Sergei Skripal and the Russian disinformation game

[Nergal]

 

When the UK authorities announced on Wednesday that they suspected two alleged Russian agents in the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, they released CCTV images of the suspects arriving at Gatwick airport.

Two of the images, framed side by side, began to spread on social media, driven by pro-Russia conspiracy theorists and suspected troll accounts. They showed the alleged agents - Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov - passing through a non-return gate at the airport.

The images had identical timestamps. How could two men be in exactly the same place at the same time, a flood of tweets asked.

Speaking on state TV, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed that either "the date and the exact time were superimposed on the image" or that Russian intelligence officers had "mastered the skill of walking simultaneously".

Her remarks were echoed by pro-Kremlin accounts on Twitter and on the messaging app Telegram, which is popular in Russia. Users suggested the CCTV images had been manipulated. They mocked the British authorities and alleged it was an MI6 operation.

Soon it would not necessarily matter that the background of the CCTV images were not identical; that the camera was at a different angle; that Google Maps shows that the non-return gates at Gatwick are a series of near-identical corridors that the two men could easily have passed down, adjacent to one another, at the same time.

What would matter would be that some people following the story would begin to question what was real and what wasn't. Some might even begin to question the very idea that there was a real, reliable version of events at all.

Russia denies any involvement in the Skripal case, and its embassy in London did not respond to a request for comment from the BBC, but analysts say the Russian state is now the chief exponent of a new kind of information warfare.

A loosely-defined network of Russian state actors, state-controlled media, and armies of social media bots and trolls is said to work in unison to spread and amplify multiple narratives and conspiracies around cases like the Skripal poisoning. The goal is no longer to deny or disprove an official version of events, it is to flood the zone with so many competing versions that nothing seems to make sense.

"What is really striking is that you no longer see the Russian machine pushing a single message, it pushes dozens of messages," said Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who studies Russian disinformation. "The idea is to confuse people."

Other theories circulating on Wednesday included a claim that the suspects were British actors, stars of a (non-existent) KGB spy series broadcast on British television in the 2000s. Another suggested the attempted assassination in Salisbury, and the deaths of other Russian nationals in Britain, were part of an MI6 plot. "Why do all these horrible events only happen in Britain?" asked Andrei Klimov, a Russian member of parliament, on state TV.