Editor’s Note: This feature separates Ukraine’s friends from its enemies. The Order of Yaroslav the Wise has been given since 1995 for distinguished service to the nation. It is named after the Kyivan Rus leader from 1019-1054, when the medieval empire reached its zenith. The Order of Lenin was the highest decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union, whose demise Russian President Vladimir Putin mourns. It is named after Vladimir Lenin, whose corpse still rots on the Kremlin’s Red Square, more than 100 years after the October Revolution he led.
Ukraine’s Friend of the Week: Facebook
Facebook, the world’s biggest social medium with 2.23 billion regular users, has had a lot of bad press in recent years. And Ukrainians, who have largely switched to Facebook since the Ukrainian government blocked the Kremlin-controlled social medium Vkontakte, still have reason to be wary of the U.S. tech giant.
That’s because back in 2013, long before internet trolls and fake news became issues in the West, Ukrainians were fighting an online battle with Kremlin agents, such as the Internet Research Agency (aka the Saint Petersburg Troll Farm) and false and misleading information about Ukraine and the EuroMaidan Revolution.
A lot of those battles were fought on Facebook, and many Ukrainians got the distinct impression that the social medium favored Russia over Ukraine: Ukrainian patriots, trying to combat Russian propaganda, would find their accounts being blocked because of mass reporting by Russian trolls. The perception was that fewer Russian trolls would be blocked than Ukrainian patriots.
Moreover, as Facebook has become a site where many people get their daily news, it has also become a conduit for fake news, created by the Kremlin and others to influence Western public opinions and even, it has been argued, voting trends.
Facebook’s business model is to monetize its users’ personal information, given freely in return for the site acting as a personal communications and public relations service. Facebook uses the information its users give it to make precision-guided, individually tailored advertising: Tell your friends on Facebook you’ve just joined a bike club, and you’re likely to start seeing ads for bike equipment pop up on Facebook, and so on.
And as Facebook tracks the things users view and “like,” it can use algorithms to present them with more ads that it reckons they might be interested in, going by their past activities on the site, and those of their friends too.
The problem is; ads can be used to sell not just things, but ideas. Highly targeted political advertising, designed to appeal to individual voters – voters in swing states or constituencies – can be created if you have access to Facebook’s data.
There is evidence that bad actors, including the Kremlin, may have used such micro-targeted political advertising in attempts to influence votes in democracies, including the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the 2016 European Union membership referendum in the United Kingdom, the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, and the 2017 French presidential election and German parliamentary elections.
So it was very good news for Ukraine that Facebook announced on March 5 that it would ban foreign-funded political advertising for the upcoming elections in Ukraine – the Kremlin will definitely attempt to influence the result of Ukraine’s presidential and parliamentary elections, and the less opportunity it has to do so the better.
That’s enough to make Facebook Ukraine Friend of the Week and its team collectively winners of an Order of Yaroslav the Wise. But the website would do even better to ban all micro-targeted political advertising altogether, and do more to crack down on trolls and purveyors of fake news. That would do something to shine up its tarnished reputation, and make the world safer for all democracies, not just Ukraine’s.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Valery Gerasimov
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and winner of the Order of Lenin is General Valery V. Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s general staff, who is often credited with masterminding the tactics Russia used to invade and occupy Ukraine’s Crimea and start a fake “civil war” in the Donbas.
Roughly, the tactics include spreading propaganda to misinform a nation’s public, inciting public disharmony by using fake news that targets a divisive issue in the nation under attack, encouraging extremism at both ends of the political spectrum, as well as using espionage and cyberattacks.
The military tactics include subversion, such as the use of regular troops in unmarked uniforms, and sending special teams of soldiers, operating under the guise of local militias, to take over police, security service, and government offices.
Writing in his now infamous article in the Military-Industrial Courier in February 2013, Gerasimov outlined these ideas in a thesis that has come to be known as the “Gerasimov Doctrine.” In the article, Gerasimov wrote that “a perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.”
While that certainly sounds like a description of what befell Ukraine in the months after the EuroMaidan Revolution, the irony is that Gerasimov was not describing a future plan for destabilizing countries like Ukraine at all. According to Russia expert Mark Galeotti, who coined the term “Gerasimov Doctrine,” the general was in fact describing what he thought Western intelligence agencies had done to foment the so-called “Color Revolutions” in the former Soviet-dominated space and the Arab Spring revolts.
For men like Gerasimov, raised under totalitarianism and social engineering via mass propaganda, the idea that there might not be an unseen foreign hand orchestrating a rebellion of the general population against the ruling elite is unthinkable. Observing Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, and later the EuroMaidan Revolution from the Kremlin’s towers, Russia’s rulers simply could not see that these uprisings were not organized from Langley, but were genuine, grassroots public movements, self-organized via social media, through which the population at large was the agent of change.
This was selective blindness. A mass public revolution was the way the Soviets came to power themselves, after all. The regime of Russian dictator of Vladimir Putin has always cracked down on public demonstrations, nipping unrest in the bud before it can grow into a mass movement that might threaten the elite, pretending to itself that it is not the public that is behind any discontent, but a shady enemy, a fifth column, provoking an uprising from afar.
That is nonsense, of course. The West is not particularly interested in Russia, and certainly not in trying to foment regime change or conquering Russia militarily. However, for Russian nationalists, admitting this would be too belittling for the Motherland for them to bear. The sprawling, creaking modern Russian state, like the Soviet Union before, needs an outward threat, an enemy, to help bind it together, to provide national cohesion.
Russia, bereft of an enemy after the end of the Cold War, found itself facing some uncomfortable truths about itself – it was a large country but poor, and not great. And unlike Russia, the West did not need an enemy to define itself. It did not need Russia.
That hurt, and so it is hardly surprising that most Russians were willing to throw away democracy in 2000 in exchange for dictatorship again under Putin, whose unwritten social contract not only offered improved living standards, but the promise of making Russia strong, feared and respected again.
The “Gerasimov Doctrine” is thus not an innovative strategy for prosecuting “hybrid war” to conquer the world, but a response to phantom threat from an imagined Western enemy, created by the Putin regime’s own paranoia. It is designed as much as a toolbox of tactics to defend the Motherland as it is to destabilize states like Ukraine, which are supposed to be Moscow’s obedient client states – not fully sovereign, and not even “real countries.”
Gerasimov himself, writing in his February 2013 article, noted that in the modern world, the distinction between wartime and peacetime has become almost meaningless. For as long as Russia has enemies – which will be for as long as it is ruled by tyrants – Russia will be at war, only these days the war is fought as a political war against those enemies who cannot be attacked by military means.
Hence, the West is under attack by Russia – not with bombs and planes and tanks, but with propaganda turbocharged by social media. With corruption to buy spies, businessmen and politicians. With cyberattacks. And with inference in, and undermining of, democratic processes and institutions, like votes and referendums, and parliaments and the media.
Gerasimov is indeed Ukraine’s and the West’s foe, sadly, and also infuriatingly, because this is how he and his Kremlin masters see themselves. This will probably not change until their own worst fears are realized, and the regime is overthrown.
That will be done not by some unseen Western hand, but by the Russian people themselves. However, it will only happen if they – like Ukrainians did before them – can discover their own, true strength.
