The Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine Warns: For the Next Week russia Is Planning the   Culmination of  the  Campaign to Discredit Ukraine in the Context of Ongoing Exchanges

According to the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, the decision to launch the campaign was made personally by the president of the russian federation, while  one of the first deputies of the president of the russian federation is responsible for coordinating the actions of officials and the immediate “response” of the russian media. The aim of the campaign is obvious: to provoke outrage among Ukrainian society (military and their families) at the actions of the Ukrainian authorities, to demoralize society, and at the same time to discredit Ukraine in the eyes of the international community as a party that does not fulfill its obligations.

The entire pool of pro-kremlin resources – from m. simonyan and v. solovyov to all sorts of  military correspondents and bloggers – is being maximally used in the campaign in the russian-language information space. They constantly produce emotionally charged content, manipulate statistics, and immediately and categorically interpret any technical delays in the exchange process as deliberate actions  of the Ukrainian authorities and their unwillingness to return their citizens.

The campaign includes pro-russian proxies – marginal European information resources: the Hungarian publications Magyar Nemzet and Magyar Hírlap, the Czech CZ24.news, the Slovak Jednotné Slovensko, and the French-language Réseau International. Their task is to spread russian narratives and impose russia’s interpretation of the ongoing exchange. Among the narratives: “Ukraine refuses to accept the bodies of its dead”, “the bodies of almost six thousand soldiers have not yet been returned to Ukraine”, “the relatives of the dead will have to wait longer because of the inaction of the Ukrainian authorities”.

The culmination of the campaign is scheduled for the last days of the exchanges (circa June 20). The final part of this should be the deliberate publishing in the media of distorted (false) lists of dead Ukrainian military and civilians allegedly  identified by russians. In this way, russia hopes to provoke a wave of panic and indignation in Ukrainian society and shift responsibility for the crimes committed onto the Ukrainian authorities.