Building Resilience: Ukraine’s Experience with Russia’s Information Warfare

Yevhen Fedchenko, Co-founder and Chief Editor, StopFake.org; Director, Mohyla School of Journalism, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine

Russian television has long been a channel used for influencing Ukrainian public opinion. Its propagandistic capacities were deployed well before the Crimean annexation and the beginning of the war in Eastern Ukraine.

Russia has extended its dominance over the Ukrainian media landscape to include Internet news media, social media and shared entertainment industry. All of these have been gradually weaponised — starting well before 2014.

Russian media — both state-owned and private — has been involved extensively in manufacturing and distributing textual fakes, manipulative titles, visual (photo and video) fakes, false claims, forged documents, hoax experts, fake news sources and witnesses.

With these tools, the Kremlin has created whole narratives discrediting different aspects of life in Ukraine, targeting different audiences: in Russia, Ukraine and globally.

Since its launch in 2014, StopFake.org — the factchecking platform set up within the Mohyla School of Journalism to verify facts about events in Ukraine and debunk disinformation systematically appearing in Russian mainstream media — has already debunked more than 1,500 fake ‘news’ stories coming from Russian media.

Thanks to its work, it has been able to evidence that Russian propaganda is a systematic approach of the Russian government and to establish a clear connection between Russia’s information warfare and the kinetic war in the East of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.

Research conducted by StopFake in 2017 revealed that a majority of Ukrainian citizens (58,3% of the respondents) shared the opinion that there is a threat of Russian propaganda in Ukraine. Among the most widely-named sources of Russian propaganda, Ukrainians pointed to Russian TV channels, online media and social networks (45%, 34,5% and 19,8% respectively).

In light of this, Ukraine has started to build up its resilience to disinformation. Different NGOs (including StopFake) have been researching and explaining the scope and impact of disinformation efforts, and educating people about critical ways of media consumption. In response to growing dangers of information warfare, Ukrainian courts regulated the presence of hostile TV broadcasts in Ukraine and Russian social media companies were sanctioned.

The Ukrainian experience of tackling information warfare is one of a unique blend of grass-root initiatives and governmental efforts to protect citizens under conditions of war while at the same time protecting the democratic nature of media ecosystem.