What is particularly dangerous, he told the agency, is that genuine facts are used but packaged in a way that creates a false impression.
A senior figure at the Global Fact-Checking Network has told TASS that European countries will keep up a "barrage of fake news" against the diesel deal between Moscow and Washington, arguing that the arrangement does not serve their interests. Daniil Bisslinger, the network's vice president, was speaking on the sidelines of the 3rd Russia-Uzbekistan Media Forum in Tashkent, held on 9-10 November and organised by TASS and the Uzbekistan National News Agency.
According to the report, Bisslinger was responding to comments by Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian president's special envoy for investment and economic cooperation with foreign countries and chief executive of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. Dmitriev dismissed as fake a Financial Times report that tankers travelling to the United States under the diesel deal had changed course, and complained that the newspaper was running fake stories more often than before. TASS does not give the substance of the Financial Times report, and the newspaper's own account is not quoted.
Bisslinger framed the dispute as part of a wider pattern. The point, he said, was not the diesel or the deal itself, but that such contacts and dialogue point to possible normalisation or prospects for stabilising the international situation. Certain forces are concentrated in countries unfriendly to Russia, including in Europe, he added, and whether the subject is a meeting, talks in Abu Dhabi, a diesel deal or a draft settlement agreement, these initiatives will not meet the expectations of those states or groups of states. If they are not bombarded with fake news, he said, they will at least be portrayed in a false light.
He went further in describing the methods involved. What is particularly dangerous, he told the agency, is that genuine facts are used but packaged in a way that creates a false impression, as he said happens with the diesel deal. That distinction between outright fabrication and selective framing is the more consequential claim in the interview, because it is harder to test and harder to rebut than a straightforward factual error.
The material as published is a single-source account of an allegation. It does not identify which European governments or media outlets are said to be involved, does not set out the terms of the diesel deal, and gives no evidence beyond the disputed Financial Times report. Nor does it carry any response from the newspaper or from European officials. The existence of the diesel arrangement, its scale and its current status are all left unconfirmed here. Readers should treat the charge of a coordinated disinformation campaign as a claim made by the parties quoted, not as an established fact.
What the report does show is that the information contest around Russian economic outreach is now being fought in the same breath as the diplomacy itself. A fact-checking body publicly accusing a major financial newspaper of distortion, at a media forum co-hosted by a state news agency, is a notable turn. Whether the tanker report was wrong is a question for verification. The wider argument about how facts are framed is one both sides now appear ready to make in public.
