Russian intelligence plotting primitive psyop for May 9

The expulsion of Russian diplomats who were engaged in intelligence operations under diplomatic cover, as well as the liquidation of Russian espionage networks, significantly shrank Moscow’s capabilities across Europe. As a result, Russian intelligence is forced to resort in conducting influence operations to a toolkit applied by businesses.

According to one of Western European intelligence agencies, on May 9, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Srvice intends to launch a psyop by publishing a series of certain reports in leading international media. To this end, Russian embassies will be sending out e-mails to the relevant editorial offices in their host countries.

Such methods testify to the deepest degradation of Russia’s intelligence community and the overall effectiveness of the recent measures to expel Russian diplomats-read-spies.

The transition to spam tactics is now becoming a trend for Russian intelligence. In early spring, Russian military intelligence sent SMS messages from South African numbers across Poland as part of the operation apparently aimed at undermining Polish-Ukrainian relations.

The main theses of Russian publications intended to circulate across the European media are again related to Russia’s claim to its exclusive role in the World War 2 victory over Nazism. 

The Kremlin continues to speculate on the topic of the fight against Nazism, accusing everyone who shows no support for Russian imperialism, chauvinism, and confrontation with the U.S. 

The Kremlin’s narratives claim most European nations either allied with the Nazis or put up no sufficient resistance to Hitler. It is stressed that the ruling circles in all European countries and the USA actively cooperated with the Nazis at various periods. At the same time, The Vladimir Putin regime turns a blind eye to the actual facts of close cooperation between Moscow and the Third Reich, calling it a distortion of history.

In its current agenda, the Kremlin strives to portray the situation in Ukraine not in the context of its own neo-colonial policy and the desire to reconstitute the Russian Empire but as the result of Western schemes.

Moscow is once again trying to falsely claim the oppression of Russian culture and language in Ukraine to justify own aggression. The Russian regime continues to demonstrate its ignorance of the differences between fascist and Nazi ideologies, using both terms to refer to the leadership of any country whose policies stand against the Kremlin’s expansionist course and claims to world leadership. Publicly adhering to the policy of “anti-fascism,” Russia borrowed most of the characteristic elements of the Hitler regime, including the destruction of the ethnic identity of other peoples, mass deportations, torture, and concentration camps.

The Putin regime sees in the Third Reich an ideal model for self-preservation and survival, as well as subjugation of the masses. Russian government institutions have been deprived of critical thinking. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has turned into a Ribbentrop-type agency, which is ready to support the most outrageous criminal decisions passed by the current regime.

Earlier, May 9 symbolized Russian military potential but the failure of aggression in Ukraine requires replacing the ideological load. Now Russia will position itself as a victim of Nazism, ignoring the facts of Russia’s joint parades with Hitler’s troops in Poland and joint exercises with the Third Reich’s war pilots. This distortion of history lies at the core of Moscow’s efforts to justify its aggressive expansion in Europe, Russian war crimes, and the attempt to shift blame onto the West, which in the eyes of Russian propagandists has been ungrateful to Russia – the sole fighter against Nazism, from Moscow’s perspective.Today, Russia chooses the image of a victim that the West dragged into the war. However, this image is at odds with the Kremlin’s policy, which forces Moscow to launch influence operations by posting stories in foreign media. The Kremlin is trying to exploit falsified history to justify its self-proclaimed mission to revive the empire. In Russia, distortion of history is based on Russian “victories” that are based on crimes. As a result, the current actions by the Putin regime are also based on crimes (including war crimes), which only emphasizes the Russian path toward achieving “greatness” in the eyes of their own population.