The Temporarily Enslaved People of Ukraine and the News

Performance and gullibility; or sensibilities and a lack of sense

This is a brief addendum to my post this week on the enslaved people of Ukraine.

I had added four points that work as some suggestions as to how to support the people currently under Russian occupation. These included consolidated informational support (public diplomacy and strategic communications) – coordinated with Kyiv and other organisations across Europe – that tightly address the Ukrainians’ needs.

To my mind, the effort to undermine Russian information manipulation across Europe has lacked strategic focus, consolidated understanding, and a coordinated approach. It has been extremely difficult to persuade governments to appreciate the threat from Russia: this includes both the kinetic and informational threats, and also the complex connection between such kinetic and informational threats. (To be honest, this failing in governments has been the case for the past 25 years, when I first started working for intelligence agencies.)

Conversely, the Ukrainians have been clear about their requirements. However, they have sometimes struggled to convey these in a strategic way to organisations in Europe. European bodies have in turn been woefully unable to agree a common strategy on Ukraine; to work out internally within governments on how to apply thinking on Ukraine to concrete policy decisions on national security; to contextualise these within sophisticated thinking on to manage European security against the Russian threat; and how to communicate policy to national populations in their strategic communications.

From the UK’s failure to articulate what Ukrainian victory looks like, and the subsequently meaningless pledge to support the Ukrainians ‘for as long as it takes’, we have blundered in our policy and comms on an ad-hoc basis, with no vision of how to secure our continent. The risk that Putin wins – in the sense of destroying the viability of the Ukrainian state and then using Ukraine as a platform to undermine European security, with disastrous potential for us all – is becoming more likely. And we only have ourselves to blame.

It is difficult to write this and balance the acute call to support the Ukrainians, against putting down what Moscow wants me to write (I do self-censor when it comes to Ukraine). Putin almost certainly wants us to believe that Russia is winning in Ukraine. Responding to that effectively has been a massive gap in our work.

This leads to another key gap in our work, our inability to understand the impact of information manipulation (let alone to understand what information manipulation is and how it works). This stems from a lack of investment in behavioural science studies in government studies of information manipulation, and also from an inadequate intelligence architecture in funnelling collection and research into tailored policy-suitable advice.

Performative discourse and our gullibilities

One specific area of information manipulation that concerns me speaks to the breakdown between discourse and meaning among the Russian leadership.

The UK Government, for example, was intent on monitoring Russian official statements in the run-up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in order to analyse messaging, and from this to discern Russian plans. I warned then that this was an ineffective approach, given that the Russian leadership had long abandoned any connection between what they said and what they went. Russian politicians were using messaging as a performative act, rather than using its content as a traditional discursive – or diplomatic – tool.

(It is highly significant that American politics – especially the incoming Trump administration – have also seemingly adopted this performative approach to discourse, and this is something I shall consider in the coming weeks, especially its impact for Ukraine.)

It seems that the Russians have evolved this use of discourse as performance, most likely aware of the analytical methodologies that foreign ministries and ‘open source’ teams employ around the world.

The link between information manipulation and perceptions of the world requires rethinking. This is especially valid when the protagonist uses force or the threat of violence to accompany and substantiate messaging, aggressively imposing a new reality on victims. This is why Moscow is so bent on enslavement of other peoples: this opens the way for the Russians to take control of the information space and impose a new reality on people. They use violence and oppression to create vulnerabilities where people become even more susceptible to manipulation.

Better understanding the performative aspect of Russian political messaging could have helped us respond to the carefully-crafted threats that Moscow has made for many years – and escalated since 2022 – about how it might respond to offers to help the Ukrainians defend themselves. It is an egregious aberration of our moral responsibility that we have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by Putin’s words into doing nothing while civilians, and children, have been barbarically murdered.

Those who know people from Ukraine will be aware that many Ukrainians are highly sensitive to the news emerging from the rest of the world, especially from those countries that are supposed to be supporting them in their liberation. Rumours and leaks from the incoming US administration have an apparently profound impact on the mood on people from Ukraine, in Kyiv, in other cities, and at the front. (That news seemingly disproportionately affects people in a war should not be all that surprising.)

As I write this, I read in the New York Times that the outgoing US presidential administration will allow Kyiv to use ATACMS to hit targets in Russia. This is welcome news, but disgustingly 10 years too late. It is likely to boost Ukrainians’ moods, both away from and at the front, and that is a good thing. I only hope it can make a military difference, and that more gullible US officials do not reverse this later.

All in all, the above is why we need better coordination of policy and of communications across all of Ukraine’s partners. We also need better understanding of Putin’s long-term aims and a comms strategy that is attuned to this, and matches well with what the Ukrainians need. Time is running out.

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