Status: 06.08.2022 06:52 a.m
The British secret service publishes important information about the Ukraine war almost every day – on Twitter. With the new openness, they want to support Kyiv – and win back the trust of the British.
On February 17, the British Ministry of Defense published a video on Twitter, among others, that traced the movements of Russian troops. It was a response to the Kremlin’s lie that troops were being withdrawn from the Ukrainian border and the exercise was over. Seven days later, Russia attacked. In the video, which is spoken by a female voice with a British accent, the expression “our intelligence” is repeated over and over again.
Counterbalance to Russian propaganda
British and US secret services had been making information public for weeks as a warning and counterweight to Russian propaganda. “It was very, very classified information from sources very close to the Kremlin,” says Keir Giles, who researches security issues affecting Russia at London think tank Chatham House. ”
So far, such openness on the part of the secret service has only been experienced in the case of cyber activities. “But it was necessary to convince other European countries that a major war was imminent.” A few days before the attack, the so-called Intelligence Updates also began on the British Ministry of Defense’s Twitter channel. Maps showed the advance and activity of Russian troops, as well as information and assessments in the style of presentation slides. In light letters on a dark blue background. Credit: Defense Intelligence, Britain’s military intelligence service.
support for Ukraine
Security and intelligence expert Jeffrey Michaels of the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI) has been following the Twitter updates closely from the start. “The first were a few days before the war, probably in support of the British government’s line,” he says. “They wanted to show that they knew Russia was preparing something.”
Michaels used to work in the US government apparatus himself and suspects the following sequence of events behind the updates. “I’m assuming the slides are created when the morning briefings are prepared for the government. Then someone removes the really top-secret information and releases the rest.” Sometimes, according to Michaels, it is immediately noticeable that a paragraph is missing – “then the connection is simply not right”.
Formatting and typing errors
Indeed, exclusive information is also missing from the updates. It is more of an analysis and a summary of what is already known. In the meantime, there is usually only one update and one card per day. But they still get the most reactions on the UK MoD’s Twitter channel, which has nearly 650,000 followers.
“I’m surprised by this attention because, to be honest, they’re not very good,” says Michaels. In terms of content, the analysis of some military and Russia experts on Twitter is far superior to the intelligence updates. Especially since, according to Michaels, he keeps finding formatting errors or typos in the updates.
But he also has to realize that they are a success for the British secret service, especially for the military secret service. “You probably didn’t expect it yourself, but the updates have brought the British military intelligence service a lot of attention, both within their own government and internationally. “The updates have long been a media event.”
Ukrainian side is hardly lit
This is probably also due to the fact that the British Ministry of Defense is one of the few official bodies that regularly and easily comment on the course of the war in social networks, and thus also signal which assessments and information the British side considers serious.
What is striking, however, is that the Ukrainian side, its activities or losses are hardly examined. “On the one hand, they want to protect Ukraine safely, but on the other hand, the British side probably doesn’t have as much expertise in Ukraine as in Russia,” said Michaels.
regain trust
For the security expert Giles, the Twitter offensive is a sign that the British secret services are increasingly keeping an eye on the public – but one should not overestimate it. “The intelligence services have become more open, but the publication of really relevant classified information has reached its limits for the time being,” says Giles.
He believes that all branches of British intelligence have regained the trust of most Britons in the wake of the war in Ukraine. Trust that they had massively lost in the course of the Iraq war, in which Great Britain followed the USA on the basis of false intelligence information.
In September, the military intelligence service gets a new boss. It is still unclear how the Twitter updates on the Russian war against Ukraine will continue. But even in Great Britain nobody expects that the war will be over by then.