31 - A Web of Deceit Enmeshes Russia and China: the Wages of Disinformation
Every facet of Russian utterance on the war in Ukraine sparkles with purposeful deceit. Putin’s stories are meant more to mislead and obfuscate than merely to justify or rationalize. Obviously, they are intended to prevent protests at home and criticism from within even as they hardly improve military morale. They invite support domestically and even in some cases from abroad. China’s Xi Jinping must surely know how tendentious they are, but he nevertheless permits the Putin parasite to cling to their combined carapace of deception.
Not until this Great Wall of untruth is disassembled or repeatedly undermined can
Ukraine and the West hope that Russians will turn on Putin and help bring the conflict to a halt. Fortunately, a little of that may be happening.
There are preliminary reports that technologically savvy Ukrainians and the U.S. funded outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are managing to penetrate Putin’s veil of dark denial with cleverly arranged Russian-language television and radio broadcasts and email and social media blasts. (Radio Free Europe operates a medium wave AM transmitter in Lithuania.) Russian censors have not yet blocked YouTube, so some of Radio Free Europe/Liberty’s messages are also reaching Russian viewers that way. (Facebook and Instagram services are cut.) Additionally, an American data analytics concern reports increasing anxiety by Russians about the war and about casualties in the conflict, especially since 134,000 conscripts have just been called up to serve.
Putin’s Internet firewall is still strong, albeit more porous than China’s. And most Russians characteristically obtain news from what are rigorously Putin-controlled and Putin-allied sources: state television and state radio. His propaganda blankets far-flung Russia, so misinformation will remain extremely difficult to counteract until the war produces massive casualties, news of the sinking of the Moskva spreads, or supermarket shelves go bare. The heralded defection yesterday of a leading ballerina might send an additional message that resonates with Russians.
Russia pretends to be a democracy, and holds elections, just as the Soviet Union did. But those words mean nothing now. Nor do the people of Russia have any “voice,” having lost what little free expression that they exercised (fitfully) before Putin’s army invaded Ukraine. Independent sources of information about the military effort, about the reasons for and the impact of sanctions, and about the causes of consumer scarcities, are kept from the peoples of Russia. “It is clear that the Kremlin is…waging a shameful disinformation campaign,” declared the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (which includes fifty-seven countries, and Russia and Ukraine) in a report issued this week. “Russia, it said, is hiding “the facts of Russia’s brutal attacks on civilians in Ukraine.”
Today’s samizdat could be foreign-based social media full of news smuggled in from outside. But access to legitimate sources of information have been curtailed by heavy surveillance, self-policing because of real fear, and the shutting down of all independent Russian alternative television, radio, online, and print enterprises. Body bags are only occasionally being returned to Russia, so – unlike the Afghan war – mothers against war and other Russian protest groups have been prevented from monitoring the results of the invasion and learning of its very high fatality rates. The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers that protested killings in the Chechnyan and Afghan wars has not yet been reconstituted. Today’s Russia tolerates dissidence in the Soviet manner: by unbridled punishment and systematic obfuscation.
After all, Putin grew up in the KGB security service (now the Federal Security Service, FSB), and served a Soviet Union that dealt harshly with perceived enemies. Its enemies were everywhere, in gulags or in the streets, nearby in the Europe that rose from the ashes of World War II and became collectively stronger than even the Soviet Union and, certainly, mightier than a Russia diminished in physical size and soft power stature. All that Russia had after the collapse of the Soviet Union were its energy resources and pipelines, and wheat, nickel, aluminum, and nuclear weapons. It was also a putatively legitimate world power bound by security treaties to the Western alliance and bolstered (like France and Britain) by an outdated legacy place on the UN Security Council.
The invasion of Ukraine has brought all of that inherited primacy crashing down.
What is now left of Russia’s credibility as a world actor and global force? China is its bulwark, along with Belarus. China, for its own domestic purposes and to buttress President Xi’s imperial mission, seems unusually willing to repeat and amplify the disinformation and misinformation that Putin’s lackeys spew. “We have harmed nobody in Ukraine,” Russia says, and committed no atrocities. “The Ukrainians did it to themselves.” China not only accepts such blatant lies, but even redistributes Putin’s nonsensical claims of Nazis being the culprits in charge in Ukraine.
Stalin seems inordinately important to both Putin and Xi. The latter, particularly, vilifies Nikita Khrushchev for exposing Stalin’s many purges and internal massacres (including famines in Ukraine) and for admitting that Stalin, like China’s dictator Mao Zedong, was far less benevolent and beneficent than Soviet propaganda during the Cold War proclaimed. Xi is apparently determined never to let his authoritarian rule be threatened in the same way.
China experts propose that Xi now protects Putin for two very significant reasons; together they see a world led by the United States that could upend their personal national political strangleholds. By backing Putin, Xi bolsters his own one-man rule and his hold on power within the ruling center of the Chinese state. To break with Putin, which would now be the smarter and more statesmanlike maneuver, Xi would undermine the narrative that he has so assiduously spun of the unshakeable supremacy of the post-Communist state.
If Putin fails and falls, Xi will be more exposed, and the model centralized entity that Xi has established in succession to Deng Xiaoping’s more consensual post-Mao governing platform, will be greatly weakened. The post-Communist state that Xi has constructed largely afresh will appear less impregnable internally, and Xi’s hold weaker. It would be incredibly smart of Xi to denounce Putin for his callous behavior in Ukraine, and for deceiving his own people, his own soldiers, and his own military officers. But Xi is wedded to a very different asymmetrical paradigm.
Putin is a merciless amoral thug, benefiting from and feeding the criminalized kleptocratic state. The Soviet Union was corrupt, too, but Putin has taken high level influence peddling, pay for play, and sheer stealing from taxpayers to a stratospheric level to which Stalin’s several successors, and the hapless Boris Yeltsin, never reached. Xi should want to run rapidly away from such a Putin, but he will not. Too much is at stake personally for Xi, and the remarkable edifice of top-down micro-management that he imposes.
Even so, Xi will not come to Putin’s aid overtly; Chinese legions will not directly engage Western forces on the plains of Ukraine as Mao’s troops did in North Korea, dressed in fake uniforms. They pushed General Douglas MacArthur’s army back south during the 1950s battle for hegemony in the Korean peninsula. But Xi will purchase much concessionary oil and gas as he can, probably launder Russian money, and prevent through UN vetoes and other means any successful reprimands of Russia.
More and more counter-propaganda to counter Russia’s disinformation campaign is essential if Ukraine hopes to slow Russian advances and possibly to oust its troops. Washington needs to scale up funding for Radio Free Europe/Liberty and similar endeavors that are truth telling to Russians. It needs to provide more funding for ancillary efforts to introduce accurate stories about the invasion and its aftermath. Encouraging Russian citizens to question Putin’s leadership and to act immediately in their own self-interests would help. So would revelations of Russia’s failures on the battlefield. Bringing the cessation of combat to the cockpit of Europe now depends in large part on exposing increasing numbers of Russian citizens to real news and to Putin’s many prevarications.
More on Monday