21st day of a full-scale war unleashed on a sovereign state in Europe in 2022.
Drowsily staring at my phone first thing in the early morning of February 24 - what a nasty addiction. Headlines pop up in the news feed unanimously explicit: Russia invades Ukraine. A feeling of waking up in a near, yet fictional future. And I still wish that it was. Nothing more than a brand new Netflix series, and then we can all go back to our comfortable little lives.
The first day of war, standing and shouting into the void in front of the Russian embassy in Paris. Unable to grasp the reality of the words of my Ukrainian friend « Mon père s’est porté volontaire à l’armée » [My father volunteered for the army].
The fourth day of war, standing and shouting into the void at the place Saint-Michel. A man approaches us timidly. He speaks to us in a language I cannot understand. He discerns our clueliness quickly. « Je peux vous acheter un drapeau ? » [Could I buy a flag from you?], pointing to a couple of blue-yellow flags in my hands. We give him one as he holds dearly onto a printed image of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, this president a few took seriously. The flag on my shoulders catches his eye. I rush to respond « Vilnius, Lituanie » [Vilnius, Lithuania]. « J’étais dans l’armée soviétique. Les lituaniens et nous étions amis » [I was in the Soviet army. With Lithuanians, we were friends], he declares proudly. This man could have as well served with my father back in the USSR. We exchange looks.
This instant is one of the most human I have ever experienced. This one look conveyed the entire collective memory of millions from the East, sacrificed for decades so that the West could live in peace. I found comprehension - a feeling deeply numbed after all these years abroad - in a complete stranger.
It truly was, and still is, comfortable on numerous occasions to repeat the narrative of the country that against all odds resisted and thrived. Yet, it was not my generation who did - it was someone else. In the eventuality of war, all strikes as no longer comfortable. The perspective of having to fight for freedom strikes as, well, humanly daunting. Yet, Ukrainians do, whereas we continue dining in our fine restaurants, for now.
In the light of doing something while feeling like doing nothing in the space of meaningless and powerless, I would like to take a different turn. I will not expose the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, its total illegitimacy and brutality. I will not debunk the pseudo-argument on NATO expansion as the culprit (think again), nor will I remind how the West was « greedy and delusional » (they were and, to a certain extent, still are). There is no reason a single Russian soldier should have ever crossed the border and stepped onto Ukrainian soil. Period. The rest is the devastating spiral of war and synergies of both intended and unintended consequences, and it will only get worse. Rather, I will make a humble effort to assemble, in a concise manner, a tiny part of the Kremlin’s Playbook. One shall be wary of getting into the traps of what has been assiduously developed and refined over decades by con liberators.
THE WEAPONS OF POLITICAL WARFARE 101: WAR OF WORDS
The so-called Playbook, also known as aktivnye meropriyatiya or active measures, is colossal and has a long-lasting inglorious tradition in Russia. One could trace its origins back to the 1920s when the Special Disinformation Office was established under the orders of Joseph Stalin, albeit certain techniques were already employed by the Tsarist secret police. Refined during the Cold War, the know-how of political warfare ranges from staging insurrections to sowing disinformation. The rules of disruptive agenda are simple: distract and divide by distorting reality and exploiting prevailing social divisions. Or, as a former KGB general put it:Not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.
Oleg Kalugin
A child of the Cold War and an ex-KGB pawn turned madman, Vladimir Putin knows this all too well. He succeeded in preserving the very « heart and soul of Soviet Intelligence ». The relentless technological evolution brought new means. Other than nearly unrestricted information flow, the key diverging characteristic of Soviet versus modern Russia lies in leitmotif. Back in the days the debate mainly revolved around the « our society is superior to your decadent West » narrative. The Russian government today is hardly concerned if one embraces their way of doing things. The aim, I repeat myself, is to distract and divide by exploiting the so perceived weak spots of the West - from social fractions to the free press - with the ultimate ambition of undermining democracy.
For now, I will leave behind a great number of measures - from false-flag operations to imposing a puppet government on an occupied land - and merely focus on words. Precisely, the war of words - the one we are mainly fighting outside the battlefield.
WHATABOUTISM
Whataboutism is a simple, yet remarkably powerful tu quoque tactic aimed at discrediting the opponent by changing the subject. How? Point to others wrongdoing.
Prior to Soviet dezinformatsiya, this practice was employed by the Nazis to legitimize the annexation of territories in Europe (rings a bell?). « But what about the long-lasting French and British colonialism in Africa and Asia? » Nazi Germany officials would shake off the guilt in an instant. In the Soviet era, whataboutism thrived most notably in the area of human rights with infamous « U nich negrov linchuyut ». Today, pro-Kremlin trolls make people point fingers to any Western interference « What about Afghanistan? What about Iraq? What about Libya? ». Alas, they succeed. In the context of the war in Ukraine, you will always find that one poor idiot pointing to the alleged or factual crimes and certain systemic flaws of the United States or any other Western country.
The effectiveness of this logical fallacy lies in the ease with which one can shift the attention away from his or her own misdeeds. Why even bother engaging in an actual confrontation filled with arguments? This is profoundly troubling. Under the surface of whataboutism lies the following implication: since the world is not all black and white and everyone is guilty of something, no one is guilty of anything and all criticism is hypocritical. The tactic is built on a shaky ground of nonsense though. There is almost always a more pressing issue out there. Does it grant one a license to do whatever one fancies as long as there is something more (or not even) wicked one can point to?
Few insights are worth bearing in mind. First thing is to acknowledge that whataboutism is not designed to advance a discussion in a constructive way, quite the opposite. Conversations are meant to turn in circles, ultimately reaching dead ends. Nor is it designed to win an argument as such. The Nazis did not invade Poland as a revolt against French and British colonialism. And Russia did not invade Ukraine as a reaction to American wars in the Middle East. The aim? You guessed it - to muddy the waters.
One among plausible ways to counter whataboutism, as proposed by Edward Lucas is to stress the most precious asset the Free World disposes - self-criticism, ensured by the free speech and open politics. Regardless of the flaws Western governments may have, sooner or later they may get into trouble - by means of the media, the courts, the voters, or well, Twitter.
In Russia, if you diverge from the narrative, you get poisoned, beaten up, tortured &, if lucky, thrown in an unheated jail for 15 years. In the US, if you allienate the medical mainstream, you may get shadow-banned on Twitter &, maybe, run for office, perhaps for the presidency.
Nassim Nicolas Taleb
@nntaleb
BIG LIES & DISINFORMATION
The next on the Playbook are massive disinformation campaigns deployed in the form of propaganda. The art of dezinformatsiya as a means of misleading crowds with bogus narratives on a mass scale was elevated under Stalin’s rule. Fun fact. It is believed that Stalin employed the term to name his black propaganda department using what he judged to be a French-sounding name so he could later claim its Western origin.
As I see it, the approach to disinformation is two-fold, namely either it takes the form of (1) the dissemination of completely false information - I will refer to this as Big Lies or (2) sowing deliberately misleading or biased information by manipulating the distorted bits of real information.
To grasp the scale of Big Lies, consider the most remarkable precedent of what came to be known as Operation INFEKTION occured in the 1980s. Carrying dear consequences, a KGB campaign consisted of planting a story in an Indian newspaper claiming that AIDS had been created in the United States laboratory. From there it was initially picked up by a Russian magazine, ending up in numerous newspapers worldwide shortly after. Overall, the play is to get into the information vortex as many lies and phony versions related to ongoing events as possible. Even though « if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it » (supposedly Joseph Goebbels), the true intention is something else. Spreading a myriad of confusing narratives puts the whole idea of truth in jeopardy. It fosters distrust, apathy, distraction and even cynicism in people on a large scale. In other words, people end up believing that « nothing is true and everything is possible ». In a more recent context, look at Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shot down while flying over the eastern Ukraine in 2014. Russian trolls put the blame on the Ukrainian military, on the Americans, even came up with a story of a plane filled with already-dead bodies. As for the Big Lies emerging during the war in Ukraine, well, you name it. From surging nazism and concentration camps to the biochemical weapons (orchestrated by the United States, of course) in Ukraine - there are no limits to the delusion. Check the EUvsDisinfo database and see for yourself.
To gauge the scale of propagating misleading information, think of something simpler, more credible and way more subtle. Do not forge a story, but look for the one already out there. Then, reframe it to either inflate the worst parts or, be picky, and get rid of any instructive information and relevant context. You are good to go. Select a specific group, for instance leftists, greatly sensitive to undoubtedly otherwise truly pressing issues such as racism. A number of such campaigns, taking advantage of polarizations prevailing in European society, were awfully rewarding. First, Russian troll farms seized the opportunity to distract by exploiting the stories from the Ukrainian border of those who are not white with blue eyes. Combined with pro-Putin narratives, « look how racist those Eastern Europeans are » becomes a powerful message. Easy to circulate, too. Even better, « look how welcoming those Europeans are to white Ukrainians unlike they were to other migrants in the past years ». A second terribly successful narrative that emerged was diffused in a form of a picture - it must have caught your eye during the very first days of the war in Ukraine. Released by the Kremlin-backed media, this picture is a map showing locations of airstrikes around the world over the last 48 hours - it was shared by thousands of accounts across multiple social media platforms. How come? Yet again, « a human life is a human life » and « condemn war everywhere » is a simple message to get out there to deflect criticism away from the Kremlin. In other words, do not focus on Ukraine, focus on everything and nothing at the same time.
Disinformation works so strikingly well against the West thanks to what is actually a veritable strength - the pluralism of ideas and the freedom of speech. This tactic results in the idea that if the true cannot be known, the ones in power can translate the reality into their own terms. And they do, with a help of their very own Newspeak.
NEWSPEAK & CENSORSHIP
All these aformentioned tactics are enforced and masterly wrapped into the Newspeak, which is then repeated over and over again by Russian nowadays nomenclatura - Sergey Lavrov, Maria Zakharova, Igor Konachenkov, Putin himself. Internally, ordinary citizens are subjected to the shackles of censorship. A thoughtcrime could send you to jail for 15 years.
Let’s take somes excerpts from a recent interview with Lavrov - it contains a full package of Big Lies, misleading information and whataboutism.
This is certainly not exhaustive and shall be completed whenever needed.
Vladimir Sorokin (2006). Day of the Oprichnik.
Peter Pomerantsev (2014). Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.
EUvsDisinfo
Arena Research Program
Šarūnas Bartas (2017). Frost.
Yuriy Bykov (2014). The Fool.
An evening with Anne Applebaum | On propaganda & fake news (2020)