The decision of the European Commission to veto the Russian channels Sputnik and Russia Today, as well as the proposal approved this Wednesday by the European Parliament and defended the high representative of Foreign Affairs of the EU, Josep Borrell, of arbitrating drastic measures that shield the European information space against the disinformation campaign launched by the Kremlin, have highlighted the importance that the propaganda in the Ukrainian war. They have also raised doubts as to whether the censorship of these Russian media, however committed they may be to military plans for Vladimir Putin, constitutes the best defense for a Europe that opposes precisely the invasion of Ukraine in the name of freedom. However, the deliberate use of lies and disinformation by Moscow and the impact that this strategy has on the Russian population and world public opinion, in today’s interconnected world, have forced the EU to adopt extraordinary measures , necessary in the current war context.
Like all the wars carried out by Putin, the one in Ukraine has been based on lies and disinformation. “The art of war is based on deception,” wrote the master Sun-Tzu, more than 2,500 years ago. We don’t know if Putin is a follower of the celebrated Chinese strategist, but the brazenness with which he lied before the invasion of Ukraine (unmasked only by American satellites) indicates that outright lying is a deliberate ingredient in his conception of politics. All wars have incorporated propaganda into their military arsenal, but the current ones, what we call hybrid wars, have made the informational and cybernetic space an increasingly decisive battlefield. “What distinguishes conventional from hybrid warfare is the simultaneity of battles being fought on land, at sea, in the air, and in informational space,” General Valeri Gerasimov, chief of the Russian Army General Staff, declared in 2019.
Russia has a long tradition of disinformation that goes back to before the revolutionary period and that reached its zenith in the unfolding of the Stalinist story that sought to legitimize the extermination of a part of the Russian population. In the case of the Ukraine war, this alternative narrative has been plagued by misinformation, false flag videos and crude historical misrepresentations designed to justify the invasion. Among them, the alleged genocide of the Russophone population of Donbas, the supposedly fascist character of a “Junta” that would govern Ukraine, and the ‘fake news’ about the military and even nuclear risk posed to Moscow by the president Volodymyr Zelensky. All this accompanied by a ironclad internal censorshipwith the intention of mobilizing Russian nationalism, dividing Europe and providing arguments for potential allies to divide Europe.
The alarm of the EU is based on antecedents that are known to all. Russia’s interference in the electoral campaign that gave victory to Donald Trump, his intervention in favor of supporters of the Brexit and the attempt to attract European far right, far left groups, or secessionist movements. The gross campaign of information manipulation that has accompanied the invasion of Ukraine constitutes one more step in this tradition that already led the European Commission, in 2018, to present a plan to protect the European elections that year. With the war in Ukraine, the EU has gone further, not as a way of conditioning the story that the citizens of the Union must freely form, nor of restricting their freedom of expression -and that would be the red line not to cross-, but as the search for instruments so as not to be passively exposed to gross manipulation by an openly hostile foreign power.