To effectively fight the information war, we have to consider many more perspectives than we are currently thinking about.

Interview with Hatia Jinjikhadze, Deputy Director at the Open Society Georgia Foundation. Interviewer: Mackenzie Baldinger.

Information aggressors, especially the Russian Federation, are not “reinventing the wheel”. They use existing mechanisms. Journalists and the media, regardless of the provenance, are the first on the “information front” in the war over people’s hearts and minds. They have a choice: ignore or refute this fact or accept their role as a key element in state security and the information space.

The Russian aggression against Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 introduced a new type of warfare which has proved very effective in the digital era. This new type of war is no longer aimed at taking over territories or resources, but rather influencing human behaviour. It involves non-kinetic activities, which are undertaken in cyber space and are cheaper than traditional methods, but – most importantly – more effective when applied towards western societies which are largely unprepared for this kind of hostile actions.

Within the last several years, Russia’s information techniques and their application in Europe and elsewhere have been the focus of research of many scholars in defense, security and other areas of study. A lot of these scholars have considered the improvement and relative success of their application as part of the supposedly emerged hybrid warfare doctrine. However, a closer look at Russia’s recently displayed informational capabilities in Europe points to the presence of Soviet-inherited practices of information operations, which were used by the USSR against the West after the Second World War. Among these practices applied by the USSR and later inherited by Russia are so-called “active measures.” Recently, they have been used by the Kremlin in the Ukraine crisis as well as Europe, where it has worked on sowing discord and creating a sense of disunity among EU and NATO member states.