Military strategy of misinformation

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Up next, a clearer signal in the fog of war.

Talks between Russia and Ukraine remain stalled, with Moscow demanding sweeping concessions, including a smaller Ukrainian military and large swaths of land. Kiyv isn’t budging.

President Donald Trump weighed in again yesterday on the subject … warning of economic consequences.

TRUMP: We're very, very unhappy with them, and we're going to be doing very severe tariffs if we don't have a deal in 50 days. Tariffs at about 100%. You'd call them secondary tariffs.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Meantime, experts say the war isn’t confined to the battlefield. It’s a war of narratives, too. One where Russian propaganda is convincing some in the west that Ukraine’s a lost cause. WORLD Reporter Josh Schumacher has more.

JOSH SCHUMACHER: Glenn Corn is a professor at the Institute of World Politics. He says for years now, the Russian military hasn’t been doing as well on the battlefield as it says it has.

CORN: They had a lot of failures on the battlefield. The Ukrainians counterattacked and had a very effective counteroffensive. And then the battlefield froze, and the Russians were able to dig in.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies says the Russian military has suffered nearly a million casualties in Ukraine.

And Russia has only gained an average of 50 meters a day. During the Battle of the Somme, one of the slowest and bloodiest battles of World War 1, the allies gained an average of 80 meters a day.

CORN: The Russians are definitely taking territory, but much smaller pieces of territory than they want. And the price they're paying for that is huge.

And Corn says the Russian home front is feeling the pain of those losses. Putin’s decision to keep putting troops on the battlefield has placed a major burden on the Russian economy.

CORN: They're paying a large salaries to troops to go fight and benefits to the families of the Russian troops that are casualties.

And the sanctions levied against Russia by the West have been making that economic pressure even worse.

CORN: The Russian economy is in shambles in many ways. They're having to make very, very tough decisions. Civilian parts of the economy are struggling… They've put almost everything in their economy into their defense industries…

But Corn says Russia believes all that could change if the Kremlin can get the United States to step out of the war by convincing the West that Russia is powerful and Ukraine is a lost cause.

He says that’s part of why Russia is making such extreme demands during peace talks.

CORN: They are trying to discredit the Ukrainians…But the Russians so far have—in my opinion—have not been sincere when they claim they are ready to negotiate. And the evidence of that is doing things like making these maximalist demands that they know the Ukrainians can't agree to.

But discrediting Ukraine isn’t just a task for the negotiating table. Russia has a massive disinformation apparatus that’s tackling that same task in cyberspace—and has been for years.

LINVILL: One of the main tactics that they use now is a concept called narrative laundering.

Darren Linvill is a professor at Clemson University specializing in Russian disinformation.

He says narrative laundering is a three-step process that involves, first, planting a claim, story, or fact, second, getting more and more voices to repeat that claim, story, or fact, and then finally getting that claim, story, or fact integrated into the larger public conversation about the war.

To get the story out initially, Russia uses fake, artificial intelligence-generated news websites with legitimate-sounding names, or it pays foreign media outlets to run fabricated stories.

But another and more effective way of peddling disinformation is social media influencers.

LINVILL: These influencers are part of communities that trust them and they in many cases have hundreds of thousands of followers. So a story that they repeat or share is very likely to be picked up and shared by their followers.

But how does all this work in real time?

LINVILL: Let me show you an example…

Linvill showed a video of two men dressed in camouflage fatigues and wearing masks. The man closest to the screen wore a Ukrainian trident on his shoulder.

VIDEO: [Gunfire sounds]

The two men opened fire on a mannequin wearing a red hat and a Trump-Vance, 2024 T-shirt.

VIDEO: [After the gunfire stops]

After shooting the mannequin, one of the men bent down and set fire to a trail of gasoline that snaked toward the mannequin and engulfed its feet in flames.

LINVILL: It looks like something that I would have made in my backyard when I was in middle school… But it is actually I think, a absolutely brilliant video. Because… It's simple. It tells a very simple narrative that you know almost immediately. You don’t have to watch the whole video.

Brilliant or not, the video is fake. Linvill explains that it’s a piece of Russian disinformation. But that didn’t stop it from going viral.

LINVILL: If you were a right -leaning American you saw this video. If were a right -leaning American on X or Telegram the day after the election you almost surely saw this video.

The video was the start of Russia’s lobbying campaign against the Trump administration… trying to push it back from supporting Ukraine.

LINVILL: How do I know that? We tracked where the video came from.

The video first appeared online weeks earlier, when a brand new account posted it to a channel on the social media app Discord. It went through several pro-Russia accounts on various social media apps before English-speaking social media influencers began reposting it for American viewers.

LINVILL: And you can see this one post had 12 .4 million views. And several other posts had hundreds of thousands or over a million views as well. I mean, it went crazy.

Linvill says this sort of operation takes place all the time.

But Professor Glenn Corn says the White House is starting to look past Russia’s lies. He applauded Trump’s recent ultimatum, giving Russia 50 days to end the war or else face severe sanctions and increased American support for Ukraine.

CORN: President Trump probably knows that Putin's economic situation inside of Russia is not very good. So doubling down on sanctions and not only sanctions, but other things that we c an do to increase pressure on the Russian economy, I think would also be very painful for Putin and his regime.

For WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher

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