Fake news surrounding the war in Ukraine
The use of fake news in the Ukraine War has been rampant since the beginning of the conflict and has provided some interesting insight into the future role the internet and more importantly social media will play in future conflicts. Sun Tzu is quoted as saying “warfare is the art of deception”, and it is this aspect of warfare the Russians have mastered with their massive “troll farms” on social media whose sole purpose is to complicate issues by spewing mass amounts of inflammatory misinformation to spread discourse and arguments amongst people, wasting time that they could spend formulating a response to whatever is happening. This method of Russian fake news has seen prevalent use long before the Ukrainian War with speculation and ongoing investigation into coordinated Russian efforts to spread false information as part of a larger alleged attempt to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. These bot farms or web brigades are state-sponsored teams of people who are given specific instructions on what pro-Russian narrative to spin. In the past, these Web Brigades primarily waited on message boards and other discussion cites and would wait for something negative to be said about a Russian leader or criticize an action undertaken by the Russian Federation, but the war in Ukraine has seen the focus of these trolls in demonizing the Ukrainian people, falsifying Russian casualty numbers and “debunking” Ukrainian military successes. At the start of the war, the Russians were claiming many false things about Ukraine to justify their “incursion” into the country. The largest of these claims was that the military operation in Ukraine was to “de-nazify” the country and that Ukraine was not properly liberated during World War two and that they must liberate the people of Ukraine from the Nazis. This more recently has taken a far darker turn with this false claim of widespread fascism in Ukraine is now being used to justify the war crimes it’s committed against civilians and more worrying still are multiple reports made by these bots that are suggesting that it might be necessary for ethnic cleansing to occur to properly guarantee total de-Nazification. This is especially worrying since they made these statements weeks before the missile attacks targeting a train station and a children’s hospital which could show that they are acting on these claims they put out about every Ukrainian being “tainted by fascism” and needing to be destroyed because of it. They also in turn immediately call fake news the second these events are reported they are decried as being fake news in a gross display of hypocrisy.
The second topic that these bot farms like to argue is against any proof that the Ukrainian military is successfully inflicting losses on Russian troops. Early on this began by denying the reported casualty figures being inflicted on the Russian forces by saying they were just NATO lies and maintaining that casualties were In the low hundreds at best, when in fact by the second week of fighting liberal estimates for the Russian army were upwards to 10,000 as of now estimates places this number more closely to 15,000. It was important to the Russian disinformation program that the casualty reports low to confuse and demoralize the Ukrainian defenders by sowing distrust with any provided number and demoralizing them by making it seem like the war is going worse than it is. This fake news is also important to feed to the Russian people, so they don’t become war-weary too quickly which would be exasperated reports of lots of Russian soldiers dying in an already unpopular war. This has proven challenging to do however because the internet has been filled with images of burned-out tanks and dead Russian soldiers, but this hasn’t stopped the troll farms from instantly “debunking” them by claiming it's photoshopped or a video clip pulled from a video game. This was most famously seen with the treatment of the Ghost of Kyiv, who is a Ukrainian fighter piolet who has become famous internationally for shooting down many Russian jets within a short period of the war. The Russians soon became nervous about the moral impact his story was having on both sides and began looking for any way to discredit his story. This was attempted by claiming all footage of the Ghost came from a video game and then claiming that he had been shot down and killed but all were soon disproven. However, this leads to the Ukrainian role in spreading fake news, with speculation as to whether the Ghost of Kyiv is an invention by the Ukrainian armed forces or not. Creating a false hero to rally behind is not an unheard-of thing in war and can give the people of a warring nation the rallying cry needed to continue a desperate defense, which very well might be the case with the Ghost of Kyiv. This continues using Tik Tok by the Ukrainian armed forces, which have recently utilized the popular media platform to bring awareness to their struggle and hopefully keep national attention on the conflict which could mean the world is different when it comes to foreign aid which has proven vital to the defense of the nation.
In closing the prevalence of fake news being produced surrounding the Ukrainian war has created a sort of conundrum, despite living in the age of information it is almost impossible to access anything without vigorous scrutiny first. The Russian government has long been mastering this form of information suppression by permeating the spaces with fake news believable enough to cause doubt or disbelief in other sources.