A coordinated campaign played out (and continues to play out) across Twitter, Telegram, and Russian and Slovakian state-run media – blaming Ukraine for the attempted assassination of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico. Offering no evidence.
18 May 2024 (Paris, France) — Literally 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 Twitter (yes, I still have a hard time calling it “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. Fico was then rushed into a car by his security team. After several operations on Wednesday he stabilized and was put into an intensive care unit, but by late-afternoon yesterday he was back in the operating room with his condition listed as “serious”.
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.
But what was 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 is to take advantage of Europe’s deep political divides.
As I noted earlier this week, the Russians literally have 1000s of people prepared and at the ready for this kind of stuff. They monitor everything and have 1000s of social media accounts set-up, plus paid operatives at 1000s of media entities. They are schooled in “special combat propaganda” – the art of sowing discord in the ranks of the enemy with the help of disinformation and manipulation of consciousness. Combat, or “black,” propaganda is aimed at distorting all the real facts.
This is an effective weapon used for the sole purpose (as one Russian training manual notes) of “knocking out the enemy’s brains”.
They set-up these operations well over 20 years ago. And now, over the last 10 years or so, they have been given a massive jolt via AI tools.
And the extent of their U.S. disinformation structures beggars belief.
Western versions of this kind of operation pale to insignificance.
Note to readers: I’m at Interpol next week, and then to the U.S. for the U.S. Cyber Command workshops at the DoD. After all of that, I will update our Russian cyber monograph so subscribers will have a more detailed post.
After the initial run, right on cue, other right-wing figures around the world followed Russia’s lead, boosting allegations about Ukraine’s involvement in the Fico shooting, as well as posting 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 Twitter, alongside a video of the attack. It was not removed by Twitter.
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 months. The Kremlin-aligned Doppelganger campaign has, in recent months, been deployed to target Europe as well as U.S. audiences, most recently helping to sow division around the Gaza protests on U.S. 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, as I noted above, 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 1000 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 had been viewed more than 300,000 times by Wednesday afternoon. 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”. Kyle Walter, director of research at Logically, said:
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”.
Most of the posts on Twitter linking the assassination to Ukraine were in English, not Slovak, says Dominika Hajdu, policy director at the think tank Globsec, which is located in Slovakia’s capital Bratislava. She said:
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 re-elected 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. Sona Muzikarova, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council focused on Central and Eastern Europe, said in a BBC interview last night:
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. 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 massive government corruption. As many commenators noted, he got voted in through a democratic process, but there remains a huge chunk of the population that’s very unhappy with this kind of person being in the leader again.
And the politically charged atmosphere has been exacerbated by back-to-back election campaigns in Slovakia. The parliamentary vote in October was followed by the vote for a new president last month. In both elections, major levels of disinformation were a prominent feature, aided by Russian operatives. 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. 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.
Over the last few days, the suspect’s motivations were jumped on by conspiracists of all stripes, and quickly spread outside of the Russian campaign.
Many popular verified accounts on Twitter 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. John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at Citizen Lab, which tracks these disinformation campaigns, but is very focused on Twitter, wrote:
Twitter became a useless morass of disinformation around the Robert Fico shooting. 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 Twitter 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. Said Milan Nič, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe expert at the German Council of Foreign Relations:
This is not only Slovakia. 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 has received death threats through Twitter, 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 across Europe … and more and more danger.
As I noted, this is only the most recent act of political violence in Slovakia. In the 1990s, we had the assassination of witness Robert Remiáš. In 2018, the murders of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kušnírová, deaths that triggered mass protests and eventually forced Fico out of power. Two young people were gunned down outside the Tepláreň club, a venue popular with the LGBTQ+ community. There have been brutal police raids on Roma settlements. The outgoing president, Zuzana Čaputová, and her family have received death threats at her home.
A large part of Slovak society has, therefore, been living recently with the unspoken fear that the anger of some frustrated individual will turn into an act of violence. What happened to Fico was an individual act, but the accumulated hatred was a collective act.
In the past 5 years, Slovakia has experienced a churn of collapsed or disgraced governments, unsolved murders, mass protests, a disastrously handled Covid pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and that ensuing, widening war next door, an influx of refugees from across the border and record inflation.
With each such event, the various tribes of opinion in Slovakia’s deeply divided society drift apart like broken ice floes on opposing currents. Just as in Poland or Hungary or many other Eastern European countries, there are fairly clear dividing lines: between conservative voters and liberals, between younger and older people, between those who feel part of the west as embodied by the European Union and those who look eastward, towards Russia. Some call for freedom, individual responsibility and equality; others for the strong hand of the state, the security, safety and order of an autocratic system. Too many in Western Europe, and in the U.S., see these countries as culturally and politically homogeneous states. That is far, far away from the reality.
The shooting of Fico has dramatized the increasingly angry and polarized landscape of European politics. With just weeks to go before the European parliament elections, will Europe step back from the brink? This eruption of violence in the midst of the campaign was so shocking that it was hoped to have a chastening effect, softening the venomous tone of political discourse by reminding democracies old and new of what they stand to lose.
More likely, it will aggravate polarization and perhaps serve as a “Reichstag fire” moment for Slovakia’s national populist government, leading to a more repressive regime in Bratislava … and beyond.
Putin’s visit to China this past week was a mix of economic and military agreements. But there is one agreement they reached which gave rise to serious concern among members of the Western intelligence community.
Russia’s information and propaganda agency TASS and the Chinese news agency Xinhua signed a “cooperation agreement” in Beijing. They are joining forces to create a common propaganda network in the world.
Before this, Russian propaganda and its influence on the Internet was still Russia’s main and most powerful weapon against the West. But China was not far behind. They had worked together before, but now they will cooperate even more closely. Yes, TikTok might get banned in America, but this is not enough to fight against the common forces that Russia, China and other dictatorships are exerting to create a split among Western countries and aggravate internal and external problems.
The scheme is not new – they use methods prescribed in the old textbooks of the Soviet KGB. But having the new tools of mass global influence, like Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, makes Russia’s methods extremely effective and beneficial.
Russia honed its tactics during the hybrid wars back in 2007, when crowds of local Russians in Estonia and other groups, one way or another dissatisfied with the authorities, were provoked by agents of influence across social media, looting and destroying property in the center of Tallinn, Estonia. The riots lasted for 2 nights in a row.
The police were completely unprepared for this. But it taught Estonia a lot and Estonia now has one of the strongest cyber security structures in Europe.
Then there was the kinetic war and cyber war on Georgia, of course. But unfortunately, Western partners did not want to listen to the Estonia experience and waffled on a response. It was probably not until the huge investigation carried out by the Czech intelligence services to expose the Russian extensive network of influence across Europe that a light bulb went off, confirming how much effort Russia is making in this direction.
And Russia’ tactics will succeed. So far the Western response has been very slow, and meanwhile the hybrid war tactics have reached all the way to New Caledonia, the French territory comprising dozens of islands in the South Pacific. I am sure you have read about the deaths, the physical destruction of property by agitators, the ongoing cyber attacks and the Russian disinformation campaigns.
This … more than 14,700 km from Europe.
Why can we assume that Putin and his associates are involved in the riots in the New Caledonia riots and destruction? Since 2023, the New Caledonian independence movement has been supported by Azerbaijan. A non-profit organization, the Baku Initiative Group, was created there, which holds conferences and strengthens cooperation among political movements fighting for independence in France’s recent colonies, including New Caledonia, French Polynesia, French Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Corsica.
The French and indigenous Kanak population have tense relations, but it is precisely such groups that are the main target audience for propaganda. NGOs are a common Kremlin strategy. Under the guise of fighting for human rights and preserving culture, they receive donations from the Kremlin and promote pro-Russian policies and narratives, hold conferences and organize protests.
Such NGOs can be found in every country in Europe and around the world. This is one of Russia’s proven tactics.
Azerbaijan is another dictatorship that appears to have joined the new Axis of Evil – Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia. Since 2003, Ilham Aliyev has ruled there, winning the last “election” in February 2024 with a result of 92.12%. Since 2023, Azerbaijan has openly supported anti-French movements. The Baku Initiative Group even organized a conference in Geneva. The platform was provided to them by the UN and 22 countries which took part there. The UN is complicit in so many of these things it boggles the mind.
Before the unrest in New Caledonia, there was a massive information/disinformation campaign in the local media for several months, fueling protest sentiments. And this is, again, a common Kremlin tactic. Find a group of people who somehow feel marginalized, their rights violated, and begin to influence it, manipulate it through social networks, using various propaganda techniques from the KGB textbooks.
France has already (belatedly) banned TikTok on these islands, but there are just too many alternate social media channels and Russia heavily uses Facebook, Google and YouTube. Those channels have been/can be blocked in many cases, but are accessible from so many other parts of the world. And the Russian agents and Russians living abroad can still use these platforms in a way beneficial to Russia.
We have effectively put the best technology weapons we created in their hands, which are ultimately are directed against us.
Western intelligence analysts say Putin organized the riots in New Caledonia as an answer to French support of Ukraine and Macron’s statements about sending a contingent of troops to Ukraine. And so France is forced to send new forces to suppress the riots, troops originally to be used for protection services during the upcoming Olympic games.
Three weeks ago, before the unrest began, the Azerbaijani leadership visited Moscow, so there is little doubt that this operation is being planned by the Kremlin.
The new Axis of Evil is straightening its shoulders. China is closely monitoring the situation … watching a Master Class in operation … and looking at its application in Taiwan.
And the Chinese are not stupid. They see the problems Putin is experiencing in Ukraine, and they see Russia’s weakness – highly evident in this past week’s talks between the two which I will try to get to in more detail later this weekend.
China is now the senior partner in the relationship, and China sees the opportunity to take an even bigger role with a weakened Russia.
China may very well be the next dictatorship that will be insatiable in its appetites and decide to expand its “lebensraum” capturing new territories all around it.
Final note
Earlier this week I was in a briefing by Graphika, the disinformation research company. It was about how China and Russia are using AI avatar news anchors to deliver its propaganda. News avatars are proliferating on social media and experts say they will spread as the technology becomes more accessible.
The story was captured nicely this weekend in a Guardian article which you can read by clicking here.