In the tense weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russian officials denied it had any plans of the kind, charging the United States and its NATO allies for fomenting panic and anti-Russian hatred. When it invaded, officials denied it was at war.
Since then, the Kremlin has been processing a torrent of lies to explain why it had to conduct a “special military operation” against a sovereign neighbor. Drug-addicted neo-Nazis. Genocide. American biological weapons factories. Birds and reptiles trained to bring pathogens to Russia. Ukrainian troops are bombing their own cities, including theaters hosting children.
Disinformation in wartime is as old as war itself, but today war takes place in the age of social media and digital diplomacy. That has given Russia — and its allies in China and elsewhere — powerful tools to substantiate the claim that the invasion is justified, exploiting disinformation to rally its citizens at home and discredit its enemies abroad. The truth has just become another front in the Russian war.
Using a barrage of increasingly outlandish lies, President Vladimir V. Putin has created an alternate reality, one in which Russia is not at war with Ukraine, but with a larger, wicked enemy in the West. Even since the war began, the lies have grown increasingly bizarre, from claims that “true sovereignty” for Ukraine was possible only under Russia, made before the attacks, to those about migratory birds carrying biological weapons.
Russia’s message has proved successful domestically, where the Kremlin’s claims remain unchallenged. Surveys suggest a majority of Russians support the war effort. Internationally, the campaign has seeped into an information ecosystem that allows them to spread virulently and reach audiences that were once harder to reach.
“When you used to be in Moscow and you wanted to reach an audience that was in, say, Idaho, you had to work really hard for that,” said Elise Thomas, a researcher in Australia for the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, citing disinformation campaigns dating back to the Soviet Union. “It takes time to set up the systems, while now you can do it at the push of a button.”
The strength of Russia’s claim that the invasion is justified comes not from the veracity of an individual lie intended to support it, but from the broader argument. Individual lies about bioweapons labs or crisis actors are put forward by Russia as quickly as they are debunked, with little consistency or logic between them. But supporters stubbornly hold on to the overarching belief that something is wrong in Ukraine and that Russia will fix it. Those connections prove harder to shake, even as new evidence is introduced.
That mythology, and its resilience in the face of fact-checking and criticism, reflects “the ability of autocrats and evil actors to completely brainwash us to the point where we don’t see what lies ahead,” said Laura Thornton, the director and senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy of the German Marshall Fund.
The Kremlin’s stories feed on pre-existing views on the root causes of the war, which Mr Putin has cherished for years — and which was reiterated in increasingly sharp language last week.
The strategy of misleading, or at least confusing, international observers was used after the bombing of a maternity ward in Mariupol on March 9.
Twitter and Facebook eventually deleted the posts, but gruesome photos, stamped “Fake” continued to circulate around the internet, including on the Telegram chat app.
Another meme gained even more traction, relying on a years-long campaign in Russia to fuel unfounded fears that the United States was producing biological weapons in Ukraine.
However, when Russia took such claims to an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, it faced scathing criticism. “Russia has today introduced a series of wild, completely baseless and irresponsible conspiracy theories into the Security Council,” British representative Barbara Woodward told the Council. “Let me say it diplomatically: they are utter nonsense.”
Russia’s accusations of nefarious US activities in Ukraine date back decades, and emerge in new forms with each new crisis, such as the political upheaval in 2014 that led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Ukraine is conducting its own information campaign, with the aim of discrediting Russia, exaggerating its own military successes and minimizing its losses. It has also spread false reports of heroism, including the martyrdom of soldiers defending an island in the Black Sea and the exploits of a top fighter pilot in the skies over Kiev.
By most accounts, Ukraine has so far won the information war, led by a powerful social media operation that flooded the internet with its own tangle of anecdotes and myths, boosted morale among Ukrainians and unites the Western world behind its cause. The most central figure in their campaign was President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, whose video messages to Ukrainians and the world have combined courage with the stage presence of the television performer he once was.
However, Russia has more tools and range, and has the upper hand with weapons. The strategy was to overwhelm the information space, especially at home, “what their focus is really on,” said Peter Pomerantsev, a scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute who has written extensively on Russian propaganda.
The Russian propaganda machine is playing on the suspicion of the West and NATO, which have been vilified for years on state television, deeply entrenching mistrust in Russian society. State media has also recently echoed the beliefs of the QAnon movement, which largely attributes the world’s problems to global elites and sex traffickers.
Those beliefs make people feel “afraid, insecure, and alienated,” said Sophia Moskalenko, a social psychologist at Georgia State University. “As a result of manipulating their emotions, they are more likely to embrace conspiracy theories.”
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Russian troops appear to have stalled. With Russia’s advance into Ukraine’s major cities stalled and satellite images showing soldiers digging into defensive positions around Kiev, consensus is emerging in the West that the war has reached a bloody stalemate.
Mr Putin’s public comments, which dominate the state media, have become increasingly fierce. He has warned that nationalist sentiment in Ukraine poses a threat to Russia itself, as does NATO expansion.
But when the invasion started, it seemed to get hold of the organs of the propaganda apparatus unprepared. Officials and state media had just spent weeks accusing the Biden administration of exaggerating what Russia claimed were just regular military exercises, not building an invasion force.
“Obviously they haven’t prepared the information warfare machine,” Pomerantsev said. “It takes months to prepare something like that.”
That could explain the changing, disjointed nature of the Russian campaign. The threat of biological weapons in Ukraine — let alone secret US arms factories that produce them there — was not cited as the reason for the “special military operation” that Putin announced at dawn on Feb. 24. These falsehoods only came to light later.
“They throw things away and they see what works,” said Ms Thomas, the researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “And what’s really working for them right now is the biolabs stuff.”
The Kremlin’s campaign has gone beyond spreading its message. It has moved quickly to silence dissent that could break the fog of war and discourage the Russian people.
For now, the campaign appears to have rallied public opinion behind Putin, according to most research in Russia, although not as high as might be expected for a country at war.
“My impression is that many people in Russia believe the government’s story,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “They have faked images on state-controlled media. Private media are not reporting the war, fearing 15 years in prison. The same goes for people on social media. Russia has lost the information war worldwide, but the regime is quite successful domestically.”
The question is for how long.
Cracks have formed in the information fortress that the Kremlin is building.
A week after the invasion began, when it was already clear that the war was ending badly for Russian troops, Mr Putin rushed to enact a law punishing “fake news” with up to 15 years in prison. Media regulators warned broadcasters not to view the war as a war. They also forced off the air two flagships of independent media – Ekho Moskvy, a liberal radio station and Dozhd, a television station – which gave a voice to the Kremlin’s opponents.
Access to Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and most recently Instagram has also been cut within Russia – all platforms that diplomats of the country have continued to use outside of Russia to provide misinformation. Once spread, misinformation can be persistent, even in places with a free press and open debate like the United States, where polls suggest more than 40 percent of the population believe the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump.
“Why are people so surprised that this kind of widespread disinformation can be so effective in Russia when it was so effective here?” said Mrs Thornton of the German Marshall Fund.
However, as the war in Ukraine continues, casualties are mounting, forcing families in Russia to face the loss of fathers and sons. That could test how convincing the Kremlin’s information campaign really is.
The Soviet Union tried to maintain a similar veil of silence around its decades-long swamp in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but the truth somehow seeped into public consciousness and eroded the very foundation of the entire system. Two years after the last troops withdrew in 1989, the Soviet Union itself collapsed.
Claire Fu research contributed.
