DISINFORMATION will go to a “whole new level” during the next phase of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the SNP's defence spokesman has said.

Stewart McDonald said he has been close to tears during conversations with friends on the ground in Ukraine and that he worries for their wellbeing as the fight rages on.

McDonald, who became the first Scottish politician to be awarded the country’s Order of Merit in 2019, told The National that he has been working to keep contact between MPs in the UK and Ukraine in a bid to provide assistance.

The Foreign Affairs Committee member also hit back at the UK Government for “being as slow as an oil tanker” in putting sanctions in place and its reluctance to open up a safe visa route for Ukrainian refugees.

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Awareness of Russia’s disinformation tactics has been around for a while – they are notorious for running propaganda through state media outlets and circulating fake news on social media.

The conflict with Ukraine is no different, with Russian broadcasters avoiding the words “war” and “invasion” and instead calling it a “special military operation”. In the weeks before Russian troops crossed the border, social media was reportedly flooded with claims that Ukrainians were the aggressors, and Putin himself has repeatedly said the country is led by “neo-Nazis” in a vain attempt to confuse and detract from his real motives.

The fact that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish and a large part of his family was tragically wiped out by the Nazis in concentration camps does not feature in Putin’s narrative. As McDonald pointed out: “That strikes me as an important detail.”

The official Twitter account for Ukraine, as one example, has been repeatedly warning of these tactics and redirecting followers to official channels.

In a post on Saturday, they claimed that Russia was spreading false rumours that leaders in Ukraine had fled the country and alleged that threats were being sent to “Ukrainian activists, journalists and researchers”.

Numerous Ukrainian accounts have popped up across social media warning against Russian propaganda, something the country is well-versed in dealing with.

McDonald said: “They’re first class at this because they’ve been on the front line of a kind of disinformation war for years now.

“All of the eastern Baltic states are very good at not just spotting it and calling it out, but building up their own resilience against it, and during a war information is an enormously important part of the mix of the conflict.”

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The neo-Nazi slur has been thrown at Ukraine since the 2014 revolution, but the far-right failed miserably in the 2019 elections and returned only 2% of the vote.

McDonald said: “In France it’s higher, in the Netherlands it’s higher, in Germany it’s higher – and by some way.

“The AFD [Alternative For Germany] have seats in the German parliament, Marine Le Pen was actually in the run-off with Macron at the next election and might just be in the next few weeks as well, but for some reason all this gets forgotten about.

“In Ukraine, if you take parties closer to that end of the spectrum they are tiny and you get amongst the lowest share of the vote than any country in Europe.”

The National: Volodymyr Zelensky

Volodymyr Zelensky

Yet Putin continuously repeats the false claim, even in televised addresses, and that doesn’t even touch the impact of Russian bots pushing fake news on social media.

It can be easy for even those aware of fake news to be pulled in, and with thousands of social media posts flooding in it can be almost impossible to verify everything you see.

McDonald said: “Even though disinformation is something I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about, I can get tricked or confused by things.

“It happens, we’re all human, but it is going to go to a whole new level over the course of this conflict above what we’ve seen in the opening few days alone.”

The SNP MP added that he had heard disturbing reports of bodies being decapitated and fears that images of atrocities will begin to leak on to social media, inevitably to be blamed on Ukrainian forces.

Asked if he believed those kinds of disturbing images would be used to try to cause a shock reaction, McDonald added: “That’s what they want, we are all human beings who have emotions, most of us anyway – and to play on emotion is an extremely powerful thing, particularly during a war.”

McDonald has friends and fellow politicians on the ground in Ukraine, who he has been checking in on frequently. He has set up a chat between MPs in both countries where they regularly keep in contact.

Asked if he was worried for their safety, he added: “Yes, there’s not a phone call I have where I’m trying not to cry and they’re not crying because they’re made of stronger stuff than me.

“I was on the phone to another friend and I could hear him putting the kids into the car as he was leaving the city earlier in the week. I was on another phone call where I could hear shells going off in the background. It’s brutal and it’s grim.”

McDonald also lamented that UK Government sanctions against Russia are some of the “weakest and slowest” when compared with the likes of the US and EU. He also fears that the prominence of restricting Russia from Swift – a banking messaging service – in the press and public eye may lead people to believe that is all that is needed.

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Instead, pressure should be put on oligarchs who have children studying at private schools in the UK and Scotland, and Russia’s central bank reserves – around $640 billion – should be targeted. He added: “Swift is important, I don’t want to understate it, but it’s not everything.

“You have to start getting into how many Russian oligarchs have children in private schools in the UK or in Scotland, in Scotland I think it’s nearly 40. You have to start going after people like that, the individuals.”

McDonald joined senior SNP figures Angus Robertson and Ian Blackford in calling for Russian diplomats and ambassadors to be removed from the UK and Scotland. The Edinburgh office of the Consul General for the Russian Federation has been the site of anti-war protests since the invasion of Ukraine began.