The Czech President Václav Havel shared Vidins’ claim, arguing that Russia’s operations in Chechnya should be identified as the “killing of a nation.” Gavel asserted that the Russian war in Chechnya had nothing to do with countermeasures against terrorism.
23 Quoted in Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 90.
24 Huntington, 20.
25 Ibid., 125.
26 Ibid., 130.
27 Richard Stengel, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019), cover page.
28 The term “political warfare” was outlined in George Kennan’s 1948 Policy Planning memo. It reads: “Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace. In broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures, and ‘white’ propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, and ‘black’ psychological warfare.” See “George F. Kennan on Organizing Political Warfare,” History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Wilson Center, 30 April 1948, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/114320.pdf?v=941dc9ee5c6e51333ea9ebbbc9104e8c (accessed 18 June 2020); also quoted in Stengel, Information Wars, 139.
29 See, for instance, David V. Gioe, Richard Lovering, and Tyler Pachesny, “The Soviet Legacy of Russian Active Measures: New Vodka from Old Stills?,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 33, no. 3 (2020): 1–26.
30 Rid, Active Measures, 13.
31 Vladimir Putin, “The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II,” The National Interest, 18 June 2020, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/vladimir-putin-real-lessons-75th-anniversary-world-war-ii-162982 (accessed 19 June 2020).
32 Shane Harris, @ Wars: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex (New York: An Eamon Dolan Book, 2014), 226.
33 Stengel, Information Wars, 289.
34 Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda, xi.
35 Huntington, 156.
36 Heidi Blake, From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin’s Secret War on the West (New York: Mulholland Books, 2019).
37 Oleg Kalugin, Spymaster: My Thirty-two Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 443.
38 Kalugin, Spymaster, 442.
39 Agnotology refers to the “study of the deliberate manufacture of ignorance or doubt, including the spread of selective, inaccurate or misleading scientific data.” See John Launer, “The Production of Ignorance,” Postgraduate Medical Journal 96, no. 1133 (2020): 179–80; also available at https://pmj.bmj.com/content/postgradmedj/96/1133/179.full.pdf (accessed 19 June 2020).
40 Theodor W. Adorno, “Messages in a Bottle,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2012), 35.
41 Alexander J. Motyl, “Putin’s Russia as a Fascist Political System,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 49, no. 1 (2016): 25–36.
42 U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, From Competition to Collaboration: Strengthening the U.S.-Russian Relationship: Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, 111th Cong, 1st Sess., 25 February 2009 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2009); also available at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-111hhrg47667/html/CHRG-111hhrg47667.htm (accessed 20 June 2020); see also Ashish Kumar Sen, “Will Sanctions on Russia, Weapons for Ukrainians, Keep Putin at Bay?,” Atlantic Council, 7 April 2015, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/will-sanctions-on-russia-weapons-for-ukrainians-keep-putin-at-bay/ (accessed 20 June 2020).
The Many Faces of the New Information Warfare
Marcel H. Van Herpen
In the last ten to fifteen years the world has been confronted with a new phenomenon—information warfare. It is called a “war” and sometimes, as was the case in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia, part of a real kinetic war. However, in most cases this war is being fought in areas of the world which are at peace. For this reason, a new term has been coined—a “hybrid war,” a state between war and peace that in many respects resembles the Cold War. At times, a conflict takes on the character of a kinetic war, fought with soldiers and weapons. Yet, more often than not, the kinetic aspect of military action, involving lethal force, is missing from the picture. One of the features of a hybrid war is secretiveness: the aggressors try to conceal their involvement. They do not acknowledge that they are waging a war. For this reason, for the aggressors, plausible deniability is important. Plausible deniability means that the attacking party is able to deny its knowledge of or responsibility for hostile actions conducted by its agencies or by third parties under its control, such as so-called “separatists” in Ukraine’s occupied Donbas region, manipulated and supported by the Russian Federation. Although there is ample evidence to suggest that that these separatists are controlled, instructed, armed, and manipulated by the Russian Federation, the Kremlin stubbornly denies its involvement in the region, arguing that this is not a war of aggression, but a civil war, waged by “separatists” who refused to accept a new, illegal, and “fascist” government in Kyiv, installed after the Maidan revolution.
“Hybrid war” and “plausible deniability” are the two characteristics of new information warfare, a war that is hidden and non-declared, in which the aggressor denies responsibility for the casualties and damage this war causes. Often, the damage is substantial. For instance, cyberattacks might bring the economies of entire countries to a standstill, paralyzing electricity grids and the air traffic, and putting people’s lives in jeopardy in dysfunctional hospitals. Manipulating public opinion and meddling in the electoral process might have even more damaging and enduring consequences. These actions might undermine democratic governments and challenge the values on which these democracies are built.
