.
In Russia, one of the efficient propaganda tools is a talk show format on state-run TV channels.
"At a first glance, the talk show format on pro-Kremlin TV can seem to provide audiences access to a diversity of viewpoints, [with] a small number of “dissidents”, e.g. an opposition activist, a Ukrainian or even a “token American” will be invited into the studio, but these will always be massively outnumbered and yelled at by the majority of talk show participants, who hold pro-Kremlin views, and who are traditionally backed both by the studio audience and, crucially, the host. The role of the dissenting voice is thereby reduced to being a scapegoat, or even an instrument in legitimizing mobbing," explains EU vs Disinformation.
Read more: How Russian TV-channels promote pro-Kremlin narratives in talk shows
EUvsDisinfo, the EU's anti-fake news watchdog, describes one of the latest cases showing how the victim-blaming strategy has been constantly used on the Russian TV.Read also:
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- Week’s top Russian disinformation keywords: Genocide, Nazis, and the World Cup
- How Russia uses dehumanizing disinformation as a weapon of the information war against Ukraine
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- Fake Western experts as a propaganda tool on Russian TV
- From objective reporting to myths and propaganda: The story of RIA Novosti
- How pranksters are used as a pro-Kremlin propaganda tool
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- Flight MH17: Why can’t the Kremlin tell the truth?
- Russian troll factory expands its work space threefold in 2018
- Seven things you should know about pro-Kremlin disinformation