I frequently see the claim that Russia is losing the information war in Ukraine. This idea is widely believed, even by people who support Russia, and even some Russians themselves. As someone with relevant experience in that field, I can confidently say this is not true. And I speak not from an emotional standpoint, but in realistic, practical terms. So I will analyze the Russians’ de-nazification of Ukraine from the perspective of American military doctrine in the science of Information Operations.
Introduction
I am not Russian and never in the Russian military. I was in the American military. I’m sure their doctrine differs. However, much American military doctrine is borrowed from the Soviet military, and even doctrine we got from the Germans they also borrowed from the Soviets. So, I think I can say with reasonable certainty that my statements about Russian strategy are accurate.
This will be a series of entries that I will link at the bottom of this page. So to read and keep track of them, I will pin this thread at the Reading Junkie main page.
Anyway, here’s my case:
Information wars are won by the truth
I was a US Army public affairs specialist for 10 years. Looking back, I do not agree with America’s wars. But I do not have regrets about my own actions. I did not tell lies. I spoke the truth and only the truth. That’s not what’s happening now.
There is this idea that “both sides are equally bad” and everyone spreads disinformation. No. If a general or government spokesman says something, it should and absolutely must be a true statement, not a lie. If he says that 20 enemy tanks have been destroyed, that must be a true statement. If he says that we have had 500 soldiers killed in action, this must be a true statement. See, if a general lies about enemy casualties, and his own casualties, nothing he says can be trusted. This is why it is so important for official spokesmen and outlets to not tell lies.
The nazi regime in Ukraine has lied, and lied repeatedly about everything. They have also gone to extraordinary lengths to make their lies appear credible with faked photo and video evidence. Absolutely nothing they say can be trusted. We cannot believe any claim coming out of their mouths. We cannot even believe a claim that appears to be true. It is better to ignore the Ukronazis altogether. Why waste precious time and mental bandwidth analyzing the words of someone who constantly lies? Just don’t. The more attention we give to fake news, the more people die (see my post Fake News Killed the Ukrainians and it is Our Fault)
Official institutions and media outlets are deliberately spreading lies, this is poisonous and destroys their credibility. I can never again listen to an American military spokesman and trust a single word coming out of his mouth.
Of course I’m sure some readers will be quick to point out that the American government has lied about many things before. Well, yes. But I as a human being can only speak out of my own personal awareness. My nagging doubts about my government were all confirmed by this war.
As far as I can reasonably tell, the Russian MoD have told the truth and done their best to not distribute false information. This is the first and main reason I argue that Russia is not losing the information war. Both Ukraine and their NATO masters utterly destroyed their credibility, nothing they say can be believed. Russia still has their credibility intact, and that’s is a crucial part of winning the information war.
In a previous article, I argued that globalist elites in the West hate Russia. They hate Russia because they don’t want anyone to know that there is an alternative to being evil. Well, that statement applies to information war as well. Our governments in the West want us to believe that everyone lies like them and it’s just not true. Our governments lie, and the Russian government tells the truth. Or at least they try to tell the truth, and frankly, telling the truth is genuinely not hard if you make an honest attempt. Anyone with a functioning brain should be able to see that now.
On a related note, I want to clear up a question that some readers had regarding my post debunking fake news coming out of Ukraine. In that post I stated that I personally know the US/NATO clearance procedures for releasing official photographs and video to the public, and Ukrainians are not following these procedures. As a NATO-trained military, Ukrainians should be following basic procedure, and the fact that they aren’t is proof that these photos and videos are faked. Ukrainians went to the Defense Information School (DINFOS) in Maryland. My school. In the same building.
Some people on social media have, correctly, pointed out that I was speaking about official information outlets. What about videos filmed by civilians? This is a fair question. My answer: don’t trust those videos.
Watch this YouTube channel, Captain Disillusion. He is a skilled filmmaker who analyzes viral faked videos, and explains the software and practical effects behind them. If it’s that easy to fake a video of a flying saucer, those same techniques can be used to fake tanks being stuck in the mud and blown up. Only trust official information from the Russian MoD. That’s it. If a statement coming from civilians in Ukraine is true, the Russian MoD will eventually get around to verifying that claim, and will acknowledge it. Then we can accept it as fact.
There is of course much more to say, and I will bring up doctrine to back up what I’m saying. This will not be opinion or conjecture, but verifiable fact supported by textbook definitions.
I will continue this series in the upcoming week, and embed them here in a table of contents. So stay tuned.
Sources
I have uploaded some resources as PDFs on my own website, where anyone regardless of location or IP address should be able to read them. These are of course all publicly available, not classified. I’ll add more as I go along.
Joint Publication 3-13: US DOD Information Operations
AR 360-1: US Army Public Affairs Program
ADP FM 6-0: Commander and Staff Organizations and Operations
Patterns of Conflict by John Boyd (Credit for this document goes to Chet Richards, link follows to his site slightlyeastofew.com
See thesaker.is and moonofalabama.org for some great analysis of the war in Ukraine.
I also gathered together some main points and related articles and compiled them all into one post. This is my attempt to gather crucial, bare-bones information about what led up to the special operation in Ukraine and why it is being fought. View it here.
Featured Image Source: Tumisu on Pixabay
See full series for Russia is Not Losing the Disinformation War
Ian Kummer
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On the subject of statements by generals or politicians to the press, within the scope of wars or security actions: Whether Russian, American, any country, there’s no basis for trust whatsoever. Historical constant.
It’s been argued that a competent organization would still produce truth a modest majority of the time, so that the audience doesn’t tune them out. But that’s about the best case. And there’s a competing school of thought that says “just go ahead and say whatever you want people to believe, and find a way to shout down or silence contrary opinions”.
In this conflict, Russian MoD has been overall far more professional in their approach than their opponents. But don’t doubt that in specific cases, they’ll do what any of their counterparts around the world would do, and simply shut down the information flow or remove selected pieces of information.
Looking at alternative English-language news outlets… I’d apply a handful of salt to Saker in particular. That site, while assembling a wide collection of voices not found elsewhere into one place (in part because the english language media universe didn’t want to hear their point of view), is home to a crew with biases of their own. In particular an excess of Russian chauvinist cheerleading, too many words spent on insults, and some borderline hate speech mixed in now and then. The factual content is largely sourced from a handful of popular and Russian language sites with corresponding sentiment, including Cassad, Podolyaka (and his fellow YouTuber, “Mikel”), and Readovka. Observing over the past month, be aware that these sources also tend towards unjustified optimism as seen from their point of view – though in this case not as over-the-top as the many English-language reproductions of the Ukrainian media universe.
More so than the prior conflict in 2014, the Russian government is actually trying with some conviction to shut down amateur / “OSint” reporting — and at the same time, transitioning to the Chinese approach, just as the US is. Although thus far, the methods in Russia (and Canada and a number of EU countries) have been more focused on the speaker than the US method, which has thus far focused on the media channel. That will last while it lasts.
For now, if you want to add a couple of semi-officially-shepherded Russian news sources to the pile, with setups that don’t depend on YouTube or Twitter, and have similar content (minus the amateur mapping), but with better quality control (at the cost of heavier filtering by the Russian state), try tv-zvezda and anna-news. Although you’d have to do some of your own translating or rely on google.
Ironically, the English-language RT, now banned, had better editorial freedom and a much higher truth content than both regular US media and less BS bravado than any of the aforementioned English-language “Russian-sympathetic alt-media”. Chasing down the people who used to be on RT would probably be a worthwhile task.
Finally, I’m sure not news to this blog’s host, all of these, and for that matter all the western approved news, tend to produce a sanitized view of the whole affair, although this is starting to break down. Nobody wants to see piles of corpses every day. Sometimes I question the wisdom of that editorial decision, sometimes I don’t.
Hi ptb,
I mostly agree with you. The Russian-sympathetic “alternative news” in English-speaking media does tend to be too chauvinist, and also tends to portray Russia as some sort of based trad white Christian paradise, which isn’t a correct stereotype, and pretty clearly not even a stereotype that most Russians would even want imposed on them.
But about casualties… no. And I speak as someone with inside knowledge of how casualty reporting works. The USA couldn’t cover up thousands of military deaths. If for no other reason, there is just too much bureaucracy around a soldier’s death. Body transportation, funeral costs, family benefits, education benefits, support groups, etc. It’s just absurd to think that sort of coverup is possible in the internet age. Actually here’s a dirty little secret for you – at least part of the reason behind using mercenaries is that they’re not in the system (a mercenary wounded in Afghanistan, for example, cannot receive any free healthcare beyond immediate life-saving treatment). They can and do die “off the books.”
Russia follows more or less the same system as the USA, so this idea of them covering up 7,000 deaths is ridiculous. Also, Russia is obsessed with awards. In WWII, they gave out more awards than every other combatant combined. For God’s sake, we’re talking about the people who made a national hero out of a dog. We honestly think they would cover up human deaths? No, you die, you get a cheesy ribbon, maybe a statue in your hometown. Covering up deaths doesn’t actually doesn’t have any kind of political gain either. What, from their perspective, does covering up deaths help them with? If anything, more deaths shows the urgency of putting down the Zelensky regime.
Thanks for that insight. I was referring to what I feel is a lack of principled honesty by anyone with a national-security emergency to deal with, or a war to fight, when addressing the public.
I don’t mean to specifically imply an coverup of casualties by a factor of 5x by Russian MoD, but I also wouldn’t put it past them if the situation were different. IMO governments still have little trouble making facts disappear, in plain sight if necessary. The motivation would be whenever domestic public support for a war or policy is shaky enough to threaten the government’s legitimacy. Not the situation in WWII in Russia, but it was going in that direction both in US in Vietnam, USSR in Afghanistan, and to some degree US in Iraq for OIF.
In the current conflict, the issue of public support in Russia might have been a concern for the Russian government 2 weeks ago, but I can only imagine that both Biden’s provocative ad-lib’s, and recent accounts/videos of abuses by Ukraine army’s more extreme elements, had the effect of swinging public opinion in Russia toward justifying the war. Perhaps elsewhere too.
Ian,
Great post and great discussion in comments with ptb.
I need to increase my memory cash to download the Telegram app and shall.
I’ve been following MoA and Saker. I hadn’t been to Chet Richard’s site in a while so I checked. There was a good post with 3 comments by non other than Larry Cummer! Not only that, he linked to Caitlin Johnstone! I click on his name and I’m on fabiusmaximus.com and there you are!
I got a kick out of that.
Keep up the good work and best regards.
I have been enjoying your articles and appreciate the spirit of many of your comments above but I’m not sure they reflect the practical realities.
“Information wars are won by the truth” and “Russia still has their credibility intact, and that’s is a crucial part of winning the information war.”
Information warfare has many layers that act upon various target audiences. If it was true that “truth” wins the war there would be no information warfare, the very fact that exists suggests, rightly, that the truth can be bludgeoned to death and buried in a shallow ditch. in terms of Western efforts to isolate Russia from other states, the tools of narrative exposition are facing a harder target: educated statesmen with an understanding of propaganda and the overlap between intelligence services and media. In this case the West is losing the information war by showing recently developed states like China and India what they might expect in the future, and through this, making itself seem increasingly desperate.
However, another target is the collective political elite of the West. Part of the information war is to provide them fodder for rhetoric that will allow them to divert domestic attention from homegrown political problems by demonizing Russia, and possibly feeding into broader Great Reset policies in terms of information control, censorship and economic hardship. In this case, the information war is not being won so much as sold to third parties who use it for political capital to solidify domestic control and crack down on dissent.
A third level is at the general public, those who throughout Europe and the US, overwhelmingly view Russia as a ruthless instigator of aggression. These individual opinions mean little but collectively this is the body politic that grants legitimacy to democratic governments and, through their spending and social activity, prop up the firms and tech giants that sanction and alienate Russia. The strings may be pulled at a higher level but by conceding the information war at this level the extent of social, economic, and cultural isolation of Russia becomes far more extreme. Small things like video game companies refusing to sell to Russian players, operas firing Russian singers, musicians refusing to plays shows in Russia, etc. are all things that would be less likely to happen if the general public had access to a more balanced view of the issues in question. During the Iraq invasion the public was far more aware of the dissenting voices but today we see antiwar groups demanding not peace talks, but no fly zones that would lead to war on far greater scale. This is a result not of this latest stage of the information war but of two decades of post 9/11 efforts to censor dissent from hate speech laws to the imprisonment of Assange.
It would be nice to believe that the truth always comes out and that those who matter recognise it but it is worth remembering that the CIA’s original headquarters proudly bears the inscription “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
One other point:
“Our governments lie, and the Russian government tells the truth.”
In this case the truth is very heavily on Russia’s side and, as such, it is generally in their interests to tell the truth. I would not take this as any evidence that they always tell the truth about Ukraine, or that they are generally more honest in their politics than other countries. I think you can make an argument (a very strong one) that they are comparatively more honest than the US and UK as they favour diplomacy that is more plainspoken and direct, perhaps due to culture, perhaps as a strategic policy. Also, their track record, as far as I am aware, shows far less of a pattern of hypocrisy and broken promises. However, manipulation, propaganda, and outright lies are all useful political tools and any Great Power with an understanding of realpolitik is likely to make use of them when they prove expedient. In this case, I do not think Russia feels any great need to do so but it is always wise to remain skeptical of all parties and to apply the smell test to each of them in the same manner.
Hi Brannagyn,
I think you’re correct that I engage in too many absolute statements, and I do agree with most of everything you wrote here. However, a successful information war – which is just one “department” in an overall war – needs to have SOME basis of truth for the operation to work. If you don’t, you will consistently lose, and end up with situations like Vietnam and Afghanistan, where a trillion dollar army drops their weapons and runs away because nobody wants to die for a shitty puppet government.
And yes, Russia does downplay their failures and hype their successes – but I do not think this type of PR can be categorized the same as outright lying and manufacturing things that aren’t true. For example, recently Putin was questioned about nazis in Russia, and he said something along the lines of yes, there are nazis, but we don’t endorse them. Every country has SOME nazis (even non-white countries that you think wouldn’t have a nazi problem) – but that’s not the same as endorsing and arming nazis, which is what we have done with Ukraine and the Baltic states.
I didn’t want to believe this meme until now. Had a conversation with my mom where she literally repeated NAZI propaganda to me – ‘Slavs are not really European.’ [Right](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans).
She’s _black_. College educated and intelligent. Surely she’s read 1984 like the rest of us? This is crazy. WTF is happening over there?
World War III is happening over there, and here – and yes, it is amazing to see every mainstream media outlet trotting out literal textbook nazi propaganda. It’s truly astonishing.
What US did to provoke Russia? https://rumble.com/vw1q27-us-is-always-the-baddie.html
Hypocrites condemn Putin for keeping US nukes out of Ukraine but not Kennedy for keeping nukes out of Cuba.
https://rumble.com/vy2as9-turmel-america-is-always-the-black-hat.html
“What’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”
Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo — Texas A&M University (April 15, 2019)
Tell me you are a communist Jew without telling me you are a communist jew.