For many years now, I have been debunking Russian propaganda. Unfortunately, I encountered it quite early, back when I was still at school. Later I watched it at work in an already independent Ukraine, and for the past 16 years I have been studying it here, in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Now that I speak many languages, it is fascinating to see that the Russians no longer even bother to tailor their lies to each country (having realized that people who lack critical thinking and fact-checking skills will believe anything anyway). They simply churn out the same sentences, talking points and “facts”, just in different languages.
The other day on Twitter I came across a new Russian propaganda template in Serbian, in the style of whataboutism. I wanted to take it apart to show clearly how the propaganda machine of the terrorist federation works. It took me several days, but I don't regret it: this example shows very well how easy it is to manipulate people who are not used to asking questions.
So, the ZICER account is verified, but at the same time it carries a “Parody account” label. That is a convenient shield: you can spread a political message and answer any criticism with “it's just a parody.”
The calculation is also that people who see the blue check mark will take the account as reliable, will not open the profile, and will not notice that it is supposedly a parody account. The text itself contains no parody whatsoever. It is a direct political conclusion, propped up by eleven historical arguments.
The structure of the text is repeated eleven times: “Russia killed X. No, it was Y.” The finale: “Ok, what's happening in Ukraine is a fratricidal war financed by Europe.”
This is classic whataboutism, also known as tu quoque. The aim of the technique is not to prove anything about Russia's war in Ukraine. The aim is different: to change the subject. Instead of the question “What is Russia doing in Ukraine right now?”, the reader is handed the question “Who was worse in history?”
Several techniques at once
1. Straw man – instead of refuting a fact, the author refutes his own distorted and more emotional version of it. No one has ever accused Russia of Hiroshima, the slave trade or the events in the Congo. The author invents absurd accusations, “refutes” them himself, and creates the illusion that all accusations against Russia are equally groundless.
2. False equivalence and changing the subject. Even if all the crimes listed are real (and they are), none of them cancels out a single Russian crime. Crimes do not offset each other. Leopold's actions in the Congo do not make the destruction of Mariupol lawful.
3. Cherry-picking by omission. The list is compiled so that the reader does not notice that Russia and the USSR have their own, very long list of the same kind.
4. Manipulating numbers. Where the crime is Western, the figures are often inflated (Korea, Cambodia, Iraq). Where a number is “inconvenient”, the author lowers it, because he does not know the subject well himself (India, Algeria). The figures are tailored to emotion, not to sources.
5. Anaphora and rhythm. “No, it was… No, it was…” is repeated eleven times. This is hypnotic repetition: after eleven repetitions, the reader automatically accepts the final claim as well, which is no longer about history but about the present.
6. Reversing victim and aggressor. The final sentence shifts responsibility for the war from the one who attacked to those who help the victim defend itself.
Now let's look at the details, point by point.
1. “Russia killed 300,000 people in Japan with atomic bombs. No, it was the United States of America.”
Fact: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were carried out by the United States. No one denies this; there is a vast, open American historiography on the subject and a heated debate within the US itself.
Figures: the most widely used estimates, also cited by the Japanese-American Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), are about 90,000–166,000 deaths in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki within two to four months of the bombings. That is roughly 150,000–240,000 in total. “300,000” does not match the estimates of deaths from the bombings themselves. The Hiroshima register of victims does contain more than 340,000 names, but for decades it has included every bomb survivor who later died of any cause.
What is left out: on August 8, 1945, between the two bombings, the USSR declared war on Japan, violating the 1941 neutrality pact. In April 1945 Moscow had announced that it would not renew the pact, but legally it remained in force until April 1946. After Japan's surrender, the Soviet Union took some 575,000 Japanese prisoners of war to camps, and about 55,000 of them died doing forced labor. Russia still occupies the southern Kuril Islands, which Japan considers its own.
Technique: straw man. Nobody accuses Russia of Hiroshima.
2. “Russia killed between 5 and 6 million Jews. No, it was Germany.”
Fact: Yes, the Holocaust is a crime of Nazi Germany. Yes, the Red Army (units of the 1st Ukrainian Front; altogether, millions of Ukrainians fought in its ranks) liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.
What is left out:
On August 23, 1939, the USSR signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler, including a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe. On September 22, 1939, the Wehrmacht and the Red Army held a joint ceremony in Brest to hand over the city (often called a joint parade).
In the spring of 1940, the NKVD shot some 22,000 Polish prisoners of war – officers, policemen and members of the intelligentsia – in the Katyn Forest, Kalinin and Kharkiv. For half a century the USSR blamed this crime on Nazi Germany and even tried to pin it on the Germans at the Nuremberg trials. Moscow admitted guilt only on April 13, 1990. In other words, the formula “No, it was Germany” is a Soviet invention, not a Western one.
In 1940 the NKVD handed several hundred German and Austrian anti-fascists, including Jews who had fled to the USSR, over to the Gestapo (the best-known witness is Margarete Buber-Neumann, who survived both the Gulag and Ravensbrück).
1948–1953: the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans”, the execution of members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (1952), the “Doctors' Plot” (1953).
Germany has acknowledged its guilt, pays reparations and has banned Holocaust denial. Russia, by contrast, still does not provide full access to the NKVD archives and has not, for example, recognized the Holodomor as genocide.
Technique: straw man plus substitution. An undeniable German crime is used as an “alibi” for an entirely different state.
3. “Russia killed 6 million people in the Congo. No, it was Belgium.”
Fact: the crimes in the Congo Free State (1885–1908) are among the darkest pages of colonialism. An important clarification: the Congo was the personal property of King Leopold II, not of the Belgian state. Belgium annexed it in 1908 precisely under the pressure of an international scandal. Estimates of the population loss vary widely, from several million to 10 million (Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost). There are no exact figures, as no censuses were taken.
Belgium acknowledges this history: King Philippe expressed his “deepest regrets” in 2020 and repeated them in Kinshasa in 2022, and a special parliamentary committee was set up (although in 2022 it ended without joint conclusions).
What is left out – Russian colonialism:
The Circassian tragedy of the 1860s: after the Caucasian War, the Russian Empire expelled or destroyed most of the Circassians. In 2011 Georgia recognized this as genocide.
The Kazakh famine of 1930–1933: more than 1.5 million people died, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population; among ethnic Kazakhs, according to various estimates, up to 38–42%.
The suppression of the 1916 uprising in Turkestan and the Urkun, when tens of thousands of Kyrgyz civilians died while fleeing to China.
Technique: cherry-picking by omission. Colonialism is presented as an exclusively Western phenomenon, even though the Russian Empire was the second-largest contiguous colonial empire in history.
4. “Russia killed hundreds of thousands of starving people in India and enslaved the peoples of Asia and Africa. No, it was England.”
Fact: British colonial policy bears direct responsibility for famines in India. And here, paradoxically, the author understates: the Bengal famine of 1943 alone claimed, by various estimates, between 2.1 and 3 million lives, and the famines of the 19th century tens of millions. “Hundreds of thousands” speaks volumes about the author's ignorance of the subject.
What is left out: the Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine. According to the Ptukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, direct losses amount to about 3.9 million people. Grain was confiscated from peasants, villages were put on “blacklists”, the “Law of Five Ears of Grain” was adopted (August 7, 1932), and a directive of January 22, 1933, banned peasants from leaving Ukraine and the Kuban in search of food. The Holodomor has been recognized as genocide by Ukraine, the European Parliament (December 2022), the Bundestag and more than 30 countries, including Slovenia and Croatia (2023).
Technique: cherry-picking by omission. The author picks precisely the crime (artificial famine) for which Soviet history has the most direct and brutal counterpart.
5. “Russia deported millions of Africans in chains to enslave them in America. No, it was the British, the Spanish and the Portuguese.”
Fact: the transatlantic slave trade is indeed a crime of European states. According to the Slave Voyages database (the most comprehensive academic source), about 12.5 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic. The largest carrier was Portugal (including Brazil), followed by Britain.
What is left out:
Serfdom in Russia, effectively the enslavement of the state's own subjects. According to the 1857 census, there were more than 20 million serfs in the Russian Empire; they were sold, lost at cards and sold separately from their families. Serfdom was abolished only in 1861, almost at the same time as slavery in the US (1863–1865).
The Gulag: according to researchers (Anne Applebaum, Memorial), some 18 million people passed through the camp system. It was a forced-labor economy on a national scale.
Mass deportations of peoples: the Crimean Tatars (May 1944, about 190,000; by various estimates, between a fifth and almost half died in the first years of exile), the Chechens and Ingush (Operation Lentil, February 1944, about 490,000), the Volga Germans, Kalmyks, Balkars, the Baltic peoples and Ukrainians from the western regions of Ukraine.
The Netherlands officially apologized for slavery in 2022. In Britain and Portugal there is a public debate on historical responsibility and reparations, although both governments have so far rejected reparations. Russia, meanwhile, liquidated Memorial, the organization that documented the victims of the Gulag, through the courts in 2021–2022.
Technique: cherry-picking by omission. “Deportation in chains” is a phrase that best describes precisely the Soviet practice of deportations in freight cars.
6. “Russia killed thousands of people in Algeria. No, it was France.”
Fact: the Algerian War of 1954–1962 was a colonial war marked by torture and mass killings. And once again the author understates: estimates of the death toll range from several hundred thousand (French historians) to 1.5 million (Algeria's official figure). France is gradually acknowledging its guilt: in 2018 Macron recognized the system of torture (the Maurice Audin case), and in 2021 the murder of Ali Boumendjel.
What is left out: Chechnya. Two wars (1994–1996 and 1999–2009) claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives. In 2003, according to widely cited reports, the UN called Grozny “the most destroyed city on Earth.” The European Court of Human Rights has issued hundreds of judgments against Russia over extrajudicial executions, torture and enforced disappearances in Chechnya.
Technique: projection. A war waged by an imperial power against a people seeking independence is exactly what Russia did in Chechnya and is doing now in Ukraine.
7. “Russia killed 3 million people in Vietnam and 2 million in Cambodia. No, it was the United States of America.”
Vietnam: the war had catastrophic consequences; estimates of Vietnamese deaths range from 1.3 to 3 million (the upper figure was given by Hanoi in 1995). But it was also a civil war, in which the US intervened directly on one side, while the USSR and China supplied arms to the other. The USSR armed North Vietnam with surface-to-air missile systems, MiGs and Soviet advisers. In other words, Moscow was not an “innocent party” in this war but a party to the conflict.
As for Cambodia, this is outright falsification. Some 1.7 million Cambodians (about 21% of the population) died in 1975–1979 under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, a communist regime (data from Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program; judgment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, a UN-backed tribunal, 2018). US bombing of Cambodia (1965–1973, heaviest in 1969–1973) killed, by earlier estimates, between 50,000 and 150,000 people; researchers Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen believe the real figure is higher. That too is a crime, but attributing two million victims of a communist genocide to the US is a deliberate lie.
Technique: substituting the perpetrator. The victims of a communist regime are blamed on its enemy.
8. “Russia killed six million Koreans, from both the South and the North, and a million Chinese during the Korean War. No, it was the United States of America.”
Who started it: On June 25, 1950, North Korean troops invaded the South. Declassified Soviet archives (published, among others, by the Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project) show that Kim Il Sung repeatedly asked Stalin for permission to invade, and that Stalin gave his consent in principle in January 1950 and his final approval in April, during Kim Il Sung's visit to Moscow. Soviet pilots (the 64th Fighter Aviation Corps) secretly fought in the skies over Korea.
Who fought: 16 countries fought in the UN forces, established under Security Council resolutions 82–84. It was not “American aggression” but the UN's response to an invasion.
Figures: total Korean losses (North and South, military and civilian) are estimated at about 2.5–3 million. “Six million” is a figure inflated twofold. Chinese losses were about 180,000 according to official data and up to 400,000 according to Western estimates, so “a million” is an exaggeration too.
Technique: reversing aggressor and victim, and manipulating numbers. A war sanctioned by Stalin is attributed to those who helped the victim of the invasion. It is the same scheme as in the finale of the post about Ukraine.
9. “Russia killed a million people in Iraq, even with depleted uranium bombs that cause babies to be born with deformities twenty years later. No, it was the Anglo-Americans.”
A telling detail that shows how poorly the author understands the subjects he takes on: next to the item on Iraq is the flag of Iran.
Fact: the 2003 invasion of Iraq had no UN Security Council mandate, and in 2004 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan explicitly called it illegal. This is serious criticism, and it is voiced above all in the West.
Figures: the Iraq Body Count project has documented between 200,000 and 227,000 violent civilian deaths since 2003. A study published in The Lancet (2006) gave a higher estimate, while the “million” comes from a 2007 ORB poll whose methodology was widely criticized. An analysis of IBC data for 2003–2008 (Hicks et al., PLoS Medicine, 2011) showed that 74% of civilian deaths were caused by unknown perpetrators, 11% by anti-coalition forces and 12% by the coalition.
Depleted uranium: international assessments (a 2001 WHO monograph and a 2010 opinion of the EU scientific committee SCHER) have found no proven link between depleted uranium and birth defects in humans, although they acknowledge gaps in knowledge; individual studies on Fallujah remain disputed. Presenting this as an established fact, let alone claiming that uranium “causes babies to be born with deformities twenty years later,” is manipulation and playing on emotions.
What is left out – Syria: from 2015 onward, Russian aircraft bombed Aleppo, Idlib, markets, hospitals and schools. The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria and Human Rights Watch documented strikes on civilian facilities and the use of cluster and incendiary munitions.
Technique: a combination of hyperbole, pseudoscience and omission.
10. “Russia killed more than 240,000 people in Afghanistan. No, it was the United States.”
The figure of 240,000 comes from Brown University's Costs of War project, but in distorted form. It is the total number of people killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan combined, including Taliban fighters, Afghan security forces and civilians killed by the Taliban themselves. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) recorded for years that most civilian casualties were caused by anti-government groups.
What is left out: the Soviet war in Afghanistan of 1979–1989. By various estimates, between 1 and 2 million Afghans died and about 5 million became refugees. The USSR invaded, killed the country's sitting leader Hafizullah Amin (Operation Storm-333) and installed its own man. Does that remind you of anything? In July 2025, Russia became the first country to officially recognize the Taliban government.
Technique: the most blatant omission in the entire text. Only someone counting on readers' ignorance could write about Afghanistan without mentioning the Soviet war.
11. “Russia committed genocide against indigenous peoples and annexed half of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and other territories. No, it was the United States of America.”
Fact: together with the annexation of Texas (1845) and under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Mexico lost about 55% of its territory. The US acquired Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898, and Hawaii was annexed the same year. The tragedy of the indigenous peoples of the Americas is real. In 1993 the US Congress adopted an official apology to Native Hawaiians (Public Law 103-150).
What is left out:
A. Russia itself destroyed indigenous peoples of America.
The author writes about the genocide of the indigenous peoples of America as if Russia had nothing to do with America. In fact, from 1741 to 1867 there was Russian America: Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, Kodiak and even a settlement in California (Fort Ross).
The Aleuts (Unangax). Before the Russians arrived, an estimated 12,000–15,000 Unangax lived on the islands. The Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association (APIA), an organization of the Aleuts themselves, reports that by 1800, a little more than 50 years after first contact with the Russians, their number had fallen by about 80%, to around 2,500 people. The causes were armed clashes, Russian cruelty, forced labor and introduced diseases. Britannica notes that the Russians treated the Unangax as serfs whose labor was tied to the fur trade.
Punitive expeditions in the 1760s. After the Aleuts of Unalaska destroyed several Russian ships in 1763–1764, fur hunters (including a party led by Ivan Solovyov) carried out punitive raids on island settlements. The death toll is not reliably known: estimates range from several hundred to several thousand people (the highest figures come from older accounts that some historians consider exaggerated).
The Awa'uq (Refuge Rock) massacre, 1784. On August 14, 1784, the Russian merchant Grigory Shelikhov, founder of the company that later grew into the Russian-American Company, attacked thousands of Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) people who had taken refuge on a rock near Sitkalidak Island. According to the Alutiiq Museum, about 300 people were killed (other estimates range from 200 to 500), and more than a thousand were taken hostage. Afterwards, the men who were hunters were forced into serf-like labor hunting sea otters. Archaeologist Rick Knecht called the event “Alaska's Wounded Knee,” and the Alutiiq Museum regards it as a defining moment in Alutiiq history. The museum is now preparing a memorial to the victims.
The hostage (amanat) system. Russian companies took women and children from villages as hostages to force the men to hunt for furs. Aleuts and Alutiiq were resettled to the Pribilof Islands to hunt fur seals, and hunters were taken as far as California (Fort Ross).
The Tlingit put up armed resistance to Russian colonization, and Russia established its rule in the Sitka area by force (the Battle of Sitka, 1804).
Key point: when the author lists US crimes against indigenous peoples, he “forgets” that the US acquired some of these peoples only after a century of Russian rule over them. In 1867 Russia sold Alaska to the United States together with the peoples it had previously subjugated. In other words, part of “American colonialism” was sold to America by Russia itself.
B. Siberia and the Far East.
The conquest of Siberia and the Far East from the 16th century onward was accompanied by the destruction and subjugation of indigenous peoples (the Itelmens, Yukaghirs and Chukchi), the yasak (fur tribute) and epidemics. Siberia is literally Russia's “Wild West,” only no one makes films about it.
C. 21st-century annexations:
Crimea (2014) and four Ukrainian regions (2022). The UN General Assembly declared these “referendums” invalid: resolution 68/262 (2014) and resolution ES-11/4 (2022, 143 votes in favor).
The key difference: the US annexations belong to the 19th century. Russia's annexations are happening right now, in violation of the UN Charter and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Russia committed to respecting Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and existing borders.
Technique: chronological substitution. Crimes from 150 years ago are placed alongside a present-day war to blur responsibility for the present.
And now, the grand FINALE: “Ok, what's happening in Ukraine is a fratricidal war financed by Europe.”
This is the only sentence the whole post was written for. And it is wrong in every word.
“Fratricidal.” This framing echoes Putin's July 2021 article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” in which he writes “We are one people” and claims that Russia “did everything to stop the fratricide” in Donbas.
The word “fratricidal” turns the war into an “internal family matter” with no aggressor and no victim.
“War.” This is not “a quarrel between two brothers” but a full-scale invasion of one state by another on February 24, 2022 (and in fact since 2014). On March 2, 2022, the UN General Assembly, in resolution ES-11/1 (141 votes in favor, only 5 against), demanded that Russia immediately withdraw its troops. On March 16, 2022, the International Court of Justice ordered Russia to suspend its military operations. Russia ignored that ruling.
On March 17, 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova for the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine has documented killings, torture, sexual violence and deportations. Bucha, Izium, Irpin (and now Oleshky is suffering). The drama theater in Mariupol (March 16, 2022): Amnesty International established that it was a Russian airstrike on a building where hundreds of civilians were sheltering, with the word “CHILDREN” (in Russian: “ДЕТИ”) written in huge letters on the ground outside. Mariupol has been effectively destroyed.
“Financed by Europe.” Inversion. Europe is helping a state that has been attacked to exercise its right to self-defense, enshrined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. Russia, on the other hand, receives Shahed drones from Iran, and shells, missiles and troops from North Korea. In April 2025, Moscow and Pyongyang officially acknowledged that North Korean troops had taken part in the fighting in the Kursk region. If we are going to talk about “financing a war from outside,” we should start with Moscow.
SUMMARY
The ZICER post does not refute a single accusation against Russia. It rests on three substitutions:
1. Eleven times, it “refutes” accusations that no one has made.
2. It presents some Western crimes with inflated figures (Korea, Iraq, Cambodia) and others with understated ones (India, Algeria), because the goal is not history but emotion.
3. It systematically conceals that every item has a Russian or Soviet counterpart: Katyn, the Holodomor, the deportations of peoples, the Gulag, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Syria, Crimea.
The main difference between the West and Russia is not that someone has a “clean past.” Nobody does. The difference is that Germany, the Netherlands, France and the US (yes, to varying degrees and not always enough) acknowledge their crimes, open their archives, apologize and in some cases pay compensation. That is precisely why the author of the post knows about Hiroshima and the Congo at all: these crimes were documented and debated by Western historians.
Russia, by contrast, has liquidated Memorial, refuses to recognize the Holodomor as genocide, is rehabilitating Stalin and is committing new crimes in Ukraine today.
Even if everything in the post were true down to the last figure, not a single word of it would justify a single child killed in Mariupol.