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Content: 14]Pascal Bonnamour, the head of the European department of Reporters Without Borders, called the newly announced network "another step of the state to control information." [ 15]In 2009, Luke Harding(then the Moscow correspondent) of The Guardiandescribed RT's advertising campaign in the United Kingdom as an "ambitious attempt to create a new post-Soviet global propaganda empire." [ 16]According to Lev Gudkov, the director of the Levada Center, Russia's most well respected polling organization. Putin's Russia's propaganda is "aggressive and deceptive... worse than anything I witnessed in the Soviet Union"[17]
In 2014, Ivan Zassoursky, a professor of Media and Theory of Communications in the Journalism Department of Moscow State University, said that: " Today there are many complex schemes of influence in the world that can be labeled as soft power. But traditional thuggish methods of propaganda and direct control used by the Russian government cannot be considered effective from the professional standpoint and acceptable from the viewpoint of journalist morality." [ 18]
Following Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, a significant increase in Russian propaganda was noted by NATO.[19] In February 2017, a fabricated audio recording of NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenbergsupposedly interacting with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenkowas published by Russian news website Life.ru. The supposed voice of Poroshenko was revealed to be Russian pranksters. Russia has been accused of comparing Ukrainian Nationalist fighters in Donbass to members of ISIS.[20] Political scholar Nikolay Kozhanov has claimed that Russia has used propaganda to convey nationalistic as well as pro-Assad messages during the Syrian Civil War. Kozhanov claims that Russia has made an effort through propaganda to paint Russia and Syria as a stable force "in the struggle against instability caused by the Americans and terrorism supported by the US regional partners." [