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Clarity for friends, confusion for foes: Russian vaccine propaganda in
Ukraine and Serbia

This paper examines how Russia tailors its vaccine propaganda to
hostile and friendly audiences, like Ukraine and Serbia. Web scraping
of all articles about vaccines on Russian state-owned websites from
December 2020 to November 2021 provided data for quantitative topic
modeling and qualitative analysis. This revealed that the Kremlin
muddles issues and sows confusion for Ukrainians but feeds Serbians
focused, repetitive narratives. Therefore, countering Russian
propaganda proactively also requires a tailored approach. Journalists
and public communications officials should clarify information and
separate unrelated issues in Russia-hostile places like Ukraine but add
nuance and context to narratives in Russia-friendly places like
Serbia.

By

[29]Katrina Keegan

Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, USA
Image by [30]chenspec on [31]Pixabay

Research Questions

* What are the structural differences in the coverage of COVID-19
vaccines in Russian propaganda outlets targeting Ukraine and
Serbia, which have majority anti-Russia and pro-Russia publics
respectively?
* How do specific Russian COVID-19 vaccine propaganda narratives in
Ukraine and Serbia compare?

Essay summary

* The pandemic presents a rare opportunity
for directly-comparable analysis of Russian information operations
on an urgent, policy-relevant issue: COVID-19 vaccines.
* This study uses data scraped from all 2,417 vaccine-related
articles in Sputnik Serbia and 1,552 articles in Ukraina.ru, both
Russian state-owned outlets, from December 2020 through November
2021. To test quantitative findings, a random sample of 20 articles
per country was also analyzed.
* The breadth of coverage in Ukraina.ru articles was wider, and
articles contradicted each other, while Sputnik Serbia covered
fewer topics more consistently.
* Narratives in Ukraina.ru touched a wide range of topics, such as
geopolitics, Russia's vaccination campaign in the Donbass, and
criticism of the Ukrainian government.
* Sputnik Serbia focused on positive coverage of the Russian vaccine
Sputnik V and the Serbian government's vaccination campaign.
* This research allows journalists to take a more proactive,
context-based approach to countering Russian propaganda.
* In Ukraine and potentially other Russia-hostile countries,
journalists and public relations officials should address
misinformation by simplifying and clarifying narratives, including
separating vaccines from other political issues.
* In Serbia and potentially other Russia-friendly countries, the
opposite approach of providing more nuanced narratives and putting
Russian claims in context would be most helpful.
__________________________________________________________________

Implications

Serbia and Ukraine are two of many countries around the world that are
victims of extensive and effective Russian information operations
related to COVID-19 vaccines. This issue has received an enormous
amount of attention (Barnes, 2021; EU vs. Disinfo, n.d.; Gray &
Edwards, 2020; Hyde, 2021; Kier & Stronski, 2021; Kraincanic, 2021;
Kuzmanovic et al., 2021; Reyting Group, 2021; Sunter & Cappello, 2021;
Thomas et al., 2020; UCMC, 2021). The magnitude of the problem makes it
important in and of itself, but the circumstances also present a rare
opportunity to understand Russian information strategy more broadly by
directly comparing cases with the same topic and timing.

Harold Lasswell (1927) wrote that propaganda is directed at the ally,
enemy, and neutral sides. However, research on modern Russian
information campaigns almost exclusively focuses on the enemy. The
conclusion of this prolific body of research is that the Kremlin's
uniform strategy is to sow information chaos, characterized by a lack
of narrative consistency, to make truth seem subjective (Fitzgerald &
Brantly, 2017; Global Engagement Center, 2020; Jankowitz, 2018; Singer
& Brooking, 2018; Will, 2021).^[32]1While focused on the domestic
manifestation of this idea, one of the best books about this is
Pomerantsev's Nothing is true and everything is possible: The surreal
heart of the new Russia (2015). Leaders of Russia have long operated
under the assumption that information can be manipulated for political
purposes; see Lenin (1902).

This paradigm works well for understanding Russian vaccine propaganda
in Ukraine, a country hostile to Russia. However, it does not apply to
Russia's information campaign in Serbia, whose public is pro-Russia.
Russia may have a rich arsenal of divisive and anti-West narratives
that it uses in other contexts in Serbia (Stiftung, 2018; Stronski &
Himes, 2018), but on vaccines, Sputnik Serbia is taking the opposite
approach to information chaos. It conducts its information campaigns
through repetition of highly consistent pro-Russia narratives.
Repetition, which psychological research shows to be highly effective,
is a known component of Russian propaganda, but the finding that
Russian narratives are consistent in Serbia contradicts prior research
(Paul & Matthews, 2016).

This can be explained through the logic of the audiences' receptivity
to Russian propaganda, hinting at the Kremlin's diverging motivations.
In Ukraine, Russia is creating a package of pro-Russian ideas about
geopolitics, domestic politics, and vaccines for its readers. If one
part of the narrative resonates, the reader might be more open to a
pro-Russian position on an unrelated topic included in the same
article. In Serbia, where Russia can assume support from its readers on
other topics, which can be addressed independently, vaccine messaging
can be simpler. Additionally, attempts to polarize society through
inconsistency and contradictions is a well-documented Russian
technique, including in Ukraine (DiResta et al., 2018; Peisakhin &
Rozenas, 2018). In majority-hostile publics, isolating and radicalizing
receptive segments of the population helps achieve the Kremlin's goal
of increasing internal conflict. It would not be logical to adopt the
same approach in a friendly country like Serbia, where the Kremlin
benefits from maintaining a stable, status-quo political environment.

This research has implications for what narratives journalists and
civil society actors in each country should use to counter Russian
propaganda, including public health NGOs, local independent
journalists, and Western media outlets like Radio Liberty, Voice of
America, BBC, and Deutsche Welle. It can also inform the government's
public outreach on vaccines, although these recommendations are
unlikely to be adopted by the Serbian government, which is closely
aligned with Russia (Kara-Murza, 2022). So far, targets of Russian
information campaigns have struggled to proactively counter-narratives
(Jones, 2018). This is a problem because the Kremlin prioritizes rapid
dissemination of narratives, as people usually believe what they read
first (Paul & Matthews, 2016).^[33]2The U.S. campaign to proactively
combat information amidst the ongoing Russian aggression against
Ukraine is a welcome change in approach (Merchant, 2022). However,
these efforts still rely on knowledge of specific future information
narratives gained through intelligence. This research allows
for a broader, structural understanding of Russian propaganda that
allows for a more proactive approach even in the absence of forewarning
about upcoming Russian information campaigns. This research provides a
better understanding of the structure of Russian propaganda narratives,
not just the specific ones used currently, in different political
contexts. This can help those fighting disinformation on vaccines and
other topics proactively use their own narrative structures that are
most likely to be effective.

When Russia is trying to muddle narratives and conflate vaccines with
other political issues, as in Ukraine and possibly other hostile
contexts, the appropriate countermeasure would be to use clear and
concise narratives focused only on vaccines. For example,
journalists--including op-ed writers--should refrain from discussing
the Russian vaccines alongside Russian military action in Ukraine, even
if it is tempting to use both as examples of Putin's geopolitical
ambitions. Public health organizations and government officials
responsible for pandemic outreach may want to avoid statements on
politics entirely. This would help Ukrainians, including in the more
pro-Russia separatist-held regions, develop a nuanced set of opinions
about vaccines and other issues that are not bundled as strictly
pro-Russia or anti-Russia, and could reduce polarization. The approach
of addressing issues one at a time can be applied to counter other
Russian information campaigns, including narratives about Putin's
current invasion of Ukraine.

Serbia and perhaps other Russia-friendly contexts require a different
approach. Adding nuance to issues that the Russian government is trying
to frame as simple would dampen the impact of propaganda. While it
would be unhelpful to take the Russian tactic in Ukraine of conflating
only tangentially related issues--this would only fuel the fire, since
Sputnik Serbia frequently comments on how the West likes to tie
vaccines to geopolitics (RS #879, #989, #1533)^[34]3For ease of
reference and to distinguish outside research from the random sample,
articles in the random sample used for qualitative analysis are denoted
by their number in the overall corpus for each outlet. RS refers to the
Sputnik Serbia corpus, and UK refers to Ukraina.ru. Citations for
sample articles are provided in the Appendix.--journalists and public
health organizations and officials can provide context and caveats to
Russian claims about Sputnik V and the Serbian government's pandemic
response. For instance, they could acknowledge data on the
effectiveness of Russian vaccines, but also note the source of the data
and compare it to alternative vaccines. Such additions may help even
pro-Russia citizens moderate their views.

This study shows that further data-driven research is necessary to
combat Russia's information campaigns proactively. This issue has
become even more urgent since the Russian invasion of Ukraine; initial
reports have already shown how the Kremlin is tailoring its propaganda,
including for the friendly domestic audience and hostile Ukrainian
audience (Miburo, 2022). There has been some research on how Russia
targets different narratives in various countries, including Ukraine
and Serbia (U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, 2018).
However, such research does not address structural variation of
information campaigns, which limits the ability of journalists and
others to effectively counter it even before specific Russian
narratives emerge. To my knowledge, there are only two other studies
that address whether countries differentiate propaganda narratives used
on adversaries and allies (Golan & Viatchaninova, 2014; Melki & Jabado,
2016), so these findings should be tested in other contexts. It is also
critical to understand how tactics and platforms targeting specific
audiences, not just narratives, differ when used on allies versus
adversaries. This paper addresses what counter-narratives to Russian
propaganda should be, but not how, where, and to whom they would be
most effectively deployed, a subject for future research.

Findings

Finding 1: Vaccine coverage in Russian propaganda incorporates a broad
range of topics and is inconsistent in Ukraine but is narrowly focused
and consistent in Serbia.

Topic models, which use quantitative methods to group articles into
topics and reveal the most frequently used words in those topics, show
that the range of Ukraina.ru articles about vaccines is wider than that
of Sputnik Serbia (see Figures 1 and 2). Both outlets covered domestic
vaccination campaigns and Sputnik V, but these were the only two topics
in Sputnik Serbia reporting. Ukraina.ru incorporated vaccines into
domestic politics to such an extent that it formed its own topic, which
included opposition politicians like Poroshenko and Medvedchuk. In
contrast, not even the Serbian president was in the top 40 words of
either topic. Ukraina.ru articles about vaccines also mentioned
geopolitics far more often, forming two additional topics. Qualitative
analysis confirmed that vaccines featured in Ukraina.ru articles on
issues from censorship to war in the Donbass, while in Sputnik Serbia,
articles including the word vaccine were almost entirely about
vaccines.

Qualitative analysis showed that even in a small random sample of
Ukraina.ru articles, coverage is often contradictory, except where
Russia's key interests - Sputnik V and the Donbas - are concerned. This
includes whether Ukraine should use AstraZeneca (UK #808, #900), when
Ukraine would likely receive Western vaccines (UK #1107, #1374), praise
and criticism of China (UK #1004, #274, #37), and the varying
assessments of the Ukrainian government's vaccination efforts (UK #309,
#1275, #1107, #1004, #1080), although the latter was mostly negative.
Qualitative analysis did not reveal any contradictions in Sputnik
Serbia. For example, all articles about China in the Sputnik Serbia
sample reiterated that the government was excited to get Chinese
vaccines and made the right decision to use all available vaccines (RS
#1612, #1949, #2131), contrasting with mixed messaging on China in
Ukraina.ru.
Figure 1. Top 40 words of topics generated using LDA topic modeling in
Sputnik Serbia vaccine coverage.Figure 2. Top 30 words of topics
generated using an LDA topic modeling in Ukraina.ru vaccine coverage.

Finding 2: Russian vaccine narratives in Serbia are almost exclusively
positive or neutral coverage of Sputnik V and the Serbian government's
vaccination campaign.

Only two clear topics emerged in Sputnik Serbia's vaccine coverage (see
Figure 1). The first is the Russian vaccine Sputnik V. Over half the
articles are on this topic, and Serbia is not even one of the top forty
words, so most articles regarding vaccines in Sputnik Serbia are not
about Serbia at all (see Figure 3). A primary narrative is Sputnik V's
widespread and early implementation, revealed by words like already,
first, register, early, and approve (RS #417, #1908, #989). A related
narrative is that Sputnik V is safe and effective (RS # #417, #1451,
#1908, #634). These claims are often overstated and incomplete, and
they lack comparisons to the effectiveness of other vaccines (Nogrady,
2021).^[35]4One of these claims, namely that Russia is the only country
to export vaccine technology, is disinformation. AstraZeneca is
produced in multiple countries, which started well before the
publication of RS #634. Several articles focused on how Russia is
generous with Sputnik V around the world and does not have ulterior
motives, as the West claims (RS #1533, #1908, #989); related words in
the model are delivery, production, and world. These positive
narratives about Russia and Sputnik V were much more frequent than in
Ukraina.ru. Sputnik Serbia mentioned Russia 36% more and Sputnik V over
three times more than Ukraina.ru.^[36]5Combined with all forms, such as
"Russian," "Russian Federation," etc. This is calculated relative to
the overall word count. p < 0.001 for both.
Figure 3. Proportion of articles in Sputnik Serbia primarily devoted to
each topic.

Finding 3: Russian vaccine propaganda in Ukraine also covers Sputnik V
positively, but additionally incorporates geopolitics and criticism of
the Ukrainian government.

Like in Sputnik Serbia, much of the vaccination and pandemic topic was
useful, factual content with words like announce, report, day, data,
case, dose, and Ministry of Health (see Figure 2; UK #879, #309).
Ukraina.ru editors likely intended to lure readers into thinking
Ukraina.ru is an objective outlet so they are more likely to believe
the less reliable articles, a technique taught explicitly to
propagandists during the Soviet era (Yakovlev, 2015). It is striking
that this technique's target of 60% neutral coverage precisely matches
the percentage of articles in this topic (see Figure 4).

The domestic politics topic, which did not exist in Sputnik Serbia
coverage, was quite distinct in Ukraina.ru, demonstrated by words like
authorities and political, and the names of politicians. Qualitative
analysis showed that many articles, including those that blended
domestic politics with the vaccination and pandemic topic, criticized
the government's procurement policies: its refusal of Russian vaccines,
use of subpar AstraZeneca and Chinese vaccines, and failure to obtain
Western vaccines in a timely fashion (UK #44, #900, #1374, 1107,
#1004). Articles in this topic also brought vaccines into other
domestic issues, including President Zelensky's unpopularity and
repression of critics (UK #1080, #1004).

The two international politics topics, comprising about a quarter of
coverage combined, incorporated vaccines into wide-ranging discussions
of global issues, as demonstrated by the top positions of Russia, U.S.,
Biden, China, Donbas, Crimea, and UN (see Figures 2 and 4). Notably,
the Ukraine-Russia-U.S. topic highlighted war in the Donbas, both
prominent words in the topic. Qualitative analysis showed that the main
narrative was that Russia is generous with its vaccines, while the
Ukrainian government and the West do not care about Ukrainians' health
(UK #415, #1418, #1107), for example: "In the uncontrolled territories
[i.e., the Donbass] people are receiving the vaccine, while the
Ukrainian elites essentially threw the people to the whims of fate and
themselves got vaccinated secretly in private clinics" (UK #1219). The
diversity of the geopolitical themes to which Ukraina.ru ties vaccines
differs substantially from the closest equivalent topic in Sputnik
Serbia, Russian vaccines, which is limited to praise of Sputnik V and
Russia's generosity distributing it.
Figure 4. Proportion of articles in Ukraina.ru primarily devoted to
each topic.

Methods

This study seeks to understand how Russia's approach to propaganda
differs when directed at the hostile versus friendly publics. This
includes the key narratives and structure of the overall coverage.
Ukraine and Serbia serve as good case studies because they are both
European, post-communist countries but are polar opposites on the
independent variable. Multiple recent head-to-head opinion polls show
that the vast majority of the Ukrainian public is anti-Russia, and the
vast majority of Serbians are pro-Russia (Hosa & Tcherneva, 2021;
Mitchell, 2017). Most directly relevant, the Hosa and Tcherneva (2021)
study found that 82% of Ukrainians do not trust Sputnik V and 75% of
Serbians do.

The Russian propaganda outlets chosen for this research are
Serbian-language Sputnik Serbia and Russian-language Ukraina.ru. Both
are subsidiaries of the same Russian government-owned and operated
media conglomerate, Rossiya Segodnya (Vedomosti, 2014). Therefore, they
are not only both unambiguous mouthpieces for the Russian government
but are also led by the same actors within the Russian government, so
their narratives are directly comparable.

These sites are appropriate for analysis of Russian propaganda in
Ukraine and Serbia because they specifically target each national
audience and are influential, albeit in different ways. Ukraina.ru was
launched in May 2014, shortly after the annexation of Crimea
(Vedomosti, 2014). Therefore, it was explicitly designed to operate in
a hostile context. Ukraina.ru propagates fake news stories that appear
in Ukrainian outlets and social media, as identified by the Kyiv-based
fact checker StopFake (n.d.).^[37]6The outlet publishes in Russian,
which the vast majority of Ukrainians understand, even if they prefer
not to speak it (Matviyishyn, 2020). The Belgrade-based,
Serbian-language Sputnik service began in 2015 (Vucicevic, 2016).
Previous studies have shown that it wields significant influence
through partnerships with local media (Brey, 2018; Jonsson, 2018;
Stronski & Himes, 2019). Sputnik Serbia and Ukraina.ru play very
different roles in the Russian propaganda apparatus namely because of
the political differences that motivate this study; by design, there
are no outlets in both countries with directly comparable tactics of
influencing the public. Further research on the precise audience of
these outlets and the way they integrate with the broader propaganda
apparatus is needed.

The period of analysis, from December 1, 2020, to November 30, 2021,
captured one year since the vaccination campaign began (Delauney, 2021;
Ukrainskaya Pravda, 2021). All articles containing the word
vaccine^[38]7As determined by a search result for that word through
each website's own search function. in this period were scraped from
the websites using Python (2,417 articles in Sputnik Serbia and 1,552
in Ukraina.ru). I converted the words to their dictionary form so that
all grammatical forms were considered the same word.^[39]8For this
lemmatization process, I used the Python packages Pymystem3 for Russian
and Classla for Serbian. Phrases of up to four words were created such
that words typically appearing next to each other, such as Sputnik V,
were considered one term.

Quantitative analysis was conducted using the statistical software R.
This includes Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, which
creates topics based on the frequency with which words appear in the
same text and ranks the most common words in each topic. Human
judgement was used to decide on the number of topics that made the
model most interpretable. To test and elaborate on quantitative
findings, a small sample of twenty articles for each country was
qualitatively analyzed. An equal number of articles about each topic
was selected randomly from the group of articles within that
topic.^[40]916 of these were divided evenly between the topics and were
selected randomly from articles highly representative of the topic, as
the model estimating that over 90% of the content in the article is
that topic. After meeting the 90% threshold, the sample is random. An
additional four were chosen from articles containing a mix of topics to
see how narratives may overlap. Mixed was defined as the model
estimating that the topic with the largest represented topic does not
comprise more than 60% of the topic.

Topics

* [41]COVID-19
* / [42]Propaganda
* / [43]Russia
* / [44]Vaccines

Share

[45]Download PDF

Topics

* [46]COVID-19
* / [47]Propaganda
* / [48]Russia
* / [49]Vaccines

Cite this Essay

Keegan, K. M. (2022). Clarity for friends, confusion for foes: Russian
vaccine propaganda in Ukraine and Serbia. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)
Misinformation Review. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-98

Links

* [50]Appendix

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Funding

No additional funding was provided.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

Ethics

Institutional review was unnecessary because all data used in this
project are publicly available.

Copyright

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the
[91]Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted
use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the
original author and source are properly credited.

Data Availability

All materials needed to replicate this study are available via the
Harvard Dataverse: [92]https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RVW6WO

Acknowledgements

I express deep gratitude to Joel Brenner of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology his guidance and comments. I would also like to thank the
anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, most of which were
incorporated and significantly improved the article.

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