Читать книгу Information Wars - Richard Stengel - Страница 33

First, there were the little green men.

That’s how early news reports referred to the masked men in unmarked uniforms who suddenly appeared in strategic locations around Crimea at the end of February 2014.¹

On February 27, these units took over Crimea’s Supreme Council—its parliament—as well as critical locations like airports and military bases and television stations.²

The green men were Spetsnaz—Russian special operations forces. Putin vehemently denied they were Russian troops, claiming instead they were patriotic local militias defending the rights of ethnic Russians in Crimea. How local militias had Russian PKP machine guns, Russian composite helmets, and Russian tactical vests was not explained. These troops were accompanied by digital forces, as Russian internet trolls and bots echoed the message that they were local militias.

At a press conference a week later, Putin was asked if there were Russian troops in Crimea. He said, “No.”³ Putin asserted that “there were no Russian troops in Crimea.”

This was an unblinking lie. It was a lie without any verbal hedges or ambiguity, a direct knowing lie on the world stage about one country invading another.

Within days, Putin had engineered the installation of a pro-Russian government. The new council declared the Republic of Crimea to be an independent entity, and a referendum was to be held on March 16 in which voters would choose whether or not to join the Russian Federation.⁴ The vote was overwhelmingly in favor of joining.⁵ On March 18, a treaty was signed in the Kremlin between Crimea and Russia to formally bring Crimea into the Russian Federation.⁶

The White House condemned the violation of the sovereignty of Crimea and called for sanctions on Russia. In a phone call to Putin, President Obama said that Crimea’s referendum would “never be recognized by the United States and the international community” and that “we are prepared to impose additional costs on Russia for its actions.” Putin, for his part, told Obama that the referendum was “fully consistent with the norms of international law and the U.N. charter.”⁷

Oh, and one month after the initial invasion, Putin owned up to the fact that they were Russian soldiers—without ever acknowledging that he had denied it in the first place.⁸ That’s Putin’s way. Establish a new baseline of reality and never look back.

The context for all this was the months of demonstrations in Kiev that began in November 2013 and culminated in the flight of the Putin-supported president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, at the end of February.⁹ The protests, centered in the neo-Stalinist-style square known as the Maidan, began in reaction to Yanukovych’s rejection of a Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement that would have established a free-trade zone. Putin had urged Yanukovych to reject it, and he had.¹⁰ On the Maidan, pro-EU demonstrators carried EU flags and chanted, “Ukraine is Europe.”¹¹ It was the largest gatherings of protesters since the pro-democracy demonstrations of the Orange Revolution in 2004.¹² And that’s what spooked Putin—he had long claimed that America was behind these “color revolutions” in the Russian periphery.¹³ In 2011, Putin had accused Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of being the invisible hand behind the anti-corruption protests that had rocked Moscow and St. Petersburg that year.¹⁴

The U.N. rejected the Crimean annexation and referendum, passing a nonbinding resolution affirming the “territorial integrity of Ukraine.”¹⁵ The leaders of the G7 condemned “the Russian Federation’s clear violation of the sovereignty of Ukraine”¹⁶ and then suspended Russia’s membership in the G-8 and canceled the planned summit in Sochi—a blow to Putin, as the gathering was meant to showcase Russia just before the Russian-hosted Winter Olympics.¹⁷

Over and over, the President and the State Department reaffirmed that Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected.^18,19 Secretary Kerry went further. On Face the Nation, he said, “It’s an incredible act of aggression. It is really a stunning, willful choice by President Putin to invade another country.”²⁰

I was outraged about Putin’s actions. I was particularly incensed by the stone-cold lying and disinformation. We had been monitoring for months how Russia had been claiming that Nazis and fascists were behind the “Euromaidan” protests. What could I do? Well, heck, I was the head of public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department, and at the very least, we could tweet about it. I know that sounds like shooting spitballs at a tidal wave, but it was no small thing at State. I asked that public affairs officers and State staff and ambassadors tweet out the statements about Ukraine that the President and the Secretary had made. Easy, right? But nothing happened.

So, I started to tweet myself, condemning Putin’s actions in Ukraine, all the while not getting out ahead of the Secretary or the President. Here’s an early one:

The unshakable principle guiding events must be that the people of #Ukraine determine their own future.

Not exactly fire-breathing words, but it was something.

After I began tweeting, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t get much reaction from within the Building, but I would get immediately trolled online by dozens of seemingly furious people. Someone named Petrik Krohn tweeted a few minutes later:

The key to the liberation of #Ukraine is understanding that the US @StateDept = #CIA. #Euromaidan is their anti-Russian #pogrom.

And then this got retweeted by other Russian-sounding Twitter handles. This was all new to me. Here are a few others, all of which were liked and retweeted by one another:

Everyone knows for a long time that the State Department only deals in misinformation.

The US is the empire of evil and fascism [accompanied by an image of a bloodied Obama holding a map of Ukraine].

Why is it forbidden to hold protests like the Maidan in the USA? You are undemocratic and authoritarian.

And the always useful:

Are you a drunk or do you lie deliberately?

In the beginning, there was very little echo of what I was trying to do within the department. The attitude at State was: the President has spoken, the Secretary has spoken, the U.N. has spoken—why do we need to do anything else? Even people who were privately furious about what Putin had done were reluctant to go on social media and say the same thing. Or even support what the President and the Secretary had said.

I asked to be furnished with regular tweets. Public affairs sent me some, grudgingly. Here is one that was sent to me to post, provided, of course, that EUR cleared it, which they eventually did:

U.S. is closely monitoring developments in #Ukraine.

Putin must have been quaking in his boots.