Russia's information warfare policies in the Ukraine conflict

Information warfare offers a crucial perspective on understanding new era conflicts and is used as an effective tool by states to legitimize the conflicts. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine marks a pivotal moment in the realm of information warfare, emphasizing that the war must be won first in people's minds, not on the battlefield. Russia has assigned special significance to this field and is trying to ensure information superiority by developing its own policies. This pursuit is driven from Russia's attempt to recover the influence it lost the following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Within this framework, the policies developed by Russia in the information-psychological and information-technical fields during the Ukrainian conflict clearly demonstrate the importance it attaches to information warfare and aim to rebuild the perception of a powerful Russia that was trying to be eliminated by this conflict. For instance, in the information-psychological field, Russia constructs its narrative based on religion, language, geography, anti-Westernism, culture, and historical discourse, while it has generally created the information-technical field with defense and attack policies against cyberattacks. This thesis aims to examine Russia's information warfare policies in Ukraine and provide an overview of how Russia legitimized its role in the Ukrainian conflict as a result of its information superiority. Data were collected from words, pictures and observations in order to understand Russia's attitude and behavior towards Ukraine about the information warfare policies implemented by Russia on Ukraine. An inference was made based on literature research, the perspective of national and international media on the conflict, the use of social media, and the data obtained with new technologies developed against cyberattacks. However, due to the continuation of the conflict, the inference is predictive and limits the conclusion of the thesis. In line with the data obtained, it is concluded that Russia's narrative in the information psychological field, spread through the use of information-technical tools, prolongs the conflict further, and it is inevitable to legitimize the conflict by adopting Russia's narrative unless sufficient support is provided to Ukraine.