Against fighting fire with fire

Against fighting fire with fire

By Nina Jankowicz • Issue #43 • JAN 14, 2022

On tensions in Ukraine and countering disinformation

This week U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman was in Europe, conducting a series of talks with Russian officials and transatlantic allies in hopes of defusing mounting tension between Russia and Ukraine. For the past several months, Russia amassed over 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s eastern border, the largest such buildup since the first time Russia invaded modern Ukraine, back in 2014. (It’s important to remember that we’ve seen this movie before; then, as now, the Kremlin was the instigator, funder, and perpetuator of the conflict.)

The talks seem to have yielded little in the way of diplomatic solutions; Russia is demanding that NATO end its “open door” policy to countries that meet criteria to become potential members. In particular, the Kremlin does not want Ukraine or Georgia (the Republic of, not the U.S. State) to join the Alliance. NATO and the United States are maintaining that nations have a right to self-determination, and that they won’t be bullied into changing their membership criteria because Russia throws a tantrum. With no commitment to de-escalation along Ukraine’s border, a new flareup in hostilities—one that would have very high economic and human costs for both combatants—seems possible. This morning, government ministries in Kyiv were hit with a wave of defacements that echoed the five-day war between Russia and Georgia in 2008. Today’s attack has not yet been officially attributed, but it brought down the sites for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’, along with several other government departments as well as Diia, Ukraine’s e-governance platform. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said today that “Russia is also laying the groundwork through a social media disinformation campaign that frames Ukraine as an aggressor that has been preparing an imminent attack against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine.”

The news has inspired a flurry of takes from both sides of the Atlantic about what to do about Russia, the beast of the East. We’ve heard Deputy Secretary Sherman, Undersecretary Nuland, Psaki, allied officials, and heaps of commentators noting the obvious: with demands so stark and so utterly inconceivable for NATO, Russia never intended to reach a solution through diplomacy in the first place. It sought to create the pretext—"the West doesn’t want to negotiate about NATO, therefore we’re justified in our military action"—for further invasion. In short, the Kremlin was running a diplomatic disinformation campaign, and by forcing NATO to the table swat away Moscow’s demands (not to mention the sheer number of cyber bros on Twitter today expressing a whole lot of sanctimonious doubt about who might be behind the cyberattack, with some even suggesting it was NATO starting their own false flag campaign), one could argue that it’s working.

Unfortunately, this realization spawned ideas about how to “counter Russia’s narrative war” and other similarly jargony phrases with little substance behind them. By my count, at least two opinion pieces were published in reputable outlets this week suggesting that the West “give Russia a taste of its own medicine,” in so many words. (I will not link them as I don’t want to further amplify them.)

Let me show you what it looks like when we try to do that:

A 2020 meme created by U.S. Cyber Command.

A 2020 meme created by U.S. Cyber Command.

U.S. Cyber Command created the meme above—a silly bear (a nod to Russian hacking teams Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear) in a Soviet hat, dropping his Halloween bucket full of malware “candies"— in order to educate the American public about Russian malware ahead of Halloween. (Do you feel educated? I don’t.) According to an interview with CyberScoop, officials hoped it would make the Russians angry. “We don’t want something they can put on T-shirts,” the official said. “We want something that’s in a PowerPoint their boss sees and he loses his shit on them.” With the amount of tongue-in-cheek articles written about the meme (which performed fairly poorly on social media), and the fact that it took over 20 days to clear DoD bureaucracy, I can only imagine Russian cyber operatives having a little chuckle about it over their afternoon tea.

That wasn’t our only misstep in this arena; ahead of the 2020 we texted millions of Russians and asked them to give us tips about disinformation campaigns that might affect the presidential election. The effort was ridiculed by Russian officials and ordinary citizens alike as being out of touch (not to mention dangerous for any Russian who might respond). In 2014, we attempted to go head to head with ISIS on Twitter, an effort TIME magazine called "embarrassing.” During the Trump era, the State Department funded a project that attacked human rights advocates and researchers who disagreed with the administration’s hardline policy on Ukraine.

The idea that the United States Government or any of its allies should be able to match the duplicitous rhetoric or the amount of resources Russia spends and go head to head in a meme war with Moscow is a nonstarter. But even if these initiatives were more skillful, more nimble, and better funded, neither the United States or its democratic allies should be entertaining the idea of employing our own disinformation campaigns against Russia or any other adversary.

Every time someone makes an argument that the West should give Russia a taste of its own medicine, Putin, Lavrov, Peskov, Zakharova, hundreds of government-paid trolls, and thousands more individuals who are happy to amplify Kremlin rhetoric file that sentiment away in their “whataboutist” folders, ready to deploy whenever a Western nation claims the moral high ground. Putin has claimed that the United States, in particular, plays just as dirty as Russia, since the early 2000s. In the context of the current buildup of forces in Ukraine, this informational buildup would be cited as yet more fodder to justify a further military incursion, and would lead to an increase in anti-Western sentiment.

As I wrote with my colleague Henry Collis in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College Quarterly, in autumn 2021:

Adversaries use information operations to exploit open societies and undermine shared democratic values; therefore, they must remain the center of gravity for any approach to countering hostile interference. Preserving these values and the transparency, openness, and commitments to freedom of expression and human rights through a community of democracies will ensure our societies continue to provide an alternative to the authoritarian regimes of hostile states.

If we “fight fire with fire” in Russia, or worse, if political actors in the United States deploy domestic disinformation, we cede whatever shaky moral high ground we have maintained over the past several democratically difficult years. I do not want to be in league with nations that poison and murder opponents, that fabricate news stories and harass journalists, that unilaterally redraw borders and commit human rights violations along the way. How low Vladimir Putin is willing to stoop should never indicate the floor for the U.S. or its allies.

So what can we do? The impatient among you will not be satisfied with this answer, I’m afraid. In many respects, we continue doing what we’re doing (though preferably with a little more oomph): investing in independent media and democratic development; supporting anti-corruption measures; communicating to Russians and Ukrainians and any other vulnerable populations abroad, as well as our own domestic audiences, about the realities of Putin’s Russia. This last suggestion is where we could afford to be a lot more creative and a lot less thrifty. No more silly bears in lame, inexplicable memes. Let’s (transparently) support the efforts of journalists, activists, and the creative classes to tell the stories of those impacted by Putin’s regime. Let’s think creatively about how to get that information across the firewalls the Kremlin continues to erect in hopes of hermetically sealing its information environment from foreign ideas.

Will it solve the crisis at hand right this minute? No. But it is an investment toward a more democratic, peaceful future in which the American legacy is improved upon and secured.