Front Burner - The information war in Ukraine

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

A new battlefield in Ukraine has opened up as each side fights to control the narrative of the ongoing war. Some experts say Ukraine and its allies are winning the information war by implementing a multifaceted strategy that includes pushing David and Goliath stories – even ones that may not be true – and creating a phone line where Russian parents can check in on their conscripted sons. On the other side, Russia – a country known for its relative success in shaping international media narratives – is clamping down. Today on Front Burner, Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow with the New America think tank, takes us to the front lines of the information war and explains why this fight matters.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. As the war in Ukraine rages on, a new battlefield has opened up as both sides fight to control the narrative. And a growing number of experts say Ukraine and its allies are winning the information war.

From pushing Davin and Goliath stories, to preemptively debunking Russian narratives, to creating a hotline for Russian moms, so they can find out if their sons have become prisoners of war or worse. At this moment I think around 10,000 Russian mothers and wives don't know where their relatives, men are, if they are alive or dead, or if they even already know that they are dead, just thanks to our government, who decided to inform them directly, to inform directly mothers of Russia. Valentina Aksanova is an advisor to Ukraine's Ministry of Information and Culture. And she says this kind of thing is a key piece of their strategy.

We have to be sincere with our enemy. And we have to be empathic because the Russian Federation will never afford to do with their citizens, to be empathic to them. On the other side, Russia, known for its relative success manipulating information, is clamping down. Today on FrontBurner, we examine the information war between Russia and Ukraine. We're talking to political strategist Peter W. Singer about the tactics and the tools both sides are using and why they matter so much. Hi, Peter. Thank you very much for being here.

Thanks so much for having me. So we're watching this conflict between Russia and Ukraine play out on our phones and on television. What have you thought of the coverage surrounding this, specifically Ukraine and the messaging on their side? I think what is so interesting is that in the arena of information war, Russia's information warriors, they ran wild for years. They elevated conspiracy theories around the world from QAnon. Researchers said in August that Twitter archives showed Russian accounts had helped spread QAnon in volume beginning in December 2017. A more granular review by Reuters shows Russian

accounts began amplifying the movement as it started early in the previous month. To anti-vaxxer information. And of course, they also provided the justification for Russian military interventions, you know, everywhere from Syria to Georgia. Syria is also where Putin tested out internationally the disinformation tactics Russia is known for today, muddying the waters about Assad's crimes against his own people and the nature of Russia's military targets, at one point even painting humanitarian rescue workers as terrorists. And yet, this time, when it was Putin's most ambitious, arguably most important operation of all, Russia failed. Ukraine has been watching, learning, and basically taught the supposed

Russian master how you actually fight information warfare in 2022. I understand you have this term called like war. And can you explain to me how we're seeing that play out here in Ukraine. What LikeWAR is, is it's hacking the people on social networks by driving ideas viral through a mix of likes and shares and sometimes lies. LikeWAR is incredibly important. It's not just about what shapes network behavior, what you see online. It's about shaping real world behavior. If your ideas get out and win out, that determines everything from whether soldiers and voters join your cause, both within your country, but also around the world. 16,000 foreigners have joined in the fight on the ground

in Ukraine. That from President Volodymyr Zelensky. Over the weekend, President Zelensky called non-Ukrainians to come fight to defend Europe and the world, as he put it. To what they believe about the very truth of the world around them. And I think what's incredibly notable is that Russia used to essentially dominate this space in large part because it was essentially pushing against an open door. This time around, Ukraine and this larger, almost network-style coalition that built up, so the government of Ukraine, but the individual accounts of Ukrainian leaders, like most of all Zelensky, but also the governments of the West, certain key NATO states like the Baltics and the UK, the difference in how the United States, the Biden administration handled this. global coalition of online you know democracy activists to what you call open source intelligence trackers basically people mining social media for tidbits of data of what's happening there they basically pre-bunked what russia was trying to push and then once the invasion started there's

been this just multi-faceted pushback, frankly, has not just been winning the information war for Ukraine. Arguably, it's already won it for Ukraine. That is, it's almost impossible to imagine a world where Russia and Putin in particular win back the narrative, not just about what's happening in Ukraine, but their overall mystique, which is something that was so important to Russian foreign policy and Putin in particular over the last decade. Let's pull apart this multifaceted approach that we're seeing come out of Ukraine and many other actors around the world. So you mentioned pre-bunking. Just talk to me a little bit more about how they did that. So in the past, Russia drove the conversation.

Russia drove the conversation. It initiated its military and information operations at the time and the storyline of its choosing. And that meant that it also struck at audiences with almost no pushback. And it could also use these fake provocations to justify what it was doing. And that both confused the local politics, but also confused how nations outside would respond. to fake atrocities. It drove viral a fake story of Ukrainian soldiers crucifying a three-year-old Russian boy. Then, of course, it was completely false, but it went viral in that period. This time, Russia's adversaries didn't just try and debunk this all after the fact, which usually doesn't work because an information war, you know, the first one there to drive the story, that's what sticks. But they had a strategy to pre-bunk what Russia was doing. So what Putin needed to tell both to his own population, but also to the wider public in the world was, we are responding to an emergency. And in this emergency, we're the ones going in and rescuing Ukrainian citizens from the atrocities of their neo-Nazi

regime. We will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. Russia cannot feel safe, develop and exist with a constant threat emanating from the territory of modern Ukraine. And also, this is a fait accompli. It's going to play out over the matter of a day. And guess what? It's all done. There's nothing that you can do against it. Well, in the pre-bunking, they got ahead of it. Literally for months beforehand, they were pushing out evidence of,

hey, this is not an emergency. You're doing this massive buildup of forces. Aerial images shared by the United States have sparked concerns of a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine. In recent weeks, evidence has emerged of an estimated 100,000 Russian troops building up on Russia's western border. And they depicted it in ways that showed the overall scale of it. So satellites showing these huge bases that were being built on the borders of Ukraine. They also did it even in the literal hours before the invasion itself.

Russia had all of these provocations planned, these fake stories of events it was responding to, and they debunked them, or rather they pre-bunked them. This meant that essentially Russia's narrative was ineffective from the very start. I would have to talk a little bit about something you mentioned earlier, I think when you probably brought up President Zelensky as well, these themes of sort of heroism, the idea of the martyr. And can you give me some examples of how Ukraine is using these themes purposefully and with some success? So in the online world, there's no single pathway to victory. And a tactic for sure defeat is to push out one single message by one single messenger. Instead, what you want to do is flood the zone and then drive viral all of these

different messages. And along the way, turn your target audience into your allies, but also your fellow combatants. So they're the ones carrying this array of messages forward. And that's what Ukraine and this wider network has just been so masterful at. Once the war began, they pushed out a series of messages that ranged from early stories of heroes fighting back, you know, the David versus Goliath narrative. One of the most viral, of course, was the Ghost of Kiev, this story of a Ukrainian fighter pilot who shot down six Russian jets in the first minutes of the invasion. Now, like so much else in the online world,

it's unclear whether that's totally true or not. that's totally true or not. Russian jets definitely were shot down. Was it actually six? Were they actually by this one pilot? That's not so clear, but it almost doesn't matter because in the online world, virality trumps veracity. And so it's the power of that story that mattered more. Another part of this is related to the hero, but it's the story of the martyr. One of the things

that they've done is almost daily, they push out a new story of a single Ukrainian soldier who sacrificed themselves in some noble manner. For example, an engineer who blew himself up to stop a Russian tank convoy from crossing a bridge. Very effective in terms of if you think of the narrative of this. And this has, of course, a long history in war's past of that notion of a martyr, let's join their cause too. That's where we've seen the man of the people narrative that Zelensky has built up tie into this. Glory to our defenders. Glory to our defenders. Glory to Ukraine. A very different story than you typically see of leaders. Захисницям. Слава Україні! Слава Україні! Це дуже інша історія, ніж ви типово бачите, про лідерів. Він є там,

зі своїм популусом. Він на вулицях. Це також дуже зверталося до інших європейських лідерів. «Хай я там, в місті, ти не, дай мені допомогу!» І він висновно втіпав на цю історію, Hey, I'm in there in the mix. You're not. Give me aid. And he's consciously hit that narrative when he's clapping back on Twitter at the Italian leaders who are delaying aid saying, you know, I'm actually in the middle of the fight. That's why I can't meet with you. It's about connecting his online goals to his real world goals.

He's demonstrating that he's personally in the fight, but it's also interesting enough, the best way to him accelerate the aid that Ukraine as a whole needs to stay in the fight. There's a final part of it that matters in the messaging is the contrast, the contrast of this youthful, Zelensky, authentic, in the field with the elderly, distant Putin, you know, at the end of this absurdly long table. Ridiculous tables. Yeah. Exactly. And that's, you know, both about setting up a contrast.

And let's compare the toxic masculinity of Vladimir Putin to just the masculinity and hotness of Zelensky. This should be a lesson for all men. One of them is going to go down in history as a f***ing buffoon. And the other one is going to go down

in history as a f***ing legend. It's also another element that really does matter in information war. It's mockery. This is all about, again, popping the bubble of that Russian mystique. I'm going to go. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. not know their own household income. That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I do want to go back a little bit and ask you about some of these examples like the the the snake island one and the ghost of kiev there's an update on the 13 ukrainian border guards on a tiny island in the

black sea who were reported to have refused to surrender they told a russian warship to go f yourself and all communication was lost ukraine i know you said said that the truth doesn't really matter in the information war, but are there risks, you think, to flooding the zone with things that may not be 100% true? Just out of curiosity. I want to be clear here. The truth definitely matters in war, and the truth definitely can go viral. According to the British defense ministry, that long column, armed Russian column that's advancing, that was advancing on Kyiv is now pretty much stalled, hasn't moved significantly in three days. There are problems with mechanical breakdowns, with Ukrainian resistance and perhaps congestion. So it's staying put for the moment.

perhaps congestion. So it's staying put for the moment. It is truthful that Russia's operations have not gone well and that has gone viral. It is truthful that Zelensky has shown massive bravery and that has gone viral. But what is notable about information operations, whether we're talking about what's happened in Ukraine to what happens with celebrities to, unfortunately, think about how the various narratives, false narratives around coronavirus and masking and vaccines, they haven't been truthful, but they've led a lot of people to act against public health and this pandemic to be worse than it actually needed to be. In the online world, virality is what matters. It's what has true power for information. I think what's on us is to try and give veracity a fighting chance against it.

Given what you've said and the point that you made that Russia has been so successful at information wars in the past, right? I just want to hear you talk a little bit more, I guess, about why you think they have fallen so short here. Is it just because the Ukrainians and this coalition of other actors have been so successful, or is there something else happening here? There's a couple of reasons for why the Russian efforts at controlling the narrative around the war in Ukraine have failed so spectacularly. I would argue essentially Putin made the mistake that drug dealers advise you never do, which is you don't get high on your own supply. Essentially, they believed their own most optimistic intelligence and then went in with, at the start, light forces. They didn't use their full combat power. It was a really poorly planned operation. You name it. The same thing on the information operation side, they did not prepare their own

public and the wider West for, you know, weeks and weeks of this is going to be a long grinding war. The second was all of the old tactics that worked for Russia. They've been watched. that worked for Russia. They've been watched. They've been studied. People are aware of them, whether it's the NATO nations, the government of Ukraine, to us, the online world. And so those very same tactics, they don't work the same because we've geared up to fight them. The information ecosystem has also changed. It's not just there's a dubiousness there. There's a lot of this open doors that they can't walk through anymore. You know, back in 2016, for example, if you think about the targeting of elections in the U.S., Facebook's own data shows that half the American population saw Russian propaganda

during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Well, the companies that used to look the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Well, the companies that used to look the other way at that. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, he is firing back against accusations that fake stories on the site influenced the election. He insists they did not, but is vowing to take action again. They've changed their policies. So basically, the space that Russia has been trying to fight in the information world, it's altered. Putin passed this really tough law on journalists.

Russia has now made it illegal to disagree with its version of this story. A journalist can be jailed for 15 years just for straying from the Kremlin's narrative. They can't even call it a war. Anyone caught spreading false information about the military and the invasion can be sent to jail for 15 years. They've shut down Facebook. And so what does this tell you? Does this tell you that the Kremlin, that Putin feels like he's losing the information war? These moves by Putin

and his regime are them trying to show off their power, but they also exhibit a great deal of fear. And that's because the audience that arguably matters the most now to not just how or when the war in Ukraine ends, but also what happens to the Putin regime is the audience within Russia. And, you know, we haven't seen the kind of massive swings in social media and popular and political attitudes as we've seen in Ukraine or in the West, but that might play out. I think that's the fear. The situation inside Russia is different from the online battles that we've watched Ukraine win so vividly. Here's building up both direct and indirect control of the media and the information ecosystem within Russia.

Another part that matters is that the most popular social media platforms within Russia are not the ones that are most popular for us in the West. So, you know, while you can see these hashtags like, you know, support Ukraine or end the war going viral on Instagram or Twitter or whatnot, inside Russia, it's VK that matters the most. So we haven't seen that kind of massive shift for these reasons within Russia. Yet, the longer the war goes on, the harder this is going to be for the regime to sustain. Casualties are hard to keep quiet, and they certainly undermine a message of an easy win. All right, so before I let you go today, I want to take you to Moscow. Because also worth noting here, there is some pushback among Russian news against the official state narrative. Along with Russia's new media law, the Kremlin also blocked the websites of independent news outlets like TV Rain. So TV Rain reporters said no to war

and walked away. On Thursday, they finished streaming their last show, For Now, on YouTube, and they started playing Swan Lake. Swan Lake has this heaviness in Russia because it's what Soviet state TV would play during times of political upheaval. It was a big stand, but they weren't alone. Last week in Berlin, there was an exodus of top editors at news agency Rupley, which is funded by the Russian state, after workers there were told they couldn't use certain words about the war. We will keep watching this, but today, that is all. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.