War in Ukraine and the New Information Reality Published Nov. 8, 2024 By Maj. Paul E. Schubert Wild Blue Yonder--Maxwell AFB -- The laying of the Trans-Atlantic Cable was rightly heralded as a sea-change for the connectedness of nations, and it fundamentally was the direct forerunner of what would become the modern internet over a century later. “The cable was landed on August 5, 1858. For the first time, the telegraph networks of Europe and North America had been connected.”[1] Suddenly, information that once took weeks to transmit from the European continent to America now took mere hours. In the ensuing century and a half, humanity’s unparalleled access to information has resulted in the exponential increase of scientific discovery for the benefit of humankind, but that access to information has also come at a cost. Verifying information has become even more necessary as the ubiquity of the internet provides bad actors with myriad opportunities to muddy the water with inaccurate, untrue, or unverifiable information, and manipulation of information has become a key concern across every facet of life – especially in warfare. In late February 2022, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in the culmination of a yearslong information warfare campaign waged across the global information space. The effectiveness with which he manipulated the information environment prior to and during the invasion served to enable his strategic goals by creating an environment of confusion and conflicted data, and it has resulted in an entirely new conception of the domain of information warfare. Proclaiming that he has essentially established a new domain of warfare is not an assertion that can be taken lightly. Through the prism of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, therefore, it is critical to analyze how Putin used fabricated realities, lawfare, and denial/deception to craft a distorted narrative of Just War, ultimately redefining war in the information domain. Prior to the invasion and throughout its progression, Putin’s exploitation of his unprecedented control of the information environment, massive disinformation campaigns, repetition of blatant falsehoods, and false flag operations functioned to create a veritable alternative reality surrounding the conflict. Information warfare, generally, has focused on controlling the “information space” – e.g. intelligence operations, controlling access to information, denial, deception, and propaganda. Putin’s alternative realities, however, exceed the traditional notions of information warfare to an absurd degree. It is difficult to pin down an exact starting point for the initiation of these fabrications, but Putin and the Russian government (along with the Belarusians, occasionally) laid significant groundwork in the aftermath of the 2013 Euro-Maidan protests, which eventually resulted in the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. In the interest of keeping Ukraine’s government friendly to Russia (as it was with Yanukovych), “[t]he Russian foreign ministry derided the Euro-Maidan revolution […] and accused its perpetrators of having ‘nationalist and neo-Nazi moods.’”[2] For Putin’s purposes, these claims laid the groundwork for Russian action in Ukraine by characterizing any future use of force as necessary to root out Nazi sympathizers. His rationalization, while claimed under the auspices of Just War, perverted the Mencian theory that suggests “in international relations, especially in wars among states, humane responsibility overrides sovereignty.”[3] The “reality” of widespread Nazism practically demanded Russia’s “humane responsibility” of intervention, and Putin made certain to invoke memories of the Holocaust and Nazi death squads to highlight the criticality of the situation. This carefully concocted fabrication was just the beginning of a distinct theme for the alternative reality that embodied aberrant perversions of Just War, but Putin leaned into this theme and carried it throughout the 2022 invasion. After Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the alternative realities validated by Just War became eminently clear once again. In the immediate lead-up to the 2022 invasion, Putin focused on historical revisionism with a July 2021 article espousing the origination of “Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians […] as one people bound together by a common Orthodox Christian faith, ‘Old Russian’ language and […] historical experience.”[4] Building upon the claim that Ukrainians were Nazis, step two painted a picture to Russians and to the international community that Russians and Ukrainians were one disunited but ethnically Russian people. His comparisons to Nazism intentionally evoked the atrocities of the Holocaust, and in late 2021, Putin and his allies in the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk amplified those concerns by claiming imminent Ukrainian attacks on civilians, including the use of chemical weapons.[5] In January 2022, Russia recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR, respectively) under the auspices of preventing Ukrainian genocide in those regions, a concern which was itself fabricated fearmongering to justify Putin’s actions. Once again, Putin guided the narrative through a filter of rationalization to arrive at another perversion of Confucian concepts of Just War. Specifically, Mencius posits that “[t]he invaded side has to have proof of a clear violation of humane governance [and] [t]he invasion has to be done out of the intention of saving the invaded people from suffering.”[6] Under the narrative that the invaded people (Ukraine) were suffering, along with the merit granted by the illegally recognized DPR and LPR, Putin positioned himself to claim that Russia’s invasion a month later would be fully justified. Having fabricated concerns about Nazism, genocide, and chemical attacks, and binding those fears to a revisionist narrative to liberate ethnic Russians in Ukraine, Putin’s alternative reality paved the way for further, deeper manipulation of the information space. Leaning heavily on justifying the war, Putin simultaneously cultivated a unique blend of legal strategy and information warfare that has, in recent decades, been conceptualized as “lawfare.” Lawfare is essentially the manipulation of domestic and international laws or regulations to present a façade of legitimacy in order to justify actions taken or to delegitimize an adversary by claiming that they are operating counter to the established rule of law. It is most apparent when one party intentionally mischaracterizes an established law to legitimize their position, often completely counter to the spirit of the law. In Russia’s case, both the misreading of laws and the creation of new laws to build a foundation of justification are explicit. One of the more blatant examples revolves around the United Nations’ Article 51, which establishes that each member has the explicit right to self-defense and that other members may not inhibit a member from the conduct of their own self-defense.[7] As early as 2014, Russia began bolstering its troop presence in the vicinity of the DPR and LPR. It then set the stage for Russian intervention in the region with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s proclamation “that ‘extremist organizations’ were trying to seize Russian military infrastructure in Crimea […] which alluded to Article 51 of the UN Charter.”[8] By claiming that there was an imminent risk to Russian military equipment, Russia created an illusion that they would likely be required to conduct self-defense operations, and by alluding to Article 51, Shoigu implied that any country’s interference in Russia’s right to self-defense would be a direct violation of the UN’s own rules. The implication, in Shoigu’s view, would call into question the UN’s own legitimacy and the legitimacy of their charter. Clearly, Russia’s intent was to place the UN into an unwinnable position. The UN could either watch Russia conduct obvious troop buildups and inject itself into the Donbas region, which would bolster the façade of actions taken in pseudo self-defense, or the UN (and an international coalition) could prevent Russia from doing so and risk fevered Russian cries of UN hypocrisy. Putin again used information to both justify and fuel his position. Furthermore, Russia employed its lawfare tactics to progressively delegitimize the Minsk II accords from cradle-to-grave. The accords, which were agreed upon in February 2015, mandated several concurrent efforts, including decentralization of the breakaway republics and a ceasefire.[9] This was intended to rein in the conflict after Russia’s takeover of Crimea; however, in forcing the acceptance of decentralization of the DPR and LPR, “the Kremlin wanted to depict Ukraine as a failed state in order to justify future military operations.”[10] Elsewhere, Russia sought to cast itself as one of the principal backers of the Minsk II accords while concealing, or attempting to conceal, its destabilization efforts in the Donbas region. Russia backed continuous provocations in Donetsk and Luhansk, which in turn forced the Ukrainian military to respond, so that Russia could claim that Ukraine violated the terms of the Minsk ceasefire. The constant subversion of the legally agreed upon ceasefire served two goals: to paint the Kremlin as the aggrieved party, and to simultaneously solidify “Russia’s narrative that Ukraine violated Minsk […] which eventually justified the February 2022 invasion.”[11] In this way, Putin’s simultaneous support for and sabotage of the Minsk II accords created a perception that Ukraine was in fact the party acting in bad faith. Coupled with characterizations elsewhere of the DPR/LPR citizens as ethnically Russian and in need of protection, he created a situation in which the “victim of aggression fights in self-defense, but he [is not] only defending himself, for aggression is a crime against society as a whole.”[12] The final piece of the information warfare puzzle lay in the Russian military’s use of traditional denial and deception. Throughout 2021, Russia continuously built up their forces along the Ukrainian border with equally continuous denials that they were preparing for an invasion. Notably, Russian military leadership continued to rely on the narrative of aggrievement and claimed that the buildup and activity of roughly 80,000 to 100,000 Russian troops on Russia’s western border with Ukraine was intended to “[carry] out sudden combat readiness checks of the Southern and Western military districts.”[13] During the buildup and alleged drills at the end of 2021, the Russian Defense Ministry repeatedly denied that the troop levels were a precursor to invasion – yet less than four months after the November drills, Putin indeed launched his invasion. Some of the chief proponents of the use of denial and deception in warfare are the Chinese military classics. In particular, in his lessons on military teachings, The T’ai Kung explains that the precursor to a sudden attack should be “an outward display of confusion while actually being well ordered [and to] make secret plans, keep[ing] your intentions secret.”[14] Denial and deception are tactics that are as old as warfare itself, and Putin is clearly well-versed in their employment. Maintaining the undercurrent of aggrievement while leveraging denial and deception to create an atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion allowed Putin to effectively hamstring any pre-emptive measures that the West might have tried prior to the invasion. Ultimately, the interconnected nature of the 21st century has forced humanity to reckon with an endless influx of information. The ability to manipulate the flow of data has drastically influenced the creation and waging of information warfare. While conventional methods of denial and deception are still effective, Putin also deftly showcased the impact of information control throughout the invasion. He flooded the information sphere with false narratives to create alternate realities, which muddied the situation and sowed enough uncertainty to divide international support either for Ukraine or counter to Russia. His use of lawfare to justify the invasion and further muddy the legal standing of Russia’s actions versus Ukraine’s responses effectively stifled the ability of international organizations to mount substantial anticipatory actions while simultaneously dividing the international community. Having refined and advanced the weaponization of information, it is not too bold to imagine that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has changed information warfare forever. In future wars, it will be imperative to seize and maintain the information initiative or risk being engulfed by a tidal wave of misinformation and deception. Identifying truth or fabrication may be the difference between victory and defeat. Maj Paul Schubert is a career intelligence officer. He has extensive experience in special operations with both the Army and Air Force, as well as experience with targeting, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). Recently, Paul worked as a joint, interagency liaison with a focus on interagency partnerships and their nexus to defense intelligence. [1] Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers, (New York: Walker & Co., 1998), p. 80. [2] Samuel Ramani, Putin’s War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution (London: Hurst & Co., 2023), p. 35. [3] Tongdong Bai, Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 226. [4] Ramani, Putin’s War, p. 102. [5] Ramani, Putin’s War, p. 109. [6] Bai, Against Political Equality, p. 227. [7] United Nations, “United Nations Charter (full text),” accessed 25 Aug 2024, [8] Ramani, Putin’s War, p. 47. [9] Ramani, Putin’s War, p. 57. [10] Ramani, Putin’s War, p. 58. [11] Ramani, Putin’s War, p. 62. [12] Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 59. [13] Ramani, Putin’s War, p. 96. [14] Ralph D. Sawyer, trans., The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China (New York: Basic Books, 2007), p. 52.