As a steady flow of British weapons arrive in Ukraine, and UK forces line up to bolster Nato’s eastern flank, a dedicated team of three dozen officials in Whitehall have been playing a lesser-publicised role in response to Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
A new counter-disinformation unit, the Government Information Cell (GIC), set up to dispel Kremlin falsehoods relating to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, is responsible for trawling through online and broadcast material to identify disinformation and tackle it.
Ministers and officials see the counter-disinformation effort as a vital element of the support Britain is providing to Ukraine. A senior official in the unit told The Telegraph that the Kremlin was “weaponising lies” and using untruths “to justify the unjustifiable”. The information cell was “exposing those lies by countering Kremlin disinformation,” he added.
Putin is well aware that Russian public opinion, and his future, rests on the information battle. He appears determined to flood the airwaves and internet with false and often outlandish claims, such as that Ukraine is led by neo-Nazis and is developing chemical weapons for use against Russia, in order to justify the invasion. The UK information unit is trying to hit back by exposing the “Kremlin playbook”.
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The cell was set up at the behest of Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, in the weeks prior to the invasion in late February, and operates between the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence. Its 35 full-time staff are drawn from departments including the Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence, Home Office, Cabinet Office and Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport.
An ally of Ms Truss said: “Liz thinks ditching our Cold War anti-propaganda capability was a mistake and has restored it with this new information unit. It’s part of our strategy to tackle Russian disinformation and fake news and call out Kremlin lies and subterfuge. This is doubly important in the social media age.”
The unit’s routine work involves identifying Russian disinformation and taking steps to expose such material as false. As well as creating new content to disseminate online, officials in the unit advise government departments, including No 10 Downing Street, and embassies and governments abroad. GIC reports have been distributed to some 30 Nato and EU allies, as well as Australia and New Zealand, which are members of the “Five Eyes” intelligence partnership.
In the UK, Russia Today, the Russian state-owned broadcaster that lost its licence on Friday, was seen as a significant conduit for Kremlin disinformation. But the cell’s research shows that just 3 per cent of the public trust it as a source of information on the conflict.
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The cell’s crucial audiences are in Russia and Ukraine.
Shortly after the start of the invasion, the unit was responsible for disseminating a video in which Boris Johnson directly addressed the people of Russia, telling them in their own language: “I do not believe this war is in your name.” A version of that video translated into Russian was viewed by more than eight million people, according to the unit’s data.
While, conventionally, if the Government wished to disseminate a video of the Prime Minister it would rely on posting the clip on official Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages, here the usual rules do not apply.
For a start, Putin has blocked access to Western social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook in Russia. But there is also an understanding that the Russian president has cultivated an innate hostility towards the UK Government and, as a result, ordinary people are not likely to see nor attach any credence to messages deriving from official Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence accounts.
To get around that problem, The Telegraph understands, the unit has been commissioning advertising agencies to target the Russian population with its messages on sites such as VK, a Russian social media platform. The tactic means that material such as Mr Johnson’s speech will reach the laptops, tablets or mobile phones of people who would never have thought to seek out the view of the British Government.
Heading off Putin’s lies with ‘pre-bunking’
Members of the unit are also working to expose Putin’s attempts to pre-emptively accuse Ukraine and the West of engaging in activities in which the Kremlin is already involved. Internally this work is known as “pre-bunking”. An example of this was another intervention by Mr Johnson, to warn that Putin may be preparing to deploy chemical weapons in Ukraine, after Moscow claimed it had uncovered a “Ukrainian biological weapons lab”. The US dismissed the claim as “absurd propaganda”.
The information cell is coordinating with embassies abroad to translate and disseminate its “pre-bunking” content around the world, in a bid to overturn the idiom coined by Jonathan Swift that “falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it”. Officials are now beginning to distribute content in Mandarin, amid questions over China’s potential support of the war.
Currently, the unit is working to expose what it believes are Kremlin preparations to initiate a series of sham referenda to try and carve out new separatist republics from Ukraine, modelled on a similar vote in Crimea in 2014.
“This isn’t a level playing field,” the senior official said. “We know that the Russians won’t hold themselves to the same standards of truth, transparency and accuracy that we in the UK want to uphold. But we see that as part of our armoury in countering the Russian disinformation.
“We know that Russian textbooks dating back to Soviet times, on psyops, psychological operations, taught students that, in defending the state, a lie is not a lie. That’s a weapon. That’s what we’re dealing with and what we’re up against.”
