[REGNUM] The other day, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree dismissing Polina Lysenko from the post of head of the Center for Combating Disinformation (CPC). The official reason is that Lysenko herself applied for dismissal. Lysenko took over as head of the JRC in April 2021, moving from the position of assistant to the first deputy director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), a body believed to have been created by the United States to facilitate the external administration of Kiev.
It was during Lysenko’s tenure as the head of the CPD that the most famous Ukrainian fakes were thrown into the media space, from “the massacre of civilians in Bucha” to reports of “toilets stolen by Russian soldiers.”
Ukrainian methods of information warfare were distinguished by creativity, according to a number of experts and journalists. It's not so much about the experience of playing the Ukrainian president in the KVN team "95th quarter." Ukrainian newsmen were trained, supported and guided by Western colleagues with their skills, media resources and money.
From the very first days of the CBO, a huge number of fakes have been poured on Russian readers and viewers. A whole range of different topics (from “urgently withdraw money from banks” to “urgently hide your men from mobilization”), posted on a number of sites, from social networks to pirated films on the Internet, where Ukrainian fakes went instead of advertising online casinos. All these messages were, of course, prepared in advance as "canned food" opened at the right time - which once again underlines the intention of the Kyiv regime to start a war.
Moreover, the purpose of these stuffings was both the minds of Russian viewers (reports of allegedly huge losses of the Russian Armed Forces, betrayal of the elites, war crimes of the Russian army, lawlessness of Chechens and other representatives of the peoples of Russia), and Western citizens.
A number of fakes - like the "crimes in Bucha" - even received a visual design. Now the city, destroyed by artillery of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, where the Ukrainian military shot civilians and artistically laid them out on the road, has become a real attraction for tourists from among Western politicians and media stars.
But the problem is that against the backdrop of all this creativity, the Ukrainian president fires the person responsible for the information war and the generator of fakes. The Ukrainian media do not write about the reason for the dismissal - at best, they mention that Lysenko has been on maternity leave since the end of last year. But, according to experts, her dismissal is connected not with personal, but with professional problems - a serious drop in the level of trust in Ukrainian fakes. Moreover, both in Russian and in Western society.
“The situation with Lysenko is not the first. Prior to this, the Ukrainian leader had already fired Ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova, the author of fakes about the mass rape of Ukrainian children by the Russian military. I think the main issue here is the depravity of the West. They measure everything in money. Allocated so much money for propaganda - please, report on the result. And the result is measured by the same Western rating and analytical agencies. And these results do not please the sponsors, which means that the culprit is urgently needed. First Denisov, now Lysenko, ” explained Ruslan Ostashko, a media expert and host of Channel One, to REGNUM .
TIRED AND DISTRACTED
If we take the influence of Ukrainian propaganda on Western society, then this fall is explained by several reasons. Firstly, the general fatigue from the ongoing 14th month of hostilities, the consequences of which almost every resident of Europe faces in real life.
“Europeans are tired of the whining and lies of Ukrainians, because they are forced to reduce their standard of living because of the crisis. The EU countries are witnessing the exorbitant arrogance of Ukrainian refugees. And when a European is forced to “tighten his belts”, and a brave lad walks along the street and shakes his rights, anyone will have a question - why is he here, and not at home? - explained IA REGNUM reporter Nadana Friedrichson.
Secondly, Ukraine has not had any real successes on the battlefield for the past six months. Rather, on the contrary, defeat after defeat follows - Soledar is left, tens of thousands of fighters are destroyed in the "Artyomovsk meat grinder". International economic structures issue reports on the massive corruption of the Kyiv regime and the very sad prospects for the Ukrainian economy, which now lives exclusively on external subsidies. And the regime is forced to offset this lack of victories with more and more wild fakes like Denisova, which, of course, only reduces the level of trust in Ukrainian propaganda.
Finally, thirdly, new, more important topics appear in the Western information space. “Americans are becoming more and more immersed in their problems, they are starting an election process. And they no longer want to follow the Ukrainians,” Friedrichson noted.
The point, however, is not only that they do not want to. And the fact that a number of US candidates (both Republican favorites, as well as a number of Democrats, if they do have a primaries) will campaign under the slogan of curtailing American participation in the Ukrainian operation. If the Republicans insist that Ukraine, like a black hole, is pulling out billions of dollars from American taxpayers, then the left-wing Democrats are guided by questions of survival. They do not want America to be brought to the brink of a nuclear war with Russia due to excessive involvement in the Ukrainian war.
TRUTH CONQUERS LIES
If we talk about Russian society, then the ineffectiveness of Ukrainian propaganda (which we call the word “CIPSO” - after the name of one of the fake generators, the Center for Information and Psychological Operations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine) is largely due to the high-quality work of Russian participants in the information war. Journalists, bloggers, military experts - all those who, from the first days of the NMD, have been actively involved in protecting Russian minds and hearts from destructive influence from Kyiv.
One could get the impression that a significant part of the journalistic community either fled the country, or deserted from the information front, or wrote collective “pacifist” letters. But the patriotic media community managed to organize itself quickly. “Russian fighters against TsIPSO do not need to be highly professional. We have a very simple task - to speak the truth regularly, methodically and calmly. This is just the case when order and discipline beats any class, ” explained Ostashko.
"Of course, I would like our counter-propagandists to work more professionally. But for now, what we have is enough. The main thing here is not to slip into the methods of Ukrainian propaganda. And quality is a business. The blessing of practice is the sea, and in time everything will come.
This victory is due to several reasons. Thus, in more than a year of the information war, the Kiev regime opened a number of its drain tanks - nominally neutral channels that discredited themselves with stuffing of short-term Ukrainian fakes. Having used them for conditionally trifles (for example, to disperse the panic about the capture by the Kiev regime of the entire left bank of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions shortly after the Russian evacuation from Kherson), the Kiev regime deprived these channels of trust from the Russian society.
In turn, it was the Russian information workers, the very ones who work at the forefront, who gained confidence. “The strength of the Russian information machine is in military reporters. There are a lot of reports from the field. In addition, many Russian military units are open in the media and publish their videos," explained Friedrichson.
“Ukrainians are trying. They turned off the brakes, removed decency, forgot about conscience and shame - they are trying very hard. But there is no result. Because truth always wins over lies. The only question is the time and the amount of "collateral losses," said Ostashko.
And this is not some figure of speech, not an emotion - rather a sober miscalculation. We live in the information age. An era where a fake usually lives for an extremely short time - information is checked from all sides, geolocations are taken, the picture and sound are analyzed, rechecked from other available sources, and then refuted in the next day or two. Maximum a week. That is why Ukrainian propaganda was never able to split Russian society, and Polina Lysenko, with her methods, went out.
April 25, 2023
Gevorg Mirzayan