The Spokesman-Review
Before Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion that has killed thousands and forced millions to flee their homes in Ukraine, he launched an assault on another front – a disinformation campaign aimed at challenging the very reality of the Kremlin’s actions.
As Putin has cracked down in recent weeks on what remained of the free press in his country, advocates of press freedom say pro-Moscow disinformation poses an even more vexing challenge than outright censorship. A flood of false news reports in Russian-language media – along with the distrust and ambivalence they breed – have spilled over Russia’s borders and spread around the world, even reaching the Slavic community in Spokane.
Anatoliy Mazhan, one of tens of thousands of Slavs in the Spokane area, said many Ukrainian, Russian and other Slavic people in the Inland Northwest – especially older generations – still rely on Russian state-run media for their news.
“Because they’ve been listening to Russian propaganda so long, they kind of stick to those views,” said Mazhan, who immigrated to the United States from the eastern Ukrainian city of Slavyansk in 1998.
Even if those people don’t believe everything they hear from Kremlin-backed news sources, Mazhan said, the nonstop stream of false claims – that a pregnant woman who died after Russia attacked a maternity hospital was an actor, or that Ukraine and the U.S. are plotting to use birds to spread biological weapons – muddies the waters...
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