According to the Kremlin: A drug addict, a dictator and a puppet, oligarch, collector of Nazi memorabilia and a Nazi himself, an agent of MI6 and perhaps the CIA . These are not colourful descriptions of a Bond character, but the picture of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy painted by Russian state and pro-Kremlin outlets.
Smearing Ukraine’s democratically elected leaders and institutions has been the bread and butter of pro-Kremlin disinformation. The examples collected in the EUvsDisinfo database are numerous and go back a decade. Before President Zelenskyy, Petro Poroshenko was portrayed as an usurper of power and, of course, a Nazi, by a myriad of pro-Kremlin sources on social media and online.
It is one of the most prominent strands within the Kremlin’s disinformation narratives: smear Ukraine’s democratic leaders to delegitimise its statehood and the very existence of a free Ukraine. And in the context of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, such slander takes on a whole new meaning.
A lot at stake
At the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian people rallied around their elected leader. President Zelenskyy has become not only a natural interlocutor for Ukraine’s friends and allies around the world, but also a symbol of Ukrainian resistance. Breaking it has been the focus of Russian information warfare in order to demoralise, destabilise and divide Ukraine and its allies.
For this reason, many of the Kremlin’s information manipulation operations in recent years have centred on undermining President Zelenskyy: there were fake European magazine covers to ridicule him, fake US billboard posts shared by the spokesperson of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to humiliate him, elaborate information laundering operations set up to misrepresent him as an opulent and corrupt oligarch.
Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that Ukraine cannot hold scheduled presidential elections at this point, due to Russia’s ongoing aggression. In the meantime, Russia, one of the most repressive countries in the world where ‘elections’ only serve to rubber-stamp Putin’s grip on power, seems particularly hung up on accusing Zelenskyy of being an ‘illegitimate’ president and thus, an illegitimate interlocutor for a possible peace agreement.
All this clearly shows that it is not just one politician’s reputation that’s at stake. In the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine, delegitimising Ukraine’s leader means delegitimising Ukraine’s fight for survival and Ukraine’s voice in any possible peace negotiations.
This also shows that Russia is not truly interested in ‘negotiating peace’, despite what it says, and that it is still determined to keep fighting and to undermine Ukraine and its democracy.
The Kremlin’s biggest fear
For decades now, the Russian people have been spoon-fed disinformation portraying liberal democracies as weak, perverse or dying. Democracy, they are led to believe, can only bring chaos and dysfunction.
For the Kremlin, which has spent two decades brutally imprisoning and clamping down on its civil society and political opponents, there is nothing more dangerous than a neighbouring democracy that would set an example for the Russian people. Which is what Ukraine and its leaders continue to demonstrate every day.
Article and pictures first time published on the EUvsDisinfo web page. Prepared for publication by volunteers from the Res Publica - The Center for Civil Resistance.
