Ukraine goes on the ‘psyops’ offensive to weaken Russia
Ukrainian agents are conducting a “psyops” campaign to destabilise Russian society by stoking anti-immigrant sentiment after the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack, Kyiv's new director of information warfare told The Times.
Four men from Tajikistan have been charged with carrying out the massacre, causing a wave of xenophobia against Tajiks living in Russia, with reports in recent days of beatings and arson attacks as well as deportations and unlawful detentions.
Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, in which gunmen killed more than 140 people at the concert venue. Despite this, and western security agencies' intelligence to the contrary, the Kremlin has tried to blame Ukraine. Russia, a country made up of nearly 200 ethnic groups and 21 national republics, has a long history of oppressing the minority populations it has engulfed over centuries of expansion across Eurasia.
For Ukraine, this tension between Russia’s Slavic and non-Slavic ethnicities is “fertile ground” in which to exploit divisions and distrust among the Russian public, Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation (CCD), said.
By infiltrating local Russian Telegram chats, one of the few information spaces not controlled by the Kremlin, Ukrainian agents have been working to play ethnic groups off against each other. After video footage was leaked of Russian special forces cutting the ear off one of the suspects, the CCD sought to amplify expressions of sympathy for the terrorists among Telegram groups popular with Tajiks to turn them against the security services.
“[The terrorist attack] provoked a split between nationalities in Russia and of course it’s very beneficial for us to support any national splits there and to fuel them using information,” Kovalenko said. Among the messages being amplified were comments by Tajiks in Russia saying: “Let’s mobilise, we are not respected here, let’s do something with these awful police.”
After it was speculated online that the soldier who wielded the knife had been a Chechen, the Ukrainians seized the opportunity to intensify anti-Chechen animosity among ethnic Russians as well. “We’ve seen and amplified attempts to cause conflict with the Chechens, saying, ‘Chechens are everywhere in Moscow and they’ll cut up a Russian just like they did with the Tajik’,” Kovalenko said. “This was presented as being from Russians, who do not like Tajiks, but hate Chechens even more.”
The CCD, which has about 50 full-time analysts, answers to the National Security and Defence Council, the body responsible for Ukraine’s security services. It was founded in 2021 with the primary purpose of fighting Russian attempts to spread false information in Ukraine.
Speaking to the press for the first time since assuming the directorship at the beginning of this year, Kovalenko said the centre was increasingly taking a more offensive role by carrying out its own “psyops”, or psychological operations. “Russia is a colossus with clay feet that needs to be shaken from all sides if we are to win this war,” he said, at the centre's unmarked and unremarkable headquarters in Kyiv. “We have to shake it by any means necessary and information is critical to that.”
Long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow had been waging a campaign of disinformation against its neighbour.
The Kremlin recently harnessed artificial intelligence to do the work of dozens of human agents to spread fake posts.
Oleksiy Danilov, the recently departed head of the National Security and Defence Council, told The Times in February that Russian agents were spreading 166 million disinformation posts on Telegram, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X every week. –