On Monday, September 19, the Crimean Tatar Resource Center at the Ukrinform news agency held a presentation on Fakes about NATO in the occupied Crimea, during which the speakers spoke about the trends in the dissemination of fake information about NATO in the temporarily occupied Crimea in August 2022.
Speakers:
Eskender Bariiev – Head of the Board of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center, Head of the Department of Legal Affairs and Foreign Affairs of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people
Serhiii Parkhomenko – Manager of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center
Vineta Kleine – Director of the NATO Information and Documentation Centre.
Moderator: Tetiana Podvorniak – Communications Manager of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center
“We remind you that the Crimean Tatar Resource Center earlier launched a new column NATO in the media of the occupied Crimea, aimed at tracking fakes in the temporarily occupied Crimea about the values, goals and current activities of NATO and refuting this information”,- Podvorniak said.
The communications manager noted that there are already certain results of the campaign, because publications in social networks covered more than 400 thousand people, among whom a significant part are residents of Crimea.
“In Crimean media, most of the propaganda is about NATO. For many years, Russia has been intimidating the population of the peninsula, identifying the union with fascism. Beginning in 2014, Russian authorities began openly calling NATO an enemy and accusing it of making threats. Since that moment, Russia has been actively spreading Putin's propaganda that NATO is reaching the borders of Russia, etc.”,- Bariiev noted.
The expert spoke in detail about the main fakes about NATO in the occupied Crimea in August 2022, and also highlighted the main trends for August:
1. The Russian occupation media continue to purposefully call the NATO political-military alliance a military bloc.
2. The Russian Federation is increasingly convincing its audience that it is at war with NATO, and not with Ukraine.
3. All the fakes of the Russian media were directly related to the explosions in Crimea.
4. The Russian media are spreading fakes, allegedly NATO directs the actions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
5. NATO pushed Ukraine to a confrontation with the Russian Federation.
“The topic of NATO in the media of the temporarily occupied Crimea is one of the key ones. Last week, a fake appeared that NATO reconnaissance aircraft discovered the location of Russian air defenses near the Crimean bridge, but if you look at the movement of aircraft on the Flightradar 24 resource, you can see that the path of the aircraft ran far from Crimea and the Crimean bridge”,- said Serhii Parkhomenko.
Parkhomenko stressed that among the media publishing and promoting fakes, it should be noted: the Crimean branch of the RIA News publication, Komsomol Truth, Crimea 24. Publics in the telegram: News of the Crimea, Crimean News, Sevastopol. Crimea. News, News of Sevastopol, etc.
Vineta Kleine spoke about the activities of the NATO Information and Documentation Center, in particular, about the specialized web portal Let's Dot the I, where they talk about the most important Russian myths about NATO. She noted the importance of this activity, since Russian propaganda is quite active in many countries.
“Russia is actively using disinformation as its weapon. During the entire six months of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine, Russia has been actively spreading fakes about NATO. At first they talked about the opening of military bases of the Alliance on the territory of Ukraine and about fabrications about NATO aggression against Russia. But lately we have been seeing more and more distorted information”,- she said.