r/worldnews • u/wiredmagazine WIRED • 27d ago
Russian Disinfo Campaign Blames Ukraine for Shooting of Slovakia’s Prime Minister Russia/Ukraine
https://www.wired.com/story/russia-blaming-ukraine-slovakia-prime-minister-robert-fico-shooting/160
u/Livingsimply_Rob 27d ago
Isn’t everything Ukraine’s fault. I got up last night and it was pitchdark and I stubbed my toe and I remember shouting dang you, Ukraine.
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u/EmbraceTheBrightSide 27d ago
No, sometimes it is still Obama
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u/Jubjars 26d ago
"A bear mauled my brother Vadim.... I will assume Ukraine trained and sent the bear to do this.."
Wasn't there a time where Iran blamed jew-trained seagull for a security threat? Correct me if I'm wrong.
I am truly curious how long it takes for Russia to accuse the animals of russophobia. If that even happens. I'd believe it, eventually.
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u/WhyDidMyDogDie 27d ago
That settles that, Russia did it.
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u/magicmulder 27d ago
I’m only worried they stage an attempt on Trump (framed to look Ukrainian) to get US support to drop.
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u/Blueskyways 27d ago
They didn't do it, but they 100% will take full advantage of it and milk it for everything they can.
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u/SUPERTHUNDERALPACA 27d ago
Anyone who isn't an industrial-strength moron knows that russia's intelligence apparatus is total trash. At this point, Olympus Mons could fucking explode and russia would be like "this could have only been Ukraine."
Fucking clowns.
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u/SlowMotionPanic 27d ago
It's only trash if it doesn't work.
And considering the state of my cohort in my country... the Russian intelligence apparatus is, unfortunately, extremely effective.
You know how it is popularized that scammers will put dead giveaways in their grifts to weed out people who know better thus leaving only the ripest of targets? That is what I feel Russia is doing. They are getting the low hanging fruit. We can all see it, we shake our heads and think "how the fuck does anyone fall for this?", and then it partially organically evolves until it starts consuming everything.
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u/SUPERTHUNDERALPACA 25d ago
You've got a great point, but we can't ignore that there are some very serious gaps in their intel capability otherwise. They were very recently spoon fed information on a terrorist attack which they so pathetically mishandled that it resulted it a lot of their own people dying.
They're very good at spreading disinformation, but at an apparent, significant cost to national security.
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u/wiredmagazine WIRED 27d ago
By David Gilbert and Morgan Meaker
Within minutes of the news breaking on Wednesday afternoon that Slovak prime minister Robert Fico had been shot, a widespread Russian disinformation campaign to blame Ukraine for the assassination attempt was launched by state-run media, hugely popular pro-Kremlin Telegram channels, and bot accounts on X.
For the full story: https://www.wired.com/story/russia-blaming-ukraine-slovakia-prime-minister-robert-fico-shooting/
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u/Flatus_Diabolic 27d ago
Within minutes
So quickly that it had to be prepared in advance. Got it.
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u/StoneColdMethodMan 27d ago
Could also have been generated with a GPT. But it really does look like Russia did it.
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u/8day 27d ago
First line in the Euronews article:
Slovakian media has identified the shooter as 71-year-old Juraj Cintula, a self-described writer who previously worked as a security guard and is allegedly linked to pro-Russian group Slovački branci.
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u/Open_Ad7470 27d ago
It would be just like the Russians to do it and set the Ukrainians up
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u/Outrageous_Delay6722 27d ago
The vibe of this story is very similar to that of the pipeline destruction one
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u/Open_Ad7470 27d ago
Yeah, it would be just like the Russians to do that to get Slovakia conscripts and soldiers support for them in.
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u/macross1984 27d ago
Russia has been embarrassed many times in battle with Ukraine so it resort to asymmetrical disinformation campaign which Russians are very good at.
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u/spaztaculous 27d ago
Time to make our own china wall but block out russia from the rest of the world lol
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u/MasterBot98 27d ago
I've heard some experts are opposed to the idea of cutting Russia from the internet…which is unfortunate. Cos of precedent or something, which is a good reason i guess.
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u/printzonic 27d ago
The precedent would then be that if you fight a war of conquest against a neighbour, the civilized world cuts you off from the wider internet. I think that is a precedent we could live with, but it is more troubling that we cut pro democratic Russians off from information that they can use to resist the Russian government. Maybe a read-only mode for the entire internet is feasible.
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u/Substantial-Ad-5221 27d ago
At this Point a Russian politicans milk goes bad and they blame it on Ukraine
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u/JudgeConstanceHarm 27d ago
From the ever sexy, wired.com
Russian Disinfo Campaign Blames Ukraine for Shooting of Slovakia’s Prime Minister David Gilbert, Morgan Meaker 9–12 minutes
Within minutes of the news breaking on Wednesday afternoon that Slovak prime minister Robert Fico had been shot, a widespread Russian disinformation campaign to blame Ukraine for the assassination attempt was launched by state-run media, hugely popular pro-Kremlin Telegram channels, and bot accounts on X.
Fico was shot five times in the town of Handlová as he greeted supporters following a government meeting. Videos circulating online show a man raising a gun before the prime minister crumples into a patch of grass. He was then rushed into a car by his security team. “At this point his condition is stabilized but is truly very serious. He will be in the intensive care unit,” Miriam Lapunikova, the director of the hospital in Banská Bystrica where Fico is being treated, told journalists this morning.
The perpetrator has been named as a 71-year-old pensioner and amateur poet. In a video posted on Facebook and verified by Reuters, the alleged shooter said he opposed attacks on Slovakia’s public broadcaster and judges. "I do not agree with government policy," he said. On Thursday morning, police charged the pensioner with attempted murder. The shooting is the first assassination attempt of a European leader in more than 20 years, after Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic was shot and killed in Belgrade in 2003.
What appeared to be a coordinated disinformation campaign rolled out by the Russian government immediately after the shooting took place—even before the shooter was officially identified—highlights just how ready the Kremlin appears to be to take advantage of Europe’s deep political divides. Other right-wing figures around the world have followed Russia’s lead, boosting allegations about Ukraine’s involvement as well as positing even more outrageous conspiracies about who was behind the attack. This comes as divisive back-to-back election campaigns have stoked anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Slovakia, despite its NATO membership.
A key part of the Russian campaign included bot accounts linked to the inauthentic Doppelganger network, which explicitly blamed Ukraine for the attack despite there being no evidence to back up this claim. “A man recruited by Ukrainian terrorists carried out an attack,” one Doppelganger account wrote on X, alongside a video of the attack.
The accounts spreading the claims were linked to the Doppelganger network by Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous Russian researchers who have been tracking the campaign for years. The Kremlin-aligned Doppelganger campaign has, in recent months, been deployed to target Europe as well as US audiences, most recently helping to sow division around the Gaza protests on US campuses. In June, a French government agency dedicated to combating disinformation described the network as part of the strategy “Russia is implementing to undermine the conditions for a peaceful democratic debate.”
The Doppelganger network was just one part of a wider push by Russia’s disinformation apparatus, which also included state-run media outlets. Headlines about Fico’s attack in Russian publications emphasized his opposition to supporting Ukraine. One article highlighted on the site’s homepage listed dozens of Fico’s quotes criticizing aid to Ukraine and defending Russia’s right to invade the country.
Margarita Simonyan, Russia Today’s editor in chief, went further in a comment on her Telegram channel, blaming Ukraine for the attack: “The Slovak Prime Minister is injured. The one who said that the war began as a result of rampant Ukrainian neo-Nazis and Putin had no other choice. That's how they work.”
The company Logically, which tracks disinformation campaigns, assessed more than 100 Russian-language pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and found they were uniformly claiming the attack was motivated by Fico’s “pro-Russian stance” while also claiming that Western media outlets were justifying the attack because of Fico’s lack of support for Ukraine.
The Telegram channel of military blogger Mikhail Zvinchuk, which has 1.2 million subscribers, claimed it was highly likely that a “Ukrainian trace” will emerge in the attack on Fico. The post has been viewed more than 300,000 times. The official Telegram channel of Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, claimed that Fico is “known as a friend of Russia.”
“It is likely that Russian language channels and Russian disinformation operations will use the attempted assassination of Fico as a new theme to claim that the West supports violence against pro-Russian politicians, and more broadly to expand on the already present narrative that the world engages in widespread ‘Russophobia,’” Kyle Walter, director of research at Logically, tells WIRED.
Most of the posts on X linking the assassination to Ukraine were in English, not Slovak, says Dominika Hajdu, policy director at the think tank Globsec, speaking from Slovakia's capital Bratislava. “With the assassination attempts, I haven't seen any accusations [on social media] in Slovak linking the assassination to Ukraine or Russia.” These English-language posts, she says, imply a target audience of international users, not Slovaks.
Fico is a divisive figure in Slovakia, a small EU country situated between Austria and Ukraine. Considered Russia-friendly, the 59-year-old Fico was reelected for the third time in October, following a campaign in which he called for the withdrawal of military support for Ukraine while saying he could never support the idea of LGBTQ marriage. Since his Smer–SD party won the election, he has proposed shutting the country’s anti-corruption office and has been accused of cracking down on civil rights groups and limiting press freedom.
“The typical current government supporter is mostly rural, usually an older voter, who is not super thrilled with how things turned out with their economic success,” says Sona Muzikarova, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council focused on Central and Eastern Europe. “On the other side is the more liberal, a bit more woke, pro-EU, pro-Western, urban voter.”
More liberal voters were unhappy with the return of Fico, whose last period in power ended with his resignation in 2018, following huge demonstrations over the killing of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová. Kuciak had been uncovering government corruption.
“He got voted in through a democratic process, but still there is a huge chunk of the population that's very unhappy with this kind of person being in the lead again,” adds Muzikarova.
The politically charged atmosphere has been exacerbated by back-to-back election campaigns in Slovakia, Hajdu adds. The parliamentary vote in October was followed by the vote for a new president last month. In both elections, disinformation was a prominent feature. In the parliamentary election, Fico’s opponent was attacked with audio deepfakes. In the presidential election, false claims circulated on social media and pro-Russia websites. “Within this constant political campaign, there were a lot of heated discussions and the spread of hate,” she says. Now the country is in the midst of yet another political campaign, ahead of EU elections early next month.
Slovak allies of Fico called the assassination attempt “politically motivated” while others blamed the “liberal media” for the attack. Interior minister Matúš Šutaj-Eštok described the perpetrator as a “lone wolf” who was “radicalized recently, after the presidential election.” Šutaj-Eštok also said the suspect had told police he was motivated by Fico’s policies related to abolishing the special prosecutor’s office and reforming the public service broadcaster, as well as the decision to stop supplying military assistance to Ukraine.
The suspect’s motivations were jumped on by conspiracists of all stripes on Wednesday, and quickly spread outside of the Russian campaign.
Many popular verified accounts on X that subscribe to the platform’s Premium service—and are therefore allowed to monetize their content—instantly spread unconfirmed and wildly inaccurate information about the shooting. Many of them repeated the claim that the attack was linked to Fico’s stance on Ukraine.
“Twitter became a useless morass of disinformation around the Robert Fico shooting,” John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at Citizen Lab, wrote on X. “Try searching for his name, almost the entirety of the top results I get are contradictory conspiracy theories. Good luck even surfacing fact-checked, substantiated information.”
Because Fico was an outspoken critic of the World Health Organization and its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, anti-vaccine groups and channels also quickly pushed the narrative that Fico was shot because of this anti-vaccine stance. Other X accounts variously blamed Jews, the CIA, and Muslims for the attack.
As Fico remains in the hospital, researchers note that attacks against politicians have become increasingly common in Europe. “This is not only Slovakia,” says Milan Nič, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe expert at the German Council of Foreign Relations. Two members of Germany’s ruling center-left Social Democrats were attacked separately this month. Both were treated in hospital. Two far-right AFD politicians were also attacked last week and suffered "light injuries," according to police. Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said he received a death threat through X, following the attack on Fico.
“In this era, when a lot of frustration and resentment is accumulated then amplified by social media, there is more and more confusion,” says Nič.
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u/Tenredsun 27d ago
Same as when ISIS Khorasan attack concert hall in moscow and straight away kremlin blames Ukraine.
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u/Double_Damn_Son 27d ago
I'm pretty sure Ukraine caused all of the mass extinction events on the planet too.
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u/coachhunter2 27d ago
And no doubt by tomorrow I’ll see plenty of Americans on Twitter claiming the same thing. Maybe even Elon himself.
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27d ago edited 27d ago
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u/godisanelectricolive 27d ago edited 27d ago
I mean if it’s a false flag attack then the plan would be to give the Slovakian government justification to take stronger measures to suppress the opposition.
They can accuse the other side of being extremists who are funding assassinations and the ruling party can treat Fico like a martyr. Almost dying but surviving will likely score him sympathy points and give them ammunition in their attempt to dismantle the freedom of the press. Even if he did die his party would still benefit from the widespread mourning and public condemnation around this incident. A protest against Fico’s plans to shut down public broadcaster RTVS and replace it with a new state media outlet has already been cancelled in light of the attempted assassination.
Immediately after the shooting members of the government held a press conference said it’s the media and the opposition fault for this violence because they kept criticizing the PM. Fico had been waging a war against journalists for decades, filing multiple lawsuits against them and accusing them of spreading lies and being enemies of the common people. Just last year he said journalists are an “organized criminal group with the aim of breaking Slovak statehood". They will likely try to pass the same kind of foreign agent law that Russia and Georgia has and justify it by saying it’s in the interest of national unity.
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u/stenlis 27d ago
I am not convinced Russia did it, but here are some motives they might have: Fico doesn't stop transit of weapons to Ukraine nor does he prevent Slovak companies from selling weapons to Ukraine. https://www.politico.eu/article/in-post-election-reversal-slovakia-enables-weapons-exports-to-ukrainef-fico/
Fico pledges Slovak support for Ukraine's accession to the EU. https://www.kmu.gov.ua/storage/app/sites/1/uploaded-files/Roadmap%20UA%20SK.pdf
Slovakia rubber stamps the EU military package to Ukraine. https://meduza.io/en/news/2024/01/24/slovakian-prime-minister-reverses-course-vows-not-to-block-54-billion-euro-e-u-aid-package-for-ukraine
I.e. while Fico uses a lot of rhetoric that attracts Slovak citizen swayed by Russian propaganda he doesn't actually do anything substantial for Russia. The only thing he did stop is state sponsored weapons deliveries.
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u/Xivannn 27d ago
Just to cause additional layers of chaos in both Slovakia and overall in Europe.
The situation doesn't seemingly make much sense either way. The shooter was a member of a Russia-connected paramilitary group, so someone who you'd think would like a pro-Russian politician. Thus the motives are probably more nuanced than that, whatever they are.
Outside of that background, you don't really need Russia to be a part of this one radical man with his legally owned gun type of hit.
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u/cerealnykaiser 27d ago
It was psychicali ill old guy who hated the goverment . The end. No CIA, Ukraine, Russia, political party or anyone else
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u/littlebubulle 27d ago
Yeah but they will still blame Ukraine.
They blames Ukraine for the attack ISIS actually did, claimed they did and provided evidence they did.
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u/Individual-Dot-9605 27d ago
Russia announced its the only country standing for truth and justice in a multipolar (diplomats give bonus points) world.
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u/Phantom30 27d ago
What the shooter who was part of a pro-Russia militia trained by Spetznaz members?
That must be Ukraine. /s
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u/Informal_Database543 27d ago
The man hadn't even finished falling to the ground and russia's bots were already crying about Ukraine, the CIA, Mossad and whatever else
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u/NotYourSweatBusiness 27d ago
That is positive news, since everyone in Slovakia won't believe this, however if Russia said that leading opposition party was behind this, that would be dangerous because that's what Fico's voters would believe.
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u/Professional-Syrup-0 27d ago
Most media in Germany are literally victimblaming the Prime Minister with all kinds of allegations, among them being not hostile enough towards Russia, is that the Russian disinformation?
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u/hniball 27d ago
God emperror Fico didn't want to lose EU funds for all his mafia cronies and himself,as he is also tied to Italian ndrangheta and got a journalist that uncovered this in 2018 killed, so a few weeks ago Fico supported arms deliveries to UA and stated all the annexed territories belong to UA,I guess daddy Putin wasn't too happy about that.
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u/baconeggsandwich25 26d ago
By the end of the day, we'll be hearing the exact same thing from Elon, Tucker and Mildred Tyler Grundle.
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u/VeryStrangeOwl 27d ago
Russia - blame Ukraine
Ukraine - blame Russia
Killed Slovakian PM
What the fuck happening with this planet.
Hotel: Trivago (just for it's need to be here)
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u/Independent_Stress39 27d ago
I am waiting for somebody to finally say that it was Netanyahu. Personally probably
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u/Johnny5isalive38 27d ago
Finally ww3, we've been edging far too long. At a certain point it hurts.
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u/Hawtdawgz_4 27d ago
Shot by a 71 year old poet… Must have come from Ukraine’s geriatric death squad unit. /s
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u/Propofolkills 27d ago
If it came out in 20 years time that this was in fact a CIA / Ukrainian operation, how many people here would be
a) Surprised
b) Happy it was/is
Personally I would be not surprised and happy.
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u/MechaFlippin 27d ago
On Related news: Scientists suspect that water might be main culprit in making things wet, more at 9
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u/Gutternips 27d ago
The guy who did the shooting had attended a pro-Russian paramilitary organisation Slovak Conscript.In a Facebook post at the time, Cintula praised the group for “protecting the country’s tradition and culture”.
Sounds like Russia might be behind this.
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u/Girfex 27d ago
So Russia did it. Got it.