Could Ukraine end up as a War of Words?

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — The Biden administration has introduced a new tactic that I’ve called “Deterrence by Disclosure,” as the U.S. makes public its intelligence about Moscow’s military and covert planning as a way to head off what Washington claims to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal of either keeping an independent Ukraine out of NATO or retaking control of Ukraine by military action.

Although a great deal of this new tactic involves disclosing what once would have been highly classified intelligence information, much of what is being done remains secret. I’m referring to the contents of direct personal exchanges, and not just the telephone conversations between the contesting Presidents, such as the one Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin had on Saturday.

I’m referring to what was said during Friday’s call between their top generals, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark A. Milley and Chief of Russian General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov, and what was said during Saturday’s discussion between U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and his Russian counterpart Sergey Shoigu.

This may be the first attempt in modern times to have information warfare stave off initiation of kinetic warfare.

Has it worked? I’ll get to that later. First, let’s look at how we got to where we are.

We are approaching the eighth anniversary of Putin’s 2014 takeover of Crimea and the military assistance he provided to pro-Russian rebels who broke away from Kyiv to create independent regions in eastern Ukraine. Note that today’s Russian military activities are frighteningly similar to those back then, as are public statements by Putin and his top aides.

The current Biden approach appears to be based on what his team learned back in February and March 2014, when President Barack Obama’s administration was caught flat-footed by Putin’s moves.

Compare that to White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s aggressive Sunday statements on CBS’ Face the Nation: “We have seen over the course of the past 10 days, a dramatic acceleration in the buildup of Russian forces and the disposition of those forces in such a way that they could launch a military action, essentially at any time. They could do so this coming week. But of course, it still awaits the go order. And so therefore, we cannot predict the precise day or time that they may take action.”

Sullivan pointed back to all the intelligence about Russian troop movements the administration had put out and how it had turned out to be correct. “I would just say: If you look at the course of the past few months, as we have said, we predicted there will be a buildup of this kind.  Our information is telling us that the Russians are likely to move in these ways.  Thus far — in November, in December, in January — that has borne out.”


Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Members receive exclusive expert briefings from members of our expert network.  Upgrade to Subscriber+ today. 


Another intelligence disclosure pattern has been to describe potential Russian covert propaganda activities.

Back on January 23, I wrote about a little-noticed U.S. Treasury Department press release, in which the Biden administration accused Russia of implementing a 2020 information warfare plan for, “destabilizing the political situation in Ukraine and laying the groundwork for creating a new, Russian-controlled government in Ukraine.”

The plan, according Treasury, included “identifying and co-opting pro-Russian individuals in Ukraine and undermining prominent Ukrainians viewed as pro-Western, who would stand in the way of Russian efforts to bring Ukraine within its control.”

That same day in London, the British government announced that same plan and included the name of a pro-Russian former member of the Ukrainian parliament as Putin’s preferred puppet.

More exposures have followed, such as publicizing information about a fake Russian video that was reportedly in the works that would have falsely depicted killings of Russian-speaking people in the breakaway regions. Such a video could have been used as rationale to justify Russian troop intervention to ‘protect’ Ukrainians who have dual citizenship and Russian passports.

Sullivan on Sunday offered yet another example. “We also are watching very carefully for the possibility that there is a pretext or a false flag operation to kick off the Russian action in which Russian intelligence services conduct some kind of attack on Russian proxy forces in eastern Ukraine or on Russian citizens, and then blame it on the Ukrainians.”

Of course the Russian side can play that game, too.

On Friday, the Russian news agency Tass reported that Ukraine may attack the Donbass republics [the pro-Russian breakaway regions of Ukraine] in the immediate future, according to Donetsk People’s Republic leader Denis Pushilin.

Pushilin was quoted saying, “I do not rule out that Ukraine may attack at any moment. Ukraine has everything ready for that: the concentration of forces and means [of Ukrainian Armed Forces in Donbass] makes it possible to do it at any moment, as soon as a political decision is made.”

What we are witnessing is the opening up of a new front in information warfare, made possible in part by cyber usage in the digital age. “Cyber…has magnified vulnerabilities as well as expanded the field of strategic contests and the variety of options available to participants,” say Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher in their new book, “The Age of AI and Our Human Future.”

While it is obvious that satellite imagery has played a major role, intercepted Russian messages have also been key to the Biden administration’s deterrence plan. U.S. officials publicly releasing the substance of intercepted messages contrasts with long-standing intelligence community inhibition to expose the extraordinary electronic collection capabilities of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command.

Up to now, discussion of cyber warfare has mostly involved talking about the attacking or defending of computer systems. Little publicity has been given to intelligence collection capabilities, much less describing the outlines of intercept successes for fear of losing access to sources or methods for gathering such information.

The Biden ‘deterrence-by-disclosure’ plan has caused Putin to join in the public dialogue by repeatedly having to deny any intention of invading Ukraine.

As an example of how the White House approach has affected Kremlin statements, Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s top foreign policy aide and former ambassador to the U.S., described Saturday’s conversation between Biden and Putin as coming “against the backdrop of an unprecedented push by U.S. officials to whip up hysteria over the allegedly imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine.” Ushakov also referred to similar requests for urgent conversations by Biden officials, meaning perhaps Milley and Austin, as part of a “coordinated effort to pump out hysteria about the ‘invasion,’ which is now at its height.”

Ushakov is correct. The Biden team has pumped up concern about a Russian invasion, even suggesting last week, that it could come as early as tomorrow [Wednesday].

But yesterday, the Kremlin released two transcripts of meetings that indicate Putin wants to lower concerns that any aggressive military move into Ukraine by Russian forces is not that imminent, if it even happens at all.

First, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in an afternoon meeting with Putin yesterday said that responses from the U.S., NATO and other European nations had so far not satisfied earlier Russian demands. Nonetheless, Lavrov said, “We are developing a dialogue on some aspects that are of practical importance today, with our Western, primarily American colleagues. We will simultaneously seek their answers to the legitimate questions that we have raised,” he said, according to the Kremlin transcript.

Lavrov also said, “We have already warned more than once that we will not allow endless negotiations on questions that demand a solution today.” But he added, “I must say there are always chances…It seems to me that our possibilities are far from exhausted… At this stage, I would suggest continuing and building them up.”

Thirty minutes later, according to the Kremlin posted transcripts, Putin met with Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu to get a report on the ongoing, large-scale, Russian military exercises.

Shoigu described that “they are underway in the Western Military District” near the Ukraine borders, and involved “virtually all [Russian Navy] fleets” and “military units from virtually all military districts.”

More importantly, Shoigu added, “Some of these exercises are nearing completion, and others will end in the near future.”

Another sign that may indicate things might be cooling down: Ukraine Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said yesterday that talks with his Belarus counterpart had led to an agreement that the Ukraine military attaché in Belarus could observe theUnion Resolve 2022 Belarusian-Russian military exercises that are underway now.

There had been speculation by U.S. officials that the Belarus exercise would turn into an invasion attack on Kyiv, which is just 140 miles away.

While U.S. involvement in the Ukraine information war is far from over, a release yesterday from the Russian Foreign Ministry in effect admits to Washington’s impact. The release talks of “evidence of a well-coordinated information attack against Moscow, aimed at undermining and discrediting Russia’s rightful demands for security guarantees and at justifying Western geopolitical aspirations and its military development of the Ukrainian territory.”

As for Biden’s deterrence-by-disclosure plan to prevent actual warfare: So far, so good.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

The Cipher Brief may earn small commissions from purchases made via links


Related Articles

Search

Close