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Russian Disinfo Campaign Blames Ukraine for Shooting of Slovakia’s Prime
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David Gilbert Morgan Meaker
Politics
May 16, 2024 2:03 PM


RUSSIAN DISINFO CAMPAIGN BLAMES UKRAINE FOR SHOOTING OF SLOVAKIA’S PRIME
MINISTER

A seemingly coordinated campaign playing out across X, Telegram, and state-run
media blames Ukraine for the attempted assassination of Robert Fico—something
for which there is no evidence.
Robert Fico, Prime Minister of Slovakia.Photograph: VLADIMIR SIMICEK/Getty
Images

Save this storySave
Save this storySave

Within minutes of the news breaking on Wednesday afternoon that Slovak prime
minister Robert Fico had been shot, a widespread Russian disinformation campaign
to blame Ukraine for the assassination attempt was launched by state-run media,
hugely popular pro-Kremlin Telegram channels, and bot accounts on X.

Fico was shot five times in the town of Handlová as he greeted supporters
following a government meeting. Videos circulating online show a man raising a
gun before the prime minister crumples into a patch of grass. He was then rushed
into a car by his security team. “At this point his condition is stabilized but
is truly very serious. He will be in the intensive care unit,” Miriam
Lapunikova, the director of the hospital in Banská Bystrica where Fico is being
treated, told journalists this morning.

The perpetrator has been named as a 71-year-old pensioner and amateur poet. In a
video posted on Facebook and verified by Reuters, the alleged shooter said he
opposed attacks on Slovakia’s public broadcaster and judges. "I do not agree
with government policy," he said. On Thursday morning, police charged the
pensioner with attempted murder. The shooting is the first assassination attempt
of a European leader in more than 20 years, after Serbian prime minister Zoran
Djindjic was shot and killed in Belgrade in 2003.

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What appeared to be a coordinated disinformation campaign rolled out by the
Russian government immediately after the shooting took place—even before the
shooter was officially identified—highlights just how ready the Kremlin appears
to be to take advantage of Europe’s deep political divides. Other right-wing
figures around the world have followed Russia’s lead, boosting allegations about
Ukraine’s involvement as well as positing even more outrageous conspiracies
about who was behind the attack. This comes as divisive back-to-back election
campaigns have stoked anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Slovakia, despite its NATO
membership.

A key part of the Russian campaign included bot accounts linked to the
inauthentic Doppelganger network, which explicitly blamed Ukraine for the attack
despite there being no evidence to back up this claim. “A man recruited by
Ukrainian terrorists carried out an attack,” one Doppelganger account wrote on
X, alongside a video of the attack.



The accounts spreading the claims were linked to the Doppelganger network by
Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous Russian researchers who have been tracking
the campaign for months. The Kremlin-aligned Doppelganger campaign has, in
recent months, been deployed to target Europe as well as US audiences, most
recently helping to sow division around the Gaza protests on US campuses. In
June, a French government agency dedicated to combating disinformation described
the network as part of the strategy “Russia is implementing to undermine the
conditions for a peaceful democratic debate.”

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The Doppelganger network was just one part of a wider push by Russia’s
disinformation apparatus, which also included state-run media outlets. Headlines
about Fico’s attack in Russian publications emphasized his opposition to
supporting Ukraine. One article highlighted on the site’s homepage listed dozens
of Fico’s quotes criticizing aid to Ukraine and defending Russia’s right to
invade the country.



Margarita Simonyan, Russia Today’s editor in chief, went further in a comment on
her Telegram channel, blaming Ukraine for the attack: “The Slovak Prime Minister
is injured. The one who said that the war began as a result of rampant Ukrainian
neo-Nazis and Putin had no other choice. That's how they work.”



The company Logically, which tracks disinformation campaigns, assessed more than
100 Russian-language pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and found they were uniformly
claiming the attack was motivated by Fico’s “pro-Russian stance” while also
claiming that Western media outlets were justifying the attack because of Fico’s
lack of support for Ukraine.

The Telegram channel of military blogger Mikhail Zvinchuk, which has 1.2 million
subscribers, claimed it was highly likely that a “Ukrainian trace” will emerge
in the attack on Fico. The post has been viewed more than 300,000 times. The
official Telegram channel of Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the Russian
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, claimed that Fico is “known as a friend of Russia.”

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“It is likely that Russian language channels and Russian disinformation
operations will use the attempted assassination of Fico as a new theme to claim
that the West supports violence against pro-Russian politicians, and more
broadly to expand on the already present narrative that the world engages in
widespread ‘Russophobia,’” Kyle Walter, director of research at Logically, tells
WIRED.

Most of the posts on X linking the assassination to Ukraine were in English, not
Slovak, says Dominika Hajdu, policy director at the think tank Globsec, speaking
from Slovakia's capital Bratislava. “With the assassination attempts, I haven't
seen any accusations [on social media] in Slovak linking the assassination to
Ukraine or Russia.” These English-language posts, she says, imply a target
audience of international users, not Slovaks.

Fico is a divisive figure in Slovakia, a small EU country situated between
Austria and Ukraine. Considered Russia-friendly, the 59-year-old Fico was
reelected for the third time in October, following a campaign in which he called
for the withdrawal of military support for Ukraine while saying he could never
support the idea of LGBTQ marriage. Since his Smer–SD party won the election, he
has proposed shutting the country’s anti-corruption office and has been accused
of cracking down on civil rights groups and limiting press freedom.

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“The typical current government supporter is mostly rural, usually an older
voter, who is not super thrilled with how things turned out with their economic
success,” says Sona Muzikarova, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council focused
on Central and Eastern Europe. “On the other side is the more liberal, a bit
more woke, pro-EU, pro-Western, urban voter.”

More liberal voters were unhappy with the return of Fico, whose last period in
power ended with his resignation in 2018, following huge demonstrations over the
killing of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová. Kuciak had
been uncovering government corruption.

“He got voted in through a democratic process, but still there is a huge chunk
of the population that's very unhappy with this kind of person being in the lead
again,” adds Muzikarova.



The politically charged atmosphere has been exacerbated by back-to-back election
campaigns in Slovakia, Hajdu adds. The parliamentary vote in October was
followed by the vote for a new president last month. In both elections,
disinformation was a prominent feature. In the parliamentary election, Fico’s
opponent was attacked with audio deepfakes. In the presidential election, false
claims circulated on social media and pro-Russia websites. “Within this constant
political campaign, there were a lot of heated discussions and the spread of
hate,” she says. Now the country is in the midst of yet another political
campaign, ahead of EU elections early next month.

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Slovak allies of Fico called the assassination attempt “politically motivated”
while others blamed the “liberal media” for the attack. Interior minister Matúš
Šutaj-Eštok described the perpetrator as a “lone wolf” who was “radicalized
recently, after the presidential election.” Šutaj-Eštok also said the suspect
had told police he was motivated by Fico’s policies related to abolishing the
special prosecutor’s office and reforming the public service broadcaster, as
well as the decision to stop supplying military assistance to Ukraine.

The suspect’s motivations were jumped on by conspiracists of all stripes on
Wednesday, and quickly spread outside of the Russian campaign.

Many popular verified accounts on X that subscribe to the platform’s Premium
service—and are therefore allowed to monetize their content—instantly spread
unconfirmed and wildly inaccurate information about the shooting. Many of them
repeated the claim that the attack was linked to Fico’s stance on Ukraine.

“Twitter became a useless morass of disinformation around the Robert Fico
shooting,” John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at Citizen Lab, wrote on X.
“Try searching for his name, almost the entirety of the top results I get are
contradictory conspiracy theories. Good luck even surfacing fact-checked,
substantiated information.”

Because Fico was an outspoken critic of the World Health Organization and its
handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, anti-vaccine groups and channels also quickly
pushed the narrative that Fico was shot because of this anti-vaccine stance.
Other X accounts variously blamed Jews, the CIA, and Muslims for the attack.

As Fico remains in the hospital, researchers note that attacks against
politicians have become increasingly common in Europe. “This is not only
Slovakia,” says Milan Nič, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe expert at the
German Council of Foreign Relations. Two members of Germany’s ruling center-left
Social Democrats were attacked separately this month. Both were treated in
hospital. Two far-right AFD politicians were also attacked last week and
suffered "light injuries," according to police. Polish prime minister Donald
Tusk said he received a death threat through X, following the attack on Fico.

“In this era, when a lot of frustration and resentment is accumulated then
amplified by social media, there is more and more confusion,” says Nič.







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David Gilbert is a reporter at WIRED covering disinformation, online extremism,
and how these two online trends impact people’s lives across the globe, with a
special focus on the 2024 US presidential election. Prior to joining WIRED, he
worked at VICE News. He lives in Ireland.
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Morgan Meaker is a senior writer at WIRED, covering Europe and European business
from London. She won the top prize at the BSME Awards in 2023 and was part of
the team that worked on WIRED’s award-winning investigation series “Inside the
Suspicion Machine.” Before she joined WIRED in 2021, her... Read more
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