When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Kiev’s digital information war came to life immediately. The Ukrainians were ready. Since then, their progress in the online conflict has seemed – at least to Western observers – unstoppable. Ukraine has garnered international support and attracted almost universal sympathy from European and North American users across major social media platforms.
All of the country’s official social media accounts are synchronized to push the same narrative of brave Ukrainians standing up to brutal Russian occupiers — a message that is, of course, essentially true. The campaign is built around Ukraine’s charismatic leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky, who, for a time in March and April, had a strong claim to be the most admired man in the West.
If Ukraine’s effort at information warfare has been a triumph, Russia’s has looked almost as poor as the performance of its tank regiments. Moscow has made little effort – beyond a few cryptic statements about NATO expansion – to make its case to a foreign audience. The main target of the government’s communications has been the Russian people, the goal of legitimizing Russian aggression and Russians ready for a world divorced from the West – no more McDonald’s, Apple or Netflix.
The lack of effort to sell the war abroad almost suggests that Moscow knew it would be pointless. Images broadcast by state news channel RT in the first weeks of the war seemed either clumsy in their denial or deluded: jubilant marching troops and Ukrainians waving Russian flags showed a Potemkin military campaign.
This reverse split of the screen led many observers to declare that Russia had “lost” the information war. This is now the accepted wisdom in the West.
But it is wrong. Moscow has not lost the information war so much as opened new fronts in the war elsewhere, away from the eyes of the West.
Russia is now directing its disinformation to parts of the world where anti-Western sentiment is already strong, places that include the West’s former colonies – above all, Africa. Anticipating an impending global food crisis, Moscow has coordinated its media and social media accounts to convey this message: Western sanctions against Russia are to blame for causing shortages, and Ukraine is deliberately destroying grain supplies.
When I was in Odesa at the end of April, Ukraine’s most important port on the Black Sea was already surrounded by mines and steel. The fighting nearby, in the south of the country, was fierce. Kiev’s army was holding Russian troops outside the city of Mykolaiv, about 70 miles to the east. The Odesans were preparing for a long war. Where I could once walk freely along the city’s shoreline, I saw concrete slabs and sandbags and shivering soldiers eager to prevent me from taking photos of anything they—often arbitrarily—deemed sensitive.
In the distance, bombarding just beyond the horizon, Russian warships were poised to strike. Until they did, they could take solace in the fact that as long as they continued patrol the Black Sea coast of Ukraine, the country’s most important port could not function.
Even then, in the first months of the war, Moscow’s plan was becoming clear. If Russia could not defeat Ukraine militarily, it would target its adversary’s economy by blocking its foreign trade. The goal was simple: to suffocate Ukraine by any means.
One of these tools is what Ukraine’s agriculture minister, Mykola Solskyi, has called “outright robbery.” In Odesa, I spoke with Ukrainian security analyst Hanna Shelest, and she told me about Russia’s theft and destruction of grain stores in her country. Wherever Russian troops went, she said, they stole Ukrainian grain — especially in the south, in the regions around the cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhya.
As Solskyi told Al Jazeera, this was “happening everywhere in the occupied territory.” In April, he accused Russia of stealing “several hundred thousand tons” of wheat. And what the Russian soldiers didn’t steal, they destroyed. On June 6, Russian forces struck a grain terminal in Mykolaiv, one of the largest in Ukraine, destroying about 300 tons of grain destined for export.
The problem is acute, and not only for the economy of Ukraine. Ukraine is one of the world’s largest exporters of crops and food products: According to the International Trade Center, 8 percent of the world’s wheat, 12 percent of barley, 13 percent of corn, and 18 percent of safflower oil. sunflowers come from here. The World Food Program receives most of its grain for food aid programs from Ukraine. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the losses of Ukrainian wheat in the world export market due to the blockade of the country’s ports by Russia, as well as its theft and destruction, will cause not only an increase in prices in the rest of the world, but severe shortages – especially in Africa.
Historical precedent suggests that food shortages in Africa, although rare sole cause of social unrest, very often contribute to political unrest. Food shortages played an important role in the 2011 Arab Spring, which saw people take to the streets in protest as international food prices rose and unemployment soared. Annual food price inflation in Egypt had reached nearly 19 percent shortly before President Hosni Mubarak was toppled. In that region today, the Kiel Institute calculates that Tunisia’s total wheat imports will decrease by more than 15 percent and Egypt’s will shrink by 17 percent. The institute also predicts that South Africa will cut wheat imports by 7 percent and other grains by more than 16 percent. The result will be a food security crisis on the continent.
Russia has already laid the groundwork for its response to disinformation. “How the UK is doing its best to fuel a food crisis while blaming Russia,” was the headline of a June 24 article in Russian state media. Sputnik. This is complete fiction, of course. I recently attended a briefing session with Western diplomats in which, to enable them to speak freely, journalists did not have to attribute quotes. “We don’t impose sanctions that restrict the trade of food and fertilizers from Russia to any third country,” said one of the diplomats, “so it’s not the sanctions that cause food safety issues.”
But denying the effects of Russian aggression is only part of the Kremlin’s evolving strategy. RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan recently relayed at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum what she called “a very cynical joke that appeared – not even a joke, just a call – in Moscow”: “All our hope is in famine’ … It means that the famine will begin now, and they [Western nations] will lift the sanctions and be friends with us because they will understand that it is unnecessary.”
Simply put, Russia’s strategy is blackmail. Moscow will block Ukrainian wheat exports until it gets much-needed sanctions relief. Western diplomats were unclear about what they saw. As one of them said: “Russia is doing this on purpose – to try and exploit [grain] the issue to cause hunger, thus creating chaos, which will lessen the sanctions. Putin has been extremely clear that wheat exports will begin when sanctions are lifted. This is the public position of the Russian government.”
Another factor comes into play: Russia is also Ukraine’s biggest competitor as a grain exporter. Moscow’s plan is not only to maintain the threat of food shortages around the world, but then to show itself as the savior, appearing at the right time with its grain supply – much of it stolen, of course – in exchange of diplomatic support. for her fight. With rising commodity prices already hitting the poorest citizens of African countries hard, Moscow’s gambit is sure to find an open audience. Yevhen Balytskyi, the pro-Russian governor of the occupied Zaporizhzhya region, recently announced on the Telegram social media app that 7,000 metric tons of wheat would be sent to “friendly” countries. The quid pro quo is as obvious as it is shameful.
Ukraine has belatedly realized that it must respond to the way Russia is weaponizing global hunger to advance its political goals. Last month, President Zelensky gave a speech to the African Union in which he told its members that their continent was now “a pawn” in Russia’s war in Ukraine.
I recently spoke with Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, Ghana’s information minister, who is a prominent figure in the fight against disinformation in Africa. He had no doubt about the crisis facing the region. “It is bad enough that war has broken out, but to block grain exports, which is causing a food crisis in many parts of the world, especially in Africa, is more troublesome,” he said. “In Africa, the situation is becoming extremely worrying, as many families are increasingly struggling to feed themselves. In some countries, shortages of key subjects have begun. Lives are at stake.”
Nkrumah understands the seriousness of the threat from a Russian disinformation campaign. “We are doing our best to let our people know the real causes of this crisis and also show them the ways we can curb the situation and even where possible switch to local alternatives,” he said. “But I have to say that this is very difficult as, once again, disinformation is emanating from some of the various nations responsible for this crisis – which is driven by Western social media outlets in particular, just as the crisis is fueled by Western wars . “
Earlier this month, I visited Kenya to investigate these issues. In the capital Nairobi, fear among the population of rising food prices was everywhere, even if they have not yet reached the level of despair. Russian narratives are flooding Kenyan online spaces, starting with major official sources: On April 16, national broadcaster NTV Kenya shared a story on its Facebook page titled, “Russia in Kenya: Blame US and EU for high food and fuel prices”.
Such a message—amplified by Russian embassy accounts—seeps into Kenyan Twitter accounts, where pro-Russian, anti-Western sentiment has become much more visible in recent times. For example, a I tweet stuck by one Johnson Mwangi, whose tweet suggests he works for an NGO in Nairobi, shows images of Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Syria, supposedly before and after US intervention. The text on Twitter reads: “Does this ring a bell? I wonder where you find the moral authority to speak out against Russia… Russia was annexed [sic] Crimea and rebuild it into great city..see all your previous conquests; women were raped, infrastructure was destroyed, a well-developed economy was destroyed in the name of?”
Russia’s instrumentalization of the wheat crisis is the latest example of its broader strategy to exploit instability to implement what the US State Department has called “permanent adversarial competition.” In the digital arena, Moscow’s information and disinformation operations aim to plant, amplify and perpetuate insidious, corrosive narratives designed to undermine the West and democracy and promote Russia as a better partner for African nations.
“Everything is getting more expensive. Now I hear we may have problems with our food,” a Nairobi taxi driver named Gilbert told me. “Once again, Africans are paying the price for the problems between the great powers.”
