The War at Home: Putin’s Information Strategy Toward the Russian Population

Abstract

Russian president Vladimir Putin is pursuing a return to great-power status for Russia. In order to achieve his goal, Putin is using several information strategies to persuade the population to accept an escalation in military spending and the use of military force. These strategies have been called hybrid or information warfare, because they involve manipulating information available to the general public by controlling television networks and the Russian media. The media presents the Russian population with an “us against them” narrative where the “genuine and clean” Russian moral values are contrasted with the “depraved, immoral and decadent West.” This battle of values is depicted in the national media as an existential struggle that requires the support and expansion in the use of military force.

Probably there is no such thing as an objective truth. But we need the rules to deal with it to function as a society.

—Peter Pomerantsev (in an interview with Urve Eslas, April 2015)

We’re something along the lines of Russia’s Information Defense Ministry.

—Employees at the news service RT (Russia Today) (Spiegel Online, May 30, 2014)