What at first looked like as a social media grudge match could be a precursor to invasion, war, and resistance in the Baltics.
Mindaugas
is an unassuming, thirtysomething advertising agency director by day,
and a ferocious cyber-warrior by night. He started a phenomenon, here in
Lithuania, of countering Kremlin propaganda and disinformation on the
Internet. “We needed to call our group something. What to name it? Well,
we were fighting trolls. So I said, ‘Let’s be elves.’”
There
were 20 or 30 at first, when the trolls began a targeted campaign of
leaving nasty comments about the Lithuanian government and society,
usually pegged to a hatred of NATO, the European Union and, of course,
the United States. Since then, elves have proliferated into the
hundreds. They’re now scattered about neighboring Latvia and Estonia and
have even been spotted as far north as Finland. The elves pride
themselves on clandestinity and reclusiveness, and so I was quite lucky
to catch this Lithuanian Legolas on my last night in Vilnius.
“Most of
us were already participating in some online groups,” said this man, who
suggests we call him Mindaugas in person. “Fighting the trolls on
Facebook and vKontakte, giving examples of Russian lies. That’s how we
met.”
Facebook
is where the light skirmishes take place; the mortal combat is reserved
for the comment sections of Lithuanian news articles, where the trolls
loose a constant drizzle of falsehoods and complaints, each comment
helping to construct an alternate reality version of life in this Baltic
country of 3 million. Rather than a thriving and patriotic post-Soviet
success story, which it is, the image the trolls cultivate is that of a
demoralized and angry society whose people are ready for regime change,
be it through internal democratic mechanisms or through “liberation” by a
friendly neighboring army.
No
one knows how many trolls are polluting the Lithuanian media, or how
many are actual human beings versus bots programmed with word algorithms
that spew out permutations of the same anti or pro sentiment, or how
many are single persons posing under different handles as multiple
people, or how many are genuine provocateurs as opposed to salaried
employees clocking in at one of many Russian troll farms, such as the
well-reported Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg. All that’s
known for sure is that their messaging is relentless and consistent.
Mindaugas, speaking ironically, summed up the broad themes: “We are
Nazis. Our president is controlled by Obama. Our country is a puppet of
the United States.”
The
civic activists committed to knocking down this disinformation have
grown steadily over the last 18 months. Their pushback is dogged but not
dogmatic, Mindaugas insisted. “We don’t try to be propagandists in
reverse. Lithuania has problems, of course, like any nation. We only
want to expose the bullshit.”
Online
armies, he believes, can only be met with opposing armies. Mindaugas
goes by the online nom de guerre “Baltas” and his network has expanded
to the point where the elves exercise a kind of virtual
command-and-control to counteract particularly fierce troll offensives.
He set up the online headquarters in a Google Group. Everyone could
share information and target-scout the front lines of reader feedback
sections. “We’d put in a link and all the members would go to it and
leave their comments, liking, disliking, et cetera.”
A recent documentary
made by Lithuanian filmmakers Martynas Starkus and Jonas Banys offered
some remarkable insights into the cyber contingent against which
Mindaugas is ranged. They interviewed Karolis Zukauskas, a Lithuanian
public relations expert, who says he staged an experiment to see just
how easy it was to recruit pro-Kremlin trolls for money. Zukauskas
posted an advertisement on Facebook, adorning the job spec with Russian
nationalist iconography. In less than a day, he had six applicants,
three of them with their own portfolios of hostile comments to bolster
their chances of hire. And everyone wanted to be paid in euros, not
rubles.
What’s
also striking is that the Kremlin’s information war isn’t waged in any
linear or chronological fashion; archival material is just as
susceptible to attack as is recently published content. An article
posted in 2011 at Delfi, a prominent news portal, about Lithuanian
Special Forces’ deployment to Afghanistan suddenly became, in 2015, a
cynosure for pro-Kremlin activity.
Some
613 comments were left under the piece, over 60 percent of them
negative, although few rose above such Olympian geopolitical heights as:
“Respect to Afghans for driving out occupants and mercenaries who came
to kill and provoke hate between local people.” Or: “It should be called
A-Team of America’s bootlickers. Balls out [sic] off Afghanistan.” An
IP address analysis showed that more than a third of the 60 percent came
from just four computers. This was four years after the original piece
was published.
Sometimes
the elves learn each other’s real names and meet up in person; more
often, they remain unknown to each other, the better to avoid being
infiltrated by the other side. “We do counterintelligence like any
spies,” Mindaugas said, adding that professional diversity has greatly
improved their technical savvy.
There
are the IT specialists who came up with a bespoke chat software
considered more secure than Google. There are psychologists adept at
behavioral pattern recognition, by which similar online personae can be
mapped, followed, and possibly doxxed. The objective, Mindaugas
admitted, is to name names. “We are trying to figure out the identities
of the trolls—at least locate the country or town they come from.” So
far, they’ve had little success.
The
Lithuanian Armed Forces eventually noticed the elves and were duly
impressed. At a recent NATO summit in Riga, Lithuanian soldiers began
explaining the elf phenomenon to their Latvian counterparts as a new
breed of partisan resistance fighters for the 21st century. Reports of
this discussion leaked to the Baltic media, ironically making it a
subject rife for meta-trolling and, one imagines, meta-elfing. It was,
as Mindaugas put it, “a big shock” that the world’s largest military
alliance had discovered his independent cabal of activists and saw them
fit for discussion. Also not an altogether pleasant surprise, since the
elves fear that too much scrutiny could scupper their most prized
possession—anonymity.
A
trend has caught on, making the daily workflow for the elves much
lighter. “At the moment, for us, we have a pretty good situation because
during this year and a half, our society has changed. We don’t need to
go to those comments that much anymore because ordinary people are now
doing it themselves.”
Lithuania
considers propaganda and disinformation—“active measures” in the old
and suddenly new-again argot of Cold War tradecraft—a high-level
national security threat. The country’s pugnacious president, Dalia
Grybauskaite, referred to as the Baltic Iron Lady, has said that
Lithuania is “already under attack” by Russia. “The most dangerous goal
of information warfare,” Grybauskaite emailed me,
“is to break the people’s will to resist and defend their state, and to
create favorable environment for possible military intervention. And
the example of Ukraine is proof that conventional war in Europe no
longer is theoretical.”
It’s
also meant that Lithuania is no longer taking any chances. The national
defense budget was increased by 35 percent after Crimea. In March 2015,
parliament voted almost unanimously to reintroduce conscription, a
policy that had been suspended in 2008. And three months prior to that,
Defense Minister Juozas Olekas issued a new handbook for schoolchildren,
the military, and general public titled, “How to Act in Extreme
Situations or Instances of War.” It’s more or less a field manual for
withstanding Russian invasion.
Many
Lithuanians believe one is imminent; by the time I left Vilnius earlier
this month, I nearly did myself. At a private briefing at the
Lithuanian Defense Ministry’s Department of Strategic Communications—a
department that, inter alia, anatomizes Kremlin messaging at a granular
level, looking for patterns, plots or signposts that may suggest a hot
confrontation is near—I had the three audiences of Kremlin infowar
explained to me:
First
are the populations of foreign countries, whose histories are distorted
and the health of whose political systems are consistently questioned,
all in order to push them into a pro-Moscow orientation.
The
second audience is NATO and the European Union, the dual bugbear
institutions that Russia has inflated into sinister global conspirators
and would very much like to see dismantled, starting with those member
states in its immediate western periphery.
Finally,
Russia goes after its own people, convincing them that, should it come
to war with one of the “fascist” neighbors, it will definitionally be a
just and defensive one.
In
April 2015, the Center of Systematic Analysis and Forecast, a think
tank close to the Russian government, issued a report written by the
Center’s head, Rostislav Ischenko. Titled “On the Necessity of the
Preventive Occupation of the Baltic Region,” it laid out the
circumstances under which Moscow and Belarus might be obliged to conquer
the three former Soviet-occupied countries on their western periphery.
The
casus belli in this rendering would be a forthcoming or likely act of
NATO aggression, an invasion of Russia launched from Estonia, Latvia,
and Lithuania. For the last year, Russian state-run media organs have
portrayed such a NATO invasion as inevitable, with some even naming the
year it’s set to commence as 2020. (The documentary on Russian
propaganda directed by Martynas Starkus and Jonas Banys was called War 2020.)
Thus
the “necessity” for a preemptive strike on these countries, Ischenko
writes, “arises not only because of the threat of the invasion but also
as a means to shorten the possible front line in case of need… The
overwhelming blow at the Baltic region is necessary in order to
eliminate danger to the northern wing of Russia’s and Belorussia’s armed
forces.”
Preventive
war would also stop a concomitant NATO blockade of Kaliningrad, the
Russian exclave, which shares a border with Lithuania. The Kremlin has
lately threatened to deploy Iskander nuclear missiles to this
non-contiguous oblast in the heart of Eastern Europe, and to occupied
Crimea, for the possible annihilation of Warsaw and other NATO capitals.
“In case we are successful in preserving our current positions,”
Ischenko continues, “pro-Russian political forces could be placed into
power in all Baltic states, in the context of downfall of NATO, [and] it
would be possible to achieve a special status providing Russia with the
role of guardian of these countries.”
Without
overstating the likelihood of a Russian assault on the Baltics, Jānis
Kažociņš, the former head of Latvia’s Constitutional Protection Bureau,
one of the country’s intelligence services, has noted ominously that the
three Baltic states share a 932-mile border with Russia and Belarus,
where Russian troops are garrisoned. The border they share with their
nearest NATO partner, Poland, is just 64 miles long.
Ischenko’s
dire military forecasting, which really would usher in World War III,
combines in the open source realm with Russia’s expansive “compatriots”
policy. It is now a matter of strategic doctrine that ethnic kin and
Russian language speakers living within or without the borders of the
Russian Federation can be defended by force, irrespective of another
country’s sovereignty. This policy, a kind of tribalist answer to the
“Right to Protect” norm, was the pretext for the annexation of Crimea
two years ago.
The
story here is by now widely known: A Nazi junta had seized power in
Kiev in a U.S.-underwritten coup, ousting the legitimate President
Viktor Yanukovych and waging pogroms against ethnic Russians, Jews, and
other minorities. In mortal danger of arrest, dispossession, or
extermination, they required urgent humanitarian intervention and
fortunately it arrived just in time. At first, those coming to the
rescue were depicted by Moscow as mere “volunteers”—“little green men”
with assault and sniper rifles and insignia-less uniforms—who mobilized
to seize full control of the peninsula within 24 hours.
Putin
later admitted that Russian conventional forces, mainly those that had
already been garrisoned in Crimea under a preexisting treaty with
Ukraine, but added to by incoming Special Forces and intelligence
officers, did indeed stage a near-bloodless takeover of European soil.
But rather than an Anschluss, Putin cast this act of aggression in a
purely defensive light. (Hitler had done much the same thing in the
Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in 1938.) This physical siege was both
preceded and accompanied by a psychological one.
“During
the so-called referendum in Crimea, we sent our ambassador there,”
Lithuania’s Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius told me during the course
of a 45-minute interview in his office. “It was not easy for him to get
in. But he stayed for some time, and met locals... Tatars, also ethnic
Russians, elderly people. They were scared that bandits and fascists
were coming from Kiev to kill them. They were so happy to see Russian
soldiers liberate them.”
And now, Linkevičius said, the same messaging campaign has started in the Baltics.
Over
the last 18 months, Russian state media have alleged falsely that
Lithuanian Special Forces kidnapped six Russian children in order to
coerce their parents into collaborating against Russia, and that Latvia
has erected concentration camps for ethnic Russians.
According
to Lithuanian military officials who study and anatomize pro-Kremlin
propaganda, Putin’s compatriots policy is promiscuous enough to
encompass anyone born within the former boundaries of the Soviet Union
or the prior czarist imperium. “Even Alaska,” one defense official told
me, straight-faced.
No
doubt this expansive definition owes to the variable quotient of ethnic
Russians in Moscow’s self-arrogated sphere of influence. The population
of them in Lithuania is a mere 6 percent of the total, less than in
Estonia and Latvia. Yet 8 percent of polled Lithuanians say they
supported the annexation of Crimea. Most Lithuanians speak Russian. It’s
often the first tongue you’ll hear when you arrive in the capital.
Some
97 percent of the people watch television every day; of that figure, 14
percent are glued to Russian stations, many of which are actually
registered in European countries and therefore beholden to EU
regulations on broadcasting. Russian TV watchers are common among the
older generations of Lithuanians who grew up with Soviet media and are
more comfortable being misinformed and entertained in their primary
tongue. Tomas Kvedaras, a press attaché at the Lithuanian Foreign
Ministry, said his 85-year-old grandmother still prefers NTV or Channel
One to any Lithuanian-language station.
Whether
it’s funhouse mirror distortions of pre-Soviet national past,
emotionally manipulated nostalgia for a glorious never-was of communism,
or barely recognizable caricatures of contemporary politics, Kremlin
active measures have got you covered.
As
Foreign Minister Linkevičius put it, “Lies are not alternative points
of view,” and the country has enacted punitive measures against outlets
that go too far.
Not
without controversy. In April 2015, Lithuania’s Radio and Television
Commission decided to suspend the broadcast license for the Russian TV
channel RTR Planeta, which is registered in Sweden, for three months for
transmitting “propagation of violence and instigation of war,” as
commission member Mantas Martisius justified
it. “This was done in accordance with European law,” Linkevičius said,
“but there was a big noise, believe me. They accused us of censorship.
They violated fair practices for broadcasting. They were instigating
terrorism, war, hatred, xenophobia, and glorifying the actions of
Russian separatist groups. Vladimir Zhirinovsky called for the tanks to
roll into Ukraine. Even into Brussels. He’s deputy chairman of Duma,”
the lower chamber of Russia’s parliament. “So these threats cannot be
taken lightly.”
***
During
three days in Vilnius, I interviewed journalists, activists, and
government officials. Almost everyone told me (usually off the record)
that if little green men stole across the border from Kaliningrad or
Belarus, they wondered if NATO—and by that most meant the United
States—really would defend Lithuania and risk a shooting war with
Russia? And how would that even start, when the instigator of that war
would plausibly deny being a party to it? Moscow disclaims any role in
the ongoing violence in the Donbas, while Putin presents himself at
Minsk as the separatists’ interlocutor for “cease-fires” and a lasting
political settlement. This Monty Python satire on geopolitics is
precisely what has the Balts worried. Tanks roll across borders, while
their owners pretend not to know how they got there.
Most analysts point to an article written by Valery Gerasimov, the chairman of the Russian General Staff, in Voyenno-Promyshlennyy Kurier, or the Military-Industrial Courier,
which hardly anyone read when it was published in February 2013. Now,
however, the article becomes a secret decoder ring for understanding
Russia’s supposedly innovative means of waging what’s variously been
termed “hybrid” or “non-linear” or (God help us) “postmodern” warfare.
Gerasimov’s lead no doubt contributed much to the cult-like status his essay has lately attained in Western military circles:
“In
the 21st century, we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines
between the states of war and peace,” he opens, somewhat grandiosely.
“Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an
unfamiliar template.” That template consists of the “use of
special-operations forces and internal opposition to create a
permanently operating front through the entire territory of the enemy
state, as well as informational actions, devices, and means that are
constantly being perfected.”
As
much an act of theater as one of aggression, what Gerasimov is selling
here is in no way new. Stalin, for starters, established his puppet
regimes in Europe even before the definitive close of World War II in
much the same manner.
Ironically,
though, Gerasimov’s template wasn’t Russian at all; he was outlining
what he perceives as the American way of war in the 21st century. He has
in mind not only the U.S.-led interventions in Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya
but the seemingly spontaneous “color revolutions” in Europe, as well as
the recent Arab Spring uprisings, which, Gerasimov insists, are all
U.S.-made conspiracies.
The
Kremlin continues to believe that anywhere in the world democratic or
anti-authoritarian convulsions occur, the electrical current is being
supplied by spooks, State Department grant-writers, Delta Force, and
long-cultivated fifth columns.
“Instead
of an overt military invasion, the first volleys of a U.S. attack come
from the installment of a political opposition through state propaganda
(e.g., CNN, BBC), the Internet and social media, and nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs),” explains Charles K. Bartles, an analyst at the
Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, who has offered the
best exegesis of Gerasimov to date (PDF).
“After successfully instilling political dissent, separatism, and/or
social strife, the legitimate government has increasing difficulty
maintaining order. As the security situation deteriorates, separatist
movements can be stoked and strengthened, and undeclared special
operations, conventional, and private military forces (defense
contractors) can be introduced to battle the government and cause
further havoc.”
In
other words, by sacking Crimea and waging a recondite invasion of the
Donbas, Putin was only replicating what he thinks Clinton, Bush, and
Obama have done for the last 20 years. Or at least this is what Putin
and his General Staff would like the West to believe is now their
operative paradigm and motivation for waging dirty wars abroad.
Mindaugas painted a scenario which sounded like a Baltic remake of Red Dawn—without
the happy ending. “Russian hunters or sportsmen from Latvia come to
Lithuania through the Schengen border. They take a small town hostage.
Let’s say it’s Visaginas, which is a little bit north of Vilnius. This
is where an old Soviet nuclear plant is. Almost all the town is Russian.
So they declare the ‘independent republic of Visaginas.’ You don’t need
a majority in this town to make a revolution; 50 or 100 people, well
organized, can do it. So then what happens? Lithuanian police, the army,
are sent in to retake the town. Russian media goes crazy showing the
‘fascist coup regime’ at its worst, shooting Russians. Suddenly 50 to
100 people becomes 1,000 to 5,000 soldiers who arrive as if from nowhere
with APCs and BUKs. The rest you can imagine because you’ve seen it
already in Ukraine.”
Lately,
Mindaugas said, and he and the other elves have begun venturing out
beyond cyberspace to do battle in the streets with the provocateurs they
believe are going to lead the above-described occupation of Lithuanian
territory.
Pro-Russian
protests are an increasingly common occurrence in Vilnius, organized by
strange groups with uncertain financial backing. All of the same themes
popular online are regurgitated among the placard-wielding activists
who position themselves in front of the U.S. embassy or the presidential
palace to denounce the hydra-headed beast of America, NATO, and the EU.
The
result is always the same: a public disruption that is invariably
filmed by Russian media outlets and published or broadcast back in
Russia as a purported slice of Lithuanian public opinion. “The latest
trend is refugees,” Mindaugas said, echoing what other European
countries, especially Germany, have lately experienced. “Pro-Russian
people and Lithuanian nationalists are teaming up against Arabs.”
At
this I couldn’t help but laugh because to date Lithuania has only taken
in six Syrian refugees, although government officials have told me that
they’d gladly welcome more. “Today only six, tomorrow thousands,”
Mindaugas said. “They are trying to arrange referenda against refugees,
to keep them out.”
So,
against the trolls’ street theater the elves have assembled to stage
their own guerrilla counter-demos, photobombing the other side by
draping themselves in American or EU flags, with big smiles on their
faces. It means more work for the cameramen in Vilnius and the
post-production editors in Moscow to get the requisite shot just right.
Crashing
the troll parties carries the predictable risk that the elves are being
watched and identified, for future harassment—or worse. “Fake reporters
are filming, making photos of protesters from our side, placing those
photos on Internet, asking for people’s help to identify us. They’ve
asked for help from the Russian embassy.”
This
is why, Mindaugas said, he asked me to use a fake name for him in this
story. The next phase of protests, he fears, won’t be peaceful. “I think
they will try to provoke violence, using the same methods they have
used in Ukraine. I bought a gun. I’m learning tactics. If needed, we,
all of us, will protect our houses not only with words, but also with
guns.” He plans to join the Lithuanian army reserve, as do a lot of his
friends, elves or not.
“NATO,
the EU? So what?” Mindaugas said. “We should prepare to fight for
ourselves, protect ourselves. We need to become Baltic Israel very fast.
A small country with a small territory to fight with big, unfriendly
neighbors.”
thedailybeast.com