ANALYSIS, RUSSIA, UKRAINE: A Non-Linear War

RUSSIA’S USE OF DISINFORMATION IN THE UKRAINE CONFLICT – ANALYSIS

By John R. Haines

All warfare is based on deception…
To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill. –Sun Tzu

We will not forget! We will not forgive! –CyberBerkut motto

In the vanguard of the non-linear war now raging in eastern Ukraine is an old weapon, disinformation, wielded by an unconventional force. Exemplifying that force is the hacktivist group, CyberBerkut. It recently issued an ultimatum to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to end the war in eastern Ukraine that “has plunged the people of Ukraine into an abyss of war, poverty, unemployment and despair.”[1] It directed an additional threat to Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk:

“Mr. Yatsenyuk! We start the countdown. You have three days to stop what you started. In the event our conditions are not met, we will open the world’s eyes to all that is happening in the country. Personal correspondence top officials, telephone calls, secret documents — everything that we found by hacking the computers of employees of Ukraine’s Security Service. You decide: to stop the bloodshed in your own country and start over from scratch, or to commit public suicide in front of millions of people.”[2]

The newest fulfillment of this threat is the release of a set of documents CyberBerkut alleges it obtained by “cracking”[3] Ukrainian Defense Ministry computers.[4] The documents, published on CyberBerkut’s website and the Russian portal LifeNews, purport to be correspondence between Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Secretary, Peter Mehedi, and a senior Syrian commander, Brigadier General Talal Makhlouf.[5] If the documents are to be believed, they suggest American arms shipments intended for frontline units in eastern Ukraine were diverted by Ukrainian government officials and sold illegally for private financial gain to the Assad regime.[6]

Risible as this claim may seem, it is impossible to disprove on the basis of open-source evidence, but then again, that misses the point. The objective of disinformation, to borrow from Whitehead, is to impose a pattern on experience. It is a lens used to distort and pervert our understanding of facts. It is telling Ukrainians that their government is corrupt and has betrayed the forces fighting in eastern Ukraine. It reinforces the narrative among the “Territorial Defense Battalion” paramilitaries — for example, the “cyborgs” of the Azov Battalion whose defense of the Donetsk Airport lasted longer than the siege or Stalingrad or Moscow — that they are being sacrificed in the war, a common and recurring social media theme.[7] It provokes demoralizing backlashes — a 2 February protest on Kyev’s Independence Square included calls for the imposition of martial law and the dismissal of senior defense and security officials — that are reported gleefully in Russian news portals.[8]

Americans and Western Europeans are not the intended audience for Russian disinformation about Ukraine. Instead, Ukrainians are: the intent is, at the minimum, to demoralize; and at the maximum, to provoke a popular backlash against the Ukrainian government, even a putsch. It is intended to sustain a narrative that the political leadership has abandoned the frontline forces fighting in eastern Ukraine, especially among army conscripts and nationalist paramilitary volunteer units. The purported Mahedi-Makhlouf correspondence is a variation on the Dolchstoßlegende,[9] the mythical “stab-in-the-back” of the army by craven politicians, exemplifying the corrosive effect of even less-than-artful disinformation.

This, then, is the less-noticed side of the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Bringing incidents of disinformation to light for discussion purposes can have risks since disinformation thrives on repetition. It is nonetheless important to understand the instrumental effect of Russian disinformation on eroding Ukrainians’ confidence in their civil institutions and creating fertile ground for extremist groups on all sides.

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