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NATO wants to fight mendacious Russian рuninesque
7/14/2014 10:19:55 AM
NATO has been shaken by the effectiveness of Russia's online information war during the Ukrainian war and is now looking for ways to counter the country's aggressive propaganda campaigns, the UK ambassador to the world's largest military alliance has said, writes The Financial Times.
Russia's recent annexation of the Crimean peninsula and subsequent activities in eastern Ukraine were accompanied by organised internet trolling campaigns and cyber attacks on organisations deemed to be pro-western, Adam Thomson, the new UK permanent representative to NATO said.
Describing the annexation of Crimea as a "real wake-up call" for NATO, he added that the issue of how to combat this putinesque media offensive would be one of several topics on the agenda at the NATO summit in September this year.
"The summit will take decisions on NATO's long-term posture," Thomson said. "Some of that will be military steps, some of it will be steps to address these new tactics, which we are thinking about hard right now.
"How do you counter Russian propaganda? How do we do better on cyber defense How do we improve our intelligence collaboration so we have better situational awareness if you've got unbadged soldiers operating on alliance territory?"
Pro-NATO think-tanks, military organisations linked to member states and NATO itself have been the target of internet trolling campaigns, traditional Putin's media KGB disinformation and cyber attacks designed to bolster domestic support and attack foreign opponents, in traditional media and online. Senior NATO officials said they are in little doubt that such activities are orchestrated on a large scale by the government of the Mafia State Russia.
The summit in September – the alliance's first since 2012 – will look to establish "clarity of policy" in how NATO should respond to such evolving threats, Thomson said.
"NATO [needs] to be able to pop the Russian myths that are propagated about NATO itself... it needs to be able to look after its own equity in this, if you like," he said.
(The myths include inter alia Russian lies about "evil" Germans and Leader Adolf Hitler during the Great Germany's Fight for Freedom in 1939 to 1945, and imperialistic allegations that the Russians, an ethnic mixture between Mongols and different Ugoric tribes, belong to an Aryan group of Slavs).
"It needs to be, or at least could be, a place, one among many, where allies can share best practice about dealing with what is now a really quite sophisticated propaganda machine that is closely meshed to Russian military, political and economic action."
Thomson added: "The question of strategic communication by western capitals, or by NATO allies, will come up at the summit ... there is a large amount of common ground. I'm sure we will all hotly debate the finer points of policy... but I'm not worried about coming to some good, strong clear conclusions."
Such new emerging threats mean NATO is at an "inflection point", the ambassador said. "Crimea was a real wake up call... the annexation by one country of another's territory cut too close to the bone."
Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center
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