Ukraine: disinformation on the battleground of a hybrid war

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, atten­tion to dis­in­form­a­tion, one of the battle­grounds of hybrid war­fare, has increased. Inform­a­tion is key in war­time, espe­cially when the con­flict is so close to home. Rus­sia has under­stood that a demo­crat­ic coun­try can­not afford to help Ukraine in the long term if its pop­u­la­tion is opposed to it or suf­fers too many reper­cus­sions (such as high­er energy prices). The war is there­fore also tak­ing place on the inform­a­tion front. The chal­lenge for the Krem­lin is to suc­ceed in spread­ing its pro­pa­ganda in the West­ern media and on social networks.

This war was first played out on the vir­tu­al battle­ground of disinformation.

Car­ole Grim­aud, founder of the Centre for Research on Rus­sia and East­ern Europe (CREER), is cur­rently work­ing on the influ­ence that Rus­si­an pro­pa­ganda can have on French cit­izens, par­tic­u­larly students.

From the first moment the Rus­si­an army set foot in Ukraine, a mul­ti­tude of examples of dis­in­form­a­tion emerged, start­ing with Vladi­mir Putin’s jus­ti­fic­a­tion for this war¹. The Kiev regime is said to be neo-Nazi, and to have been per­pet­rat­ing gen­o­cide on the Rus­si­an-speak­ing pop­u­la­tion of Don­bass since the begin­ning of the war in Feb­ru­ary 2014. How­ever, recent events, such as the dis­cov­ery of the mass grave in Izum – a town in the Kharkiv region lib­er­ated from Rus­si­an occu­pa­tion by Ukrain­i­an forces, in which a mass grave con­tain­ing at least 450 bod­ies was dis­covered – have brought to light images that call into ques­tion the Krem­lin’s ver­sion, which is hard to dispute.

“The Ukrain­i­an gov­ern­ment expects oth­er dis­cov­er­ies of the same type in oth­er cit­ies under occu­pa­tion,” says Car­ole Grim­aud, “because the city of Izum is not the first. Mariu­pol and Butcha are examples, and satel­lite images are avail­able, but Moscow still denies respons­ib­il­ity.” All this leads one to ima­gine that these are not excep­tions, espe­cially since they are real evid­ence of war crimes. “Many civil­ian bod­ies show signs of tor­ture, and oth­ers of star­va­tion,” she says. “This is con­sidered a war crime. The army that occu­pies a ter­rit­ory must guar­an­tee the right to life of the civil­ians liv­ing in that ter­rit­ory, some­thing that the Rus­si­an army is clearly not con­cerned about.”

The Krem­lin’s dis­in­form­a­tion about the Boutcha mas­sacre may “seem absurd”. Accord­ing to the Moscow regime, the images of the hun­dreds of civil­ian vic­tims are noth­ing more than a set up to put the blame on Rus­sia². For Car­ole Grim­aud, this state­ment is con­sist­ent with the Rus­si­an strategy. “The dis­in­form­a­tion used in the case of Boutcha may have been effect­ive with the Rus­si­an pop­u­la­tion, but abroad, the object­ive was rather to sow doubt. It worked with cer­tain French per­son­al­it­ies, who took up the Krem­lin’s lan­guage³.”

How­ever, Rus­sia is not the only one to propag­ate this doubt, some French people invol­un­tar­ily par­ti­cip­ate in it, and the research­er notes: “In France, main­stream inform­a­tion tends to sup­port one view­point, as if there was only one side of the story. Every­one must agree, there is no longer any real debate. This can push people to seek dif­fer­ent, less main­stream inform­a­tion.” The risk is then that they will come across inform­a­tion fab­ric­ated by the Rus­si­an counter-dis­course. “We know that false inform­a­tion, or inform­a­tion that provides a dif­fer­ent per­spect­ive, even if it is later dis­proved, leaves its mark on the memory of those who have been exposed to it,” she concludes.

“The inform­a­tion broad­cast by the gen­er­al media in France is the inform­a­tion of the Ukrain­i­an gov­ern­ment. How­ever, it is a gov­ern­ment at war that has been apply­ing mar­tial law since Feb­ru­ary,” she says. West­ern­ers do not have sol­diers on the ground to veri­fy the inform­a­tion giv­en, but civil­ians, NGOs and the vari­ous human­it­ari­an aid work­ers on the ground bear wit­ness to what they observe. Their feed­back is more impar­tial and most of the time cor­rob­or­ates Kiev’s version.

It is there­fore import­ant for Rus­sia, to cre­ate this kind of doubt, to spread its dis­course through our com­mu­nic­a­tion chan­nels. A recent report by the NGO EU Dis­info Lab high­lighted one of their ways of doing this⁴. The NGO iden­ti­fied fake sites bear­ing the names of real media. Thus, 20 minutes wit­nessed the birth of its usurp­er – 20minuts​.com instead of 20minutes​.fr –, through which art­icles con­sist­ent with the Krem­lin’s dis­course were disseminated. 

There is thus a dir­ect desire to influ­ence main­stream news sources – the Brit­ish news­pa­per The Guard­i­an, the Ger­man Der Spiegel, and more than fif­teen oth­ers are also vic­tims of this decep­tion. These pro-Rus­si­an art­icles are then dis­sem­in­ated en masseon social net­works, through fake accounts. 

The NGO EU Dis­info Lab has iden­ti­fied fake sites bear­ing the names of real media outlets.

Arnaud Mer­ci­er, pro­fess­or of inform­a­tion and com­mu­nic­a­tion sci­ences at the Uni­ver­sity of Par­is Panthéon-Assas, believes that the Krem­lin’s pro­pa­ganda strategy is that of an “arson­ist”. He says that “dur­ing the Cold War, the strategy was to belittle the adversary and enhance its own image. Today, Rus­sia iden­ti­fies the points of ten­sion in our soci­et­ies and seeks to exacer­bate them by throw­ing oil on the fire, hop­ing to divide our societies.”

This strategy has been seen in the past when Rus­sia has tried to influ­ence the elect­or­al pro­cess in West­ern coun­tries. And in each of these events, the most effect­ive medi­um for spread­ing its dis­in­form­a­tion has been social net­works. “The rise of influ­ence strategies on social net­works goes back to at least 2016, with the elec­tion of Don­ald Trump and Brexit,” he says. “But it had already happened in 2014 dur­ing the par­lia­ment­ary elec­tions in Germany.”

“A large num­ber of fake accounts then appear on the net­works. These are anti­no­mi­an accounts that spread mes­sages to rad­ic­al­ise both sides,” says the pro­fess­or. “This is done to destabil­ise voters. These mes­sages are then taken up and spread in turn by real users. There are people who, faced with inform­a­tion that is not very cred­ible, are fooled and play the use­ful idi­ot by relay­ing it,” he adds, “and oth­ers who are already convinced.”

How­ever, it is dif­fi­cult to have an exact estim­ate of the num­ber of false accounts on the net­works. Accord­ing to Arnaud Mer­ci­er, the example of Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twit­ter is proof of this⁵: “The bil­lion­aire’s con­di­tion for buy­ing the plat­form was to have an estim­ate of the num­ber of bots [fake accounts] present. Twit­ter was unable to meet this demand, so the takeover deal was ter­min­ated. How­ever, we do know with some cer­tainty that there are at least a hun­dred thou­sand accounts.” This cer­tainty comes from the estim­ate made by Twit­ter itself at the time of the poten­tial takeover: fake accounts would rep­res­ent at least 5% of act­ive users, which Elon Musk dis­putes, estim­at­ing that the fig­ure would be closer to 20%⁶. Of course, not all these fake accounts are Russian. 

The mass dis­sem­in­a­tion of con­flict­ing inform­a­tion is also a source of doubt for the recip­i­ent of the inform­a­tion. “They allow dif­fer­ent inter­pret­a­tions to cir­cu­late in a halo of uncer­tainty. There is a desire to sur­round a fact with mul­tiple inter­pret­at­ive pos­sib­il­it­ies,” says the research­er, “to cre­ate a cer­tain amount of doubt. Charles Pasqua had already described this tac­tic: when there is a story, you must cre­ate a story with­in a story, and then anoth­er con­tro­versy until people don’t under­stand any­thing any­more. Fake accounts and fake news aim to make people lose track of events.”

Ulti­mately, with its fake accounts – and the thou­sands of mes­sages they dis­sem­in­ate – Rus­sia man­ages to instil its dis­course in West­ern pub­lic opin­ion and has done so for many years. This strategy has become more pro­nounced since the start of the Ukrain­i­an con­flict. “Vladi­mir Putin now talks about the dam­age that European sanc­tions are doing to the eco­nom­ies of the old con­tin­ent,” says Car­ole Grim­aud. He main­tains that the primary vic­tims are the Europeans, and that winter will be hard on them. All this is done in the hope that pub­lic opin­ion will turn in his favour. Doubt is a sneaky weapon of war.

Although these prac­tices are present in West­ern coun­tries, the main tar­gets are oth­er coun­tries around the world.

Non-West­ern coun­tries are also tar­geted. “These false accounts do more dam­age in soci­et­ies where anti-West­ern sen­ti­ment is already present,” notes Arnaud Mer­ci­er. In Asia, Lat­in Amer­ica, and more recently in Africa, the Krem­lin’s dis­course is much more eas­ily accep­ted. The example of the Sahel is, in this respect, quite con­vin­cing, espe­cially as it dir­ectly con­cerns France. First arriv­ing in the Cent­ral Afric­an Repub­lic, Rus­sia man­aged to estab­lish itself in the region. Under the guise of fight­ing ter­ror­ism, dis­in­form­a­tion attempts to dis­cred­it the French armed forces – present there dur­ing Oper­a­tion Barkhane⁷.  

“The strategy is, once again, to inflame a situ­ation that is already tense due to a con­flict,” he adds, “in the case of Oper­a­tion Barkhane, mul­tiple accus­a­tions have been made. From pae­do­phile sol­diers to the dis­cov­ery of mass graves – for which France is the prime sus­pect – to ques­tion­ing the object­ive of this operation.”

A recent case of this con­flict of influ­ence between France and Rus­sia is the dis­cov­ery of the Gos­si mass grave in Mali on 21^stApril 2022. A few days after the han­dover of the French mil­it­ary base in Gos­si to Mali­an forces, a Twit­ter account pos­ing as a Mali­an sol­dier announced the dis­cov­ery of a mass grave not far from the base. “This is what the French left behind,” he said, shar­ing a video of the mass grave. Only, France had filmed the whole scene with a drone that remained on site. The video showed caucasi­an sol­diers –  not Mali­ans – with Chinese equip­ment, thus asso­ci­ated with Rus­si­an forces, bury­ing the bod­ies. Accus­a­tions were made that France was respons­ible for this mas­sacre, even though it was the mer­cen­ar­ies of the Wag­n­er group, who had arrived to take over from Barkhane, who had com­mit­ted this act.

How­ever, for a loc­al, access to inform­a­tion is already lim­ited in favour of Rus­si­an dis­course. Since the Mali­an mil­it­ary junta has decided to cen­sor the French media France 24 and RFI⁸, a Mali­an now gets his or her inform­a­tion from Rus­si­an state media, such as Rt News or Sput­nik⁹. 

Pablo Andres