NEW! Leaked documents show how the Kremlin arranges propaganda attacks and information operations against the Baltic countries, Belarus and Moldova… and how they are in large part failing. 👇
This is a slide from a presentation that sums up propaganda operations arranged by the Cross-border Cooperation directorate (CBC) in June last year. CBC is part of Russia’s presidential administration, its employees usually have intelligence services backgrounds. 
CBC uses proxy organizations such as the Russian Association for Baltic Studies (RAPI), the Historical Memory Foundation (FIP) or the propaganda site RuBaltic. In June 2023, they produced 98 publications targeted at the Baltic countries.
In another document the CBC sent “key talking points” to the proxy orgs about specific events. During the NATO summit in Vilnius last summer they needed to spread the message to Moldovans that “the Sandu regime is trying to abandon Moldova's neutral status..."
"...dragging the country into NATO and turning it into another anti-Russian bridgehead in the post-Soviet space”.
Another talking point stated that NATO plans to open a "second front" against Russia.
Another talking point stated that NATO plans to open a "second front" against Russia.
“Given the huge losses in manpower as a result of the failure of the counteroffensive, replacing Ukrainians on the battlefield with Moldovans is also beneficial for V. Zelensky and his Nazi regime,” the message-to-be-promoted said.
CBC largest attention goes towards Belarus where Putin desperately sees the need to impose Russian history narratives.
When an art festival “Slavonic Bazaar” was held in Vitebsk, the propagandists needed to say that it is “one of the symbols of cultural unity of Russia and Belarus. Preservation and promotion of historical and cultural traditions is the most important task of the Union State.”
Our Belarusian colleagues from @BuromediaBY identified loads of cases where the Kremlin-imposed key talking points were presented to the audience word-to-word. buromedia.io/be/news/po-uka…
Most of the narratives that the Kremlin tries to impose on the Baltic countries are about Russophobia and portraying Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as nazi-states. This is a report that one of the proxy orgs — RAPI — sent back to the Kremlin in April 2023.
The man who appears to be responsible in the CBC for enforcing the history narratives is Alexey Zhuravlyev. He’s a seasoned Kremlin bureaucrat who has earlier worked as the Deputy Envoy of the President of the Russian Federation in the Central Federal District.
But Zhuravlyev has a problem. He is not very successful because they don't reach audience in target countries. “The share of views in target countries rose to 43.6% (up from 39% in May and 29% in Apr), but it is still less than 50% of the total audience,” they noted on a slide.
As visible on the first slide, less than a tenth of their audience of the Baltic direction are actually Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian people. In other countries they are a bit more successful.
Read our full story here (paywall AND in Estonian, sorry!) delfi.ee/artikkel/12031…
It was a cooperation with colleagues from the Lithuanian Public Broadcaster LRT and independent Belarusian media @BuromediaBY.
Here is the Lithuanian angle lrt.lt/naujienos/lrt-…
Here is the Lithuanian angle lrt.lt/naujienos/lrt-…
And once again the Belarusian one as well buromedia.io/be/news/po-uka…
If you're interested in reading about more about the CBC, we had a whole series about them last spring. Here's a place where to start from vsquare.org/secret-kremlin…
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