It’s getting harder to deceive, even in the fog of war

Alan Philps unpacks how social media and the power of the internet is changing the nature of war reporting.

Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn't seem to bothered about the fact that social media is changing the nature of war reporting. Mikhail Klimentyev / AP

Last summer when the Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine were in danger of being defeated, help mysteriously arrived in the form of devastating artillery barrages to save the day. Moscow denied that it had entered the war against the Ukrainian army. But it proved hard to keep the secret Russian intervention off social media.

Excited residents of the Russian town of Gukovo videoed barrages of rockets heading over the border towards Ukraine and posted the footage online. The moderator of a local forum sounded the alarm: “Stop giving away information. Can’t believe you are giving away straight proof that ‘Russia is attacking Ukraine’. Please delete.”

This is just one example of the evidence that can be uncovered by a new form of war reporting. Social media posts, combined with street view maps, satellite images and other open sources, provide a trove of information that has changed the ground rules for carrying out covert military interventions. Their deniability now has a very short life. In fact, the unconsidered trifles that people upload to social media are already writing the history of the conflict.

A good example is the issue of responsibility for the shooting down over Ukraine of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which is still being investigated by the Dutch authorities. After reports suggested that a Russian-made Buk missile launcher had shot the airliner down, the Russians claimed that it was actually downed by a Ukrainian fighter.

That claim was always thin but appears to be ruled out by news this week that the broadcaster RTL had identified shrapnel from a Buk missile at the crash site.

Noting that the Ukrainians also used the Buk anti-aircraft system, the Russian defence ministry insisted the launcher belonged to the Ukrainian armed forces and had set out from government-held territory. This claim was based on the identification of a car dealer’s billboard that features in the background of the picture of the passing missile launcher. But the car dealer has many billboards in Ukraine. And the one in the picture has been shown by citizen journalists to be in the city of Luhansk, under the separatists’ control, not where the Russians claimed.

The star of these investigators is a blogger from the English city of Leicester by the name of Eliot Higgins. He and his team have now traced the Buk missile launcher all the way from the city of Kursk to its firing point, using Russians soldiers’ social media posts and odd scraps of video taken as the convoy trundled along Russian roads.

Mr Higgins revealed some of the tools of the trade in a lecture this week at the SKUP 2015 conference of the Norwegian Foundation for a Free and Investigative Press.

Tracking the Buk, he said, was made easier by the odd habit of one motorist uploading the video of his dashboard camera as he drives around eastern Ukraine. While the video may be the dullest ever shot, it provides a means to identify the locations where the Buk passed.

It is now possible to analyse shell craters from satellite images to see from which direction the ordnance was fired. Anyone with time and nerdish persistence can link up the blast craters with the firing positions, identifiable by the scorch marks on the soil and the tracks of the army vehicles in the fields.

Russian media have dismissed Mr Higgins as a know-nothing amateur or a tool of western intelligence established to fight Russia in the information war. The latter charge, however, neglects the fact that Mr Higgins, then an unemployed househusband, began his work by analysing uploads from Syria before anyone thought of war in Ukraine.

Does it matter that the Kremlin has been caught lying? Vladimir Putin’s rationale is that the US has bent international law and gone to war on the basis of untruths for many years.

History shows that in war, winning is more important than truth, as the victors control the narrative. But times are changing and the truth is now much quicker to appear amid the lies of war. Perhaps Mr Putin has created a crisis that he cannot control.

For the moment, Mr Putin’s control of Russian television means that much of the population believes that the enemy is at their gates. In such an atmosphere, they will tolerate some wartime disinformation. But for how long?

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the exiled Russian businessman who spent a decade in Siberian prisons, says that Kremlin propaganda is diverging so far from reality that more and more Russians are thinking critically. From 11 to 16 per cent of the population are ready to tell pollsters that they oppose the current “militarist hysteria”, he says. This number would grow, especially in the big cities.

The lesson here is that covert military operations have to be quick and successful. They do not stay secret for long, and the population will quickly tire of their soldiers dying in an unacknowledged war. They will then seek out ways to find out what is really going on.

Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs

On Twitter @aphilps