Story, storytellers and lies in the Ukrainian war

The return to normality brings both pleasant and unexpected surprises. It is a necessary luxury, for example, to resume the custom of the annual seminar on Security and Defence, organised in Toledo by the Association of European Journalists. The pandemic has prevented attendance in person in recent years, which also prevented the usual conglomeration of civilian and military specialists in global geopolitics from meeting and converging at the Parador in the Castilian capital of La Mancha.

In times of intense, harsh and determining war for the future of humanity, it is also a unique opportunity to listen to the stories told by correspondents and special envoys to Ukraine, who thus take the opportunity to catch their breath at this event in Toledo, after months of contemplating the immense and tragic picture of cruelty and human misery on the Ukrainian battlefields. Two of these special envoys, veterans of several wars and many adventures around the world, agreed on the reasons why this time they had to put on their helmets, bulletproof vests and insulating boots in the Ukrainian war: "nobody among the young people in the editorial staff wanted to go to the front, so someone had to do it," they said separately.

I look astonished, I find it hard to believe that with so many journalism faculties in Spain, which churn out thousands of graduates every year, there were no young people willing to risk their lives in order to fulfil their supposed vocation of telling the story from the front line. Perhaps there are not enough incentives for these new generations, supposedly so well educated and protected by a generous welfare state, to decide to move the tango in search of those war stories that help explain what is being aired in Europe and the fierce dispute on the outcome of which a future of freedom or misery will depend.

My interlocutors have added to their already considerable wealth of experience and above all they have greatly increased their knowledge of the increasingly refined techniques of intoxication, disinformation and lies that are developed to the maximum in times of war. It is the battle for the narrative, on which the final outcome of the war will largely depend.

Without such life experience, it is easy to fall prey to disinformation and even become an unwitting vehicle for false mantras that nonetheless end up being accepted by public opinion. Following the doctrine of Army Chief of Staff General Gerasimov, Russia works hard and conscientiously to fix mantras in international public opinion that are swallowed without resistance.

"There is no war between Russia and Ukraine, only a special military operation to 'denazify' Ukraine". "What there was before 24 February last was a genocide of Russian-speaking inhabitants of the Donbas region". Also an aggressive expansion of NATO to the very borders of Russia, whose existence is thus seriously threatened". "The war and its prolongation is the excuse used by the United States to make a lucrative business deal with Europe and to cover up Biden's scandals".

A litany that goes hand in hand with the systematic denial of civilian killings; the generation of scaremongering in Western public opinion; the blaming of the food crisis on the sanctions imposed by the European Union on Russia; and the persistent and persistent accusation of the West, which is treated as a single whole, of fomenting Russophobia.

With such messages multiplied by all kinds of media, especially social media, more than a few of them have already provoked tensions across the globe. For example, more than a few African countries have bought the damaged goods of, effectively, blaming Europe for the famine ravaging their countries, when the reality is that Putin is blocking Ukraine's agricultural products from leaving the Black Sea, while bombing and burning millions of tonnes of grain in its storage silos.

And, along with the more specific mantras, Russia does not let up on more fundamental ones, such as "Ukrainian Nazis staged a coup d'état in the Maidan", "Russophony is in danger" or that "Ukraine does not have its own entity as a country because it is part of Russia".

The battle for the narrative is therefore no joke. Gerasimov says that, "properly managed [intoxication and disinformation], a quarter of purely military means and troops are then enough to achieve the desired end goals".