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The Kremlin is intensifying a disinformation offensive aimed at demoralizing Ukraine and Western powers, using Russian state broadcasters and staff on social media platforms to portray the West as an aggressor and the government in Kiev as a NATO “puppet government,” officials say. Westerners and information warfare experts.
Scary messages in recent days have included claims that Ukrainian special forces are planning to launch so-called “fake flag” attacks in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine to justify NATO military action and that the United States is planning to attack Russia during this week’s Winter Olympics in China.
The crucial message is that NATO and Kiev pose a major threat to Russia, they say.
Moscow has waged a sophisticated and multifaceted information war campaign against Ukraine since 2014, when a popular uprising toppled Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Shortly after ousting Mr Yanukovych through the color revolution, which Moscow blamed on the West, Russia annexed the Ukrainian Peninsula of Crimea and occupied part of the Donbas, initially using armed representatives.
Western leaders fear that Mr. Putin is prepared to invade Ukraine if he fails to secure the concessions he wants from the United States and NATO, which would in fact create for Russia a sphere of influence similar to the Soviet era throughout. Eastern Europe. Among President Putin’s main demands is the provision of a guarantee that NATO will never expand eastward. Russian officials deny having any intentions of occupying their neighbor, despite unprecedented mass military mobilization along Ukraine’s borders. They accuse Western powers of sounding the alarm.
“The beating of the Kremlin’s propaganda drums is also becoming significantly stronger,” said Yevhen Fedchenko, co-founder of the fact-checking website StopFake.org, which monitors Russian disinformation.
“Over the past eight years, Moscow has been able to deploy an impressive and growing arsenal of information weapons against Ukraine,” Fedchenko wrote in a letter to the Atlantic Council, a US-based think tank.
“This arsenal includes the use of a variety of tools, from small armies commenting online to well-funded mainstream media that combine world-class production values with an often almost complete lack of journalistic ethics. Each individual element of this arsenal operates under the direct or indirect control of the Kremlin. “Together, they reiterate and reinforce the same carefully crafted messages, created to justify or support in various ways Russia’s undeclared war on Ukraine.”
Message formation
Other analysts also say the Kremlin is making strong efforts to control the narrative of developments in Ukraine and to tailor messages to Russians and key audiences outside Russia.
Tom Southern, director of special projects at the Center for Information Stability (CIR), a UK-based non-governmental organization exposing disinformation activities, says there are two sides to the Kremlin’s information war – “what is being sent to Ukraine” “and what is being produced for Ukraine.” He says Kremlin propagandists work in a broad spectrum that uses official statements of the Russian government broadcast by its well-funded local and international media, but amplify key messages using social media sites and messaging apps like Telegram.
“This includes the message that Ukraine is a failed state and the historic revisionism of Ukraine and NATO as a provocation to Russia or to the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine,” he said. A key message for both Russian and international audiences is that NATO is the aggressor and has broken promises made after the dissolution of the Soviet Union not to expand the Western alliance eastward.
The Russian leader has repeatedly stressed this claim to NATO, accusing Western powers of taking advantage of a weakened and disoriented Russia as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. And the alleged deception of the West and the breach of a solemn commitment not to expand has been an important component of Putin’s foreign policy message, which portrays Russia as a victim and an injured party. This key message is being transmitted to all Russian-controlled media and social media platforms, disinformation experts say.
Historians familiar with the matter say no such official campaign has ever been launched. In 2014, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview that “the topic of ‘NATO enlargement’ was not discussed at all” during his talks with US leaders.
This year, propaganda production by the Kremlin has increased compared to the same period last year, says Taras Shevchenko, Deputy Minister of Culture and Information Policy in Ukraine. Official websites in Russia are the main drivers, but the technology is used by the Kremlin to “circulate harmful, hostile content” and to spread misinformation, he says. Mr. Shevchenko says Russia’s dominant message includes three key elements: Ukraine is a failed state, Russia is peaceful, and the West wants war.
Western broadcasters have complained in recent weeks that state-controlled Russian media have misused their reports and footage by altering them with comments created to help form the message that the West is preparing for an attack.
This is a variant of what disinformation experts call “information laundering” – using Western sources to undermine Western arguments, often interviewing “experts” who are in line with Moscow but have dubious backgrounds.
The Crisis Media Center in Ukraine, a non-governmental organization that also receives funding from the European Union, has warned that the Kremlin is seeking to fuel tensions with ongoing accusations that Ukraine is “preparing provocations.” The group says an example of such an attempt was a recent allegation that Ukraine and NATO were planning to launch a clandestine operation codenamed “Crushing Sword” that would use fake images of Russian aggression and use it as a pretext for to attack Russia.
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