Working on the information space is complex. I have been doing this in various forms for almost 25 years, and can bring at least personal experience to a field which is still inchoate as a discipline.
One thing that concerns me more than any other is our lack of understanding in the UK as to how Moscow conceptualises the information space, both domestically and internationally, and integrates it into its diverse spectrum of efforts to wage war on other countries. Including the UK.
Image: The Cenotaph, London, outside my former place of work, 8 May 2025 (author’s own)
(As a brief aside, I have already written about my lack of knowledge and present inability to define ‘war’ (particularly in the dynamic and complex interrelationship (even if there is a difference) between kinetic and informational warfare (I guess my discipline would prefer there to be some kind of difference, whilst proposing that informational warfare has a more immediate and intrinsic part within military operations)). I do not have a definition yet of the new war, though do think that one is urgently required, given the problems with terms such as ‘hybrid war’ or ‘grey wars’ that abstract issues and lead populations to ignore the real threat. I am reminded of a former UK diplomat (I have used this example previously), who responded to my work with: ‘Well, I have no idea how to define disinformation, but it’s like pornography: I recognise it when I see it’. Well, if war entails murdering our people on our streets with nuclear and chemical weapons while using state resources to manipulate information around those attacks, then seems like a war to me.)
There are two key but interrelated issues with this. One is the tendency of academics and others (including governments, though their approach is different) to push ‘disinformation’ studies into an abstract field of study that examines methodologies and data, without linking conclusions firmly into real-world impacts.
I used to work with one government whose approach was to measure data for selected social media platforms (almost invariably Twitter, if you are old enough to remember that) and use the number of retweets and likes as a formal warning-system for ministers on likely coordinated inauthentic behaviour. There was no understanding of the complex relation between the adversary’s intent, methods, and consequences. Even now some teams talk of analysing informational TTPs, without adding TTPIs (impacts).
The other issue is that our responses are compartmentalised, both cognitively and operationally. Understanding of information manipulation requires geopolitical wisdom, strategic knowledge, situational awareness, language, social and cultural familiarity, knowledge of the information space and its manipulation both conceptually and practically, knowledge of specific social media platforms and how they work, experience with big data, analytical experience, policy and policy advocacy, behavioural science and insight into psychologies and impacts, and much more. The problem is so big that it requires both broadening, and also the ability to narrow down on highly focused problems, as well as the ability to understand the relationships between the whole and specific, often minuscule points.
So. In short, we need a new specialisation which is none of the above, but which is the skill to bring specific aspects of all the above expertises into particular analytical conclusions in varied aspects at any moment. It requires experts who know how to consolidate and rarefy key aspects of other specialists’ knowledge into a conclusion that is relevant to a particular problem (ie how will the Russians leverage highly complex vaccinology to exploit the Covid pandemic to attack the UK). It requires both long experience, and the ability to adapt as knowledge rapidly advances. We are a long way from mastering that, and the problems will only change more rapidly as the world speeds up and becomes more intricate.
Unsurprisingly, Trump has been the cause of rapidly-changing political problems. I have written previously, perhaps too aggressively, about how Europe (including the UK and Ukraine) must prepare to defend themselves against a Washington that is not only indifferent to us, but hostile, in the informational space as well as elsewhere.
However, it seems that the Kremlin is also uncertained with the White House, and is waiting to see where Trump settles before Putin comes down on a firm policy position on the new Newworld.
Kremlin messaging – if you can read it accurately – will be an indicator of where Moscow sees its strategic priorities and how it hopes to achieve them (Russia being seemingly incapable of achieving its foreign policy objectives through normal means).
That being said, some things are already obvious. Or, in UK Government language, almost certain to happen. As soon as Trump made it clear that he would realign himself with Putin’s strategic interests, the immediately changed the focus of its informational ire to the other Anglo-Saxons, the UK.
All information manipulation is inherently historical. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mariya Zakharova and others invoked tales of London and past incidents of our evil and malice. Zakharova has railed against the UK as the true instigator of Nazism in Europe and the cause of World War Two. More pertinently, Zakharova has recently accused London of acting to thwart US President Donald Trump’s plans for peace in Ukraine.
Image: Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mariya Zakharova accuses London of thwarting Trump’s Ukraine peace plans
UK next
What does the Kremlin’s turn on us mean?
Moscow has targeted the UK in its operations for years, decades at least. By coincidence, as hinted above, I started my career on Russian media for the UK intelligence agencies at the same time that Putin slithered into power, in autumn 1999.
From there I could see how Putin used a variety of manipulative techniques on Tony Blair (information manipulation, economic bribery, sycophancy, personal proximity) to push and the UK Government into consolidating Putin’s highly frangible (at the time, it seems hard to recall that now) power base. Putin also manipulated Blair into legitimising the brutal war on Chechnya, which has had catastrophic ramifications for us now.
Typically for the UK, it seems, we have continually embraced advances or changes that open up our vulnerabilities, in particular to Russia. We have possibly been overwhelmed by British traditions of myths of openness, mercantilism, and exceptionality, an overenthusiasm to counter our island status, that we have let down the wrong drawbridges and exposed ourselves to a wide range of manipulations. The Russians do many things badly, but we cannot underestimate their ability to do some things extremely well, and locating and probing our weakness is one of their major strengths).
My ongoing work will continue to explore those vulnerabilities and to study Russian offensiveness, in its broad understanding. Over the next few posts I shall go into specific Russian operations against us, what to expect, and what we might wish to do to build up capabilities against them. Please do engage with these thoughts and proposals; pooling cognitive resources is the only way to fight this.
In addition, Lvivski will continue to explore and to document abuses of the enslaved people of Ukraine. We’ll also continue to develop our partnerships with Ukraine and with organisations in the UK. This is the right thing to do for those people; it will help us understand how we should be fighting the new World War.
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Ruth Windle:
Thank you Adam for this. Much to think about in pondering what it’s possible to do as a run-of-the-mill citizen. This may seem completely off the wall and not particularly relevant but I was thinking of a conversation I had today which included the ‘Russian celebration’ of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and led to talking about the Ribbentrop/Molotov Pact. About which my friend knew nothing - so had not realised there were two aggressors in cahoots who began WW2. I noticed also that on very little of the news coverage was there any reference to the fact that the Russian narrative omits any reference to the actual start of the war in 1939. Which takes me to my second ‘digression’. I’m have been devouring the novels of Sergei Lebedev these last two years (the only Russian novelist I can bear to read). He is preoccupied with the fact that the Soviet Union was never called to account for its crimes and that even now there is scant reference to the fact that in the present war “negotiations” are going on with an indicted war criminal. His novels are meditations on this and way it corrupts a whole society. His latest novel, “The Lady of the Mine” is set in a mining town in Donetsk over four days in July 2014. He brings together the past crimes buried in the concreted over mine and the current crimes in the war prosecuted by the Russians in the Donbas and hidden by the very strategies of disinformation and obfuscation that you talk about. It is a tour de force and I can highly recommend it and indeed all his other novels too. “Untraceable” has its origins in the story of the Skripal poisonings - again an indication of the war already in our midst. Maybe bringing historical facts into our everyday conversations and not letting “narratives” slip by without comment or analysis are the small things we can do in our everyday live. And in addition talking about the torture chambers in
Donetsk and Luhansk run by the FSB; about the amazing teenagers who had been taken by force to Russia and rebelled against the institution in which they were put and finally managed to escape and make their way (perilously) back to Ukraine; the teenage girls meeting in secret to read Ukrainian literature. These are all ways of humanising the reality of what is happening.