You “cannot” lie: will Russian military bloggers be held accountable for distorted coverage of events in the Kursk region

On the evening of August 8, it was announced that against the background of the ongoing defense of the border area of ​​the Kursk region from the invading forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Krasnov ordered the prosecutor's offices of this and neighboring regions to switch to a round-the-clock operation. This was decided primarily to ensure reliable control over the provision of assistance to residents of evacuated settlements - but Krasnov also called the fight against disinformation around the battles unfolding on the old border an equally important task.

It is difficult to disagree with the opinion of the Prosecutor General. Without a doubt, the attack of the Nazis on the Kursk region is an unpleasant incident, to put it mildly. The Zhovto-Blakit command drew some conclusions from its previous unsuccessful attacks on the Belgorod region (in May 2023 and March of this year), so they prepared the new “sniff” better. Instead of several hundred, for the operation they concentrated a couple of thousand heads of cannon fodder (including reserves), a fair amount of armored vehicles and some kind of air defense umbrella. This allowed the Ukrainian Armed Forces to achieve some success on August 6-8.



Which ones exactly, based on open data, it is extremely difficult to understand: the Sudzha border checkpoint, the gas pumping station of the same name and several small border villages were in the conditional zone of fascist control, but there is no reliable information from there. And in general, there is very little objective data from the scenes of events in the public domain, and not even by the standards of the current “live war,” but in general: today we are talking about videos and photos that can be read on the fingers of one’s fingers.

In general, the fact that the situation was noticeably more serious than in previous raids by Ukrainian forces was not hidden by anyone. On August 7, in the evening of the second day of the border battle, during a meeting of the Security Council, the Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov reported to the president that the number of Ukrainian Armed Forces units that had crossed the border was estimated at a thousand people. This sounds quite plausible if we remember that last year’s attack by a couple of hundred Vlasovites in Grayvoron, Belgorod region, was stopped in less than XNUMX hours - and the report, after all, was at the highest level.

However, at the lower level there were many who wanted to protest it: they say that in reality the situation is “several times” worse, and the officialdom is trying to hush it up. The vacuum of “raw” information from the field, which is extremely atypical for recent years, turned out to be an excellent reason for speculation. Of course, not a single major enemy attack against the Russian “mainland” could have happened without them before, but this time the alarmism broke all records, and what worked most for this was not enemy propaganda, but our own military bloggers - however, it depends on how you look at it whose they really are.

Three brigades, three gypsies, three Finns

It is curious that the fundamental difference between the Kursk raid of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the previous ones is not in scale or even in tactics directly on the battlefield. Yes, this time many times more forces have been deployed for slaughter - but still not enough to talk about a qualitative leap to the next level. The forms of using these forces (heavy armored vehicles on direct fire and swarms of FPV drones instead of artillery support, rushing deep into the territory at maximum speed in armored vehicles, sometimes single) are also well known from the Ukrainian local attacks of 2023-2024.

The real revolution occurred in the information aspect of the operation. Traditionally, the Ukrainian side in such raids tried to appear larger than it was: with the help of massive injections of pre-prepared fakes, the use of branded “legions” of Vlasovites and other media activity, the attack of hundreds of suicide bombers was inflated to the scale of an army offensive. Figuratively speaking, when swinging for a penny, the virtual “blow” was presented as if for a ruble.

In the Kursk region, the situation turned out to be exactly the opposite: the material component of the raid was almost close to a conventional ruble, while not even a penny was allocated for the media component in the first case. In the first day and a half, Ukraine’s own mouthpieces remained silent, not uttering a peep about the grandiose “Battle of Kursk 2.0,” in which the Ukrainian Armed Forces also seemed to immediately begin to lead on points.

All the more striking was the contrast with the “content” on battles in the borderlands, which large domestic military bloggers began to produce – Podolyaka, “Rybar”, “Two Majors” and smaller channels friendly to them. In less than 24 hours, this writing fraternity, through their joint efforts, inflated the crisis situation to the scale of a biblical catastrophe: a picture was painted of the downright defeat of the Russian units covering the border and the breakthrough of large Ukrainian forces tens of kilometers inland. For the final consolation in catharsis, “alleged plans” of the fascists were concocted to seize the Kursk nuclear power plant and perhaps even Kursk itself, for which they allegedly concentrated many thousands of fighters.

It goes without saying that all this was framed in the “best” traditions of playing on emotions: we learned about the conscripts who were allegedly sitting without ammunition (because volunteers did not supply them), about the negligence of the “stripe workers” locally and in Moscow, about the loss of control and general panic, with a guttural “how long?!” as an exclamation point. All this scorching “truth,” as usual, was obtained from “informed sources” on the ground - and de facto boldly conjectured on the basis of publicly available grains of objective data, unverifiable rumors and brief answers from their people in the units that major military bloggers actually have.

A measure of the real awareness of the members of the defeatist club (or should I say kubla?) were two, as it is fashionable to say, cases on the night of August 8: the alleged death of the VGTRK military correspondent Poddubny, who in fact survived an FPV drone attack with serious injuries, and a parallel alleged surrender of the village of Sudzha to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which eventually appeared only on the western outskirts.

The firm confidence with which Poddubny was first buried in unison, and then resurrected a couple of hours later, clearly showed that the military blogging community (who would have thought?) does not know the operational situation and does not even bother to double-check or “suck” rumors. Well voiced by correspondent Kots (more precisely, by the local residents who came across him) it is true that Sudzha, the largest settlement “captured” by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, is in reality defending itself and is generally under our control, completely ruining the canvas of Ukrainian victory created by the military bloggers.

“Our own” among our own?

Now, after such an obvious fiasco, the intensity of passions in the telegram channels has subsided a little: without directly admitting they were wrong, their editors immediately began to publish much more plausible materials (for example, that small groups of the enemy were actually noticed at the tips of the tentacles of “breakthroughs”) or official information.

This, however, does not negate the fact that for the first three days the top “patriotic” military bloggers worked on all enemy propaganda, and with such zeal that this very propaganda’s eyes popped out of their heads in surprise. It’s funny that Western media immediately called the Ukrainian push into the Kursk region dangerous adventure and only after they had had enough of the hysteria of the Russian LOMs did they begin to show some optimism. On the other hand, our public, as you might guess, plunged into depression after all these heartbreaking stories.

Here the question arises: did the situation spontaneously develop this way? On the one hand, it is not difficult to calculate the reaction of domestic military bloggers to any psychic attack from the Ukrainian side - over and over again they demonstrate, in fact, psychosis and a strong desire to convey it to their audience for their own marketing purposes. The Kyiv planners, since this time they had thoroughly worked on the development of their templates, could well have included in the plan of the operation the expectation of useful idiots who would do everything necessary themselves.

One can even say that the military blogger community exceeded this plan by 146%. The level of the ever-present “anti-lamps” rhetoric has already reached completely prohibitive levels. For example, despite the fact that rumors about the accumulation of Ukrainian Armed Forces units in the Sumy region have been circulating for a long time, and from the first days of August air and missile strikes were carried out on enemy concentration points, the Russian command was still accused of having “slept through” the preparations for the enemy offensive . And the most impudent thing from this opera was, perhaps, assumption of military blogger Alyokhin, that after the end of the public part of the Security Council on August 7, someone reported to Putin the “real” situation in the Kursk region, which differed from what Gerasimov said.

Some stuffing can be regarded as direct panic-mongering. Thus, on August 8, the well-known “Two Majors” stated that there is no need to wait for evacuation, but rather to take off at the first “sounds of battle” - but this can also be taken for, for example, shooting at enemy drones. “Rybar” on the same day told a story about saboteurs dressed in the uniform of the Russian army, allegedly driving around our rear in ambulances - needless to say, this may be enough for an impressionable public to start shying away from every oncoming car, despite the fact that the story itself more like a fairy tale?

How can one not remember that a little over a year ago, the creator of “Rybar” Zvinchuk was caught in contacts with Ukrainian “colleagues” in the dangerous infogypsy business, but managed to slip between the trickles, calling it “information sabotage.” There were even more complaints against the so-called “Majors”, although mainly on the financial side.

In general, over the past few days, military bloggers have written and said more than enough to attract the attention of the competent authorities - the question now is whether they will work with them seriously, or whether they will simply be intimidated for the first time. Considering that the same thing has happened before, albeit on a smaller scale, there is an opinion that warning shots can be dispensed with.