The buildup to armed conflict on the border between Russia and Ukraine this winter has made for a strange preface to a war—strange in how visible each step has been, to any interested person anywhere around the world. This month, just scrolling Twitter, it was possible to find images of hundreds of snow-covered Russian tanks and transport vehicles, in a neat formation in Yelnya, and of what looked like mechanized and pontoon bridges on trucks in Kursk. It was possible, during a hopeful moment on Tuesday, to find radar tracking of military flights that might have shown Russian units withdrawing from forward positions in Belarus—and then, in a less hopeful moment on Wednesday, to track a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter moving toward Ukraine from a base in Romania and a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber headed out from a Royal Air Force base in Gloucestershire. Technology, having not long ago been manipulated to lower a screen of privacy over the ominous maneuvers of war, was now also being manipulated to lift it.
But that isn’t the only, or even the most interesting, reason that this proto-war has been so visible. The United States government has also changed its approach. Even as President Biden has made clear that the U.S. military will not confront Russia directly, there has been an unmistakable flurry of intelligence assessments and observations in American media. The pattern was evident early. In November, the White House informed reporters that it had alerted European allies about a possible invasion of Ukraine. At the beginning of December, U.S. officials stated that Russia’s military buildup was vast in scale, and that as many as a hundred and seventy-five thousand troops could be involved. If the point weren’t plain enough, the Washington Post published intelligence documents showing the satellite photos and troop estimates. By February, the U.S. government was warning that an invasion would leave up to fifty thousand dead and turn five million into refugees, and that Kyiv could fall within two days.
You didn’t need to be a practiced national-security observer to notice that some of the claims were very specific. In January, word came, via the U.K., that Russia had plans to install a puppet government in Ukraine. Not only were Russian mercenaries with links to their country’s spy services said to be arriving in Ukraine but Reuters also reported on the movement of a single Russian mercenary, who had gone to Donetsk. Early this month, the Pentagon press secretary, John Kirby, told reporters that Russia was planning to disseminate a “very graphic” fake video in order to create a false pretext for war. Any one of these leaks might have been normal in a tense situation—a way to manipulate a particular development in the news, or distract an annoying reporter. But, as the former C.I.A. officer Douglas London wrote this week, in Foreign Affairs, “The current quantity, frequency, and depth of classified raw intelligence being revealed is unprecedented.” Taken together, these leaks suggest a turn in strategy toward a transparency initiative.
Among national-security professionals, one reaction has been celebration: finally, after several years of being outflanked by Russian misinformation, the United States was fighting an information war of its own. “There’s a cultural revolution going on in the information age,” Michael Hayden, the former C.I.A. director, told me. “If we don’t do something about it, other people will.” Hayden thought that this turn was overdue—“I think you’ll see more and more of that,” he said—and the resistance to it had been essentially cultural. “The C.I.A.,” Hayden said, “doesn’t want to talk about anything.”
But the dispositional change also has a more specific source. “It has a lot to do with Russia’s ability to continuously sow confusion and conspiracy theories, whether it is about the use of chemical weapons in Syria or whatever else,” Andrea Kendall-Taylor said. Kendall-Taylor was deputy national-intelligence director for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council, from 2015 to 2018, and now directs the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. Many of the people now overseeing the national-security state, Kendall-Taylor pointed out, were in government during the Obama Administration, and then spent the Trump years thinking about the 2016 election, the role of Russian misinformation, and how to combat it. One lesson that many of them drew, she said, was that, in a constant and consuming information war, the point of view of the U.S. government would not automatically be trusted, and that, “when the intelligence community has credible information that they can lean into, there’s an ever-greater need to do that, because it’s getting harder and harder in some cases to discern what the truth actually is.” Kendall-Taylor said, “I spent ten years in the intelligence community, working on Russia-related stuff in Syria and everywhere, and the burden of truth has become extremely high.”
The face of the Biden White House’s transparency initiative has been Jake Sullivan, the President’s national-security adviser and a longtime Democratic policy hand. It was Sullivan who appeared on “Face the Nation” this week to answer questions about why the Administration had used the word “catastrophic” to describe the consequences of an invasion, Sullivan’s deputy who went on record with the Washington Post to describe the White House’s “tiger-team” war-gaming, and Sullivan who told a press conference last week that an invasion might take place “any day now”—a timeline that got even more specific when President Biden reportedly told European heads of state that the attack could come on February 16th, this past Wednesday. That last prediction, in particular, was specific in a way that could immediately be tested.
When there was no Wednesday attack, a backlash followed. A Ukrainian parliamentary leader said that the reporting of CNN, Bloomberg, and the Wall Street Journal in this crisis had been worse than that of the Russian propaganda outlets, and fumed that “hysteria is now costing the country two to three billion dollars each month.” Of course, it was hard to prove exactly what had happened; maybe Putin had been planning an attack on the 16th, and Sullivan’s public warning had dissuaded him. But the Ukrainian response did hint at a pattern in what was being declassified. The leaks have tended to suggest that the invasion is imminent, the potential casualties alarming, the threat severe. The transparency has so far had the effect of raising the temperature, not lowering it.
That may just be the logic of deterrence at work. Last month, the Biden Administration and its allies detailed the sanctions package that they would levy against Russian institutions and individuals in the event of an invasion—a package that would, among other things, aim to cleave Russian banks from the global financial system, as had been done in sanctions levied against Iran. Edward Fishman, an Obama State Department official who helped lead the team that designed economic sanctions after Russia’s Crimea war, in 2014, told me, “I think it’s a first, that the use of sanctions as a deterrent has been used this deliberately.” Fishman said that, if your aim was to prevent an invasion, threatening sanctions before a military action took place was more likely to be effective than imposing them punitively afterward: “If we can change Putin’s behavior using economic sanctions, even after we’ve taken military options off the table, that would be a huge victory for U.S. foreign policy.” But, if sanctions are to be a deterrent, their impact must be understood to be devastating, and be emphasized as part of the information campaign. Fishman told me, “My biggest worry right now is that Putin doesn’t realize how serious they are.”
To flood the media with this amount of intelligence might be a new tactic for national-security officials, but it is very much of the moment in other ways. During the past year, medical authorities and election officials, faced with the problem of public mistrust, have chosen to respond with more detail—more charts and images and attribution—in the hope that transparency will rebuild social trust. The effects so far have been mixed; rather than fully persuading the doubters, these efforts have tended to cause people to dig in, pitting those who trust authority against those who distrust it. That the U.S. government is now trying something similar is probably inevitable, an expression of the realization that its spokespeople can no longer simply say something and be believed. But there is also a totalizing effect, in that the mind of every interested citizen, here and abroad, is now a battlefield in the information war.
The next few days are, among other things, a test of whether disclosure can serve as a deterrent. Kendall-Taylor told me, “It kind of goes back to: What are our strengths in this domain?” If the authoritarian strength lies in misinformation, then maybe the way for a democracy to counter that is through transparency. On one level, it has been heartening to hear national-security officials describing the free press as a weapon against authoritarian misinformation; on another, it sent a slight shiver down my spine to hear a pillar of liberalism discussed as if it were a national-security asset, another quasi-military tool to be deployed. Kendall-Taylor said, “Exposure is part of the battle.”