Russian media is blaming Charlie Kirk’s murder on Ukrainian presidnet Zelenskyy, and yes, they’re serious

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has sent shockwaves through the United States, but now, foreign adversaries like Russia and China are seizing the opportunity to exploit the tragedy. According to NBC, these countries are pushing propaganda to inflame U.S. political divisions and paint America as an unstable, declining nation.

The rhetoric coming from Russian state media and other pro-Kremlin outlets is particularly aggressive, with one outlet even going so far as to blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the killing. This is a pretty big deal because it’s the same thing they did with the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last year, which they also blamed on Kyiv.

In the days following the shooting at Utah Valley University on September 10, Russian state media and pro-Kremlin social media accounts quickly began to suggest that the United States was headed for civil war. They also pushed conspiracy theories about a “deep state” being involved. At the same time, Chinese state media highlighted the tragedy as yet another example of a troubled society, rife with political disorder and gun violence. They even posted videos of U.S. lawmakers arguing in Congress to further their point. Not to be left out, Iran’s media outlets joined in, posting baseless allegations that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency had orchestrated Kirk’s murder.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination is somehow helping disinformation campaigns

According to a report from the fact-checking site NewsGuard, state media in Russia, China, and Iran mentioned Kirk over 6,200 times between September 10 and September 17. These countries are all known to run covert online influence operations that often aim to stress divisive narratives to American audiences. However, researchers are unsure whether these campaigns have gained much traction with the already-divided U.S. populace.

Darren Linvill, the director of Clemson University’s Watt Family Innovation Center Media Forensics Hub, which tracks these kinds of online disinformation campaigns, mentioned seeing a few Russian “Matryoshka” accounts, which are Russian operation that posts fake news stories that appear to come from legitimate news outlets.

The one exception seems to be the Russian international news outlet, RT. Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said that RT has dedicated extensive coverage to the assassination and was one of the first media outlets to broadcast graphic footage of the shooting.

“It is extraordinary the degree to which Russian state media and RT specifically centered their coverage on the Kirk assassination,” Brooking said. He also noted that “As the hours passed, RT was amplifying and directing its focus toward individual Americans who had posted insensitive things about Kirk.” By doing this, the Russian media is essentially trying to align itself with the American political right by echoing conservative voices.

The closest we got to the wrong killer was the old man who tried to buy the real suspect more time. The most shocking headline, though, comes from the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, which recently ran the headline, “Ukraine has found the culprit in Kirk’s death: it turned out to be Zelensky.” This is a completely unsubstantiated and bizarre claim. U.S. prosecutors have already stated that the shooting suspect, Tyler Robinson, is a U.S. citizen who acted alone.