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Russia’s viral hero story almost certainly Kremlin propaganda

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You’ve probably heard about the Russian special operations troop killed recently in Syria. As the story goes, he was alone, low on ammo, and surrounded by Daesh attackers. He called in an air strike on his own position, martyring himself to kill the enemy hordes converging on his position. If you read SOFREP regularly, you’ve probably already seen Jack Murphy’s scathing deconstruction of this narrative. Unfortunately, that piece wasn’t the final nail in this absurd coffin. No, the story continues.

Russian psychological warfare operatives are astute. As Murphy observed, it doesn’t matter if informed consumers see the propaganda for what it is. What matters is that their audiences don’t. Undoubtedly this story has created a swelling of national pride among Russians, and good for them. The problem is that Russian propaganda continues to gain unfathomable traction here in the West. Although Moscow is pushing the narrative through Kremlin mouthpieces like Russia Today and Pravda, British tabloids were more than eager to spread the message. Despite enormous cause for skepticism, even mainstream sources like the Washington Post began including this tale in reports on Syria.

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Comments

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Here’s a sample of the comments on this post.

  • Kenny Powers

    I’m not so sure, people ate up the Jessica Lynch propaganda like candy. You do make a good point though in that many are so willing to believe foreigner’s accounts of heroism without question.

  • Andreas M

    Salil, thank you for writing this article and especially for your analysis of the transcript, I initially bought this story at face value as did a lot of the Facebook pages I follow (a lot of reputable military ones) and I didn’t give it a second thought. It was only after your write up and after reading the transcript between the operator and command ,which in my opinion was a big red flag, was I able to see exactly what you already knew. I have read countless of articles and books regarding people in those situations and none of them ever talk like that on the radio (i.e don’t let them disrespect the uniform, avenge me, etc), this looks more like a script for a movie. I hadn’t even considered looking to the source which wrote up the article as I thought multiple sources had confirmed it and since no one else seems to be calling it BS except for you and Jack
    However bull shit the story is I cannot say that this scenario is absolutely impossible or could never happen.
    One example of this occurred during the Second World War when an African American in the US Army named John R. Fox deliberately called in artillery fire on his own position to stop advancing German forces and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
    (source)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Fox

  • Pedro A

    watch “Hyena Road”, same story

  • A7Dave

    I don’t know how many times I’ve been sent emails from friends with some wild and fantastic claim about our government, our military or the West in general. I read the article, do one quick search and the source claim is from RT. Like you say, our own people are willing to believe the worst of our government as pitched by the Kremlin. 30 years ago this would be dismissed for what it is: Pravda propaganda. It absolutely infuriates me that some domestic hotel chains include RT on their cable TV line-up.

  • Leo W

    Maybe they just wanted the final pitch to Hollywood that much easier.