How Russia Is Trying to Win Over the Global South

The Economist, London, 22 September 2022

Its propaganda is deceptive, multilingual and well-funded. But does it work?

n september 21st Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, announced the calling-up of perhaps 300,000 military reservists to fight in his sputtering war against Ukraine. The 18m followers of the rt (formerly known as Russia Today) Spanish-language Facebook page were left in no doubt as to why. Framing his invasion of Ukraine as a war for national survival, Mr Putin, rt reported, had declared that the goal of the West was to “divide and destroy” Russia.

Other recent developments seem to have been curiously underplayed. News of Russia’s retreat in north-eastern Ukraine earlier this month, in which Ukrainian forces have retaken thousands of square miles of territory, was hard to find. Headlines that dominated Western news outlets, about Russian soldiers abandoning their weapons and fleeing, were absent. Besides the mobilisation announcement itself, the only hint that Russia’s invasion might not be going entirely according to plan was a few clips parroting the Russian defence ministry’s announcement of a “regrouping” of Russian forces.

Russia’s efforts to shape narratives and influence politics in Europe and America are well-known. But Mr Putin’s propaganda machine has long targeted the developing world, too. ... In Africa, Russian propaganda networks have pushed the line that Western sanctions, rather than Russia’s blockade of the Black Sea, caused food prices to spike.

“Russian propaganda today has an edge in the global south,” argues Timothy Snyder of Yale University in an essay for Foreign Affairs. “In much of Africa, Russia is a known quantity, whereas Ukraine is not.” There are good reasons to worry. Fighting online disinformation is hard at the best of times. Big tech firms, most of which are based in America and serve their English-language users first, find it even trickier in other languages, reckons Tessa Knight, who studies disinformation in Africa at the Atlantic Council, an American think-tank.

Academic research on disinformation is likewise mostly skewed towards the rich world, where governments have complained most loudly about the problem. ... Local cutouts can spread messages cheaply and in ways that are hard to trace. Groups linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose mercenary army, Wagner, has been used in the Central African Republic, Mozambique and Sudan, have in the past hired marketing firms and influencers to produce content.

“They’ve figured out that the more local you can go the better,” says Shelby Grossman of Stanford University’s Internet Observatory. ... China’s global propaganda network often pitches in to help, too. ... Independent Media, a South African group part-owned by two Chinese state firms, often engages in “information laundering” designed to make sentiment appear homegrown, says Herman Wasserman at the University of Cape Town.

In South Africa there is little evidence that the governing party’s sympathy for Russia is replicated among the general population.