Information warfare in the Russia-Ukraine crisis

Information warfare consists of exploiting, corrupting, and denying the narrative of one party to the other. Information warfare happens in the information environment, but it can lead to changes in other physical domains, social domains and cognitive domains (the perspectives of the soldiers and the people all over the world). Russia has used these tactics extensively in the past and is known to have paved the road to it. Information warfare is extremely important especially when one or both parties are democratic (with frequent elections and regime changes). This warfare is used to protect their justification for their actions and demonize the enemy. This is also used to create a favourable environment in the international arena and to manage the perception of its own, and its allies' citizens. Information warfare unlike other mediums of warfare is implemented during peacetime as well and it is always happening between two adversaries.

There is no accurate model for this type of warfare yet. This information includes things that are public knowledge and secret military strategic decisions. For example, most of the world failed to predict the invasion even when Russia started its build-up over the border with Ukraine. Russia was able to keep its intentions a secret for a very long time.

The information war between Russia and Ukraine is not originated from the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. It first started during the annexation of Crimea in 2014 by Russia. In this warfare, social platforms are being used as weapons and manipulated photos, false narratives, and fabricated videos are the ammunition for those weapons. Attacking ethnic flashpoints, targeting stereotypes, and deep beliefs of culture and religion are part of the information warfare tactics. Information warfare also includes military tactics sabotaging communication channels, cyber-attacks and other technical tactics but we are going to look at Russia-Ukraine information warfare from a humanitarian perspective and control of the narrative. the dynamic of information warfare has changed with time, people are currently getting news directly from the front lines with the use of social media instead of news channels and other official government channels. Even in the current time, the Ukraine-Russia conflict is being focused on more compared to all the other conflicts that went down in the recent past and going on now. Any information or news from any conflict zone in the middle east or Africa used to take days and sometimes weeks before getting in front of the eyes of the people but in the Russia and Ukraine conflict, the updates are available to the general public within minutes.

Russia has accused Ukraine of circulating fabricated videos of dead bodies which included people who are alive and pretending to be dead. Both sides put up several accusations and became a breeding ground for a series of disinformation campaigns. All the accusations and videos are cancelled and invalidated by the opposite party. Ukraine accused Russia of carrying out a civilian massacre in a town outside Kyiv named Bucha. Many automated bot accounts and networks used by both parties are detected which are intentionally spreading false information. In the first week of March 2022 social media, especially Twitter was flooded with campaigns coordinated for promoting both parties' agendas and using hashtags relevant to them. few of the automated accounts were traced back to India.

In this campaign, Ukraine is trying to win the hearts and minds of the people through its savvy use of electronic and social media. The appeals from Ukraine to the US Congress and European Parliament and court of world opinion cleared the way to frame a picture of the war from their side to the entire world. The Russian state-controlled media outlet RT is not less in many aspects compared to any asset west has in its media silo. Many strategies are being used by both parties but Russia is not in any way a match for the mighty resources of the West, especially the United States. The ability of the west to push its propaganda into electronic, print and social media is unmatchable.

this information warfare between Russia and Ukraine affected India a great deal as well, the west tried to polarize the views of the world by condemning the energy and weapons purchases of India from Russia, but in reality, Europe has been buying many folds more resources from Russia, when compared to India. This is also a part of the warfare when India is targeted, the fact that India was buying energy was widely circulated while the purchases of the European countries were not publicized.

There are various tactics that both sides use in this warfare.

A few of them are listed below.

·        Accusations of atrocities: the party will accuse the other party of inhumane activities, human rights violations, genocide etc. assigning all the civilian casualties as the victims of genocide.

·        Exaggeration of stakes: with these tactics, one party will try to make the people feel like everything they value is at risk,  they even tried to show the war as a conflict between democracy and autocracy where Ukraine can hardly be categorized as a democracy.

·        Demonisation: there have been many attempts by the west to demonize Putin, there have been news and social media circulations of posts saying that Putin baths in Blood to cure his cancer.

Vocabulary warfare:

Both Ukraine and Russia have weaponized their vocabulary and pushed their narrative, when I say Ukraine we have to consider the massive support it's been getting from the western countries. Everyone is using a vocabulary that will suit their side of the narrative, the west Is calling it Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia is calling it the special operations in Ukraine, and few neutral players and some media outlets are referring to it as the conflict in Ukraine.

Controlling the vocabulary is one of the tactics to change the perspective of the listener subconsciously. For example, the journalists reporting from Iraq for the US were asked not to use the word “kill” whenever the US troops kill the fighters of the other side, instead, they were asked to use words like neutralized or destroyed, to control the narrative. The same goes for the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Russian parliament passed a law making it a crime for any media organization to refer to what Russia is doing in Ukraine as a war or an invasion. Due to this pressure from the government media outlets like TV Rain, and Echo Moscow have left operations in the country. There have been instances where Russian sources tried to circulate the information that they have killed the president of Ukraine every day for some time. Social media is not liable for the misinformation being spread on it and is one of the major reasons for spreading misinformation through social media more than any other electronic print media. As this is going on without any response from international governance organizations, the information spread using prisoners of war, like releasing video statements of the soldiers captured and humiliating them was considered a violation of protection offered under the Geneva convention. The convention protects the prisoners of war from cruel, inhumane, degrading and humiliating treatment. The Human Rights Watch highlighted this issue.

The fact that the democratic governance bodies hide or manipulate the truth for the general public goes against everything the organizations stand for. But these activities are ignored even though they are public knowledge. This warfare sometimes leaves the day-to-day users of social media overwhelmed and confused. The narrative is highly dominated by the west but one of the most populous countries like China published the 100% Russian narrative in its state-controlled media and even used the same vocabulary that is being used by Russia when referring to the ongoing conflict, and India is Neutral giving a chance for the general public to tip to the side they see the best.

Pic Courtsey-Mario Caruso at unsplash.com

(The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent views of CESCUBE )