Thread by @haynesdeborah

NEW: The volume of Russian disinformation seeking to frame Ukraine as a threat to justify military action by Russia has more than doubled in the past week, western officials have said
UK Foreign Secretary @trussliz told #MCS2022 there'd been a 2-fold rise in 🇷🇺disinformation
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This includes a ramping up of output by Russian state-linked media of what western officials believe to be reports on false provocations blamed on the Ukrainian military in an attempt to create pretexts for Russia to invade.
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“This is an information operation co-ordinated by Russia,” a western official said.
“Unfortunately for them, they are not as good as they think they are,” the official said, describing some of the material as “shoddy fakes”.
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Western officials say that the Kremlin has a track record of using false information to create confusion and doubt when trying to avoid blame for an attack or to create an excuse to act. For example, it happened in the wake of the Salisbury spy poisonings in March 2018.
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Western officials say Russian disinformation has also targeted Ukraine for decades, aimed at trying to make Moscow look good and the West appear aggressive.
It increased in the run up to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and has spiked again.
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Sorry, a little add to this thread.
It's worth including the Foreign Secretary's exact comments at the Munich Security Conference about the Ukraine/Russia crisis:
"There are many people who would want to think hopefully about the situation...
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"But I think we need to prepare for the worst case scenario and that worst case scenario could happen as early as next week. The reality is that Russia does want to turn the clock back… to the 1990s and before and we’ve already seen a pattern of behaviour.
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"We’ve seen Russia invade two sovereign nations and - in the last week alone - we’ve seen a doubling of disinformation and we’ve seen false flag operations in the Donbas region."
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One more add:

bit.ly/36fZF86