The conflict over Ukraine’s borders, which pits Vladimir Putin’s Russia against Joe Biden’s West, has ushered in a new era of informative confrontation under the shadow of fake news.
Instead of pure and simple disinformation, the weapon presented is unbridled sincerity across the board. Putin has been moving troops and equipment since last November in the open for any spy satellite or scout on the ground to see.
Predictably, he denies any idea he wants to invade Ukraine. At the same time, instead of making speeches about the rights of Russians in the Donbass (neighbor east), he issued a clear ultimatum to the Western allies: he wants them to give up absorbing Kiev.
It was a jumping jack, of course, but it was put in writing while soldiers were training on four different fronts around the territory under Volodymyr Zelensky’s chaotic rule.
On the other hand, Biden and some allies have denounced each of those they believe is a step by Putin towards armed intervention in his neighbour. Since January, they have been talking about an “imminent invasion” and have even given dates: February 16, this Sunday (20) or “a few days later”.
At the United Nations Security Council, Secretary of State Antony Blinken enumerated tactics that Russia could apply to provide a pretext for war. When civilians began to be evacuated from Donetsk and Lugansk on Friday (18) the American must have felt somewhat vindicated.
A few hours earlier, however, it was Putin who made a joke when he cut the ball raised by a Russian reporter in an interview with his friend dictator Aleksandr Lukachenko (Belarus), saying he had not seen the invasion of the 16th on TV.
Narrative, to use the familiar term of this era of fake news, has always been an open field. This has been the case since the campaigns of antiquity, imbued, for example, in Athens by the clash between myths and the attempt at objectivity of the first great military chronicler, Thucydides.
In a more vulgar register, just watch the same news on Russian RT and American CNN. On Kremlin TV — one of them, in fact — Biden is mocked and his “non-invasion day” has become a motto. In a more serious and worrying tone, the Thursday and Friday incidents in the Donbass became “refugees fleeing from Ukrainian bombing”.
In the other, the invasion is “imminent”, “possible”, there is the “threshold of war”. Commentators treat Putin as some sort of antichrist bent on wiping out the West, and the Russian president behaves like a prankster.
Or not, and that’s the problem with the game of mirrors and smoke going on in Eastern Europe. His movements in daylight, which naturally may be hiding others in the shadows of cyberspace, for example, draw attention because they give him the initiative and the possibility to mount the circus and, at the end, he smiles and states that “I didn’t do anything like always said”.
This is the most benign reading, of course, albeit a terrible one for a shackled West. Putin may simply be making everything he is accused of being out in the open, confusing even less alarmist analysts, who doubt the rationality of going to court.
But the risk taken by Americans seems greater. Keeping the maximum boiling has a cost: every day that the invasion doesn’t come, the loss of credibility increases. There is a strong smell of Iraq-2003 with the succession of alerts without more solid evidence.
At this point, the US, like the UK, seems to be betting on a narrative (again!) that by denouncing without proof a Russian intention that may have come from the head of some analyst nerd at the CIA, the West is barring Putin.
Whether this is going to stick with the electorate, the midterm parliamentary election in October will be there to find out. In Russia, so far Putin’s speech has found resonance, and most believe that NATO is the one who wants trouble.
In addition, there is an important collateral damage of American tactics: Ukraine. According to a spokesman for Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, the country has been losing up to $3 billion a month since January on rising risk premiums and borrowing rates, as well as investor flight.
And the West’s lack of effective military commitment threatens to leave Kiev in the lurch if the insistent screams finally reveal a ravenous wolf.
In the end, the problem is when the “sincere” disinformation from side to side begins to lurch into the open, as the shots in the Donbass began to suggest. Will “False Flag” Work to Convince Western Publics? Will “provocations” serve the Russians when their Ukrainian cousins ​​begin to die under their bombs?
It is a new territory, in the most serious military incident since the Collins dictionary elected fake news as the word of the year, in 2017. 1709-84), it had not yet been tested on this scale in the era when it was elevated to the status of applied science.
