Moldova Manoeuvring

A very narrow escape should not give us cause to relax, but should force us to reconsider, enhance, and consolidate our counter-information manipulation capabilities

This will be only a short post, with family and other work looming. I normally think and worry about these posts for (too) a long time before writing, but this post is in a more extemporaneous spirit to clear some thoughts.

I was at an uninspiring talk on Ukraine a couple of nights of ago. The speakers were Russia specialists who discussed the issue drily, from the perspective of geopolitics. It was highly unsatisfactory, with no fresh insights and certainly no discussion of the people in Ukraine – especially the enslaved people in the south and east.

(I am trying to use terms other than Temporarily Occupied Territories to personalise the horrors in Ukraine, and to push away from tendencies to abstract the occupation and to view it as an issue resolvable through deals over maps.)

However, I was reassured by one of the audience members at the talk, a former journalist, who spoke about the evolution of Russian information manipulation. I was gratified that some people do get past the received thinking as Russian activity as inherently statist, formal, and inflexible.

Russian and pro-Russian information manipulation has proven to be – certainly since 2022 – complex, agile, and at times highly creative. Russian and pro-Russian actors usually know their audience well. They understand the balance between strategic and tactics in their messaging, and how these various messages interact with each other. They also get how different types of messaging work at different times, on different audiences. They are likely very effective against young people, with some of their video messaging using slick production and catchy techniques. And some of their stuff is funny, devilishly so.

However, one key thing for me is the complex evolution of Russian and pro-Russian information manipulation against Russian kinetic activity. The received thinking when I started to establish capabilities for the UK Government against information manipulation was that Russia relied on information manipulation because it did not have enough military capabilities to achieve its political objectives through force. I suspect that this line of thinking encouraged commentators and policy makers in Europe and North America to consider ‘Russian disinformation’ as a separate challenge from, rather than intrinsic to, the holistic danger from Russia, and to disregard any significant kinetic threat from that country. People were so fixated on trying to decipher Moscow messaging before February 2022 that they could not possibly imagine that Putin would do more than launch a few more vicious tweets.

Seeing ‘disinformation’ as a discipline in its own right has perhaps prevented us from considering information manipulation now as an integral part of Russian aggression, which does involve military activity, including missile attacks on civilian targets.

It is clear that the Russians now launch information operations that are tightly intertwined with its military operations, and have the capability to launch microtargeted messaging at specific locations to support military aims – often just before during, or shortly after an attack. Telegram (this why this is the First Telegram War) is a key tool in this, but the Russians can use other media also.

In addition, Moscow appears to have extended its creative range, using a variety of companies and studios to produce many high-class videos undermining the Ukrainians, as well as other target audiences. It understands it targets well, and is adapting fast to changing circumstances. This seems to patch somewhat with the strategic adaptability or adaptation advantage that the Russian military at some points demonstrate.

The Russians sometimes get it wrong. They almost certainly intended, unsuccessfully, to use messaging prior to its continuing invasion in 2022 in order to demoralise the Ukrainians before their attacks. They have also experienced other setbacks, such as their inability (although by a handful of votes) to sway the recent EU accession referendum in Moldova.

Screenshot of Moldovan President Maia Sandu’s X/Twitter account

So what does failure in Moldova mean?

I have not followed closely the referendum, so shall not comment on the details of what Moscow tried to do there.

But we cannot relax after Russia failed in Moldova. Where their information operations fail, the Russians have a habit of engaging in the same battle with renewed vigour and developed techniques. Electoral events are a key vulnerability and a core concern of government ‘counter-disinformation’ (not the best phrase) teams around the world. But it seems certain that Moscow will continue to target elections – not just with information manipulation, but with an increasing range of methods (bribery, coopting of favourable politicians) and with growing aggression.

One only has to look at the some of the things going on in Georgia to realise the wide spectrum of things that adversaries are increasingly prepared to do to interfere with elections: I shall be watching events tomorrow with concern.

The interaction and balance of information manipulation alongside other Russian activity will likely continue to evolve, and we should evolve capabilities to understand information flows and information manipulation not in isolation, but as an integral part of a wide range of interrelated capabilities designed to attack us. This is why I believe the UK and other countries need enhanced and unified information manipulation investigative teams that are themselves integrated with other agencies that can counter a variety of threats alongside the informational.

The Russians see information as a key component of their weaponry against us, and we can only counter the issue when we understand this and start to consider informational and associated attacks as a serious national security issue. I shall write more about this in the coming weeks.

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One quick addendum here: I am pleased to see an seemingly increasing amount of material dedicated to the enslaved people of Ukraine, the unspeakable cruelty that has been levelled on them, and their ongoing hardships. It is a deeply personal issue to me, as I have spent much time in the east and often see Ukrainian affairs through a Donbas prism. I strongly believe that we need to push the human stories and real impact of Moscow’s enslavement of these people, a focus on the actual lives and persons than simply on the territories.

The possibility of any kind of agreement or ceasefire that perpetuates the torments of these people fills me with dread, and it would be an unspeakable betrayal to consign thousands of Europeans in our modern age to the medieval barbarity that the Russian forces have unleashed there. A source of mine within the Ukrainian Presidential Administration told me recently that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is deeply worried about the lives of people under Russian enslavement, and this is one of the key motivating factors in pushing him to continue to fight. And it’s also a key motivation of soldiers I know who are fighting. We cannot force the Ukrainians to give in; the consequences are too horrific to contemplate.

I’ll be writing more about the enslaved people and their lives over the coming weeks, based on my research and personal experience. But their fates are intrinsically linked with what the Ukrainian armed forces are doing now. So I shall be trying to write more about that link and also encourage people to support financially specific teams fighting to liberate other people and to save us.