Tools, strategies and impact in Russia – Ukraine information warfare

The war launched by the Russian Federation against Ukraine in February 2022 is not being fought solely on the battlefield. For four years, a second front has been unfolding – less visible, yet equally decisive: the information space.

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Information Is Used as a Weapon…

…perception has become a battleground, and public opinion—both domestic and international—functions as a strategic objective.

Controlling the narrative, manipulating emotions, and generating confusion now play a role comparable to that of conventional weapons. Information warfare is not waged at random. It has a coherent architecture, deliberately constructed to produce polarization, uncertainty, and ultimately to erode the very idea that truth can be established.

And by 2026, after artificial intelligence has radically accelerated both the speed and sophistication of manipulation, the stakes have only grown.

In analysing this conflict, a necessary – if imperfect – distinction must be made: between offensive propaganda, used by Russia as an instrument of aggression, and defensive strategic communication, used by Ukraine for political, military, and symbolic survival.

Of course, in any war, the side under attack relies on symbols and framing designed to boost morale, elements that can fall under both propaganda and national-interest persuasion.

Yet the distinction remains essential, precisely to avoid the confusion that Russian propaganda deliberately cultivates: the false equivalence between aggressor and victim, and between systematic manipulation and legitimate communication.

On 16 February, President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the First Deputy Head of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), Oleksandr Poklad, to remove those who, “from the positions they hold, do not serve the interests of Ukraine, but other interests.” Photo: X

THE RUSSIAN INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Russia operates a layered system built on centralised control and the informal delegation of tasks to affiliated actors.

The first level consists of state and para‑state media—news agencies, television channels, and online platforms—that generate the official narrative. In this framing, aggression becomes a “special operation”, a “preventive defence”, or a “protective mission”. By 2026, the Kremlin had increased funding for these structures by roughly 54%, a clear signal of its commitment to intensifying the information war.

The second level is the proxy ecosystem: ostensibly independent websites, Telegram channels, influencers, and self‑styled analysts who adapt official messages for different audiences, creating the illusion of pluralism while delivering convergent narratives.

The Pravda network, for example, published more than 3.6 million articles in 2024 alone—not to persuade human readers, but to contaminate the training data of artificial‑intelligence language models. Researchers have labelled this tactic “LLM grooming”: the systematic injection of propagandistic content into the datasets used to train Western chatbots. The consequences have been significant. Studies released in 2025 by NewsGuard and the American Sunlight Project confirmed that demonstrably false Kremlin narratives were being reproduced by major chatbots as though they were verified facts.

The third level is the global social‑media sphere, where coordinated networks of accounts—both automated and human‑operated—create the appearance of mass consensus. Operation Storm‑1679, documented in August 2025, revealed the sophistication now achieved: using deepfakes, the network mimicked the voices of journalists and public figures, producing fabricated news segments that imitated ABC News, the BBC, and Politico. The content was shared by American public figures before fact‑checkers could intervene.

Advanced digital tools do not aim for perfection, but for saturation. Not everything needs to be believable; it is enough for everything to be confusing.

Vladimir Putin and commanders of the Russian Navy — Photo: President of Russia

THE RECURRENT TECHNIQUES OF RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA

The inversion of guilt remains the fundamental technique. Russia presents itself as the victim of Western expansion, and Ukraine as the provocateur.

From invoking the “NATO threat” to the narrative of “denazification”, the aim is to recast the aggressor as the defender. Logical coherence is irrelevant; what matters is reshaping the moral frame. Whataboutism completes the rhetorical arsenal: deflecting responsibility by selectively citing unrelated events, relativising guilt, and blocking critical evaluation. “You also bombed Iraq” is not an argument – it is a mechanism for shutting down the discussion.

The fragmentation of truth – real information stripped of context or blended with falsehoods—and information saturation work in tandem. Multiple messages, sometimes contradictory, are released simultaneously, not to be believed, but to induce cognitive fatigue.

In a digital environment where a user scrolls through hundreds of pieces of content a day, the objective is not to win attention, but to exhaust it.

The technique of demonisation and dehumanisation goes further still: labels such as “Nazis”, “extremists”, or “artificial state” are designed to justify violence and suppress empathy. Dehumanising language is not a rhetorical accident – it prepares the moral ground for accepting aggression.

Commemoration of the Heroes of Kruty, Askold’s Grave in Kyiv

A TARGETED IMPACT FOR EACH AUDIENCE

When it comes to Ukraine, the objective is demoralisation: weakening trust in the state, the army, and its allies.

The massive attacks on energy infrastructure – generation capacity fell from 33.7 GW to just 14 GW by early 2026—are amplified narratively to convey a sense of inevitable defeat. On 2–3 February 2026, Russia launched 450 drones and 71 missiles in a single strike, the most devastating of the year, leaving more than 1,170 apartment blocks in Kyiv without heating and 300,000 residents in Kharkiv without electricity. Each such attack is accompanied by a narrative offensive designed to suggest to Ukrainians that resistance is futile.

For the West, the goal is polarisation: turning support for Ukraine into a source of internal conflict, and solidarity into cynicism.

Subversive campaigns targeted the European elections of 2025 and 2026 – from Moldova to Hungary, from Romania to Germany – with messages tailored to each political context.

Pro‑Russian populist parties now lead the polls in several European states, and every percentage point gained represents, for Moscow, an investment in eroding Western resilience. Europe remains, in 2026, structurally unable to impose significant costs below the threshold of Article 5, and incidents of sabotage, cyberattacks, and information operations continue to be treated as isolated offences rather than components of a coherent doctrine.

Inside the Russian Federation, propaganda reinforces consensus through strict information control, narrative justification of sacrifices, and the cultivation of a grandiose sense of “Great Russia”. Polls indicate 66% support for peace negotiations, but not for acknowledging failure – a distinction that domestic propaganda manages with great care.

At the beginning of February, 157 Ukrainian prisoners of war returned home.

THE UKRAINIAN RESPONSE: DEFENSIVE COMMUNICATION

In contrast, Ukraine uses informational communication primarily as a defensive instrument.

The first layer is rapid, consistent institutional communication – daily briefings and updates on the military and civilian situation. Maintaining this rhythm is essential to preventing rumours.

In a conflict where electricity can be cut for days at a time, the mere continuity of communication becomes an act of resistance.

Next comes public diplomacy: Ukrainian leaders address international audiences directly, bypassing traditional filters. Volodymyr Zelensky has turned every public appearance into a tool of foreign policy—something analysts underestimated at the start of the war.

Collaboration with independent journalists, NGOs, and OSINT communities provides credible counterbalance through satellite imagery, geolocation, and open‑source analysis. Societal‑resilience campaigns help sustain morale and internal cohesion.

These techniques differ substantially from classical propaganda. Pre‑bunking – warning the public about false narratives before they emerge—reduces the impact of disinformation in advance. Fact‑based debunking, grounded in verifiable evidence, is slower than the production of disinformation but remains crucial for credibility.

The personalisation of communication – presenting the war through concrete human experiences, through the stories of civilians, soldiers, and families – counteracts propagandistic abstraction and keeps international audiences emotionally engaged.

The legal and moral framing of the conflict – defending sovereignty, international law, and humanitarian norms – remains essential for sustaining external support.

Domestically, clear information reduces panic. Externally, constant visibility prevents the normalisation of aggression. There are risks – mobilising messages can be labelled as “propaganda”, and any factual error is aggressively exploited – but the distinction endures between legitimate mobilisation in a defensive war and systematic manipulation in the service of aggression.

STRUCTURAL ASYMMETRY AND THE LESSONS OF 2026

The Russia–Ukraine information war highlights a fundamental structural difference: Russia uses propaganda as a weapon of aggression, while Ukraine uses communication as a tool of defence.

Narrative control does not replace military force, but it can amplify – or diminish – its effects.

On both sides, propaganda operates. Yet the logic of the battlefield follows a different tactic: there, territorial gain is military victory.

In the information war, defeat or victory on the front line triggers communicative reactions that can behave either like the tail of a comet – with a long, diffuse effect – or like the tip of a nuclear warhead – with a concentrated, devastating impact.

Viewed with clarity, Russian propaganda is coherent in message, while Ukrainian communication is diverse in method.

Time has worked against Ukraine. Russia was humiliated in the media space at the start of the war, but it has the resources and the persistence to reverse the trend.

Kyiv, 26 February 2026. Several European leaders joined Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife to mark four years since the start of the war.

The 54% increase in the state‑media budget, the operations aimed at corrupting artificial intelligence, the escalation of hybrid warfare across Europe, and the campaign of systematic sabotage on allied territory are unambiguous signals. If 2025 was the year in which Europe finally acknowledged the scale of Russia’s hybrid threats, then 2026 must be the year it responds.

In the digital age, victory is no longer determined solely by the conquest of territory, but by the ability to defend the truth.

This war demonstrates that the information space is not a secondary battlefield, but one in which the resilience of societies, the legitimacy of alliances, and ultimately the course of history are decided. And in an information war, the most dangerous weapon is not the lie itself, but the destruction of trust in the very idea that truth can still be known.