[oooooooooooow]

>Remember Russia has been the undisputed world champion of dezinformatsiya for centuries

My friend, you seem to have mispelled United States of America

[toss1]

Sure, correlates nicely (NOT) with the Russians having a word for it before it appeared in French or English [0]

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/disinformation

[manicdee]

Russians had leading rocket science for years. They don’t now, and can barely assemble a rocket that works. Why is that? Does that loss of capability apply to other fields too?

[hypertele-Xii]

So if you were the first to invent misinformation, you would immediately add it to your local language to make that fact public? Doesn't make sense. You'd rather make up some newspeak code name. It's more plausible that Russians made the word to describe what their worst enemy (USA) was doing, so they could be aware of it and counter.