Russian information war against Ukraine

Due to effective censorship, most media outlets in Russia are government-controlled, allowing Kremlin messaging to successfully sway the citizens of the Russian Federation to support its approach in Ukraine.

[32] The Russian government frames its hybrid war as a conflict between Russia and NATO, but while geopolitics and its desire for a post-Soviet sphere play into its focus on Ukraine, so do its domestic politics.

[47] After the 2022 legislation made it illegal to publish information on the Ukrainian war that the Kremlin deems "false", some Western media withdrew their reporters, due to safety concerns.

"— Oleksandr Danylyuk, former secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council[51]Russia's Leer-3 RB-341V [fr] drone system can listen to, or suppress, cellular communications, and even send text messages to front-line soldiers.

In a 2016 article, Estonian Military Academy researcher and University of Tartu co-professor for oriental studies Vladimir Sazonov similarly noted that Russian intelligence agencies had been conducting information warfare operations ever since the start of the war in Donbas in 2014.

[63][64] As early as September 2008, Alexander Dugin, a Russian fascist[65][66] known as "Putin's brain", advocated an invasion of Ukraine and other countries that had previously been part of the USSR:[67][65] "The Soviet empire will be restored.

"[88] On 12 March, YouTube blocked an unspecified number of media outlets controlled by the Russian state, including RT and Sputnik, citing its policy against content that "denies, minimizes, or trivializes well-documented violent events".

[96] On 13 April 2014, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in a statement posted on the alliance's website, accused Russia of promoting war and wanting to overthrow Ukraine.

[101][102] Russia has also learned to skillfully use Western public relations (PR) companies to disseminate narratives that serve the interests of various Russian government institutions and private corporations.

[112][113] The top 20 most-viewed TV channels almost all belong to Ukraine's wealthiest oligarchs: A decline in advertising revenues has left media outlets even more dependent on support from politicised owners, hence hindering their editorial independence.

[134] Marina Ovsyannikova has been hired by the German media company Die Welt, a month after she drew worldwide attention for bursting onto the set of a live broadcast on Russian state television to protest the war in Ukraine.

[147] For several months, distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) were carried out against Ukrainian information sites—Censor.NET, Tizhden.ua, Ukrayinska Pravda, and others, as well as the website of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine—during which ads for former-president Yanukovych were broadcast.

[152]Other more subtle attacks, known as reflexive control, systematically distort and reinterpret words, leading "extremists" to become an accepted description of independent journalists and human rights activists, or for peaceful demonstrators to be arrested as security threats.

Putin "used disinformation to lay the groundwork to annex Crimea in 2014, and to support continued fighting in Ukraine's Eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk", wrote Forbes contributor Jill Goldenziel.

[152] "We can't really take the Russians for their word" said Canadian ambassador to the United Nations Bob Rae, after Russia resumed shelling within hours of announcing a ceasefire for civilian evacuation.

"[178] In October 2022, Russian-American writer and professor Nina Khrushcheva said, alluding to George Orwell's novel 1984, that in "Putin's Russia, war is peace, slavery is freedom, ignorance is strength and illegally annexing a sovereign country’s territory is fighting colonialism.

"[179] British historian Jade McGlynn wrote that in occupied Ukrainian territories in 2022, after seizing control over mobile internet offices and equipment and installing their own networks, Russian first unrolled propaganda of the same type as in 2014.

[187] A criminal case was brought against the leader of the Ukrainian Right Sector, Dmytro Yarosh, for supposedly publishing an appeal to Dokka Umarov to carry out terrorist attacks in the Russian Federation.

[190] According to The Washington Post, in 2014 the Russian military intelligence service (GRU) created more than 30 pseudo-Ukrainian groups and social media accounts, as well as 25 "leading English-language" publications.

[206] On 11 March 2022, the Belarusian political police (GUBOPiK) arrested one of the most active users of Russian Wikipedia, Mark Bernstein, for the "spread of anti-Russian materials", violating the "fake news" law, after his being doxxed on Telegram.

[334] An underdog hero tackling evil forces attacking him is an ancient human narrative as fundamental and continuing as Gilgamesh and Luke Skywalker, and Zelenskyy has told it masterfully.

[335] Wearing a green military t-shirt,[336][337] he passionately appealed for help for his people in fiery virtual speeches to the parliaments of Canada,[338] the United Kingdom,[339] and the European Union,[340] as well as a joint session of the U.S. Congress, to a standing ovation each time.

Images of the younger Zelenskyy wearing body armor and drinking tea with Ukrainian soldiers starkly contrasted with news broadcasts of Putin in rococo surroundings and very socially distanced.

[347] Ukrainian media has been particularly savvy in playing up the eleventh hour rise of its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose line, "I need ammunition; not a ride", may rival the likes of William Shakespeare's "cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war" in terms of quotability.

[348]Official Ukrainian social media accounts have sought to bolster support for efforts against the invasion and spread information, with targeted posts and videos used to recruit soldiers and call for international aid.

[349] Several academics, including Professors Rob Danish and Timothy Naftali, have highlighted Zelenskyy's speaking ability and use of social media to spread information and draw upon feelings of shame and concern while building kinship with viewers.

[352] Chinese diplomats, government agencies, and state-controlled media in China have used the war as an opportunity to deploy anti-American propaganda,[353][354] and they have amplified conspiracy theories created by Russia, such as the false claims that public health facilities in Ukraine are "secret US biolabs".

[363] In South Africa, the governing African National Congress published an article, in its weekly newsletter ANC Today, endorsing the notion that Russia had invaded Ukraine to denazify it.

[365][366][367] The wildly popular social media legend, Ghost of Kyiv, "a Ukrainian fighter pilot who shot down six Russian planes cannot be confirmed", said Deutsche Welle on 1 March.

[370] Citizen contributions can also serve the more serious purpose of combating disinformation, says Daniel Johnson, a Roy H. Park Fellow at UNC Hussman's School of Journalism and former U.S. Army journalist.