DARVO

It takes work to write this. But over the last two-plus years, I have become very good at spotting Russian propaganda. Once I started following the Middle East closer, as a Jew, you quite never stop following, it was striking. Hamas uses the same propaganda techniques deployed by the Russian Federation. If anything, they are more prominent. One is called DARVO, an acronym for Deny, Attack, Reverse, Victim, Offender.

The meme below came from the Hamas-Israeli conflict; it is a good summary of this dynamic. We have nothing like this from the Russia-Ukraine War. This came up on social media. I have yet to learn who the original author is, but it is a good summary.

DARVO is a type of psychological abuse, and it is designed to make the target doubt reality. We saw it with the attack on Kramatorsk early in the Ukraine war. Russia first denied that they were behind that attack at the train station. Within hours, they claimed it was Ukraine. This was the first attempt at seeding doubt at who had done it. Then they reversed the whole thing; now, the victims were Russians who were attacked by Ukraine and had their reputation besmirched, and Ukraine became the offender. We have seen this every time Russia hits something it should not, like, oh, civilian housing or hospitals.

Yes, they hit hospitals often. Just one example, a better known one, the maternity hospital at Mariouul. There are far…