The Kraków shooting: A Polish tragedy, a Russian opportunity
As soon as a few images of the perpetrator and the contents of the boot of his car appeared in the media, the Russian propaganda machine was set to work.
This may be a hazard of the profession of analysing Russian information warfare, but it is sometimes dazzling to observe how Moscow’s propaganda campaigns are compelled to navigate resonant current affairs and to interpret them, whatever the actual facts, in a light favourable to the Kremlin’s foreign-policy interests.
This obviously requires a high degree of creativity on the part of Russian propagandists, or suggests to us a boundless space of imagination in which they operate.
The most tragic events in Poland, where 24-year-old Michał Oksiński killed both of his parents and his sister at home in the town of Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski and then drove to central Kraków and shot dead six people (four Polish nationals, a Briton, and an Austrian), wounding 16 more, offer a case in point.
As soon as a few images of the perpetrator and the contents of the boot of his car appeared in the media, the Russian propaganda machine was set to work.
One image showed the perpetrator’s bullet-resistant vest with a patch depicting a modern version of the flag of the early-18th-century pirate Edward Teach, known as “Blackbeard”, a morale patch widely used across the West today.
Russian propagandists immediately, but wrongly, interpreted the patch as the symbol of the US military lifestyle brand “Forward Observations Group”, whose representatives travelled to Ukraine during the Russian-Ukrainian war.
Anton Shekhovtsov is director of the Centre for Democratic Integrity in Vienna, visiting professor at the Central European University, and author of three books: New Radical Rightwing Parties in European Democracies (2011), Russia and the Western Far-Right: Tango Noir (2017), and Russian Political Warfare (2023).
