After the 2008 war with Georgia, Russian authorities concluded they were lagging their western rivals in information-war capabilities, especially propaganda. There is genuine concern in Russia about the potential for regime destabilisation implicit in this inferiority. The Russians consider the information-war a core dimension of national security. Shortly after the Georgian war started, so did a long-term effort to catch up – which faced multiple obstacles. One obstacle was the relative lack of financial resources, which made it unfeasible to take the massive media empires of the West head on. However, the rapid spread of social media has offered the Russians a low-cost vehicle for becoming more competitive. Another obstacle was the rigidity and bureaucratism of the state apparatus, including of the Russian intelligence agencies. Attracting the new skills deemed necessary for re-launching Russian information-war capabilities appeared to be problematic, at least in the short term. Hence, the agencies started tapping into the commercial sector, where information manipulation techniques, typically imported from the West, were already in widespread use in the world of corporate rivalry and advertising. Among the actors involved in this effort was Evgenyi Prigozhin’s internet Research Agency, before Wagner Group even emerged. There is no doubt that Russia’s capabilities in the field have massively increased since. Wagner Group’s information operations in Africa have widely been acknowledged to be effective in undermining France’s influence and expanding Russia’s. The quality of Russian information operations in Ukraine is also claimed to be improving. Allegations that Russian information operations decisively influenced the 2016 elections in the US or the 2024 presidential elections in Romania are more questionable.
Can AI help Russia Decisively Improve its Information War Against the West? (Antonio Giustozzi – RUSI)
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