British researcher and journalist Peter Pomerantsev, born in Kyiv, is the author of two reference works on Russian propaganda, incl Nothing is true, everything is possible. Adventures in today’s Russia (Saint-Simon, 2015). He outlined America’s “peace plan” for Ukraine.
Confusion arose over the origins of this plan, which greatly benefited Moscow. Is this a “peace plan” or a Russian influence operation?
Russia’s concept of diplomacy is very different from ours. Russia uses diplomacy as its own weapon of war. Look at what they’re doing in Syria: negotiating, negotiating, bombing, bombing, negotiating. That’s typical of them. They always combine military action, intelligence operations, information operations and diplomacy. That’s the whole thing. We distinguish “peace plans” from influence operations, whereas for Russia these are closely related.
Russia always makes it seem like this is our fault (if peace negotiations fail)which is quite easy, because the viewpoints are very different (in Europe). Meanwhile, they advanced to the battlefield and increased military pressure. This is their method. Plus there is a kind of internal political struggle in the United States, which is very chaotic.
What role does the media play in Russia’s influence operations?
What the media sometimes misses is the intent of influence operations. The best example occurred in 2016, when American media used leaks released by Julian Assange (founder of WikiLeaks) to corroborate the story in Russian hacked documents about what Hillary Clinton did (later candidate for American presidential election) will do bad.
In this case, it is difficult to ignore the contents of the plan, because it is important. However, as media, we must always do some kind of meta-analysis: who did this? What for ? What happened on the battlefield? Are there any signs Russia wants a ceasefire? There’s no sign there. Therefore we have to analyze the whole.
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