Information warfare expert says the U.S. is finally countering Russia at its own game
Kyiv, Ukraine — The head of an organization that's battled Russian disinformation in Ukraine since President Vladimir Putin last sent troops into the country in 2014 tells CBS News the United States has finally learned to counter Russia's unique brand of hybrid warfare.
"I believe this is one of the first times when we saw an effective response from Washington and its European partners to this hybrid threat of Russia," Ruslan Deynychenko, executive director of the StopFake organization, told CBS News at his Kyiv office.
The U.S. and its European partners have aggressively countered Russia's narrative since it started massing forces along Ukraine's borders in recent months. Putin's government has insisted that Russia is merely hosting military exercises that pose no threat to Ukraine or any other nation.
Washington and its partners have countered that stance by pointing not only to Russia's recent history of invading Ukraine, but also its consistent use of covert tactics to try to subvert trust in Ukraine's central government and stoke tension in the country's east, where there is significant pro-Russian sentiment.
Deynychenko's media organization, which operates a website and runs a television program aired in Ukraine, has spent almost eight years debunking the Russian disinformation spread by its state-run and private media and its army of unofficial internet trolls via social media.
StopFake was founded during Russia's invasion of eastern Ukraine, which led to Putin unilaterally annexing the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. That landgrab, while portrayed by Russian officials and media as a defense of ethnic Russians in Ukraine's Donbas area, has never been recognized by the West. Kyiv and Washington still consider two breakaway regions in Donbas part of Ukraine, despite pro-Russian rebels' firm control of the ground.
StopFake is run by volunteers and journalism students at the Mohyla School of Journalism in Ukraine's capital.
"We wanted to show people, not just regular citizens, but governments, that Russian television, it's not about informing people. It's about using media as a powerful tool to influence people," Deynychenko told CBS News.
Calling out false information, learning how to interpret it and teaching the general public to do the same, are valuable ways to fight back against disinformation and propaganda, he said.
Deynychenko said America should be on guard for similar information warfare in other countries.
"We know that other players, they try to use the same technique. But, very often, the disinformation and these hybrid operations, they are not so open, and you cannot see them. It might be people chatting in the Telegram or WhatsApp groups, and they are not public, but someone can work with them, someone in these groups can persuade them to hate each other, to hate because of a different race, different language they use, different color of skin or different religion or whatever — and to persuade them to kill each other," he told CBS News.
"One day, you can wake up in the morning and look through a window and see how people with machine guns are killing each other."
He said it was important for individuals, countries and companies to invest in real journalism and media literacy to counter the threat of disinformation campaigns, and he urged people to be wary of falling into traps set online by those seeking to foment division.
"Remember that someone still pays for even for free content, and the free cheese might be only in the mousetrap," Deynychenko said.
