In 2016, RAND analysts Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews coined the term ‘firehose of falsehood’ for Russia’s modern propaganda style: bombard every channel with a torrent of messages – some true, many half-true, others outright fiction – until audiences stop trying to separate fact from noise.
Paul and Matthews found that Russia’s method has four tell-tale features:
- High-volume, multichannel delivery
- Rapid, continuous repetition
- No commitment to objective reality, mixing truth, half-truth and fabrication at will
- No commitment to internal consistency – mutually contradictory stories are launched simultaneously without embarrassment.
Nearly a decade on, that very playbook appears to be running again, not in Moscow’s backyard but in America’s escalating fight over Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) transparency.
Russian propaganda ranks among the world’s most formidable, especially within the murky battlespace of disinformation and psychological operations.
Russia’s truth-plus-fiction approach was evident after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July 2014.
Russian outlets began with genuine uncertainties – conflicting radar tracks, chaotic eyewitness accounts, and an admitted lack of hard data in the first hours, which primed audiences to accept a flood of speculative narratives.
Within days, Russian-connected sources offered mutually exclusive theories: a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jet, a CIA plot, a missile fired at President Putin’s aircraft, even pre-loaded corpses on board the Boeing 777.
By anchoring each false claim to the genuine early chaos, Russia made every theory sound plausible – and drowned the facts in noise.
Put simply, a single verifiable fact can clear the path for multiple Trojan horses of disinformation.
Hellbound and Down 