Ukraine: silence and secrecy in war

By Matthew Parish, Associate Editor

Tuesday 7 April 2026

In wartime silence is not merely the absence of speech. It is a discipline, a weapon and sometimes a form of mercy. In Ukraine today, where every mobile telephone is a sensor and every social media account a potential source, silence has become an instrument of national survival.

The Russian Federation has waged her war not only with artillery and drones, but with informants, cyber penetration, psychological operations and cultivated indiscretion. Her intelligence services — notably the Federal Security Service and the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GUR) — have long traditions of infiltration. They rely not only upon recruited agents but upon carelessness, vanity and the ordinary human desire to speak. In an era in which location metadata can be extracted from a photograph and troop movements inferred from a casual remark in a café, the smallest indiscretion can ripple outward into fatal consequence.

Ukraine has learned this lesson at great cost. Since 2022 there have been repeated arrests of collaborators transmitting artillery coordinates, relaying the positions of air defence systems or reporting the movements of Western-supplied equipment. The Security Service of Ukraine has been compelled to devote enormous resources to counterintelligence — monitoring telecommunications, infiltrating suspected networks and prosecuting those who, for money or ideology, whisper to Moscow. Yet counterintelligence cannot substitute for culture. Silence must be habitual, instinctive and collective.

The importance of secrecy in wartime is hardly new. During the Second World War the British state institutionalised silence as patriotic virtue. Posters warned that “Careless Talk Costs Lives”. The success of Operation Overlord depended not only upon the accumulation of materiel in southern England, but upon a vast architecture of deception — fictitious armies, false radio traffic and the elaborate misdirection of Operation Fortitude, the military deception campaign preceding the D-Day landings in 1944. The Allied high command understood that secrecy is never absolute; rather it is probabilistic. One does not eliminate all leaks; one ensures that the adversary cannot distinguish signal from noise.

Earlier still, in the First World War, the sinking of the RMS Lusitania illustrated how intelligence failures and miscalculations can have strategic consequences beyond the battlefield. The German Empire believed she was striking at logistics; instead she provoked moral outrage and ultimately shifted American public opinion. Silence — or the failure to communicate clearly — can be as consequential as speech. Governments in wartime must decide what to reveal, what to conceal and what to distort.

In Ukraine’s present struggle the informational environment is radically more complex. Telegram channels track missile launches in real time. Civilian observers report the flight paths of drones. Commercial satellite imagery is accessible to journalists and hobbyists alike. The front line is no longer a place alone; it is a stream of data. Under these conditions silence requires active effort. Soldiers must resist the urge to reassure families with specifics. Civilians must avoid posting images of air defence intercepts before official confirmation. Journalists must weigh public interest against operational harm.

Yet secrecy is not without danger. Democracies fight wars differently from autocracies precisely because they are accountable to their citizens. Excessive secrecy can corrode trust. If casualties are concealed, if setbacks are euphemised, if corruption is hidden behind the veil of operational security, morale may erode more surely than under the impact of enemy fire. Wartime silence must therefore be discriminating — tactical rather than total.

Historical precedent again offers guidance. During the Second World War, Winston Churchill withheld intelligence derived from Ultra decrypts of German communications to protect the source. Coventry’s bombing has long been surrounded by myth — that the city was sacrificed to preserve secrecy — although historians continue to debate the facts. What is clear is that intelligence advantage is fragile. Once the adversary knows he has been read, he adapts. Silence about sources and methods is therefore a strategic necessity.

The Cold War furnishes further example. The Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved not only through naval quarantine and back-channel negotiation, but through disciplined control of information. President Kennedy addressed the American public with calibrated disclosure — sufficient to legitimise action, insufficient to compromise surveillance capabilities. The Soviet leadership for her part concealed internal dissent and bargaining from her own population. Both sides understood that words could escalate as rapidly as missiles.

In Ukraine the risks of Russian infiltration are amplified by linguistic, familial and historical interconnections. Millions of Ukrainians have relatives in Russia. Social networks overlap. In occupied territories, residents are coerced into collaboration; in liberated areas, suspicion lingers. Silence can become social fracture if it degenerates into paranoia. The challenge is to cultivate prudent discretion without dissolving civic cohesion.

This is especially acute in the age of artificial intelligence. Automated scraping of open-source material enables adversaries to construct patterns invisible to the human eye. A photograph of a new armoured vehicle, posted proudly, may reveal unit insignia. A sequence of blackout complaints may disclose the effectiveness of a missile strike. Silence must now encompass digital hygiene — the refusal to generate exploitable data.

There is also a moral dimension. Silence protects not only plans but people. The families of soldiers, the identities of intelligence officers, the locations of shelters — these are shielded by restraint. To speak unnecessarily is to gamble with lives not one’s own. Wartime secrecy is therefore an ethical discipline, grounded in solidarity.

But silence must never become complicity. Where crimes are committed — whether by occupiers or by one’s own forces — silence corrodes the very cause for which the war is fought. Ukraine’s struggle is premised upon law, sovereignty and the defence of civilian life. If secrecy were to obscure violations of those principles, she would forfeit moral authority. The line between operational security and moral evasion is thin, and must be vigilantly guarded.

In Lviv, far from the heaviest bombardments yet within reach of missiles, one feels this tension daily. Conversations in cafés lower when the subject turns to troop rotations. Journalists pause before publishing details of new defensive systems. Even celebratory images of intercepted drones are delayed until the sky is quiet. Silence here is not fear — it is participation in the collective defence.

History teaches that wars are won not only by firepower but by discipline — the discipline to withhold, to defer and to trust. The Russian Federation exploits noise. She thrives on leaked rumours, on amplified grievance, on the careless boast. Against such a strategy, silence becomes counter-offensive.

Wartime secrecy is a paradox. Democracies must speak to survive — to rally, to persuade, to maintain legitimacy. Yet they must also refrain from speaking — to protect, to deceive the enemy and to preserve advantage. The art lies in knowing which is which. Ukraine, forged in the crucible of invasion, is learning that art in real time.

Silence in such circumstances is not emptiness. It is resolve. It is discipline. And in a war where information travels faster than artillery it may be the difference between life and death.