After the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, a mobilization campaign in the Armed Forces began. At the same time, the Russian Federation launched large-scale disinformation operations regarding conscription into the Ukrainian Defense Forces.
Points of attention
- The Russian Federation is conducting special information operations in Ukraine to disrupt the mobilization campaign in the Armed Forces and weaken the country's defense capabilities.
- Anti-mobilization messages spread through social media platforms like TikTok, containing partial truths for maximum impact on Ukrainians.
- The disinformation campaign aims to undermine trust in the Ukrainian leadership, create internal conflicts, and ultimately weaken the resilience of the country against Russian aggression.
- Russian propaganda combines real facts, manipulation, and fakes to portray the Ukrainian state and military as enemies, encouraging evasion of mobilization.
- The Kremlin utilizes a variety of methods, including bot farms, troll factories, and media resources, to spread anti-mobilization messages in Ukraine and influence the behavior of its citizens.
Russia has intensified special operations to disrupt mobilization in Ukraine
Information operations against mobilization have been carried out by the special services of the Russian Federation in Ukraine since the beginning of the hybrid aggression in 2014. The Russians threw messages into the media aimed at undermining trust in the military-political leadership and creating artificial divisions in society. And they also promoted the narrative of "civil conflict" and "war between oligarchs", participation in which the average Ukrainian should avoid.
Active KGB-style measures, such as "wives and mothers' rallies" or "anti-war pickets", were aimed at blocking the work of military commissariats.
The mobilization of reservists was stopped in 2016. But on February 24, 2022, due to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the situation changed and President Zelensky announced a general mobilization.
A new Russian campaign to disrupt it began almost simultaneously.
Key anti-mobilization messages
An important element of this disinformation campaign is that anti-mobilization messages must contain a grain of truth and be spread not only by Russian propaganda, but ideally organically by Ukrainians who have come under its influence. These messages include:
mobilization is illegal due to the "wrong" state of war in Ukraine (it is contrasted with the "correct" state of war);
territorial recruitment and social support centers (TCC) are not part of the Armed Forces, but "private firms", and therefore do not have the right to mobilize;
someone else has to fight: MPs, civil servants, police officers, customs officers, border guards, judges, professional/personnel soldiers (not mobilized civilians), etc.;
TCCs are totally corrupt, so the rich are bought off, the poor serve;
The Armed Forces suffer heavy losses, the commanders do not protect the fighters, therefore the mobilized are doomed to perish;
it is not worth fighting for a corrupt government that violates the rights of citizens and closes borders;
the Russian army is invincible, there is no point in resisting.
Since 2022, the Kremlin's propaganda efforts have been aimed at weakening Ukraine's ability to resist Russian aggression by generating artificial internal conflicts in society and pitting some groups of citizens against others.
In addition to the traditional technique of pitting Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking populations in the West and East of Ukraine against each other, the Kremlin has also tried to create fault lines between internally displaced persons (IDPs) and residents of IDP-hosting regions, as well as between those who left Ukraine and those who remained. or between civilians and military.
A special part of the anti-mobilization campaign is the demonization of TCC employees, as Russia is trying to indirectly discredit the Armed Forces of Ukraine as a whole.
The special services of the Kremlin, which conduct psychological operations, use natural human fears (fear of death, fear of mutilation, fear of the unknown), as well as real organizational shortcomings, abuses and offenses of officials.
The Russian authorities carefully monitor the Ukrainian media space and use it to promote anti-mobilization messages with facts of bribery, abuse of official powers by TCC employees, as well as with an emphasis on any conflicts involving the military, military casualties, illegal border crossing by men, etc.
Pro-Kremlin disinformation combines anti-mobilization messages with real facts, manipulation and fakes, leading consumers of propaganda to conclude that:
The Ukrainian state is an enemy of citizens;
the Ukrainian military poses a danger to civilians;
losers are mobilized, avoiding mobilization is success.
After all, the goal of the Russian anti-mobilization operation is to influence the behavior of Ukrainians. During 2022-2023, the information operation was aimed at popularizing passive evasion of mobilization (ignoring military registration, avoiding contacts with the TCC, creating fictitious grounds for obtaining a postponement).
From the end of 2023 to the beginning of 2024, the direction aimed at the normalization and popularization of active forms of evasion (illegal border crossing, violence against TCC employees, burning of cars) became more noticeable.
How Russia's special information operations work against mobilization in Ukraine
To carry out information operations, the Kremlin uses combined methods that include the operation of networks of Russian influence in Ukraine: media resources (websites, profiles in social networks, Telegram channels), bot farms and troll factories. In 2022, dozens of regional Telegram channels were created, which spread messages with locations where TCC employees allegedly issue summonses.
The propaganda and disinformation machine uses the politics and algorithms of social networks popular in Ukraine for its own purposes. Thus, only during March-November 2023, as part of a study conducted by the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security together with the Center for Democracy and the Rule of Law, 596 advertising messages with disinformation and Russian propaganda targeted at the Ukrainian audience were discovered. 136 and 82 of them, respectively, i.e. a total of almost 37%, promoted Russian messages about the situation at the front and mobilization in Ukraine.
Russian propagandists use TikTok as an entry point into the Ukrainian media space. The authors of the study of the Texty.org.ua project came to the conclusion that the recommendation algorithms of this social network, like some others, start promoting the video before it is processed by the moderation algorithms responsible for blocking and removing content. This means that Ukrainian TikTok users have a very high chance of seeing Russian disinformation and propaganda with popular hashtags, even if they are not subscribed to pages with such content.
So, in mid-July, the hashtag #ТЧК was the most popular in the Ukrainian segment of TikTok.
Most of the content with these hashtags is aimed at discrediting the mobilization in Ukraine. In July, the Top 10 most popular hashtags included frankly anti-mobilization hashtags, such as: #stopttsk, #народпротитск, #спротивттск, #протестттск, as well as the anti-state hashtag #ценемояукрайна.
They are mostly accompanied by videos (both real and staged) of conflicts involving TCC employees, as well as out-of-context retellings of offensive stories and instructions on avoiding and actively countering mobilization, or simply unfortunate quotes from military interviews about the need for mobilization.
Organization of setting fire to military vehicles and its media coverage
One of the areas of active resistance to mobilization is the organization of setting fire to military vehicles in Ukrainian cities and its media coverage. According to the investigation of the "Vazhnye istorii" publication, at the beginning of June on Russian-language forums in the darknet there were advertisements offering monetary rewards for setting fire to TCC cars. This is primarily about the Hydra forum, which specializes in drug trafficking and other illegal operations. The forum periodically changes its address in the Tor network.
In turn, the Security Service of Ukraine and the Prosecutor General's Office reported the arrest of suspects in such arson, who received assignments via Telegram. Videos and photos of burned military vehicles are circulating through Russian media networks as evidence of "popular resistance" to the mobilization. In particular, TikTok videos are accompanied by the hashtags listed above.
Propaganda resources and Russian state media magnified such cases into a story about "popular resistance" to the mobilization and "confrontation of Ukrainians with the authorities" and President Volodymyr Zelenskyi personally.
In particular, on July 21, the Russian state news agency TASS distributed a number of materials, which it claimed were interviews with members of the "pro-Russian underground" in Ukraine. The publication mentions that the burning of military cars and relay boxes on railways (a classic example of sabotage against transport infrastructure) are supposedly "acts of resistance" by men subject to mobilization.
Over the next three days, this story was shared by more than 40 Russian and pro-Russian resources: Telegram channels, Facebook pages and websites. About 40 more messages were published in the Russian social networks "Vkontakte" and "Odnoklassniki".
Cases of suicide are associated with anti-mobilization narratives
Russian propaganda tries to include high-profile cases related to violence and suicide attempts in the anti-mobilization narrative. On July 18, a woman set herself on fire near the courthouse in the Belotserkiv district of the Kyiv region. Russian propaganda sources presented it as an "act of resistance" because the court did not grant her husband a reprieve from mobilization.
The fake is obvious at least due to the fact that postponements from mobilization are issued in TCC, not courts. Over 40 Russian and pro-Russian websites and Telegram channels spread the fake within three days (monitoring tools detected 50 messages).
The spread of the fake occurred even after the police provided an official explanation: the court was considering a case regarding the rights of a woman and a man to custody of their child.
The Kremlin uses agents of influence to disrupt mobilization in Ukraine. Under the guise of journalistic or human rights activities, they create networks for organized opposition to mobilization, discrediting the state and the military.
At the end of July, the Security Service of Ukraine detained the head of one of these networks and his accomplices. They are suspected of creating and distributing content with calls for armed resistance to the TCC, publication of personal data of military personnel, and other actions subject to Art. 114-1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (obstructing the lawful activities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine).
Special operations of the Russian Federation against mobilization plan to weaken Ukraine's defense capabilities
Russia is directly interested in weakening Ukraine's defense capabilities. Therefore, its efforts are aimed at disrupting Ukrainian mobilization.
For this, the Kremlin uses all methods that are in the arsenal of special services and Russian propagandists:
coordinated dissemination of disinformation and manipulation,
creating fakes,
recruitment of agents and sabotage.
The tools are used in combination and complement each other.
The Russians are trying to convince the Ukrainians that their real enemy is not the aggressor, but their own state. And they are also trying to undermine trust in the Armed Forces, generate internal conflicts and turn them into a force confrontation. Or, with the help of the media, create the illusion of the deployment of such a confrontation.
