Introduction

Abstract

Political analysis is replete with multiple vindications of the importance of informationladen dimension to the conflictual interactions between Russia and its European neighbors. However, academic conceptualizations vary in content and look more diverse. Some scholars prefer to categorize the issue under consideration as part of the fake news phenomenon (Tandoc et al., 2018) and deploy it in a wider scholarly debate on post-truth society. Others are more sympathetic with using the concept of hybrid warfare and the ensuing weaponization of information (Dash, 2019), which was instrumental in the appearance of a new field of study at the intersection of Russia’s compatriot policy and security studies (Pigman, 2019). A more neutral concept of information disorder (Wardle, 2018) includes deliberate spread of disinformation, intentionally inaccurate posts and comments, and manufactured forms of online solidarity. Anyhow, regardless of varied academic qualifications, the Habermasian ideal of communicative power seemed to turn into its opposite – miscommunication, disinformation, propaganda, and various manipulative techniques. Despite the lack of consensual approaches, the ongoing debate raises a number of important questions – for example, ‘whether the Internet can be home to a new form of political realm?’ (Smith, 2015, p. 241). Again, answers vary. Some scholars point to geopolitics as a relevant academic frame for discussing the proliferation of biased and fabricated information (Barthel & Bürkner, 2019) that might ‘shake the legitimacy of the neoliberal international order’ (Gerbaudo, 2018, p. 746). Others accentuate the biopolitical facets of the debate with their ‘anti-political thrust meant to lock people into their bodies as discriminatory and classificatory identities, thus disqualifying people from the political realm on account of the body’ (Smith, 2015, p. 250). Another key element of de-politicization is a phenomenon dubbed neutrollization, ‘a radical intervention to preserve “politics without telos”’, bent on a strategy of ‘producing meaninglessness’ and thus ‘precluding the very possibility of meaning’, and ‘eroding willingness to contribute to online political debate’ (Kurowska & Reshetnikov, 2018, p. 346). In particular, this approach can be used as an explanatory factor for the global phenomenon of populism. However, the academic narratives in this realm still suffer from excessive overgeneralization, which is particularly unfortunate when it comes to discussing measures of countering Russian politics of disinformation. In fact, Russia’s subjectivity in this political sphere is quite lucid and well documented (Orttung & Nelson, 2018; Mejias & Vokuev, 2017; Pomerantsev, 2015); disagreements concern only modalities of interference – direct (Kremlin-controlled) or indirect (outsourced to proxies), mass-scale with lavish centralized