How effective is Russia’s information war?

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Despite this, only very rarely have these operations been traced back and examined in sufficient detail to determine with any degree of confidence if they achieved results. As a result, the question still remains of whether it makes sense for governments to put resources into attempting to counter such campaigns.

It is worth looking at specific case studies of Russian information operations with targeted outcomes to illustrate the potential impact of information activities. Here, I look at Russia’s campaign of nuclear intimidation, an attempt to influence Amnesty International’s International Secretariat, and the long-running efforts to divide western societies and erode trust in their governments and institutions. Pitched at different levels of ambition to achieve change, two of these have been successful and one, fortunately for the overall security of Europe, has failed. But they all lead us to important conclusions about the nature of the threat posed by Russian information warfare.

Russia and nuclear weapons

Russia’s successful efforts to constrain western support for Ukraine for fear of triggering a nuclear war have been spectacularly successful. The idea that the use of nuclear weapons by Russia is not only possible but actually probable if Moscow is challenged or threatened, let alone defeated or “humiliated”, has been deliberately fostered by long-term Russian propaganda efforts. The six months following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine saw an unprecedented barrage of threatening nuclear language from all elements of Russia’s information warfare apparatus. This high-profile campaign has involved Vladimir Putin, Russian public diplomacy, the country’s media commentators and propagandists, agents of influence abroad and even Russia’s troll armies on social media. The campaign built on a much more long-term programme conducted through propagandists and influencers over more than a decade to inculcate in western audiences the assumption that Russian nuclear use is likely if it is obstructed or offended, and that “miscalculation” between Russia and a NATO member state would inescapably escalate to a full-scale conflict involving nuclear exchanges. Tireless repetition of the mantra that any event that Russia would dislike would ensure “guaranteed escalation to the Third World War” had its desired effect. By mid-2022, this assumption formed part of the basic starting point for many public and private discussions about how to respond to Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine.

This assessment was widespread across western media, which fulfills a key function in disseminating and amplifying Russia’s messaging. But this function was reinforced by western politicians and senior officials also responding to Russian nuclear threats in precisely the manner wished by Moscow. This challenge of repeating and validating Russia’s messages is not restricted to Europe: senior figures in the United States have also repeatedly amplified warnings of a nuclear response from Russia.

The clearest example of the effects of this long-term Russian campaign has been the successful deterrence of Ukraine’s western backers, including the US, from providing war-winning military support. Western powers have been consistently careful not to give the Ukrainian armed forces weapons that could threaten Russia itself. Assistance to Kyiv has been carefully calibrated, constantly looking for Russia’s red lines and proceeding only once it has become clear that they are fictitious. Successful deterrence, and the associated fear of a situation where Russia suffers a defeat, also continues to lead to arguments that a ceasefire in Ukraine is preferable to an outright Ukrainian victory.

In this way, the West’s repeated emphasis on its fear of escalation proves to Russia that threats work, irrespective of how implausible they may be or how often they are shown to be empty. Even though the intensity with which they are being delivered has decreased in recent months, Russia’s nuclear threats will continue to have their desired effect for as long as western leaders state clearly that they are effective in preventing Ukraine from being provided with war-winning military support, and even in deterring them from backing Ukrainian victory altogether.

Russia and Amnesty International

Long before Amnesty International triggered international outrage through its flawed reporting from the conflict in Ukraine, which criticised Ukrainian troops for defending populated areas, the organisation had already demonstrated its susceptibility to targeted Russian information operations in a high-profile incident involving the Russian political figure Alexei Navalny.

One successful technique of disinformation that has been updated for the online age is “astroturfing”, the term for flooding a conversation with fake supporters to give the impression of widespread popular agreement on a political topic. This can be an effective means of influencing any decision-maker in the West that is sensitive to public opinion. In late February 2021 Amnesty, which had previously been supportive of Navalny, announced it no longer considered him a “prisoner of conscience” following a Russian campaign to discredit him. Perversely, Amnesty officials knew perfectly well that they were being subjected to an “orchestrated campaign”, but even so argued that “we had too many requests; we couldn’t ignore them.”

In doing so, Amnesty confirmed for Russia that the methods of astroturfing and mass trolling work. This has broader political implications than the status of Navalny. Social media is an easy and obvious means of organising campaigns of this kind, which makes the habit of some western governments of giving in to social media outrage campaigns especially dangerous. Any demonstration that public policy can successfully be influenced by Twitter mobs only increases Russia’s incentives to invest resources in this low-cost, low-risk means of intervening in other states’ internal affairs.

Russia and Ukraine

One aspect of Russian campaigning that remains especially open to doubt is its attempts to sow division within western democratic societies, undermine societal cohesion, and in particular erode popular trust in government institutions. This is a set of campaigns, tailored to individual target countries, that have been widely recognised but insufficiently analysed. This is partly due to the fact that western governments consider the extent of analysis that would be required too complex and expensive. At the same time, in some cases this would require the kind of intrusive insight into popular opinion that in some countries would run counter to social or constitutional norms.

Assessing impact is also made more difficult by the fact that the campaigns are long term and cumulative, meaning that their effects have to be measured over a long period. This is also challenging for western governments constrained by their budgets and electoral cycles. Researchers argue that it can be a mistake to refer to a disinformation campaign as an “information operation”, because it may not be a specific operation, but simply a steady-state daily routine.

But comparison of what is “normal” in the information space in English-speaking countries in 2023 compared to 2013, for example, reveals spectacular change over time. Assisted by the policies and algorithms of social media platforms, Russia has both benefitted from and accelerated trends of fragmentation, distrust and the spawning of alternative realities. It is now joined by a wide range of foreign and domestic imitators, who choose to emulate Russian tactics for their political ends, only amplifying the damage done. The combined result is increased fragmentation in society, with people devolving into alternative realities on a whole range of topics. And the tactics that achieve this are repeated again and again, with Russian and Russian-backed sources in particular generating implausible denials and contradictory versions of the same dramatic or controversial event. Some people among the target audiences even come to believe each of them as they appear. Russia’s influencers can then sit back, watch and occasionally stoke the flames further as these different groups attack the facts and each other.

Russia’s principles of information warfare offer an enormously long list of people that should be targeted with this aim. As the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service’s annual report pointed out in 2021, in effect “this means that the entire world population outside Russia is a potential target.” The aim, according to Russian information warfare theory, is to influence the mass consciousness of the population – directing people so that the population of the victim country is induced to support the aggressor, acting against its own interests.

But the key target that demonstrates the crucial importance of countering campaigns like these is Ukraine. If campaigns of the kind detected across Europe and North America had been successful in Ukraine, and genuinely threatened societal cohesion and trust, and support for government institutions, Ukrainian society might well not have shown the astonishing resilience and unity that has allowed it to survive not only eight years of war, but a full year of unconstrained Russian attempts to invade and destroy the country.

Short of open military conflict, Russia watches for any weakness or vulnerability that it can exploit to inflict damage on western countries and societies because, in its perverse understanding of international relations, anything that weakens them means that in relative terms Russia is stronger. The destructive and irresponsible nature of the campaigns is clear from efforts like boosting anti-vaccination propaganda in the middle of a global pandemic. The example of Ukraine provides a strong argument for looking more closely at the impact of Russia’s information campaigns, even in countries that may for the time being consider themselves not at direct risk of Russian invasion. But the other two examples cited here – the local tactical impact of changing Amnesty International’s mind, or the much broader strategic success in convincing the West that Russia is untouchable because it has nuclear weapons – also demonstrate clearly how these campaigns can have readily identifiable success, and as such pose a direct threat to the integrity of our societies and institutions.

Keir Giles is a senior consulting fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House in London. His latest book is titled Russia’s War on Everybody: And What It Means for You (2022).

disinformation, Information war, Russia, Russia's war against Ukraine