As of: March 17, 2024, 8:19 p.m
From: Foreign Policy
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Putin is waging information war against the West.
This also has consequences for the war in Ukraine.
Western governments must act urgently.
Since Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin has not only been waging a military war against Ukraine, but also an information war against the West.
The polarized Western public and social media platforms like X and TikTok are promoting Putin's hybrid war.
Political decision-makers in the West must act - they can learn from Ukraine's actions in the fight against Russian disinformation, says historian Ian Garner in this essay.
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published by
Foreign Policy
magazine on March 9, 2024 .
Moscow – A few weeks ago, a Russian autocrat addressed millions of Western citizens with a propaganda event.
A generation ago this would have been unthinkable.
Today the event is so normal that it is hardly noticeable anymore.
Tucker Carlson's interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin has now been
viewed more than 120 million times on
YouTube
and
X.
Despite the dullness of Putin's two-hour lecture on an imaginary Russian and Ukrainian history, the streaming and distribution of the interview by Western platforms is just the latest successful foray in Russia's information war against the West.
An information war that Moscow seems to be winning.
And in this war, the Kremlin is relying not only on social media but also on the people of the West themselves to spread its messages far and wide.
Putin's information war: Political decision-makers and companies remain inactive
A decade after Russia's information war began, social media companies appear to have forgotten their promises.
After the 2016 U.S. presidential election interference scandal, when Russian-sponsored posts reached 126 million Americans on Facebook alone, the companies vowed to act.
It's not just that policymakers don't seem to know the full extent of Russia's information war.
Fears of stifling free speech and contributing to political polarization have also led them and social media companies to largely refrain from taking action to stop Russia's ongoing campaign.
This inaction comes amid increasing signs of Russian influence that has penetrated deeply into Western politics and society.
Dozens - if not hundreds or more - of Russian agents have been observed everywhere from English cities to Canadian universities.
Many of these agents are insignificant and appear to accomplish little individually, but they occasionally penetrate institutions, corporations, and governments.
Putin pours hundreds of millions of dollars into influencing elections
Meanwhile, a flood of money is supporting Moscow's ambitions.
This includes hundreds of millions of dollars that the Kremlin pours into influencing elections, some of which goes covertly (and openly) to political parties and individual politicians.
For many decades, Western societies have been inundated with every kind of influence imaginable.
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While there have been some countermeasures since the start of the recent Russian war - including the blocking of access to Russian media networks such as
RT
and
Sputnik
by the United States and the European Union in early 2022 - these small, ineffective steps are the equivalent of virtue signaling information warfare.
They do not change the fact that Western governments have no coherent approach to the many vectors of Russian disinformation and hybrid warfare.
Just as Kremlin narratives on social media begin to seriously erode support for Ukraine, Western governments' handling of the disinformation crisis appears to be growing weaker by the day.
Russia's embassies have immense reach: Tucker Carlson has become Putin's helper
For Putin's Russia, "information-psychological warfare" - as it is called in a Russian military textbook - aims to undermine "the morale and psychological spirit" of an opposing population.
It is a central aspect of a broader war against the West and is waged online through a relentless barrage of fake, real and misrepresented news, as well as a sophisticated network of knowing and unwitting enablers like Carlson.
Use the opportunity to convey your messages: For Vladimir Putin (r.), Tucker Carlson's interview came at just the right time.
© IMAGO / ITAR-TASS
The Kremlin's messages have an extraordinary reach: in the first year of the Ukraine war alone, posts from Kremlin-affiliated accounts were viewed at least 16 billion times by Western citizens.
Each of these calls is part of a comprehensive attack on the West aimed not only at undermining support for Ukraine, but actively damaging Western democratic systems.
Russia's strategic information warfare has a tradition
Moscow is launching its attacks using a pattern familiar to anyone who has followed the disinformation campaigns surrounding the 2014 invasion of Crimea and the 2016 US presidential election.
Bots, trolls, targeted advertising campaigns, fake news organizations, and lookalike accounts of real Western politicians and pundits spread stories.
They were hatched in Moscow or St. Petersburg, where the then-leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, led an army of trolls posting on Western social media.
Although the specific technologies are new, Russia's information warfare strategy is not new.
During World War II, Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg described the pen as “a weapon made not for anthologies but for war.”
For decades, from the beginning of the Bolshevik era to the end of the Cold War, his colleagues spread disinformation abroad in the hope that the countries attacked by Russia would not be able to “take care of themselves, their families, their communities and their country “defend,” as Soviet journalist-turned-defector Yuri Bezmenov put it.
Western public as a weapon in Russia's information war
What is undoubtedly new is the enthusiasm of a polarized Western public to re-center its own identity around Moscow's narrative - and thereby unwittingly become a weapon in the information war.
Take, for example, the QAnon movement, whose adherents have long drawn critical energy from the arguments provided and disseminated by Moscow on social media.
The QAnon supporters propagate a number of grievances that are known from Russian propaganda: anti-LGBTQ+, anti-liberal and, in particular, anti-Ukrainian attitudes.
QAnon channels on the messaging app Telegram, for example, quickly became forums for anti-Ukrainian and pro-war sentiment.
While ordinary users are sure they are just expressing their opinions, a domestic political issue has ultimately turned into a vehicle for Moscow to exert influence over national security decisions.
Support for QAnon has spread from the United States to countries across the West — and every group of followers, regardless of their location and platform, appears to share the same pro-Putin sentiments and skepticism about supporting Ukraine.
Such phenomena are all too familiar, be it with the US presidential election interference scandal, with Moscow's constant repetition of arguments about NATO, or with the network of useful idiots - from quasi-journalists to rappers - who act as... Appear to act as a mouthpiece for the Kremlin by spreading consistently positive narratives under the guise of asking questions or presenting two sides of a story.
Russian disinformation: TikTok plays a crucial role for Kremlin
Moscow is also exploiting non-Western networks such as Telegram and TikTok to its own advantage.
Today, 14 percent of American adults regularly consume news on Chinese-owned TikTok, where thousands of fake accounts spread Russian arguments - and where Russian propagandists can count hundreds of thousands of followers.
TikTok has occasionally uncovered Russian bot networks, but its efforts to stop the spread of content consistent with the Kremlin have been lackluster and ineffective.
Millions of Americans absorb the material created by Moscow's propagandists, connect with influencers and other users who also share this material, and constantly spread Moscow's position on Ukraine.
TikTok's unwillingness to help combat such disinformation has left U.S. lawmakers little choice but to consider banning the network entirely.
Even then, however, that would largely be due to China-related concerns rather than lawmakers recognizing TikTok's crucial role for the Kremlin.
Musk's Twitter takeover has expanded the reach of Russia's propagandists
Even where they supposedly have more control, U.S. policymakers have been unwilling to do much to stem the tide of pro-Russian propaganda.
Since Elon Musk took over Twitter and renamed it X, the network has openly welcomed Russian influence campaigns onto its servers.
The platform even hosts Kremlin-allied neo-fascists like Alexander Dugin, who uses it to spread his apocalyptic vision of the war in Ukraine to his 180,000 followers, including through English-language discussion forums.
Hundreds of accounts – many belonging to ordinary Westerners – increase the reach of Dugin (and similar figures) by following him and liking or commenting on posts.
X's streaming and promotion of the Carlson interview and Musk's own adoption of Russian arguments — such as very specific claims about Ukraine using language typically only used by Russian officials — were heavily criticized.
But just as damaging are the smaller communities that have emerged around figures like Dugin, in which Western users do much to spread an anti-Ukrainian message.
Russia's war for Western opinion is weakening Ukraine
As Russia enters its third year of trying to conquer Ukraine, it has become clear that the Kremlin's information war is fully integrated into military war.
Part of this is directed at Ukraine, with Russian disinformation campaigns attempting to sow distrust in the country's political and military leadership.
But for the Kremlin, information warfare against the West is key.
That's because Putin's theory of victory in Ukraine also affects Western capitals: if it manages to erode Western support over time, Kiev will lack the weapons and resources to continue fighting.
The war for Western opinion is therefore at least as vital for Putin as the fight on the ground in Ukraine.
Yet despite numerous examples of Russian narratives appearing in Western debates, there is almost no serious discussion within governments or among the public about how to end Russia's information war against the West.
Many in the West fear that interfering in online activity will lead them down the slippery slope of suppressing free speech.
Perhaps they cannot see the conceptual connection between information warfare and military war - and refuse to acknowledge that the West is already at war with Russia, even if that war is not a military one.
There are signs that governments are taking Russia's influence campaigns less seriously than in the past.
The British government initially prevented the publication of a damning report on Russian interference in British politics.
After the report was published, it did little to implement its findings.
In Washington, the Biden administration is scaling back its efforts to counter Russian disinformation.
Confused by a barrage of criticism reflecting concerns about free speech, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security closed its Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) in August 2022.
The DGB is an authority set up in the USA to combat disinformation.
The DGB's work was halted even as Americans were overwhelmed by an unprecedented wave of pro-war and anti-Ukraine propaganda on social media.
Since then, the US State Department's meager resources have gone mostly to small non-governmental organizations that provide fact-checking and disinformation tracking services - a drop in the bucket at best.
Russia's information war is being played down in the West with attempts to exert influence
When Western governments deal with hybrid threats from abroad, e.g.
With issues such as cybersecurity and election interference, they are increasingly focusing on China.
And they still refer to such threats as merely “influence” or “interference,” rather than part of a larger, concerted military effort.
In their responses, Russia's hybrid warfare is therefore incorrectly described as a discrete, limited and targeted policy of disruption.
In reality, it is an ongoing, fluid and comprehensive phenomenon that invites continued violence.
Any Western vision for future peace in Ukraine - and any discussion of a return to normality with Russia - must be coupled with a limitation on Russian interference and influence on daily life in the West.
Ukraine, which has been actively fighting Russian influence since 2014 as part of its war against Moscow, has already developed approaches that the West could learn from.
West can learn from Ukraine: measures against Russian disinformation campaigns
First
, Ukraine has taken to heart that “information is a weapon that Russia uses against the West,” as Ihor Solovy, head of Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security, put it to
Foreign Policy
.
The West must also describe Russia's disinformation campaigns and other influence measures in the language of war.
For Moscow, academics arrested in Norway and Estonia, Western politicians working for Kremlin-controlled companies and fake Facebook groups are part of the same military spectrum that includes soldiers and tanks.
When an agent or influence operation is exposed - such as the German Wirecard executive who was exposed as a Russian spy - politicians should say loud and clear that the West is under attack by Russia.
Foreign Policy Logo © ForeignPolicy.com
Combating Russia's interference: Joint action by Western states is required
Second,
Western politicians must act together - and form a coalition analogous to the Ramstein Group, which coordinates military aid to Ukraine - to pass laws and take other measures to ensure that Russia is unable to share its information to share social media directly with Western citizens.
While citizens should be free to discuss whatever they please, enemy combatants in the West should not have the right to free speech.
This means that figures like the ultra-nationalist Dugin should not be welcome on Western social media.
The platforms should be threatened with crippling penalties if they allow Moscow’s propaganda to spread.
The US State Department's recently released framework for countering disinformation falls far short in this regard.
At a time when Moscow is already waging its hybrid war deep within Western societies, restricting Moscow's access to social media portals is an urgent and essential act of national defense.
The time for vague plans, investigations and reports is over.
It is time to use the West's superior technical capabilities to ensure that no more Russian bots, trolls or fake accounts can access X, Facebook and other platforms.
Enlightenment in the Western population: Information war must be named
Third,
Western governments must move beyond ineffective fact-checking and implement a massive civic education program in schools, universities, and public advertising.
Such a program should relentlessly emphasize the threat of Russia's influence.
Clearly identify this as an ongoing war and provide the public with tools to understand and respond to Russian attacks in their various forms.
A recent campaign by the Canadian government was a good start, but it portrayed disinformation as a vague threat that is "well hidden" rather than exposing it as a tool of a foreign government attacking Western societies.
Ukraine's anti-disinformation education program has proven robust and could serve as a model.
Of course, some Western citizens might still choose to access Russian propaganda through non-Western services like Telegram and TikTok.
A truly courageous government would respond to the Russian threat not only defensively, but also in kind - for example, by flooding pro-Russian channels on Telegram with Western news and setting up other channels that subtly spread anti-Russian narratives.
The West must act to prevent Russia from winning the war in Ukraine
When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin spent millions of dollars on trolls to spread its messages online.
For Putin, the money was well spent.
Since then, Russia has continued to refine its approach and penetrate deeply into electoral processes and public debates – ultimately affecting decisions about how and whether to help Ukraine.
Yet Western politicians are still caught flat-footed, either unwilling or unable to confront the reality that the Kremlin is waging a war against the West in which all citizens are already complicit.
Solving this problem requires bold and potentially unpopular action.
As artificial intelligence and other technologies make it easier to spread messages to Western audiences—and as the tide on the battlefield in Ukraine appears to be turning in Moscow's favor—it is time for Western governments to act.
Otherwise, Moscow will win not just a military war in Ukraine, but a hybrid war across the West.
To the author
Ian Garner
is a historian and translator of Russian war propaganda.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” on March 9, 2024 - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.