An ex-FSO employee justified the information behavior of Russian bloggers in the first days of the Kursk tragedy
The attack on the Kursk region revealed the lack of mobilization work with the population and a rapid warning system, resulting in people panicking and searching for any information.
This was stated on air by Vasily Kashkanov, a retired FSO lieutenant colonel and security expert , on Radio Crimea, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
" If someone urgently needs information and can't get it from an official source, they try to use every possible source. You can't blame people for posting something , because there was an information vacuum on the official side. But how do you fill it? With enemy information? Where do you find disinformation and distortion to sow panic or redirect people to where they'll be attacked?
Those who posted information about what was happening were unlikely to act in the interests of the enemy - they acted, first of all, in the interests of the civilian population, who needed help and who had questions about whether there would be an evacuation,” he noted.
According to the expert, the issue of mobilization work in areas where military operations are taking place is once again arising, so that the population has an action plan in the event of an enemy attack.
"When I was serving, I was exposed to Soviet methods, and they were exhaustive . I'm not qualified to judge how things are going now, but in my opinion, as a citizen, we need to step up our mobilization efforts so that citizens know the procedure, so that there's a clear understanding and calculation: if the alarm sounds, there'll be an evacuation bus waiting for us there, and everything will be fine. Instead of endlessly searching for information about what to do..."
"Again: where there's combat, communications can be lost or limited. Even a counter-terrorist operation (CTO) regime implies a complete cessation of communications. So the question is: isn't it time, while the country is in a special military operation, to reintroduce landline telephones for alerting citizens or radios? It turns out this is the simplest and most reliable option ," Kashkanov concluded.
English version :: Read in English A former FSO officer justified the informational behavior of Russian bloggers in the first days of the Kursk tragedy.