With Russian troops poised on the border with Ukraine, 'information warfare' has already begun

The dire warnings from America about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine keep coming. On Saturday, U.S. intelligence reports stated that Russia was capable of overtaking capital Kyiv within 72 hours and inflicting 50,000 civilian deaths. On Sunday, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that the 130,000 Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border could attack “any day.” On Monday, President Biden told those 30,000 Americans living in Ukraine “it would be wise to leave the country.”

The Russian version of the situation, however, is markedly different. Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, called the U.S. assessments “madness and scaremongering,” dismissing them as “propaganda.” Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for Russia’s foreign ministry, on Monday asserted that the U.S. and U.K. are targeting Russia “to divert public attention from domestic political crises.”

Russian state TV is painting Ukraine as the aggressor in the standoff, and in recent days has reported that the former Soviet republic is about to attack ethnic Russians in the eastern portion of the country, disinformation that the West worries may be used as the pretext for a Russian invasion.

Ukrainians “are confused and they are split,” Oleksandr Danylyuk, the country’s former security chief, told Yahoo News. Some citizens are packing up their families, he said, while others believe the threat is being overplayed by Western media.

Conflicting reports of how likely Russia is to invade have left many people unsure what to believe. “The information space is absolutely polluted,” said Russia analyst Ivana Stradner, a Jeane Kirkpatrick visiting research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Stradner says we’re in the midst of Kremlin-instigated “information warfare” — a type of hybrid war. “Russia is really a master in information operations,” she said, adding that information warfare is a form of asymmetric fighting that ranges from pounding home false narratives and spreading disinformation campaigns across social media to launching cyberattacks on government and media sites.

“Information warfare is Russia’s strategic nonnuclear weapon,” she said. The goal is “to make people confused, so they don’t know what to believe anymore, and to spread fear and anxiety.” As one example, she points to how Russia, through Kremlin statements and a campaign waged across social media, has attempted to frame the conflict as a showdown over NATO expansion while keeping the conversation away from such topics as Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea, its role in kicking up the proxy war in Ukraine’s east and its human rights abuses. Instead, “we’re discussing what Russia wants to discuss.”

“Russia’s disinformation campaigns,” said former NATO analyst Edward Hunter Christie, senior fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, “portray Russia as an innocent country on the defensive ... that they are somehow being cornered by this U.S.-led alliance called NATO, which keeps expanding closer and closer to them.” The reality is “that Russia has put a huge military force all along Ukraine’s border, deliberately, in a manner that everybody can see. So it’s not just a question of intelligence experts anymore. There’s a lot of open-source intelligence, which lots of people can follow very easily. And it is widely believed by genuine experts that Russia fundamentally does not accept Ukraine’s sovereignty and does not respect Ukraine statehood. And they want to basically either run the place, either control it completely, or attack it or destabilize it, or cause great harm.”

“Robert,” a European defense expert on cyber disinformation who asked to remain anonymous for this article, agreed. “Russia has repeated the story often that [the border crisis in Ukraine] is all NATO’s fault, all the fault of the U.S. — and they are playing into the hands of anti-Americanism that is there in Germany, in France and other European countries as well. And the Russians are using this,” he said.

The ploy is starting to work, Stradner said, at least in Eastern Europe, where polls show half of Russians and nearly half of Slovakians and former East Germans believe that NATO and the U.S. are the culprits in the Russia-Ukraine crisis.

In addition to warning about false flag scenarios, the White House “has deliberately described what the most aggressive scenario could look like, which is not simply made up; it’s based on those [growing] Russian forces that are gathering close to the border,” said Christie. “They look to a large degree like what Russia would need if it wanted to mount a large-scale invasion of Ukraine” — with U.S. intelligence agencies saying Russia now has about 70 percent of the troops and firepower it would need for a full-scale attack. “The U.S. is simply reporting this information to the world.” That is not propaganda, he said. “It’s strategic communications between Washington, D.C., and Moscow. And the purpose of the message is to say to Moscow, ‘We know what you’re up to.’ It’s a strategy to try to reduce even the probability of war and if the war happens anyway, at least to deny Russia the ability to distort the facts in front of the eyes of the world.

“The White House has been pretty smart in doing this,” Christie added, “because if they hadn’t spoken so openly and forcefully about the danger that Ukraine is probably facing, we wouldn’t have had the mobilization and the awareness of the magnitude of this problem and the situation — we would be in a worse place.”

Danylyuk, the former security chief, finds it absurd that Ukraine’s leaders are ignoring the warnings of the West. The problem, he told Yahoo News, is that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “doesn’t trust Biden and he doesn’t trust Americans. And the fact that our intelligence gets information from the West, a lot of it from Western partners, doesn’t make it credible to him.”

In effect, Danylyuk said, when it comes to conducting information warfare to try to convince Ukrainians that the West is to blame for the conflict, Zelensky is doing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s job for him.

Zelensky’s government is “almost blaming the West for exaggerating, saying that, you know, we have a better understanding of what was happening, they’re not interpreting the intelligence properly, or they don’t understand the methodology.”

Danylyuk concluded, “So you don’t need to have Russian propaganda because you have the Ukrainian government actually performing this role. Which is very odd and which is extremely confusing.”