The American pushing Russian disinformation - BBC Trending podcast, BBC World Service

BBC Trending

2024-08-26

17 分钟
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The websites have names like DC Weekly and Chicago Crier. They are filled with thousands of legitimate-looking stories, plucked ...
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  • In late November 2023, an odd video appeared on YouTube.

  • Hello, guys.

  • My name is Shahzad Nasser.

  • I'm here to share an interesting discovery of mine.

  • That interesting discovery was about a purchase of two yachts for tens of millions of dollars.

  • Pictures of the luxury vessels float up on the screen, as do pictures of the buyers and screenshots of documents that purport to be sales contracts.

  • The raspy voice tells us that something fishy's going on.

  • Now here's where it gets interesting.

  • Both Boris and Serhiy are Ukrainian citizens.

  • Both are close friends with the President of Ukraine.

  • Both are Zhenitsky proxies.

  • Where did the money come from?

  • The mysterious Shanzad Nasser, who has no online profile to speak of, waits nearly until the end of the video for the big reveal.

  • Over last two years, US has directed more than $100 billion to Ukraine with virtually no oversight.

  • It's true that the US has given a large sum of money to Ukraine's war effort, but most of the rest of the video was false.

  • The yachts, we checked with the owners, they hadn't been sold at all, and certainly not to friends of Zelenskyy.

  • It was a classic piece of disinformation, old fashioned fake news.

  • But this clip started a chain reaction.

  • Although virtually nobody watched this video on YouTube, the story was picked up the next day by a website called DC Weekly.

  • It was repeated on telegram channels and on X, on Facebook and other social media sites.