When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Kyiv’s digital information war sprang immediately to life. The Ukrainians were ready. Since then, their progress in the online conflict has seemed—to Western observers, at least—unstoppable. Ukraine has rallied international support and attracted almost universal sympathy from European and North American users across the major social-media platforms.

All of the country’s official social-media accounts have synchronized to push the same narrative of brave Ukrainians holding out against the brutal Russian invaders—a message that is, of course, essentially true. The campaign is built around Ukraine’s charismatic leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky, who, for a time in March and April, had a solid claim to being the most admired man in the West.

 seemed almost as lackluster as the performance of its tank regiments. Moscow has made little attempt—beyond some perfunctory statements about NATO expansion—to make its case to a foreign audience. The primary target of government communications has been the Russian people, the goal to legitimize Russian aggression and ready Russians for a world divorced from the West—with no more McDonald’s, Apple, or Netflix.

The lack of effort to sell the war abroad almost suggests that Moscow knew it would be pointless. The images broadcast by the state news channel RT in the early weeks of the war seemed either clumsy in their denialism or flat-out deluded: Cheerful troops marching along and Ukrainians waving Russian flags pointed to a Potemkin military campaign.

This contrasting split screen led many observers to declare that Russia had “lost” the information war. That is now the received wisdom in the West.

But it is wrong. Moscow has not lost the information war so much as opened up new fronts in the fight elsewhere, away from Western eyes.

Russia is now directing its disinformation at parts of the world where anti-Western sentiment is already strong, countries that include former colonies of the West—above all, in Africa. Anticipating a looming world food crisis, Moscow has coordinated its media outlets and social-media accounts to spin this message: Western sanctions against Russia are to blame for causing the shortages, and Ukraine is deliberately destroying grain supplies.