This is how Russia and China wage war on the West
How Russian and Chinese meddling undermine social cohesion, facilitate radicalization, damage media credibility, influence politics and fuel distrust in the Atlantic Alliance. The analysis by Francesco D'Arrigo, director of the Italian Institute of Strategic Studies "Niccolò Machiavelli"
After weeks of siege and almost three months since the beginning of the Russian invasion, the battle for the conquest of Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov, in south-east Ukraine, ended last Tuesday.
On paper, this is an important military victory for Russia, achieved however at the cost of tens of thousands of fallen Russian soldiers, civilian casualties and devastating bombings. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu communicated to Russian President Vladimir Putin "the end of the operation" and "the complete liberation of the Azovstal steel plant from Ukrainian militants".
Nonetheless, President Putin is winning another victory, the one that is fought every day in the Italian media, that of the information war .
According to Russian military doctrine, information warfare is a form of political power and a geopolitical tool that allows for a high level of manipulation and influence, therefore a form of conflict that must be all-encompassing and perpetually active against enemies and adversaries.
In Russian strategy, information warfare is not an activity limited to the ongoing war, but has a holistic and all-encompassing nature and is both the subject and the medium of conflict. Information warfare is not limited to the initial stage of hostilities where it generally includes the preparation of useful information about the battlefield but is an ongoing activity, regardless of the state of relations with the opponent.
As described in the essay by Prof. Christopher Andrew (official historian of the British Security Service Mi5) written together with Oleg Gordievskij "Secret History of the KGB" – 1993, the KGB has always believed that, of the four main powers of Western Europe, the Italy was most likely to become the most permeable state to Russian influence and a fundamental tool of the Kremlin for its own internal propaganda, given the deep cultural attachment of the Russians to Italy, unlike France, Germany and England.
Since the time of the Cold War, the KGB has adopted a strategy of disinformation, influence and subversion towards Italy entrusted not only to secret agents or "spies", but to journalists, pollsters, academics, entrepreneurs, Italian politicians and exponents of the Vatican. All enrolled in the program orchestrated by Moscow, as revealed in 1999 by C. Andrew and Vasilij Mitrokhin in their best seller “The Mitrokhin Archive”.
THE INGERENCE OPERATIONS OF THE FSB AND GUOANBU
The KGB favored surrounding itself and possibly recruiting conservative big media representatives, wealthy filmmakers, academics, cynical and self-centered people and politicians. The potential “pro-Russian influencers” of today are respectable people who, however, in the eyes of the FSB – the successor of the Soviet-era KGB – must be narcissistic individuals, possibly eager for money and able to help influence their country of origin. During the Cold War years, the KGB in the United States recruited professors and civil rights defenders to increase dissent and destabilize the country.
Today, these activities are defined as "interference by state actors", an activity not exclusive to the Russian Secret Service, but also by the largest national security agency on the planet, Guojia Anquan Bu (Guoanbu) – the "Ministry of the Chinese State Security, with intelligence and counter-espionage duties. The Foreign Propaganda Office, more commonly known as the " Information Office of the Council of State of the People's Republic of China" , has been investing enormous resources in infowarfare for a decade and is coordinating with a coalition of front groups such as the " 50 Cent Army " and the " United Front " to conduct information warfare operations globally.
A huge success of Beijing's meddling that also brought out the restless debate within Europe on how to deal with, and at this point negotiate, the ambitions of a China that is expanding globally, was the signing of the memorandum on the New Way of Silk and 29 commercial and institutional agreements between Rome and Beijing. With that agreement, signed without any parliamentary passage, Italy became the first G7 country to sign an agreement on the disputed infrastructural maxi-plan of the People's Republic, causing a fracture with the most powerful countries of the West, challenging the USA and putting the sharing of strategic information in the NATO and Intelligence sphere is in crisis.
State propaganda can reach every aspect of people's lives using all the tools available to totalitarian states, from military-grade artificial intelligence to thousands of full-time employees posting government messages on social media.
The KGB before, and the FSB now, have always been very focused on psychological warfare rather than mere espionage, which is only a minority part of their mission. The manipulation of public opinion through ideological subversion can cause people to reject even obvious facts to satisfy the perceptions and beliefs induced through propaganda.
Social conditioning or amplified feedback loops are used to radicalize people intent on revolting against national interests and even their own. In other words, a good cause can be intentionally armed against a population without its knowledge, with destabilizing effects that we have seen, for example, in the Arab Spring.
Paul Dabrowa , an expert in artificial intelligence and social media, specializes in the operational aspects of persuasion and related psychology. Dabrowa is currently the co-founder of biome.ai , a company that uses artificial intelligence to develop treatments for diseases using the human microbiome. However, his academic background, at both the University of Melbourne and Harvard Kennedy School, saw him interview former Nazis and KGB agents to develop a neuroscience model of how totalitarian propaganda works, and he is one of the most authoritative experts on these. themes.
According to Dabrowa, one way a state actor could destabilize a foreign election campaign using a social media such as TikTok, for example, would be to boost the message of a limited number of users to spread a specific fake news. The potential advantage in intentionally radicalizing elements of any political, social or religious movement, even on the order of 1% of a segment of the population, is potentially incalculable. The risk induced for the principal, on the other hand, is insignificant, because the technology already exists and the attribution to a State is almost impossible to prove.
This potential was well understood by the Kremlin and in February 2017, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced the establishment of an " Information Army within the Russian Armed Forces ". Commenting on Shoigu's decision, former Chief of Defense Staff Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky said that a victory in information warfare "may be far more important than victory in a classic military conflict, because it is bloodless, but the impact is overwhelming and can paralyze the power structures and decision-making process of an enemy state ”.
THE RUSSIAN INGERENCE STRATEGY
The Russian intelligence agency, since the days of the Soviet Union, has used four stages of interference to alter the mentality and behavior of people in foreign countries. The first phase is that of demoralization. During this phase, people are influenced to question the integrity of a country and raise suspicions through media propaganda and academia. Perception takes center stage and facts become meaningless. Today, through social media this phenomenon is much more pervasive and effective, especially in the younger generations, who are advocated by the distrust of traditional media and the absence of moral standards in Western society.
For a population flooded with propaganda and conspiracy theories, the truth loses its grip on society. The “demoralization” phase was widely used during the pandemic against Western vaccines, and even if favored by ambiguous and contradictory institutional communication, it was not successful in Italy.
Even in the ongoing conflict, the "demoralization" phase of the interference is being used, giving space to Kremlin advisers, Russian state TV journalists, guests and "experts" who argue in favor of the invasion, or repeat versions of the Kremlin in Italian programs broadcast in prime time. By instrumentalizing our freedom of thought and "giving voice to all bells" we host Russian media journalists blocked by sanctions – such as Sputnik and Russia Today – allowing them to evade them and turn reality around by spreading Russian propaganda about the war. to Ukraine.
In the Russian intervention strategy, destabilization is also defined as the second phase, it consists in altering the foreign relations, the economy and the defense systems of a nation. During the pandemic, the attempts to change Italy's international positioning, carried out by authoritative exponents of the Italian government, without any parliamentary mandate and with the support of a part of the mass media, helped to fuel a very advanced form of destabilizing propaganda justified by the pandemic emergency. Apparently sudden decisions that questioned the historic European and Atlantic Alliances, weakening the role of Parliament and creating disorientation among the population due to the massive presence on Italian territory of soldiers and vehicles not belonging to NATO countries. According to some authoritative studies in the field of persuasion methodologies, the new cognitive hacking technology developed by Russia and China has enormously enhanced digitally created propaganda, endowing it with a power never seen before. The greatest risk to cognitive security is now the influence driven by artificial intelligence (AI) that hides behind "secret" algorithms inoculated into social media platforms, which can also lead to destabilization and crisis of a country.
The third phase of the interference concerns the control over the energy and economic sector, which in Italy has been in place for several years now, causing the underestimation, if not the concealment of the geopolitical risks associated with energy dependence on a single foreign supplier. A (dangerous) choice strongly influenced by the Russian intervention strategy, which has managed to impose it as the most convenient option from an economic point of view.
If we add to this a violent change in the geopolitical and economic power structure, such as that caused by the invasion war in Ukraine, we arrive at the fourth phase, that of normalization, which can last indefinitely. The term "normalization" derives from Soviet propaganda which sought to minimize drastic change in a country quickly led to a state of crisis through aggressive political, economic and disinformation operations with which the Soviet Union took over a country's conscience.
Concerned by the pervasiveness of Russian interference, our Information and Security Agencies and the Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic have also been monitoring the situation for several months, and following the multiple hearings carried out, Copasir issued a statement that speaks of "interference and disinformation activities carried out by state actors, in the light of a phenomenon made even more worrying after the invasion of Russia in Ukraine ”. “In other words, an activity driven by actors linked to the Russian government which finds fertile ground in the social bubble as in Italian TV”.
Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry has ordered the urgent printing of about 175,000 new diplomatic passports to allow the replacement of officials and spies, and its elite to continue to operate and do business abroad. The same goes for the officers of the FSO, the Security Service that protects Vladimir Putin.
The Kremlin, anticipating the announced Western sanctions on visa blocking, also banned 963 American citizens and 26 Canadian citizens from entering its territory, including United States President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA chief William Burns, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Majority Leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, as well as dozens of other senators and deputies, as well as Biden's son Hunter, and President Trudeau's wife.
President Putin thus attempts to circumvent the sanctions imposed by the West not only by resorting to autarchic practices, but above all by strengthening ties with those countries that do not apply them.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/ecco-come-russia-e-cina-fanno-la-guerra-alloccidente/ on Sun, 22 May 2022 08:50:22 +0000.