Ukraine has alleged that a concerted disinformation campaign has been undertaken by Russia, alleging it attempts to discredit its Winter Olympics team, claiming the campaign is to reduce international support to Kyiv in the ongoing war.
Ukrainian officials state that a set of fake social media posts went viral in many platforms together gathering over a million views. The posts were directed at single athletes and the team of Ukrainian athletes and athletes in general, disseminating misinformation aimed at harming their reputations and presenting this team in a new negative light.
Among the key misinformation was that of Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych. Recently he came into international limelight when he was disqualified in the Winter Olympics due to wearing a helmet on which pictures of Ukrainian athletes who were murdered in the war were painted. Olympic events International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided that the exhibition represented a breach of a policy against political messages on Olympic grounds.
Users also made false claims in the disinformation posts that the brother of Heraskevych had participated in the recruitment of soldiers in the Ukrainian military. According to Ukrainian officials, the statement is purely an invention and it is a part of a larger plot to associate the sportsmen to military operations in a move to politicize their presence in Games.
The other most common fake statement was that a Hungarian athlete was reported as wearing a sticker that said we are all fed up with (Ukraine) indicating a sense of resentment toward Ukraine among other participants. Ukrainian officials deny that such an incident took place and termed it as another fake piece of news meant to cause division.
According to the statement of Sports Minister Matviy Bidny, Russia is attempting to discredit Ukrainians and diminish international support of Ukraine with such fakes. He claimed that this campaign is indicative of a larger trend of information warfare that comes hand in hand with the military war.
Other fake accounts have been spread online as well. There were posts that Ukrainian athletes were not with other delegations because they were toxic. There were also other speculations that the doping regulations had been softened on the Ukrainian team to enable them use psychoactive substances. There was also a rumor that 52 translators of Ukrainian language had fled during the Games. The government of Ukraine and the organizers of the Olympics have denied these allegations claiming that they do not have a foundation.
The Ukrainian athletes scandal has not only been based on disinformation. Heraskevych has sought his disqualification to be appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). In a statement, CAS affirmed that the appeal was a decision by the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (IBSF) jury which found that his display of a helmet did not comply with the Olympic Charter. The helmet was adorned with portraits of Ukrainian sportspeople who died during the war, something that Heraskevych has justified as a form of remembrance but not politics.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the move of the IOC, to the effect that the Olympic movement should not become the sporting tool of aggressors. He appreciated the efforts of Heraskevych as heroic and that the commemoration of deaths among the soccer players should not be compared with the propaganda.
The IOC also directed Ukrainian short track speed skater Oleh Handei to cover a motivational quote on his helmet with a sticker and has used the prohibition of political utterances as an excuse. This was the saying of the Ukrainian author Lina Kostenko, which said: Where there is heroism, there is no ultimate victory. Handei agreed to comply on the condition of competing but denied the description of the message as war propaganda.
In the meantime, there are still far-wider geopolitical tensions influencing the Olympic environment. The European leaders also renewed their support to the Ukrainian country, as the United Kingdom and allies promised to support Ukraine with another EUR30 billion military aid. Norway and France have also proposed new funding packages of military supplies.
Meanwhile, discussions in the international sports organizations regarding the participation of Russia take place. Since the invasion of 2022, Russian and Belarusian teams have been banned at numerous competitions. Some of the officials have proposed to revoke some of the bans, others, such as the president of UEFA, have indicated that the existing restrictions still stand.
Outside the sports arena, the war goes on in the battlefield. Reports by Ukrainian officials indicated that Russia had made new attacks on energy infrastructure with missiles and drones which means that hundreds of thousands of people are left without electricity. In Belgorod, a region in Russia, the authorities reported that over 220,000 residents lacked power after what they termed as an attack by the Ukrainian forces on a substation.
It is against this backdrop that Ukrainian officials believe the online disinformation campaign against their Winter Olympics team is one of a larger campaign to engage in information warfare as well as military operations. They claim that sports, culture and media is also a domain where discourses concerning the conflict are debated.
With the Games still underway, Ukrainian officials indicate that they are still concerned with helping their competitors despite concerted efforts to disseminate misinformation. They insist on the fact that the strength and presence of Ukrainian competitors on the international arena is a rebuttal in and of itself to the discreditation campaign.