As Congress debates additional support for Ukraine, the anti-Ukraine echo chamber will peddle myths and half-truths, including these four:
Myth: Washington is writing Kyiv “blank checks” that Americans cannot afford.
Myth: There is not enough oversight of US aid to Ukraine.
Myth: America is exponentially the largest donor to Ukraine.
Myth: Russia is a distraction. The US must focus on China.
A newly declassified American intelligence analysis says Russian spy agencies are using influence laundering techniques to hide the Kremlin’s involvement in cultivating pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine messages.
CNN reports: Russian intelligence is operating a systematic program to launder pro-Kremlin propaganda through private relationships between Russian operatives and unwitting US and western targets, according to newly declassified US intelligence. [...]
The official stressed that the Western voices that eventually became mouthpieces for Russian propaganda were almost certainly unaware of the role they were playing.
“At the end of the day, this unwitting target is disseminating Russian influence operation, Russian propaganda to their target public,” the US official said. “Ultimately, a lot of these are unwitting people — they remain unaware who is essentially seeding these narratives.”
On this day 9 years ago, Russia shot down Malaysia Airlines MH17 over Eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people. This picture shows the bodies of 193 Dutch citizens being returned to the Netherlands.
Russia often claims that it protects traditional values and Orthodox Christianity, while destroying, damaging, or looting hundreds of churches in Ukraine.
Pro-Russian social media accounts have been widely sharing a video that they claim shows Ukrainian soldiers surrendering to the Russian army en masse. The video, however, actually shows a prisoner swap between the Russian state-funded paramilitary group, the Wagner Group, and the Ukrainian army in May 2023.
The photo in the tweet is not of an organ harvesting site in Kharkiv, but an exhumation in Lyman, Ukraine, from October 2022.
The photo depicts the uncovering of a mass grave in Lyman about a week after Ukrainian troops reclaimed the formerly Russian-occupied city. It has nothing to do with the material the tweet describes.
False. The video of the anti-Zelensky billboard in Shibuya, Japan, is fake. It was edited from a popular clip that's been on YouTube for more than two years and viewed more than eight million times. There is no evidence that any such billboard has been displayed in Shibuya, one of the busiest and most popular neighborhoods in Tokyo, Japan.
Dating at least to 2008 or 2009, increasingly hostile language laid the groundwork for rejecting Ukraine’s existence as a state, a national group, and a culture.
What follows is a compilation of publicly available statements (readers are invited to submit by email any that we may have missed).
Experts such as Francine Hirsch, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg,” have pointed to such language as evidence of genocidal intent toward the Ukrainian people. Whether and how the concept of “genocide” applies to Russia’s campaign against Ukraine is the subject of debate, notwithstanding the reference in Article II of the Genocide Convention to “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.”
No evidence was provided to support the claim Johnson blocked a peace agreement, and the claim that Russia withdrew its forces from Kyiv due to an agreement with Zelensky is widely disputed by political and military experts.
Newsweek has put each of the claims it investigated to RFK Jr.'s spokespeople via email. There has been no response as of the time of publication.
Unless RFK Jr. can provide substantive proof to support some of his arguments, the claims the Democratic hopeful made on Fox News simply do not match the facts.