Digital containment: Revisiting containment strategy in the digital age

Since the Ukraine conflict began in 2014, there has been an increased awareness of the threat to EU interests posed by Russia. In early 2015, the EEAS created the East StratCom Team to respond by promoting the EU’s soft power, strengthen media resilience, and catalogue disinformation. This article categorizes several examples of Russian disinformation in order to conceptualize the conduct of digital warfare and suggest how it might be contained. We argue that Russian disinformation earns its effectiveness by focusing upon efforts to exploit differences between EU media systems (strategic asymmetry), the targeting of disenfranchised or vulnerable audiences (tactical flexibility), and the ability to mask the sources of disinformation (plausible deniability). We argue that the EU and NATO’s response should be informed by a strategy of digital containment based on the tenets of supporting media literacy and source criticism, encouraging institutional resilience, and promoting a clear and coherent strategic narrative capable of containing the threat from inconsistent counter-messaging.