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Russian propaganda is a term that describes mass media communications that promote views, perceptions or agendas of the government of Russia. The media includes state-run outlets and online technologies. At the end of 2008, Lev Gudkov, based on the Levada Center polling data, pointed out the near-disappearance of public opinion as a socio-political institution in contemporary Russia and its replacement with the still-efficacious state propaganda.
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State-sponsored global PR effort
Shortly after Perestroika and the Beslan terror act in September 2004, Putin enhanced a Kremlin-sponsored program aimed at "improving Russia's image" abroad. One of the major projects of the program was the creation in 2005 of Russia Today—an English language TV news channel providing 24-hour news coverage, modeled on CNN. Towards its start-up budget, $30 million of public funds were allocated. A CBS News story on the launch of Russia Today quoted Boris Kagarlitsky as saying it was "very much a continuation of the old Soviet propaganda services".
Russia's deputy foreign minister Grigory Karasin said in August 2008, in the context of the Russia-Georgia conflict: "Western media is a well-organized machine, which is showing only those pictures that fit in well with their thoughts. We find it very difficult to squeeze our opinion into the pages of their newspapers." In June 2007, Vedomosti reported that the Kremlin had been intensifying its official lobbying activities in the United States since 2003, among other things hiring such companies as Hannaford Enterprises and Ketchum.
In a 2005 interview with U.S government-owned external broadcaster Voice of America, the Russian-Israeli blogger Anton Nosik (ru) said the creation of RT "smacks of Soviet-style propaganda campaigns." Pascal Bonnamour, the head of the European department of Reporters Without Borders, called the newly announced network "another step of the state to control information." In 2009, Luke Harding (then the Moscow-based, Russia correspondent of The Guardian) described RT's advertising campaign in the United Kingdom as an "ambitious attempt to create a new post-Soviet global propaganda empire."According to Lev Gudkov, the director of the Levada Center, Russia’s most well respected polling organization. Putin’s Russia’s propaganda is "aggressive and deceptive... worse than anything I witnessed in the Soviet Union"
In 2014, Ivan Zassoursky, a professor of Media and Theory of Communications in the Journalism Department of Moscow State University, said that: "Today there are many complex schemes of influence in the world that can be labeled as soft power. But traditional thuggish methods of propaganda and direct control used by the Russian government cannot be considered effective from the professional standpoint and acceptable from the viewpoint of journalist morality."
RT and Sputnik are also accused of spreading false information. In the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, website Eliot Higgins's Bellingcat gave evidence about manipulation of satellite images released by the Russian Ministry of Defense, that was wide information through RT and Sputnik.
Reactions
According to Mykola Riabchuk, Ukrainian journalist and political analyst, the Russian propaganda evolved into a full-fledged information war during the Ukrainian crisis. Riabchuk writes: "Three major narratives emerged that can be summed up as 'Ukraine's borders are artificial', 'Ukraine's society is deeply divided', and 'Ukrainian institutions are irreparably dysfunctional'," thus needing "external, apparently Russian, guardianship."
During a hearing in the U.S. Congress in 2015, Leon Aron, director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, described the Russian-sponsored TV network Russia Today as not only promoting the Russian "brand", but aiming to "devalue the ideas of democratic transparency and responsibility, undermine the belief in the reliability of public information and fill the airwaves with half-truths". He described Russian state propaganda as "aggressive, often subtle, and effective in its use of the Internet".
Peter Pomerantsev, a British TV producer, in his 2014 book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, argues that the propaganda's goals are not to convince, as in the classical propaganda, but to make an information field "dirty" so people would trust nobody,
Discussing the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, John Kerry, United States Secretary of State, referred to RT as a state-sponsored "propaganda bullhorn" and continued, "Russia Today [sic] network has deployed to promote president Putin's fantasy about what is playing out on the ground. They almost spend full-time devoted to this effort, to propagandize, and to distort what is happening or not happening in Ukraine." Cliff Kincaid, the director of Accuracy in Media's Center for Investigative Journalism, called RT "the well-known disinformation outlet for Russian propaganda".