Three weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, a video surfaced on a Ukrainian news site that appeared to show President Volodymyr Zelensky imploring his countrymen to avoid fighting and urging foot soldiers to lay down their arms.
“There is no desire to die in this war,” he appears to say in the video, which circulated widely on social media and appeared brief on Ukrainian television with a TTY that suggested he had fled the country. live. “
The video, a crude deepfaux that had been posted through hackers, was removed and temporarily discredited. The genuine Zelensky dismissed it as a “childish provocation” and mocked online as an example of Russia’s desperate and caricatured attempts to spread fake news. But researchers say the deepfaux is just one example of a barrage of misinformation, manipulated images, forged documents and targeted propaganda unleashed by Russia and pro-Kremlin activists that could have had a significant impact on the public during the last year of the war.
“Changing other people’s thinking and positions is much harder than simply sowing doubt or fear,” says Andy Carvin, a senior researcher at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Laboratory, which has been tracking Russian hybrid warfare activities since 2015 and published a couple of reports. on Wednesday. analyzing the Kremlin’s data war before and after the invasion. “This is one of the reasons why the Kremlin’s data operations generate so much chaos, contagion, loss of morale or simply confuse other people about what is true and what is not. “
Read more: How Putin loses to his own disinformation in Ukraine.
Over the past year, the Kremlin and its allies have used a dizzying array of methods to protect their actions, sow doubt about news on the ground, and promote misleading or false narratives to undermine Ukraine. Deprived of the simple victory they hoped for, Russian officials are running to erode global confidence in Ukraine as a reliable partner. “To defeat Ukraine on the battlefield,” the report states, “Russia also had to quell any sympathy for Ukraine. “
In pursuit of this goal, the Kremlin has targeted everyone from Ukrainian citizens and right-wing teams in the United States and Europe to countries hosting Ukrainian refugees and those offering aid, and potentially sympathetic audiences in Africa and Latin America, as well as nationals. Russia’s techniques for spreading those narratives included the use of fake accounts, manipulated photographs such as deepfauxs, forged documents, and videos with fake teletypes claiming to be from reputable brands such as the BBC or Al Jazeera. In other cases, the agents were only intended to build the foreign public’s distrust of the Ukrainian government’s credibility and the effectiveness of its armed forces.
While many of those efforts may seem inept to digitally savvy Western observers, it’s a mistake to paint Russia as a “loser” in data warfare, says Carvin, who oversaw the project. says. ” Russia and Ukraine are fighting multiple battles, but Russia has the resources to create personalized messages for other audiences around the world. . . And in some parts of the world, their messages resonate more than others. “
Before Putin ordered tens of thousands of troops sent to Ukraine, the Kremlin spent years planting false narratives to justify the army’s action. When the invasion began, the effort accelerated. Ukrainian investigators overcame the volume of false data in the first weeks of the war.
“It’s very hard [to know what to believe], especially when you hear the bombs outside your window,” says Ksenia Iliuk, co-founder of LetsData, a nonprofit that uses synthetic intelligence to analyze data hostile or consistent with organizations. In the first month of the invasion, his team learned about 35 new exclusive pieces of Russian propaganda or accounts debunked in keeping with the day.
Ukrainian officials treated the virtual area as a front line in the war from the beginning, establishing fact-checking groups and processes in all updates posted on official channels to anticipate any challenges to its credibility. “brand,” Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov told TIME in March. “Our brand as a just country and other righteous people who seek to tell the truth. “
Read more: “This is our home. ” The guy on Ukraine’s virtual front.
Social media is the main source of data for Ukrainians, surpassing television in 2020, according to a recent vote, and Russians have attacked popular apps with false narratives aimed at demoralizing the population, sowing panic and undermining acceptance as truth in Zelensky. Data warfare took over Telegram, a messaging app that gained popularity due to its largely unmoderated platform that allowed unedited photographs of the war to be widely disseminated. The design of the application has facilitated the creation of large propaganda channels that spread false information. photos and videos to millions of subscribers.
As part of an effort to target Telegram, Russia has chosen popular fact-checking formats. He created a multitude of multilingual channels, such as the so-called “War on Fakes,” which “verified” or “fact-checked” for pro-Kremlin narratives and protecting the movements of the Russian armed forces. The original Russian-language channel garnered more than 750,000 fans on Telegram, and its online page translated its content into Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German and Spanish, which was then amplified through Russian embassies and other government channels, according to the report.
Russia has combined those efforts with more classic intimidation tactics, adding the release of leaflets in Dnipropetrovsk outlining what citizens should do in the event of an explosion at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, army educational flights that set off air raid sirens and rumors fueled by Putin himself.
Read more: How Telegram the virtual battlefield in the Russian-Ukrainian war.
Some of those narratives hit the mark, making their way on a global scale. The Kremlin’s false claims that Ukraine was a U. S. -funded think tank for expanding biological weapons were amplified through prominent American right-wing voices last summer. The right-wing One America News channel aired segments airing Kremlin conspiracies that the Russian attack on a maternity hospital in Mariupol was a “false flag. “
The Russian government blocked access to Western social media platforms within its own country, even designated Meta as an “extremist organization,” criminalized independent reporting on the invasion, and passed a law imposing up to 15 years in prison for deliberately spreading “false” news about the war. He also targeted the Russian diaspora abroad. In Europe, the Kremlin has conducted “full-spectrum, multi-channel disinformation campaigns” with country-specific messages. For example, he used statements by senior Russian officials, inauthentic social media accounts, and forged documents to spread accusations that Poland has plans to occupy parts of western Ukraine. In France, pro-Kremlin narratives have amplified false claims of widespread resale of Ukrainian weapons on the black market and exacerbated fears that Europeans will freeze in winter without access to Russian gas.
Pro-Kremlin media have also continued to pour resources into Africa and Latin America, exploiting long-standing distrust of the West and anti-imperialist sentiments. “By maintaining such data operations on a global scale, Russia has managed to prevent foreign consensus from joining Ukraine at an assumed point in the West,” the report says.
As the war enters its key year, the Kremlin will most likely continue to use those techniques to influence ongoing debates over whether to continue supplying arms and funds to Ukraine, the report suggests. According to the researchers, Russia can also continue to take advantage of the sympathy of China’s global media ecosystem towards its interests.
“Russia’s reputation as an unprecedented data warrior has been affected in the West, but this view is not universal,” the report’s authors found. lifespan, far beyond the confines of the existing conflict. “