Alternative War: Unabridged

by J. J. Patrick

  “Finally we must consider detached assets,” Komarnyckyj told me. “The activist who has drunk in the ideology purveyed from Moscow via that organisation etc. In this context, it’s worth noting that there are links between Russian intelligence and ISIS. No direct orders for an attack on the west need be issued by Putin- he just has to wind them up and watch them go.” My own research had led me to understand the clear relationship of benefits in kind between conflicts driving immigration and extremism and the resultant anti-immigrant sentiment creating more extremism and conflict. Essentially, this creates a self-perpetuating cycle in which a state such as Russia would have to do little more than sit and watch while its objectives were achieved and security services distracted. The rising number of white extremists targeting Muslims in vehicle enabled attacks is a testament to this and broadly confirms my own thinking on the true source of the changed face of terror in Europe.

  Komarnyckyj went on to establish two more concepts, which he argued fell within the use of multiple narratives, attractive to multiple audiences. “For Putin’s Russian audience, Ukraine is presented as becoming a “Godless Gay Colony” of the West,” he told me, adding: “For the West, Ukraine is presented as a fascist hell hole.” The duplicity appeared so obvious I nearly kicked myself for not thinking about in such simple terms earlier. “Kadyrov’s persecution of gays is aimed at a religious socially conservative audience stretching from the US bible belt to Afghanistan. Never take Russia and Putin at face value- see the country as a criminal cartel engaging in theatrics and terror to secure its goals,” Komarnyckyj added.

  While the Alternative War had only just started to be exposed in the West, it had been ongoing for some time right under Komarnyckyj’s eyes and there were lessons to be learned. So, I wanted to find out exactly how has this played out in practice in Ukraine. It transpired the tactic has roots much older than the current developments in technology.

  “Russia has always viewed Ukrainians and Russians as one people,” Komarnyckyj told me. “Many Russians see Ukrainian identity as a kind of blasphemy against the Russian state. Russia has therefore engaged in a hybrid war against Ukraine for centuries. The Ukrainian language was subjected to endless restrictions. Gogol was bribed to rewrite his novel Taras Bulba so that it did not portray Russia as an enemy of Ukraine. These tactics are in accord with the concept of attacking the consciousness of the enemy. Russia’s hybrid war seeks to colonise the souls of its foes.” But the contemporary development of the technique is clear when set against the evidence now unravelling before us courtesy of the weakest link: The Trump White House.

  “In Ukraine as in the US, Russia parachuted its candidate into the presidency. In Ukraine as in the US, he was aided by Manafort, a Republican party fixer. In Ukraine as in the US, the candidate was a Russian style oligarch tasked with establishing a managed democracy,” Komarnyckyj said. “A managed democracy is Putin’s term for his preferred social model.”

  “Elections are won by oligarchic political parties by a combination of mass brainwashing using fake news and deniable terror. Critical journalists are murdered by shadowy figures who are never caught. Opposition leaders are gunned down when the cameras are switched off,” he added. There was nothing I could deny in this, and nothing I could contradict a word of, but it appeared Ukraine had proved to be a critical sticking point for Russia, exposing a weakness.

  “Putin and Russia made a critical error in Ukraine,” Komarnyckyj explained. “Because they are blind to the differences between the two nations. Ukrainians have, in the absence of a state developed a ferocious capacity for self-organisation. They have simultaneously understood perhaps better than Russia itself the nature of the current conflict.”

  “The current war pits popular sovereignty against oligarchic populism- it is being fought within states and between states. Ukraine has its oligarchs but its people aspire towards a democracy where power is granted by the people. When Yanukovych tried to stifle protest in November 2013 he inadvertently mobilised Ukrainian civic society. Ukrainians very quickly developed tactics to overthrow their autocrat,” he said.

  Undeniably, Russia did have some successes in its advance on Ukraine, though Komarnyckyj informed me this was actually a trap, of sorts.

  “Russia’s seizure of Crimea was successful because the Peninsula was heavily Russianised. However, its attempt to trigger revolts across Ukraine in 2014 beginning in the Donbas failed. Russia simply does not understand that Ukrainians are not Russians. Putin only succeeded in establishing a heavily armed enclave in the Donbas. It has become a snare in which his ankle is caught.”

  “A wider invasion though often mooted would be problematic because it would require the mass killing of the people Putin claims to be protecting,” he added.

  When we started talking about the media and journalism beyond the narrow scope of fake news, more lights began to flick on.

  “When Western journalists talk about “rebels” in east Ukraine they are giving credence to a Russian fiction. They might as well argue that Rod Hull’s Emu was a real bird. The DNR and the LNR are tools of Russia and completely curated by its intelligence services. These journalists are helping Putin’s war,” Komarnyckyj told me, adding that “these tactics are in accordance with the concept of attacking the consciousness of the enemy. Russia’s hybrid war seeks to colonise the souls of its foes.” And there it was, the realisation dawning on me journalism was a weapon – in some cases acting as guardian against this multi-faceted threat but, in many cases, also working for it.

  Komarnyckyj had been avidly looking outwardly at the West and I was curious as to what concrete signs he saw of the hybrid conflict elsewhere, beyond my own findings which were solidly based in facts I was comfortable with as being accurate.

  “Russia’s assault on Ukraine has become a sleight of hand which, like a conjurer’s gestures, diverts the audience’s attention, it was convenient for western leaders to believe that Putin could be thrown Ukraine like a mad dog might be appeased with a scrap of meat. Equally many of them refused to accept that their countries were under his hybrid attack,” he told me. I had seen enough documentary evidence from such a variety of sources I could confirm this without hesitation. “However,” he continued, “[Putin's] aims were always much wider than Ukraine. He aspires, like his Soviet predecessors to conquer the world. He believes that transnational and business ties combined with a propaganda blitzkrieg can conquer his foes. The US will become a mirror image of Russia with a managed democracy and a population in thrall to hate propaganda. Europe will splinter into vassal states ruled by weak demagogues like Le Pen.” Again, his assessment was flawlessly backed up by evidence.

  “I would argue that Brexit was a successful hybrid war operation pursued by means of deniable assets,” Komarnyckyj said, banging the very reason I sent the evidence I’d put together to all the various agencies home. “Similarly, Trump’s election can be viewed as a triumph for Putin. The war against the West is using bullshit rather than bullets- but it is no less deadly for that. We may find that no British troops die as a result of Putin’s attack. But in ten years Britain will no longer be Britain but an oligarchy. The British will be an enclave at the edge of Europe providing a theme park for an international caste of oligarchs.” Having established the sheer level of Russian money laundering through the city of London, and the current government’s almost inexplicable alignment with the insanity of Trump’s White House, this rang wholly true – especially when set against Prime Minister Theresa May’s outline of a tax haven state on the doorstep of an increasingly united Europe. Of course, it was also worth repeating that the Conservatives had been aligned in some way with Russian oligarchs since the days of George Osborne.

  Komarnyckyj’s assessment of the tactics deployed in response to Russia’s assault on democracy is very astute and rightly scathing of the wider media. “The war is curiously invisible in the West because it is being pursued by overt rather than covert means,” he said. “If an intellige
nce service bribes a politician to betray their country they are prosecuted. If a media channel pays them for bogus media work, they are praised by an army of trolls and bots on Twitter. They are feted by the oligarchic press (for Putin’s Western collaborators include many of our own native oligarchs who share his aims).”

  “So, yes, I see signs of the conflict and that in the US and UK Putin is winning,” he added.

  Since Macron’s election, a triumph over Putin’s favoured candidate, Le Pen, I had been watching the marked change in the EU stance and, again, found Komarnyckyj and I shared the same view – both in terms of the likely rise of a stronger Europe and the hopeless mess facing Britain.

  “Putin has inadvertently created what he most feared: a unified and angry Europe,” Komarnyckyj told me. “His successes in the US and UK may ultimately become failures if they galvanise those countries into recognising and targeting their enemy. This may be happening in the US. Alas, the United Kingdom is losing a war it does not even know it is fighting.”

  Part of my own investigation had uncovered the reality of just how alive Europe and NATO were to the very real conflict, and what active measures they were deploying – including shutting down disinformation channels – but half of the battle, for me at least, had been trying to make people pay attention. Komarnyckyj agreed wholeheartedly.

  “In 2014, I outlined a number of initial ideas for defeating Russia’s hybrid war,” he told me. “I believe that these ideas remain a useful basis for tackling Putin’s undeclared war against the west. However, the three initial steps are: 1) To accept that the war is happening. We all have a collective responsibility to see beyond the lies of our foe. Look not at what they say but what they do. 2) To recognise the deniable assets for what they are and target them. Ban Russia Today. Treat the politicians and journalist on its payroll as social pariahs the Lord Haw Haws of the digital age. 3) To develop a plan to counter the threat based on the recognition that it is them or us.”

  “Sadly we have not reached stage 1 in the UK,” he said, explaining that the head of MI6 made a statement recognising the threat last year but worded it in vague terms. “Our politicians are making the problem worse by trying to surf the wave of chaos unleashed by Putin. And Johnson is too large and wobbly, literally and metaphorically, to stay upright on any surfboard. They are actually assisting Putin’s efforts to toxify political debate by trumpeting Brexit – a parochial, brain dead policy which will isolate the UK and help splinter the transatlantic alliance.”

  Before the UK becomes “Russia’s North Sea Oblast”, as Komarnyckyj termed it, I pressed him on what practical countermeasures need to be taken – in particular considering we were for the moment (and rightly, in my view) – seen as enemies of our EU neighbours. Komarnyckyj did not hold back, saying we urgently need to map Russia’s propaganda resources to develop a conceptual framework which breaks the countries resources into categories such as “directly financed media agencies, directly paid agents of influence, Soviet legacy political parties who are still Russian-centric in orientation.” He also made clear we needed to collectively shift away from “uncoordinated initiatives towards pooling resources and coordinating actions; move away from reacting to the material produced by the propaganda apparatus to a focus on coordinated action to destroy the apparatus itself; and focus on undermining Putin’s virtual world and its hired creators by exposing its – and their – dishonesty.”

  These moves were well under way in Germany and France already, and Komarnyckyj received them positively, though he placed an emphasis on non-violent action based upon his own experience.

  “The strategy must adhere to best practice in terms of being anti-discriminatory. It is likely that the traditional ploy of depicting people negatively will be utilised against any organised campaign. It is also possible that attempts will be made to discredit the campaign by planting agents who will make provocative, inflammatory statements. Indeed, Ukrainian politics has been affected by a number of right-wing parties who may have been sponsored by Russia.”

  As well as setting out the need for planned action focusing on the structure of Putin’s propaganda apparatus, Komarnyckyj told me that any such response: “Must adhere to the principles of transparency, equality, and diversity both as a matter of principle and because this will neutralise several means by which Russia might attempt to discredit the attack on its propaganda apparatus.” I agree: we have to fight fire with water, not petrol.

  Working as an independent journalist I had been lucky, in that I was able to avoid the trap of editorial slant, but this provided its own struggle because I was effectively competing with the financial backing of billionaires in trying to expose this mess. The situation had set me thinking and I asked Komarnyckyj for his view on the broader involvement of the mainstream media, which isn’t directly funded by the public through outlets like Byline.

  “There are other elements of the situation in the UK which deserve special mention,” he said. “You have an oligarchised media ownership which has assisted Putin’s Brexit plans, you face the proliferation of fake and pro-Russian sites- alt-right and hard left- on the Anglophone web, extensive penetration of politics by deniable assets and the Moscow-based press corps who import RU narratives with a gloss of respectability into the western media- in exchange for privileged access.”

  “The UK needs to tackle its oligarchised media and to introduce sanctions for fake news – journalists need to adopt a code of ethics preventing them from accepting money from subversive fake media channels. We need to educate the public to become resistive to manipulation via social media – and to be intelligent, sceptical consumers of news,” he added.

  Having carried my own unbreakable ethics through from my time as a police officer and whistleblower, I already saw Byline as a vital frontline resource in this conflict and Komarnyckyj agreed.

  “Your work gives a very comprehensive and detailed account of Russia’s hybrid operations against the West using open source intelligence and your own investigation. I think it should be widely circulated particularly because you are a British voice on this theme.” Nonetheless, we were both painfully aware of the risks of failure. “Britain will not survive unless it rids itself of Russia’s deniable assets,” Komarnyckyj added.

  When turning from the press to the role of academia, Komarnyckyj was less positive.

  “The UK and the West must also address the impact of Russian soft power on academic discourse,” he told me and didn’t pull his punch afterwards. “In the thirties, Russia inflicted a genocidal famine on Ukraine (which involved confiscating everything edible from vast areas) and undertook mass executions from 1930 onwards. Yet Western academia has been manipulated – via a combination of professional ties, the carrot of archival access and the consistency of message emanating from Russia – into arguing that this was in large degree a famine caused by collectivisation. Unfortunately, this reflexively complicit attitude facilitated Putin’s attack,” he told me. “He knew that the UK would lack robustness to challenge his blatant destabilisation via deniable assets. We are paying a price for our cowardice and allowing him to reinvent Stalin as a great leader. Labour and the left never shed their totalitarian heritage – progressive politics in the UK is crippled by this legacy, fettered by a dead ideology.”

  On that note, I wanted to know if any of Komarnyckyj’s proposed solutions were working on his own front line.

  “Ukraine has very quickly worked through steps 1 – 3 from my outline,” he told me. “Civic society has been able to develop initiatives to counter Russia’s hybrid operations. These include initiatives such as Stop Fake, InformNapalm, Euromaidan Press – these groups tackle disinformation head on and compile intelligence on Russia’s war effort via the web. Ukrainians are still facing massively entrenched corruption and have their own populist oligarchs, however, the continuous challenge offered is transforming Ukraine. The population understands Russia and is fighting at every level.”

  Things here in Br
itain, Komarnyckyj told me as a dual national, were not going so well, however. “Unfortunately, the UK’s 'civic society' and political parties are heavily penetrated by Russia,” he said. “Organisations such as Stop the War UK, parties like UKIP, are in effect tools of Putin’s hybrid war.” My own investigation backed him fully with broad evidence and he added that “the Putin/Milne handshake, the Farage meeting with the RU ambassador illustrate my argument about the move from covert to overt. During the cold war, an agent of influence recruited by the KGB would be prosecuted. During the present conflict, an agent of influence recruited by Russia Today can launch a campaign to bugger up the EU in plain sight. We will pay heavily for our failure to condemn and reject this species of totalitarianism.”

  “The truth is our greatest weapon,” he added, again taking me back to Sweden. “However until we see Russia as it really is rather than through the prism of Russian soft power we are lost.”

  After speaking to Komarnyckyj, I was actually left with hope. Not because enough had been done, not by a long way, but because I felt some of us were on the right track and the fight back started exactly where things began – in my case anyway – with independent journalism, funded by the direct support of the public: discovering the truth and making it heard. Causing kerfuffle.

  I began to believe this is how we could eventually win, by working together. So, I turned my attention towards finishing what I’d started, sitting down with a broadly overlooked intelligence report by the US Intelligence Agencies which confirmed my own findings on Russian subversion in the 2016 Presidential election.

  The US Intelligence Community (USIC) was, it transpired, confident the Russian Government directed the compromises of e-mails from “US persons and institutions, including from US political organisations.” The disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like WikiLeaks were, as I had deduced, consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts and these thefts and disclosures were, indeed, intended to interfere with the US election process. The joint statement for Homeland Security and National Intelligence didn’t hold back, saying: “Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” Some US states also saw scanning and probing of their election-related systems, which in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company. The extent of the efforts to hack voting machines became clearer in May 2017, when contractor Reality Winner was arrested by the FBI for leaking an NSA assessment which showed Russia had managed to get deeper into electoral systems than originally thought245.