Russia’s Weapon of Words in Numbers. Evolution of Russian Assertive (Dis)Information Actions: Comparative Analysis of the Cases of RussoGeorgian War 2008 & Annexation of Crimea 2014 .

Russian assertive actions over the last decade have led some observers to think that the Kremlin is employing fundamentally new concepts of an armed conflict. Subsequently, the scholars of the field came up with several buzzwords and ill-defined concepts such as ‘hybrid warfare’ and ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’. This paper claims that the novelty of Russian actions is not in terms of its military transformations per se, but rather the specific way the military had been integrated with other instruments—mostly state-run and coordinated information operations. Thus, the study puts a novel emphasis on information operations and asserts that, while in certain cases Moscow still uses the conventional military, the Kremlin's new plan is to achieve goals through information online in the first place. Thus, the paper focuses on analysing the evolution of Russian information strategy. In doing so, quantitative content analysis is deployed to examine narratives built by RIA Novosti and Russia Today/RT during the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 and annexation of Crimea in 2014. The comparative analysis of the two successive cases demonstrates the gradual progression of Russian information strategy insofar as by 2014, in contrast to 2008, pro-Kremlin media exploited some contested areas of international law in a more sophisticated manner to depict compatibility of the Russian actions with the democratic procedures and standards of international law.