Like a number of us, I have been paying attention to the war going on in Ukraine. I have checked news reports, news and political blogs, YouTube channels, asked questions of friends still working in some of the US and British intelligence agencies, and been commenting on the websites via Disqus as well as a number of forums.
It took a while but I started seeing more and more folks commenting start taking Russia’s side, discounting anything even minimally anti-Russian as ‘Western propaganda’ or false reports or Ukrainian Nazi disinformation. (Remember, one of Putin’s justifications for invading Ukraine is to rid the nation of the Nazis running the country. That his puppet in Kyiv was deposed and elections held to replace him pissed him off. Saying the Nazis were the ones who deposed the ‘legitimate’ Putin puppet gave him an excuse for invading a sovereign nation.)
It then became quite evident that those taking Russia’s side were themselves Russians. They would not debate, but contradict. They would claim that a specific commenter wrote ‘this’ while I was easy enough to see that what the commenter actually wrote was ‘that’, and then call anyone pointing that out a liar or Ukrainian shill. They would minimize news from western sources while providing no countering information or sources, or dismiss intelligence sources while again failing to provide countering intelligence sources. They denigrate those who disagree with them. Dismiss eyewitness accounts. Blame everything on Ukrainian false flag operations. Claim Russia is unbeatable and they will soon be closing on Ukraine’s border with Poland. Say that the size of Russia’s army is growing while Ukraine’s is shrinking.
This is a propaganda war. The Russians are very good at propaganda, having learned the lessons Nazi Germany’s Joseph Goebbels taught, particularly the lesson of The Big Lie. (The Soviets were rank amateurs compared to the propagandists of Nazi Germany.)
More people commenting on the various posts and in the forums are pointing out these Russian trolls, in some cases blocking them and in other cases reporting them as scammers and spammers. Like most trolls, they merely change the Disqus ID’s and continue with their work. But it has been getting easier to detect them because they can’t help themselves.
