Over the past year and a half, Russia has directed most of its disinformation messages about "smuggling Western weapons" from Ukraine to the Czech Republic. This was reported by VoxChek project leader Svitlana Slipchenko during a discussion of the study "Black Arms Market," a UNN correspondent reports .
It is noteworthy that despite the fact that among all narratives and all disinformation, most of the Russian disinformation messages about Ukraine were directed at Poland, the Czech Republic was the target of the most messages about "smuggling of Western weapons" - almost a third of the statements within this narrative over the past year and a half. Poland in this case is in second place with almost a quarter of these statements ,
According to her, Germany and Slovakia have 15% each, and Italy and Hungary have less than 10%.
The expert emphasized that since the outbursts of such disinformation campaigns by Russian propaganda coincide with the elections in these countries, it is likely that Russia will intensify its efforts to discredit Ukraine on the eve of the European Parliament elections.
Addendum
The Center analyzes the Russian disinformation campaign called "Black market of weapons", which was revealed during the monitoring of the Russian and international information space.
The Center foundthat the main goal of this disinformation campaign is to reinforce the steady narrative among the global audience that "Ukraine is selling procured weapons" and is "the main factor of destabilization in all hot spots of the world".
During the study, the Center analyzed 10862 messages in Ukrainian, Russian and other languages, in the time period from February 24, 2022 to October 16, 2023 inclusive.