The world has received an early and dark warning of President Vladimir Putin’s violent intentions towards Ukraine. Seven years ago, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov launched a call for massive protests against Putin’s interventions in Crimea and the Donbass region.
“The main reason for the crisis is that Putin launched an insane, aggressive and deadly war policy for our country,” Nemtsov told Ekho Moskvi radio station in February 2015.
Three and a half hours later he was shot dead near the Kremlin. Since then, the Putin regime has systematically stifled most evidence of dissent — monopolizing content broadcast by state-dominated TV channels, shutting down independent civil society organizations such as the Memorial, and imprisoning its vocal opponents, most notably Alexei Navalni.
This week Eco Moscow, one of the last media outlets to air alternative positions, was ordered to close down, as was the online news service Dozhd.
It is often said that truth is the first casualty of wars. But in Russia the truth was hospitalized a long time ago. Today it seems that Russian representatives even take pleasure in inciting colleagues from other countries with blatant lies. This week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a UN conference on disarmament that it was Ukraine that threatened Russia, prompting about 100 diplomats to flee the precinct in protest.
The argument that Russia only intervened to prevent its neighboring country from acquiring nuclear weapons, given that Ukraine had already given up the world’s third largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for Russian security guarantees, requires mental acrobatics to do the most minimal sense.
But the only audience Putin really cares about is the Russian public. Indeed, the outside world’s determination to isolate Russia only makes it easier for it to persuade Russians to ignore hostile foreign opinions. There are, however, three reasons why the Russian information campaign could still fail.
For starters, it’s not easy to sustain lies. Reality has a nasty habit of intervening. The Russian domestic narrative that its invasion of Ukraine would be swift and bloodless is demonstrably false. Thanks to the ubiquitous digital camera, the amplifying power of social media, and the attention of a global community supported by countless sources, it is impossible to hide the reality of the urban battlefield. Russia has already acknowledged having suffered nearly 500 casualties.
Second, it is clear that Ukraine is winning its own information war at home and abroad. One of the most striking aspects of the conflict is that it opposes two very different information systems. Ukraine has mobilized civil society, and there is collaboration between the state and the population.
In the case of Russia, the state dominates almost all communication. It is a contest between a horizontal network and a vertical structure, between a choir and a megaphone. “The resilience of networks is much stronger,” says Gregori Asmolov, an internet expert at King’s College London. “Vertical information systems are extremely fragile.”
Third, Ukraine is now taking digital warfare directly to Russia. Ukrainians form the third largest ethnic group in Russia, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a televised speech, appealed to the Russian public, speaking in Russian. After spending eight years falling victim to Russian cyberattacks, Ukrainian hackers are now responding in kind.
Hacken, a cybersecurity firm formerly based in Kiev, launched a bug-hunting program asking global hackers to identify vulnerabilities in Ukrainian systems and expose vulnerabilities in Russian systems. The company says it has already recruited 10,000 hackers from 150 countries.
Some of these “hacktivists” aim to disrupt Russian media sites and promote alternative Ukrainian views on social media. “The hacker community is very well organized, it’s a real army,” says Dmitro Budorin, Hacken’s founder and chief executive.
The Russian population may, for now, be mostly cowed and supporting the Kremlin narrative, but that makes the sporadic protests against the war all the more notable. More than 7,600 people have been arrested in demonstrations across Russia, according to OVD-Infor. This week Navalny echoed Boris Nemtsov’s calls for more protests.
“Putin is not Russia,” his team wrote on Twitter. “Let’s fight the war!”
Putin’s nightmare would be that more and more Russians would not believe his narrative, something that could signal the end of his regime. That still seems unlikely, for now. But the Ukrainian resistance has already demonstrated its skill and courage in resisting despite being at such a huge disadvantage. It is possible that she will still end up becoming Putin’s worst enemy because she knows his people better.
