Ciaran O’Connor: Is West waking up to Russia’s disinformation campaigns?

A sustained Kremlin-backed operation of disinformation is making harder to distinguish reality from fiction in the Russia versus the West faceoff

Ukraine's national flag waves above the capital with the Motherland Monument on the right, in Kiev. Some airlines have halted or diverted flights to Ukraine amid heightened fears that an invasion by Russia is imminent despite intensive weekend talks between the Kremlin and the West. Picture: AP

 In his 2019 book This is Not Propaganda, author Peter Pomerantsev details how following the collapse of the Soviet Union, security officials-turned academics contended that the USSR ultimately failed not because of poor economic policies, human rights' abuses or state-sponsored corruption, but because of 'information viruses' planted by Western security services through Trojan horse concepts such as freedom or speech and economic reform.

Such a theory did not enter the Russian mainstream immediately but in the past 10 years, he explains, this permanent information warfare philosophy has become central to Kremlin doctrine which now ceaselessly puts forward the argument that the West is waging an information war on Russia through NGOs, anti-corruption initiatives and news organisations.