Russia Falsely Claims that Western Supplied Weapons Are Being Sold By Ukraine
After Western governments began donating weapons to support Ukraine’s defense in 2022, Russian information operations crafted false narratives, asserting that Ukraine was illicitly selling these weapons on the black market. This Kremlin aligned narrative gained momentum amid the Hamas attack on Israel and was notably reinforced by Kremlin-affiliated accounts on social media platforms. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev further amplified this disinformation via his Twitter/X account, stating, “Weapons given to Ukraine are now used against Israel, with more to come—missiles, tanks, and soon planes straight from Kiev, flooding the black market.”
Following the onset of the Hamas attack on October 8, Russian social media channels were flooded with misleading posts, falsely claiming that Western-supplied weapons to Ukraine were being utilized by Hamas. These deceptive messages originated in pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and were later amplified by articles in Russian state media outlets like RT and Sputnik. One Sputnik headline quoted a Kremlin-appointed official in Russian-occupied Donetsk, alleging that both Israeli and NATO weapons sent to Ukraine were being employed to harm Israelis. Western media reports suggested that Russia is transporting captured weapons from its invasion of Ukraine to Hamas, fabricating evidence to substantiate these false allegations.
A widely circulated video, shared on a Russian-language pro-Kremlin Telegram channel on October 8, purportedly showed Hamas expressing gratitude to “Ukrainian arms suppliers for providing weapons used in the attack on Israel.” The video also claimed that “during the Syrian war, various Islamist groups actively employed weapons sourced from Ukraine, suggesting that the black market associated with the conflict in Ukraine would fuel numerous future wars and conflicts, bringing substantial profits to Ukrainian arms suppliers.”
The false assertion that Western-donated weapons to Ukraine were being sold on the black market has persistently been propagated by the Russian government and Kremlin-aligned social media accounts since the beginning of Russia’s conflict with Ukraine. The narrative regained traction with increased intensity during the Hamas attack on Israel from October 8-9. Pro-Kremlin information operatives exploited the situation to advance this deceitful narrative, falsely implicating Ukraine in supplying arms used against Israel.
How pro-Kremlin Actors Produce and Amplify False Narratives About Western Weapons Supplied to Ukraine
In September 2022, a BBC report exposed an extensive Russian information operation that utilized this tactical narrative to undermine Western confidence in Ukraine’s ability to monitor weapons and, ultimately, diminish public support for supplying arms to Ukraine. The report revealed that images of weapon systems were uploaded to fraudulent ads on the dark web, posing as sales of Western weapons donated to Ukraine. These images were then shared on pro-Kremlin Russian Telegram channels, purporting as evidence of Ukraine selling Western-provided weapons. Subsequently, these Telegram posts were disseminated by Russian state media and broadcast globally on RT. The diagram below illustrates how this narrative transitioned from the dark web to Russian state media. Similar false narratives about Ukraine selling Western weapons were also disseminated and amplified by Chinese government-controlled media, including Global Times.
UN Warns Russian Disinformation Inciting Hate and Genocide
In April 2023, a United Nations committee published a report that raised “deep concern” about Russian propaganda and disinformation and warned of its “incitement to racial hatred and propagation of racist stereotypes against ethnic Ukrainians.”
The UN committee noted that such instances have been widespread “in state-owned radio and television, on the internet and in social media, as well as by public figures and government officials.” It also warned that “the lack of information on investigations, prosecutions, convictions and sanctions for such acts” would further enable them.
On September 24, 2023, the head of the UN team investigating Russian crimes in Ukraine, Erik Mose, added that “the rhetoric transmitted in Russian state and other media may constitute incitement to genocide,” and that his team was “continuing its investigations on such issues.”
Since 2014, the Russian government has aggressively promoted narratives that attack the legitimacy of the Ukrainian government and its culture, language and history.
In 2014 Ukrainian protestors took to the streets of Kyiv to reject the injustices of Ukraine’s corrupt and nepotistic post-Soviet politics and to denounce the country’s endemic corruption. On February 22, after then President Yanukovych had fled the country to Russia, Ukraine’s parliament voted to oust him and hold new elections.
Russian and far-left extremist propagandists have persistently repeated the false claim that the protest and subsequent revolution were led by Ukrainian Nazis who were funded and organized by the CIA, in order to delegitimize Ukraine’s government.
The neo-Nazi narrative was used to justify Russia’s invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014, and was used with renewed vigor ahead of Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin claimed that his country’s illegal invasion of Ukraine was undertaken to “de-Nazify” Ukraine.
The chart below visualizes the instances of the terms “Ukraine” and “Nazi” appearing in Russian and global media since 2014. Usage of these terms first peaks in 2014, around the time of Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine. It then subsides and intensifies again ahead of Russia’s 2022 invasion, demonstrating how Russia weaponizes this narrative.
Ukraine, like most other Western nations, including Canada, has extremist political movements within it. However, the absence of any far-right parties in Ukraine’s parliament make it unlike most European countries, like Austria, Germany, France, Italy and others, where far-right extremist parties have seats in parliament.
Russian State-Owned TV Channels Circumventing Canadian Regulations
Although Canada has banned Russian state-owned television channels from Canadian public airwaves, many are still available online and through paid, online streaming devices, that are connected to televisions (much like popular devices like Roku and FireStick) but stream only Russian television. These services are allowing state broadcasts to circumvent Canadian CRTC regulations and stream Russian propaganda directly into Canadian homes.
Twitter’s Removal of State-Affiliated Labels Helps Russia Spread Propaganda
From 2020, Twitter began applying labels to government-affiliated accounts to help users identify sources of information published to the platform and prevented these accounts from artificially amplifying their posts.
The company stated then that: “We will also no longer amplify state-affiliated media accounts or their Tweets through our recommendation systems including on the home timeline, notifications, and search.”
In April 2023, Twitter removed all labels that help users identify state-affiliated accounts—including diplomatic and media accounts—despite the persistence and intensification of malign foreign weaponization of social media platforms.
Twitter’s old “state-affiliated” label that was abandoned by Elon Musk in 2023.
A September 2023 European Union report on the threat of Russian information manipulation warned that Twitter’s updated policies have “played a major role in allowing Russian propaganda about Ukraine to reach more people than before the war began.” Earlier in 2023, researchers discovered that Russian-aligned accounts were buying Twitter’s blue verification checks to add prominence and amplify Russian government anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western narratives.
The EU study found that “over the course of 2022, the audience and reach of Kremlin-aligned social media accounts increased substantially all over Europe” and that “preliminary analysis suggests that the reach and influence of Kremlin-backed accounts has grown further in the first half of 2023, driven in particular by the dismantling of Twitter’s safety standards.”
Researchers have also found that Twitter’s algorithms may no longer be suppressing content published by state-controlled platforms. Voice of America reporter Wenhao Ma observed Chinese state media being amplified by Twitter, recommending state-controlled posts to Twitter users through its “For You” page, which is controlled by an algorithm.
Twitter’s Paid Verification System Exploited by Foreign Regimes to Spread Misinformation and Disinformation
Since taking over Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk has removed many of the safeguards that were deployed to alert users to foreign state-controlled accounts and those verified as being authentic.
Twitter had around 400,000 users verified under the original blue check system. This system has been replaced by gold checkmarks for verified organizations and gray checks for government officials. Under the new system, any user can pay $10 CAD annually to receive a blue checkmark, which also provides additional premium benefits that include prioritized rankings in feeds and in search results.
The ability to pay for verification provides a dangerous opportunity for malign foreign propagandists to manipulate the Twitter information space by offering the badge of authenticity to state-controlled accounts, trolls, bots, and other impersonators.
The new paid Twitter blue check verification system is being exploited by foreign regimes. Russian information operations have been buying verification for accounts used to amplify anti-Ukrainian content published by state-controlled media and Russian diplomatic accounts. These Kremlin-controlled accounts often claim to be located outside of Russia in order to evade sanctions
An account identified by Reset as a Russian controlled account featuring a blue check-mark.
One such account, identified in a Washington Post article, includes in its profile a biographical statement that says the account is “Doing my part to stop Western support for the Ukrainian war machine, one taxpayer at a time.” According to the report, the account regularly tweets videos it says show Russians killing Ukrainian soldiers. The account currently has over 200,000 followers, although how many of them are authentic is unknown. This same account has also been used to exploit the controversy in Canada’s Parliament in late September.
In April 2023, Vox reported that a fake account with a paid blue check mark subscription posed as a Sudanese army official and falsely reported the death of military leader Mohamed Dagalo. According to the report, the tweet was viewed 1 million times before the account posting it was taken down.
Fake Sudanese account with Twitter/X blue checkmark.
Paid verified accounts have been posting false videos and news about the Hamas attack on Israel on Twitter. In one case, a blue-check verified account posted a video taken from a video game, Arma 3, that depicted an Israeli helicopter being shot down by a shoulder-fired missile, claiming that it was real.
