Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire

The modern Russian information warfare tradition distinguishes itself from its peers in other countries by the extensive use of such concepts as strategicheskaya maskirovka (strategic masking) and reflexive control. The highest cadres of Kremlin’s leadership have studied this science, including Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who has been in charge of the Russian defense industry since 2011. Rogozin comes from a family of Soviet military scientists, and was among the first seven persons sanctioned by the U.S. government following Crimea’s annexation in March 2014. In his writing he has analyzed the strategic masking concept, which involves the use of deception and manipulation of the enemy.⁹¹ According to Rogozin, strategic masking is devised by the highest politico-military levels and employs various military units to jam radios, spread disinformation via media, and manipulate the enemy into believing false reports of military movements.⁹² This has been demonstrated in the Ukrainian and Georgian wars where non-Russian media were immediately blocked in occupied territories and the strategic government and military communications of these countries were breached and impaired. Reflexive control is defined by Rogozin as a means of supplying an opponent with specially prepared information or disinformation to incline him to voluntarily make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action.⁹³ All this is accomplished while exploiting the moral, psychological, and other factors affecting the target.⁹⁴ In practice, these tactics can include lowering the morale of the opponent’s military or society and thus making them less likely to resist foreign military aggression.

Along with specialized institutions that focus on training information warfare specialists, Russia also operates institutions that are dedicated to manufacturing and spreading propaganda to mass audiences. In St. Petersburg, Russian businessmen run a bona fide internet comment factory, Internet Research LLC, employing about 250 people working twelve-hour shifts round the clock writing pro-Kremlin blogs. The connection of the comment factory with the Kremlin has not been proven, but then, such links are difficult to establish in many forms of information and cyber warfare.⁹⁵ The employees of Internet Research mostly work in the Russian blogging platform LiveJournal and a Facebookesque social network, Vkontakte.⁹⁶ Some write the posts, others comment on them. The content always focuses on praising Putin and his policies while condemning the West⁹⁷—for instance, with allegations of Ukraine being run by a pro-American Kiev junta or by pro-American Nazis.⁹⁸

In addition to a blogging factory, there is a perception that the Russian government operates an army of hackers who conduct cyber warfare campaigns supporting its foreign policy and military aims. Cyber warfare relies on computers and other electronic devices for hacking and damaging an enemy’s information systems and its strategic or tactical resources for purposes of espionage or sabotage. Indeed, many cyber security experts agree that since the 2000s Russia has acquired the greatest capability in the world for cyber warfare and uses it primarily for foreign policy aims, in contrast to the runner-up, China, which concentrates on economically motivated cyber espionage. Although the Kremlin denies it, Russia was the first in history to coordinate a cyber attack with a military campaign when its hackers reportedly worked alongside Russian military forces in their invasion of Georgia in 2008, targeting Georgian internet infrastructure.⁹⁹ Earlier in Estonia, in 2007, pro-Russia hackers carried out a highly similar DDoS (distributed denial of service) campaign against Estonian business and government during a diplomatic spat between Tallinn and Moscow.¹⁰⁰ Likewise, since 2014 pro-Russian hackers have been leading a cyber espionage campaign against the Ukrainian government and even against NATO.¹⁰¹

The Russian media are among the main actors disseminating Kremlin propaganda. From about 2004 onward, or essentially since Putin came to power, the Russian media rapidly became a tool controlled by the state. A 2014 book by the Russian-born British writer and television producer Peter Pomerantsev describes Putin’s authoritarian-style methods to establish the Kremlin’s complete control over the media and thereby to create an alternative reality.¹⁰² The three major Russian channels are owned either directly by the Kremlin or by state-owned companies, and Russia’s only independent television channel, TV Rain (Telekanal Dozhd), is facing enormous pressure from the Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications (Roskomnadzor).¹⁰³ Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press 2014 survey direly summarizes the situation as follows: