In propaganda networks

Special project “Novaya Gazeta Europe” and “Decoder” about how propaganda forced millions of Russians to believe that war is the right path to the world

It may seem that the Russians do not oppose the war, because they do not know the whole truth. That in Russia there are simply no independent sources of information and the State Spopagand filled the entire space. So it is: the Russian authorities systematically squeezed out independent media and introduced military censorship in the country. But this is not the whole story.

For ten years, one of the main propaganda publications of the country, RIA Novosti, prepared Russians for this war. To do this, in tens of thousands of its news, it, as according to the manual, used identical ideologically loaded phrases. They explained how to relate to what is happening now - and will happen after February 24, 2022.

The site of the special project
We analyzed 3.5 million articles by RIA Novosti - perhaps the main Russian propaganda publication - and realized how propaganda was arranged.

Are we fighting with Ukraine? This is because they kill civilians. Does the West imposing sanctions? This is because they support the Kyiv regime. Does Ukraine fire the cities? They have been doing this for eight years. Is mobilization carried out in Russia? Yes, but we must protect civilians. Russia wants war? No, Russia does not start war, it ends them.

These narratives of propaganda helped millions of Russians overcome cognitive dissonance, resolve moral dilemmas and find rational grounds why Russia is fighting with Ukraine.

This war lasts almost two years, and all this time it was supported by at least half of the Russian population. But is it so easy to believe that war is the best way to reconcile with a neighbor?

It would be difficult if it happened suddenly. However, it all started long before the Russian invasion, even at the turn of 2013-2014.

At the end of 2013, in the midst of Ukrainian protests on the Maidan, RIA Novosti-one of the oldest information agencies and at that time one of the most progressive and “most liberal of all state media” was disbanded. After the official liquidation, the publication became part of the newly formed state media group “Russia Today”-a media monster, which included many large media. Its head was TV presenter Dmitry Kiselev.

Already in mid -December 2013, at a meeting with the editorial staff, Kiselev actually announced a change in the editorial policy: “Often under the slogan of objectivity, we distort the picture and look at our country as a stranger. It seems to me that the period of this detached, distilled journalism is finished. ”

Objectivity, according to him, is “this is the myth that we are offered and imposed”, and the mission of journalism is on the contrary, in another. According to Kiselev, she should produce, create values ​​that make Russians a commonality, a country.

Journalism “is that tool and the resource for the country that allows ... if you like, to determine what is good and what is bad.”

From that moment, tens of thousands of materials were published in RIA Novosti, in which there was the same (or slightly changed) text - the same context that explained to the Russians, "what is good and what is bad." For any more or less significant event in Russia and in the world, an ideologically loaded explanation was ready. Repeated thousands of times, it creates the so-called “effect of the illusion of truth”-in fact, cognitive distortion, when we begin to believe in something after we read the same thing many times.

This context in the news of the publication by February 2022 not only created the image of the enemy from Ukraine, but also formed a primitive (and extremely convenient) picture of the world in which Russia simply could not look bad.