Putin visited a forward command post on Friday for a briefing with top military officials about the latest developments in the special operation. The most widely reported takeaway was the confirmation that Konstantinovka, which is a crucial part of the Northern Donbass fortress agglomeration, was captured from Ukraine. By contrast, much less attention was paid to Ukraine’s new three-pronged infowar campaign about the battlefield that Russia just exposed, which this piece will review and then analyze.
Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov began by talking about how “the Kiev regime is seeking to convince its Western sponsors that it has seized the initiative from us and made significant advances on the battlefield. To this end, it is conducting an information campaign, in which it demonstrates the supposed successes of Ukrainian Armed Forces formations, while concealing the territories liberated by Russian troops under the neutral formulation that ‘they have moved into the gray zone.’”
This was later followed by two related warnings from Putin. As for the first, he said that, “Now, regarding the enemy’s supposed successes on the battlefield, we must, firstly, bear in mind that, to bolster their legends and lies, their false claims, the enemy may undertake certain sabotage and terrorist actions, launching sorties, albeit with small forces, but with great propaganda fanfare, in order to confirm their claims about supposed achievements. We must be prepared for these possible sorties.”
He then segued into the second by talking about how “the bravura statements by the leaders of the Kiev regime about successes we know to be nonexistent are, in principle, to our advantage, since they are actors, and they truly know nothing else, and have never been taught anything else. Yet, with their actions and statements, they undoubtedly disorganize both themselves and their sponsors. I repeat: this is to our advantage.”
Putting it all together, Ukraine’s new three-pronged infowar campaign about the battlefield sees it downplaying Russia’s on-the-ground gains as expanding the “gray zone”, potentially plotting more terrorist attacks and symbolic incursions as distractions, and outright lying about its own successes. The first was already evident among those who closely study the maps produced by pro-Kiev accounts, while the second’s terrorist dimension is already in progress with Ukraine’s spree of strikes against Russia.
The incursion aspect could take the form of another Kursk-like cross-border campaign against Russia and/or Belarus, the latter of which was recently in Ukraine’s crosshairs, while outright lies about Ukraine’s own on-the-ground successes are already commonplace but could become more frequent. The larger context within which this new infowar campaign is being waged concerns Zelensky’s explicitly declared 40-day influence operation against Russia aimed at forcing it to freeze the conflict.
Seeing as how Gerasimov also claimed that recent strikes by Russia degraded Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities, the only real threat posed by Ukraine’s new infowar campaign is terrorist strikes against border areas and another Kursk-like incursion. It’s impossible to preemptively thwart either with perfection, so it’s possible that these threats might materialize in the coming future, but observers should remember that they’re more showmanship than strategy and that Ukraine isn’t really winning.
