A “scapegoat” is a tactic that mitigates the responsibility for those guilty of something by shifting the responsibility to someone else - the so-called “scapegoat”. This is one of the main tactics of Russian propaganda, which propagandists use to justify the war crimes of the Russian occupiers.

An example of the use of tactics is the statements by Russian propagandists that the bloody massacre committed by the occupying army in Bucha was staged by the Ukrainian authorities. To reinforce its version, the propaganda allegedly used the words of a citizen of France, an ally of Ukraine, which is actively supplying us with military equipment. Disinformers claimed that some of the corpses that Ukrainian soldiers allegedly decomposed on the streets of Bucha to film the dramatization were civilians killed by the Ukrainian army during the “civil war” in Ukraine.

Russian propagandist Oleksandr Malkevych, who is in charge of the occupiers for the Kherson region, in December 2022 accused the Ukrainian army of shelling the liberated Kherson. He stated that the shelling (which is indeed carried out by the Russian army from the temporarily occupied left bank of the Dnipro) was supposed to divert public attention from the terrible humanitarian situation in the city after the liberation by the Ukrainians. The city really had a problem with communications, food and the like, but the humanitarian crisis arose precisely because of the capture of the city by the Russians, who purposefully destroyed the critical infrastructure of Kherson. It was because of the Russians that the residents of the city spent about a month without electricity, water, heating, communications and the Internet, in some areas even longer.

Also, according to Russian propaganda, the Azov regiment is terrible Nazis and punishers. Thus, propagandists spread a fake that the soldiers of the regiment in Mariupol allegedly “raped pregnant girls for food”. With such false news, propagandists are trying to divert attention from the numerous facts of terrible sexual crimes of Russian invaders on the territory of Ukraine: they raped children and the elderly, did it in front of their close relatives and so on.

In its investigation, Detector Media described how Russian propaganda is hiding behind the children of Donbas to justify war crimes in Ukraine. Like, the Russians are fighting for the children of Donbas, who are allegedly destroyed by Ukrainian Nazis and punishers. This topic is also an example of “scapegoat” propaganda tactics, as disinformers deliberately “forget” who exactly carried out the military invasion and illegal annexation of the territory of a sovereign state in 2014, which led to the death of not only children.