(In one viral disinformation campaign from the 1980’s, for instance, the Soviets claimed the CIA had invented the HIV virus to kill Black Americans.) By the time Covid-19 reached American shores, the message had morphed. The accusation of biological warfare against the US is a long-running trope that started in the Cold War when the Soviets claimed that the US inherited ‘fascist technology’ from the Nazis to genetically engineer diseases. In the early stages of the pandemic’s spread, the Kremlin propagated the myth that the virus was an American ‘biological weapon’ specifically engineered to target Chinese DNA. As news of the virus began to emerge, Moscow sought to exploit the increasingly bitter relationship between Beijing and Washington as a means to achieve its long-running strategic objective of undermining the West. ![]() Covid-19 represented a good opportunity in this regard. Over the last decade, the Kremlin has capitalized on the full range of emerging communication technologies, especially social media, in its attempt to mould the geopolitical sphere to its advantage. This approach is still favoured by the Kremlin today, but tools are more powerful now. What it basically means is to change the perception of reality to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no-one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country. is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or ‘active measures’. Rather than ‘spying’ in the traditional sense, he revealed that the KGB (the Soviet military intelligence agency) was more focused on using disinformation to undermine its enemies. In 1984, Yuri Bezmenov, a high-ranking KGB defector, elucidated Soviet techniques in a Canadian TV interview. As the Intelligence and Security Committee in the British House of Commons has concluded, ‘ Russia conducts information warfare on a massive scale.’ It is the undoubted master of disinformation with a long history of ‘psychological warfare’ that spans back to the Cold War. The story of Covid-19 illustrates this perfectly. In geopolitics, this ecosystem is emboldening state actors to increasingly pursue malicious disinformation operations. While information warfare has existed since time immemorial, its potency, immediacy and increasing popularity as a weapon of geopolitical influence has reached unprecedented heights. I am referring, instead, to the increasingly dangerous and untrustworthy information ecosystem in which the pandemic is unfolding. In that respect, Covid-19 is not a ‘black swan event’. ![]() I am not referring to the virus itself – experts have long warned of the dangers of a novel coronavirus causing a global pandemic. Covid-19 is a case-study of one of the great undiagnosed threats of our time.
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