How Russia Controls the Narrative: Inside the Kremlin's Global Information Warfare Campaign

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Video originally published on May 18, 2024.

Mark Twain once said 'a lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.' The true power that information has over our daily lives is chilling, and in our modern world, it is increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction. Yet this quote itself illustrates the very problem it describes—it wasn't written by Mark Twain at all, but by C.H. Spurgeon, who was paraphrasing Jonathon Swift. Most people never notice they're being told something untrue. Welcome to the world of disinformation. Information is as much a weapon of war as it is a vital resource, wielded like a gun or missile, with access to it as crucial as food and water. While information has been a critical part of warfare for thousands of years, the strategies emerging in the 21st century around information manipulation are evolving and far more sinister. Modern nation states are becoming increasingly adept at manipulating information, and advances in technology combined with a world connected through the internet make it easier than ever to spread disinformation to global populations. No nation does this better than the Russian Federation.

Key Takeaways

Information warfare is a form of conflict based on manipulation, influence and use of information to further political outcomes without firing a shot

Vladimir Putin views his war in Ukraine as one front of an ongoing global conflict against the West, using information warfare as an asymmetric strategy to avoid direct military confrontation with NATO

Russia employs both external tactics (social media manipulation, mainstream media influence, troll farms) and internal infiltration (spies, political influence, institutional penetration) to control narratives

Russian disinformation campaigns have influenced elections, undermined support for Ukraine, and infiltrated Western institutions including media, politics, academia and business

The West's response has been inadequate, with limited coordination, scaled-back resources, and ineffective countermeasures against an increasingly sophisticated threat

Artificial intelligence technology threatens to supercharge Russian disinformation capabilities in the future

Understanding Information Warfare

Before examining how Russia uses information warfare to its advantage in modern geopolitics, it's essential to understand what it is. Information warfare is a form of conflict based on the manipulation, influence and use of information to further one's own political outcomes. Crucially, information warfare can be conducted without a shot ever being fired. It can be used to gain an informational advantage over opponents, influence a government's actions in one's favour, or manipulate citizens into believing false truths.

In the world of realpolitik, that's real power, and nobody understands this better than Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Before his terms in office as President, Putin was an agent for Russia's clandestine intelligence service, the FSB, giving him intimate knowledge of how intelligence operations and information manipulation work at the highest levels.

Information warfare is as frightening as it is wide-ranging. The Russian Federation has increasingly used a wealth of tactics throughout Putin's Premiership to control and manipulate global geopolitical narratives. These tactics include using real or invented news media, statements by leaders or celebrities, online troll campaigns, text messages, botnets, and even YouTube videos, just to name a few. The breadth of these methods demonstrates that information warfare isn't limited to a single platform or medium—it's an omni-channel approach designed to saturate the information environment with narratives favourable to Russian interests.

Russian Aims and Objectives: Reshaping the International Order

To understand Russia's disinformation strategy, we must recognize it in the context of Vladimir Putin and his perspective of reality, warped as it may be. Putin sees his illegal war in Ukraine as just one front of an ongoing global conflict against the West, particularly the United States and its NATO allies. Putin's ultimate goal is to reshape the international order away from one that is dominated by the West and towards one that benefits Russia and those who fall under her sphere of influence.

If Russia were to try to make this change by force, the ensuing conflict would be overwhelmingly bad for Putin when facing the full military might of NATO—that is, if the world wasn't immediately ended by nuclear war in such a conflict. Therefore, Putin knows he must fight against the West asymmetrically, rather than through conventional kinetic means. Cloak and dagger rather than shells and bullets.

Putin himself stated as much in a speech to the Russian Federal Assembly all the way back in 2006, declaring: 'We must take into account the plans and directions of development of the armed forces of other countries… Our responses must be based on intellectual superiority, they will be asymmetric, and less expensive.' Through necessity, Russia must wage war in the shadows to undermine Western institutions, spread panic among people, and engender distrust in liberal democracies. Information warfare is used as a critically important tool for driving these objectives.

Many today believe that we are living in a 'post-truth' era, where truth itself is seen as malleable and dominant narratives rule the day, whether they're true or not. Russia has played a large part in this evolution because for Vladimir Putin, the murkier reality becomes, the easier it is to manipulate populations, politicians and policymakers towards outcomes that benefit Russia. By creating an environment where people question everything and trust nothing, Putin creates space for Russian narratives to compete on equal footing with factual information—or even to dominate the discourse entirely.

How Russia Achieves Information Dominance

Having covered the what and the why, the next question is how. How is Russia able to manipulate the informational environment and control narratives that reach Western eyes and ears? It's important to note the exhaustively broad range of strategies that Russia uses to gain an informational edge. It's not all just troll farms and TikTok bots.

Whilst information warfare can be used without violence, it is often used in tandem with conventional warfare to create battlefront and home front advantages. According to the NATO handbook on Russian disinformation, Russia's information warfare strategies differ significantly in peacetime and wartime. Peacetime is characterized by more covert measures—think of it like the USSR during the Cold War, with a focus on espionage, reconnaissance and maneuvering secretly to gain an advantage in the information space.

Wartime is where things get more aggressive and direct. Discrediting leadership, intimidating military personnel and civilians, falsification of events, and cyber-attacks are just some of the tactics that Russia uses, and most, if not all of these have been seen during President Putin's 'special military operation.' Just recently it was revealed by the BBC that in occupied areas of Ukraine, Ukrainian children are taught that their country does not exist, showing the levels that the Kremlin will go to control what people are told in aid of their political objectives. Now increasingly we are beginning to see these more aggressive tactics used on Western targets.

It is the world's worst kept secret that if Russia can successfully undermine the West's support in Ukraine while stifling Kyiv's progress on the battlefield, Russia will be able to grind Ukraine's fighting forces down through attrition, leading to ultimate victory. These are narratives we are already starting to see emerge across the West, with even Pope Francis recently weighing in that Ukrainians should have the courage to surrender and stop the bloodshed—a statement that, regardless of intent, serves Russian strategic objectives by undermining Ukrainian resolve and Western support.

The Outside Approach: Social and Mainstream Media Manipulation

How do these tactics portray themselves in our own societies? How do we know what to look for when deciding whether something is disinformation or not? By design, it's not clear. Putin aims to attack from both outside Western society and from within to spread disinformation.

The outside approach is characterized through the use of mainstream and social media. Social media at the best of times is often a fight to distinguish reality from fiction, due to the anonymity provided by the internet, alongside people generally not having enough time in their lives to fact-check every social media post they read or headline they scan. This is used to Russia's advantage, spreading, identifying and amplifying narratives that gain traction to help Russia's cause.

A good example is Anastasiya Shteinhauz and her father Oleksiy Reznikov, Ukraine's former defence minister, both of whom were targeted with false claims on TikTok that went viral at the end of 2023. In one fell swoop, such a campaign undermined the Western populace's faith in Ukraine's ongoing fight against corruption and discredited a high-profile Ukrainian political figure. Not everyone who saw those claims will see content later telling them the claims were false.

Over time, this saturation of the informational environment worms its way into the minds of Western people and eventually into the national narrative by breaking into the mainstream media. This lends a level of credibility to these claims that they don't deserve, and from there, they find their way into political circles where they can become truly damaging. A good example from March 2024 alone is the recent campaign that has taken off among French populists that the sanctions against Russia are harming Europe more than Russia, which is demonstrably false.

Mainstream media also plays its part directly. Tucker Carlson's interview with President Putin has been viewed millions of times, whilst prime time viewing is afforded to Russian sycophants like Alexander Dugin while his influence in Russia itself is minimal. The benefits to this strategy for Russia is that Vladimir Putin doesn't have to lift a finger. Once a false narrative reaches critical mass through social or mainstream media, the West does all the work for him, amplifying and legitimizing Russian talking points through its own trusted institutions and media figures.

The Inside Approach: Infiltration and Institutional Penetration

The inside approach might be the most sinister of them all. How does Russia control the narrative from inside the very institutions it's trying to undermine? Putin's goal of destabilizing and undermining Western institutions has gone on long before Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, but since that time, an infiltration campaign of pro-Russian actors across the world has sought to do just that. Western charities, academia, political parties, legal professionals and more are all now majorly influenced by Russian infiltration campaigns.

We are all aware of the 2016 US Presidential election and the interference Russia was purported to have had. The reality is Moscow's manipulation and infiltration has spread globally, having sought to influence other nations through payment, threats and spying. The examples of known Russian infiltration are numerous and alarming.

One example is Jan Marsalek, the Austrian former COO of the now defunct payment processing company WireCard, who at one stage was interested in purchasing Deutsche Bank. He was revealed to be a Russian spy and is now an international fugitive. He was reportedly recruited by the FSB in 2014.

Evgeny Lebedev, who sits in the British House of Lords, has a father who is a former KGB agent who met at-the-time foreign secretary and eventual Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2018. Lebedev has a 1% attendance record in the Lords and spends his time rubbing shoulders with high-society Britons as the owner of the Evening Standard and an investor in The Independent, two of the biggest news publications in the UK. After his peerage he stated: 'Is it not remarkable that the son of a KGB agent, and a first-generation immigrant to this country, has become such an assimilated and contributing member of British society? What a success for our system. Don't you think?' It makes you wonder whose system he is really referring to. Lebedev vehemently denies any links to the Putin regime.

In 2022, a Czech diplomat with top security clearance had been caught handing classified information over to the Russians. David Ballantyne Smith, a Russian spy working in the British embassy in Berlin, was jailed for at least 13 years in February 2023 for giving information to Moscow. In November 2023 it was revealed that the Russian embassy in Rome had taken out 4 million euros worth of cash since the war in Ukraine had begun.

Russia is also accused by US officials of an international ring of election interference, including the threatening of election workers in Eastern Europe, spreading false claims of voter fraud in the Middle East, and social media manipulation in the Americas. These are just a fraction of the examples of known Russian attempts to influence the informational environment in their favour and paint a stark picture of the connected global campaign Putin is waging against the West.

So while the troll farms play their part, the strategy is far more widespread and ominous than it initially appears. As Josep Borrell, the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, states: 'Russia accompanies its illegal war against the Ukrainian people with (an) information war and aggressive war propaganda on a global scale.'

Russia's Domestic Information Control

Moscow itself has a vice grip on the informational environment within its borders. Foreign ownership of media outlets is limited, rebroadcasting licences have been withdrawn, and independent sources of news curtailed. Russian television paints an alternate picture of reality, school textbooks are censored, and even the relatively free internet is also slowly being brought under control.

Vladimir Putin has just secured his 5th term as president in an entirely unfree and unfair election in an inevitable landslide where his biggest opponent Alexei Navalny recently lost his life whilst imprisoned in Siberia. Winning an election, even with a guaranteed outcome, helps in lending legitimacy to the Kremlin regime. This tells you all you need to know about how important the Kremlin sees controlling the narrative is, as they know how damaging it could be to their own regime if used against them.

The fact that Putin goes to such extraordinary lengths to control information within Russia—where he already has near-total power—demonstrates that he understands the genuine threat that free information poses to authoritarian regimes. This understanding informs his strategy against the West: if information can threaten his grip on power at home, it can certainly be weaponized to undermine his adversaries abroad.

The West's Inadequate Response

As we've established what information warfare is, what Russia's objectives are, what tactics they use and how widespread it is, the question remains: What are NATO and Western-backed democracies doing to combat Russia's strategy of information warfare?

The short answer, which may shock you, is not much.

The fallout over Russia's purported influence during the 2016 US Presidential election has not been sufficiently addressed. Facebook admitted that between 30 and 126 million Americans may have seen some 80,000 posts written by Russian-backed pages, but tried to downplay the level of Russian influence overall by stating this is a small minority of total posts on the platform. The West's bans of Russian state news networks, Russia Today and Sputnik, have proved ineffective, as both remain easily accessible across the internet.

In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance board was shuttered in August 2022 following political infighting. A 2020 report from the UK's intelligence services stated that Russian interference in the country is 'the new normal.' Money and resources are actually being scaled back as Russia ramps up its campaigns.

The United States' recently passed 'Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act' may have a positive effect, however we know that Kremlin backed disinformation campaigns are far more exhaustive than the lone use of social media. When it comes to information warfare, the West and The Kremlin are scarcely playing the same game, let alone by the same rules.

Therein lacks a concerted and joined-up effort across the Western world to combat Russian disinformation campaigns. Many Western nations share military information or intelligence relating to the operation of Russian spies, but have yet to formulate a working strategy that can stop Russia from exploiting the weakness in their institutions through their own people. Russia is deliberately using the West's greatest self-proclaimed asset—its freedom of speech and its freedom of press—against itself whilst Western liberal democracies continue to sleepwalk into the same crises again and again.

The Future Threat: AI-Supercharged Disinformation

The future is potentially even more menacing. With the recent explosion in artificial intelligence technology, there is the potential for Russian disinformation campaigns to become supercharged. AI can generate convincing fake images, videos, and text at scale, making it exponentially easier to flood the information environment with false narratives. Deepfakes of political leaders, fabricated documents, and synthetic social media personas could become indistinguishable from reality, further eroding the public's ability to discern truth from fiction.

Many in the West are clear they do not want outright war against Russia, but it could be argued that Russia and the West are already at war. Western weapons are being used in Ukraine while Russian information warfare ravages its enemies at home and abroad uncontested. The West must act before it is too late.

And thus, we return to that original quote, this time correctly attributed to Jonathon Swift, providing a key reminder of what the consequences of losing the information war to Russia could be. Swift writes: 'Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.'

The warning is clear: by the time Western societies fully recognize and counter the extent of Russian information warfare, the damage may already be irreversible. The narratives will have taken hold, the institutions will have been undermined, and the political will to resist may have been eroded from within. The information war is happening now, and the West's response will determine whether democratic societies can preserve their ability to distinguish truth from falsehood in an age of unprecedented information manipulation.

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FAQ

What is information warfare?

Information warfare is a form of conflict based on the manipulation, influence and use of information to further one's own political outcomes. Crucially, it can be conducted without a shot ever being fired. It can be used to gain an informational advantage over opponents, influence a government's actions in one's favour, or manipulate citizens into believing false truths.

Why does Russia use information warfare instead of conventional military conflict?

Putin knows that if Russia tried to reshape the international order by force against NATO, the ensuing conflict would be overwhelmingly bad for Russia, potentially ending in nuclear war. Therefore, Russia must fight asymmetrically through information warfare—cloak and dagger rather than shells and bullets—to undermine Western institutions, spread panic, and engender distrust in liberal democracies.

What are the main tactics Russia uses in information warfare?

Russia uses both external and internal approaches. External tactics include social media manipulation, troll farms, botnets, mainstream media influence (like Tucker Carlson's Putin interview), and amplifying false narratives. Internal tactics involve infiltration through spies, political influence, payments, threats, and penetration of Western institutions including charities, academia, political parties, legal professionals, and media organizations.

How does Russia's information warfare strategy differ in peacetime versus wartime?

According to NATO's handbook on Russian disinformation, peacetime is characterized by more covert measures like espionage, reconnaissance and maneuvering secretly to gain advantage in the information space—similar to the USSR during the Cold War. Wartime involves more aggressive and direct tactics including discrediting leadership, intimidating military personnel and civilians, falsification of events, and cyber-attacks.

What is the 'outside approach' to Russian disinformation?

The outside approach uses mainstream and social media to spread disinformation. Russia spreads, identifies and amplifies narratives that gain traction to help their cause. False claims on platforms like TikTok can go viral, undermining trust and discrediting figures. Over time, this saturation worms into Western minds and eventually breaks into mainstream media, lending undeserved credibility and finding its way into political circles where it becomes truly damaging.

What is the 'inside approach' to Russian disinformation?

The inside approach involves infiltration of Western institutions from within. Since 2014, pro-Russian actors have infiltrated Western charities, academia, political parties, legal professionals, and media through payment, threats, and spying. Examples include Russian spies in diplomatic positions, media owners with KGB connections, and compromised officials passing classified information to Moscow.

What are some specific examples of Russian infiltration in the West?

Examples include Jan Marsalek (Austrian WireCard COO revealed as Russian spy), Evgeny Lebedev (son of former KGB agent who sits in British House of Lords and owns major UK news publications), a Czech diplomat with top security clearance caught passing information to Russia, David Ballantyne Smith (Russian spy in British embassy in Berlin jailed for 13 years), and the Russian embassy in Rome withdrawing 4 million euros in cash since the Ukraine war began.

How does Russia control information within its own borders?

Moscow has a vice grip on the informational environment within Russia. Foreign ownership of media outlets is limited, rebroadcasting licenses have been withdrawn, and independent news sources are curtailed. Russian television paints an alternate picture of reality, school textbooks are censored, and even the relatively free internet is slowly being brought under control. In occupied Ukraine, children are taught that their country does not exist.

Sources

About the Author

Jackson Reed

Jackson Reed creates and presents analysis focused on military doctrine, strategic competition, and conflict dynamics.

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