By revealing an unusual volume of information from its intelligence services to the general public, the United States hopes to complicate the task of Moscow, which it accuses of wanting to justify an invasion of Ukraine, an ambitious but risky strategy for Washington.
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For a month, the American administration has multiplied the revelations on the movements of Russian troops on the borders of Ukraine and the supposed projects of Russian President Vladimir Putin, sometimes publicly, but also during meetings with journalists from senior officials of the intelligence who rarely talk to the press.
The head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken thus described Thursday in great detail before the UN Security Council the disaster scenario of an imminent attack once morest Ukraine: a pretext “fabricated from scratch”, which would allow Moscow to “declare that he must retaliate”, then an attack with “missiles and bombs”.
“Communications will be cut off, cyberattacks will block key Ukrainian institutions,” he said, without providing evidence to support this scenario. “Then tanks and soldiers will advance once morest key objectives that have already been identified,” including the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, he charged.
US officials have also accurately described the Russian military deployment deployed on the Ukrainian borders: more than 150,000 men, according to the latest figures, thousands of special forces soldiers, fighter planes, bombers, missiles and anti-aircraft batteries , amphibious vehicles positioned in the Black Sea. Details rarely revealed to the general public.
For Douglas London, a former clandestine service agent who spent 34 years in the CIA, the “unprecedented” scale of the American revelations shows that Washington is responding to Moscow’s disinformation operations in recent years, especially during the presidential election of 2016.
“Washington is finally catching up with its rivals, including Russia and WikiLeaks, by using information to influence events,” he said in a column published by the journal Foreign Affairs.
Complicate the task of Moscow
But the United States, anxious to preserve the international order, does not want to respond to disinformation with disinformation, a senior American official told AFP. The idea is therefore to reveal the tactics that the Kremlin might use so that the public recognizes the misinformation and does not fall into the trap of provocations.
The United States insists that Russia is preparing a so-called “false flag” operation, where a country uses enemy recognition marks to sow confusion. Washington thus hopes to defuse the risk that a spark, created from scratch, will set the region ablaze.
The spokesman for American diplomacy, Ned Price, thus quoted on Wednesday the Russian president’s remarks on the risk of “genocide” once morest the Russian-speaking population of the separatist regions of Donbass and Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine. “There is not an ounce of truth in these accusations,” he hammered.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby previously claimed that Moscow was preparing a “very violent” fake Ukrainian attack video, which would show dead bodies and actors playing the role of mourners, to serve as a pretext to invade Ukraine.
Douglas London, the former CIA spy, believes that these revelations have complicated things for Moscow. “The more Washington exposes Russia’s actions and intentions, the fewer options Putin has” to justify an attack, he notes.
But the new US strategy is risky, because even though troop movements can now be easily observed by commercial satellites, each revelation gives Russian intelligence services clues as to how the information was gathered and allows Moscow to adjust their plans.
In addition, the credibility of American intelligence, already tarnished by the “evidence” presented in 2003 by Colin Powell at the UN rostrum on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program, might once more be called into question if Moscow withdraws its forces from the Ukrainian borders without having attacked.
A risk that the United States is ready to run. “It would be the best possible result,” a senior US official told AFP. “We will have saved thousands of lives.”
