This week, in a striking demonstration of reality denial, we have witnessed pro-Kremlin sources pushing two contradictory narratives about North Korean troops in Kursk region(opens in a new tab): claiming they do not exist at all, while simultaneously arguing their presence is merely a Western fabrication to justify NATO involvement.
Tuesday, 5 November, marked the end of the US presidential elections cycle with the Republican candidate Donald J. Trump winning the election(opens in a new tab). As we have reported before, Russian state-controlled outlets and other pro-Kremlin disinformation actors attempted to interfere with the elections with multi-pronged influence attempts – a pro-Kremlin tactic that we have come to know far too well.
Reject the reality and substitute it with your own
The Kremlin mental gymnastics about North Korea are a response to mounting evidence from multiple intelligence services confirming that the DPRK has sent around 10-12,000 troops to support Russia’s war effort.
The deployment has been independently verified by Ukrainian intelligence(opens in a new tab), the European Intelligence Centre (INTCEN)(opens in a new tab), the US Department of Defense(opens in a new tab), and South Korea’s National Intelligence Service(opens in a new tab), with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte confirming(opens in a new tab) earlier that some North Korean forces have already moved closer to Ukraine’s borders.
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To have a cake and eat it too
What makes this disinformation effort particularly noteworthy is how it reveals the Kremlin’s propaganda machine trying to have it both ways.
On one hand, pro-Kremlin sources dismiss reports of North Korean troops as a CIA manipulation and claim foreign troops would only hinder Russia’s ‘perfectly coordinated fighting machine’. On the other hand, they are simultaneously pushing a narrative that claims Western statements about North Korean support are merely attempts to retroactively justify NATO troops’ presence in Ukraine – despite there being no NATO troops on the frontline.
This contradiction exposes a key feature in Russian information warfare: when reality becomes impossible to deny, they often resort to throwing multiple contradictory narratives at the wall, hoping at least one will stick with their target audiences.
Of course, it also looks a bit odd when ‘the greatest military in the world’, as the pro-Kremlin outlets like to hyperbolise the Russian army, needs to plead for help from an international pariah and one of the most impoverished nations(opens in a new tab) on the planet. Hence, Moscow also deployed an inverted reality to explain this conundrum by simply claiming that Russia is helping the DPRK(opens in a new tab), not the other way around.
Caught with their hands in the cookie jar
Russian state-controlled and other pro-Kremlin outlets deployed multi-pronged influence attempts targeting the 2024 US presidential election through FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference) activities.
According to official US sources, these attempts involved, for example, manufactured videos falsely depicting voter fraud(opens in a new tab), bomb threats(opens in a new tab) that temporarily disrupted voting at twelve Georgia polling places in predominantly African-American neighbourhoods, and a ‘Doppelganger’ campaign(opens in a new tab) which created sophisticated clone websites impersonating legitimate US media outlets.
It sounds all too familiar
The tactics included, among others, AI-generated content, coordinated inauthentic social media accounts, and multi-stage URL redirections to evade platform restrictions. Russian influence actors also exploited US domestic issues like Hurricane Helene to sow division, claiming that aid to Ukraine displaced hurricane relief efforts. These attempts relied heavily on ‘flooding’ tactics to push particular narratives, including deep state conspiracy theories, into the information space while attempting to erode public trust in US democratic institutions and candidates.
The Russian interference in the 2024 US presidential election follows a pattern observed earlier in the European Parliament elections, and votes in Moldova and Georgia. Similar tactics were used across these elections: smearing the candidates, flooding the information space with falsehoods, exploiting existing societal divisions, orchestrating coordinated inauthentic behaviour on social media, and attempting to erode trust in democratic institutions.
More instances of pro-Kremlin disinformation making us shake our heads this week:
- In a bizarre and twisted pro-Kremlin fantasy, a Russian military priest made an outlandish claim that Ukrainian ‘neo-Nazi and Pagan battalions’ have been conducting human sacrifices in the Kursk region. This out-of-this-world disinformation narrative, emerging amid Ukraine’s advance into the Kursk region in August 2024, attempts, yet again, to frame Russia’s invasion as some kind of holy war against ‘godless’ Ukraine. The reality check is stark: journalists from the Washington Post who visited the town of Sudzha(opens in a new tab) found no evidence of Ukrainian military misconduct against civilians. Meanwhile, there is substantial documented evidence of actual Russian war crimes(opens in a new tab), including the targeting of civilian infrastructure like schools, hospitals, and churches – with the March 2022 airstrike on a Mariupol maternity hospital(opens in a new tab) standing as one of the most notorious examples together with the Bucha massacre(opens in a new tab). This latest attempt to paint Ukrainian armed forces as ‘evil pagans’ is just another variation on the Kremlin’s obsessive ‘Nazi Ukraine’ narrative, which it has been pushing since 2014. By combining religious fearmongering with false accusations of atrocities, such disinformation attempts to both demonise Ukraine and distract from Russia’s own documented war crimes.
- The Kremlin’s propaganda machine churned out yet another absurd allegation on Poland. This time a well-known pro-Kremlin mouthpiece, Pravda-pl, claimed that Poland is ‘about to enter the war with Russia,’ baselessly spinning Poland’s discussions about missile defence capabilities into predictions of impending full-scale war. This disinformation narrative surfaced after Poland and Ukraine signed a security agreement in July 2024 that simply allows Polish air defence to intercept Russian missiles headed toward Polish territory(opens in a new tab). While Poland has indeed stepped up its support for Ukraine, including providing MiG-29s, this is a far cry from entering the war. This disinformation narrative fits into Russia’s broader pattern of portraying Poland and other NATO allies as aggressors, while conveniently ignoring that it was Russia that launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This information manipulation also seeks to paint legitimate defensive cooperation between democratic neighbours as warmongering, while attempting to intimidate Poland and other allies from supporting Ukraine.
- Another ‘classic’ from the Kremlin’s anti-EU playbook claims that an ‘out-of-control elite class’ in Brussels is stripping member states of their sovereignty while imposing ‘cultural-Marxist values’. This recurring piece of conspiratorial disinformation attempts to paint the EU as an undemocratic behemoth run by shadowy elites. The reality of EU governance is far more mundane and democratic: citizens directly elect their European Parliament representatives, while the European Council consists of democratically elected national leaders. The European Commission itself undergoes multiple layers of democratic oversight, and the principle of subsidiarity(opens in a new tab) ensures decisions are taken as close to citizens as possible. This pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative is part of a long-running Kremlin strategy to attempt to portray the EU as undemocratic – a truly ironic claim coming from a source that consistently works to undermine democratic processes both home and abroad. By pushing emotional triggers like ‘out-of-control elite’ and fabricating false tensions between EU institutions and national sovereignty, this disinformation attempt aims to sow distrust and push political fragmentation within the European Union.
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