(Bloomberg Opinion) -- If you believe the message from the Kremlin, Russia currently has no plans to send police or military forces into neighboring Belarus. But it has sent in some reinforcements — to the news media, as part of a strategy that should stand as a warning to democracies around the world.

Of course, President Vladimir Putin mused last week, Russia may eventually need to intervene in Belarus militarily. But as his spokesman put it this week: “At present we see that the situation is under control.”

Putin is trying to convey the impression that he is just a concerned neighbor in a crisis that has exploded in national unrest since Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko declared victory in a stolen election last month. Russia, Putin wants the world to believe, is holding back.

This perception is deceiving. In reality, Russia is waging a kind of stealth intervention in Belarus, the first part of which is taking place in the media. Belarusian state television has replaced Belarusian journalists with those from the Kremlin-financed RT network, which Lukashenko confirmed this week in an interview. “You understand how important you were to us during this difficult period,” he told an RT correspondent. “And what you demonstrated technically, your IT specialists, and journalists, and correspondents, and so on ... and your manager. This is worth a lot.”

An early warning about the Russian takeover of Belarusian state television came from George Barros, who works for the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. Barros wrote on Aug. 20 about new montage videos that depicted the U.S. and NATO as fomenting unrest in Belarus, as well as slick propaganda videos being released through Belarus’ interior ministry. State TV was engaged in an effort to “humanize Belarusian officials,” he told me in an interview, while portraying protesters “as threatening the families and lives of security personnel.”

This is the opposite of what was happening in Belarus. The state began arresting thousands of protesters indiscriminately after the disputed election last month. The BBC has reported that some of those detained said they were tortured in jail.

Russia’s assistance to Lukashenko did not end there, either. Barros and his colleague Mason Clark have also tracked three flights in mid-August of government-owned passenger jets from Moscow to Minsk. The first such plane, they say, belonged to the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service.

There is no direct evidence that FSB officers were on those flights. But Barros says there is circumstantial evidence that the FSB is advising Lukashenko on how to disperse the protests. After that first flight on Aug. 18, for example, the Belarusian security services ended a policy of mass arrests, which fueled unrest, and began a strategy of targeted detentions of organizers and opposition leaders.

In an interview with reporters this week, Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun said there was little doubt that Russia was “exercising some level of influence” in Belarus, and said that publicly available flight tracking data showed that “elite aircraft from the FSB intelligence service has flown into Minsk on more than a couple of occasions.”

What all this means for the future of Belarus is not good. If Lukashenko is able to retain power, he will have to reverse any policies or stances that sought or promoted greater independence from Moscow. What will happen to his opposition to an economic and political union between Belarus and Russia? Will he still tout his anti-Russian bonafides, as he did during the presidential campaign, when Belarusian law enforcement agencies arrested 33 Russian mercenaries?

More broadly, Putin’s offensive in Belarus is yet more evidence that Russia considers the media landscape a battlefield for its own brand of hybrid warfare. Sometimes, the war requires actual troops, as in 2014 in Ukraine. Other times, the goal is to sow chaos and mistrust in democracy. This time, in Belarus, it appears that Russia is trying to quell a democratic uprising without firing a single shot.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.


A distorted Muscovite picture
The information war over Belarus hots up
Russia rules the airwaves but not social media


Europe Sep 5th 2020 edition

Sep 5th 2020

MINSK

It was the cables that gave them away. As foreign and local journalists in Belarus scrambled to report on the latest crackdown on peaceful protesters, one film crew was always in prime position. Its members were untouched whenever police hounded other journalists, stripping them of their accreditation and deporting them. The camera cables that stretched past several unmarked police minibuses led to the source of their protection: a white and green van belonging to Russia Today.

Russia’s “green men”, unbadged soldiers sent to Ukraine after its revolution in 2014, are yet to make an appearance in Belarus. But the Kremlin’s propaganda warriors have already occupied its airwaves. Their invasion was solicited by Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s embattled dictator, who has lost any claims to legitimacy first by rigging the recent presidential election, then by unleashing terror against the large numbers of his people who protested.


Shocked by the violence of the security services, workers in state-owned factories, who were once Mr Lukashenko’s most solid backers, went on strike. Journalists for state television, normally obedient servants of the regime, walked out of their studios in protest. Desperate to look more in control, Mr Lukashenko appealed to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, for help.

Mr Putin cannot afford to let Mr Lukashenko be overthrown by popular protests. He does not want to set a dangerous precedent. The attempt to kill Russia’s main opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, shows just how nervous the Kremlin is feeling. But Mr Putin has little desire to incur new Western sanctions by sending soldiers to save Mr Lukashenko. (Sanctions may be forthcoming anyway, following Germany’s confirmation on September 2nd that Mr Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent similar to ones used in other Russian-sponsored assassinations, to which only state operatives could have access.) Helping Belarus improve its propaganda is more deniable and less provocative than sending troops.

The change in programming wrought by Russia is glaring. Before the information takeover, Belarusian state tv offered a largely ineffective diet of Soviet and second world war mythology—more Belarus Yesterday than Russia Today. The newly arrived propagandists from Moscow have wheeled out an arsenal of aggression and divisiveness. Breathless news reports have started to warn of the havoc caused by protests in France and Syria. Coverage also seeks to discredit and sneer at the local protests as creations of the West. Selective editing depicts them as feebly supported yet violent—and doomed to failure. A new legion of experts warns of the dangers of a split in Belarusian society.

Mr Lukashenko, who has spent the past two years rallying Belarusians around the flag and feeding his army and security services a yarn about Russia’s threat to the country’s sovereignty, has abruptly changed his tune. He talks these days about one fatherland stretching from Brest, a city in Belarus’s west, to Vladivostok in Russia’s far east. “We now have no other choice but to fasten our boat to the eastern shore,” one senior and somewhat disoriented government official says, landlocked Belarus being conspicuously lacking in shores.


But sprucing up state television’s news reports in this way may not have the intended effect. The change is so sudden and so obvious that it risks further alienating citizens who have experienced a national awakening in the past few weeks. The rush of Russian-made propaganda might persuade some wavering Belarusians against taking to the streets, but it seems unlikely to change the minds of the hundreds of thousands who are already there.

The Belarusians who brave police violence do not watch state television, but rely instead on social media and messenger groups, such as Nekhta (Someone), a Telegram channel run by young Belarusians from neighbouring Poland. It has quickly clocked up over a billion page views. Being told by Russia that they are mere extras in a Western plot will make the protesters all the more determined to prove themselves leading actors in an historic drama. ■

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "A distorted picture"