I went to Ukraine. Here’s what the trip taught me about Russia’s most destructive weapon
A day after the city of Lviv was hit by Russian artillery fire, I crossed the Polish border into the largest metropolitan community of western Ukraine with a small group of American political operatives. I was a long way from my home in Sacramento, and we were there to build a coalition of people to fight for democracy.
On our first night, we found ourselves huddled in the darkened apartment of two married academics, discussing their work and determining how we could help them and others. Between air raid sirens, our new friends shared their research on how Russia’s state information and media dominate the minds of its citizens. This is how Russia has built and maintained support for its invasion of Ukraine.
It’s been a decades-long process methodically employing messages of fear and nationalism into a toxic stew that made communicating objective facts extraordinarily difficult. Frankly, what these Ukrainian academics found was eerily reminiscent of the misinformation and conspiracy theories employed by right-wing media in the United States.
We spent 10 days in Ukraine relaying what we had learned as the Republican co-founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. But we were also there to learn about some of the most innovative data and analytical work being done in the first major war of the digital age.
What we learned was both clear and ominous: The expert disinformation methods used by Russian intelligence agencies are being exported abroad as an emerging tactic of cyberwarfare.
Ukraine is not only the battlefield of the first European war since WWII; it is also where this century’s balance of power is being defined.
The consequences of this war will not be limited by geography and military might alone. Democracies must also learn to withstand authoritarian attacks spread on digital platforms. The attacks are fueled by data and analytic work designed not only to divide countries internally but also to propel citizens toward hatred and violence against other citizens with whom they disagree ideologically.
Sophisticated misinformation ecosystems give rise to conspiracy theories that undermine traditional institutions and employ anti-democratic online threats and intimidation to stifle dissent.
This war did not begin with the Russian advance deeper into Ukraine in February nor with the Russian assault on Crimea in 2014. It has unfolded globally for more than a decade, and it has been far more successful than most realize.
The war Russian President Vladimir Putin has been waging is an information war designed to divide and destabilize democracies where the open exchange of speech is a cornerstone of governance. We must never lose sight of the fact that our own country has been a front in Putin’s war, and in that regard, he has likely succeeded beyond his own best estimates.
Russian money and influence have infiltrated our government beyond the illegal interference in recent presidential elections. Right-wing movements in the United States include well-documented Russian financial involvement in groups such as the National Rifle Association and the anti-vaccine movement.
The Russians have correctly theorized that democracies may not be well-suited to the digital age, in which information — both true and false — vastly outpaces the speed at which government can respond to it.
The professors we met in Ukraine were afraid of the bombs being dropped on their community by Russian forces. But they were even more afraid that Western democracies would not be quick enough to recognize the danger of Russian disinformation.
Ukraine could hold back Russian tanks as a unified nation. But it will be up to Western countries to counter the Russian information onslaught dividing us by keeping us fighting among ourselves.
