On 5 December, the Russian Federation Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) published to its website a set of seven documents, supposedly declassified “Secret” documents from its many residents over the past few months. It’s a rarity for us at Translating History to come across such fresh meat, so to speak, so naturally we were intrigued. But after a cursory glance, it was clear that we, along with any other readers, were being played.
Our first clue was the obvious anti-West slant to the reports, but that’s not unexpected. The reports weren’t merely sprinkled with obvious falsehoods, but buried in them. The titles seem relatively innocent enough, until you get to the end:
Reading through the “reports” it is easy to see, based on available information from hundreds of media sources, that these are fabricated in an effort to gain notice from uninformed or otherwise gullible readers. The Nord Stream report states that the West “knows” that the Ukrainians were behind the damage done to the pipelines, and are covering it up. The last of the reports states that the West is scurrying for options to boot Zelensky out of power, reflecting an assumption of Western concerns over spending on Ukraine’s defense efforts. These two reports alone are almost laughable to informed readers in the West. Is this campaign aimed at Russian eyes? Ukrainian?
A closer inspection of what should be unique numbered document externals reveals they all carry the same barcode:
The red rubber stamp that says РАССЕКРЕЧЕНО [DECLASSIFIED] at the top? It’s a .gif file that’s been applied on each document. When we did an image copy of each document, the .gif didn’t carry over, proving that it’s not an actual declassification stamp.
One would expect a little better from the SVR, given their reputation as professionals. This was a rather weak effort.
Translating History 