My first commentary on Russian propaganda and disinformation was published in Gateway Journalism Review more than a decade ago when “Ukraine’s crisis” just started unfolding in 2014 with Russia’s occupation of Crimea. I was a Fulbright fellow from Ukraine at that time, and I could not imagine how brutal and devastating this war would turn out for me personally and for millions of Ukrainians. Today, on Feb. 24, 2026 as Ukraine enters into the fifth year of battling Russia’s full-scale invasion, I am still writing about Russian propaganda and how it became a core element of the aggressive ideology of Ruscism used to justify this war.
Now more than ever we see that history is repeating itself. In different forms and places, wildly and weirdly transformed, but somehow the old ideas revive and rage in human heads again and again. The generation of Holocaust survivors experienced to the fullest how Nazi propaganda created fertile soil for mass tortures and murders of Jews, Roma, other ethnic minorities and political dissenters during World War II. Almost a century later, humanity is facing the same threats from Russian propaganda amidst growing international instability with new global turmoil looming on the horizon.
How to win an information war?
Yes, Europe is in an epicenter again, now with the Russian genocidal war against Ukrainians. The form of fascist ideology that is widely labeled as Ruscism. The Ukrainian parliament officially enshrined the term in legislation after Russia’s full-scale invasion in Feb. 2022. Ruscism employs time-tested practices and instruments—from the 2014 annexation of the parts of Ukraine’s territory with the illegal occupation of Crimea, then destruction and destabilization in the separatist quasi-states in Eastern Ukraine and the brutal kidnapping and physical extermination of military and civilians, abduction of children, filtration camps, massive attacks on civilian infrastructure and aggressive hybrid information war.
Yes again, Russia exploits the painfully familiar chauvinistic and imperialist narratives that Ukraine is a failed state, Ukrainians are a fake nation and their language is just a dialect of Russian. All this is intertwined with Soviet nostalgia and Euroasianist ambition of a restructuring of the global geopolitics around Russia as a superpower.
Yet, there is a reaction to any action. Here is a story about two extraordinary journalist figures who dared to fight the information war and apparently became successful: Sefton Delmer against the Nazis in the 1940s and Peter Pomerantsev against Russians now. Notably, both are British journalists who spent many years working on various media in Germany and Russia. I think this fact might have inspired Pomerantsev to write his recent book about Delmer. In the preface to “How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler,” Pomerantsev confesses, “It is not a regular work of history or biography. As a student of contemporary disinformation, my aim is to understand what he can teach us about the nature of propaganda and how to win an information war.” Together they are inspirational examples of professional resilience and activism.
Sefton Delmer
“He’s torn. … Can Sefton Delmer even tell which is the real him?” Pomerantsev opens his book. Is he a journalist? A propagandist? A traitor? A hero? What was his “true identity”?
A complex mixture of everything, perhaps. Obviously, he is the one who was provocative enough to fight the Nazis back with their own propagandistic tricks and so creative that these covert psychological operations still impress.
Delmer’s controversial but fascinating journalistic journey started in the 1930s in his birth town, Berlin, where he returned after having spent over a decade in Great Britain. His British parents of Australian heritage were repatriated from Germany to England as enemy aliens in the aftermath of World War I. As the anchor of the BBC German Service and the Daily Express reporter, the man obtained a quite successful journalistic career that allowed him to interview Adolf Hitler in 1931 and cover the rising power of the Third Reich. Getting in-depth knowledge about the Nazis came in handy in the 1940s, when he created brilliant propagandistic projects against them. Radio, German Propaganda Minister Goebbels’ beloved technology, penetrated every household. Of course, Delmer, the head of Special Operations of the British Political Warfare Executive, used it for spreading counter-propaganda in order to erode Nazism from within. First in 1941 via the shortwave station Gustav Sielgfried Eins (GS1) and then in 1943-45 via different radio stations and numerous other media.
A sophisticated mix of manipulation with grains of truth and aggressive disinformation was the primary content, made secretly to sound like a genuine German creation, yet rebellious and critical of the Nazi Party and its higher-ups. The Jewish refugees, former members of Berlin’s cabaret crew, acted in the shows that revealed “insider” information about the moral depravity of German leaders, their cheating on wives and perverted sexual behavior, and the neglect of the real needs of people while the soldiers died on the front. Delmer’s propaganda mirrored the Nazis’ own information warfare techniques: for instance, they blamed them as a cause of their own problems, implicitly dismissing outrageous accusations against Jews (e.g., in spreading the diseases), or called the German military to simulate illnesses and run away from the front. Delmer’s methods were based on ongoing research and intelligence data provided by the British government. They proved to be a powerful tool for converting German public morale against the Nazis.
Peter Pomerantsev
Born in Ukraine to a Jewish family of Soviet dissidents and raised in London, fluent in Russian and English with decent knowledge of Ukrainian, Pomerantsev has been investigating Russian disinformation and propaganda for decades. He is a third-generation journalist and an author: his grandfather was a military correspondent, his father is a radio host, a poet and a playwright, and his mother is a documentary producer who worked on the films on Russia, including “The Gulag” (about Soviet labor camps) and “The Betrayed” (about Russia’s first war in Chechnya).
Pomerantsev’s previous works on propaganda, “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible” and “This is not Propaganda” cover Putin’s rising authoritarianism in the 2000s Russia, where he spent nearly a decade as a TV producer and saw how its media freedom was cracking under the total control by the Kremlin. The recent book about Delmer also touches on Russia’s war in Ukraine. Pomerantsev comes to the concerning conclusion about the weakness of journalism in the face of brutal propaganda, its failure to convince those who are blind to truth and don’t have an agency of independent critical thinking. Nevertheless, his own work proves quite the opposite. Quality journalism makes a difference. Pomerantsev, with renowned human rights reporter and investigator Janine di Giovanni, co-founded an international initiative, The Reckoning Project. He describes their goal as “to ensure that the war crimes committed during the invasion didn’t disappear under a fresh blizzard of Russian disinformation,” because impunity leads only to further aggression. The crimes must be punished.
Stamping out Impunity
Illustration: WCEE, University of Michigan
The Reckoning Project consists of three main teams of experts and professionals — journalists, lawyers and scholars — who work jointly in order to document the human rights violations, war crimes and atrocities the Russians committed in Ukraine after Feb. 2022. They already finished the data collection phase of the project. The journalist team, led by the prominent Ukrainian author Nataliya Gumenyuk, collected on-the-ground witness testimonies and evidence using the “Do No Harm Principle” of sensitive reporting and the Berkeley Protocol (an internationally recognized standard for the investigation of the alleged violations of international criminal, human rights, and humanitarian law). The team published numerous investigative reports, documentaries and analytical articles on multiple international media platforms.
During the next phases of the project, its legal experts will process the collected data and compile it into the cases that can be used as the legally admissible evidence in courts. On April 15, 2024, The Reckoning Project, together with one of the victims, filed a criminal complaint in the Argentine Federal Judiciary in Buenos Aires requesting to investigate torture inflicted against a Ukrainian citizen by Russian occupying forces. This is the first such case filed in the international courts, but the team anticipates more to come. “Justice delayed is justice denied,” they say.
Finally, the team of scholars from the University of Michigan is working on the third section of the Reckoning Project, directed towards commemoration and education. They already translated the witness testimonies into English and created the digital archive and the interactive map of 300 incidents recorded by journalists and researchers. The UofM Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia and the Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research have collaboratively developed free, comprehensive teaching materials for educators across Social Studies, World History, US History, and Government to study the Russian-Ukrainian war. This curriculum is designed to build student knowledge not just of the armed conflict itself, but of core global issues including war crimes, genocide, human rights, and sovereignty. The resources consist of a detailed teaching guide with activities and discussion prompts and a student textbook featuring assignments and projects based on the incidents map and the archive.
So, what about winning the information war?
What can we learn from Delmer and Pomerantsev’s stories about fighting the information war? They inevitably force us to draw the parallels between Nazism and Ruscism — ideologies based on the imperialist supremacy of one nation over the others, hatred towards any otherness, and totalitarian worship of a strong leadership that ostensibly saves a nation from poverty and misery for the sake of either respect or fear by the rest of the world.
Both journalists make us think about the role of media in our lives, their overwhelming influence on us as objects of constant manipulations. Propaganda, disinformation and conspiracy theories exploit the trauma, fears, weaknesses and desires of people. Pomerantsev describes these forms of information disorder as “merciless, frequently murderous, reality-denying.” He is far from being positive that gutsy fact-checkers can win an information war, since they fail to deliver the truth to those who are unwilling to hear it. But we have to give the chance to quality journalism, media literacy and education. This is what every one of us can and should do.
Katerina Sirinyok-Dolgaryova is a doctoral student at SIUC’s School of Journalism and Advertising and a former Fulbright fellow from Ukraine at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
