Putin’s Willing Disinformation Agents

When it comes to war in Ukraine, Putin has found left and right-wing figures willing to spread his propaganda, as Dr David Grimes explains

War makes strange bedfellows, and the conflict in Ukraine is no exception – as Putin cheerleaders from a range of political backgrounds willingly share his propaganda.

In the European Parliament, left-wing Irish MEPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace have repeatedly blamed NATO aggression for Russia’s attack, a stance implicitly echoed on the left by groups like Stop the War.

At the opposite end of the political spectrum, figures like Fox New’s Tucker Carlson and Trump-aligned Republicans regurgitate Kremlin approved conspiracy theories, buttressed by an eclectic supporting cast including Glenn Greenwald, QAnon, Tulsi Gabbard, and even Russell Brand. 

That such canards are shared by such a diverse array gives insight into how disinformation thrives, and why amplification falsehood is so useful to Putin. 

Disinformation – the spreading of deliberate falsehoods – has a long political pedigree. It can be traced back in its etymology to a Russian root, dezinformatsiya. During the Cold War, the sharing of disinformation was a central policy of Soviet intelligence. 

Its purpose was defined by KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin as “not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts”. Such campaigns were insidious: designed to engender conflict in perceived rival nations while distracting from the USSR’s own dubious undertakings. Schemes ranged from concocting documents to imply a fake Nazi past for Western politicians, to crafting the dangerous fiction that AIDs was a US-made bioweapon. 

Such efforts were cheap and effective, and they have re-emerged with a vengeance under Putin. Its wide-reaching ramifications can be in the role of Russian influence in Trump’s 2016 election, and even with inflammatory fictions about COVID-19, – the latter designed to “..aggravate the public health crisis in western countries, specifically by undermining public trust”, according to the European Commission.  

The goal of such exercises remains cynical as it ever was. Disinformation is used to sow discord within the ranks of perceived enemies, fracturing trust and cohesion. By creating a storm of conflicting narratives and false equivalences, autocrats can capitalise heavily on the confusion this induces, efforts again visible in Russia’s anti-Ukraine propaganda. 

---

Flood the Zone With S**t

This “Russian firehose” model of propaganda is well-named: high-volume, multichannel, and unrelenting. 

Its spinning of multiple narratives is a divide-and-conquer strategy that neutralises effective opposition – making it a beloved tactic of authoritarian regimes. For disinformation to be effective, it requires a ready and seemingly unconflicted means of dissemination. 

In recent history, this required the large-scale co-opting of journalists, or even entire printing presses, willing to spread propaganda. Now, in the era of social media, getting disinformation into the hands and minds of readers has exponentially decreased this difficulty, as the existence of state troll farms attests. 

But while the bots play their part, the most useful drivers of disinformation are prominent figures in the public eye. When established voices repeat the right lines, it not only obscures the source of the propaganda, it allows devious regimes report such utterances as independent sentiment. 

Falsehoods are thus crafted to resonate with existing prejudices across the spectrum, ensuring ready adoption by those who fail to question propaganda that chimes with their beliefs.

Clare Daly and Mick Wallace are left-wing cases in point, with a long-standing propensity to adopt the positions of autocratic regimes. Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they repeatedly vectored debunked Russian disinformation without due diligence. Examples include Wallace’s insistence that Syrian human rights activists “