Disinformation and influence campaigns are an integral part of Russia’s concept of information warfare. The failure of these campaigns’ strategic objectives in Ukraine has ensured that country’s survival; but Russia has been successful both directly against Western countries and elsewhere around the world.
Information effects within Ukraine
Within Ukraine itself, Russia’s attempts to influence both military personnel and civilians have been intensive and widespread but have shown little evidence of substantial strategic impact since February 2022. This, too, is a result of the extensive prior duration of the conflict; Ukrainian targets of disinformation operations have long been accustomed to the methods in play. In the face of ongoing information warfare from Russia, Ukraine launched multiple initiatives aimed at improving coordination and building resilience between 2015 and 2021, in some cases sponsored and facilitated by foreign governments, including the UK. As a result, Ukrainians were relatively well prepared in this domain when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
If Russia had succeeded in dividing or demoralizing the Ukrainian population, or eroding its faith in and support for institutions in the manner that other Russian campaigns against the West have sought to do, this could have had a critical impact on the essential resilience and unity that has enabled Ukraine to prevail to date. However, the fundamental failure of Russia’s intelligence agencies and planners to grasp that Ukraine was a separate country that would resist a Russian attack meant that efforts in this direction were misguided, misconceived and insufficient. Campaigns of subversion targeting Ukraine’s population and decision-makers achieved far less effect than was optimistically reported to the Kremlin.
The result was a catastrophic misjudgment of the probable response of Ukrainians to the invasion and an expectation that military activity could be limited to decapitation strikes, followed by the arrest of a limited number of Ukrainian patriots, after which even a low level of active collaboration would ensure control by Russian forces over the remainder of the population. The outcome of this misjudgment has been both beneficial and tragic for Ukraine. It doomed Russia’s operational plan to failure, but it also was a key reason for the launch of the invasion in the first place, and then for its rapid transition into a campaign with genocidal aims once it became clear that Ukrainians were failing to conform to Russia’s misguided caricature of them as frustrated and slightly inferior Russians yearning for liberation.
This does not mean that Russia has not achieved local information successes. Russia’s ability to find and exploit collaborators was a key enabler for its success in occupying some southern regions of Ukraine with very little opposition. Embedded Russian agents also engaged in technical information warfare, such as SMS broadcasting and communications interception, deep within Ukrainian territory. Within Ukrainian government-held territory, individuals acting in support of Russia have repeatedly been detained for providing targeting information to Russian forces. Preparations for the invasion included renting private apartments to use as bases for electronic surveillance of individuals in the local area, including interception of their communications and activity on social networks – an important element in building Russia’s awareness of whom to target for elimination after the invasion. Other facilities established by Russia deep within Ukraine included rebroadcasting stations distributing disinformation via SMS directly on to cellphone networks.
Long-standing propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at the civilian inhabitants of occupied areas of the east of the country have had a cumulative effect, leading to cognitive dissonance when those areas are liberated by Ukrainian forces – a problem that will pose a significant challenge if or when Crimea too is recovered from Russian occupation. Pro-Russian sentiment can be strong among populations within reach of broadcast media from occupied areas, even in the face of the reality of the war, aided by highly localized Russian information campaigns via Telegram channels, which can ‘announce that the Ukrainian Army is firing mortars just before a Russian missile strike hits’.
Cyberattacks, when not tied to an immediate tactical or operational aim, have appeared designed to contribute to intimidating and demoralizing the Ukrainian defenders: ‘[E]ven if an attack’s immediate effect can be qualified as destructive –
be it data wiping, denial of service, or even causing a short-term blackout – the actual goal for these operations appears to be cognitive in its nature: the (often limited) value lies in sending a certain message or causing distress and confusion.’ But the overall impact appears limited – once again, cyber effects lose relative significance in the context of open warfare. In addition, Ukrainian OPSEC has helped to deny the intended cognitive outcomes, or desired secondary effects, of Russian cyberattacks. When Russia wants to mount an information campaign exploiting the impact of successful cyber operations to demoralize Ukrainians, this intent is frustrated if that effect is not made public. This supports the conclusion that OPSEC is vital not only in a military context, but also through the whole of society when it faces a holistic information exploitation threat.
Ukrainian strategic communications have been a whole-of-society effort, in cooperation between the government, military, news media and civil society.
In fact, Ukrainian defensive preparations have proved effective across the board. This has included the banning of Russian media and journalists ahead of the invasion, a move judged relatively controversial at the time, but subsequently found to be justifiable given their role in ‘threatening the continued development of democracy in Ukraine: via eroding public support for democracy; via distorting perceptions of truth and thereby hindering rational debate and via weakening the morale needed to fuel resistance and defence of the democratic state in the case of physical attack’. Meanwhile, Ukrainian strategic communications have been a whole-of-society effort, in cooperation between the government, military, news media and civil society. This effort has been greatly facilitated by the predominance of skilled communicators in senior positions in the Ukrainian government, enabling agile, proactive and engaging strategic communications making full use of modern media tools, in stark contrast with Russian – and sometimes Western – efforts.
Russian tactical information operations directed at Ukrainian military personnel in a particular local area include means of disseminating information that remain unchanged from conflicts in the previous century – and are therefore completely independent of the internet. These include radio broadcasts, the use of long-range loudspeakers, and leaflet distribution by artillery shell. Meanwhile, direct messages to Ukrainian military personnel containing personalized threats – for instance, including information on their families and residences as well as their names – are delivered by SMS, Telegram, Viber, Signal and WhatsApp. However, this is a technique that has been noted since the very earliest stages of the conflict in 2014–15, allowing ample time for it to become an accepted feature of the information environment, which in turn is likely to limit its effectiveness. Reporting on messaging of this kind in mid-2022 noted that despite evidence of some agility in messaging, such as threatening the defenders of Sievierodonetsk that they faced ‘another Mariupol’, the majority of personal information used was outdated. In some cases, Russia’s misconceptualization of the conflict as a whole has also undermined its information campaigns – during the siege of the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, Russian propaganda directed at the Ukrainian defenders through the internet, radio, loudspeakers and leaflet drops leaned heavily on the narrative that ‘Kyiv is unable to control the nationalists in the armed forces’, an approach which unsurprisingly was found to be ineffective.
An apparent inability to keep pace with the evolution of the information environment casts doubt on Russia’s future ability to exploit rapidly developing fully synthetic media, long described as another potential game-changer in disinformation and deception operations. The release in mid-March 2022 of a deepfake video of President Zelenskyy purportedly calling on Ukrainians to surrender provides an illustration of Russia being behind the curve both technically and conceptually. The deepfake was of low quality and would have been unconvincing even if it had been released several years earlier when deepfakes themselves were a novelty. Its use in this instance was both several weeks out of date – in the sense that it would have been far more effective at the outset of the invasion – and several years out of date, in the sense that target audiences were already familiar with the concept of deepfakes, since they had been so widely used and discussed in preceding years.
What is more, given observation of the development of Russian information warfare techniques and practice runs, potential targets of Russian aggression were already alert to the possibility of faked calls to surrender – to the extent that countries like Sweden and Latvia include in the crisis preparedness booklets distributed to all members of the population specific instructions that such calls apparently coming from government officials should be disregarded because they will not be genuine. (Ukraine’s own pre-war crisis preparedness booklet included a page on detecting disinformation, but no specific note on fake surrender instructions.) In this case, too, Russia had acquired a capability but had not developed it to keep up with the evolution of information technologies taking place in the meantime.
Information effects within Russia
The isolation of Russians from outside information is a key enabler for the Russian state, since its ability to prosecute the war depends on effective measures to ensure Russia’s population does not discover the truth about it, or frames that truth within a world view that makes the war acceptable or even desirable. As a result, Russia has put substantial and long-term effort into ensuring a homogeneous information space with no tolerance for unsanctioned viewpoints. These efforts go far beyond the state television ‘agitainment’ shows that attract most attention outside Russia, and instead encompass a holistic set of both defensive and proactive measures to shape and protect the information picture reaching Russians.
The relative success of this programme can be judged by the continued willingness of Russians to fight on the front line, notwithstanding the significant but far from universal efforts to evade mobilization. But the Russian state’s propaganda drive is not without challenges, especially in the context of unarguable setbacks in the conventional war. As noted by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW): ‘The Russian MoD struggles to address unexpected Ukrainian operations because its information strategy relies on portraying the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an easy and faultless operation … [it] needs a significant amount of time to develop and spread false narratives in the Russian information space.’ Ukrainian tactical successes, such as strikes on airbases within Russia or occupied Crimea, present Russia with a dilemma that it has more than once resolved by blaming explosions on failures to follow safety protocols. In other words, Russia would rather promote explanations of incidents that show its own troops to be incompetent, and claim damage was self-inflicted, than admit to a Ukrainian capability to reach deep behind its lines.
Besides immediate steps such as monitoring internet activity and prosecuting people for repeating illegal news or opinions, Russia’s concepts for shielding its population from the outside world include defences against fanciful methods of information attack that foreign powers are unlikely to be resourcing heavily. These include the ‘psychological infection of personnel’ through methods such as hypnosis, psychic projection and telepathy, and chemical and biological psychotropic weapons. In public discussion of information warfare, these concepts are accompanied by the embrace of questionable theories of universality in human and social behaviour. Although apparently misguided, this focus by a sector of Russian information warfare practitioners is noteworthy, because if Russia considers activities like these to be a threat, it follows logically that it will have considered how to deploy that threat against its adversaries.
Ukraine’s commanders have noted the critical importance of carrying the information fight to Russia and ensuring that awareness of the consequences of the war spreads within Russia’s own information space.
Ukraine recognizes the challenge. In September 2022, Ukraine’s commanders noted the critical importance of carrying the information fight to Russia and ensuring that awareness of the consequences of the war spreads within Russia’s own information space. The Ukrainian government and civil society have tried to devise means of reaching into Russia to deliver information about the true nature and course of the war. These efforts include the establishment of a Ukrainian hotline which Russian families can call to try to get information on family members believed to have been sent to Ukraine to fight; the hotline reportedly received over 6,000 calls in the first two weeks of the full-scale invasion. Routes into Russian information space exploited by Ukrainian civilian volunteers include dating apps and reviews posted on Google Maps.
In multiple instances, apparent Ukrainian actors have reached into Russia to hack media outlets and present audiences with subversive content. In other cases, technical exploits by organizations backing Ukraine have delivered a reputational rather than a tactical impact. The ‘#OPRussia’ campaign has carried out hack-and-leak operations against key Russian organizations such as the Bank of Russia, helping to erode the Russian state’s reputation for cyber competence as well as exploiting the direct intelligence and influence value of the data acquired.
However, none of these exploits is likely to have a substantial or widespread short-term impact in circumstances of well-established domestic information control within Russia, just as well-crafted direct messaging to Russian service personnel will be limited in its spread by the likelihood of severe reprisals for any recipient caught distributing it. Overall, a combination of Russia’s deliberate efforts to isolate its citizens from outside influences, those citizens’ complicity with that process, and the universal effect of information bubbles limiting online users’ interactions has meant that Ukraine’s efforts to influence Russian public opinion have had little more success than those of any other external actor.
As the trends of isolation and elimination of alternative opinions within Russia are set to continue, reaching or influencing Russia’s own population will only be more challenging in future conflicts. This, too, is not a new issue. Russia’s long-standing and well-embedded systems of content control, both repressive and technical, will continue to present a substantial obstacle to adversaries seeking to deliver information to its people.
At the time of writing, however, the ongoing repercussions of the abortive armed revolt by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner private military company in June 2023 offered additional insights into possible future developments within Russia. Russian information operations in wartime have shown themselves to be increasingly reactive rather than proactive, and actions by adversaries and unanticipated offline events have proven highly effective in negating Russian aims by disrupting pre-planned sequences of actions. The Prigozhin episode confirmed this and demonstrated three clear principles: a previously unsuspected vulnerability of Russia’s domestic propaganda system, due to the fact that a significant proportion of its work is outsourced to private actors (a cause of particular irony when official Russian sources complained at Prigozhin being able to dominate media space, when that was exactly what he was contracted to do); the slow reaction of the Russian state information system when presented with unexpected events; and its incapacity when Russian citizens come face to face with undeniable reality. The confused response to the Prigozhin mutiny replicated the early days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when Russia’s disinformation industry was also caught off-guard. Both occasions demonstrated the difficulty of rapidly revising narratives and the time lag before domestic information outlets catch up with the new reality. This in turn indicates a possible route for exploitation for other actors wishing to reach and influence Russia’s public.
Information effects: rest of the world
Among Western audiences, Ukraine has been highly successful in creating and leveraging messages of heroic defence – aided, of course, by the fact that there is no shortage of genuine material to work with. The ability of Ukrainian government agencies, especially the Ministry of Defence, to achieve virality and engagement through humour has also achieved widespread admiration; Ukraine appears to have comprehensively overcome the ‘bureaucratic virality paradox’, whereby government communications tend by default to be too stilted, clumsy or boring to be widely shared. This presents an obvious lesson to other government communications entities around the world, especially those that even in the third decade of the 21st century are struggling to adapt to the nature of the online information environment.
Among Western audiences, Ukraine has been highly successful in creating and leveraging messages of heroic defence – aided, of course, by the fact that there is no shortage of genuine material to work with.
Nevertheless, even if it is true that Russia is ‘losing the information war in Ukraine’, as the head of GCHQ argues, this is not the only place where the broader war will be won or lost. Audiences and decision-makers in the West appear to continue to underestimate the extent to which their view of the conflict is not shared by others around the world. Russia has been highly successful in presenting a far more ambivalent picture to the rest of the world, in terms of both who is to blame for the war and what is at stake in it. Overcoming this framing would require far greater effort by the collective West than is visible at present. As noted by information practitioner Jakub Kalenský: ‘This optimism and wishful thinking are not only misguided but also very dangerous.’ Although some formal polls indicate a recognition among populations beyond the West that Russia’s actions are dangerous and unacceptable, the number of states around the world unwilling to condemn Russia’s actions testifies to the success of Moscow’s portrayal of the conflict – or its leverage in inducing other powers to acquiesce in it.
This portrayal builds on narratives that were established long before February 2022, and in many cases even before the opening of active hostilities against Ukraine in 2014. Long-term themes in Russian propaganda have achieved widespread buy-in around the world, such as the idea that Russia was ‘encircled’ by NATO, that NATO was aggressively taking over the countries of eastern Europe in order to threaten Russia, or that Ukraine was on the point of being accepted into NATO. Since 2022, Russian disinformation directed beyond Ukraine has also leaned heavily on derogatory stereotypes of Ukrainians based around identity. False narratives based on attributes such as ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation aim to delegitimize Ukrainians and sow distrust of them. In addition to the ubiquitous characterization of Ukrainians as Nazis, Russian narratives regarding Ukrainian women seek to suggest that many have left the country in order to profit from prostitution rather than remain in Ukraine. Sexual minorities are also targeted, with narratives aimed at conservative communities worldwide portraying the Ukrainian army as being run by homosexuals and therefore both unworthy of foreign support and doomed to defeat.
Russian efforts to spread pro-war narratives have had an impact well beyond the West, and have been found to be trending in languages native to Iran, Nigeria, South Africa and South Asia. Themes targeted at these language groups included the portrayal of Putin as a ‘strongman’, the promotion of solidarity between BRICS countries, and reminders of Western historical colonialism and consequent untrustworthiness. Even in the West, Russian efforts have not been entirely unsuccessful. Narratives, ideas and individual phrases that have been inculcated by Russian tools of influence over many years now permeate the entirety of Western political debate on the conflict, facilitated by a cohort of pro-Russian agitators and agents of influence who continue to operate largely unchallenged across a range of Western countries. Crucially for Ukraine, these ideas include the key one that impeding Russia in any way will inevitably lead to escalating conflict, quite possibly culminating in nuclear exchanges – this argument has presented a crippling constraint on Western efforts to support Ukraine and back it to victory.
In order to propagate these narratives, Russia draws on a range of long-standing information tactics which in some cases have evolved under the pressures of the war and which in others remain static. Media sanctions in the EU, the UK and the US have led to the adoption of new channels for the dissemination of information. Existing assets such as embassies, diplomats and journalists have been co-opted to push propaganda, and numerous mirrored information-laundering websites and fake news outlets have been activated to reproduce Russian content and circumvent sanctions. But in other areas, existing practices have remained unchanged because no effective measures to interdict them have been taken.
Russia continues to exploit opportunities to sow social division in the societies of Western nations opposed to its aggression. Well-established cyber-information lines of effort have been augmented with the appearance of new targets, such as communities of Ukrainians displaced by the conflict and their hosts in Western countries. Russia’s exploitation (and possible instigation) of public burnings of copies of the Qur’an in Sweden has been especially impactful in the context of Turkish opposition to that country’s NATO accession. In 2022, Google noted an intensifying of hack-forge-leak activities by ‘groups suspected to be tied to Russian intelligence services’ designed to intimidate, discredit or neutralize not only Ukrainian military and government personnel but any significant figures opposing Russia’s war. Other investigations identified the Cold River/Seaborgium threat actor as prolifically involved in acquiring confidential material from targets for subsequent release by pro-Russian ‘activists’. By February 2023, the lead time between original hack and ‘leak’ on public-facing websites was greatly reduced, perhaps because the pro-Russian activists no longer saw value in plausible deniability.
Similarly, Russia’s transition to a less sophisticated pattern of attacks in technical cyber terms was partially mirrored in information activities against the West, with a September 2022 report by US tech conglomerate Meta describing ‘an attempted smash-and-grab against the information environment, rather than a serious effort to occupy it long-term’. This may have reflected a perceived loss of advantage in the course of the conflict overall: one authoritative assessment holds that Russian information warfare practitioners ‘don’t know how to behave when they don’t have the initiative’, a theory supported by the Prigozhin experience described above.
Other elements of Russia’s information campaigns directed at the West have evolved with the war through phases with distinct messaging components. Narratives that have come and (sometimes) gone include: the ‘Winter Is Coming’ campaign, intended to convince Europeans that they would freeze without Russian energy and should pressure their governments to stop backing Ukraine; the false portrayal of President Zelenskyy as a deeply corrupt leader benefiting directly from Western financial backing that would be better spent on domestic problems; the need to ‘denazify’, ‘demilitarize’ or ‘desatanize’ Ukraine; and most pervasively of all, the idea that continued or increased supplies of weapons to Kyiv will extend the war rather than shorten it. This latter deceptive message has been embraced by some of the most vociferous pro-Russian voices in Western countries. It has the dual advantages of tapping into a normal human desire among the broader population to shorten rather than prolong the conflict, and of directly targeting a critically important line of support for Ukraine. In addition to persistent themes, Russian messaging includes specific and direct threats intended to shape the behaviour of Ukraine and its backers – among examples were the threats in August 2022 to destroy the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station and trigger a Europe-wide radiological incident.
In some cases, disinformation at the unsophisticated end of the spectrum has caused the removal of Russian state media from the platforms they previously exploited for dissemination to Western audiences. After years of complaints that disinformation operations were not only operating on social media platforms but generating substantial revenue from their advertising programmes, in March 2022 Google ‘pause[d] monetization and globally block[ed] recommendations’ for Russian state and state-aligned disinformation channels. Google subsequently applied the same measures to attempts to circumvent the blocks using duplicate sites and domains. However, such measures have had little impact on operations not overtly linked to the state. Social media platforms continue to present an open playground for manipulation by actors unhampered by legal or ethical constraints, and the reduced enforcement on Twitter, now rebranded as X, makes that platform in particular an environment that is even more permissive for Russia and hostile for its critics. In addition, Russian information operations continue to produce imitation versions of genuine established news media, their effects augmented by the continued promotion of an exhaustive list of Russian talking points by news outlets in the US with substantial audiences.
Publicly discernible Western efforts to counter Russia’s influence appear to have been limited to the Euro-Atlantic area. Even there, the pattern of initiatives does not suggest that they are guided by an overall strategic vision or desired end state. The unprecedented extent of disclosures of information based on classified intelligence by the US and UK in the period before February 2022, for instance, led to successes at an operational level combined with negative second-order strategic effects that may not have been sufficiently appreciated in planning. Success came in preventing Russian narratives about the conflict from taking greater hold among Western publics and decision-makers than they might otherwise have done, and in pre-empting Russian false flag operations. According to John Kirby, at the time a spokesperson for the US Department of Defense, the benefit of declassifying and disclosing intelligence was to ‘really affect the decision-making process of a potential adversary. We were beating Putin’s lie to the punch, and we know that by doing so we got inside his decision-making loop’. At the same time, because this demonstration of awareness of Russia’s plans was not accompanied by any credible evidence of intent to oppose them, it did nothing to deter Russia from mounting the new invasion; in fact, it provided reassurance to Moscow’s assessment that there would be no meaningful response from the West.
The clear conclusion is that in addition to care over their crafting and delivery, Western strategic communications efforts need to have clear and specific aims that are developed strategically and holistically, including consideration of side effects and second-order effects.
