Neither Moscow nor Russian Embassy in Minsk has Changed Course with Babich’s Departure, Yeliseyev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 10 – It has been widely reported that Vladimir Putin promised Alyaksandr Lukashenka that following the recall of Russian ambassador Mikhail Babich, Moscow would give Minsk a year of quiet to consider how best to integrate with the Russian Federation, Andrey Yeliseyev says.

            But the director of the EAST-Center says that he doesn’t believe this promise will be kept if it in fact was made. The same implementers of the Kremlin’s policies are still in place in Russia and at the Russian embassy in Minsk, and there is no indication that they have changed course at all in what is the most febrile area – Internet operations.

            Yeliseyev’s observation comes in the course of an interview with Sergey Zaprudsy of the Belarusian ThinkTanks portal concerning the former’s new report for International Strategic Action Network for Security on the evolution of Moscow’s use of social networks over the last three years (thinktanks.by/publication/2019/05/10/andrey-eliseev-rossiyskaya-propaganda-skontsentriruetsya-v-sotssetyah.html).

            On the basis of that 35-page report, “Cardinal changes in Anti-Belarusian Disinformation and Propaganda” (east-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Belarus-Disinformation-Propaganda-2019-RU.pdfb), the researcher says he “does not see any signals that the Kremlin will change its policy toward Belarus.”

            The number of Russian-controlled sites directed against Belarus has grown dramatically over the last several years, he continues; and while they seldom attract large numbers of visitors, that is not Moscow’s primary goal. Instead, they become the basis for penetration into Belarusian social networks.

            What happens is this, Yeliseyev says. Those relatively few people who visit Russian sites then make comments about them on Belarusian social media, thereby hiding the origins of their ideas even though they are directed in what they say by Moscow-controlled outlets. Such social media comments have far more influence than any Moscow site ever could.

            This is part of Russia’s “hybrd” approach, one that also involves posting on its sites nominally neutral information in order to gain the reputation for accuracy and the seeding it with disinformation that is the real purpose for the sites’ existence and that is often accepted as true because so much else on the sites is.

            Yeliseyev does not mention her, but Nathalie Grant Wraga, the great American specialist on disinformation, often observed that the power of disinformation is that it is embedded in content that is 99 percent true. (For an appreciation of her contributions in this regard, see

economist.com/obituary/2002/11/21/natalie-wraga.)

            Nor does Yeliseyev mention in his interview what may be even more significant: Moscow employed exactly the same strategy in the lead up to its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2014/05/window-on-eurasia-despite-its-crudeness.html and

windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/02/moscow-deploys-most-dangerous-kind-of.html.)