In December 2024, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s radiological, chemical, and biological defense forces, was assassinated in Moscow. The Ukrainian government had accused Kirillov of war crimes related to the use of chemical weapons in Ukraine, and Russian officials immediately blamed Kyiv for his death. Anonymous Ukrainian intelligence officials even admitted to journalists that Kyiv was behind the assassination, but Ukraine did not officially confirm responsibility. It was the latest in a series of attacks on Russian soil that Kyiv was suspected of carrying out but on which it offered no comment.
Ukraine is not alone in refusing to acknowledge responsibility for such actions. Russia often denies hostile moves that it perpetrates against other states, even in the face of substantial evidence. When Russian troops began operating in the separatist regions of Ukraine in 2014, the Kremlin initially denied their presence. In 2018, it denied involvement in the attempted assassinations, in the United Kingdom, of the Russian defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter using a Russian nerve agent. And since 2017, Moscow has denied attempts to influence elections in the United States, despite U.S. intelligence that indicates otherwise.
Other countries behave similarly. When a Chinese balloon drifted across the United States in 2023, Beijing said it was a weather monitor that had drifted off course, even as experts asserted that its design was consistent with a spy balloon. Pakistan has routinely hidden the involvement of its armed forces in conflicts with India over Kashmir. Israel has a long-standing policy of neither confirming nor denying assassinations. And the United States refused for years to acknowledge the thousands of drone strikes it carried out in northwestern Pakistan targeting al-Qaeda members, despite widespread media reporting on the campaign.
It might seem that an attacker would gain little from concealing the truth or that refusing to admit the obvious could further antagonize the country it attacked. Yet there is an upside to obfuscation. Our recently published survey research shows that denying responsibility for a hostile action, however implausible the denial may be, reduces public demand in the target state for an escalatory response. It also shows that in the presence of denials, a target state’s citizens perceive hostile actions as less insulting and damaging to their country’s reputation and become less certain about what entity is responsible.
Our findings suggest that when both sides in a conflict seek to avoid escalation, one side’s denial can reduce public pressure on the other to respond forcefully. Therefore, denials can actually help keep conflicts from intensifying. On the other hand, a government may sometimes want to respond strongly to hostile acts, perhaps to deter future ones; in such situations, denials by the attacker state can frustrate those aims. In the worst case, the effectiveness of denials can embolden hostile states to act with greater impunity. For a target state to stand up for itself, it may first have to overcome the all-too-persuasive denials of its attacker. Fortunately, our findings point to a possible solution. The efficacy of denials is reduced in the face of overwhelming evidence—suggesting that the way to counter ambiguity may be to produce unambiguous proof.
SAY IT AIN’T SO
Understanding how the public thinks about implausible denials is important because that opinion can limit how a target state’s policymakers can respond to an attack. We conducted three surveys of representative samples of the U.S. public that ranged in size from 477 to 954 respondents. In each, we presented respondents with a hypothetical scenario in which a foreign navy attacks U.S.-flagged oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. Sometimes, we identified the attacker as Iran, a U.S. adversary; other times, we identified the attacker as Qatar, a more neutral state and thus a less plausible attacker. We also varied the strength of the evidence of responsibility. In all three surveys, we randomly divided respondents into two groups. The first read that the accused country admitted responsibility and the second read that the country denied it. After reading about the scenario, all respondents answered questions about their perceptions of the attack and how they would prefer the United States to react.
We found that denials consistently reduced public support for escalatory reactions. When the scenario offered only moderate evidence of Iranian responsibility, a denial by Iran reduced the number of respondents supporting the United States’ use of force (via an airstrike or invasion) from 50 percent to 27 percent. When the scenario offered moderate evidence of Qatari responsibility, a denial by Qatar lowered support for the use of force from 49 percent to 21 percent. When we provided respondents with overwhelming evidence of Iranian responsibility, however, an Iranian denial reduced support for the use of force only from 55 percent to 53 percent—a difference small enough that it could be due to random chance. Therefore, the results show that denying responsibility was at least somewhat helpful to the attacker in all cases but that a de-escalatory effect is much stronger when the evidence seems less overwhelming or the attacker less plausible.
Why are denials effective even in the presence of contrary evidence? Across all three surveys, respondents who read that the attacker state denied involvement expressed less concern that a nonresponse would augur future military challenges for the United States. In two out of the three experiments, they also reported feeling less insulted as American citizens. This suggests that denials can be face saving, interpreted by the target state as somehow more respectful. In turn, individuals in the target state are less likely to believe that retaliation is necessary to restore their country’s status and reputation.
Denying responsibility for a hostile action reduces public demand for an escalatory response.
But we also found an even bigger reason why denials work: a portion of the public truly believes them, regardless of contrary evidence. Among respondents presented with a Qatari attack, the proportion of those who thought Qatar was responsible dropped from 96 percent to 76 percent when Qatar denied responsibility. This suggests that Qatar is viewed by the American public as relatively trustworthy. But even Iranian denials influenced beliefs. Among respondents given the scenario with moderate evidence of Iranian responsibility, the proportion of respondents who ultimately held Iran responsible fell from 99 percent to 84 percent when Iran denied involvement. Even among those presented with overwhelming evidence, an Iranian denial brought the number down from 99 percent to 94 percent—an effect that is relatively small but still statistically significant, meaning it is highly unlikely that the difference is due to random chance. Of course, a majority of people across the surveys did not give credence to the denials, but a significant number did, thus reducing the overall support for escalation.
Although we surveyed the public, it is plausible that denials could directly influence the thinking of foreign policy decision-makers, too. Policymakers might be less likely to believe denials because of their greater access to information, but they are even more likely to be invested in their country’s reputation. The face-saving effect of ambiguity can therefore be expected to lessen policymakers’ appetite for an escalatory response.
We ran our surveys only in the United States, but within that population, we did not find that the responses to the scenarios we posed were heavily influenced by respondents’ personality or demographic traits. This suggests that denials are likely to have a similar effect on the people and, potentially, the governments of other countries, too.
LIE LOW
If a thin veneer of refutability can reduce the danger of reprisals, then denials of hostile actions can be a powerful tool for managing the fallout not only of covert operations carried out by intelligence or special forces but also of some conventional military actions, such as sending military advisers to a conflict zone or launching airstrikes. Still, there is a limit to what countries can effectively deny. For example, denials of major conventional military operations are unlikely to benefit the attacker country at all. This may explain why Russia did not deny its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, even as it dispensed false information to rationalize the invasion to the Russian public and downplayed the scope of its military operations domestically.
Despite their advantages, false denials pose a problem for democracies. In a world in which information flows readily across borders, it is impossible for any government to lie to foreign audiences without deceiving its domestic public, and democratic governments may be less willing or able to deliberately mislead their citizens. For this reason, democratic countries that do not acknowledge responsibility for some hostile actions, among them Israel and the United States, are less likely to issue explicit denials and more likely to refrain from commenting or, if they do comment, choose to “neither confirm nor deny.” This middle-road approach can have de-escalatory benefits, as it offers some measure of doubt that could help the target save face. But it sows less doubt than denial, meaning that the United States and other democratic states that rely on ambiguity may be at a disadvantage compared with nondemocratic countries, such as Russia, that are more comfortable with outright lies.
In some cases, both sides of a conflict may welcome the de-escalatory qualities of denial. As the political scientist Austin Carson wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2022, adversaries sometimes jointly seek to avoid escalation; in such cases, one side declining to acknowledge responsibility for an attack can help keep a conflict at a low level by reducing pressure on the other side to escalate. This tempering effect can allow both sides to pursue their objectives in a less risky manner and potentially reduce a conflict’s human costs.
There is a limit to what countries can effectively deny.
Yet the willingness of some members of the American public to believe a foreign adversary’s denials can be a problem for the U.S. government, particularly if a denied action crosses a redline and Washington seeks to mount a strong response that will deter similar future activity. Convincing people to believe their denials can allow adversaries to divide public opinion in the United States and potentially cause government officials to fear a domestic backlash against a forceful reaction. Even debate over responsibility can itself distract from formulating an appropriate response.
Unfortunately, this problem is likely to get worse. One might think it would be harder today for perpetrators to hide from responsibility given the nature of people’s connectivity and the prevalence of live recordings of events. But an increase in the availability of information has been accompanied by plummeting trust in that information. In the United States and many other countries, media fragmentation and political polarization have led to a situation in which no information source is widely trusted by individuals across the political spectrum. Even if the U.S. government and the mainstream media report convincing evidence of a foreign country’s responsibility for an attack, not everyone will believe it, and conspiracy theories can flourish on social media.
Given the power of denial and ambiguity to muddy perceptions of responsibility for hostile actions, the United States—and other countries around the world—should treat the adoption of these positions as serious geopolitical and military tools. Policymakers must be prepared not only to obfuscate when it makes de-escalation possible but also to counter an adversary’s obfuscation when it may have more harmful effects. Political polarization and media fragmentation defy easy answers, and better equipping the public to reject dubious claims will likely require long-term educational investments in media literacy and critical thinking skills. Yet our research shows that even in the current environment, evidence has some power to influence beliefs. This suggests that a viable short-term solution is to make an attacker country’s denial as implausible as possible. To do this, governments must be prepared to share more evidence with the public in an understandable way and manage the tradeoff between reaping the benefits of greater openness and protecting intelligence sources. For now, perhaps the best option is to fight lies with the truth.
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