Special NATO bases have been established to wage an ideological war against our country, said Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu
According to him, they are located in Riga, Tallinn and Warsaw. Thus, Russian citizens serve in these bases as well. Their main task is to conduct subversive propaganda in social networks, under the guise of ordinary bloggers, inciting conflicts in society. So how is the NATO information machine set up?
Propaganda centres have been created in Riga, Tallinn and Warsaw, where Russians, inter alia, are trained to carry out subversive information work against our country. This was stated by Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu on Friday. According to his assessment, propaganda centres operating in Estonia, Latvia and Poland monitor the information space on the Internet, identify those “who do not write anything good” about Russia and then invite them for paid work. In fact, these centres have become instruments of information warfare against Russia, the minister said.
And they are not just a few, they are dozens of people “who are stamped every quarter,” stressed the head of the Defense Ministry. “We do not train such specialists. But there are several centres in Europe that train such specialists from citizens of our country,” Shoigu added.
It can be assumed which information warfare centres the head of the Ministry of Defense had in mind. In particular, the Center of Excellence for Strategic Communication (Strategic Propaganda), or StratCom, has been operating in Riga since 2015. Tallinn has had a Cyber Security Centre of Excellence since 2008. Estonia, Latvia and Poland have established psychological operations units in their militaries, following the U.S. example. In particular, in the Polish city of Bydgoszcz, the Central Psychological Action Group (CGAP) operates as a separate unit of the Polish Army. Special Forces veteran Sergei Kozlov told Komsomolskaya Pravda that the 4th division of the CGAP specializes in work with “states with conflict situations” such as Belarus.
The propaganda centres in Riga, Tallinn and Warsaw mentioned by Shoigu are military institutions, which is why the head of the Defence Ministry and not the foreign minister speaks for them, said Nikolai Mezhevich, expert of the Russian Council on Foreign Affairs and chief researcher of the Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“There are no ‘blazers’ there, there are soldiers and officers on duty in shifts, everything according to regulations. Their main task is to organize an attack, but no one will say that out loud, so they are called cyber-security centres”, – the specialist said.
According to Mezhevich’s assessment, all three centres are interconnected and looped into NATO`s Supreme Allied Commander Europe located in the Belgian city of Mons, 50km southwest of Brussels. “People who are recruited there are interviewed not so much for technical, professional skills as for conformity with a certain political ideology. All applicants are subjected to a lie detector test. On the whole, recruitment is carried out in the same way as in the security services”, he said. It is possible that among the applicants may be pro-Western-minded Russian citizens and citizens of post-Soviet states whose native language is Russian.
Mezhevich explained that the centres were created to organise Internet attacks on Russian enterprises, civilian sector institutions and military facilities. “The very idea of these centres was born around 2003, even before Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined NATO. And in 2007, using the fact of attacks on some Estonian governmental institutions, the authorities asked NATO for a security centre. Interestingly, an investigation by Western computer experts subsequently determined that the cyberattacks were carried out from Europe and the United States, and there was no Russian involvement in them,” the expert recalled.
In addition, he said, the Tallinn centre discussed issues related to the attack on the Leningrad nuclear power plant. The LNPP is Russia’s largest operating nuclear power plant in terms of installed capacity and is located 35 kilometres west of St Petersburg on the coast of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea in the town of Sosnovy Bor.
“It wasn’t the Estonian military that announced it, so as not to cause a scandal, because such things are caisse belli in general. It was presented in a very clever way: an Estonian journalist who feeds off the local special services said it”, – the analyst explained.
Despite the fact that the main task of the centres is to disrupt communications and management of critical infrastructure in Russia, in all three structures – Estonian, Latvian and Polish – part of the capacity is closed to carrying out ideological sabotage.
“What they have done recently, for example, is the following: two units have created social media accounts and are still fuelling the Russian-Belarusian dispute over transit and energy issues. Their aim is to worsen public relations in both countries”, – detailed Mezhevich.
He also expressed confidence in the need to create similar centres in Russia to counter the actions of the West. “From my point of view, if our adversaries have a missile, we should have a missile defence,” the expert concluded.
Information warfare training centres exist in many European cities, the defense minister listed only those that directly prepare attacks, Igor Morozov, a member of the Federation Council and former Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (FIS) official, told the VZGLYAD newspaper. At the same time, he said, Russia already has tools to counter such centres.
“The Public Chamber works directly with non-governmental organizations, and the mechanisms they have created at the federal and regional levels successfully counteract such ‘work’ by the West. The majority of Russians see their future in Russia. This shows that authorities respond adequately to all information attacks of the East European countries which the West has made an anti-Russian information outpost”, – the Senator said.
The Americans spend a lot of money on information wars, military expert, retired reserve captain of the 1st rank Vladimir Gundarov said in a comment to Moskovsky Komsomolets. “For 2021, 138 million dollars are allocated to fight Russia in this area,” the expert noted. In the European Union, the Operational Working Group on Strategic Communications (East StratCom) of the European External Action Service is engaged in similar work, Gundarov pointed out. East StratCom’s official task is to counter “ongoing disinformation campaigns on the part of Russia. The expert believes that the creation of this agency within the EU structure allowed the U.S. European allies to work in a coordinated manner on information attacks against Russia. In April 2016, the Global Engagement Center (GEC) at the U.S. Department of State began its work.
Finally, since 2017, similar structures have opened simultaneously in Eastern Europe – the Centre for Combating Terrorism and Hybrid Threats at the Czech Interior Ministry and the Polish Centre for Analysis of Propaganda and Disinformation, which is formally considered a non-governmental organization. In addition, the European Centre for Combating Hybrid Threats opened in Helsinki in 2017. It is officially stated that this Finnish structure operates “on the basis of a memorandum of understanding between eight European states and the United States and in accordance with the decisions of the EU and NATO.
Rafael Fakhrutdinov, Mikhail Moshkin, Vzglyad