Bots working in the Kremlin’s interests on VKontakte sharply increased their campaign against expectations of a new mobilization in Russia starting in July, according to data from the Botnadzor project. In June, they left 579 comments on this topic, in July — 7.1 thousand, and in August — 9 thousand.
According to Botnadzor, the bots use three main arguments to convince users that there will be no new mobilization. The most common one is that the Russian army has enough volunteers and contract soldiers: one comment puts it this way — “Yes, at the moment there is no need to involve civilians. There are enough contract soldiers”, and another — “Well, if they wanted to, they would have carried out [mobilization] now, what’s the problem?”
The second claim is that reports about mobilization are “fake leaks”. In the comments, the bots write about “CIPSO”, Ukraine, and an “information attack on Russia”.
The third argument is based on references to statements by Russian officials. According to the project, the bots left 3.8 thousand comments under 142 posts from public pages and media outlets that quoted Dmitry Medvedev, who said in late July that there was no need for mobilization.
They left another 2.9 thousand comments under posts with words from Dmitry Peskov, who denied reports of a possible mobilization in late August. Under publications with Vladimir Putin’s denial, made in early September, the bots left another 2.1 thousand comments.
Botnadzor also notes that the topic of mobilization has been discussed more actively amid Russia’s heavy losses at the front, signs of a decline in the recruitment of new contract soldiers, a slowdown in the Russian army’s advance, and raids on men in different regions.
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