When news first emerged last month that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was preparing to fire his top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, officials in Moscow seemed jubilant. They had been trying to orchestrate just such a split for many months, documents show.

“We need to strengthen the conflict between Zaluzhny and Zelensky, along the lines of ‘he intends to fire him,’” one Kremlin political strategist wrote a year ago, after a meeting of senior Russian officials and Moscow spin doctors, according to internal Kremlin documents.

. . .

The Kremlin instruction resulted in thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles, created by troll farms and circulated in Ukraine and across Europe, that tried to exploit what were then rumored tensions between the two Ukrainian leaders, according to a trove of Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The files, numbering more than 100 documents, were shared with The Post to expose for the first time the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Zelensky with the aim of dividing and destabilizing Ukrainian society — efforts that Moscow dubbed “information psychological operations.”

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    • Tarte
      4•9 months ago

      do you think russia has been boycotting zelensky even before he was presient? Why would they make such an effort

      Your example is from two years after he became president. Not from the time before.

      • Infiltrated_ad8271
        1•9 months ago

        But the files obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and published on Sunday claimed that Zelenskyy and his partners established a network of offshore companies back in 2012.

        The report also found that Zelenskyy, just before he was elected, transferred his stake in one of the offshore companies to his top aide Serhiy Shefir – the target of a shooting attack last month.

        • Tarte
          3•9 months ago

          That is the relevant date, isn’t it? This news piece was written after he became president.

          • Infiltrated_ad8271
            3•9 months ago

            Fair point, unfortunately I doubt it is easy to find international news prior to his notoriety.

            This is already reliable news, but I guess it will be popularly dismissed anyway. I find it worrying that corruption cases (with solid evidence) are dismissed by easily using russia as a scapegoat.

            I think people underestimate the difficulty of forging a convincing case, and overestimate russian agents.