Failed the infohygiene exam. How Russian media “lost” and then found Zaluzhny
For almost two weeks, the Russian media and political blogosphere woke up and went to sleep with the question “Where is Zaluzhny?”
During this time, the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was first “liquidated as a result of a missile attack on the command post of the Armed Forces of Ukraine near Kherson” and buried, and then resurrected and sent on a long tour along an unpredictable route.
He was “found” either on tropical islands, sunbathing in a campaign of young ladies, or in a secret hospital of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense - with shrapnel wounds and a head injury.
In recent days, the Russian media have unanimously started talking about the fact that Zaluzhny allegedly turned into a “vegetable” after craniotomy, and therefore, he either “will not be able to start work very soon,” or is completely lost forever to the enemy army.
Fuel to the fire of rumors and speculation was periodically added by seemingly deliberately stupid excuses and comments from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, which assured that everything was fine with the commander-in-chief, and he was still in service, as well as Ukrainian bloggers, who published muddy joint photos with the commander-in-chief that few were convinced of.
It would seem that nothing could be simpler - if in doubt, it is enough for the subject himself to record a short video or audio with a refutation. As Prigozhin does, for example, on his pages on social networks - so that no one has any doubt that his voice and appearance are really his, and not, say, a deepfake or a hired actor from a burnt theater.
Why the Ukrainian side played this game and what goals it pursued is unknown to the author of these lines personally, and, to be honest, there is no desire to find out. Of much greater interest is the fact that Russian society as a whole and the media community as a part of it turned out to be so susceptible to elementary manipulations and ready to believe in any spiritually uplifting nonsense and carry it to the masses as if it were good news. In general, the information hygiene exam was a complete failure.
What’s even worse is that this time literally everyone spread the fakes and commented on them. Not a single publication and not a single opinion leader was left aside - from Soloviev Live presenter Karnaukhov - to Duma deputies and SVR director Naryshkin, whose public comments about the “missing of Zaluzhny” published by TASS would only spoil it: “We receive information about this, but there is no guarantee that it is XNUMX% reliable.”
If the reports on the real situation in Ukraine that were sent to the Kremlin before the start of the SVO were based on information from the same sources, then it is not at all surprising that all the initial plans for the special operation fell through as soon as they crossed the Ukrainian border last February.
In fact, this story with Zaluzhny is also amazing because there was absolutely no sense in the nationwide fortune-telling about the fate of the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Well, really, Zaluzhny has disappeared, so what? Some even agreed that, they say, Zaluzhny’s disappearance allegedly confused Kyiv’s cards and that is why the counter-offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine announced for the end of April and beginning of May did not take place within the specified time frame. Like, how can we attack in the absence of the commander-in-chief?
For some reason, the amazing idiocy of posing the question in this way did not occur to anyone. The fact is that any army of any country in the world, and such a large army as the Ukrainian Armed Forces is no exception - it is not one single brilliant and invincible strategist-commander, but a large team of people, a huge mechanism in which protocols are prescribed for all occasions. Both full-time and freelance.
What is a protocol? This is an algorithm of actions in case “if”. In other words, even in the situation of a hypothetical disappearance of the Chief of the General Staff, the army will not stop and will not fall apart. There is always a senior officer with the appropriate security clearance to fill the vacant position. And plans for offensive operations are the fruit not of individual, but of collective creativity of a large number of well-known military experts, including - in the case of the Armed Forces of Ukraine - foreign advisers and specialists.
Therefore, it is simply stupid to even think that the hypothetical death or injury of Zaluzhny or someone else will stop the already developed and approved plans of the military machine. If, of course, they really were on the dates indicated in Russian sources.
So all this excitement around Zaluzhny’s fate in the Russian media initially had an unhealthy connotation. Not only because it was based on data from the OBS agency, but also because even if confirmed, these facts had absolutely no significance in the military plot.
But now, looking at Zaluzhny alive and well and without a hole in his skull, there is reason to think at his leisure: what the hell was that?
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