What is information warfare and why Ukraine is losing it

When people hear the word “war”, they immediately think of killings on the battlefield, missile strikes, and destruction. However, the aggression of one state against another doesn’t start with that.

To get an ordinary person to kill someone (and we’re not talking about pathological murderers, but average individuals), there needs to be an emotional charge—a feeling that triggers this unnatural urge in a normal person. There also has to be moral justification—an explanation for why killing, in this context, is not only acceptable but necessary.

The creation of this emotional backdrop and the imposition of “logical justification” for killing in the public consciousness are the first steps and main indicators of a state's preparation for war.

In practice, this is reflected in narratives like the infamous "crucified boy" of Donbas, putin's pseudo-historical essays, and the propaganda of slogans such as: "We’re not taking what belongs to others, we’re reclaiming our own", or "We’re protecting our own" (whether it’s Christians, Orthodox believers, the working class, fulfilling international duties in Afghanistan, russians, or russian speakers, “Syria is our sister state”, etc.).

In other words, military actions are always preceded by an information war, both on the adversary’s territory and within one's own country. The difference is that in one's own country, propaganda is used, while on the territory of a potential victim, information and psychological special operations are deployed.

Propaganda

The goal of propaganda is to impose the political leadership’s interpretation of events and facts on public opinion. The target of propaganda is mainly one's own population, because propaganda, like advertising, only works when there is massive exposure to the audience, meaning the repeated repetition of the same narratives. And this is usually only possible in territories where the government controls the media.

The essence of propaganda was quite openly described by top kremlin propagandist Olga Skabeeva during her speech this year at the russian Military Historical Society.

"It doesn't completely matter what exactly is happening. The same event might occur, but the interpretation of that event is what matters. This is what, in the modern world, is called the era of post-truth—where truth exists, or perhaps it doesn’t. Meaning, it’s not important that a strike was carried out... What matters is the perspective we form around this strike, or the perspective they form for us. Their interpretation of our strike in the Kharkiv oblast is a show of aggression. For us, everything we’re doing in the Kharkiv oblast is creating a sanitary zone. And if we consider ourselves patriots, it’s better to align with the state's point of view and work for the state. Some might call it propaganda, but it’s propaganda of common sense, propaganda of your country’s interests, even if it’s an aggressive imposition of your country’s interests”.

Naturally, the propagandist is being disingenuous when she equates the interests of the country (i.e., the people) with the interests of the state, meaning the ruling political elite. It's highly unlikely that the russian people were interested in the destructive processes that the war with Ukraine triggered in their country. However, the so-called "special military operation" fully served putin’s interests, as he saw it both as a tool to maintain his power and as a mechanism to realize his “historic mission”.

The same can be said of Ukrainian propaganda. When Ukrainian TV propagandists hammered the slogan “Believe in the Ukrainian Armed Forces” into people’s minds from every outlet, they were acting in the interests of Ukraine’s political leadership, which at the time hoped to resolve the war quickly without involving the broader public, so that these masses would later vote for them in elections.

But despite its seemingly patriotic message, this mantra functioned as a demobilizer and pacifier for society. After all, faith is a passive concept; it doesn’t imply action. In essence, through its propaganda, the government was telling Ukrainians: relax, we’ll handle everything ourselves—just support us if you want peace.

As a result, the society that had been mobilized to fight the enemy in the early days of the war relaxed and lost its sense of unity with its army. And when the government realized that it couldn't cope without the help of the public and began to demand not just faith but active participation and sacrifices, the demobilized and demotivated society responded with draft evasion, sabotage, and finger-pointing.

This example demonstrates that propaganda, even the so-called "patriotic" kind, rarely serves the true interests of the country. More often than not, it is a tool to further the interests of the ruling elite. And these interests frequently do not align with those of the nation as a whole.

The slogan "Believe in the Ukrainian Armed Forces" is also an example of how short-sighted propaganda created a point of conflict between society and the state within Ukraine—a point that the enemy immediately exploited for its own information and psychological operations (PSYOP).

Information and psychological operations

The U.S. Department of Defense defines PSYOP as "planned actions to convey specific information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, critical thinking, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, or individuals".

From this definition, it's clear that it can have both long-term (strategic) and short-term (tactical) objectives.

Here, let’s turn once again to the candid statements from russian experts in this field. In March of this year, Dmitry Rogozin, the "senator" of the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia oblast, former russian representative to NATO, and ex-head of "Roscosmos", explained the essence and significance of information and psychological operations to students at moscow State Institute of International Relations) of the russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"Victory in war is primarily achieved by discrediting the political and military leadership of the enemy, presenting them to their own people as unworthy individuals who ‘accidentally ended up at the top of power in this country’. These are people who ‘are driving their population to certain death, to the slaughter’. This is a very important method.

The second way to discredit the enemy's political and military leadership is to accuse them of corruption, using a massive amount of deepfakes to prove that a particular person is simply a thief, a corrupt figure, and therefore untrustworthy. This is mostly used against the most popular figures among the enemy's population.

Of course, the method of intimidation is also used—demonstrating one's own strength, the uncompromising nature of one’s army in achieving set goals, and so on".

As we can see, Rogozin places the importance of information warfare for defeating the enemy even higher than that of military force. This makes sense because weapons are held by people, and it’s their psychological and ideological beliefs that motivate them to wield (or refuse to wield) these weapons. These beliefs can be influenced through information and psychological operations.

Russia has been conducting its PSYOPs in Ukraine since 1991. This includes the miners' strikes in the early '90s (their leader, Mikhail Krylov, recently died in moscow), supporting the "pro-russian" Kuchma to oust the "independent" Kravchuk in 1994, pushing for Crimean separatism with Meshkov, interfering in the Yushchenko-Yanukovych elections, the "gas wars", and so on.

These operations intensified after 2014, when the information war shifted into a hybrid stage, serving not only russia's political interests in Ukraine but also its military objectives. An example that immediately comes to mind is the use of "military lexicon" like "bombing Donbas", "blockade of Donbas", etc.

In the territories of the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, military actions were conducted by both sides: russia (along with its proxies "DNR"/"LNR") and Ukraine. The Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) was declared not because of protests but after russian "volunteers" led by Strelkov captured the Ukrainian city of Sloviansk. Yet, according to russian propagandists, it was only Ukraine that was "bombing"...

"Blockade", if you look it up in a dictionary, means "encirclement, isolation". Of course, Ukraine’s cessation of trade with the territories de facto occupied by russia in 2017 was not an encirclement or isolation. However, the word "blockade" carries a strong association for all post-Soviet people with mass starvation and the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Leningrad. That's precisely why it became the main label for this event in russian and even some Ukrainian media. Remember Skabeeva’s words: it doesn't matter what actually happened—“what matters is how we, or they for us, shape the perception of it”, i.e., which interpretation of the event will be cemented in public consciousness.

Interestingly, the mere fact that russia started using "war language" after 2014 is one of the signs that, even back then, moscow was treating the events in Donbas as an occupation, albeit masking it behind the Minsk agreements. This is confirmed by Rogozin’s remarks during his university lecture: "Using war language is an essential condition for deploying armed forces beyond national borders".

As we can see, information warfare always precedes armed aggression and accompanies it. By identifying its signs, one can predict the next phases the enemy is preparing: hybrid war and military aggression. That’s why it's crucial to begin the defense already at the stage of informational aggression—actively countering it on the enemy’s territory with one’s own PSYOPs and preparing the armed forces for invasion.

Unfortunately, Ukraine not only lost the information war preceding the invasion—it didn't even fight it.

Yes, there was the ban on VKontakte and Odnoklassniki russian social media platforms, the blocking of russian resources in May 2017, but these were more like localized defense measures. Wars, however, are always won by those who have the political will and resources to go on the offensive, by those who can influence the situation behind enemy lines. Can anyone cite an example of a successful Ukrainian information operation on russian territory aimed at dismantling the myths about us that the russian authorities were feeding potential volunteers, soldiers, conscripts, and the general public?

Perhaps there were some localized operations, but nothing that could influence mass consciousness (as russia does in Ukraine)—certainly not. And the reasons for this can be pinpointed immediately: a lack (at that time) of political will and resources—both financial and human.

This, in turn, stemmed from Ukraine's leadership not understanding the significance of the informational component as the first stage of aggression. Worse still, even now, nearing the end of the third year of open military aggression by russia, Ukraine has not realized that preventing a russian from picking up a weapon is just as important as sending an unprepared Ukrainian to fight against that russian.

Russia sees things differently. Here are some figures from global media publications confirming that, unlike Ukraine, the kremlin understands the value of words.

Reuters, citing an anonymous source from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), reported that since the conflict began in 2022, Ukrainian intelligence has shut down 86 russian bot farms located within Ukraine (!). Collectively, these controlled 3 million social media accounts with an audience of 12 million people...

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung revealed that the russian agency "ASD", whose employees leave comments under posts from Ukrainian state institutions, law enforcement agencies, political figures, and Ukrainian media, posted nearly 34 million comments in just three months—from January to April 2024.

In 2022 alone, NGO "Dialogue"—an organization sanctioned by the UK and the US for spreading kremlin disinformation—received 9 billion (!) rubles from the russian budget for its work.

Had Ukraine engaged in even a minimally comparable effort in the russian information space, it would have been impossible to hide.

If someone asks where Kyiv could find the money for this, the counter-question arises: where do the funds come from for military commissioners, medical commission members, and private suppliers providing the Armed Forces of Ukraine with weapons and UAVs? Perhaps it’s time to rethink the mobilization strategy?

But that’s a topic for another article. For now, I’ll provide an example of russian informational efforts in our media space that I personally encountered.

In less than 24 hours, my interview with "UkrLife" gathered 502 comments! And almost all of them were in the vein of: “Mr. Harmash is clearly not in his right mind, and it’s disgusting to listen to him!”. However, the next day, once the bots had fulfilled their quota, mostly different opinions began to appear.

To clarify—the main message of the interview was the necessity of stopping the occupation of our territories by the enemy through Chinese-Brazilian "peace initiatives", which involve a bilateral ceasefire. In my opinion, this should be done before the russians capture all of Donetsk oblast and push us out of the Kursk oblast. In this case, freezing the conflict would not only halt further occupation of Ukrainian territory but would also be a political defeat for putin—since it would imply that he failed to achieve any of the objectives of the "special military operation" and even lost legitimate russian territory.

Clearly, someone in moscow did not want this idea to gain traction in Ukraine. Thus, they employed the tactic of using mass influence against the individual. This technique was explained quite well in a lecture by "senator" Rogozin to students...

Key methods of information warfare

The former deputy chairman of russia's State Duma, and later russia’s representative to NATO in Brussels, shared with future russian diplomats a psychological experiment he participated in back during his school years.

In this experiment, a room with 9 "planted" participants was set up, and a 10th person—the target of psychological manipulation—was brought in. A person would walk in front of the group, and the participants were asked to give their impressions of him. The 9 planted individuals, following a prearranged script, would all give exclusively positive assessments, and the 10th person would inevitably align with their opinion. Then, the same individual would enter again, and the planted participants would suddenly switch to negative characterizations. As a result, the 10th person, influenced by the opinions of the nine, would also change his assessment to negative, despite the absurdity of the situation. This pattern was repeated with five different subjects.

"I was shocked at how the crowd, the collective consciousness, dominates the individual. How personal freedom and perception of the world fall under the control of the surrounding mass", - Rogozin remarked.

Indeed, the Internet holds vast amounts of information that a person simply cannot process to reach the truth or form an objective opinion. In this maze, people rely on commentators—the so-called experts, bloggers, or just those leaving comments under videos, like in the case of my interview. These are the ones shaping the opinion of the majority.

So, in today’s world, the truth itself doesn't matter as much as how a fact is interpreted by the majority. For this majority to interpret events in Ukraine’s favor, rather than russia’s, Ukraine needs not just cyber forces but also information warfare units. Such units could even employ those unwilling to pick up arms, with the added benefit of them paying the state for this form of "alternative service".

Another fundamental method at the core of information and psychological operations is to "create an artificial conflict between groups of people. Any potential fault line is sought out, such as issues of language or religion, and then radicalized into a large-scale conflict that benefits the kremlin".

This tactic was described by Denys Samyhin, an expert from the Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security.

Investigators analyzing the document leak mentioned earlier, related to russia’s "ASD", discovered the same strategy. In just three months, this agency posted 34 million comments on Ukrainian platforms. According to Sueddeutsche Zeitung: "russian analysts at 'ASD' meticulously study Ukraine’s information landscape, identify sensitive topics, and exploit them to polarize society".

Why are we losing...

Given knowledge of these methods of information aggression, it would seem logical for the Ukrainian state to work on eliminating potential fault lines and topics that polarize society, primarily those related to language and religion.

This doesn’t imply that we should stop exposing russian agents among the clergy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (moscow Patriarchate), but the Security Service of Ukraine could do its work without turning it into a media spectacle, and the authorities could refrain from politicizing the process with statements from western Ukrainian oblast councils about "banning" the "moscow church".

Additionally, state representatives might consider not referring to the native language of 40% of Ukrainian citizens as the "language of the occupier" and avoid equating ethnic russians in Ukraine with russian citizens—the people of the aggressor state.

Especially given that the main congregation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, as well as a significant portion of russian-speaking Ukrainians, live in areas currently affected by military actions.

By publicly and demonstratively attacking the religious beliefs and cultural characteristics of the local population, the state not only creates fertile ground for russian PSYOP but also reduces the loyalty of the citizens living in these regions toward the Ukrainian military.

When people feel that their values are under attack, they naturally begin to resist. This results in wait-and-see attitudes, collaborators, and voluntary informants for the enemy. In such cases, language and faith do not unite Ukrainians but divide them, and, more critically, they are directly putting Ukrainian soldiers at risk by encouraging locals to cooperate with russian "defenders" of their faith or language.

The fact that the state disregards the objective, historically established reality in southeastern Ukraine (even if it requires gradual change), while deepening “fault lines” and “societal polarization”, effectively plays into the enemy's hands in its information war against us.

Once again: the enemy bases its PSYOP efforts solely on real, existing points of conflict and fault lines in Ukraine. It's not putin creating them—we create them ourselves, through our intolerance and disrespect toward those Ukrainians who don’t fit our notions of patriotism or “Ukrainian-ness”. Thus, the most effective method of defense against russian information aggression is a targeted state policy aimed at easing and eliminating divisive issues, and a concerted effort by government institutions to prevent any signs of discrimination, xenophobia, or intolerance among Ukrainians toward one another.

Another fundamental ideological error that effectively nullifies Ukraine's ability to conduct strategic PSYOP on russian territory is equating russians with the russian government in our propaganda.

The only real actor capable of influencing putin’s regime is the russian people themselves. And this same people should be the main target of strategic PSYOP designed to influence russia’s political regime. However, when Ukraine, from the outset, declares its stance not as anti-putin but as anti-russian, this is immediately exploited by propagandists like Solovyov and Kiselyov. In doing so, Ukraine loses its chance to influence the russian population, and consequently, through them, the russian government.

In contrast to Kyiv, moscow consistently emphasizes that it is fighting not against Ukrainians but against the “Zelensky regime”, “Banderites”, and “neo-Nazis”. This allows it to garner passive or even active support among Ukrainians who do not identify with these labels.

To sum up, let me cite the words of Anton Vaino, the head of putin’s administration: “The war over the right to assign names to phenomena and events is the highest level of warfare”.

If Ukraine does not reach this level of understanding about the nature of the war, does not begin active information expansion onto the enemy’s territory, and does not balance its internal information policy, we will lose. It won’t matter how much weaponry or how many soldiers we mobilize, because ultimately, it is a person who holds the weapon. And that person needs motivation. Motivation is shaped by one’s attitude toward this war, which, in turn, is formed by information...

By Serhiy Harmash, OstroV