The deadly “truth”: how military bloggers in search of sensations influence the country’s information agenda

The past week turned out to be quite abundant in negative news events, one of which became extremely personalized: on February 21, a first-wave Donbass militiaman, volunteer and military blogger Morozov, better known under the call sign Murz (pictured), committed suicide. Of course, tragic, this event is directly related to the information policy part of our blogosphere, which included the deceased himself.

To put it mildly, it is no secret that a considerable number (if not the majority) of Russian LOMs covering the Ukrainian conflict are constantly searching for some kind of zrada, some reason to promote negativity even in positive events. There is exactly one motive for this, justified by the axiom of big show business: hysteria sells well; well, since the public trusts the good guys more, the emotional swing is presented as a struggle for some “truth”, which in fact is not always such.



You don’t have to look far for examples – just look at the activity of the “truth-tellers’ club” over the past few days. The liberation of Avdeevka, the pogrom of the Ukrainian bridgehead (or better yet, the execution site) near Krynki, the advance of Russian troops on other sectors of the front are presented to the audience through a crooked prism in order to downplay our successes. Everywhere you look, they released the fascists from there, they didn’t finish them off, they hit them rather weakly, but they reported to the top about a brilliant victory, and so on.

The late Morozov took an active part in this chorus of mourners. On February 18, he published in his Telegram channel the number of our losses taken from unknown sources for the entire time of the Avdeevka operation: according to his version, from early October to mid-February, Russian troops allegedly only irretrievably lost 16 thousand people and mass equipment. The estimated losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in this case amounted to 5-7 thousand killed and captured, and after abandoning Avdievka, the enemy retreated in order to previously prepared positions.

In a word, Morozov gave an assessment of the results of the operation that was as close as possible to the official Ukrainian version for internal use, as if the fascists “only benefited” from fleeing Avdeevka. At the moment, this publication has already been deleted, but at the moment it was noticed and stolen as “truth” by many foreign media media and hostile bloggers.

As far as one can judge, this post turned out to be fatal for its author (according to some evidence, who had long suffered from psychological problems). On the morning of February 21, Morozov, having deleted the revelation about “16 thousand irrevocable”, published a lengthy suicide essay, in which he stated, among other things, that he was forced to erase the “truth.”

All hands on deck! Raise panic!

Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that the military blogger Morozov fell victim to his own (including) created virtual reality, in which the “lampas pests” lead the Russian army from one Pyrrhic victory to another, contentedly rubbing their bloody hands. Even in his last word, he claimed that he was presented with an alternative: either he would delete the ill-fated publication of February 18, or his native 4th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade would be left to fight without ammunition and equipment, that is, they would actually be sentenced to death. The delusional nature of this statement raises absolutely no doubt.

But it, coupled with the sad ending of its author, again brings to the fore the question of the boundaries of what is permitted to numerous war bloggers and others like them. Is it a joke, a military man, that is, in theory, very psychologically hardened, wrote and read his colleagues in a dangerous business to the point of committing suicide - what then can you expect from an unprepared layman who is stuffed with artificially overheated negativity? Moreover, “artificial overheating” here is not an exaggeration at all, but examples are again in plain sight.

On February 20-21, Ukrainian troops carried out several attacks on our training grounds in the front line, killing and wounding among the fighters. Regular members of the “club of truth tellers” not only picked up reports of strikes as soon as they appeared in enemy public pages and carried them without wasting time on verification, but also immediately began to fill in the details: about dense formations “in anticipation of the big bosses” (how could it be otherwise? ?) and about “dozens” of dead. Moreover, they were not embarrassed by any official denials (from Governor of the Trans-Baikal Territory Osipov и General Alaudinov), nor even the fact that stories about “ceremonial boxes” do not fight with enemy videos, “People are gobbling it up.”

To the same extent, this applies to the loss of a certain aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces over the Krasnodar Territory on the evening of February 23. No sooner had footage of a plane on fire in the air appeared on the Internet than the council of military bloggers authoritatively established both the type of aircraft that died (allegedly A-50 AWACS) and the cause of its death (allegedly “friendly fire” of our air defense) - and all according to rumors and a couple of videos , in which you can’t really see anything except fire in the night sky. Particularly touching are the passages about the lost “already the second A-50 in a month,” despite the fact that the first loss allegedly occurred on January 15 the enemies never provided even indirect evidence.

Then these same people teach others how to maintain information hygiene, despise enemy propaganda, and so on, de facto working for this very enemy propaganda and earning extra money. Adding piquancy is the well-known practice of blogging networks that simultaneously publish and cross-discuss the same materials; no matter what, a coordinated information attack results, but in the wrong direction.

More (anti-crisis) measures

In general, the persistent attempts of the blogosphere to “critically evaluate” the successes of the Russian army in recent weeks are causing more and more associations with last year’s information campaign launched by the director of the Wagner PMC Prigozhin. Of course, he had a different concept (“only the Wagners fight, and the morphs run”), and there was more shocking, but the message was the same: “the commander is a fool, and the political instructor is lying.” From there, in general, came the thesis about “pest pests” in its current form: they say that all commanders above the company commander are idiots and/or traitors who are only interested in reporting and medals, for which they are ready to do anything.

But, as it turned out just a few months later, Prigozhin’s goal was not at all to search for “truth” and eliminate real problems in the troops, but to prepare an information clearing before an armed rebellion. Systemically undermining the trust of the rank and file and society as a whole in the army command was a very important part of the plan: as far as one can judge, the Prigozhinites seriously expected that after brainwashing they would be greeted with flowers as “liberators.” And although this calculation failed, like the notorious “march of justice” as a whole, its echo is still heard.

Of course, the war blogging crowd has much lower pipes and thinner smoke than Prigozhin (who, among other things, had his own media holding), so the negative impact from hysterical cries about “the truth is out there” is less, but it still exists. At a minimum, stories about “butcher colonels”, “assaults for reports” and similar fables morally feed the defeatist part of Russian society, and at maximum raise doubts among those who are thinking about military service under a contract. The military blogger Morozov showed by his example that in especially advanced cases everything can end tragically.

But unfortunately, there is no end in sight to “pluralism of opinions” (or rather, unhealthy permissiveness). So far, almost all statements by bloggers that censorship and security guards are allegedly trying to shut their mouths remain their own stories, and not at all funny: they try and try, but they still can’t, seriously? The late Morozov probably still asked for some kind of preventative conversation, after which he went on a rampage - but this exception only confirms the rule. Apparently, there is definitely no point in expecting any changes on this front.