War in Ukraine: the new faces of Russian online propaganda

It goes without saying: no war without propaganda. Since February 24, 2022, Russia has tried to justify the invasion of Ukraine by the supposed danger that the country would represent for its own security. Among the tools available to Vladimir Putin to profess this message are at the top of the list RT (ex-Russia Today) and Sputnik. A continuous news channel for the first, a press agency for the second, the two media were deployed several years ago to serve the interests of the Kremlin throughout the world. But the Russian offensive led to their banishment in the European Union, a strategic space if ever there was one. It was therefore necessary for the invader to bet on other routes.

Damien Liccia and Jean-Baptiste Delhomme, analysts at IDS Partners, vice-presidents of the Strategic Information Observatory, have mapped the evolution of Russian propaganda since this “deplatformization”, in a study published this Friday, December 23. Somewhat upset, this enterprise continues despite everything thanks to a myriad of sites and about 2000 very active channels on Telegram messaging, where nationalist bloggers, official bodies and local relays in Ukraine rub shoulders.

Decentralization

First lesson: in fact, propaganda has become decentralized. “The Russian blogosphere is taking an active part in the information war,” notes IDS Partners. The popularity of pro-war accounts such as Boris Rozhin (“Colonel Cassad”), Rybar or even WarGonzo testifies to this. The last two are followed by more than a million people on Telegram, the (unmoderated) messaging service founded in 2013 by the Durov brothers.

Among these profiles are probably communication professionals. According to the investigative site The Bell, is hiding behind “Rybar” a dozen people with links to Evgueni Prigojine of the paramilitary group Wagner. But not only. These accounts are distinguished from official propaganda by “their freedom of tone with regard to the conduct of military operations”, note the two partners from IDS with L’Express. “The terms they use in this regard deviate significantly from the semantics used by the Russian media and the official speeches of the authorities.” The phrase “Ukronazi”, for example, from their posts, has since Feb. 24 more than 600,000 mentions on Twitter. With a certain success in South America and also… in France, where the leader of the UPR François Asselineau took over the neologism.

This lack of Kremlin control also explains the presence of some critics. As the recapture of the city of Kherson by the Ukrainians looms in early November, Rybar deplores the “failed offensives”, “losses of personnel and equipment” or even “the low level of organization” of the army of Vladimir Putin. Unimaginable on “official” propaganda networks. The so-called “Hard Blog” (65,000 followers), does not hesitate to mention the “debility” of the Ministry of Defense and its generals indoctrinated into a “military sect”.

All these nationalist bloggers, most of whom were already active before the war in Ukraine, nevertheless remain important players in Russian propaganda. They have an average of 70,000 subscribers and have been the source of more than 8 million posts on Telegram since February 24. “The content disseminated by this ecosystem is notably taken up, in the same way as the dispatches of the official press organs, by the communication systems put in place in Ukraine to legitimize the invasion with the local Russian-speaking minorities, indicate Damien Liccia and Jean- Baptiste Delhomme. There is this form of ‘intellectual bubbling’, inventive in terms of concept, from which the Kremlin draws opportunistic use.” Their publications are also translated and exported to international populations, on Facebook, TikTok or of course Telegram. The “World & French News” space (15,000 subscribers) quotes Rybar in nearly 23% of its posts – a record.

Sputnik and RT still standing

But failing to be able to reach the Western world effectively and quickly via its own media, Russia has concentrated in recent months on Ukraine and its Russian-speaking population. “It is mainly within the local ecosystem that the creation of channels [Telegram] were the most important, with 220 channels created in 2022 (mainly in March), compared to 82 for the institutional ecosystem and 59 among the nationalists”, observe the two partners at IDS.

Damien Liccia and Jean-Baptiste Delhomme have also identified no less than 23 fake media, mostly scattered on the front line and optimized for the Russian search engine Yandex. They aim to “normalize Russia’s presence in the occupied territories” based in part on posts by ubiquitous nationalist bloggers on Telegram. “A lack of legal notices on these sites and an anonymous registration procedure for domain names which prevent their authors from being identified with certainty. The analysis of the sites shows that they are hosted on the same servers in Moscow. use of the letters “ZOV” (designating “the special operation” in Ukraine), the extension “. ru”, the choice of Russian and the use of the names of Ukrainian cities in Russian to designate them, clearly show the aims of the operation”, underline the specialists.

The method is then very simple. “These sites publish articles relaying local information, framed in such a way as to arouse the resentment of the local Russian-speaking populations and to present the Russian invasion positively. in Vinnytsia could be renamed Stepan Bandera Street. Similarly, the media Odessa-news.ru claims on November 10 that a statue of Pushkin was vandalized in Odessa.”

What, then, of Sputnik and RT? The two official media have not disappeared from the radar. Bypassing them is still at the heart of Russia’s disinformation strategy. VPNs (virtual private networks) still allow, through servers located in countries that do not block them, to access them. “Mirror” sites reproducing their content appear from time to time. The videos offered by RT and Sputnik also found refuge, for a time, on American platforms such as Odyssey or Rumble (France recently cracked down on this subject), or on social networks close to the far right such as Gab and Parler.

Then there was the creation of Sputnik Afrique in the summer of 2022, “taking over the journalists, content and communities of Sputnik France”. What to continue to disseminate in the French-speaking world the views of the Kremlin. The fact remains that the hearings have nevertheless collapsed. “The new iteration of Sputnik intended for French-speaking Africa is still very far from approaching the past influence of Sputnik France”, points out the study. The propensity of Internet users to interact with a publication – engagement – hardly exceeds several thousand people, compared to sometimes more than a million in the “beautiful” hours of the media, during the Yellow Vests crisis or during the Covid-19 epidemic.