The Information Dimension of the Ukrainian Crisis: How Media Narratives Shape Conflict

Glenn Diesen’s speech at the UN Security Council (Arria-Formula Meeting)

Thank you for the invitation, it is a great privilege to speak here today. I want to address how the conflict in Ukraine takes place on both the battlefield and in the information space, and why we should be concerned about the media manipulating narratives and demonising Russia as the adversary.

Some of the most insightful literature about political propaganda comes from Walter Lippmann following his work for the US government during the First World War. Lippmann recognised that liberal democracies tended to present conflicts as a struggle between good and evil, to mobilise public support for war. The great risk, according to Lippman, was that once the public believed the adversary was pure evil – then the public would also reject any workable peace. Because, in a struggle between good and evil, compromise is appeasement, and peace demands war as the good must defeat the evil.

This is deeply problematic because the point of departure in international security is the recognition of the security competition, as efforts by one country to enhance its security can diminish the security of others. The first step toward a common peace is therefore to place ourselves in the shoes of our opponents and recognise mutual security concerns.

However, in a struggle between good and evil, even understanding the opponent becomes treasonous. We should therefore be terrified that our political leaders and media no longer even discuss the security concerns of adversaries. Those attempting to see the world from the other side are simply denounced as “Putinists”, “Panda-huggers” or “Ayatollah-apologists”. If the generations before us had this level of maturity, it is highly unlikely that we would have survived the Cold War.

It is evident that the media does not always report on objective reality. Convinced that they are fighting the good fight, the media socially constructs its own reality. For example, recognising the losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces threatens to reduce public support for the war effort. Similarly, recognising that sanctions do not work threatens to reduce public support for sanctions. So, the media ignores reality and stays loyal to the narratives to ensure that the public is committed to the conflict, but (as Lippmann noted) thereby also removes all pathways toward a workable peace.

Russia must play a dual role in our media. It is both hopelessly backwards and weak, yet also an overwhelmingly powerful threat to West. We are told that Russia is unsuccessful in Ukraine, yet it can conquer Europe if not stopped. This communicates to the Western public that the adversary is very dangerous, yet also reassures the public that Russia can easily be defeated if we just keep the war going.

The foundational narrative in the media has been the “unprovoked invasion” by Russia

This implies that Russia is an expansionist and imperialist power, as opposed to responding to legitimate security threats. There is no debate about the narrative of an “unprovoked invasion” in the media as any challenge to this narrative is smeared and censored for allegedly “legitimising” the invasion.

The “unprovoked invasion” narrative is dangerous because it implies that any compromise is appeasement that rewards the aggressor which incentivises more aggression. Thus, we are told that peace demands supplying weapons to elevate the costs.

As with almost every other conflict after the Cold War, the media describes the opponent as another reincarnation of Hitler to remind the public that war is peace, and diplomacy is appeasement. As the former NATO Secretary General proclaimed: “Weapons are the path to peace”.

I say this is a dangerous narrative, because if this conflict was provoked, then we are escalating and getting directly involved in a war against the world’s largest nuclear power, which considers this to be an existential threat.

Since the 1990s, many leading diplomats warned about the consequences of expanding NATO. NATO expansion Western politicians, intelligence chiefs, ambassadors and other entailed cancelling agreements for a pan-European security architecture and instead redividing the continent, restarting the logic of the Cold War, and fighting in the shared neighbourhood over where to draw the new dividing lines.

(none other than) George Kennan stated in an interview in 1998 that NATO expansionism would start a new Cold War and he predicted: “Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are —but this is just wrong”. However, the media cannot recognise the obvious, that NATO expansion provoked this conflict, BECAUSE it risks legitimising Russia’s military actions.

NATO countries crossed the ultimate red line by pulling Ukraine into the NATO orbit and developing it into a frontline state against Russia. Angela Merkel once recognised that offering Ukraine a membership action plan would be interpreted by Moscow as a “declaration of war”. The former British ambassador to Russia, Roderic Lyne, said the following about pulling Ukraine into NATO: “It was stupid on every level at that time. If you want to start a war with Russia, that’s the best way of doing it”. CIA Director William Burns, had also argued that attempting to pull Ukraine into NATO would likely trigger a Russian military intervention, which Burns noted was something Russia would not want to do. This seems like excellent definitions of the word “provoked”.

Yet, in February 2014, NATO countries backed a coup to pull Ukraine into the NATO orbit. Our media nonetheless sold the coup as a “democratic revolution” even though Yanukovych was elected in a free and fair election, his removal and even the Maidan RIOTS did not have a majority support among Ukrainians, and it violated the Ukrainian constitution.

For a brief moment, in 2014, the Western media reported that the new authorities in Kiev were attacking Donbas and killing civilians who rejected the legitimacy of the coup. CNN even questioned if the people of Donbas would ever again allow Kiev to rule over them. Yet, soon thereafter, full media conformity was implemented and the resistance in Donbas was portrayed as merely a Russian operation – opposing Ukraine’s democratisation.

We have now learned that on the first day after coup, American and British intelligence agencies set up a partnership with the new intelligence chief in Kiev to rebuild Ukrainian intelligence services from scratch as a proxy against Russia. Ukraine’s General Prosecutor argued that the US was running Ukraine as a fiefdom after the coup. Members of parliament were arrested and some stripped of their citizenship, the media was purged, the Russian language purged, and the Orthodox Church was purged. Civilians in Donbas were killed for year after year. Nationalists and Western-financed NGOs undermined the Minsk-2 peace agreement, and set clear “red lines” for Zelensky to not implement the peace mandate he received in 2019. A top advisor to the former president of France, argued that the signing of the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership in November 2021 “convinced Russia that it must attack or be attacked”. Had Russia or China done any this in Mexico, we would surely have defined it as provocative. (yet we cannot recognise Russian security concerns – to solve the crisis)

To sell the story of a Russian war of conquest, the media from day one promoted the notion of a “full-scale invasion”, suggesting that Russia used its full military might to conquer Ukraine as opposed to forcing Ukraine to restore its neutrality.

For this reason, the media cannot inform the public that the low Russian troop levels and initial actions were completely inconsistent with conquest, they indicated the intention of keeping Ukraine out of NATO. The media cannot inform the public that on the first day of the invasion, Zelensky confirmed that they had been contacted by Moscow to discuss peace negotiations based on Ukraine not joining NATO – which Zelensky agreed to. The media cannot inform the public about how even Zelensky said in March 2022: “There are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives.”

The media cannot inform the public about the sabotage of the Istanbul peace negotiations, after which the Turkish Foreign Minister concluded: “I had the impression that there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue—let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine”.

Instead of discussing a European security architecture with the goal of mitigating the security competition and preventing Ukraine from being a battlefield in a redivided Europe, the media demonised Russia as pure evil and sold the story that even diplomacy should be rejected, even as hundreds of thousands of men died in the trenches.

The media pushed narratives of Ukraine winning, of Russian efforts to restore the Soviet Union, downplaying the losses of the Ukrainian army, ignoring the de-russification policies, and the brutal conscription of Ukrainian men. Even as Ukraine now faces disaster, and we could end up in a direct war, there is no willingness to recognise that Russia has legitimate security concerns. Instead, the media remains committed to the narrative of an evil Russian enemy, and the logical conclusion is thus further escalation rather than exploring paths to a workable peace.

If we want to understand why it has become near impossible to discuss peace, look toward the irresponsible and dangerous media coverage, and remember the warning of Walter Lippmann about simplifying complex conflicts into a fight between good and evil.