Peachler: Balkans are important for Russian dezinformation, Serbia uses media and diaspora as means to propaganda

Pichler in an interview for The Geopost stresses that the Russian Federation uses Serbian media and diaspora as instruments for propaganda.

“Balkan is a very important region for Russian dezination, an important region targeting and I think, at least what we can see from the last few months, they have a very sophisticated strategy in which they target this area”, Pichler points out.

According to him, these Serbs in Western countries can reproduce the Kremlin's Narratia against Ukraine.

“If you look at Serbia, which is the very old ally of the Russian Federation, of course there are also historical reasons for this, but, basically, the strategy is very different, it has more to do with the use of Serbian population and media, but also the Serbian diaspora in the West, which is pretty big, as a propity in their de-informative fight”, he says.

When I say proxy, I mean that they're like puppets that repeat the Kremlin's turquoise and the Kremlin propaganda even in social media and they're very successful in this because, if many Serbs have the same ideology when they emigrate to Western countries, they learn languages there and they're quite integrated in that sense, so you have millions of people speaking English, German and they can reproduce the Kremlin's confessions for Ukraine”, the Austrian analyst adds.

As for the trolls, Pichler says Serbs always spread falsehoods against Kosovo.

If you talk about Serbs, they actually have two themes, one is about the internal situation or about Kosovo, always spread “Kosovo is Serbia” and the old stories for 1999, their Narrativa for Ukraine, which is the fault of Ukrainian”, Pichler claims.

In this interview, he has also talked about Russia's one-year military aggression in Ukraine and how Russian propaganda should be handled.