New York Times accuses Russia of spreading disinformation about COVID-19 outbreak

In its Tuesday story, the NYT cited "newly declassified intelligence" to claim Russia's military intelligence used its ties with "Russian government information center InfoRos and other websites to push out English-language disinformation and propaganda about the pandemic."

As an example of such activities by Russia, the US newspaper mentioned what it called amplification of false Chinese arguments that COVID-19 had been created by the United States military and stories on Russia’s medical assistance that could bring a détente with the United States.

The NYT went on to say that "many of the pieces created by Russian intelligence were published on InfoRos, a site controlled by the Russian government, and OneWorld.Press, a nominally independent site that United States officials said had ties to the [Russian military intelligence] G.R.U."

The newspaper also cited some US intelligence reports that "identified two Russians, Denis V. Tyurin and Aleksandr G. Starunskiy, with ties to the G.R.U. and who make sure the messaging and disinformation drafted by the intelligence officials are pushed by InfoRos and on InfoBrics.org and OneWorld.Press." It added that Russian officials had not immediately returned a request for comment.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo earlier accused Russia, China and Iran of spreading disinformation about COVID-19 to discredit the US authorities' actions to combat the outbreak. Moscow has repeatedly denied similar accusations before. In particular, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the United States, amid the coronavirus outbreak, was bringing forward ungrounded accusations against China and Russia.