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A powerful Russian weapon against the West: the spread of false stories

 
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a State Council Presidium meeting on steps to give a boost to Russia’s health resorts in the resort town of Belokurikha, Altai region, about 3,000 kilometers (1,850 miles) east of Moscow, Russia, Friday, Aug. 26, 2016. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP) XAZ102
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a State Council Presidium meeting on steps to give a boost to Russia’s health resorts in the resort town of Belokurikha, Altai region, about 3,000 kilometers (1,850 miles) east of Moscow, Russia, Friday, Aug. 26, 2016. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP) XAZ102
Published Aug. 29, 2016

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — With a vigorous national debate under way on whether Sweden should enter a military partnership with NATO, officials in Stockholm suddenly encountered an unsettling problem: a flood of distorted and outright false information on social media, confusing public perceptions of the issue.

The claims were alarming: If Sweden, a non-NATO member, signed the deal, the alliance would stockpile secret nuclear weapons on Swedish soil; NATO could attack Russia from Sweden without government approval; NATO soldiers, immune from prosecution, could rape Swedish women without fear of criminal charges.

They were all false, but the disinformation had begun spilling into the news media, and as the defense minister, Peter Hultqvist, traveled the country to promote the pact, he was repeatedly grilled about the bogus stories.

"People were not used to it, and they got scared," said Marinette Nyh Radebo, Hultqvist's spokeswoman.

As often happens in such cases, Swedish officials were never able to pin down the source of the false reports. But numerous analysts and experts in U.S. and European intelligence point to Russia as the prime suspect, noting that preventing NATO expansion is a centerpiece of the foreign policy of President Vladimir Putin, who invaded Georgia in 2008 largely to forestall that possibility.

In Crimea, eastern Ukraine and now Syria, Putin has flaunted a modernized and more muscular military. But he lacks the economic strength and overall might to openly confront NATO, the European Union or the United States. Instead, he has invested heavily in a program of "weaponized" information, using a variety of means to sow doubt and division. The goal is to weaken cohesion among member states, stir discord in their domestic politics and blunt opposition to Russia.

"Moscow views world affairs as a system of special operations, and very sincerely believes that it itself is an object of Western special operations," said Gleb Pavlovsky, who helped establish the Kremlin's information machine before 2008. "I am sure that there are a lot of centers, some linked to the state, that are involved in inventing these kinds of fake stories."

The planting of false stories is nothing new; the Soviet Union devoted considerable resources to that during the ideological battles of the Cold War. Now, though, disinformation is regarded as an important aspect of Russian military doctrine, and it is being directed at political debates in target countries with far greater sophistication and volume than in the past.

The flow of misleading and inaccurate stories is so strong that both NATO and the EU have established special offices to identify and refute disinformation, particularly claims emanating from Russia.

The Kremlin's clandestine methods have surfaced in the United States, too, U.S. officials say, identifying Russian intelligence as the likely source of leaked Democratic National Committee emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

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The Kremlin uses both conventional media — Sputnik, a news agency, and RT, a television outlet — and covert channels, as in Sweden, that are almost always untraceable.

Russia exploits both approaches in a comprehensive assault, Wilhelm Urme, a spokesman for the Swedish Security Service, said this year when presenting the agency's annual report. "We mean everything from Internet trolls to propaganda and misinformation spread by media companies like RT and Sputnik," he said.

The fundamental purpose of dezinformatsiya, or Russian disinformation, experts said, is to undermine the official version of events — even the very idea that there is a true version of events — and foster policy paralysis.

Disinformation most famously succeeded in early 2014 with the initial obfuscation about deploying Russian forces to seize Crimea. That summer, Russia pumped out a dizzying array of theories about the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, blaming the CIA and, most outlandishly, Ukrainian fighter pilots who had mistaken the airliner for the Russian presidential aircraft.

The cloud of stories helped veil the simple truth that poorly trained insurgents had accidentally downed the plane with a missile supplied by Russia.

Moscow denies using disinformation to influence Western public opinion and tends to label accusations of either overt or covert threats as "Russophobia."

"There is an impression that, like in a good orchestra, many Western countries every day accuse Russia of threatening someone," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a recent ministry briefing.

Tracing individual strands of disinformation is difficult, but in Sweden and elsewhere, experts have detected a characteristic pattern that they tie to Kremlin-generated disinformation campaigns.

"The dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on Russia state media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that kind of context," said Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer.

"Then the fake document becomes the source of a news story distributed on far-left or far-right-wing websites," he said. "Those who rely on those sites for news link to the story, and it spreads. Nobody can say where they come from, but they end up as key issues in a security policy decision."

Although the topics may vary, the goal is the same, Lindberg and others suggested. "What the Russians are doing is building narratives; they are not building facts," he said. "The underlying narrative is, 'Don't trust anyone.' "

The weaponization of information is not some project devised by a Kremlin policy expert but is an integral part of Russian military doctrine — what some senior military figures call a "decisive" battlefront.

"The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness," Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, wrote in 2013.

A prime Kremlin target is Europe, where the rise of the populist right and declining support for the EU create an ever more receptive audience for Russia's conservative, nationalistic and authoritarian approach under Putin. Last year, the European Parliament accused Russia of "financing radical and extremist parties" in its member states, and in 2014 the Kremlin extended an $11.7 million loan to the National Front, the extreme-right party in France.

"The Russians are very good at courting everyone who has a grudge with liberal democracy, and that goes from extreme right to extreme left," said Patrik Oksanen, an editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper group MittMedia. The central idea, he said, is that "liberal democracy is corrupt, inefficient, chaotic and, ultimately, not democratic."

Another message, largely unstated, is that European governments lack the competence to deal with the crises they face, particularly immigration and terrorism, and that their officials are all U.S. puppets.

In Germany, concerns over immigrant violence grew after a 13-year-old Russian-German girl said she had been raped by migrants. A report on Russian state television furthered the story. Even after the police debunked the claim, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov continued to chastise Germany.

In Britain, analysts said, the Kremlin's English-language news outlets heavily favored the campaign for the country to leave the EU, despite claims of objectivity.