How Russian Hybrid Warfare Has Weaponized Disinformation

From The Daily Signal.com (Nov. 15):

KYIV, Ukraine—As the Russian shells and rockets rained down on them in the frontline town of Debaltseve in February 2015, Ukrainian troops began to receive curious, anonymous text messages on their cellphones.

“Your comrades nearby already left their positions, so you should leave yours as well,” one message read.

The messages also claimed that Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president at that time, as well as Ukrainian military commanders, had “betrayed” their soldiers.

The Ukrainian military later concluded that Russian military forces had taken over the local cellphone network with mobile jamming stations.

The text messages were part of a psychological operation against Ukrainian troops—not too different in its intent from dropping propaganda leaflets from airplanes, a psychological warfare technique that dates back to World War I as a way to demoralize troops.

“Fake news is a weapon,” my friend Viktor Kovalenko told me.

Kovalenko, who is a former journalist and a Ukrainian army combat veteran of the Debaltseve battle, added: “Via fake news, Russians wanted to defeat Ukrainians the same way … as by artillery and tanks.”

In Ukraine, Russian military forces have combined World War I and II era weapons and tactics—such as artillery bombardments, tank attacks, and trench warfare—with weapons unique to the 21st-century battlefield, such as cyberattacks and sophisticated social media propaganda campaigns.

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Using cyberwarfare and an empire of weaponized propaganda, Russia has embarked on a hybrid war blitz against Western democracies. Looking back, it’s clear that Ukraine was the opening salvo of Russia’s ongoing war against that American-led, democratic world order.

Russia has used the war in Ukraine as a testing ground for both its modern conventional and hybrid warfare doctrines, providing a case study for the new kinds of security threats the U.S. and its Western allies can anticipate from Moscow. [read more]

Disinformation campaigns could come from China, N. Korea, and other rogue states too not just Russia. Just to focus on Russia is stupid.