The State Department created an account on Telegram, a messaging app popular with Russians, four days into the war in Ukraine as it became clear that Washington was missing an opportunity to interact with Russians, a senior department official told CNN.
A series of posts on the account in Russian have amplified President Joe Biden’s denunciations of the war and cautioned Russians about Moscow’s propaganda machine.
“Long before the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it had stepped up its campaign of disinformation and censorship of independent media and continues to do so even during the war of aggression,” the department said from its Telegram account Thursday.
Russian engagement with the State Department Telegram account to date appears to be very modest — the account had 1,911 subscribers as of Friday afternoon Moscow time and the country’s total population is around 142 million.
Analysts say it is unlikely that any single platform or messaging campaign is going to break through with the Russian public in a significant way. But the goal shared by a range of actors trying to pierce the digital iron curtain is to chip away, cumulatively, at Russian public support for the war and the morale of Russian soldiers.
The State Department also has an account on Russian messaging platform VK, has set up a website to rebut Russian disinformation in recent weeks and has worked to get US officials on Russian-language broadcast platforms, the official said.
Not a ‘silver bullet’
But some critics have suggested the US government needs to do more and aim to emulate the huge propaganda effort of the Cold War when significant resources were dedicated to pushing messaging toward the Soviet population.
Russian authorities have detained thousands of people protesting the war in Ukraine. A Russian state television journalist who interrupted a live news broadcast Monday holding a sign that said “NO WAR” was detained and fined about $270 but could still face prison time.
“This is a real Achilles’ heel for Putin,” James Clapper, who served as President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, told CNN. The US government, he said, should be using any social media platform available to bring images of dead Russian soldiers and prisoners of war to Russian citizens.
Several Russian prisoners of war have appeared at news conferences held by Ukrainian authorities. That may be a questionable practice under the Geneva Convention, which forbids states from causing unnecessary humiliation to prisoners of war.
“This sort of thing lends itself to covert action on the part of the US government,” Clapper said. “And I trust and hope that we are doing something along those lines.”
The US intelligence community is closely watching public opinion in Russia, but it’s not clear whether there is any planning underway to conduct any form of clandestine information operations.
“We’re watching what’s happening in Russia,” said one Western source familiar with the intelligence, who added that it is not clear yet whether public opinion is breaking for or against the war.
There are less shadowy ways of supporting the free flow of information into Russia.
Alina Polyakova, president of the nonprofit Center for European Policy Analysis, said the State Department’s Telegram account is “a step in the right direction, but frankly it’s not creative enough.”
Russians today don’t appear to trust Western media or government officials as sources of information the way they did in the waning days of the Cold War, said Polyakova, who grew up in Kyiv in the 1980s.
“We really need to be more creative about thinking who the right messengers are,” she added, pointing to the numerous journalists who have fled Russia in recent weeks as the Kremlin has criminalized independent reporting on…
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