By now, the Great Cyber War was well established. The war had started in 2007 in Estonia, and now peaked in 2014 with a full-scale military operation in Ukraine, leading to the shooting down of a passenger airline by Russian army missiles, and the seizing of Crimea, an island off Ukraine’s Southern coast with a population similar to the European country of Latvia. It was the first time a country had taken land from another country by force since the Second World War.

Now at this point you may think I am wrong, or this didn’t happen, or it didn’t happen like that. You may question whether the MH17 was shot down by Russia, or may point out that there was a referendum in Crimea, and the people voted to leave Ukraine. You may also argue any number of conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine.

You have been info-bombed.

Around the Ukraine war, vast amounts of misinformation, false propaganda, and conspiracies were churned out by Russia, as part of their Hybrid War. This was a system already set up years back, based on Soviet and KGB practices, and honed for the modern era in Estonia and Georgia.

A recent report published by NATO, and authored mainly by Estonian officials, looks back at what happened, and is happening in Ukraine. It concluded that:

“Russian information operations skilfully target a wide range of audiences with different beliefs and convictions. The anti-Ukrainian approach relies on a variety of stylistic forms and nuances. It can take on the form of sensationalism and blaming… or use a more restrained approach. In addition to the content of the messages, Russian technically ensures that certain messages reach specific audiences and others do not.”

They include the recommendation that we must stop taking Russia seriously as an exporter of “alternative opinions,” because it is a country where there is no democracy or freedom of speech, and therefore it is able to propagate lies unrestrained and unchallenged.

As an example, the BBC reported in November 2017 about the St Petersburg “Internet Research Agency,” the Kremlin-backed troll factory, being involved with fake videos being produced to fan the flames of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine:

“The Russian Liberation Movement videos were distributed through seven fake accounts on the Russian social network VK. The accounts used false names and photographs of random people as profile pictures. The accounts were opened just a few days before the material appeared and were largely reposting entertainment content in an effort to look ‘real.’

BBC Russian also found that a social media account sharing the material was computer generated and belonged to a botnet--a large controlled network of social media accounts.”

A mainstay of Information Warfare is that for every true story or fact, numerous other contradictory stories are pushed out. It is immaterial whether they are believable, or believed, vaguely true or total fantasy. The aim is to bury the truth in a messy pile of crap, so nobody can work out what is true at all. We shouldn’t be surprised, as this method is no secret; it’s called the Gerasimov Doctrine and was written up in 2013 by the Russian General, Valery Gerasimov, in a report. He explained:

“The very ‘rules of war’ have changed. The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness. … All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character.”

On Twitter, Putin opponent and famous chess player Garry Kasparov explained it thus:

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

We end up wasting time arguing about which story or fact is true or not, rather than addressing any core issues. That is precisely the intention of those bombarding us with conflicting facts. We are increasingly distracted by falling down rabbit holes of argument about what did or didn’t happen, all of which is designed to distract us from what is actually happening. Surkov and Gerasimov have told us this, but they are so good at it that they can explain to us in detail that they are about to con us, and still con us despite that.

And so Russia managed to get away with invading Ukraine. Putin later proudly admitted that he had in fact invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea, despite denying previously that his “little green men” and disruptive tourists were Russian soldiers. Lying to the world, then admitting to that lie, and still getting away with it is as much a reflection of his audacity as of our stupidity.

By now you’d have thought people would have noticed something was going on. If this Great Cyber War had been a conventional war, by now we’d all have been mobilised. Three countries had been attacked, a civilian airliner had been shot down, part of Ukraine had been taken by force. The thing that connected all this was Russian information and cyber warfare. We were all lost in arguing about who shot the plane down, whether Crimea chose to join Russia or was invaded, whether the CIA had been behind the protests in Kiev, whether the Russians in Eastern Ukraine were soldiers or tourists. And all the while we were distracted by the mad propaganda stories spreading over social media. We were distracted by the white noise from the simple reality that Russia had invaded Ukraine, seized Crimea by force, and shot down a passenger plane.

Some voices were trying to shout through the noise, but they were not the headlines, and anything they posted online was attacked by pro-Russian comments, which we now know were coming either from Russian “social media factories,” or from Russian bots, which automatically post again and again to swamp the other real comments.

Meanwhile, Russia stepped into a new arena, backing Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad. A popular rebellion against him threatened to remove a Russian ally from the Middle East. The ensuing war also offered Russia a chance to show its military might in full public view, and position itself as a relevant player in world affairs. It also triggered an event that was to rock Europe.

The Russian-backed war in Syria led to a humanitarian crisis that slammed into Europe, unsettling it to its very core. The flood of refugees challenged the liberal order in Europe, and cornered some of its leading politicians.

Through all this chaos we did not notice the Great Cyber War, but all of this was the Great Cyber War. These were all connected events, battles of the same war, parts of the same plan.

Part II:

Part III:

Part IV: