Every fact in the Russian Justice Ministry’s online exhibition was checked, and the “foreign agents” who found errors in it were knowingly spreading false information, Deputy Justice Minister Oleg Sviridenko said in a TASS interview cited by the news outlet Agentstvo.
In late July, the Justice Ministry posted an exhibition on its website titled “Zashchita suvereniteta Rossiyskogo gosudarstva. Istoriya i sovremennost” (“Protecting the Sovereignty of the Russian State: Past and Present”), about attempts to “violate the sovereignty” of Russia. Independent journalists found a propaganda film about Hitler in the section containing photographs and documentaries. Elsewhere in the exhibition, they found numerous errors, including factual ones, and signs that artificial intelligence had been used to write the text.
In the interview, Sviridenko was asked whether he had expected such a strong response from “foreign-agent media outlets.”
Sviridenko called the attention “foreign agents” paid to the project “a predictable reaction.” “Their job is to spread distorted information among Russian citizens, falsify history, and replace facts with interpretations that serve their Western ‘employers,’” he said.
He said all the exhibition materials had been prepared with input from “historians, representatives of Russia’s leading museums, historical institutions, and organizations involved in historical scholarship.” Sviridenko said every fact in the exhibition had been checked against primary sources in archives.
The information foreign agents spread has no scholarly basis; it is purely political and deceitful. They don’t deal in facts because the facts work against them. Instead, as always, they use emotionally charged labels and baseless accusations aimed at an audience that lacks the background to assess them.
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