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Russia seeks to destabilize countries around the world by sowing disinformation about coronavirus vaccines that is quickly shared on social media, the head of the armed forces warned.
General Sir Nick Carter, chief of the defense staff, said the propaganda tactic reflected a strategy of “political warfare” aggressively waged by Beijing and Moscow “designed to undermine cohesion” throughout the West.
The high-ranking general accused “autocratic rivals” of “manipulating the information environment” to exploit the Covid-19 crisis for strategic benefits, including “pro-Russian vaccine policy”, in a speech at the Policy Exchange expert group.
His “disinformation narratives” were designed to permeate anti-vaccination social media groups, Carter added, pointing to an example discovered earlier this summer by Australian researchers that spread rapidly from Ukraine.
In July, a bogus press release was posted on the websites of the self-proclaimed pro-Russian state in Lugansk, eastern Ukraine. He falsely claimed that the United States had conducted vaccine trials on Ukrainian volunteers, some of whom had died.
The trials never happened, but the misleading narrative spread across multiple languages, including on a prominent Australian anti-vaccination Facebook group, despite multiple attempts to verify and discredit them.
Carter called it an example of “digital authoritarianism” alongside the Kremlin’s notorious hacking and cyberattacks, in a rare political speech delivered with Defense Secretary Ben Wallace sitting next to him.
China took a similar approach, he added, where “the Chinese Communist Party is forging a future of mass surveillance” and classification and monitoring of people based on their behavior online.
The speech comes in the run-up to a five-year integrated defense and foreign policy review that is expected to see the UK look to invest more in cyber and covert capabilities, reflecting the belief that Britain is already involved. in a persistent low -level of conflict with authoritarian rivals.
The British Army already operates a propaganda and disinformation suppression unit, the 77th Brigade. But the military is traditionally quiet about the scope and scale of its activities, and Carter’s speech offered few precise clues as to how the UK will respond.
High-level defense sources said expanding Britain’s information warfare capability “is not going to be a massive increase in spending” and that it would involve, in part, a closer exchange of information and intelligence with a variety of allies. . “The attached bill is not significant,” they said.
Countries like Russia and China, Carter argued, “see the strategic context as an ongoing struggle in which military and non-military instruments are used without restriction by any distinction between peace and war.”
The general added: “His objective is to win without going to war: to achieve his objectives by breaking our willpower, using attacks below the threshold that would provoke a war response.”
In the summer, Britain accused Russian state-sponsored hackers of targeting research labs in the UK, the United States and Canada involved in developing a coronavirus vaccine, with the apparent intention of stealing the research.
Intelligence officials said the attackers were from a group called APT29, linked in various ways to the country’s FSB or SVR intelligence agencies, in attacks that were described by Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, as “completely unacceptable.”
As part of the military’s response, Carter released a military doctrine called the Integrated Operating Concept. He recognized the need to “compete below the threshold of war to dissuade it” to prevent “adversaries from achieving their objectives in fait accompli strategies.”
