Thread by @IV_NOR_

Another case of anti-Italian disinformation on the Ukraine issue - A thread 🧵

All sources at the end of the thread. Links to disinformation sites are posted anonymously via the anonymouse service. 1/18

An alleged statement by the italian General Leonardo Tricarico on the Ukraine issue is beginning to circulate, this one:

"The European Union needs to abandon the crazy idea of winning the war in Ukraine. We must force Ukraine to capitulate and not provoke Russia into more 2/18

serious actions." - Italian General Leonardo Tricarico [1].

3/18

This tweet raised a red flag for me because a few days ago I had read an interview by General Tricarico in which he said Ukraine could win the war. I thus went in search of the article I had read. I quote verbatim a 4/18

part of the interview:

Can Ukraine win? "If winning means throwing every last Russian soldier back out of the borders, the answer is yes." He has no doubts, and not as of yesterday, former Air Force Chief of Staff and adviser to three 5/18

Council presidents, Leonardo Tricarico.

These statements published in a newspaper[2] are totally opposite to the alleged statement that is starting to circulate these days on social media, so I started a search to find out whether General Tricarico had really made these 6/18

statements or not. The result? There is no article or video in which General Tricarico made this statement. So I went in search of who was publishing this alleged statement, and since when. The first site that published this alleged statement (on 5/26/2022) is called 7/18

ukrgate(DOT)com. It is a site that appears to have some kind of connection to Ukraine (there is a Ukrainian phone number on the home page) and that publishes news of various kinds. Doing the whois, the result says that the site is owned by an alleged company (the family 8/18

magazine) based in Amman, Jordan. The article in question headlines: Italian general calls on EU to abandon "crazy idea" to win war in Ukraine - JRS at National Security and Defense Council. You can see the screenshot below as the site has taken down the 9/18

article (but the cached copy on google has remained though; although I don't know how much longer it will be available) you can find it here[3]. This site lists a Ukrainian site as the source of the article: unn(dot)com(dot)ua. Going to this site and entering the keywords 10/18

"Italian", "leonardo tricarico" and "Italian general leonardo tricarico" the result the site gives in response is always the same: По вашому запиту нічого не знайдено (Your search did not satisfy any pages). There is on the site listed by ukrgate as the source of the news, 11/18

no article about it. So I went in search of who else had published this (clearly fake) news. We have one news site, such mailbd(dot)net that has published this news. There is no contact page on their site and it is not known whose it is (via whois you do not get information 12/18

because they use a company that anonymizes the data). Another site publishing this news is vox news[4], the site in question is classified as an Italian site of political, religiously and/or racially motivated disinformation[5]. The source to which the 13/18

news given by this site refers is a Russian disinformation telegram channel: intel slava Z[6].

To recap:
this is clearly disinformation as there is no trace of these claims in the safe and authoritative channels. The only presence of this news is in disinformation sites, 14/18

Russian propaganda telegram channels and twitter accounts of the russian troll factory. To date I have not been able to go prior to 26/05 for this fake news. 15/18

Getting content indexed and disappearing is a technique widely used in disinformation. Throwing the stone and hiding the hand, you know?

Final note: The photo of General Tricarico is at least 20 years old. The disinformers probably could not get a more recent one. 16/18

#disinformation #Ukraine #Italy #italians #RussianPropaganda #russiatrollfactory #дезінформація 17/18

Source:
[1]

https://twitter.com/ivan_8848/status/1530892492983439362

[2]ilmessaggero.it/mondo/ucraina_…
[3]webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache…
[4]anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-w…

18/18

[5]www-bufale-net.translate.goog/the-black-list…
[6]I'm sorry but I don't link Russian crap. Settle for the screenshot.