It was foreseeable that Russia would deny the massacre in Butya. Nor does it attack urban areas and hospitals, a bomb shelter under a theater or a train station full of refugees. The whole idea of a raid was based on “Western hysteria” until February 24, according to President Putin.
When that incursion did begin, with Russia deploying an estimated two-thirds of its total ready land forces, it was not to be called a war, but merely a “special military operation” to liberate the Ukrainian fraternal people. However, now that the planned ‘fresh and merry war’ has turned into its opposite, the Kremlin faces a dilemma, wrote Michael Kofman, an American Russia expert, on Twitter† “It can’t sustain a long war as a ‘special operation’, but it doesn’t want the operation either.” reframe like a real war.”
According to him, this means that Putin cannot declare a general mobilization and therefore cannot call on conscripts to force a breakthrough in Ukraine. But it also has consequences for the provision of information on the Russian home front.
Of great communicator Zelensky and the stream of videos of successful attacks on Russian tanks and other equipment give Ukraine the initiative in Western imagery and in its own country. Russia can hardly show images of combat at home, let alone of losses. After all, that too would prove that a real war is going on, which, moreover, is not progressing well.
The fact that Ukraine staged the massacres in Butya and elsewhere “at the behest of the United States”, or committed them itself as “provocation”, therefore has a sinister logic, which can still count on support. After all, in many Russian eyes it confirms that Nazism is in power in Ukraine, as their president says.
‘She doesn’t believe me’
The effectiveness of that frame is also apparent from the many testimonies of Ukrainians who cannot convince their own families in Russia that Russian missiles are turning their cities into ruins. Or as Nadezhda Bakran (73), a nurse in the Russian-destroyed town of Trostyanets, discovered when she called a good friend in Moscow with whom she has been on vacation for 43 years: “I tried to explain it but she doesn’t believe me”, she told The Guardian† “She said: ‘You owe this war to yourself.’ While we were friends. Deeper even than friendship. †
The United Nations General Assembly Russia suspended this week admittedly as a member of the Human Rights Council, but against the 93 countries that supported that proposal, there were 24 against and 58 abstentions. And in the Security Council China called the statues from Butsha “worrying,” but it demanded “careful investigation” first.
The set pattern of denying or distorting facts also makes Russia predictable in a way. Influencing the US presidential election in 2016? The attempt to poison former spy Sergei Skripal in 2018? The assassination attempt on opposition politician Navalny with the same Novichok poison in 2020? We have nothing to do with that (it was the CIA!).
On Twitter, Russia has lost the information war, but that channel has been largely blocked in Russia.
Or that other Russian tradition: not so much trying to convince people otherwise, but hiding the truth in a mist of alternatives, so that people no longer know what to believe. A practice in Russia infoshumcalled ‘info noise’, writes Russia expert Mark Galeotti in The Weaponization of Everything (2021). Example: for the downing of MH17 by a Russian Book missile in 2014 exist according to EUvsDisinfoa European Union project to fight Russian disinformation, now has 388 alternative explanations.
brainwashing
Russia still excels at “directing unlimited what people think” wrote the American diplomat George Kennan in 1944, when he was stationed in Moscow for the second time. “So that you can carry out your own propaganda and prevent someone else from carrying out his”. Whether such information “is true to our understanding is immaterial,” he added. Moreover, “it becomes true not only for those to whom it is addressed, but also for its creators. The power of autosuggestion plays a huge role in the Soviet Union.”
According to Kennan, Russia could have chosen to let its relationship with foreign countries “developed harmoniously”. But Russia is not only permanently insecure, yes, paranoid about its relationship with the rest of the world, but also about itself. Closing the people off from “foreign influences” and the belief in conspiracy theories thus serve the survival of the Kremlin.
Like Frank Bruni in The New York Times wrote: “A leader can win the hearts of his people by working hard to improve their lot. Or he can take the short, cheap route Putin has chosen: try to brainwash them.”
The Lies on Government Channels Are “Unbelievably Monstrous” according to Navalny’s Twitter account this week. “Unfortunately, that also applies to its persuasiveness on people without an alternative source of information.” On Twitter, Russia has lost the information war, but that channel has been largely blocked in Russia. On Telegram, popular in Russia and Ukraine and not blocked, Russia has to tolerate unwelcome reporting. “Telegram is now the main battleground in the information war,” said Clint Watts, researcher at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Telegram is “the link between the Russian Internet and the Internet used by the US and NATO countries.”
How the Information War – also called “Z-War”, “World Cyber War I” and called “TikTok War” – is unpredictable, certainly now that the ‘real’ war is continuing. Optimists may find hope in the daily briefing from the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, Thursday. It reported that Russian commanders in the field have been ordered to severely limit internet access for their soldiers in order to combat “bad morale”.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad of 9 April 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of April 9, 2022
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