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David Gilbert
Minutes after the announcement Wednesday afternoon of the assassination of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, a vast Russian disinformation crusade aimed at blaming Ukraine for the assassination attempt was launched through state media, popular pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and bot accounts.
Fico was shot five times in the city of Handlová as he greeted supporters after a government meeting. Videos circulating online show a man brandishing a gun before the prime minister collapsed on a patch of grass. He was then thrown into a car through his security gear. “At the moment his condition is stabilized, but it is very serious. He will be in a long car,” Miriam Lapunikova, director of the Banská Bystrica hospital where Fico is being treated, told reporters this morning.
The culprit of the crime is known as a 71-year-old retiree and amateur poet. In a video posted on Facebook and verified by Reuters, the suspected shooter said he opposed attacks on the public broadcaster and judges in Slovakia. “I don’t agree with the government’s policy,” he said. On Thursday morning, police charged the pensioner with attempted murder. This is the first attempt to assassinate a European leader in more than 20 years, following the shooting of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in Belgrade in 2003.
What appears to be a coordinated crusade of disinformation introduced through the Russian government without delay after the shooting, even before the shooter is officially known, highlights just how well positioned the Kremlin is to take credit for Europe’s deep political divisions. Progressive wing figures around the world have followed Russia’s lead, bolstering accusations about Ukraine’s involvement and evoking even more outrageous conspiracies about the identity of the attackers. This comes as back-to-back divisive election crusades have stoked anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Slovakia, despite its NATO membership.
A key detail of the Russian crusade included bot accounts connected to the inauthentic Doppelganger network, which explicitly accused Ukraine of being to blame for the attack; There is no evidence to support this claim. “A guy recruited through Ukrainian terrorists carried out an attack. “wrote a Doppelganger account on X, along with a video of the attack.
The accounts that spread those allegations were connected to the Doppelganger network through Antibot4Navalny, an organization of anonymous Russian researchers who have been following the crusade for years. The Kremlin-aligned Doppelganger crusade has been deployed in recent months to target European and American audiences. , which recently helped spread the word about the Gaza protests on U. S. campuses. In June, a French government company committed to fighting disinformation described the network as part of the strategy “Russia is implementing to undermine the conditions for nonviolent democratic debate. “”.
The Doppelganger network was just one component of a broader crusade through the Russian disinformation apparatus, which also included state media. Headlines in Russian publications about Fico’s attack underscored his opposition to Ukraine. A featured article on the site’s homepage indexed dozens of Fico quotes. criticizing aid to Ukraine and protecting Russia’s right to invade the country.
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Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Russia Today, went further in an observation on her Telegram channel, accusing Ukraine of being to blame for the attack: “The Slovak Prime Minister is wounded. Whoever said that the war was due to the proliferation of Ukrainian neo-Nazis and Putin had no choice. That’s how they work.
The company Logicically, which tracks disinformation campaigns, evaluated more than a hundred pro-Kremlin Russian-language Telegram channels and found that they uniformly claimed that the attack was motivated by Fico’s “pro-Russian stance,” while also claiming that Western media justified the attack because of Fico’s lack of Ukraine for Ukraine.
Military blogger Mikhail Zvinchuk’s Telegram channel, which has 1. 2 million subscribers, claimed that a “Ukrainian trace” will most likely emerge in the attack on Fico. The message has been viewed more than 300,000 times. The official Telegram channel of Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, claimed that Fico is “known as a friend of Russia. “
“Russian-language channels and disinformation operations will most likely use Fico’s assassination attempt as a new theme to claim that the West supports violence against pro-Russian politicians and, more broadly, to build on the already existing narrative that the global is engaged in widespread ‘Russophobia,'” Kyle Walter, director of studies at Logicically, told WIRED.
Most of the messages on “As far as assassination attempts are concerned, I have not noticed any accusations [on social media] in Slovak linking the assassination to Ukraine or Russia. ” These English posts, she says, are aimed at foreign and non-Slovak users. .
Fico is a divisive figure in Slovakia, a small EU country sandwiched between Austria and Ukraine. Considered pro-Russian, Fico, 59, was re-elected for a third time in October, following a crusade in which he called for the withdrawal of the military for Ukraine, while saying he may never consider the idea of LGBTQ marriage. Since his Smer-SD party won the election, he has proposed shutting down the country’s anti-corruption office and has been accused of cracking down on civil rights groups and restricting press freedom.
“The typical supporter of the current government is usually a rural voter, usually an older voter, who is not very enthusiastic about the way things are going and their economic success,” says Sona Muzikarova, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who specializes in Central America. and Eastern Europe. ” On the other side are the more liberal, more awake, pro-European and pro-Western urban voters. “
The more liberal electorate was unhappy with the return of Fico, whose last term ended with his resignation in 2018, following gigantic protests following the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová. Kuciak had uncovered government corruption.
“He has been elected after a democratic process, but there is still a large section of the population that is very dissatisfied with the fact that these types of users are back at the head of the sector,” Muzikarova added.
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The politically charged environment has been exacerbated by back-to-back election campaigns in Slovakia, Hajdu adds. The October parliamentary vote followed a vote to elect a new president last month. In both elections, disinformation was prominent. During the parliamentary elections, Fico’s opponent attacked with audio deepfakes. During the presidential election, false claims circulated on social media and pro-Russian websites. “During this constant political campaign, there were a lot of heated debates and a spread of hatred,” he says. Now the country is in the midst of a new political campaign, ahead of the European elections to be held early next month.
Fico’s Slovak allies called the assassination attempt “politically motivated,” while others blamed the attack on “liberal media. “Interior Minister Matúš Šutaj-Eštok described the attacker as a “lone wolf” who had become “radicalized recently, after the presidential election. “Šutaj-Eštok also said that the suspect told police that he had motivated Fico’s policies such as the abolition of the special prosecutor’s office and the reform of the public broadcasting service, as well as the resolution to prevent the provision of military aid to Ukraine.
The suspect’s motives were uncovered on Wednesday by conspirators of all stripes and temporarily spread the Russian campaign in the open.
Many popular verified accounts on X that subscribe to the platform’s Premium service (and can monetize their content) immediately spread unconfirmed and incredibly erroneous data about the shoot. Many of them repeated that the attack was related to Fico’s stance on Ukraine.
“Twitter has an unnecessary quagmire of misinformation about the Robert Fico shooting,” John Scott-Railton, a senior fellow at the Citizen Lab, wrote in X. “I try to study his name, almost all of the most productive effects I get are contradictory conspiracy theories. Good luck even in presenting verified and substantiated information.
Because Fico blatantly criticized the World Health Organization and its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, anti-vaccine teams and channels were also quick to spread the narrative that Fico had been shot because of this anti-vaccine stance. Other X accounts blamed the attack on Jews, the CIA, and Muslims.
While Fico remains hospitalized, investigators find that attacks on politicians are becoming more common in Europe. “It’s not just about Slovakia,” says Milan Nič, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe at the German Council on Foreign Relations. Germany’s ruling center-left Social Democratic Party came under fire this month. Both were treated at the hospital. Two far-right AfD politicians were also attacked last week and were “slightly injured,” according to police. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk claimed he had gained a risk of death through X, following the attack on Fico.
“At a time when a lot of frustration and resentment is building up and then amplified through social media, there’s more and more confusion,” Nič says.
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