Information Warfare

Moscow, confronted with several dilemmas in relations with Armenia and its role around Nagorno-Karabakh developments, has resorted to its usual tactics: blame others. For a long time Russia has portrayed itself as Armenia’s main security guarantor, with thousands of servicemen deployed there through its 102nd military base and FSB border guards watching over guarding Armenia’s borders with Iran and Türkiye on the basis of bilateral agreements from 1992 and 1995. However, when developments in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh became less manageable for Russia, the Kremlin tried to compensate with a disinformation campaign targeting, above all, Armenia’s political leadership and the so-called ‘collective West’.

As winter makes life harder, the Kremlin steps up its atrocious attacks on civilians while running campaigns to undermine public morale in Ukraine and across Europe. To be prepared, we look back on the two earlier cold seasons. Winter has come to Ukraine. As Russia’s full-scale war enters the third cold period since February 2022, last weekend saw perhaps the most intense Russian drone attacks on civilian targets across Ukraine. What is the usual Kremlin cocktail when it gets cold? A closer look at the previous cold seasons in 2022 and 2023 can serve as a warning of what to expect. After more than 21 months of high-intensity war and wanton destruction across all sectors of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s disinformation does not even try to hide it: Moscow’s aim is the destruction of the modern Ukrainian state. Ukraine is denied statehood and identity. Putin and every pundit repeat that Russia cannot accept a neighbour which seeks its future outside Moscow’s control. It has become almost a law of nature for the Kremlin that the world must be structured this way.

Kremlin narratives and hard realities rarely meet. In one of many examples, pro-Kremlin and Russian state-controlled disinformation outlets have cease-lessly declared since the February 2022 full-scale invasion that the ‘special military operation’ is going well, despite the fact that Ukraine has retaken at least half of territory that Russia initially occupied. But of all these feats of wishful thinking, perhaps the most striking was the Kremlin’s determination to believe that, without imported Russian gas, Europe would freeze to death. Rarely have disinformation narratives arisen with such a dramatic clamour of impending doom, only to disappear relatively quickly into a defeated and ignominious silence. However, the Kremlin’s core disinformation narratives never die. Instead, they withdraw from sunshine, perhaps to re-emerge with the coming of night. And versions of the ‘freezing Europe’ narrative, including this one alleging that the loss of cheap Russian gas is causing Germa-ny’s ‘de-industrialisation’, occasionally reappear into the light of public discourse.

Individuals and their fates don’t interest the Kremlin, which just exploits them as disposable pawns in the Kremlin’s losing game. Last Tuesday 21 November, we commemorated the 10th anniversary of the Revolution of Dignity, also known as Euromaidan. We remembered those who lost their lives protecting Ukraine’s right to choose its own future as a sove-reign member of the European family of countries. Over the years, EUvsDisinfo has documented count-less lies that Russian disinformers have spread as they have tried to tarnish the legacy of the watershed moment that unfolded on the streets of Kyiv 10 years ago. Maidan as orchestrated by foreign powers, a lie that aims at denying the genuine agency of Ukrainians who bravely took to the streets and opposed Kremlin-aligned forces. The pro-Kremlin disinformation ecosystem has tried to frame Maidan as a coup d’etat in order to delegitimise the protests Lastly, pro-Kremlin disinformation peddlers continu-ously refer to post-Maidan Ukraine as a failed state, as they try to challenge Ukraine’s sovereignty and its status as a nation-state.

Most forms of kinetic warfare require weapons to sustain it. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is no exception. Consequently, after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s international partners deli-vered substantial amounts of weaponry, armaments, and military equipment to the country to support its fight for freedom and independence. For Ukrainians, this military support is the most immediate means of protecting their land against invaders and holding the aggressor accountable. For pro-Kremlin disinforma-tion outlets, however, any military aid to Ukraine, particularly coming from its Western partners, presents an opportunity to drum up fears about these weapons and armaments illicitly spreading beyond Ukraine. Let’s examine how pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets have used allegations of illicit weapons diversions to drive fear, sow divisions, and erode support to Ukraine. Specifically, we will zoom in on pro-Kremlin allegations about one type of weaponry known as small arms and light weapons, or SALWs.

The EEAS has uncovered a coordinated anti-Western campaign on Facebook that leans on sophisticated techniques to hide its creators tracks. Advertising is a big driver of the digital economy. But not all that glitters is gold. Recently, we detected over 1,000 sponsored Facebook posts, 188 of them unique, promoting anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian content. Facebook pages masquerading as online shops and categorised as ‘Musician/Band’ pages were the source of these ads. The manipulation campaign we unravelled was – or rather is, as some of the pages are still online – international in nature. Out of the 658 ads we could access at the time of discovery, 318 were in German, 321 in French, 14 in Ukrainian, and 5 in Hebrew. The actors behind the campaign put in a good effort to hide their tracks. Out of 1,000 total ads, every fourth one contained a web address belonging to 105 distinct domains. The Facebook pages promoting the ads were all created between June and October of this year.

On 5 November, Moldova held the first round of local elections during a tumultuous period. Disinformation sources focused on discrediting pro-European authorities and candidates, as well as Moldova’s development partners. Pro-Kremlin sources rolled out Russophobia, an important tool of propaganda and disinformation in Moldova. On the eve of the elections, Moldovan authorities took a series of drastic measures to combat disinformation, including banning television channels and blocking websites. Ever since its pro-European government was formed more than two years ago, Moldova has become a top target of Russian disinformation and hybrid attacks. Top topics include the country’s energy dependency or tensions with the Transnistrian region. Throughout this period, Moldovan authorities have taken numerous measures to combat such disinformation.

Pro-Kremlin disinformation blurs the line between the digital realm and physical space, amplifying online images of graffiti to fuel offline anti-Semitism while trying to provoke discord and turmoil. When we think about countering pro-Kremlin information manipulation and disinformation, we sometimes fall into the trap of equating the information space with the vast digital realm. Admittedly, since the dawn of the World Wide Web, the digital realm has become a crucial and life-altering part of the information space. However, when it comes to purposeful attempts to manipulate the information space, the boundaries between the digital and the physical can sometimes be blurred. This week, let’s zoom in on a telling example of how this intersection can be exploited for deceitful and manipulative purposes.

Exposing Russia as a colonial fascist empire with a history of organized terrorism following a well-established formula is first and foremost about justice says Maksym Eristavi., a Ukrainian journalist and writer who founded the Volya Hub. But it’s also about stopping the popular talk that ‘this is Putin’s war and Russians are victims too.’ It’s about exposing that Russia has always been like this and will remain so unless it faces accountability. But, to quote Shuhada’ Sadaqat (originally known as Sinéad O’Connor, a legend of anti-colonial art), before there’s justice, there must be knowledge and understanding. Until the world stops ignoring the problem of Russian colonialism, regimes and generations in Russia will keep changing, but Russian fascism will keep terrorizing neighboring societies, like mine.

Pro-Kremlin outlets try to turn the main focus onto the Israel-Hamas war while talking up ‘Ukraine fatigue in the West’. They are almost silent about Russia’s atrocious bombardments in Ukraine, Black Sea grain issues, and Nagorno-Karabakh… Russian state outlets have a years-long propensity to focus on how bad the situation is outside Russia, apparently wanting to inoculate Russian society against inspiration from liberal democracies. Now, as the new reality of a protracted war against Ukraine is sinking in throughout Russia, every outside crisis is welcome. No wonder, then, that the Israel-Hamas war and its wider implications are taking centre stage for Moscow’s media machine. The (last) The narrative is now that the conflict in Gaza will consume all the West’s political and military attention and that the UN cannot react(opens in a new tab) due to Western obstruction.