2023-12-26 13:45:00
Screenshot from one of the cartoons produced by CMP Wagner for African countries. Here we see a Wagner fighter, with a CMP chevron and the Russian flag on his sleeve, flying to the aid of a Malian soldier who is defending his country against French military aggression.
Par Christine Dugoin-Clément, IAE Paris – Sorbonne Business School
In his National Strategic Review (RNS) of 2022France carried the influence as a strategic priority. The previous RNS, published in 2017, had already been revised in 2021 in order to clarify French strategic priorities for 2030; but the tensions observed in 2022 prompted its early revision.
Influence is a major topic in international relations. State and private actors became painfully aware of this with the start of the war in Donbass in 2014, then with the affair Cambridge Analytica en 2016. Since then, the importance of this theme has only grown, and it has become essential with the information war observed since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the information sphere being a significant conflict issue.
Characterized by different stepsthis communication war included phases of hesitation in the management of Russian rhetoric when, during the summer of 2022, Ukraine gained ground during its counter-offensive. Moscow then adapted its discourse in such a way as to overemphasize the significance of medium-sized victories, for example when taking Soledar in January 2023.
Finally, while the Kremlin must manage an invasion of Ukraine that is longer and more delicate than expected, its informational action extends to other theaters and areas to weaken kyiv’s allies. However, these operations are not always crowned with success, as shown, for example, by the recent episode of the stencil painting of Stars of David on the walls of Paris, attributed to Russia. Quickly detected by the Vigilance service and protection against foreign digital interference (Viginum)the operation did not have the consequences undoubtedly desired by its organizers.
The West, an increasingly crucial target over time
If, at the start of the conflict, Russia focused its influence efforts more on the African continent and the Middle East than on the West, the long-term nature of the conflict has changed this orientation. Indeed, Moscow is betting on the erosion of Ukraine’s support and on their divisions that could fuel internal social tensions, their own political agendas or divergent interests. As Ukraine remains deeply dependent on Western support, particularly in terms of weapons, any event likely to weaken this support will have a major impact on the continuation of the conflict.
In this sense, the operation Dôppelganger, if it was not original in substance, took on an unprecedented scale. Let us recall that Russia has, in this context, created “clones” of numerous Western newspapers in order to disseminate content aimed at harming Ukraine’s reputation, or even dividing Europeans. The Doppelganger campaign was accompanied by an interesting monitoring system intended to evaluate the penetration of this operation within the populations and to measure the real effect of the campaign.
This operation lasted several months but before being officially unmasked in the summer of 2023. However, the revelation of the existence of the Doppelganger project did not put an end to the informational operations, which are the backbone of the cognitive warfare which we are currently witnessing. More recently, while the Hamas attack of October 7 has deeply destabilized the Middle East and the West fears that the shock wave of this explosion of violence will result in unrest on their territories, a new operation has been identified.
It was Viginum who, by sounding the alarm, allowed the French State to officially question the “Recent Reliable News” (RNN) site for having knowingly amplified on the web the impact of images of Stars of David tagged in the Xe district of Paris.
In addition to the thousand bots used to relay information through some 2,600 tweets, the Moldovan nationals arrested in flagrante delicto at the end of October indicated that they had acted for remuneration. Furthermore, the investigators went back to a troubled characterknown for his former pro-Russian connections in Moldova.
The action attempted to capitalize on an existing crisis and a tense social context, marked by the increase in physical attacks against Jewish peoplein order to benefit from it in terms of influence and cognitive warfare.
The multiplication of crisis zones
This instrumentalization of disrupted contexts with the aim of exacerbating them and profiting from them for Russia is a method which has often been used, including quite recently on the African continent, a new theater of confrontation with the West, and especially with France. African versions of the media Sputnik and RT were launched in 2014, and we also noted, from 2018, the presence of mercenary groups, such as Wagner, notably in Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR).
Along the same lines, films produced by agencies in the Prigozhin constellation such as ” _The tourist “_ or « Granit », produced by the Aurum company.
Even more recently, cartoons presenting France and its armed forces alternately as snakes, rats or zombies have swept across West Africa, and several pseudo-foundations and NGOs have taken up dialectics serving the Russian interests.
Furthermore, after President Bazoum in Niger, considered close to France, was overthrown by military coup quickly supported by the information sphere attached to Russia, the French army was accused of having kidnapped children in this country as part of pedophile trafficking. This content, distributed by a “human rights foundation” known to be a disinformation outlet linked to Russia and for having gravitated towards the movement of Yevgeni Prigojine, will be taken up by Dimitri Poliansky, permanent representative of Russia to the United Nations on his Telegram account.
Human psychology, one battlefield among others
Cognitive warfare can be defined as the weaponization of all aspects of society, including human psychology and social relationships, in order to modify the beliefs of individuals and, ultimately, the way they act.
This theme, and the concept behind it, is taken so seriously that it was the subject of the Fall 2021 NATO Innovation Challenge, hosted by Canada that fall, which ‘titled “The invisible threat: Tools to fight cognitive warfare”.
In the present case, the multiplication of crises can, as such, represent a form of “stress test” aimed at measuring the capacity of Westerners to manage a plurality of disorders. In addition, the African continent is an all the more important issue for Russia as European sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine push the Kremlin to diversify its sources of financing, for example by using private military companies in order to to capture funds and raw materials to help support a Russian economy forced to shoulder the burden of its war against Ukraine.
Christine Dugoin-ClémentGeopolitics analyst, associate member of the IAE Paris Research Laboratory – Sorbonne Business School, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, “norms and risks” chair, IAE Paris – Sorbonne Business School
This article is republished from The Conversation sous licence Creative Commons. Lire l’article original.
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