Since the Peloponnesian wars, armed conflict and propaganda have been a well-matched couple. Maybe long before: as Sun Tzu says, in ‘The Art of War’, all war is based on deception. Nobody can be surprised, therefore, that Vladimir Putin also accompany the invasion of Ukraine by a intense propaganda campaign. What we now call disinformation. The concept is not new either, as is often believed. The ‘fake news’ was not born with the internet. They always accompanied the war. What happens is that, in Russia, it is deeply rooted and the tradition has been part of the military strategy since Soviet times. In conflict with the West, the KGB created a department destined, literally, to “invent data to generate in the mind of the adversary incorrect images of reality so that he makes decisions that are beneficial to us.” It is the tradition of ‘dezinformatsiya’, of which Putin is a privileged interpreter for the years he grew up in the Soviet secret services. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian disinformation sent to the world has reached unprecedented heightssupported by the possibilities offered by social networks and by a certain predisposition of Western societies to take for good news that it is not and to assume what George Orwell called ‘alternative facts’, long before 1984.
Since the beginning of the war, Spain has been one of the targets of the systematic disinformation campaign with which the Kremlin aspires to change reality. Starting by calling a special military operation what is an invasion of a sovereign country without it having previously attacked Russia. The revelation that the Spanish public opinion has received more than 40,000 disinformation messages is worrying and should motivate an informative and educational response at all levels. It is not a question of opposing propaganda to the crude Russian campaign, but of answer him with the complete truth about the war, its causes and its consequences. It is relevant that, in Spain and in other countries, Putin’s digital agents have taken advantage of the existence of previously existing networks, promoted by denialist groups during covid. He indicates that misinformation acts like a virus, spreading through skeptical societies, hit by the crisis, inert in the face of the complexity of the challenges facing humanity. Those who embraced the idea that the virus had emerged from a laboratory to dominate the world are more likely to believe the lies of Sergei Lavrov, the incombustible Russian foreign minister. It doesn’t matter if it’s about denying the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, the Bucha massacre, or pretending that the Russian destroyer hit by Ukrainian fire in the Black Sea sank in a storm.
Disinformation is not easy to fight because its ultimate goal is not to give credibility to an alternative story but to spread the feeling that everyone is lying. In this ability to sow doubt is its strength. Whether we are talking about the pandemic or the war in Ukraine. Putin successfully used this extraordinary machinery of confusion during the electoral campaign that brought Donald Trump to the presidency and has made it an instrument of intervention in the internal politics of many European countries. Denouncing his presence in the war in Ukraine is a way not only to restore the truth, but also to prevent the virus of disinformation from continuing to spread in Spanish society.