War of Words over South Ossetia

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It broadcast experts' opinions saying that Georgia would not have attacked without the approval of its master, the United States, and that Washington wanted to force Russia out of areas which were traditionally under Moscow's dominance. News reports by state-controlled TV channels spoke of quantities of Western-made arms and "black soldiers" helping Georgians in combat. Ukraine, another active ally of Georgia, was also accused of helping Georgia with arms and military experts.

War on the Web

The war was fierce in cyberspace as well. A CNN web-based, admittedly non-scientific "Quickvote" on the war recorded more than 350,000 responses of which 92 percent agreed that Russia's role was that of peacekeeper, and only 8 percent perceiving its actions in Georgia as aggression. Such exercises have little to do with the real state of public opinion, but the fascinating thing about this one was that the result reportedly was highly distorted thanks to a rapid response organized by Russian bloggers. According to the online journal Vebplaneta, an indexed search on the Russian search engine Yandex.ru turned up a huge number of links to the CNN website with comments like "Vote ‘yes', support Russia," "pass the link to others!" and so on. Apart from many Russian bloggers on LiveJournal, online community networks like News@mail.ru, and Securitylab.ru were involved.

Many young and computer literate Russians are feeling that Western media are offering inaccurate coverage of the war. They are unwilling to accept the convincing graphic images of the destruction and human suffering inflicted by the Russian military. "CNN and BBC feed you lies" was addressed to the English-speaking audience in a video a Russian youngster, claiming he had lived in the United States for 10 years, posted on YouTube. "Russia is keeping the peace, it is the Georgians who committed atrocities against Ossetians" was the gist of hundreds of Russian blog posts. Pro-Kremlin youth movements like Nashi and Molodaya Gvardiya have issued a call for young citizens of Russia to confront the Western propaganda, and "spread the truth." Russian blogs were littered with personal attacks and profanity against anyone expressing online doubt about the purity of the Russia's mission in the war.

More radical activity was taking place to limit Tbilisi's capacity to spread its point of view. Georgian government sites became targets of denial-of-service attacks, hindering their activity. The Georgian Foreign Ministry's site was hacked, and a collage of images depicting President Mikheil Saakashvili juxtaposed with photos of Hitler appeared there, causing a news anchor on the Russian state-controlled channel Vesti to comment, "the resemblance is incontestable." According to the newscaster, the images expressed the feelings of the Internet community toward Georgia's foreign policy.

Certain Georgian news sites were also inaccessible for various periods of time. Noting that some Russian websites encountered similar problems, Interfax suggested that the disruptions could have been caused by the very high influx of visitors interested in the war news coverage.

However, since reports that the attacks on the Georgian governmental sites were tracked as coming from Russia, Estonia has offered to host the website of the Georgian Foreign Ministry, and the news site Civil.ge has moved to a Google Blogspot domain. Estonia was prepared to send cyber security experts to Georgia.

Now that the military action has cooled down, the confrontation will most likely switch to the web. And this means what we have seen so far of the propaganda war was just a warm-up.

Provided by Transitions Online—Intelligent Eastern Europe