The Lies Putin Tells to Justify Russia’s War on Ukraine

In the tense weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Russian officials denied that they planned anything like that, accusing the United States and its NATO allies of having causing panic and hatred against Russia. When it invaded, officials denied it was at war.

Since then, the Kremlin has gone through a series of lies to explain why it had to conduct a “special military operation” against a sovereign neighbor. New Nazis addicted to drugs. Genocide. US biological weapons factories. Birds and reptiles are trained to carry pathogens into Russia. Ukrainian forces bombed their own cities, including theaters that were sheltering children.

Wartime disinformation is as old as war itself, but today war breaks out in the age of social media and digital diplomacy. That has given Russia – and its allies in China and other countries – powerful means to back up claims that the invasion is justifiable, exploiting disinformation. to rally its citizens at home and discredit one’s enemies abroad. The simple truth has become another front in Russia’s war.

Using a series of increasingly bizarre lies, President Vladimir V. Putin has created an alternate reality in which Russia is at war not with Ukraine but with a larger, more sinister enemy in the West. West. Even since the war began, the lies have become more and more bizarre, moving from claims that “real sovereignty” over Ukraine is only possible under Russia, made before the attacks, to claims about migratory birds carrying biological weapons.

The Russian message has proven to be a success in the country, where the Kremlin’s claims are not challenged. Surveys show that the majority of Russians support the war effort. Internationally, the campaign penetrated an information ecosystem that allowed them to spread rapidly, reach the audience used to be more difficult to access.

“In the past, if you were sitting in Moscow and you wanted to reach an audience that was sitting there, like Idaho, for example, you would have to work really hard,” said Elise Thomas, a researcher in Australia for the Institute for International Studies. Strategy dialog, said. disinformation campaign dating from the Soviet Union. “It took time to set up the system, whereas now you can do it with the touch of a button.”

The strength of Russia’s claim that the invasion was justifiable comes not from the validation of any personal wrongdoing in support of it but from the broader argument. Personal lies about biological weapons labs or crisis agents rapidly advanced by Russia as they are exposed, with little consistency or logic between them. But supporters stubbornly cling to the overarching belief that something is wrong in Ukraine and that Russia will fix it. Those associations prove harder to shake, even as new evidence emerges.

That myth, and its resilience in the face of test and criticism, reflect “the ability of autocrats and villains to completely brainwash us to the point that we fail to see see what lies ahead,” said Laura Thornton, director and senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund.

Today’s Kremlin narratives draw on pre-existing views on the root causes of war, which Mr. Putin has nurtured for years – and reinterpret increasingly rigid language last week.

The strategy to deceive, or at least confuse, international observers was employed after the bombing of a maternity ward in Mariupol on 9 March.

Twitter and Facebook eventually took down the posts, but the gruesome photos, stamped “Fake,” continued to spread around the internet, including on the Telegram chat app.

Another meme gained even greater traction, relying on a years-long campaign in Russia to fuel unfounded concerns that the United States was producing biological weapons in Ukraine.

However, when Russia brought such statements to an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, it was met with fierce criticism. “Today Russia has presented the Security Council with a series of wild, completely baseless and irresponsible conspiracy theories,” the British representative, Barbara Woodward, told the council. “Let me say it diplomatically: They are completely meaningless.”

Russian accusations of nefarious American activities in Ukraine go back decades, appearing in new forms with each new crisis, like the 2014 coup that led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. .

Ukraine is waging an information campaign of its own, aimed at discrediting Russia, exaggerating its military successes, and minimizing its losses. It has also circulated false reports of heroism, including the martyrdom of soldiers defending an island in the Black Sea and the feat of a brilliant fighter pilot in the skies over Kyiv.

By most accounts, Ukraine has so far won the information war, led by a strong social media operation that has flooded the internet with its own jumble of anecdotes and myths. , strengthen the spirit of the Ukrainian people and unite the Western world after its cause. The most central character in their campaign is President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, whose video message is to the people of Ukraine and to the world, has combined bravery with the stage presence of the television performer he once was.

However, Russia has more tools and reach, and has the upper hand in weapons. The strategy is to dominate the information space, especially at home, where “it’s really where they focus,” said Peter Pomerantsev, a scholar at the Agora Institute of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation at Johns Hopkins University, who has worked widely written on Russian propaganda.

The Russian propaganda machine’s distrust of the West and NATO, which has been vilified on state television for years, fuels mistrust in Russian society. State-run media have also recently echoed the belief heightened by the QAnon movement, which holds that world problems are primarily caused by global elites and sex traffickers.

Sophia Moskalenko, a social psychologist at Georgia State University, says those beliefs make people feel “fear, uncertainty, and alienation.” “As a result of manipulating their emotions, they will be more likely to accept conspiracy theories.”

Mr. Putin’s public remarks, which dominate the state media, have become increasingly tough. He has warned that nationalist sentiment in Ukraine is a threat to Russia itself, as well as to NATO expansion.

However, when the invasion began, it seemed to capture the organs of the propaganda machine unprepared. Officials and state media have just spent weeks accusing the Biden administration of exaggerating what Russia claims are simply routine military exercises, not invasion force construction.

“It is clear that they did not prepare the information warfare machine,” Pomerantsev said. “It takes months to prepare something like this.”

That could explain the fluid, fragmentary nature of the Russian campaign. The threat of biological weapons in Ukraine – not to mention the secret US weapons factories that produce them there – should not be seen as the rationale for the “special military operation” that Putin claims. at dawn on February 24. These lies appeared only later.

“They throw things out and they see what works,” said Ms. Thomas, a researcher from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “And what’s really working for them at the moment is the biolabs tool.”

The Kremlin’s campaign is not simply about spreading its message. It has moved quick to silence dissenting views that could break through the fog of war and frustrate the Russian people.

According to most surveys in Russia, the campaign seems to be drawing public attention for Mr. Putin, though not as high as one might expect for a country at war.

“My impression is that many people in Russia are buying the government story,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “They had themed images in the state-controlled media. The private media did not cover the war, fearing 15 years in prison. Same with people on social media. Russia has failed in information warfare globally, but the regime is quite successful at home.”

The question is for how long.

Cracks have appeared in the fortress of information that the Kremlin is building.

A week after the invasion began, when the war had turned sour for the Russian military, Putin hastily enacted a law punishing “fake news” with sentences of up to 15 years in prison. Media regulators warned broadcasters against treating the war as a war. They also forcibly laid off two fleets of independent media – Ekho Moskvy, a freelance radio station, and Dozhd, a television station – that gave the Kremlin’s opponents a voice.

Access to Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and most recently Instagram has also been cut off inside Russia – all platforms that the country’s diplomats continue to use outside to spread misinformation. Once spread, disinformation can persist, even in places with a free press and open debate, like the United States, where polls show more than 40% of the population believes that the 2020 election was stolen by former President Donald J. Trump.

“Why are people surprised that this kind of rampant misinformation can work so well in Russia when it works here?” Ms. Thornton of the German Marshall Fund said.

However, as the war in Ukraine dragged on, casualties are increasing, confronting families in Russia with the loss of a father and son. That could test the credibility of the Kremlin’s information campaign.

The Soviets tried to keep a similar veil of silence around their decades-long quagmire in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but nonetheless the truth has seeped into the public consciousness, eroding the background. foundation of the entire system. Two years after the last troops withdrew in 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed.

Claire Fu research contributions.