The conflict between Zelensky and Zaluzhny has been prepared from the Kremlin for years - WP

The conflict between President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi and former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valeriy Zaluzhnyi was provoked by the Kremlin's ISI. The Washington Post writes about this with reference to documents obtained by the European intelligence service, UNN reports .

Details

According to the newspaper, citing documents, in January, when the news first broke last month that Vladimir Zelensky was preparing to fire Valery Zaluzhny, officials in Moscow seemed jubilant.

The documents show that they have been trying to organize just such a split for months. Putin's administration ordered a group of Russian political strategists to use social media and fake news articles to push the theme that Zelenskyy was "hysterical and weak" and afraid of being "pushed aside" so he was getting rid of the dangerous ones.

"The Kremlin's instruction led to thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles created by troll farms and distributed in Ukraine and across Europe, which tried to exploit the tensions between the two Ukrainian leaders," the publication writes.

The documents indicate that in January 2023, the Kremlin's first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, instructed a group of officials and political strategists to create a presence on Ukrainian social media to spread disinformation

"The effort was based on a previous project that Kiriyenko had been carrying out to undermine Western support for Ukraine, particularly in France and Germany. The European propaganda group was headed by one of Kiriyenko's deputies, Tatyana Matveyeva, head of the Kremlin's Department for the Development of Information and Communication Technologies," the documents say.

In January 2023, Kiriyenko outlined four key goals for the Ukrainian propaganda group: discrediting Kyiv's military and political leadership, splitting the Ukrainian elite, demoralizing Ukrainian troops, and disorienting the Ukrainian population.

This was supposed to lead to "lower ratings of key personnel in Zelenskyy's office, the Ukrainian government, and the command of the Ukrainian armed forces," as well as to increase the belief among the Ukrainian population that the country's elite worked only for themselves.

Among the materials covered on social media was a fabricated Facebook post claiming that the family of the deceased soldier had not received any assistance from the state, which received over 2 million views. The propaganda outlet also posted a video on Telegram stating that the main goal of the war of the authorities in Kyiv is to "fight to the last Ukrainian.

Dozens of hired trolls wrote more than 1,300 posts and 37,000 comments on Ukrainian social media every week. According to the data, troll farm workers received 60 thousand rubles a month, or $660, for writing 100 comments a day.

In the first week of May 2023, a Facebook post claiming that Zaluzhny could become the next president of Ukraine received 4.3 million views. The Kremlin then issued orders to create similar posts, or "augmented reality," a term Russian officials use to refer to fake news. These included messages that Western leaders were looking for a replacement for Zelensky and that Zaluzhny was intent on stopping the counteroffensive.

Recall

On February 8, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed decrees dismissing Valeriy Zaluzhnyy from the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and appointing Oleksandr Syrskyy to the post.