2023-04-17 15:53:07
Published on :
Donbass Devushka was one of the pro-Moscow social media accounts most directly involved in spreading the “Pentagon Leaks”. Behind this girl from Donbass, who pretended to be a Russian patriot, was in reality a former American soldier who had become addicted to Kremlin propaganda.
She spoke with a slight Russian accent, claimed to come from Luhansk, a region of Ukrainian Donbass, at the heart of the war with Russia. She professed her admiration for Vladimir Putin to the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to her various social media accounts. But Donbass Devushka – literally the girl of Donbass in Russian – actually had no connection with Russia and spoke perfect English.
This 100% “made in the USA” 30-year-old who lives in the Washington region, in the United States, confirmed her name as Sarah Bils, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Sunday April 16. The famous daily presents her as a key element in the dissemination of “Pentagon leaks” – the famous classified documents of the American intelligence services – on Russian social networks.
Interviews with top pro-Russian bloggers
As of April 5, some of these documents began to circulate on Donbass Devushka’s Telegram channel where “they were spotted by several Russian-speaking accounts”, notes the Wall Street Journal.
Sarah Bils maintained that another moderator of her Telegram channel had disseminated this information. Because “the daughter of Donbass” is not alone in playing pro-Russian propaganda on her social networks. Since 2021, this former soldier has built a “small empire of pro-Russian disinformation”, which would occupy regarding fifteen people from its North American suburbs, says Nafo, a group of pro-Ukrainian activists, who were the first to discover the true identity of Donbass Devushka.
Since the start of the war in February 2022, Sarah Bils has multiplied the accounts on Twitter to promote messages likening the Ukrainian government to a bunch of Nazis or circulating pro-Moscow “analysis” which minimizes the setbacks of the army. Russian in Ukraine. But her accounts have been closed one following the other, leaving only the first, @PeImeniPusha, which she created on Twitter in 2012 and which is followed by just over 60,000 subscribers.
It’s better than his YouTube channel which has just over 3,000 subscribers. She continues to regularly post long interviews with all the gratin pro-Russian bloggers and self-proclaimed independent journalists in the English-speaking world. Personalities like Jackson Hinkle or Eva Bartlett, who are among the top 10 non-Russian “influencers” to support Moscow, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, discuss the “inevitable decline of the West” or even the how the United States is using Ukraine to attack Russia.
On Telegram, Sarah Bils does not hesitate to share more violent content with her community, which is 65,000 strong. Messages there celebrate the killing of Ukrainian soldiers and defend the ultra-violent methods of the Wagner mercenary group.
“This English-speaking pro-Russian disinformation network uses all the language elements used by Moscow. There are both accusations of Nazism once morest the Ukrainian government and the assertion that Russia is besieged by a West in decline”, summarizes Yevgeniy Golovchenko, specialist in Russian disinformation and propaganda mechanisms at the university. from Copenhagen.
Fish food or pro-Putin merchandise?
Sarah Bils seems to have become the propaganda mistress of Moscow. His career, however, gave no indication of such a professional specialty. Despite her assertions, the one who pretended to be Donbass Devushka never set foot in Russia and even less in the Donbass.
Information collected by activists from the Nafo collective indicates that Sarah Bils joined the army in 2009 to join the navy. She left active duty in November 2022, due to “post-traumatic stress disorder”, she told the Wall Street Journal. Contacted by the newspaper, the army did not confirm the version of the facts put forward by the young woman.
In the meantime, she had set up a small business selling… fish food. She even participated in podcasts on this theme, which is nevertheless very far from Russophile considerations.
It was only with the start of the big offensive in February 2022 that Sarah Bils turned into a staunch supporter of the Russian cause. “She built one of the fastest growing English-speaking pro-Putin communities,” said Pekka Kallioniemi, a researcher at the University of Tampere in Finland and a member of the Nafo collective.
Difficult to explain this professional retraining. But she is far from the only one to have chosen to become an influencer in the service of Moscow. “The vast majority of this English-speaking support for Russia comes from the United States or Europe,” says Jeff Hawn, Russia specialist and outside consultant for the New Lines Institute, an American center for geopolitical research.
Opportunism
This is not, however, a sign of Vladimir Putin’s growing popularity in the Western world, says this specialist. “In the United States, most of these supporters of Moscow are promoting Russia because it embodies the antithesis of an America they no longer support,” says Jeff Hawn.
There is probably also an element of opportunism. “It’s a niche that can pay off,” notes Jeff Hawn. Sarah Bils had set up an online store – deactivated since this weekend – selling various items in support of the Russian war effort in Ukraine. You might find T-shirts or cups to the glory of Vladimir Putin, the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov or even Sergei Prigojine, the boss of the Wagner group.
“You should not necessarily see behind English-speaking networks such as Donbass Devushka an effort to recruit Russian intelligence services to export its propaganda”, assures Yevgeniy Golovchenko. On the other hand, whatever the motivations of these Putinophile “influencers”, their actions “are very useful to the Kremlin”, assures this expert. For him, “the main weakness of Russian propaganda is that it always appears very institutional and linked to Russian power. With these relays in the English-speaking world, Moscow can boast of having popular support. What might be more distant, a priori, from the corridors of the Kremlin than a former soldier reconverted in the sale of fish products in a small American town.
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