Magazine
"By effectively employing 10 essential messaging themes, Ukraine beat Russia in shaping the early narrative of the conflict, helping to keep themselves in the real-world fight.
In modern war and politics, the information space is one of the most crucial parts of the battlefield. This is not about mere propaganda. If your ideas get out and win out, that determines everything from whether soldiers, civilians and onlookers around the world will join your cause to what people believe about the very truth of what’s occurring on the ground. And, if your ideas don’t win out, you can lose the war before it even begins.
In the arena of information warfare, there was arguably no one more feared over the last decade than Vladimir Putin. Russia’s information warriors ran wild for years, hacking democracies by intervening in more than 30 national elections from Hungary and Poland to Brexit and the 2016 U.S. presidential race. They elevated conspiracy theories that ranged from Q-Anon to coronavirus vaccine lies and provided justification for Russian military action everywhere from Georgia to Syria.
Yet, when it came time for one of Putin’s most ambitious and important operations of all, the invasion of Ukraine, Russia failed at the information side of the fight as much as it failed at its plan for a quick seizure of Kyiv. And the stakes could not have been higher. While Putin’s forces may be able to turn around their military prospects by sending more missiles, tanks and troops to overwhelm Ukraine’s cities, they have no such opportunity on the information war side. Contrary to claims that it is somehow too early to call, Ukraine isn’t just winning the battle for hearts and minds online, it has already won. And now it’s too late for Russia to change the narrative.
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At this task, Ukraine — both through official government channels and through a global coalition of supporters participating with them in the online front — has been masterful at driving forward 10 essential persuasion messaging themes. Each of these themes had scores of underlying narratives and examples, pushed out by wider networks that scaled from the hundreds to the millions.
1) Not waiting to debunk: Pre-bunking
2) Highlighting heroism
3) Stacking the cards in just the right way
4) Mythologizing martyrs
5) Showing a Man of the People
6) Amplifying civilian harm
7) Magnifying civilian resistance
8) Encouraging others to jump on your bandwagon
9) Humanizing your side (and let slip the cats of war)
10) Making use of mockery
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But Is It Working?
By all measures, the combination of these efforts have been a stunning success inside Ukraine. This is proven most by the very fact that the Ukrainian state and society didn’t collapse the way Russia hoped would happen in the first few days of fighting. Indeed, besides the rapid swing in Zelenskyy’s polling, surveys also show that now 70 percent of Ukrainians believe that their military is the side that will win the war, despite the real combat power disadvantage and territory losses.
This disparity makes the fronts of the information war essential for Ukraine. No matter the attitudes and bravery of its people, Ukraine only has a chance if it enlists the outside world in its fight. And here, the Ukrainian efforts are winning. Nations as far away as Australia and as surprising as Germany have promised military aid to Ukraine, and once unthinkable levels of financial sanctions have been put into place to squeeze the Russian economy. Indeed, when even Switzerland agrees to join sanctions against you (something it wouldn’t even do to Hitler), you have lost the narrative fight.
In the U.S., one could almost get whiplash by how rapidly things have changed from when former President Donald Trump complimented Putin as a “genius” and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly screamed at a journalist “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?” Trump has started complimenting Zelenskyy as “brave,” and Pompeo took to tweeting about how supporting Ukraine was the key to stopping Putin. Even Fox News, whose most popular host Tucker Carlson was a prominent early backer of Putin’s side, has recently published stories like “Russian President Vladimir Putin has features of a psychopath” and aired segments such as “Ukrainian civilians volunteer to fight for democracy.” This shift is reflected among the public more broadly, too: Between the beginning and end of February, polling shows that the percentage of Americans who said the U.S. should take Ukraine’s side went from less than the percentage who said the U.S. should remain neutral to more than double it, driven in large part by a 42-point swing in Republican opinion.
Yet, the audience that might matter the most to whether the war ends is inside Russia. Here, the information situation is different than the battles we have seen Ukraine win so vividly. The Putin regime has spent years building up both direct and indirect control of the media, and it uses everything from arrests to “accidental” deaths of activists to reinforce censorship. Indeed, at the start of the war, Putin’s information-shaping was so effective that many Russians did not even know they were at war. The relative popularity of social media platforms also matters. For as much as #SupportUkraine has trended on Twitter and Instagram, the most popular social network for Russians is VK.
But the longer the war goes on, the harder this becomes to sustain. Casualties are difficult to keep quiet and undercut a message of an easy win. Indeed, the fact that Russia’s government has just implemented new laws that threaten 15 years in prison for spreading “fake information” about the military or the war in Ukraine is a sign that the Putin regime fears it is losing this fight.
An essential mission of Ukraine’s information war is to try to further pierce this information bubble, an effort that is already underway. Reportedly, Ukraine’s interior ministry has been reaching out on VK to parents of Russian prisoners of war to let them know that their son is alive but that they should “Go out and protest, overthrow your government before we bury all in Ukrainian soil.” Similarly, in the absence of any Russian government death notices, a “Look For Your Own” website was also created to allow parents of Russian soldiers to submit their DNA information to find out whether their son had been killed in combat in Ukraine. Even that site’s address, 200rf.com, is loaded with meaning. It is a reference to “Cargo 200,” the Russian military term for flying home the bodies of dead soldiers. It is a brutal but potent example of what Ukraine warns is to come on the battlefield and, more importantly, of how Ukraine wants Russia to know it."
MORE DETAILS >> https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/12/ukraine-russia-information-warfare-likewar-00016562
