Dueling disinformation campaigns ahead as firehoses abound “on both sides”. The current stakes now include claims that there will be deployments of on-ground crisis actors. This includes how useful idiots like previous guy or others supported by foreign money repeat themselves using social media or proxies. One example is Josh Hawley ‘parroting Russian talking points’. Another is Tucker Carlson reinforcing somewhat peripheral items like Hungary’s Orban during a visit with Putin, even as Carlson’s father is a pro-Hungary lobbyist.
Feb 3 (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence officials believe Russia has formed a plan to fabricate a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine, potentially by producing propaganda videos showing a staged attack, according to a senior Biden administration official.
Russia is formulating several options to give it an excuse for an invasion of Ukraine, the official said.
One is a fabricated video showing the graphic aftermath of an explosion, including equipment appearing to belong to Ukraine or allied nations, according to the official, who requested anonymity.
"The video will be released to underscore a threat to Russia's security and to underpin military operations," the official said. "This video, if released, could provide Putin the spark he needs to initiate and justify military operations against Ukraine."
The U.S. official said Washington is publicizing the specific allegation in order to "dissuade" Russia from following through with such plans.
"We don't know definitively that this is the route they (Russia) are going to take, but we know that this is an option under consideration," U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Jonathan Finer said in a media interview.
It "would involve actors playing mourners for people who are killed in an event that they (Russia) would have created themselves... (and) deployment of corpses to represent bodies purportedly killed," Finer told MSNBC.
Russia has accused the United States of ramping up tensions and ignoring Moscow's calls to ease a standoff over Ukraine, a day after Washington announced it would send nearly 3,000 extra troops to Poland and Romania. read more
www.reuters.com/...
Since its 2008 incursion into Georgia (if not before), there has been a remarkable evolution in Russia's approach to propaganda. This new approach was on full display during the country's 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula. It continues to be demonstrated in support of ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Syria and in pursuit of nefarious and long-term goals in Russia's “near abroad” and against NATO allies.
In some ways, the current Russian approach to propaganda builds on Soviet Cold War–era techniques, with an emphasis on obfuscation and on getting targets to act in the interests of the propagandist without realizing that they have done so.1 In other ways, it is completely new and driven by the characteristics of the contemporary information environment. Russia has taken advantage of technology and available media in ways that would have been inconceivable during the Cold War. Its tools and channels now include the Internet, social media, and the evolving landscape of professional and amateur journalism and media outlets.
We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”2
Contemporary Russian propaganda has at least two other distinctive features. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency.
www.rand.org/...
The Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, said the video would have purported to show a Ukrainian attack on Russian territory or Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine and would be “very graphic”. He added that the US believed that the plan had the backing of the Kremlin.
“Our experience is that very little of this nature is not approved at the highest levels of the Russian government,” Kirby said.
US officials said the video would show Turkish-made Bayraktar drones taking part in the fabricated attack as a way of implicating Nato.
The Gleiwitz incident (German: Überfall auf den Sender Gleiwitz; Polish: Prowokacja gliwicka) was a false flag attack on the radio station ''Sender Gleiwitz' in what was then Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, Germany (today Gliwice, Poland) staged by Nazi Germany on the night of 31 August 1939. Along with some two dozen similar incidents, the attack was manufactured by Germany as a casus belli…
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