A Year in Russian Facebook PsyOps (Pics)
From somewhat sane and slightly bizarre and utterly mental, Russian PsyOps offer it all
Welcome to early 2023.
It’s still frosty outside and I’m sitting slightly bored, scrolling my Facebook feed in search of somethingness, and nothingness, at the same time.
Every now and again different pages appear in my feed, offering me the services I had previously googled. Or simply acting as an echo chamber of what I had already liked or commented on — be it some funny videos or annoying articles by the Guardian that keep popping up in my feed to this day.
Out of all this clutter, however, one post catches my eye almost instantaneously— and it stops my right index finger from scrolling further.
There’s a good reason why: it pictures Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a money-hungry man climbing a pile of dollars (between 2019-2022) vs. a questionable saint (2022-2023) whose hands are covered in blood while he stands atop dead soldiers.
This bizarre collage is complemented by a poorly-spaced caption in Ukrainian:
“The battle for Bakhmut is lost already. But how many more fortresses like that will there be? How many more victims of lunatic chiefs will fall in this unequal battle? Do we really believe in our victory against a nuclear state? The result is regrettably inevitable, it’s a matter of time.”
I immediately — and quite naturally given my line of work — take interest and click the advertiser of the sponsored content — only to see a page called Consbookca, a purportedly local and travel website with 12 likes and 8 followers.
An anonymous source in times of war, encouraging you to surrender because your enemy is so much more prevailing…
Now, who could it possibly be?
Judging by the comment section, I wasn’t the only one who begged the same question after seeing this post, with Ukrainians — whom the ad was clearly targeting — reacting in the way you’d expect them to: by mocking the author.
“Burning pretty well I see” and “Lavrov has once again delivered drugs to the vatniks)))) It is not for nothing that he visited the narco cartels” are among the comments that you see in the screenshot below (mind you, those are flattering).
This episode, as later became evident, was the first in the series of Russian PsyOps on Facebook that plagued my feed for many months.
Some of the posts, like the one below made by Tsumaki, another anonymous page with no followers or information, made at least some sense as they mentioned that the European ammo producers are experiencing difficulties in delivering ammo to Ukraine (which was true at the time and still is to a great extent).
But why would Ukrainians tell Ukrainians about this using an anonymous page? Often with completely unrelated imagery to it that somehow also features WW1 American weaponry to be used before 1914 (p.s. the US declared war on Germany in 1917)?
There’s a reason to believe that the authors of these post did not ask themselves such questions so it’s only natural that it did not take long for these PsyOps to stop making any sense whatsoever.
The image above, alongside the caption, offers just about everything to substantiate that thesis:
The portrayal of President Zelenskyy with a Borat-like “Jewish nose”
The posting of the ad at 02:37 am
The reference to the Ukrainian government as “the Kyiv regime”, a derogatory Russian term for the democratically elected government of Ukraine
The labeling of Biden’s office as the “Bidon’s office” (toilet’s office)
The reference to the liberation of Crimea as its “capture”.
And that’s just two paragraphs of text, ladies and gentlemen!
In another attempt by Batar Taga, the so-called Ukrainians posted an image of Zelenskyy at a kiosk that offers “everything for genocide”, — this time, however, with a less “Jewish nose” — saying in Russian “I don’t have money, can I pay with people?”
“Ukrainians” telling Ukrainians in Russian that Zelenskyy wants to purchase ‘weapons for genocide’ with Ukrainian people...
Let it sink in.
If that wasn’t enough, here’s another example the Russian psy-ops gurus in action.
Using an anonymous page Windsankirs, they decided to ask Ukrainians to watch a cartoon dubbed UkraineCocaine, which was allegedly created by the French cartoonists (of course not), and sign a petition via a shady site for no one to see it.
All this is complemented by googletranslated Ukrainian that makes little to no sense in some parts literally translating the Russian soft curse “blin” into a Ukrainian “pancake.”
Notably linguistic troubles have been recurrent in Russian PsyOps, and not just on Facebook. X (Twitter) offers a glimpse into them as part of the infamous 2022 #LightOnZelenskyyOFF campaign that demanded that Zelenskyy turn on electricity following Russia’s relentless strikes on Ukraine’s power plants that year.
The tweet below is am example of how googletranslated text from Russian to Ukrainian went terribly wrong, with imserhii, who’s mockingly trying to press the socket with his finger, saying sarcastically: “Half of the country is without electric food, there’s not enough piss to endure these hellish flours”.
In Russian, this sentence made perfect sense — but not in Ukrainian.
The list of these anonymous PsyOps would, arguably, be incomplete without a page featuring a Bitcoin logo and the misspelled “crypto” word, depicting ‘evil’ President Joe Biden, holding a bomb (is it that dirty bomb that Russia’s envoy to the UN Vasily Nebenzya was once talking about?) and the caption that starts by saying “The US says that Ukraine is falling apart!”
The rest of that post is a long doom-and-gloom monologue of how unknown American media outlets are talking about military failures, “the Americans feeling that it’s time to leave because they didn’t manage”, “Washington’s desire to distance itself from “the future failure in Ukraine” and more.
Thanks to my X (Twitter) follower Robin Molnar, I also later found out that similar PsyOps were launched in other Facebook segments, particularly the one aimed at German speakers.
An anonymous post by Physically ye4 is an example of that. It includes the link to an article on how Russia effortlessly circumvents sanctions (which is not true — even though it does partially circumvent them), calling the solution “easy and elegant”.
Do you remember the taste of plombir?
Whether due to abundance, ubiquitous reporting, or ineffectiveness, at some point the anonymous PsyOps ceased to exist in my feed.
Enter the Soviet nostalgia posts that first started to spread on Facebook in late 2023 — and at lightning speed.
POFU — добрый юмор (POFU — kind humor) is an example of a handle posting “first person” Soviet memories of how great life was in a totalitarian state.
Unlike the anonymous pages above, POFU appears — at least by Russian standards — a more credible source of information with 598K likes and 865K followers. It even has legit likes from legit people as you can see below.
“Fantastic bright faces, men and women with fit bodies. And the eyes! There are no pictures like these nowadays. Because there’s no friendship like this. Selfless. Honest. Without any vulgarity. NONE! Such bright faces) Everything changed so much, instead of natural feelings, everything’s fake. Oh how I want a Time Machine) these pictures from the past are so bewitching. To walk down these streets. To breathe that air….”, reads one of POFU’s typical posts below.
In the same vein, POFU talks about the food in the USSR — which according to the older generation (my late grandmother included) is superior to the modern one — that was both cheap and ‘so very tasty and natural’.
The “already outside I was drooling” type of food as written in the post below wherein the author pretends to remember how great food was at a stolovka (akin to a food court but with very limited options, typically located at factories).
The goal of these emotive texts, disguised as memories, is always the same: to evoke emotions among those who still recall the mythical days of the good old “plombir” — the code word for all Homos Sovieticus.
An ordinary ice cream, the recipe of which is likely to have been imported from the US in the 1930s, plombir is a proven method to generate comments and evoke the sense of ultimate superiority over “Western imperialism” (This fantastic X thread by Slava Malamud will help you understand how important plombir is for Homo Sovieticus and, ultimately, Russian PsyOps at large)
POFU, however, is just one of the many Facebook handles that focuses on the life of the typical Homo Sovieticus. Тайны Мироиздания (Secrets of the Universe), for example, sheds light on the “fun times” when Soviet students were forcibly sent to the collectives in the summertime.
Other types of Russian PsyOps are a bit more neutral-toned. Most likely because their goal is to target non-aware audiences. Future Russia, which usually shows beautiful videos of beautiful Russians, with 552K likes and 742K followers is a good example. If it weren’t for the targeting, perhaps, even I would dismiss the synergy of Slavic treasures as a regular post.
Only it’s not as it targets Ukrainians and beyond and attempts to present Russia as a country that is not carrying out a war of aggression in broad daylight.
So, what have we learned from these psy-ops?
Ultimately, three things.
First, Facebook still has a long way to go to get rid of its Cambridge Analytica-like image.
Though the posts — especially from the first batch of anonymous sources with bizarre names — have been widely reported, they kept popping up in many people’s feed for months. Worse still, the content appeared as sponsored and targeted, meaning that Facebook allowed murky individuals to carry out advertising propaganda campaigns in broad daylight.
Second, Russians don’t understand Ukrainians. They keep viewing them as an extension of themselves, a nation that adheres to a doom and gloom scenario with no hope of change. Admittedly, some of their messages do get through to some parts of society. Foremost the eternal skeptics.
Most, however, ridicule their stance as alien to the Ukrainian mindset, as well as simply stupid.
Third, Russia uses many ways to interact with its audience, covering many themes: from Soviet times to beautiful costumes and more. It focuses on emotions to appeal to a large segment of people who’d later interact with its other, more politically-oriented content.
In such an environment one can only remain vigilant and report as much content as possible.
Last but not least, imagine the quality of someone’s life if after many decades your happiest memory is lunch with buckwheat covered in a diarrhoea-like sauce, some tasteless ice cream, and herring with peas.
Nice piece Lesia 👍🏼 I enjoy learning about the Russian psyche & mindset, especially as reflected in their anti-Ukraine propaganda & twitter screeds. I look forward to more of your writing.
Soup always tastes better when your starving