Russian officials and diplomats have been coordinating an unusually organized and large-scale disinformation campaign to discredit reports that the nation is responsible for the June 6 collapse of the Nova Kakhovka Dam, according to a new study.
Disinformation scholars from the German Marshall Fund (GMF) studying one week of tweets about the incident found that Russia’s propaganda push around the Kakhovka dam’s collapse — which killed at least 45 people, created a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe in Ukraine, and gave Russia the upper hand in its efforts to control the region — marked one of the Kremlin’s “most aggressive overt messaging campaigns of the war,” they wrote in a report published Wednesday.