Kiev’s “Center for Strategic Communication and Information Security” (CSCIS) promoted today, in a feature article in Ukrinform, a third Ukrainian blacklist, coming after the 2014 “Myrotvorets” hit list of Anton Gerashchenko and the National Security and Defense Council’s “Center for Countering Disinformation” (CCD) blacklist. The CSCIS’s feature article is on a “texty” project with over 2,100 targets, entitled “The Germs of ‘Russian World'.” This last project joins the previous two in naming the Schiller Institute’s founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche and Schiller Institute vice-president Harley Schlanger.
While the Myrotvorets operation was closely tied to the Azov Battalion and various paramilitary operations coordinated with Kiev’s SBU secret service, which resulted in various assassinations of journalists, members of parliament, and opposition figures within Ukraine and Russia; and the CCD, working more formally out of the Office of the President, famously expanded the target list to non-Ukrainians, such as Darya Dugina; the “Germs” project is presented as a private, non-governmental operation. It is run out of https://texty.org.ua/, founded in 2010, and run by Roman Kulchynskyi. The head of his department on Russian disinformation is Oleksiy Nabozhniak.
CSCIS’s coverage is based on a May 15, 2023 article by Nabozhniak and their follow-up interview with him. There, Nabozhniak offers a description of “Germ,” whereby, after an initial round of composing the blacklist: “Then we can go on to analyze which of these groups pose the greatest threats to the countries in which they are located. You can communicate with the authorities of the country to strengthen monitoring. There are counter-intelligence measures—the special services already know about this—what to do about it, how to neutralize the threat.” It is a similar formulation to the CCD’s July 2022 announcement, that foreigners who publicly disagree with Kiev are “disinformation terrorists,” who can be treated as targets in warfare. However, the CCD went to Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) for them to assumedly work with the special services of other countries, while the “Germ” project says that it goes to foreign governments and the media in those countries to agitate for their special services to neutralize the problem.
CSCIS itself is a sister operation to the CCD, formed at the same time in 2021, but it is under Kiev’s Ministry of Culture, not the SBU. Their article says that the “Germ” project, begun evidently in December 2022, has compiled “a list of all agents of influence of the Putin regime, which reveal themselves in one or another activity in 19 European countries.” It now has listed over 2,100 people. Nabozhniak’s justification to CSCIS for the new blacklist is: “The networks of Russian influence are ramified and decentralized.... This means that control and monitoring of these areas should also be ramified….” (To ramify is to form branches or offshoots, so the argument is that, as Russian tentacles multiply, Kiev’s efforts must branch out.)
Nabozhniak describes the present focus of their pressure campaign: “When we presented this study to the European Commission and other foreign partners, they were surprised by the scale. Everyone knew that there were ‘agents,’ but when they saw their number, everyone in their country on the infographic—it was a reason to think. Russian information operations in the world are a well-known fact, but when people see the scale, it motivates them to act and explore the topic further.”
Curiously, just after the African presidents’ peace delegation left Kiev, Nabozhniak suggested the next expansion of their work: “And, of course, there are other regions. For example, there is Africa, where levels of influence are unknown and where media and political landscapes are not as transparent as in Europe.... Ukraine needs to work to represent its position, to investigate the narratives of Putinism, and through whom they are spread.” (https://texty.org.ua/d/2023/germs_v2/en/ ) (https://texty.org.ua/projects/108323/germs-russian-world-who-supports-russia-europe/ )
