Alexander Rojavin ’20, Law & Public Policy Scholar
Alexander Rojavin is a multilingual intelligence, media, and policy analyst specializing in information warfare. He is currently working on a book on modern Russian cinema as a key battlefield in the Kremlin’s information war. He is also co-chair of the Symposium on Disinformation Studies. In his spare time, he moonlights as a published literary translator (Routledge, Slavica Publishers, forthcoming Academic Studies Press).
Day seven of the war for democracy draws to a close. What follows is an attempt to chronicle key events and trends in the information war between Russia and Ukraine following Russia’s unprovoked, colonialist invasion of its neighbor. It is again slightly longer than your typical op-ed.
As a disclaimer: I have not been adding links to my articles because most of them would be to Ukrainian- or Russian-language pages. Western media have not been reporting most of the things in these articles, hence why I’ve felt the need to write these in the first place.
Day Six
On March 1st, the Kremlin’s panic finally crystallized: the Office of the Prosecutor General (OPG) declared that longtime post-Soviet liberal outlets Dozhd and Echo of Moscow must be shut down. This came after they published materials inconsiderately calling the “special operation” a “war.” For years, these outlets and a few others, like Novaya Gazeta, had been kept around to create the illusion of plurality in Russia. By the war’s sixth day, the Kremlin evidently decided that even this small bit of pseudo-dissent had become too great a liability.
Moreover, the Kremlin concluded that the measures implemented by Roskomnadzor (reminder: the Russian equivalent of the FCC) and the OPG during the previous five days were insufficient. While the OPG closed down the last vestiges of liberal-adjacent thought, Roskomnadzor threatened to block Wikipedia because of its page, “2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.” The Kremlin, terrified that even the slightest bit of truth might penetrate Russia’s domestic information space, had decided to throw all pretense out the window.
However, the information space’s impregnability began to crack. The first body bags with the corpses of Russian soldiers began crossing back into the country. Russian governors of various regions—Kabardino-Balkaria, Samara, and Bryansk, to name a few—began ceremonially announcing the deaths of some of their soldiers. Having to hold funerals certainly complicates the narrative that all is going well—especially as, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, credit cards are rejected en masse and banks have begun running out of cash.
Nevertheless, Kremlin-aligned outlets rallied to push a few new narrative strains.
(1) Kremlin mouthpieces reported of “spy mania” taking hold of Ukraine, wherein Ukrainians have been rabidly hunting people, including children, who are drawing chalk marks on buildings and sidewalks and detaining them. (Throughout the invasion, Russian forces have been using such chalk marks to identify targets and critical infrastructure).
(2) A new hallucinatory poll was released claiming that Putin’s approval rating between Feb. 20th and 27th rose from 60% to 71%. Another sign of panic.
(3) Possibly the dominant strain of the day emerged after Ukrainian leadership announced it was considering plans for a preemptive strike against Belarusian forces. Kremlin-aligned media pounced on this announcement, pivoting back to the comfort of the “Ukrainian fascist junta” narrative, and tried again to paint Ukraine as enthralled by warmongering, Bandera-worshipping zealots.
Meanwhile, across the border, though Ukraine’s military effectively continued defensive operations, its information warriors implemented a series of offensives.
(1) Ukrainian ad agencies began a coordinated, automated telethon targeting Russian citizens with a recorded message by President Zelensky informing them of the war and imploring them to withdraw their troops.
(2) A new site went live intended to give Russian citizens statistical info about their forces’ losses, their crimes, and a Google Doc of the dead and captive. The site is: https://www.russkiykorabl.info
(3) A captured Russian soldier told Ukrainian forces that Russian officers have been telling their soldiers that “Zelensky already capitulated. All that’s left is to defend Kyiv.” Ukrainian media pushed this and other such news about the desperation and brain-washing of Russian forces in order to fortify Ukrainian citizens’ morale and to damage Russian morale.
(4) A minor note about Ukrainian information strategy: all Ukrainian news outlets have been exclusively identifying Lukashenko as the “self-declared president of Belarus.” An important, if minor, part of this strategy is to (correctly) deny Lukashenko’s legitimacy. (As I wrote for this Blog two years ago, Lukashenko lost Belarus’s 2020 presidential election).
Understanding its creeping losses in the information space, the Kremlin ordered its forces to attack Ukrainian communications systems, including the transmitter of Espreso TV and a large TV tower in Kyiv. This resulted in a rocket strike killing the war’s first journalist and damaging the Babyn Yar Memorial Center, which commemorates how actual Nazis had killed ~33,000 Jews over two days in 1941.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian intelligence learned that Russia was readying a massive disinformation operation that the Ukrainian government has capitulated. As Ukrainians tried to go to sleep, Ukrainian websites and TV channels worked overtime to immunize everyone to this impending narrative strain.
Finally, as day turned to night, reports surfaced that Russian marines in the eleven assault ships in the Black Sea tasked with attacking Odessa defied orders to storm the port city, rioted, turned their ships around, and returned to port in Sevastopol. Having been stationed in Crimea, these troops were better-informed about the state of the war than the rest of the Russian army, and so knew more about its true purpose and the actual state of affairs regarding Russian losses. This was the biggest signal in six days that the morale of Russian troops—especially those aware of the real state of the war—was cratering.
Day Seven
Early on March 2nd, it became known that Viktor Yanukovich, the Kremlin’s marionette president of Ukraine deposed during the Revolution of Dignity (commonly known in the West as the Maidan Revolution), was in Minsk. In a vivid demonstration of the Kremlin’s laughable, utter lack of understanding about Ukrainian popular opinion, it appeared that the Kremlin’s grand disinformation operation involved falsifying evidence of the Ukrainian government’s capitulation and the installation of Yanukovich as the new president of Ukraine. It is unclear how the Kremlin believed that such an outcome would be accepted by the same people who ran him out of the country eight years prior—unless, of course, you consider the possibility that the Kremlin’s leadership inhabits a space of deeply rooted delusion.
Later in the day, Ukrainian leadership announced that the Kremlin was preparing a deepfake video of President Zelensky surrendering the country. Ukrainian websites and TV immediately began preemptively immunizing audiences to this impending disinformation.
By this point, Ukrainian public opinion has strengthened further: 88% of Ukrainians believe that they will win the war—up from 70% a few days prior.
In Russia, however, things are deteriorating. Grasping for new narrative strains, Kremlin-aligned outlets pushed out the story that Russia’s invasion—apologies, “special operation”—is necessary to prevent Ukraine from obtaining nuclear weapons. It’s best not to think too hard about the logic underpinning this strain.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Ministry of Education has recommended that schools hold special history classes during these days to “form an adequate position concerning the special peacekeeping mission by [our] armed forces.” This as Russian invaders began creating fake social media accounts for Ukrainian military divisions in an attempt to sow “panic and dissatisfaction with the [Ukrainian] leadership,” per Ukraine’s general staff.
Finally, the body bags have been acknowledged publicly. The Russian Ministry of Defense announced that 498 RU troops have perished in Ukraine and 1597 have been wounded. While the real number of casualties is greater than 6,000 by this point, this is a far cry from the “no losses” narratives from the weekend.
Three Concluding Thoughts
(1) On day six, in an interview with CNN and Reuters, President Zelensky revealed that Ukraine had developed six defense plans depending on how the invasion went. If true, then it may be that his months-long public denials that there would be an invasion were a calculated part of Ukraine’s information war strategy. If true, then it could be argued that this strategy lulled Russian leadership into a false sense of security, which resulted in their belief that the conquest would take 3-4 hours, thus tricking them into failing to prepare for a prolonged invasion or information war. Meaning that President Zelensky and President Biden played both their complementary roles in the preparatory information war perfectly, the former deceiving the Kremlin, the latter readying the West and preemptively legitimizing all post-invasion Western sanctions and other measure.
(2) Western media in both Europe and North America have been doing a subpar job of reporting on the war, especially if judging only by eye-grabbing headlines. While Ukrainian news outlets are doing everything in their power—successfully—to maintain the morale of Ukrainian troops and civilians, Western media are (a) lagging in their reporting, often by 24 hours, and (b) for the most part, engaging only in doomsaying. The strategy of Ukrainian news has been to publish accurate information without hyperbole about both Ukraine’s victories, no matter how minor, and important defeats. Western media have been publishing mostly exaggerated reports about how dire the situation is. The situation is dire. Over 2,000 Ukrainian civilians have perished in the fires of Russia’s xenophobic war, and nearly 500 Ukrainian troops (compare those numbers, by the way, and tell me whom the Russian troops have been targeting first). We know. But some news reports from day four made it seem like Kyiv was on the verge of surrender.
If you wish to get a sense of how Ukrainian news have been working, please read this page throughout the day: https://suspilne.media/211514-russia-invades-ukraine-live-updates-suspilne/. Suspilne (meaning “social” in Ukrainian) is an independent Ukrainian news channel created after 2014, and its journalists update this page 24/7 with many of the same updates they and other journalists have been posting in Ukrainian for the last seven days.
(3) Third final thought: Ukraine believes in the West. The modern Western world of peace and democracy. Even if many in the West don’t, even if many in democracies around the world are convinced that the problems with the “global democratic West” are insurmountable and that the corruption of so many Western systems makes it beyond saving, Ukrainians are convinced that this is not that case. Ukrainians believe in the West. They believe in it as an idea—and they believe in it as a real, tangible world that is worth fighting for, worth dying for, and, most importantly, worth living for.