Ukraine stokes anti-immigrant tensions in Russia

Ukrainian agents are conducting a “psyops” campaign to destabilise Russian society by stoking anti-immigrant sentiment after the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack, Kyiv’s new director of information warfare has told The Times.

Four men from Tajikistan have been charged with carrying out the massacre, triggering a wave of xenophobia against Tajiks living in Russia, with reports in recent days of beatings and arson attacks, as well as deportations and unlawful detentions.

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, in which gunmen killed more than 140 people at the concert venue. Despite this, and western security agencies’ intelligence to the contrary, the Kremlin has tried to blame Ukraine.

Russia, a country made up of nearly 200 ethnic groups and 21 national republics, has a long history of oppressing the minority populations it has engulfed over centuries of expansion across Eurasia.

For Ukraine, this tension between Russia’s Slavic and non-Slavic ethnicities is “fertile ground” in which to exploit divisions and distrust among the Russian public, Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation (CCD), said.

By infiltrating local Russian Telegram chats — one of the few information spaces not controlled by the Kremlin — Ukrainian agents have been working to play ethnic groups off against each other.

After video footage was leaked of Russian special forces cutting the ear off one of the Crocus City Hall suspects, the CCD sought to amplify expressions of sympathy for the terrorists among Telegram groups popular with Tajiks to turn them against the security services.

“[The terror attack] provoked a split between nationalities in Russia and of course it’s very beneficial for us to support any national splits there and to fuel them using information,” Kovalenko said.

Among the messages being amplified were comments by Tajiks in Russia saying: “Let’s mobilise, we are not respected here, let’s do something with these awful police.”

After it was speculated online that the soldier who wielded the knife had been a Chechen, the Ukrainians seized the opportunity to intensify anti-Chechen animosity among ethnic Russians as well.

“We’ve seen and amplified attempts to cause conflict with the Chechens, saying, ‘Chechens are everywhere in Moscow and they’ll cut up a Russian just like they did with the Tajik,’” said Kovalenko. “This was presented as being from Russians, who do not like Tajiks, but hate Chechens even more.”

The CCD, which has about 50 full-time analysts, answers to the National Security and Defence Council, the body responsible for Ukraine’s security services. It was founded in 2021 with the primary purpose of combating Russian attempts to spread false information in Ukraine meant to undermine the government and weaken national resolve.

Speaking to the press for the first time since assuming the directorship at the beginning of this year, Kovalenko said that the centre was increasingly taking a more offensive role by carrying out its own “psyops” — psychological operations.

“Russia is a colossus with clay feet that needs to be shaken from all sides if we are to win this war,” he said, at the centre’s unmarked and unremarkable headquarters in Kyiv. “We have to shake it by any means necessary, and information is critical to that. We leverage what we can, because we know that in fuelling these ethnic tensions we weaken Russia.”

Information warfare is not new. During the Second World War both the Allies and Axis powers conducted airdrops of leaflets containing propaganda over enemy territory, hoping to demoralise those who read them.

But the advent of the internet, and in particular social media where unfiltered information is instantaneously transmitted across borders, has radically expanded this theatre of war. Long before Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow had been waging a campaign of disinformation against its neighbour, the central message of which was that Ukraine was a failed state that required Russia’s patronage.

The fact that Ukrainians did not flock to join the invading Russian army demonstrated the failure of that campaign, but nevertheless the Kremlin continues to intensify its efforts, recently harnessing artificial intelligence to do the work of dozens of human agents to spread fake posts.

Oleksiy Danilov, the recently departed head of the National Security and Defence Council, told The Times in February that Russian agents were spreading 166 million disinformation posts on platforms such as Telegram, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X every week.

Liubov Tsybulska, a hybrid warfare expert, said that Russian disinformation campaigns had become vastly more sophisticated in the past two years and had been the underlying cause of anti-war protests in which Ukrainians blocked roads, preventing the transport of weapons from the West.

Gone are the days when error-strewn Ukrainian language posts would be an immediate giveaway of a Russian infiltrator, she said, as Russia was recruiting native Ukrainian speakers from occupied regions to work for them.

The Russians were also tailoring their false information posts to specific social groups, for example offering ways to avoid mobilisation to men of fighting age.

The same should be applied to Russia, she said, where “sentiment in Astrakhan is completely different to that in Pskov”. Tsybulska, who founded the Centre for Strategic Communication, another government agency combating disinformation, added: “You can’t apply the same narratives everywhere.”

She agreed, however, that tensions between ethnic Slavs and minority groups was one of Russia’s biggest vulnerabilities. “You can see there is a crack there, but these things take time to destabilise. Do we have that time?”

Additional reporting by Viktoria Sybir