When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022 the documentary filmmaker Oleksandr Techynskyi quickly moved his wife and two teenage daughters out of the country and took a job translating for a foreign TV crew covering the war. Where he once spent his days making lyrical films, he now spends endless hours crisscrossing the country in a car full of foreign journalists. With his own work on hold and his family in Germany, his days are now defined by the war and the road.

But almost as if he couldn’t help himself, he picked up a camera and began snapping photos from inside the car. At first, he tried taking photos of what he saw in a traditional journalistic style that he thought would attract foreign media outlets. But the straightforward shots of devastation left him cold.

Then he began taking a different approach. He imagined his new photos as stills from a movie. He was the protagonist in a car driving through a land of the living dead. “This is an apocalyptic noir that shows our present—heavy, leaden clouds and ruined homes,” he says, referring to his new images. “The car passes people resembling zombies with empty eyes.” Stopping amid these ruins inevitably leads to the death of the protagonist. “He himself will turn into a zombie, and he will also wander the mazes of war-torn cities,” says Techynskyi, who everyone calls Sasha.

The TV crew that employs Sasha works on rotations: two weeks on, then two weeks back in Europe to rest. But for Sasha there is no break. As soon as he’s done with one team, he picks up a fresh one at the Polish border. “I clearly remember only the endless road,” he says. “When I have an unexpected weekend, I come home. There is no one there. My wife and children have been evacuated. I wander around the house and can’t find a place. I can’t sleep. It is a black hole. Here the nausea is even stronger.” Rather than stay home, he asks for another assignment escorting a fresh crew of TV journalists back into the war. “I want to go back,” he says. “At least I feel alive there.”

I first met Sasha in 2017 when he was my translator on a reporting trip. It was only a handful of years ago, but the world was far different then. Ukraine’s democracy was young and the country was an intoxicating mix of independent idealists, wayward politicians, corrupt businessmen, and a new breed of artists and bohemian free spirits. Back then, Sasha split his time between the eastern city of Dnipro, where his wife and daughters lived, and Kyiv, where his art and friends thrived. He spent his days creating intimate, wide-ranging documentaries that won international awards. He documented everything from the Maidan Revolution to stories of baggage carriers sleeping by the side of the road and the lives of fishermen of the Ukraine River Delta.

Sasha’s films explore profound, sweeping concepts, but always with a quiet, poetic eye. The films are empathetic without being simplistic and always attuned to the absurdity of human existence—hallmarks of a true Ukrainian. There is one scene in particular from his documentary about the Maidan Revolution that encapsulates this. In the film, a group of young protesters pull down a tall stone statue of Lenin that once stood on a large pedestal in the middle of the street. The protesters find a sledgehammer and begin hacking away at the toppled figure. As a reporter in eastern Europe in the early 90s I’d witnessed many a Lenin statue dismantled, sometimes with a simple slow-moving crane that reached down and elegantly plucked it out of the ground. Other times with a violent crowd enthusiastically chanting; hoping to eradicate the past and move feverishly forward into that new unknown future.

On this particular night in Ukraine Sasha’s film captures an old Soviet man stumbling amid the crowd as if in a fever dream. “Please,” he said. “No. Please.” Sasha filmed him as he slowly lowered his body onto the bust of the newly toppled Lenin begging the crowd to stop. He leaned down and kissed Lenin’s head. The crowd, wild and full of ferocity, watched him bemused. But no one touched him. He was a man from their shared Soviet past crying as he watched the world as it once was crumbling around him. “Come away, father,” said one protester gently. “Kiss it and say goodbye,” said another. “In 1917, you overthrew us; now it’s your turn to be overthrown.” A young woman pleaded with him to leave and scolded the crowd for jeering him. “He’s old enough to be your father,” she said. Finally, two men escorted him away, staring down anyone in the crowd who might dare to touch him.

But that was before. Before the 2014 annexation of Crimea; before Russia’s full-on bombardment and systematic destruction of the country. That was when Ukrainians felt the future was entirely in their own hands. Overthrow the president, end corruption, cull through the bank accounts of the oligarchs. The catch words in those days were transparency, freedom, and democracy. And for the first time in years, these lofty goals seemed like an actual possibility. Of course, this new possibility was not pristine but it was beautiful all the same, the way real possibility always is. The way the future actually works.

When I first met Sasha, Ukraine was barely an afterthought to the west. It was just one of the last of the formerly Soviet countries to find its footing in the new capitalist word. Maidan was three years in the past, and a low-level war with Russia was playing out in the east. Just troublesome enough to keep Ukraine from having a serious chance at entering the European Union or NATO. The West was far from intent on getting into a proxy war with Russia. This could go on for years—and did. Eight years, in fact, of Russians picking off a number of young men every week. Enough to keep the flames of war burning, but not enough to stir the ire of the West.

It was around that time that Sasha and I traveled down to Dnipro to interview soldiers recently wounded in the fight against Russia. I knew that few, if any, in the West would be interested. I even suggested we not bother the men, that it felt false or worse. “No one will want this story,” I told Sasha in the hospital parking lot. This was before Ukraine became the darling of the West. Before Volodymyr Zelensky spoke by video at the Grammys, before Manhattan boutiques showcased Ukrainian flags in their shop windows, and before scores of Western journalists poured into the country, tracking down any quotes they could get from soldiers and fleeing villagers.

Sasha just shrugged. “It doesn’t matter that no one will read this. The men will like it,” he said. “They’re village boys. An American journalist standing at their bedside, and a woman. It’s something. They will say patriotic things and feel better.” So, we went inside the hospital and walked through rooms lined with beds full of newly wounded soldiers.

Sasha was right. The men were eager to talk, and every one of them spoke of the same thing: the glory of Ukraine, the bravery of their comrades. How much they loved their family and wanted to die for their country. Only one man was silent. The day before, both his legs were blown off by a Russian grenade. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling, the blood soaking through the white gauze bandages wrapped on his limbs that only hours earlier had been cut just above the knee. Sasha and I looked at each other. Sasha shook his head, I nodded and we both walked quietly past the bed.

When Vladimir Putin unleashed Russia’s full force invasion earlier this year, I immediately texted Sasha to see how he was. Over the next several months we kept an easy correspondence of texts and phone calls. At first, it was hard to know how bad things would get, and where or when the Russians might attack. During one of our first phone calls after the invasion he was in a dark humor, a bit stoic as if preparing himself for death. “I’ve had my adventures,” he told me. “If I die, I die.” Then he got quieter and said he now felt real joy when he saw a Russian soldier lying dead on the ground. “I am afraid of what I am becoming,” he said.

These days, I think of Sasha as I once knew him—as he still is, even now—forever lighthearted, laughing and talking animatedly, sharing wild thoughts. I remember our long drive back from Dnipro to Kyiv in the rain. The windshield wipers flip-flopped back and forth as he rattled on in his enthusiastic way. Trucks passing us in gusts of water and rain. He was on a jag about a new idea that had just occurred to him. “Maybe I am a feminist,” he declared. I remember being amused, but he was dead serious and wanted to discuss the possibility for the next hour. He couldn’t stop talking, and the wipers swished back and forth, as if trying to keep up with him.

Sasha was not supposed to be an artist; he was supposed to work in the diamond mines of Siberia with his father and brother. He was born in Ukraine during Soviet rule to a father who worked long, hard hours in the Ukrainian coal mines of Donbas. But when a mining accident broke both his father’s legs it was enough to provoke his father to make a change. Looking for a better life, he moved his wife and two sons to Siberia and took a job as a mining engineer. That’s where Sasha spent most of his youth. The family returned to Ukraine only after the fall of the Soviet Union. His father, though, was never entirely able to find a place for himself back in Ukraine. He lost his job, he lost his wife, he lost his family. The collapse of the Soviet Union took everything. “In the end, he found a way to save what he could save,” says Sasha. “He took my young brother and headed back to Siberia.”

And that is where his father has stayed for 22 years—all of Putin’s reign. There, Sasha’s father watches Russian TV and rarely uses the internet. “He’s totally out of understanding of what’s really going on.” When father and son talk on the phone, Sasha might try to explain what’s happening in Ukraine now, how whole cities have been decimated by Russian shelling. But his father is awash in Russian propaganda. “He doesn’t believe me,” Sasha says. “He is polite. But I can hear his skepticism.” Rather than being angry with his father, Sasha is patient, even generous. “His life was tough and now in a way he’s finally found some peace,” he says. “He doesn’t want to get out of his bubble.”

Sasha, meanwhile, spends every day immersed in war. We texted one night after he’d spent hours at the mass grave site in Izium where 440 bodies were found. He worked all day with the television crew as they filmed the bodies at the site. Some victims had their hands tied behind their backs. Some were children. Some were tortured or killed, by chance, in a bombing. In the midst of everything, Sasha pulled out his own camera and took a black-and-white photo of emergency workers clad in white suits and masks, quietly standing in line before the police tape surrounding the exhumation area. That night he posted the photo on Facebook, titling it “Lifeguards in the Pines.”

Gatherings such as these have become a kind of morbid homecoming for Sasha. They are where Ukrainian journalists run into each other, where they meet and catch up with friends. “You are on the road,” says Sasha, “and then in the end at the newly liberated town, the new mass grave, you are standing there and hugging your journalist friends that you haven’t seen for a long time.”

Sasha has become more at ease with himself and the war around him. As if he and others are simply becoming more accustomed to death. Recently, he told me about a friend, “a real peaceful guy, you know the type who likes to sit and catch fish from the bank of the river.” But now, Sasha tells me, this friend “can’t go to sleep without watching YouTube clips of the murder of Russians. This is a common thing. It makes sense—there is no other way for us.”

Sasha continues: “Russia wants us to be all the same. No love, no education, no future, no choices. We aren’t just fighting against brutality—we are fighting against slavery.” He lists the freedoms that Ukrainians are in danger of losing: freedom of speech, freedom to be gay, freedom to simply be a person. “Of course, we must win, or Russia will just continue to swallow all the other post-Soviet countries too. Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia,” he pauses. “Belarus is already swallowed.”

There is now talk of a fresh wave of military conscriptions. “One beautiful day, I will receive a conscription letter,” Sasha says with a laugh. If that day comes, he will need to report to the conscription center. “After that, everything can happen,” he says. “If I receive a conscription, of course I will go.” He pauses. “And take whatever will come.” The work he’s doing with the European TV crew also helps the war effort—news of Ukraine inspires EU countries to send more money and resources. But he is clear he won’t mind if he’s called up.
“Yes,” I say to him, “but it’s different to hold a gun than a camera?”
“Yeah, but you know,” he says, laughing, “to kill Russians, that would be a pleasure.”

Sasha’s daughters are 13 and 16. “The main thing for me now is to keep them as far as possible from the war,” he tells me. “I want them to be usual teenagers with usual teenager problems. Not teenagers heavily traumatized by the war.” He then mentions his fear that his daughters might lose some of their joyfulness. “I’m just a happy person,” he says. “I was this way from the beginning. My wife is like that too. No matter what happens, you can’t break those kinds of natural things inside of me.” He stops. “Small things make for happiness,” he says. Then I realize he means something profound. “Small things save lives.”

This story was originally published in Stranger’s Guide.

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Ukrainian journalist Svitlana Oslavska documents war crimes testimonies for The Reckoning Project, which comprises a team of Ukrainian and international journalists and legal experts established in 2022 to record, collect, and conserve witness testimonies of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. She spent a day with one of the local war crimes prosecutors who investigates the Russian army’s misdeeds in the south of Ukraine. 

One woman among the bombardments

In the city of Mykolaiv in July of 2022, Viktoriia Shapovalova drove to work as usual, parked, got out of the car, and immediately realized there was complete silence all around her. It is said that you don’t hear anything when you are in the epicenter of an air strike. And that was exactly what was happening. A missile hit a building some 150 meters away from her. The houses that stood between Shapovalova and the explosion attack saved her life. Remembering the feeling she had when a shell exploded nearby, she said it is “like your soul is being turned inside out”. 

Shapovalova witnessed most of the bombardments and missile attacks on Mykolaiv, a city that, before 2022, had a population of 470,000. She was there during the hardest days the city experienced during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

In the spring of 2022, the Russian army struggled to capture Mykolaiv, a regional capital located between Odesa and Kherson. Failing to seize the city, it started attacking its residential quarters with artillery and missiles. 

There was a period when artillery shelling occurred every two or three hours. Residents who stayed in the city adapted to this routine. Shapovalova spent nights in a shelter; a basement of a nine-storey block, with her teenage daughter. But life had to go on, so after the morning shelling attacks–which usually happened around six or seven in the morning– she prepared breakfast, walked her dog, and hurried to work. She knew there would be two or three quiet hours before the next shelling and, during that time, she could work.

In the spring of 2022, at age 37, Shapovalova was appointed chief of the war crimes department at the Mykolaiv regional prosecutor’s office. Before that, as was the case with most of the Ukrainian prosecutors, her work was not connected with war issues. After her appointment, she, like thousands of her colleagues, had to re-train as a war crimes investigator, diving into the topic of international humanitarian law. As part of the war crimes prosecutors training, Shapovalova had a chance to visit the Hague and the International Criminal Court. 

During the first two years of the full-scale invasion, Russia conducted more than 2,500 civilian infrastructure attacks in the city of Mykolaiv and the surrounding region, according to The Tribunal for Putin initiative. After an attack, the prosecutors team, together with the war crimes investigators from the Ukrainian security service and the police, as well as the emergency services, all go to the site to document what happened. The attacks often take place at night, which means Shapovalova would often work without sleep for the 24 hours after an attack. She must stay at the site of an attack until the last body is taken from under the rubble. 

Shelling of residential neighborhoods and other civilian infrastructure of Mykolaiv comprises about 70% of the 2,500 war crimes Shapovalova and her team is now investigating in the region. She says her experience of living in the city during all the attacks helps in her job: “I was there, I remember a lot.” But nearly every week, she spends at least one or two full working days out of her office, in the field. 

Witnesses are both eager and afraid to talk

The east and south of the Mykolaiv region were occupied in the spring of 2022 and liberated after eight months, in November of the same year, together with the right bank of the Dnipro and the city of Kherson. Since then, Shapovalova’s team of 10 war crimes prosecutors investigates atrocities in the once-occupied towns and villages.  

On the day I joined Shapovalova and her two colleagues, they met at an agreed-upon spot at 9am and headed to the north of Mykolaiv, to a small village that was occupied during the first half of March in 2022. The plan is to collect and document as many witness statements as possible. A team of lawyers from the not-for-profit Global Rights Compliance accompanies the prosecutors on this trip. GRC is specialized in international humanitarian law, and Ukrainian prosecutors need support to deal with thousands of war crimes cases. The lawyers are present during the interviews with witnesses, they read interrogation protocols, and advise Shapovalova’s team of war crimes prosecutors where exactly violations of international humanitarian law lie and what evidence has to be collected. In Shapovalova’s words: “They help us with the quality of justice.”  

In the front seat of the car, Shapovalova makes several calls to invite colleagues to a training session about OSINT investigations. “Good morning, how are you doing?” she starts every conversation with these simple words. In the context of possible night attacks, the question and the answers become meaningful. 

The cars turn from the motorway onto a dirt road. A herd of sheep with a shepherd crosses the road. We drive slowly between empty fields. “We’re going to meet the village's head first. He and his family were abducted by the Russians.” Shapovalova explains the plan for the day, adding that such field trips are often unpredictable. 

And she is not wrong. The car suddenly stops having come upon an  impassable stretch of road. The driver must walk around to find a detour. It’s a cloudy day, several degrees above zero, and we see no other cars on this village road. Finally, the driver finds a bypass across a forest strip nearby, but before we go, he has to uproot several small trees. 

But we are fortunate. Such an off-road maneuver wouldn’t have been possible in the southeast of the region, which was under occupation for eight months and where Russians left mines all over the fields. In the first weeks after liberation, the war crimes prosecutors started visiting towns and villages. “We called the mine clearance service, asked them to clear, for instance, a police building,” Shapovalova explained. “And after that, we went there to collect evidence.” Humanitarian mine clearance teams are working every day, but still, many fields and forests are surrounded by red signs that read “Stop! Mines.”

The village head is a thin man of around 50. The skin on his face suggests he works a lot in the open air. Shapovalova starts with some informal questions about realities under the Russian occupation. She already knows that this man had been abducted by the Russians and beaten, but he did not report this incident to the police after the village was liberated. 

“What for? We’re alive, and that’s enough,” he replies to Shapovalova’s argument that this was a violation of laws and customs of war. “Are you going to investigate this?” the man goes on in a skeptical tone. “That’s why we’ve come here.” Shapovalova is patient. She understands the man needs more time to trust her. She is also aware many people don’t want to discuss publicly what happened to them because they are afraid Russia may occupy the region again. 

Thus, Shapovalova changes the topic to the situation in the village in general. Several houses were destroyed by shelling, their owners have no ownership documents on those buildings, and that’s why they have trouble getting aid to rebuild them. Shapovalova promises she will look into it and see how she can help.   

Finally she comes back to the reason for our visit. “We have to document these crimes even if you don’t believe we will investigate them,” she says.  The village head goes outside to smoke a cigarette, when he returns he agrees to give a formal interview. One of the prosecutors stays to record his testimony on video, and Shapovalova goes on to meet the next witness–a woman whose son was shot by the Russian soldiers. 

The woman starts talking almost as soon as we step over the threshold. “They came to the house, tied him up, took him away, and abused him for two days. Then they took him to a forest, tied his hands with a wire, and shot him. He survived and crawled to a nearby village.” Her words show that she shares the confidence of many Ukrainians who lived through the occupation: that the perpetrators must be identified and punished. “Of course, I’ll testify. Why not when this happened?”

The array of Russia’s war crimes

What happened to the village head and the woman’s son is not unique but  common during the Russian occupation. 

According to international humanitarian law civilians are under the protection of the occupying force. But while talking to the people from the occupied territories, Shapovalova routinely recorded incidents of abductions, arbitrary detentions, and tortures. 

In one village, a local man was killed and his wife was abducted. A bag was thrown over her face, and she was brought to a trench where soldiers harassed and taunted her, at some point even pouring liquid on the 50 year old woman saying: “We’ll burn you and we will be looking at how Ukrop's mother is burning.” Ukrop is a derogatory term for Ukrainians and the soldiers used it to refer to her son who fought in the Ukrainian army. She spent five days in detention. During the first days, interrogations took place every hour. The same questions were repeated again and again, asking her about things she had shared on her social media pages and about her son. And then, as suddenly as she was detained, she was released. No one provided any reason for her detention. 

In another village of the region, a local mayor was abducted when he was trying to deliver 300 loaves of bread to people in the village. He was tortured with electric jolts and beaten. He spent three months of unlawful detention in several detention centers. 

And in another village, the Russians murdered an elderly local school teacher. Soldiers took him from his house. The teacher's wife looked for him everywhere in the village and nearby, riding a bicycle from one building where the Russian military were stationed to another. Finally, his mutilated body was found. It lay covered with a mattress in a shallow pit near one of the buildings known to the villagers as occupiers’ headquarters.

These are just some accounts recorded by The Reckoning Project team in the Mykolaiv region. Its researchers documented hundreds of similar cases in various parts of Ukraine that were under Russian occupation. Male and female village heads, volunteers and activists, former soldiers, or anyone who owned a weapons even just for hunting were often the first victims of arbitrary detentions, torture, and murder. 

“The occupying Russian forces neglected their obligations to safeguard the Ukrainian populace. Instead, they viewed Ukrainians under occupation solely through a security lens,” says Raji Abdul Salam, The Reckoning Project’s chief legal data archivist. They categorized, he explains further, civil and humanitarian actions, such as the right to access information, freedom of movement, and adequate housing, as potential security threats. This approach of prioritizing security-based measures over humanitarian considerations deprived Ukrainians of their fundamental human rights and exacerbated the suffering caused by the conflict. 

Justice is slow, and the prosecutors must work fast

To determine who was responsible for any given bombardment isn’t easy as it’s necessary to prove who gave an order. Investigating tortures and arbitrary detentions is difficult for another reason: survivors often don’t know a lot about the identity of their abductors and torturers. 

In most of the incidents documented by the researchers of The Reckoning Project, the Russian soldiers tried to conceal who they were: they did not provide their names, wore no insignia, and covered their faces with masks. They tied blindfolds around the eyes of their captives or put bags on their heads so that people would not be able to recognise who was torturing them. 

“The soldiers deliberately obscure their identities to evade accountability for their actions, including looting, extrajudicial killings, and unlawful detentions”, says Abdul Salam, adding that in over 90% of testimonies the researchers of The Reckoning Project collected state that the Russian soldiers were hiding their identity. 

“This underscores the complicity of the Russian military leadership, as their failure to take disciplinary measures on the ground condoned and facilitated these grave breaches of international law,” Salam explained. “The consequence of this unchecked misconduct was a relentless onslaught on the Ukrainian populace, inflicting untold suffering and trauma.”

On our way back, Shapovalova reflects on the mistrust many people have on perspectives of justice and punishment for Russian war criminals: “I understand this. Justice is a long process, and the victims want it right now. But the main task for the prosecutors is to collect the highest quality evidence.”

It’s almost 6pm when we come back to her office. Shapovalova is planning to stay at work for several more hours. She says 10 minutes of rest was enough to continue with a lot of paperwork after a day in the field. 

There is a large map of Mykolaiv on the wall of her office, with a small piece of paper pinned to it. A date is printed on it, “October 13th, 2022”. On this day, Russia allegedly attacked Mykolaiv with S-300 missiles that hit a residential block. Seven people died in that attack, one of them a child. The attack happened at night, when people were in their beds. When I Google this incident, I find images of a five-storey residential building. Its destroyed upper middle part looks like it was bitten away by some monster. 

This case is already in the courts. The investigators found a man, a resident of Mykolaiv, who passed information about this civilian building with no military objects nearby to the Russians. Besides this there are several other incidents of war crimes Shapovalova’s department has now passed to the court. They are about the inhuman treatment of civilians: imitation of shooting to death, and about the organizers of a detention center in one village of the region, where people were kept for several days in horrible conditions. The trials are ongoing. 

According to Shapovalova, those incidents have enough evidence for prosecutors to charge the Russian combatants with committing war crimes. Investigations of all the crimes, Shapovalova explains, will take years. This understanding, she continues, along with the fact that tomorrow may simply not come, motivates her to accelerate her work. 

Besides that, she adds, important online evidence, like Russian channels on Telegram, are deleted since they understand those posts and videos could one day also be used as evidence. 

Most of the trials for Russian war criminals in Ukraine are now conducted in absentia. The victims may not be satisfied with this result, but the prosecutor explains that it is not only important a particular soldier would be punished. “By proving a particular crime, we prove the guilt of the main perpetrator. For proving his guilt at the Tribunal, not only our verdicts would be taken into account, but also our evidence base,” says Shapovalova.  

The day after I left Mykolaiv I read the news about another Russian attack on the city and in the region. I go to the page of the Mykolaiv regional prosecutor and see the photos of war crimes prosecutors working on the site of the attack, Shapovalova among them.

The post A Day In The Life Of A Russian War Crimes Prosecutor In Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

The history of Russian occupation in Georgia dates back more than 200 years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it won its independence but separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia refused to acknowledge the new Georgian state and went to war. In 2008 Russia sent the military into South Ossetia and Abkhazia to shore up control and today twenty percent of Georgia remains under Russian control. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s complex history with its eastern neighbor is deeply rooted in centuries of Russian colonialism and expansionism. In this photo essay, award-winning Polish photographer Justyna Mielnikiewicz documents the people of Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan at times of upheaval—in the throes of protest, dissent, and strife, and as they try to hold on to their identity in the face of modern Russian imperialism.

The post What makes a nation? appeared first on Coda Story.

It’s the kind of direct political interference in education not seen in Russia since it was part of the Soviet Union. For nearly 30 years, teachers have been able to choose from a selection of approved textbooks to use in their classrooms. This year, Russian authorities have issued a single Russian history textbook nationwide for the 11th grade, and they plan to do the same across lower grades next year.

The revised textbook emphasizes continuity between the fight against Nazism in World War II and Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. The textbook quotes Vladimir Putin speaking about the “revival of Nazism” in Ukraine, and arguing that the country should not exist.

With an estimated number of Russian casualties exceeding 50,000, the Kremlin has continued to characterize the ongoing war as existential for Russia. The high school lesson plans — authored by Kremlin insiders — provide a window into the Kremlin’s thinking on the war and suggest that the Kremlin believes its own propaganda.

“On one hand history is being used as propaganda,” said Alexey Makarov, a member of the human rights organization Memorial in Moscow. “On the other, the people using history as propaganda — the Russian authorities — actually believe in what they’re saying.”

The newest chapters for students in the 11th grade, which is the final year of high school in Russia, include a section dedicated to the “special operation” in Ukraine. Ukraine is referred to as a “ultranationalist state,” the U.S. is said to be “prepared to fight until the last Ukrainian standing,” and a positive spin is put on global sanctions against Russia, calling them an “opportunity” for investment. The book’s front cover is dominated by a full-page photo of the bridge built by Russia in 2018 connecting annexed Crimea to mainland Russia.

“Ukraine, history, politics — they are inseparable,” said Jade McGlynn, the author of “Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Russia.” “It’s a memory war becoming a real war.”

The lead author of the textbooks is Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister who has represented Moscow in negotiations with Kyiv. Over the years, Medinsky has held various roles in government and served as a close aide to Putin, advising on history and the humanities. His career started in advertising, said McGlynn. During the 1990s, he co-founded a Moscow advertising firm best known for creating ads for MMM, a Russian company that ran one of the world’s largest-ever Ponzi schemes.

“That’s where he honed his skills in terms of selling narratives to people, playing on their hopes, their needs and sometimes their desperation,” said McGlynn. “He is ultimately an advertiser who aims to manipulate people.”

In the days following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, authorities already began distributing pamphlets to high school teachers across the country with instructions on how to talk about the invasion of Ukraine with students. The pamphlets followed a question-and-answer format:

Q: Why is the war happening?

A: NATO enlargement and its approach to Russia’s borders is a threat to all of us. There are the sad cases of Iraq, Libya and Syria. What’s more, Ukraine could create nuclear weapons. Considering the current regime in that country, it’s a direct threat to Russia.

Alexey Makarov, from Memorial, is a social studies teacher in Moscow and said he was devastated to read through the pages of the new textbook, soon to be taught at his high school.

“This is the same rhetoric that was used in the 1930s ahead of the invasion of Poland, exactly the same,” said Makarov, drawing a comparison between the textbook’s justification for Russian forces occupying Ukraine and the Soviet Union’s stated rationale for invading Poland at the start of World War II.

There has been a progression in the government’s campaign to rewrite history, starting with the reframing of Russian imperial expansion and the rehabilitation of figures like Ivan the Terrible. While history has long been an important focus for Putin, patriotic education became a top government priority in 2012, which the government declared to be the “year of history.”

“We know how the distortion of national, historical and moral consciousness leads to catastrophe for entire governments. It weakens them, leading to collapse, to the loss of sovereignty and fratricidal war,” Putin said in a meeting in 2012 on the importance of patriotic education in Russian schools.

In the lead up to the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin tightened its grip on institutions involved in documenting the country’s past. As Russian troops marched on Kyiv, the Russian Supreme Court struck down an appeal from Memorial to stay open. For three decades the nonprofit, a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been documenting crimes committed under Soviet rule.

Russia is far from the only country where the government has intervened to revise high school history textbooks. The Arab Spring has been distorted in Egyptian textbooks, Indian officials have excised mentions of the 2002 Gujarat riots from national textbooks, and new curriculum standards in Hungary assign the writing of a war criminal and Nazi sympathizer to students. Most recently, officials in the U.S. state of Florida approved classroom material that instructs students that “climate activists are like Nazis.”

The new Russian history textbooks will most likely cross the border into occupied Ukrainian territory. Last August, reports surfaced of Ukrainian teachers being pressured to switch over to a Russia-approved curriculum. Scores of teachers fled, some went into hiding, and others were sent to Crimea or Russia to “re-train” under new teaching standards. In occupied cities like Melitopol, Russian authorities ceremoniously delivered tens of thousands of Russian textbooks. Parents who tried to keep their children at home were threatened with having their kids taken away.

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The messy episode highlighted the Catholic Church’s dwindling influence in the war in Ukraine. Since February 2022, the Vatican has steered clear of condemning Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin, a stance similar to the positions of Brazil and China. After a meeting with the Pope in May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that “any peace proposal must originate from Kyiv, not from the Vatican, China or elsewhere.” 

The Vatican’s limited role as a mediator in the conflict reflects the Pope’s geographical priorities. Pope Francis named 21 new cardinals last week from Argentina, Colombia, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania and Malaysia. The Pope also promoted Monsignor Claudio Gugerotti, who served as a papal ambassador to Ukraine and Belarus, which could be seen as a nod to the challenges of the war. The headline promotions, however, were bishops based in Hong Kong and Israel, where the Catholic community is small.

While previous pontiffs, such as John Paul II, threw their support behind Western powers in times of crisis, John L. Allen Jr., a journalist with the Catholic news website Crux, has written that the changing demographics of the Catholic Church mean that the concerns of Europeans and North Americans are becoming less pressing on the Vatican’s agenda. The majority of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics live in Latin America, with the African continent seeing the biggest increase in Catholic congregations. And the Pope “gives great importance to relations with other continents such as Asia,” said Massimiliano Valente, an associate professor of contemporary history at the European University of Rome.

The Vatican infuriated the Ukrainian government last summer by suggesting that Russia’s actions might have been driven by “NATO barking at Russia’s gate.” In another interview, soon after, the Pope said the war in Ukraine was “perhaps somehow provoked.” 

According to Nona Mikhelidze at the Institute for International Affairs in Italy, the comments present Ukraine “as a mere pawn.” The Ukrainian government has also questioned the Church's assumptions about Ukraine. Mykhailo Podolyak, Zelenskyy’s advisor, said in June that the Vatican needs to have a “sound understanding of this war.”

Across the region, the influence of the Vatican is being challenged. In Poland, where 91% of people identify as Catholic, the Polish Catholic Church — one of the most powerful institutions in the country— has been at loggerheads with Pope Francis over liberal reforms such as decentralizing power. Next door in Lithuania, Catholics have called for an “inquiry on sexual abuse in the church,” as survivors continue to come forward in the Baltic nation.

The Vatican’s position in Belarus, a nation that acted as a staging ground for Russia’s attack on Ukraine, has also been criticized. In a country where Catholic priests are being jailed or exiled for speaking out against Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Vatican has taken a conciliatory tone. The papal ambassador, Ante Jozic, has celebrated the Belarusian government and parroted a line favored by Lukashenko that Minsk could hold peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

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It was 1998. Olivier Rubbers, then 29 years old, came up with the idea of returning beavers to his local rivers. “My level of knowledge about nature was extremely poor,” he now confesses. But he’d read a magazine article about how the beaver was indigenous to Belgium, though it had long been nearly extinct. Bringing beavers back, he thought, “would be a great project.”

“Beaver bombing” or “beaver black ops” — as it’s become known in conservation circles — is the practice of illegally releasing the humble beaver into a waterway and leaving it to do what it does best: fell trees, build dams and construct lodges. Beavers are known as “ecosystem engineers,” or a “keystone species,” because they create an ideal habitat for all kinds of other wildlife. 

Rubbers borrowed his father’s car and drove to Germany to pick up the beavers, then crossed the border back into Belgium and dropped them in a river. Throughout 1999 and 2000, Rubbers repeated the feat with 97 more beavers, bringing them from Bavaria to Belgium in a van kitted out with homemade beaver crates. “We wanted them all,” he said.

Rubbers and his accomplices soon learned that the best time to beaver-bomb was not at night but in the middle of the afternoon, preferably on a Sunday, when everyone was having lunch.

He procured almost all the beavers from Gerhard Schwab, a wildlife manager based in Bavaria known as “the Pablo Escobar of beavers.” Over the years, Schwab has bred beavers and helped numerous communities across Europe with reintroductions — always in partnership with local wildlife management schemes. Rubbers showed Schwab some official-looking papers, all stamped and in French. Schwab had no idea that Rubbers was introducing the beavers into their new surroundings without local approval. 

“I had all the authorizations I needed,” Rubbers said. “Which, in my mind, meant no authorization.”

“He bombs quite a bit,” Schwab admitted about Rubbers. “He wanted to do something for nature.” 

Rubbers was eventually fined 500 euros for detaining and transporting a protected species, although he told me that the local administration forgot to claim the money. He has spent the following years watching with satisfaction as the beavers spread across Belgium, transforming its waterways. Frogs and fish came to lay their spawn in the slowed, dammed-up water, while bugs and beetles thrived in the rotting wood of the felled trees. Birds followed in their wake, feeding off the fish and insects. “Belgium should thank me for services rendered to the nation,” Rubbers said.

Rubbers is part of a secretive, underground network of wildlife enthusiasts who are returning species back into the landscape without asking permission first. It’s not just beavers: There are boar bombers, a “butterfly brigade” that breeds and releases rare species of butterfly and a clandestine group returning the pine marten — one of Britain’s rarest mammals — to British forests. 

Some, like Rubbers, have no background in conservation. Others have scientific credentials and feel an urgent need to restore nature’s ecosystems by taking matters into their own hands.

The movement is facing backlash from farmers who don’t want wild animals wrecking their crops and a number of scientists who believe that the reintroduction process should be regulated and controlled. They say rogue rewilding is a crime, however you dress it up. The mavericks argue that the bigger crime is not to reintroduce keystone species in a biodiversity emergency.

At the beginning of the 20th century, beavers were on the verge of extinction in Europe. They were hunted for their prized pelts and scent glands, and by 1900, there were just 1,200 left. Now, beavers are back from the brink, with the current European population estimated at about 1.5 million — and conservationists and rewilders agree that beaver bombers are partly to thank.

Floods, wildfires and droughts have become multi-trillion-dollar problems in the 21st century, ravaging the landscape from Bangladesh to Belgium. As the world burns and biodiversity hits a crisis point, rewilding — the process of letting nature restore itself — can feel like a hopeful refuge. Beavers, ecologists say, may be part of the solution.

The healthy wetland systems beavers create can sequester large amounts of carbon, according to climate scientists. Slowing down river flow helps the land act like a sponge, storing and holding more water, so it is more resilient to flooding and drought.

“Beavers work for free, they work weekends, they work round the clock increasing the groundwater and being a motor for biodiversity,” Schwab said. 

In the U.S., after Oregon’s devastating forest fires in 2021, beaver wetlands remained green and lush, acting as natural firebreaks in the land. On aerial images of the charred landscape, the beaver’s habitat stands out, a wide and verdant ribbon running through the blackened trees.

“I think beaver bombers are the heroes of our time,” said Ben Goldsmith, a British financier, writer and environmentalist who is a passionate supporter of rewilding. “A human lifetime is short — why should I not be the one that gets to see wildcats back on Dartmoor? Why should I not live in a country with beavers when they’re supposed to be there?”

I asked Goldsmith if he’d participated in rogue reintroductions. “Had I been involved in beaver bombing more widely,” he said, “I don’t think I’d tell you.” Until last year, Goldsmith served as a director for the U.K.’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. His older brother, Zac, is a former member of parliament and the U.K.’s current international environment minister.

For ecologist and author Alex Morss, the fringe of the rewilding movement and its powerful backers are a problem. “Who cleans up the bill for illegal anonymous rogue rewilding if things go wrong?” she wrote to me in an email. Alongside a number of scientists working in ecology and conservation, Morss worries about the pitfalls ahead if people are encouraged to take matters into their own hands to address species loss. 

Maverick rewilding, she says, could increase the chances of conflicts between humans and wildlife, spread disease and actively harm biodiversity by introducing the wrong animals into the wrong environments. “There are also releasers who are skirting around the law or outright breaking it,” Morss added. “Or making decisions based on personal bias rather than ecological expertise, rather than lawful, professional and evidence-based conservation done carefully and less glamorously.” 

Beavers are capable of destroying valuable trees, eating crops and flooding farmland. In Tayside, Scotland, where beavers were illegally introduced around 2006, farmers shot the animals on sight. There was no law to stop the farmers from doing so because, although the beavers were endangered, they also weren’t officially there. It was, as one ecologist explained to me, a “wild west.”

Morss said she welcomes “true” rewilding but is concerned that the movement is being co-opted by a privileged few who want to turn nature’s last refuges into “eco Disneyland.”

As rewilding and the prospect of nature restoring itself has caught the public imagination in recent years, projects have sprung up all over Europe, often led by philanthropists and enthusiastically backed by politicians. But many of these projects have also become entangled in bureaucracy and an intense debate over the scientific practicality of rewilding.

Many in the rewilding movement say that political leaders are not doing enough to restore biodiversity — leaving the mavericks with little choice but to act unilaterally and reintroduce species themselves. 

“The British government and European governments are foot-dragging,” said Tim Kendall, who wrote a book about beaver bombing with his wife, Fiona Mathews, the chair of Mammals Conservation Europe and a professor of environmental biology at Sussex University. “You can’t go through the official channels and make it work.” 

Goldsmith is vocal about what he sees as a reactionary fifth column within the nature conservation movement. “There are these gray figures that lurk in the background of government agencies and other bodies, who kill off these projects before they have a chance to happen,” he said. “These are people who are governed by caution and say, ‘We’ve got to make sure every possible angle is researched to death.’ They don’t feel the urgency.”

The rewilding fringe believes that something more radical than scientific reintroduction and conservation programs that are implemented at a sloth-like pace is necessary. According to Mathews, there is a “grudging acknowledgment” among scientists that without the maverick rewilders, “we’d just get nowhere. We’ve been talking about reintroducing beavers in many countries for years and years, and basically, nothing happens.”

Derek Gow told me that he believes change will never come if the rules are always followed. Gow, 58, worked for a decade as a sheep farmer in Devon, in southern England, but is now one of the loudest voices in the maverick rewilding movement. He had his moment of reckoning when a pair of curlews — a European wading bird species — disappeared from his farm. They died, Gow says, because there was nowhere left for them to take cover, feed or breed. “How solemn and how sad that is,” he said. “They died because we had mowed everything to a bowling green with the sheep.” 

After the birds were gone, Gow began to see his farm work as a model for perfect destruction. He observed the men alongside him, who had worked in agriculture all their lives. “They can remember the last of the gray partridge or the glow worms. And even though they’ve done nothing for nature, they’ve done nothing other than continue their destruction; when their time finishes, that’s the thing they’ll remember.”

Gow now runs a 300-acre rewilding project in Devon with financial support from Goldsmith, among others. He spends his days among wildcats, Iron-Age pigs, wild horses, beavers and storks. He wakes up every morning to a cacophony of birds singing from the trees. He describes them to me as we talk on the phone: bluetits and stonechats flit above him, a water shrew runs past his feet.

Gow is resolute: He thinks the time has passed for doing things slowly and carefully. “I do wonder how the people who administer these things — who display the most incredible caution and naivety and a lack of willingness to do anything — really feel when they finish a long, long career and have achieved absolutely fuck all.”

I ask if he sees himself as a beaver-bomber, a maverick or a rogue rewilder. “I would describe myself as a human being concerned about the fate of the natural world,” he said, “at this time of colossal extinction, crisis and ecological collapse. I’m not interested in any other titles.”

Gow recently gifted former Prime Minister Boris Johnson a beaver pelt. Johnson has been vocal and enthusiastic about rewilding. “We’re going to rewild parts of the country and consecrate a total of 30% to nature,” he said in 2021 to rousing applause during his speech at the Conservative Party conference. “Beavers that have not been seen on some rivers since Tudor times, massacred for their pelts, are now back. And if that isn’t conservatism, my friends, I don’t know what is.”

“Build Back Beaver!” he added. Johnson tried to give his father Stanley a pair of beavers for his Somerset farm but was reportedly thwarted by his own government’s regulations. 

Rewilding has become a popular activity among Britain’s landed elite. The medieval 3,500-acre Knepp Castle estate in Sussex, owned by Baronet Sir Charles Burrell, is perhaps the country’s most famous rewilding project. King Charles III has a wildlife retreat in Transylvania, a rewilding mecca known as “Europe’s Yellowstone.”

Goldsmith jokingly described an emerging black market for wildlife trade unfolding in the gentlemen’s clubs of Mayfair. “You’ve literally got conversations happening over the lunch tables of White’s where one landowner is passing beavers to another,” he said. “You know: ‘I've got beavers on my farm in Perthshire, old buddy old pal. I could bring a few to you in Herefordshire.’”

This is a sticking point for Morss. “Is it healthy that a class of elite unelected people are using their wealth and privilege and influence to make changes to places, rather than with places and their communities of ‘plebs’ who live and work there and don't get a say?” she said. “It feels like a form of ecocolonialism.”

In Scotland, a cohort of millionaires, billionaires and corporations known as the “green lairds” have bought up huge swathes of the Highlands for rewilding and carbon-offsetting nature restoration programs. Among them is fast-fashion Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, Swedish Tetra Pak heiresses Sigrid and Lisbet Rausing and pension funds Aviva and Standard Life. The green laird movement has been criticized as “a greenwashed land-grab” that’s pushing up the price of land in the country and shutting out local communities. The Scottish Land Commission has reported to the Scottish government that the ownership of land by so few people in Scotland is tantamount to a monopoly.

“It is not democratic or always particularly wise when restoration ‘'rewilding’ is led by unqualified, rich hobbyists,” said Morss.

Across Holch Povlsen’s land, forests are beginning to regenerate. The project has been praised by Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds as “Scotland’s most exciting and celebrated forest recovery project.” There have been increased reported sightings of ospreys, golden eagles, red squirrels and pine martens — all incredibly rare creatures in modern Britain. The manifesto for Holch Povlsen’s project, Wildland, says it aims to build “a culture of mutual respect with our communities” and “to support the viability of the local economy and improve quality of life.” But British online retail giant ASOS, the company that helped Holch Povlsen make his billions, has been criticized in the past for having an entirely different mission, with investigations revealing how the brand has used child sweatshops and contributed to the fast-fashion industry’s substantial carbon footprint.

Holch Povlsen and the Rausing sisters have contributed funding for a study exploring the implications of reintroducing the lynx to the Highlands, a predator that hasn’t been seen in Scotland since the Middle Ages. They’re still known in Holch Povlsen and the Rausings’ native Scandinavia as “the ghosts of the forest,” moving silently through the land while they hunt their prey. 

Reintroducing the lynx could well be in the plans of rogue rewilders too. “I wouldn't be surprised,” said Goldsmith, “if we started seeing lynx popping up in different parts of Europe where they've been absent.”

The hope in bringing back the lynx to the Highlands would be to see it help naturally control Scotland’s deer population and restore the overgrazed landscape, with minimal human interaction. 

Thomas Cameron, a senior lecturer in ecology at the University of Essex, is skeptical. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land, scientifically speaking,” he said. “It sounds nice. It's really pretty. It's a good story. It attracts lots of money, but it's not going to reduce deer numbers.” He added that it would take hundreds of years to have an effect — “and we need less deer tomorrow.”

Cameron works on an above-the-table beaver reintroduction project in Essex, which he said is already helping to reduce flooding in the local area. But he said he is wary of “false promises” made by advocates for species reintroduction. “Beavers aren't going to save biodiversity. They're not going to stop climate change by improving carbon sequestration,” he said.

Species reintroduction has limits — and it’s not going to fix the planet’s problems, he said. “The idea that that’s somehow some kind of utopia to get to is also quite dangerous.” The science, he insisted, “tells us that it's simply not true. And the science tells us we’re at a crisis point.” 

Cameron, who hails from northeastern Scotland, is also frustrated by how much Scotland, rather than England, features in the imagination of the people who want to reintroduce predators to the ecosystem. “It’s always about Scotland — ‘Oh it’s wild, let’s go to Scotland’ — despite the fact that people are poorer there than they are in the south. They lead shorter lives. Making a living from the rural environment is more challenging. We've got people with limited opportunities, and we want to put it on them.” 

In continental Europe, rifts are emerging between rewilding projects and local agricultural communities. In Asturias, in northwestern Spain, some farmers are furious about the presence of wolves among them. Spain’s wolf population, once close to being wiped out, has grown since the 1970s to become the largest in Europe at around 2,500 wolves. They kill around 11,000 livestock a year, for which farmers are compensated by the state. But when the government introduced a law banning people from shooting or hunting the wolves, it led to outrage. In May, a protest culminated with locals dumping two decapitated wolf heads on the steps of a town hall. 

“The human-wildlife conflict isn’t far away,” tweeted local wildlife photographer Luke Massey with a photo of the bloody heads. 

In Italy, the far-right government is busy dismantling hunting regulations and laws protecting wildlife. When a rewilded bear in Trentino mauled a jogger to death in April, the right-wing governor of the region took a reactionary stance: cull the bear. The governor has since embarked on a one-man mission to deport 70 more bears from the region. There were wider calls for rewilding projects to be scrapped. “We need to kill them all and close the discussion,” wrote one Twitter user when the jogger was attacked. “Fuck bears and animals,” said another. Viewers on Italian TV were invited to answer “yes” or “no” to the question, “Should the bear be put to death?” 

In May, news spread that beavers had turned up on the River Tiber, upstream from Rome. “They must be removed,” said Claudio Barbaro, the Italian undersecretary for the environment. He added that the beavers had “entered illegally,” using language that surreally echoed the government’s anti-migrant rhetoric.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, up by the Belarusian border, beavers and humans are working together. Ukrainian military commanders say beaver-made wetland systems, with their swampy terrain and waterlogged landscape, are helping to protect the country from Russian attacks, creating a natural barrier along the frontier that’s difficult for tanks and infantry to traverse.

With his bandana and grizzled white beard, Gerhard Schwab stands out among the dark-suited crowd of business travelers at the Munich airport arrivals gate. We drive straight out into the Bavarian countryside. Swinging on his keyring in the ignition is a fat little cuddly-toy beaver. 

“When I was a child, there were a lot more edges between the fields,” he says, as we drive past huge, featureless pastureland, the neat green crops rippling in the early summer sunshine. “Now it’s just fucking green. Back then you had everything. All kinds of wild plants. All the small ditches, all the small creeks — they’re all gone.” 

He takes me to a rare scrap of wilderness. The pocket of meadow, right next to a busy autobahn, has been transformed into a vibrant wetland. Bright blue dragonflies dip across the water, and the air seems to vibrate with birdsong. Schwab points to something in the distance, and I can see a pile of sticks: a beaver lodge.

We hear the two-note call of a cuckoo. I’ve never heard it before, though it was a familiar sound for my mother, who grew up in Surrey in the 1960s. Europe has lost 550 million birds since she was a child, and in Britain, cuckoo numbers have crashed by 70%. The cuckoo’s distinctive call is a traditional symbol of the start of summer. But most children in the U.K. will grow up never hearing it. 

The strange sorrow we feel when we confront this world without our fellow creatures has a name: “species loneliness.” Isolated from nature, we feel an existential loss for how the world once looked and sounded.

For Ben Goldsmith, his despair over the destruction of our wild places intersects with his own grief over the sudden loss of his teenage daughter, Iris. A lifelong lover of nature, she died, aged 15, in a farm vehicle accident in 2019. He has since given his farm over to rewilding. The spot where Iris died is marked with a stone circle. Not far off, along the stream threading through his land, a family of beavers has appeared.

“The family on my land happened to make their own way there, which is sort of a beautiful irony,” Goldsmith said. “They appeared by magic at a time in my life when I really needed and wanted that. It was one of the happiest events of my life.”

Beavers are resilient creatures. When the Khakova dam collapsed in Ukraine in May, it unleashed a torrent of chemicals and toxic oil into the surrounding landscape, with untold amounts of debris flowing into the Black Sea. But amid the waterlogged wreckage of Kherson, a lone beaver was seen wandering the streets. “OK, I’ve got work to do!” one British tabloid quipped in a caption of the video. Beavers are used to rebuilding, restoring and fixing what’s been broken.

Schwab feels sure beavers will long outlive us. After all, they have roamed the Earth far longer than humans — the oldest fossil is around 30 million years old. “When my bones and your bones are gone,” he says, “the beaver will still be here.”

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For 40 years, Dragos Olaru has been paying his respects to the great Romanian cultural figures buried in his home city of Chernivtsi, in western Ukraine. With its decorative tombstones and earthy paths, the cemetery on Zelena Street is the resting place of ethnic Romanian artists, activists and intellectuals who defined their culture and defended it when outside powers encroached upon it. Although he met none of these figures — his “friends,” as he calls them — before they passed, Olaru feels he knows them intimately in death. He tells me that he is continuing their work.

He is also trying to protect these Romanian graves from actual destruction. Local Ukrainian authorities have decided to exhume the remains lying beneath some 200 of the tombstones on Zelena Street — which they say are unidentifiable — and then auction the plots. But Olaru sees the campaign as a way to “Ukrainize” the cemetery.

“They are doing this to remove the traces of us,” he told me, as we passed the grave of Romanian philologist and revolutionary Aron Pumnul, who advocated for the Romanian language to be written using the Latin alphabet, instead of Cyrillic, in the mid-19th century.

The fate of the Zelena Street cemetery is just one incarnation of wartime tensions between Ukrainians and ethnic Romanians, the country’s second-largest linguistic minority after Russian speakers. After Ukraine gained independence in 1991, respect for the rights and interests of Western ethnic minorities waxed and waned as the new country struggled to fortify its self-image in the face of ever-present Russian influence. But the 2014 Maidan Revolution marked a turning point, providing a new impetus to protect the Ukrainian language and establish it as the country’s lingua franca. The subsequent ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war between the Ukrainian government and Russian proxies in the eastern Donbas region left Ukrainians with an urgent need to define their day-to-day relationship with Russia and Russianness, and in turn, to define what it means to be Ukrainian.

The full-scale invasion in February 2022 brought a fierce embrace of Ukrainian culture and language. Yet while this hardening of Ukrainianness is clearly intended as a way to distinguish the country from its aggressor, minority communities in western Ukraine have become collateral damage. Linguistic policies aimed at strengthening Ukrainian are edging Romanian out of the public lives of many native speakers. And other moves, ranging from the exhumation of remains in the Zelena Street cemetery to political allegations against Romanian religious leaders, have left some ethnic Romanians unsure of their position in Ukrainian society.

Although Dragos Olaru was aggrieved by the events in the graveyard, which he sees as a mean-spirited move against Romanian culture, he still supports the Ukrainian state. “Putin is the biggest enemy of the world,” he said. I later learned that his nephew was serving on the front line in Bakhmut, more than 700 miles away on the other side of the country.

Ukraine has been home to ethnic Romanian, Hungarian and Polish communities since territorial lines were redrawn following World War I and World War II. Following Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991, some 400,000 Romanian speakers became Ukrainian citizens, becoming a part of the nascent state’s heterogeneous social fabric. Through much of the 1990s, Ukraine was also consumed by economic turmoil, the result of hyperinflation coupled with rampant cronyism. Conversations about national identity were often relegated to the back burner as Ukrainians worked to keep bread on the table. When the economy stabilized in the early 2000s, the trickle-down effect was limited, and the country’s oligarchs continued to grow their power and wealth. Russia was ever watchful, supporting the campaigns of Russia-friendly politicians who would prevent the country from swaying too far west, toward the European Union and NATO. Whenever identity questions did arise, these lawmakers were eager to frame Ukraine in the context of Russia by highlighting the historical bond between the two countries. 

In Ukraine’s west, Hungarian, Polish and Romanian minority communities lived their lives largely in their own languages, often benefiting from the policies of Russia-backed politicians who, at Moscow’s behest, sought to protect the Russian language with moves that tended to benefit other minority languages at the same time. When pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych passed a language law in 2012 that gave minority languages, namely Russian, the status of a “regional language” in areas where 10% or more of the population did not speak Ukrainian, it was seen by opponents as an attempt to undermine Ukrainian. But the measure found support among minority language speakers in the west of the country.

Following the Maidan revolution, Ukraine’s language issue took on a new urgency, and policymakers passed a series of laws to formally establish the use of the Ukrainian language in various aspects of public life, ranging from media to education to the legal system. In sum, these laws effectively dismantled Yanukovych’s 2012 language law. Its fate was finally sealed in 2018 when the Ukrainian Constitutional Court deemed the law unconstitutional. People who supported these changes argued that they would create a more cohesive Ukrainian society and lead to necessary improvements in the country’s struggling education system. 

But the wave of legislation set off alarm bells for Ukraine’s Polish, Hungarian and Romanian minorities. These communities largely understood the motivations for the changes but also saw them chipping away at their own languages and traditions and at the practical bridge that their languages offered to living and working in the EU. Warsaw, Bucharest and Budapest stepped in, routinely chiding the Ukrainian government for not doing enough to protect minority rights. Supporting their pleas for a more considerate approach to the Ukrainian question was a report from the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s top advisory body on constitutional matters, that said that a 2019 language law passed in Ukraine “failed to strike a fair balance” between promoting the Ukrainian language and “safeguarding minorities.” 

Ukrainian authorities repeatedly argued that the changes were not an attempt to erode minority languages but rather an effort to buttress Ukrainian identity and introduce a sense of cohesiveness to everyday affairs across the country. And much of day-to-day life continued to play out in languages other than Ukrainian, including in Russian. Even today, while Ukrainian is the official state language according to the constitution, Russian is still the first language of approximately 20% of Ukrainians, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself. 

But Russia’s incursions continued. In a 2021 speech that foreshadowed the invasion of Ukraine months later, Putin denounced the Ukrainian language laws and promoted the false claim that Russian proxies in the Donbas “took up arms to defend their home, their language and their lives.” The speech highlighted the extent to which Putin sees respect for the Russian language as a key component in the bond between Ukraine and Russia — and as a pillar in Russia’s political strategy toward Ukraine.

Months after the first Russian tank crossed into Ukrainian territory in February 2022, the Kremlin used Ukraine’s language policies as part of a robust disinformation campaign to justify carrying out what has become the greatest land invasion in Europe since World War II. “The Russian language is banned in Ukraine,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the BBC in April 2022.

When it comes to Ukraine’s language battles, the most sensitive issue for Romanians is education. The village of Petrashivka lies an hour south of Chernivtsi, a stone’s throw from the Romanian border. There I met Gheorghe and Mihaela Lupu, a middle-aged married couple who have dedicated their careers to running the Petrashivka Secondary School. Nearly all classes for the school’s 314 students are taught in Romanian.

“We speak Romanian, but we are Ukrainian,” Gheorghe, the school’s director, told me. The presence of both languages and nations is evident at Petrashivka. As we walked through the school corridors with their lace curtains and reddish-brown wooden floors, the couple told me about Ukrainian and Romanian government support for their work. A grant from Bucharest allowed them to buy new tables for the Romanian history classroom. Next door, in the Ukrainian language classroom, a TV, chairs and other materials were brought in with support from Kyiv. When we stuck our heads into the classroom, the students greeted us eagerly. The teacher prompted a 12-year-old girl, Anastasia, to recite a poem she had written about the war. “I pray in my thoughts,” she said with zeal. “Bring peace on the earth, God! Have mercy on us, God! Save us from this war.”

Gheorghe said that parents were happy that their children could speak both languages fluently, as it opened up more opportunities for future studies in Ukraine and Romania.

This transition has been in the works since Ukraine’s 2017 adoption of an education law that set the country on a path for public secondary schooling to be conducted in Ukrainian. Heralded as a move to align Ukraine’s school system more closely with European standards, the law gives space for EU minority languages like Romanian to be taught as a second language. But for the students of the Petrashivka Secondary School, nearly all of whom speak Romanian at home, the implementation of the education law will be a significant change.

When I asked how they felt about the language change, the teachers were hesitant to share their thoughts. Gheorghe offered only this: “If the change is state law, we will do it. We live under Ukrainian law.”

Their acquaintance, Iurie Levcic, was much more forthright. Back in central Chernivtsi, sitting in the Bucovina Art Centre for the Conservation and Promotion of Romanian Traditional Culture, which the 54-year-old man runs, Levcic described what he sees as the quiet dissolution of Romanian culture in Ukraine. 

“They want to assimilate us, they try a total assimilation, starting with the schools,” he said. He excoriated the Zelenskyy government, arguing that officials were unwilling to meaningfully engage in dialogue with the Romanian community.

Levcic is not alone in his distrust of the Zelenskyy government. The current situation has also angered politicians in Romania, who feel slighted by Kyiv’s position on the minority issue despite Romania’s support for Ukraine in the ongoing war. Tempers flared in December 2022: The Ukrainian parliament adopted a law on national minorities to fulfill one of the conditions necessary to start negotiations for EU membership but did not take on board fully recommendations from the Venice Commission on the protection of minorities. Condemnation from Bucharest was swift and cemented the idea that, although Romanian speakers were not necessarily being targeted by Kyiv, they had become an afterthought in Ukraine’s corridors of power. Adding insult to injury, the move came months after Zelenskyy made a speech before the Romanian parliament, in April 2022, in which he promised to “start a dialogue” on a “new comprehensive agreement that guarantees the absolute protection and development of our national minorities” — a reference to the approximately 46,000 ethnic Ukrainians living in Romania. He reiterated this position to the Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in January 2023, after the two heads of state had a call on the issue. A read out from the call said Zelenskyy “expressed his full openness to identifying solutions, so that the Romanian community in Ukraine benefits from the same rights enjoyed by the Ukrainian community in Romania.”

Back in Chernivtsi’s City Hall, Iryna Tkachuk, the head of the city's education department, took a more political stance. She defended the upcoming implementation of the education language law, arguing that it would ensure “minority speakers could have full access to university level education in Ukraine.”

The affinities of ethnic Romanian religious leaders have also come under scrutiny as Ukraine strives to shed its cultural ties with Russia. In Chernivtsi, many Romanians still worship in the Moscow-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Although the Church claims it broke off communications with Moscow in May 2022, months after the invasion, and denies being influenced by Russia, Ukrainian political leaders have trained their focus on church figures, keen to identify and sever any remaining ties to the Kremlin.

Sitting inside the Ascension Church on the outskirts of Chernivtsi, clad in black robes and a matching puffer coat, Father Pavel Paulencu told me he feels a crisis setting in. He worries it is only a matter of time before the authorities arrive at his door. 

“I’ve had people ask already why I’m doing a mass in Romanian in Ukraine,” he said. Ethnic Romanians make up 60% of his congregation, and Romanian is the language of priority for services. “I told them to go and read the history,” he said with a heavy sigh. “In church, it should not be politics, just God.”

Anxiety in Kyiv about ties between the Romanian religious community and Russia have been brewing for some time, but they reached a boiling point in late 2022, when Ukrainian Security Services (known as the SBU) raided the Chernivtsi-Bukovina Diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, as part of a series of searches across the country. The SBU Telegram account reported that law enforcement officers found Russian passports and pro-Kremlin literature among the belongings of the Chernivtsi-Bukovina clergy. Soon after, citizenships of 13 representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church — including from the Chernivtsi-Bukovina Diocese — were suspended by presidential decree. In response, a Romanian cleric threatened to sue President Zelenskyy. The U.N.’s human rights office said that the nationwide SBU searches could “undermine the right to freedom of religion.”

In April 2023, a resident of the Chernivtsi region was arrested on suspicion of burning down a Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the village of Milieve. In early May, prosecutors in Chernivtsi submitted to a court an indictment against the local Banchen Monastery, claiming that an assistant abbot helped men of draft age illegally cross the border. Ukraine’s wartime rules prohibit men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country.

The anxieties behind these actions by law enforcement have been exacerbated by the war. But they are not new. In 2019, politically-driven tensions within the Church led to a schism and to the establishment of the similarly-named Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which today has the full support of the Zelenskyy government. The schism was a blow for Putin, who sees the Russian Orthodox Church and its affiliates as the centerpiece of his notion of a “Russkiy mir,” or Russian world, the idea that all Russian and Russian-identifying people should be united. But for Ukraine, establishing a church independent of Moscow was seen as a move to not only distinguish the country from Russia but also to stymie the Kremlin’s ability to influence certain clergy. 

In the eyes of the Ukrainian state, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church harbors a threat. But for the average ethnic Romanians, what’s happening to the Church is yet another way in which Kyiv is imposing upon their lives.

In a country traumatized by Russian war crimes, where people are struggling to survive each day, the space for debate on issues such as language and national identity is limited at best.

On the streets of Chernivtsi, one hears a steady mix of Ukrainian, Russian and Romanian languages, with most Russian speakers skewing older and Ukrainian ones younger. Although the war has hardened attitudes toward Russian speakers, there is no outward animosity toward the lyrical sounds of Romanian in daily life. 

And while the language issue has riled up politicians and activists, most Romanians I spoke to seemed more focused on ensuring that their families survive the war. Chernivtsi has been spared from Russian rockets, but the war remains ever-present. Ukrainian flags dot almost every door. Every morning, the city takes a brief moment of silence to honor the men and women on the frontline. And in a new graveyard on the city’s outskirts, the groundskeepers can be seen digging graves for the bodies of soldiers, returning home from the frontlines for the last time.

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India has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, abstaining from voting on half a dozen resolutions at the United Nations General Assembly that called for Russia to withdraw from Ukraine and end the war. In a tightrope balancing act, India has stated that the “sovereignty and territorial integrity" of the countries involved must be respected while simultaneously maintaining close defense and economic ties with Russia. A recent report from a Finnish think tank named India one of five “laundromat” countries that have significantly increased their imports of Russian crude oil, which they go on to sell — in the form of refined oil products — to other countries, including those in Europe that have committed to helping restrict Russia’s revenue stream from fossil fuel sales.

This was the diplomatic backdrop against which a small Ukrainian cultural festival was held in the Indian capital Delhi last week — a tentative step toward the people-to-people contact Dzhaparova described. I met Masha Kondakova, a Ukrainian film director, at a screening of her 2020 documentary, “Inner Wars.” In 2017, Kondakova began to follow three Ukrainian women who served on the battlefield, two as combatants in the Donbas region, fighting against pro-Russian separatists, and one as a doctor in the Ukrainian army. The resulting film is a rare and urgent look at life as a woman on the front lines of war.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted you to make a film about women soldiers?

I saw a lot of movies about war from the male gaze. I always saw the men as the main characters, and I thought, ‘no, wait a second,’ and I discovered that there are women fighters on the front lines in Ukraine. When I started to work on the movie in 2017, we had limited positions for women in the army.

For example, even if a woman was a sniper or working in a mortar squad, she would be registered as a kitchen worker or someone making clothes. This meant even if women were joining as fighters or combatants, we would not receive the same treatment as male soldiers. If you’re a veteran, the government helps you. It’s not the same if you’re registered as working in the kitchen. By 2018, things changed. The women that I filmed joined the army when there were no positions for them as combatants. So these rare women warriors had to be brave enough to fight at the front line and also brave enough to fight for their rights within the army. These women proved they had a place in the army.

I wanted to give these women their voices, to show their faces, to show that women too are war heroes.

You said things changed for women in the army in Ukraine in 2018. What specific challenges do women soldiers defending Ukraine from Russia’s invasion now face?

Women form about 23% of the army in Ukraine. It’s huge. Today we have more than 50,000 women who serve in the army. Around 7,000 are fighters on the front line. There are many more women now who are combatants in the war. This is voluntary. It’s not an obligation, it’s a choice. The army has never been adapted to suit women. But women are resilient. A friend of mine, an actress, learned how to be a first responder and give medical help on the battlefield. Also, there are a lot of women who have learned how to shoot. Until the beginning of 2022, before the invasion, even the uniform was not adapted for a woman’s body. All of that is changing now.  

Are any of the women you filmed in 2017 on the front lines again? Have you been in touch with them?

Yes. One of the women I followed, Elena, was in Bakhmut. She is a senior sergeant in the mortar battery in the Donetsk region. When I spoke to her, she told me about this terrible moment when her 10-year-old son called her at 4 a.m. and said that he was scared. There were explosions in Kharkiv, where he lives. She was defending the country, she told me. But at that moment, she couldn’t protect her son.

You live in Paris now, but you still have family in Kyiv. When were you last able to visit them?

My father and mother are physicians. My sister is a pianist. They never talk too dramatically about the war. My mother and sister temporarily joined me in Paris, but my father didn’t want to leave Ukraine. He is 70 years old. He can’t fight but he said, “I will at least protect my house.” I last went to Ukraine in August. I heard the sirens. It was powerful and kind of scary. I visited places where buildings were destroyed, where it was horrible like in Hostomel and Bucha. But people were still walking around. People were still kissing on the street. Life is stronger than death, that’s what I learned.

On your visit to India, what sort of response have you received about the war in Ukraine?

I met two people who were very supportive, who told me they felt ‘very, very sorry.’ These people were young. I met one tuk-tuk driver who was around 60 years old and spoke Russian. He said, ‘I talked to Vladimir Putin and he said everything will be okay.’ I said, ‘Oh great, for which country?’ There is a war. We are free to take positions, and I respect that. But when he said, ‘Ukraine and Russia are together,’ I had to say, ‘no, it’s been a long time, almost a century.’

I don’t judge anyone. But if somebody believes Ukraine somehow belongs to Russia, please educate yourself. I know Russian propaganda is very strong. I also know that Russia and India have a long relationship. From my point of view, supporting Ukraine doesn’t mean you become an enemy of Russia. But when innocent people are dying in Ukraine, children, women, I don’t understand the tolerance. Ukrainians showed from the very beginning of the invasion that they wanted to remain sovereign. They don’t want to be the slaves of Russian imperialists.

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A slender man of 54, with piercing blue eyes and a gentle manner, Andrii knew that if anything happened to him on the battlefield, Yurii, his partner of nearly 25 years, would not be able to make medical decisions on his behalf. If Andrii died, Yurii would not be allowed to pick up his body from the morgue or arrange a funeral. Under Ukrainian law, the love of Andrii’s life would be little more than a stranger.

Following the 2014 Maidan revolution that overthrew a pro-Kremlin leader and installed a president dedicated to pursuing integration with the West, Ukraine took a handful of steps toward protecting its LGBTQ population, including an amendment to Ukraine’s labor code that made it illegal to fire a person on the basis of their sexuality. “The Ukrainian LGBTQ movement never had any support from our authorities until around 2015,” Andrii told me. 

But past gay pride parades in Kyiv have been marred by violence, and the country of 43 million people has stopped well short of offering the full civil rights of citizenship to gay people. This could all change if those pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to protect the civil rights of LGBTQ people achieve their aims. LGBTQ soldiers have been particularly influential in changing public opinion. An estimated 200 people who openly identify as gay serve in the Ukrainian military, upending existing ideas of what constitutes a national hero.

So far, the country has taken fitful steps toward protecting gay rights. After the invasion, a petition for Ukraine to amend Article 51 of its 1996 constitution — which states that “marriage is based on the free consent of a woman and a man” — gathered 25,000 signatures, enough to necessitate a presidential review. Zelenskyy’s office replied that Ukraine’s constitution “cannot be changed during a state of war or emergency.” The response did say that the government would look into the legalization of civil partnerships, which would extend certain financial benefits to LGBTQ couples, but exclude others, such as adoption rights. 

For Ukraine, the fate of proposed LGBTQ protections during the war with Russia carries special significance. Russian President Vladimir Putin has framed Russia’s invasion as an existential holy war that pits Russia’s blood-and-soil religious, political and social values against Ukrainians who support a jaded, morally corrupt West. He has called LGBTQ people vessels of Western amorality, targeting them for violence and censure inside Russia, and enacted a law that banned children from accessing any media that positively portrays LGBTQ identities. Any legislative protection extended to LGBTQ people in Ukraine now would be cast as a cultural rebuke of Putin’s — and by extension, Russia’s — worldview. 

It’s not only in the war between Russia and Ukraine that LGBTQ rights have become a singular litmus test for whether a country has decided to evolve toward a more tolerant vision of society or to join the wave of emerging authoritarian states around the world. A crucial legal battle is currently underway at India’s Supreme Court, in what could be a landmark moment for LGBTQ communities in the country. The increasingly authoritarian government of Prime Minister Narenda Modi is pushing back against the legalization of same-sex marriage, calling it an “urban elitist concept.” The hearing is expected to go on for at least two weeks. A favorable verdict would be historic and would make India only the second country in Asia, after Taiwan, to legalize same-sex marriage. 

In Hungary, the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has vowed to defend a law that bans the use of materials seen as promoting homosexuality and gender change at schools. A case before the Court of Justice of the European Union, which interprets EU laws to make sure they are applied equally in every EU member state, has the potential for a clash with Hungary, where Orban’s insistence on preserving the law has reinforced Budapest’s increasingly authoritarian bent. 

Andrii, the man called up to fight, did what he could to mitigate his lack of civil rights. He went to a notary and drafted his will to ensure that his partner Yurii could at least inherit the apartment they owned together in Kyiv — the city that the couple has called home since fleeing Luhansk in 2014, when fighting erupted there between Russian proxies and the Ukrainian military. Yurii would not be entitled to death benefits should Andrii pass away.

“I don’t refuse to protect my country, it’s my duty. But I don’t have my ordinary rights,” Andrii told me recently when we met in central Kyiv. After following his military’s summons, he received a temporary deferral. This allowed him to continue his work with Nash Svit, one of Ukraine’s oldest LGBTQ rights organizations. Andrii co-founded the organization in 1997, just six years after the fall of the Soviet Union, at a time when the gay rights movement in the region was only beginning to stir.

Since then, progress on equality has been blocked by Ukraine’s religious institutions and ultra-conservative groups. Same-sex marriages and civil partnerships are not recognized by the state. But the Russian invasion has changed minds. Some Ukrainians, who were previously unsure of their personal views on LGBTQ rights, are taking a pro-gay rights position simply because it is contrary to Moscow’s. While around 41% of Ukrainians do not support “the introduction of a registered partnership for same-sex couples similar to ordinary marriage,” a growing number are uncomfortable with the rights of soldiers in wartime being undermined because of their sexual identity.

Ukraine follows a global trend in which negative attitudes towards LGBTQ people can be deeply entrenched in the country’s armed forces. It’s a situation that has been exacerbated by disinformation pumped out by Russia. Detector Media, a media research group, has tracked the rise of false pro-Russian social media narratives about Ukrainian troops having AIDS “because they are gay.” This has made some members of the Ukrainian military sensitive to any steps taken to encourage the acceptance of gay soldiers. When LGBTQ Military, an NGO fighting for equality in Ukraine, promoted the establishment of a gay-fiendly unit in the armed forces in 2021, the head of PR for Ukraine’s army told local media that reports of a so-called “Ukrainian LGBTQ battalion” were false and accused LGBTQ Military of having Russian origins. LGBTQ Military continue to deny this allegation.

For many LGBTQ soldiers, the flurry of talk around equal rights has sparked hope over the past year. Vlad, a cadet from the southern Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, told me that official recognition of same-sex partnerships would mean real freedom for him. Currently based in Odesa, the 18-year-old endured years of bullying. When he joined LGBTQ Military, he found power in numbers. “I took an example from the guys who have already come out,” he told me in a Telegram message.

Among Ukrainian lawmakers, the leading voice on equal rights for LGBTQ people is Inna Sovsun, a 38-year-old opposition member of parliament from the eastern city of Kharkiv. We met last month at a Crimean Tatar restaurant in Kyiv. A few days before, she had proposed a law on same-sex partnerships that received bipartisan co-sponsorship. The bill would offer an alternative path to official same-sex partnerships, as Zelenskyy’s government drags its feet on the legislation it promised in its 2021 National Human Rights Strategy.

“For a while we were thinking that we should introduce a bill which would give the right to same-sex partnerships only to those where one person was in the military as that would have a greater chance of getting through parliament,” she told me. “But we decided against it because that would be discriminatory.”

And it’s good timing. Her new bill could help mitigate a wave of negative publicity that is expected to follow a pending judgment by the European Court of Human Rights, in Maymulakhin and Markiv v. Ukraine. The case, filed in 2014, was brought against Ukraine by a gay couple who claimed the state discriminated against them by refusing to legally recognize same-sex family partnerships.

“The argument I am going to use is: We are going to have to use this legislation to pre-empt this negative decision against us,” Sovsun told me. Depending on where things land, Sovsun’s bill could give policymakers a way to demonstrate a concrete commitment to equal rights straight away. 

But support for LGBTQ equality legislation will not come easy on the floor of Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, where the Ukrainian Council of Churches wields considerable influence. In a statement issued in late March, the organization said it was “outraged” by Sovsun’s bill, alleging that it threatens “both the institution of the family and the value foundations of Ukrainian society as a whole.” Ultra-conservatives will also coalesce against the law. The mayor of the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk declared that “a gay cannot be a patriot.”

Recognizing the long odds of receiving legal recognition of same-sex marriage, some of Ukraine’s soldiers have gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure their wishes are respected in death.

Last November, Leda Kosmachevska, a 33-year-old woman from Crimea, received a call from a childhood friend. Would she marry him? The man on the other end of the phone had been in a committed relationship with another man for 15 years.

She thought it through and agreed. 

Leda wasn’t surprised when she got the call, she said. Her friend had been in the army since March 2022, and she was well aware of the kinds of pressures and discrimination that gay people face in Ukraine.

“He doesn’t have any close relatives and was raised by his grandmother,” she told me. “We’ve known each other since we were eight. He told me he was gay when we were 18.”

The two friends talked through the logistics. They laid out the terms around his medical care, what to do if he went missing, funeral arrangements. As their conversations continued, Leda grew more comfortable with the idea of being a liaison between her friend’s actual partner and the state. But she was also nervous. The stakes were incredibly high.

Leda wrote about what she was doing on Facebook. She posted her story with a high-quality photograph of herself, sitting on a sofa, wrapped in a white sheet. She explained to me that her public name, Kosmachevska, is different from what appears on her official documents. This was done, she said, to protect her friend, and herself, from hostile actors.

When the post went viral, her story ricocheted around Ukrainian media and became another example of the extraordinary measures some Ukrainians have taken to protect each other in wartime. It also triggered a torrent of abuse from Facebook users who tried to shame her. Still, she left the post up.

“There are people who will use those details to apply to the courts and say the marriage is fictional,” she said, but “my friend is still on the frontline fighting for our country.”

Tusha Mittal contributed additional reporting to this article. 

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“We’re a Russian-speaking media,” Rakovitsa told me as we settled in at the lobby bar of the InterContinental hotel in central Kyiv, now a hub for foreign journalists reporting on the war as the world looks on. Born and raised in Mariupol, Rakovitsa is also in the business of storytelling, but her audience is closer to the action than most.

The Institute’s online newsroom, News of Donbas, is aimed at people in Ukraine’s Russia-occupied territories.

“In order to reach our audience, we don’t use hate speech,” Rakovitsa told me. “We use the principles of conflict-sensitive journalism, and we don’t label people as orcs and Rashists,” she said, referring to the slang epithets that many Ukrainian media now use to describe Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

As the war grinds on into its second year, Ukraine’s news organizations have worked hard to showcase the brutality of Russian military forces and to keep the war on the international agenda. In the reporting of smaller media based in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainians who have Russian sympathies or are apathetic about living under Moscow’s hand are still somewhat present. But they have all but disappeared from coverage by outlets that are considered mainstream.

Rakovitsa’s organization is working to show how people in eastern Ukraine are experiencing the war and to counter the relentless tide of pro-Russian disinformation. They do this by reporting straight facts in a style that is bone dry, in both Russian and Ukrainian.

Among Ukrainian media, their approach stands out. And it is exactly what some people are looking for. Since the invasion, News of Donbas and its sister YouTube channel have seen their audience numbers skyrocket. People living under occupation have engaged with the newsroom’s mix of news updates and short features. And Russians hungry for facts have driven traffic to the YouTube channel in particular. More than 70% of the channel’s 169,000 subscribers are logging on from Russia, although some portion of this figure is likely Ukrainians who were forcibly moved to Russia over the course of 2022.

In the past, the organization’s divergence from the norm has led to criticism or doubt from other media outlets. Before the war, much was made of News of Donbas’ decision to publish photographs of Denis Pushilin, the Russia-backed leader of the unrecognized Donetsk People's Republic. The site also ran a photo of the region’s unofficial flag, a move that some saw as legitimizing Pushilin’s initiative. But since the war began in 2022 Ukraine’s journalists have united around a common enemy.

“The journalists in this country started a marathon of coverage over a year ago,” Rakovitsa told me between swigs of her non-alcoholic beer. “24/7 we’re covering this story and in so many ways it has brought us together. At times, yes, there are people who still criticize us, but I understand that they are also suffering from this war.” Ukrainian journalists, she said, are living with “nerves with no skin,” covering a war that is challenging their very existence as a people.

The Institute first launched in 2009, with a goal of shining light on corruption and life in Donetsk. In 2014, the work expanded to a YouTube channel, which focused on the Maidan revolution and human rights violations that proliferated as fighting erupted between Russian proxies and the Ukrainian government. With the majority of its reporters from eastern Ukraine, the newsroom became adept at obtaining and explaining information about what was happening inside occupied territories.

Now funded by major Western donors like the Council of Europe and USAID, the non-profit has developed various arms, including a think tank, the annual Donbas Media Forum and Crimea Today, a separate news outlet that focuses on communities in the annexed peninsula. “Our audience there watches us, trusts us, knows we are pro-Ukrainian media,” said Rakovitsa. “We don’t say they are fools and blame them for Russia’s actions,” she said.

This, too, sets them apart from the norm. Further west, many believe that a lack of local resistance to Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea helped set the stage for the 2022 invasion. 

Rakovitsa sees her organization’s work as integral to Ukraine’s future and thinks that discussions about what to do after the war need to start now, even as the battles rage on. People liberated from the occupied territories will have to be weaned off a robust diet of Russian propaganda, she told me.

Indeed, the Ukrainian information sphere has become highly charged, with people quick to judge one another and seemingly eager at times to define who has betrayed Ukraine and who has not. In the occupied territories, people are also experiencing wartime fervor, but for many, it is mediated instead by Russian propaganda. Rakovitsa expects that whenever the war ends, those who have only been fed the Russian side of the story will have a deeply distorted view of what has happened. She worries that this clash of narratives could result in a whole new round of conflict. 

“We need to ensure that there is no second war after the first one,” she said to me, a few times over.

In February 2022, the organization’s offices moved west following the invasion. In total, 50 staff members work under Rakovitsa. Most are now working remotely, due to the constant threat of shelling. And new obstacles arise each day. But the sense of mission is palpable and sustaining. 

“The people we are reporting to, they are our people,” Rakovitsa said to me, as we walked out of the hotel doors and onto the street. “We’re fighting for them.”

CORRECTION [04/28/2023 10:20 AM EDT]: The original version of this story said that the offices of the Donetsk Institute of Information moved west amid the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The editorial offices moved west in February 2022.

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Even before the war, Ukraine was at least 10 years away from reaping the financial rewards for some of its in-demand raw materials, vital ingredients in many products from iPhones to fighter jets. Most rare earths are, in fact, not all that rare. But extracting and purifying the lightweight elements is expensive, dangerous and environmentally damaging. Almost all of Ukraine’s critical materials and rare earths can be easily found elsewhere. International investors might seek less risky alternatives.  

As the war grinds into its second year, the European Union, the United States and other Western powers are making strategic investments around the world to diversify away from their dependence on Chinese and Russia-sourced critical raw materials — investments that will translate into mines and infrastructure in places other than Ukraine and greatly undermine Ukraine’s ability in the future to compete in the critical raw materials market.

“Most of the foreign natural resource development is probably off the table,” said Chris Berry, an analyst on critical raw materials at House Mountain Partners in Washington, D.C. Even after the war, investor confidence is likely to be deeply shaken. The demining process alone will take approximately ten years according to Ukrainian officials. Russia has contaminated vast swathes of territory with landmines and other unexploded ordnance.

The total value of Ukraine’s deposits is believed to be astronomical, a prospective loss to add to the estimated $138 billion worth of damage caused so far by Russian strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure.

Ukraine and the European Commission had signed a strategic partnership agreement on raw materials in 2021, heralded as a significant step forward for Ukraine in the renewables space. It was an accord that also boosted the confidence of foreign mining companies moving to secure Ukrainian exploration permits, the first step in the mining process.  

The Ukrainian government has not publicly announced how many lithium fields and promising areas are now under Russian occupation. Before the invasion, no lithium was being extracted from Ukraine. But several licenses were in various stages of development, including the Shevchenkivske field in the Donetsk region, the Kruta Balka block in the Zaporizhzhia region and the Dobra block and the Polokhivske field in the Kirovohrad region. Both the Shevchenkivske field and the Kruta Balka have danced along the war’s ever-moving frontlines.

Despite this, Ukrainian officials have presented an image of a stalwart critical materials partner to the EU, and last month Ukraine and the EU reaffirmed the strategic importance of their alliance. In December, Ukraine’s parliament passed mining reform legislation to increase the attraction of the country’s extraction industries.  

The invasion coincided with the EU’s quest to seek alternatives from China in order to meet its ambitious goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. The pandemic established the need to move away from single suppliers like China, while the Ukraine invasion underscored the geopolitical vulnerabilities for Europe that exist close to home.   

China supplies Brussels with 98% of the EU’s supply of rare earth elements. It’s a supply chain that Olivia Lazard, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said needs to be reviewed.

In fact, the issue of raw materials tops Brussels’ political agenda. Last September, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced the European Critical Raw Materials Act. “Lithium and rare earths are already replacing gas and oil at the heart of our economy,” said von der Leyen in a speech, adding that Europe has to “avoid falling into the same dependency as with oil and gas.”

While Europe has been moving away from reliance on Russian oil and gas, Russia continues to hold many of the essential elements for the West’s green transition. Russia accounts for approximately 7% of the global supply of nickel, a vital ingredient in solar panels. It is also a leader in the global supply of aluminum, palladium, potash and vanadium. The EU imports approximately $7.4 billion a year in Russian raw materials.

Russian metals and minerals have escaped the same kind of scrutiny that oil and gas exports have encountered. Norilsk Nickel, the world's largest producer of palladium and high-grade nickel, owned by the Putin-supporting oligarch Vladimir Potanin, has not come under Western sanctions. Russian nickel exports to the U.S. and the EU actually saw a boost in 2022. “If you look into the sanctions, you will see that the EU has been more cautious on certain types,” said Vasileios Rizos, the head of sustainable resources and circular economy at CEPS, a think tank. “The whole raw materials agenda comes from a more strategic perspective at the EU level.”

In 2020, Russia pledged $1.5 billion for mining rare earth minerals with the goal of becoming the biggest producer after China. Capturing raw materials on Ukrainian land will redound to Russia’s benefits, allowing the Kremlin to keep the materials off world markets. 

Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group is believed to collect raw material deposits to shore up its finances. “This tells us something about the nature of the Russian approach now regarding security and defense,” said Lazard, the Carnegie fellow. “Geology is now an asset and geological exploration is a competency to wield in the global geopolitical competition.” 

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Bulchak’s case is not unique. On the day Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine began, another Catholic priest, Father Alexander Baran, posted a photo of the Ukrainian flag and the flag of the Belarusian opposition movement on social media. He was subsequently arrested, charged with “illegal picketing” and the “dissemination of extremist materials” and sentenced to 10 days in prison. Around the same time, Father Andrei Kevlich, another Belarusian Catholic priest, was detained and later fined for reposting content about the war from banned independent media. 

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has tightened the space for the Catholic Church and its priests in Belarus to criticize the government and its authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Although the clampdown on the Church began soon after the rigged presidential election in August 2020, which saw Lukashenko claim 80% of the vote, the Belarusian regime has taken advantage of the attention given to the war in Ukraine to gain an even greater hold over a key religious institution in Belarusian society. 

It has also proved to be an opportunity to end what the Belarusian government believes is a dangerous pocket of Western influence in a country that allows the Russian military to use its territory to wage its war on Ukraine.

For Catholics in Belarus, “the whole atmosphere has become one of fear,” said Natalia Vasilevich, a Belarusian theologian and human rights lawyer based in Germany. “Sermons are being watched, trust is even being tested inside some communities, even the social networks of priests are being checked. People cannot trust any structures anymore. They can only trust the relationships in front of them.”

Historically, the Belarusian Catholic Church has close ties to the Polish Catholic Church, which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, helped to beef up the numbers of the Belarusian Catholic clergy. By working to sever the ties between these two Churches, Lukashenko believes he has exorcized a malign Western influence hanging over the country’s second-largest religious community.

If the Catholic clergy in Belarus was hoping that the Vatican would advocate for their right to free speech, they have been mistaken. In fact, Vatican diplomacy has seriously weakened the ability of the Catholic Church in Belarus to withstand the slings and arrows of Lukashenko’s government. Instead of defending its priests, the Vatican’s ecclesiastical diplomats have taken a conciliatory tone with the Belarusian regime, ensuring that the Church’s high-level influence is not diminished. It’s a move reminiscent of Ostpolitik, a Cold-War era strategy that saw the Vatican open communication channels with the Communist governments of Eastern and Central Europe.

“The role of the Vatican in Belarus has been to make the Catholic Church less visible as a protesting institution,” said Vasilevich, the Belarusian theologian. The justification for such a move, Vasilevich argues, is that the Vatican has seized an opportunity to become a bridge between Lukashenko and the West while foreign diplomats close their doors in response to Belarus’ alliance with Russia. 

In November 2022, nine months after the first Russian tank rolled across Belarus’ border to invade Ukraine, the Vatican’s ambassador to Belarus gave a speech to celebrate 30 years of relations between the Holy See and Belarus. He stated that the relationship between the two states “continues to be supplemented with new wonderful pages.” His speech came weeks after mass was banned in Minsk’s iconic Catholic Red Church, which was damaged in a mysterious fire that September. Later that year the same Vatican ambassador, Ante Jozic, told Belarusian state TV that Minsk could host peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, a line also parroted by Lukashenko.

To Belarusian Catholics, no other example reflects the Vatican’s coziness with the Belarusian government than the case of Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz. After defending the rights of anti-government protesters in 2020, the widely respected cleric was denied entry to Belarus on his return from a ceremony in Poland. When he was eventually allowed to return to Minsk following an intervention from Pope Francis, Kondrusiewicz was forced to retire and replaced with a Belarusian bishop, Iosif Stanevsky, thought to be more sympathetic to the regime. In November 2022, Stanevsky gave a papal Order of St. Gregory to Alexander Zaitsev, a close ally of Lukashenko and businessman subject to EU sanctions. 

“Now there is no illusion among Belarusian Catholics about the Vatican’s stance. However, at the parish priest level, almost all Catholic priests are against the authorities,” said Aliaksei Lastouski, a researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden. The Vatican declined to comment for this article.

In response, Catholic priests in exile from Belarus have mobilized to counter the threats to Catholic priests who remain in the country. Father Viachaslau Barok, an exiled parish priest, sent a letter to Pope Francis that questioned the Vatican ambassador’s relationship with the Belarusian government and pleaded with the pontiff not to be swayed by the regime. “Everyone can see that by calling you ‘the best Pope,’ Lukashenko only seeks to hide behind the authority of St. Peter’s successor,” he wrote. 

It’s not only the Vatican. The Belarusian Orthodox Church, the largest religious denomination in the country, has also sought to placate the regime. After the 2020 presidential election, the leaders of the Orthodox Church were reported to have removed senior members known to be critical of Lukashenko. Since the full scale Ukraine invasion, it has transferred priests as punishment after they showed opposition to the war. This alliance between the Belarusian Orthodox Church and the state was on display when Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, visited Minsk last June to celebrate the 1,030th anniversary of Orthodoxy in Belarus, a visit that highlighted Moscow’s willingness to drag Belarus, a nation widely regarded as one of the most secular former Soviet states, into its religious sphere of influence. 

All the while Belarus’ Catholics are becoming less engaged with the Vatican and more frightened of their precarious position in the country. “The Vatican is no longer a pillar that you know will always be on your side,” said Vasilevich.

The post The Vatican is turning its back on Belarus’ Catholics appeared first on Coda Story.

“I will thank him profusely,” Finkel said. “He was the one that prompted me to write this book.”

That GRU agent had posed as a student who Finkel taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. While Finkel had always known that there could be spies at a place like SAIS, last year’s discovery of his student’s real identity as a Russian military intelligence service agent was devastating. Finkel had written the undercover agent a letter of recommendation to the International Criminal Court, where he was seeking an internship with the group that is now investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine. 

“You want to use me to know how Russian genocide is being investigated? That’s how I fight back,” Finkel said, referring to the book he is writing that will examine the origins of genocide in the current war.

A year into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war has triggered a reckoning at universities in the West over how Russia, the Soviet period and the wider region has been presented and taught across a range of subjects. It has raised complex questions about the outsized role Russia has played, how imperialism, colonialism and histories of violence have, or have not, been addressed and which perspectives and readings have been privileged.

I spoke with 17 scholars to understand the debates raging across academic forums and online publications (and even summarized through memes) that show no signs of letting up. At their roots is the question of whether the university departments need to undergo decolonization, a term that means different things to different people.

The academic debates are sensitive and emotional, especially for many with personal connections to the region. The stakes include what classes and languages are taught, who receives tenure, the names of departments (East European? Eurasian? Slavic? Russian Studies?) and even what photos are posted on departmental websites (should a picture of the Kremlin remain?).

At its broadest, decolonizing means removing Russia from the center of study and instead centering other nations and regions, said Oxana Shevel, an associate professor at Tufts University. Part of the difficulty is that there is no one way to do this or a consensus among scholars on what that should involve. Some scholars argue that they are already taking a critical approach, for example by teaching the violence of the Soviet period, she added.

This questioning of a Russia-centric narrative had been happening before the war in more advanced courses and among scholars, but the average undergraduate student, Shevel argues, doesn’t come away with this perspective and typically doesn’t know much about Ukraine or Central Asia.

For Serhii Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University who has written numerous books about Ukraine, decolonization is an imperfect term. “When I’m thinking about Russian history, it’s not about decolonizing per say,” he said. “It’s about de-imperializing Russian studies.” He adds that Russian historiography was never critiqued through the lens of empire like French or British history have been.

The current war started with an imperial argument from Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians are the same people — a view Plokhy says was held by some of the scholars who pioneered the writing of Russian history in the U.S. nearly 100 years ago.

And while the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to more scholarship on other countries in the region, like those in Central Asia, it hasn’t been enough, he argues. “We are behind as a field in that sense,” Plokhy said.

The questions scholars now ask themselves include whether Russia has received too much attention and emphasis, whether its empire-building has been examined enough and whether countries that have been dominated, occupied and colonized by Russia have been incorporated enough into scholarship, said Maria Popova. Popova is an associate professor at McGill University who is currently co-writing a book about the roots of the ongoing war with Oxana Shevel at Tufts.

Popova says there was a tendency prior to the 2022 invasion to dismiss perspectives from the Baltic states or Ukraine as “Russophobic” or distorted by historical experience. “The debate right now is about how to reincorporate or how to extend the research and scholarship into Russia as an imperial actor in the neighborhood,” she said.

Following the February 2022 invasion, it became clear to Finkel he wouldn’t be able to teach his previous course on Russia and Eastern Europe — it would need an overhaul. So he decided to teach a new class about the war called “Russia and Ukraine in Peace and War.”

Finkel is fully onboard with asking different questions and looking at perspectives from outside of Moscow. But he’s not keen on using colonization as a proxy and worries that it could take agency away from countries. “Taken to an extreme, it will simplify the very complex role that Ukraine played in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union,” he said.

Pushback

Not all scholars think the decolonization debate is needed.

Alexander Hill, a professor of military history at the University of Calgary, believes that attempts to decolonize Russian history could “result in a re-writing of all Russian history from the perspective of the Russian state as ‘oppressor’ — something that doesn't do justice to the complexity of the development of the Russian, or indeed any, empire and certainly doesn't do justice to the development of the Soviet Union,” as he wrote in an email to me. He added: “I see a debate as particularly unnecessary where the current growing fashionableness of ‘decolonization’ in Russian history seems to be motivated by pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian political biases relating to the current war in Ukraine.”

Sean Pollock, a professor of history at Wright State University, says scholars have been studying non-Russian territories and places since the 18th century.

“I see a long tradition where others, I suppose, feel the need now to call for the decolonization of the field. And I think it’s crystal clear these calls are a reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” he said.

Pollock understands the emotional reactions in this moment but thinks it’s important to separate personal views from professional scholarship — a view he knows many will disagree with. He told me he thought twice before agreeing to an interview because he knows people will hear him differently than how he intends to be heard.

“In my area, which is the history of the Russian empire, the field has suffered from those who have brought strongly negative feelings about Russian imperial politics to the study of the subject. I think there are ways to dispassionately approach the imperial dimensions of Russian history, and I frankly feel that it is our professional responsibility as academics to try and do that,” he said.

He also worries that “countless non-Russians [who] played important roles as Russian empire builders” will be lost to history.

Others have argued that the problem of Russocentrism has been overstated and that calls for decolonization are a stalking horse for halting the study of the Russian language, politics, society and culture. Many scholars themselves are wondering if research projects they had planned in Russia will ever be able to take place.

Unsettled debate

“Nobody is canceling Russia,” said Vitaly Chernetsky, a professor of Slavic and Eurasian Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. “You need to rebalance and give presence and voice to others and continue looking at Russia, but without giving Russian history or culture a pass to the very many problematic aspects it had.”

Chernetsky argues that many Russian literary classics, from authors including Pushkin and Dostoevsky, were given a pass without properly interrogating the colonial, racist or prejudicial views they presented. At the same time, important figures in Ukrainian literature such as poet Taras Shevchenko were read by few outside of the Ukrainian community, he said.

Kristy Ironside, an assistant professor at McGill University, is now teaching the most students she ever had in a class, in both her introductory Russian history course and a Soviet history course, something she attributes to students wanting to understand what’s happening. “We’ve always been a pretty political field,” she said.

When she was hired, Ironside changed the titles of many courses and says she’s never taught Soviet history from the perspective of only Russia. She’s recently added readings from Christian Raffensperger and Serhii Plokhy to give students more context on Kyivan-Rus, following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s references to the medieval state.

Ironside is open to the decolonization discussion and understands the sense of urgency many are feeling as a horrible war continues, but she doesn’t want the work of earlier scholars to be overlooked. “There has been a lot of scholarship that has been done on the non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union and I don’t think in this race to decolonize the curriculum...that we should act like that didn’t happen,” she said.

Ironside expects the process and debates around issues such as department names to be messy. “I think there is going to be a lot of trial and error in the next several years,” she said.

For Alexander Motyl, a professor at Rutgers University, decolonization is something he’s been supportive of his entire career.

“All of this is music to my ears,” he said. “How far should it go? Well at a minimum, it needs to increase our collective understanding and appreciation of the various non-Russian nationalities within the Russian Federation and of course those inhabiting states on Russia’s border. They have been historically neglected.”

Motyl is among the academics who have been banned from setting foot in Russia. In November 2022, his name was added to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ list of sanctioned Americans — those who, according to the Russian government, have been accused of promoting a Russophobic campaign and supporting the regime in Kyiv.

“I’ve been waiting for that for years,” he said. “I feel vindicated.”

Motyl expects to see a growing number of courses on non-Russia topics and shifting research agendas for up-and-coming scholars. “I’m not surprised people are resistant. It requires admitting guilt and no one wants to do that. And it requires changing your entire paradigm,” he said, adding it could take as long as 15 years to see a tangible change.

“Academics are being asked and being forced to make a choice,” Motyl said. “When you see a genocide and total war taking place, it’s arguably unethical and immoral not to express some criticism. It’s easier in that sense for Ukrainian specialists. It’s hard for Russian specialists, but they need to do it and not pretend it’s not an issue. This is what happens when you have big crises that impinge on your academic reality.”

Susan Smith-Peter, a professor of Russian history at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, attended the Ukraine Action Summit in Washington D.C. in September 2022. She believes that she was the only Russian historian who attended the event. “I don’t think it’s anti-Russian to want a better Russia or anti-Russian to think the current Russia we have is not the only Russia,” she said.

In many ways, the debates are just getting started. When well over 1,000 scholars gather at the end of 2023 at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies, decolonization will be the year’s theme.

Russia’s full-scale invasion brought “long-simmering issues of Russocentrism in the region and in our fields of study” to the forefront, said Juliet Johnson, a professor of political science at McGill University and the president of ASEEES. She chose the theme.

But there are already concerns that all the talk around decolonization won’t lead to any meaningful changes.

“In my view, the changes have so far been largely cosmetic and the field is only waiting to return to business as usual,” said Oleh Kotsyuba, the manager of publications at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Because the conversations around decolonization are time consuming and onerous, John Vsetecka, a PhD candidate in the history department of Michigan State University, fears they could fade or even cause bigger divides between scholars, the longer the war goes on. 

“I’m worried that this decolonization moment for Ukraine and understanding what Ukraine is in the world is a moment and not something that’s lasting,” he said, adding that while the debates have been happening for longer than he’s been alive, he’s not sure how much they’ve been listened to previously.

Vsetecka is on the academic job market. He’ll defend his dissertation, on the aftermath of the 1932-33 Holodomor and the 1946-47 post-war famine in Ukraine, later this year. It’s a topic he says could be seen as political.

“The war in some senses is a litmus test for the job market,” he said. “How seriously will they take me?”

The post The war in Ukraine triggered a reckoning in universities appeared first on Coda Story.

In fact, this year’s renewal of Russia’s war in Ukraine emerged from pre-existing twisted narratives. Espousing an alternative reality, Russian President Vladimir Putin has grounded his “special military operation” in false claims that Kyiv was orchestrating a genocide against Russian speakers in the country. He has unfurled a web of lies about the Ukrainian government having Nazi sympathies. Putin’s venomous dislike of the truth has now resulted in thousands of deaths in Ukraine and millions of people displaced.

Since late February, the disinformation frontlines in this war have evolved. At first the disinformation from Moscow was pushed out by state-backed media outlets and a worldwide web of influencers and allies. But as sanctions limited the reach of Russian state broadcasters, and social media platforms attempted to curtail information pollution about the war, the Kremlin’s disinformation machine worked to influence the Russian diaspora and shore up support from vulnerable domestic media globally. 

As the conflict dragged on, some organizations have profited from the ad revenue accrued from Russian lies. An investigation by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Yandex, the Russian version of Google and a Nasdaq-listed organization, helped “sites pushing false Russian claims make thousands of dollars a day through on-site adverts.” 

As the war shows little sign of slowing down, and with 2023 on the horizon, here are some of the key disinformation moments from the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Russia thought it could take Ukraine within a week. As tanks rolled across the border from Belarus and residents in Mariupol witnessed the brutal destruction of their city, a Belarusian-linked hacking group called Ghostwriter began to target the accounts of Ukrainian military and public figures. Like the tank assault on Kyiv, their campaign failed, and when it became clear to the Kremlin that the Ukrainians could successfully defend their country, the tone of the disinformation changed. The new messaging attempted to gaslight the world. Speaking on March 3 at a security council meeting in Moscow, Putin said that the “special military operation is going strictly according to schedule.” Since then, the same refrain has been used in spite of crushing Russian defeats both in the war and in the court of public opinion. But, as laid out by the Canadian government, “Russia wouldn’t need to mobilize another 300,000 citizens if its illegal war of aggression in Ukraine was going as planned.”

One of Moscow’s most incendiary lines of disinformation came early on in the war when the country’s Foreign Ministry claimed that special forces had found documents showing “evidence” of U.S.-financed military biological experiments in Ukraine. Playing off fears that the conflict would see casualties from the use of biological or chemical weapons, this disinformation flew around the world. It got the backing of Chinese officials, who had previously tried to distance themselves from the war. “This Russian military operation has uncovered the secret of the U.S. labs in Ukraine, and this is not something that can be dealt with in a perfunctory manner,” a Chinese spokesperson said at the time. In the United States, where the government was scolding Russia for its information war, QAnon conspiracy theorists were quick to capitalize on the disinformation to buttress their own narratives.

The mass murder and torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian troops in Bucha became evident to the world in early April. At least 458 people were killed in this town west of Kyiv, their bodies left scattered on roads, in shallow mass graves and in destroyed buildings. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, children were among those who were unlawfully killed. The horrors of Bucha not only showed the world the brutality of Russian troops but crushed Moscow’s claims of superior military prowess. The Kremlin’s rhetorical response was to falsely assert that the massacre was faked by Ukrainian forces to provoke Russia. In the following weeks, Putin and his spokespeople would deny any responsibility for the same horrors that emerged in Irpin and Izium. To this day, Moscow claims its forces do not target civilians. 

The war in Ukraine has caused the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II. According to the U.N. there are approximately 7.8 million refugees from Ukraine across Europe, while 4.8 million people have received temporary protection. But even as Europeans threw open their doors to those fleeing the Russian advance, pro-Russian websites and social media accounts were able to circumvent EU sanctions and effectively spread disinformation about the refugee population. Allegations that Ukrainian refugees were financially well off, that they were depleting resources for native populations and presented a security threat to host countries were widely shared. In the Czech Republic, Russian disinformation poured into the physical world when, in September, over 70,000 people took to the streets of Prague to protest the Czech government, Russian sanctions and assistance given to refugees.

The hybrid war in Ukraine mirrors the Syrian experience. Rife with Russian disinformation, the Syrian civil war marked its 11th year in March. Meanwhile, on the African continent, the Wagner mercenary group is pushing disinformation through powerful social media influencers to shore up support for its war in Ukraine and involvement in local conflicts. The Kremlin’s disinformation machine in 2023 will not slow down.

The post The year in Russian disinformation campaigns appeared first on Coda Story.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, AI-powered drones — both homemade and highly sophisticated — have been deployed on an unprecedented scale on the battlefield. Russia has reportedly used the Kalashnikov Kub and Lancet Kamikaze “highly autonomous” drones. Ukraine has relied on the Turkish Bayraktar TB2 that has autonomous flight capabilities and boasts “laser guided smart ammunition.” The U.S. has committed to sending Ukraine 700 Switchblade kamikaze drones and “Phoenix Ghosts” that use GPS-tracking and object recognition software.

But now a new generation of autonomous machines — colloquially known as ”killer robots” — is debuting in Ukraine. They augur a new military era, offering capabilities that far outstrip the current generation of weapons, and are no longer limited to drones in the sky or sea. They are poised to upend modern warfare and introduce new challenges, lethality and concerns.

In late November, Germany discreetly announced that it would provide 14 tracked and remote controlled infantry vehicles for support tasks as part of this year’s $1.64 billion spent on military support for Kyiv. These unmanned vehicles rely on far superior tech to similar robots used during wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — mostly for landmine disposal.

Estonian military contractor Milrem Robotics, the maker of the Tracked Hybrid Modular Infantry Systems unmanned ground vehicles, also called "THeMIS,” will provide Ukraine with units primarily designed for casualty evacuation, an example of how the war in Ukraine is serving as a testing ground for cutting edge, but unproven, technology.

Milrem Robotics CEO Kuldar Väärsi, said their THeMIS vehicles, which can be outfitted with light or heavy machine guns and anti-tank missiles, are “considerably cheaper than a tank” and will be a common sight on the battlefield in coming years.

“As with all new technology, especially technology that hasn’t existed before, concept development and experimentation are needed to see how it fits into the doctrine before large quantities will be deployed,” he said.

Germany’s ministry of defense invested in THeMIS at an early stage of development, but in a design version for saving lives rather than its lethal version, according to a source familiar with European military procurement. A German ministry of defense spokeswoman declined to comment citing security reasons.

Some experts have begun to sound warnings, worried that military aid to Ukraine is substituting flashy new-fangled weaponry over proven, effective conventional arms deliveries. 

“Much will be made of the importance of using emerging and disruptive technologies in wars of the future,” Daniel Fiott, professor at the Brussels School of Governance and Fellow at the Real Elcano Institute, said. But the lure of high-tech solutions should not come at the expense of conventional arms deliveries to Ukraine, he argued.

“No doubt, many powerful militaries will be arguing that the application of high-tech solutions will be needed to enhance the performance of arms and give militaries an advantage in the information space,” Fiott said. 

Ukrainian robotics company, Temerland, has released a weaponized reconnaissance robotic platform called GNOM, designed as an anti-mine vehicle that is tailored for operational combat units. “In the next decade we will see the introduction of ground-based drones with automation elements and further increase AI for independent response and decision making,” Eduard Trotsenko, the CEO of Temerland, said.

Meanwhile, NATO allies like the Netherlands are already testing AI-powered robotics. Lieutenant Colonel Sjoerd Mevissen, commander of the Royal Netherlands Army's Robotics and Autonomous Systems unit, said every war is a technology test. 

“We see a big advantage in the future, having these types of systems,” he said, referring to the THeMIS unmanned ground vehicle. “It will also lower the cognitive and physical burden for soldiers when they are able to deploy more of these vehicles.”

Colonel Mevissen said pricing — each unit costs approximately $350,000 — remains a significant barrier to having these types of robots fighting side by side with soldiers in the short term. 

Russia’s war of aggression has spurred Ukrainian homegrown military tech innovation. Ukrainian soldiers have modified commercial drones for the frontlines, and a whole suite of tech ingenuity has come together in groups. Ukrainians call it hromada, a self-organized community.

In late October, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov told a NATO conference that Ukraine was developing "Delta," a situational awareness platform that helps soldiers locate enemy troops and advises on the best coordinated responses. Delta was instrumental in helping Ukrainian troops retake Kherson from Russia, in what Fedorov described as “World Cyber War I.”

To counter Russia’s drones, many of which are made in Iran, Ukraine’s army has deployed newly designed Lithuanian "SkyWipers" that have the capacity to not only shoot down Russian drones but to take control of them, effectively to hijack them, in the first widespread use of such devices.

But much of the most advanced killer robot work is kept within the borders of NATO countries. U.S. military and European defense companies are withholding much of their latest high-tech equipment to prevent it from ending up in the hands of Russia or China, said Fiott, the professor from Brussels.

In late November, the U.S. Navy launched a “Digital Horizon” exercise to develop the world’s first “unmanned surface vessel fleet.” U.S. General Erik Kurilla recently told a conference in Bahrain that AI-powered marine drones intercepted a dhow sailing ship carrying thousands of kilos of explosives in the Arabian Gulf “without any orders and without the team in the operations center even pushing a button.”

U.S. defense giant Lockheed Martin has developed a crew-less helicopter called Matrix that demonstrated flying autonomous missions in October. And the first squad of pilot-less aircraft “wingmen,” which fly alongside manned fighter jets, are being developed for the British army’s 20-year “radical transition” plan, dubbed Future Soldier. 

These types of drone projects are more successful because AI can better model and navigate homogenous and predictable environments in the sky and sea, according to Max Cappuccio, a Canberra, Australia-based academic and co-author of a research paper entitled “Saving Private Robot.” “I don’t think anybody could say exactly when fully autonomous ‘killer robots’ will be ready to be systematically deployed in contested scenarios,” he said.

Regardless of when fully autonomous military technology comes online, Mevissen, the colonel who heads the Dutch army’s robotics unit, believes the world faces a “new arms race,” one of constant software redesign, AI development and cybersecurity upgrades.

“The hardware is quite easy,” Mevissen said. “So, this is mainly a race for software.”

As a result, militaries are adjusting recruitment strategies to meet an urgent need for software engineers, AI experts and soldiers able to work with tech-rich equipment.

“You need good soldiers who are also very good gamers,” Mevissen said.

Critics disagree. “We need to prohibit autonomous weapons systems that would be used against people, to prevent this slide to digital dehumanization,” Human Rights Watch argued in a campaign against the deployment of fully autonomous weapons.  

In 2023, the Dutch government will host the world’s first international conference on the military applications of AI. 

Colonel Mevissen counseled calm: “Humans are giving the system the target. We are giving the system the mission. What is possible only comes from us.”

The post Killer robots have arrived to Ukrainian battlefields appeared first on Coda Story.

The conference was a political lightning rod. As it began, protestors swept through the streets of Verona while conference attendees gave interviews outside the event hall. “Homosexuals must be treated, otherwise hell is waiting for them,” one woman told journalists outside the conference. 

Also at the conference, Giorgia Meloni, who was elected last month to be the new prime minister of Italy, gave a rousing speech to a standing ovation, railing against surrogacy for gay couples. “A puppy rightly cannot be ripped from the mother’s womb as soon as it’s born. So two rich men should not be able to buy a son from a desperate mother,” she told the enraptured crowd. 

Meloni’s election victory also swept in Fontana, 42, who was elected speaker of the lower house of Italy’s Parliament — the third most powerful position in Italian politics. But despite their history of overlapping values and a shared conference podium, the appointment came as a shock to people who have been watching Meloni’s rise to the pinnacle of government. 

“I was surprised,” said Marianna Griffini, a lecturer in European and international studies at King’s College London. She described how Fontana’s election as speaker is at odds with Meloni’s newfound moderation strategy. “As soon as she stepped into Parliament, into government, she basically went through a makeover of her discourse and image. The style was much less aggressive, much less emotional, much more moderate in tone.” 

In contrast to Meloni’s trajectory toward the middle, Fontana doesn’t mince his words, eschews compromise and calls for the complete repeal of Italy’s abortion law. This positions him as Meloni’s ideological standard-bearer, allowing her to sidestep political purity tests. In being her choice for parliamentary speaker, said Griffini, Fontana represents the new government’s core ideology, while Meloni wears a mask of moderation: “We have to see that she’s walking a tightrope between mainstreaming and radicalization.” 

Fontana, meanwhile, stakes out a hardline defense of “traditional family values,” a movement at the core of Meloni’s rise to power, which has been promoted and financed by a coalition of pan-European, U.S., and Russia-backed individuals and institutions for nearly a decade. A year before the Verona conference, Fontana, at the time Italy’s minister for families, made headlines when said he believed LGBTQ families “don’t exist.” Key figures in the traditional family values movement have coalesced in support of Fontana.

The multi-country campaign to roll back LGBTQ, immigrant and reproductive rights across Europe was galvanized five years ago by Vladimir Putin’s repressions against many public expressions of gay life in Russia — notably a ban on the promotion of "LGBT propaganda" among children that last month was expanded to include people of all ages. “The Russians might be the Christian saviors of the world,” said Larry Jacobs, the Congress of Families’ late managing director. In 2016, Fontana said that “with gay marriage and and immigration they want to dominate us and wipe out our people,” adding that the example to follow was Russia. 

Fontana joined the hard-right League party when he was 16 years old. He drove a forklift before becoming a politician. “Never has a politician from the city of Juliet risen to such heights,” the Italian newspaper La Repubblica wrote of him.

Intensely religious, Fontana has called Vilmar Pavesi, a priest in Verona with virulently anti-LGBTQ views, his spiritual father. “Gays are a creation of the devil,” Pavesi told Espresso magazine in 2018, before saying that he and Fontana think the same way. “If we thought differently, our paths would divide.” Fontana says 50 Hail Marys a day, and his social media channels are peppered with images of Christ and the Madonna. 

Fontana’s fast rise in Italian politics is often linked to his ability to cultivate connections with the larger constellation of right-wing, Catholic associations in Europe. In addition to the Congress of Families, Fontana has called members of Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn movement his “friends.” He has links to CitizenGo, the ultra-conservative Madrid campaigning platform that sends bright orange “freedom planes” and “freedom buses” around Europe with slogans like “boys have penises, girls have vulvas, don’t be fooled.” Fontana has also campaigned alongside Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the renegade, anti-vaccine, conspiracy-theory-promoting former Vatican envoy, who recently blamed the war in Ukraine on the American deep state, U.S. bioweapons labs and Zelensky’s “LGTBQ ideology.” 

Fontana admires Vladimir Putin. He once called him “a light for us Westerners, who live in a great crisis of values.” Alongside Matteo Salvini, a right-wing Italian politician known for his hostility toward immigrants, Fontana wore a “no to Russian sanctions” T-shirt in the Italian Parliament during Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. Later that year, the Kremlin invited Fontana to Crimea, alongside other members of pro-independence and anti-immigration parties, to act as international observers in a sham independence referendum.

Meloni has vowed to maintain unflinching support for Western sanctions against Russia no matter the energy implications on Italy this winter. Fontana, meanwhile, has expressed concern that sanctions against Putin could “boomerang” and that allowing Ukraine to enter the European Union “would risk exacerbating the already bad climate with Moscow.” 

Space between Meloni and Fontana is largely confined to foreign policy, while positions concerning LGBTQ people and women are more in lockstep. “I think they will try to make us like Poland. Keep out the possibility of abortion. The possibility to get a divorce, to get contraception. They will try — and I think they will succeed also,” said Silvana Agatone, a gynaecologist in Rome who leads an association protecting the rights of women to receive an abortion in Italy.

While Meloni has said she will not repeal Law 194, Italy’s version of Roe v. Wade which protects the rights of women to an abortion, Fontana has made no such promise. Instead, he is a member of a group called Committee No To 194, which works explicitly to overturn the 1978 law.

“We are concerned that they might create obstacles — financially, organizationally, institutionally  — so they might not touch the law, but they might physically make implementation impossible,” said Giulia Tranchina, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “It’s already incredibly hard, for poorer women, from southern Italy, from outside the big cities to actually access abortion,” she said. Doctors in Italy are allowed to invoke conscientious objection to performing an abortion, a law she worries will be taken advantage of by the new government. 

Since the new government was elected, Agatone, the Roman gynaecologist, has been receiving new, strange messages from people asking about her views on abortion after 22 weeks and abusive notes accusing her of “wanting to kill babies.” She said that her colleagues from other associations have received similar messages. “It’s almost like they are trying to catch me out in some way. Like my answers are under observation. So I think we will be attacked in some way.”

In espousing ideas about population decline, demographic implosion and an immigrant invasion, Fontana echoes white nationalists in the U.S. and in Northern Europe who embrace the Great Replacement — a conspiracy theory that holds that nonwhite people are being allowed and encouraged to come to the U.S. and Europe to "replace" white voters and achieve a leftist political agenda. In 2018, Fontana wrote a book called “The Empty Cradle of Civilization” where he argues Italians risk “extinction.” The legality of abortion forms part of this concern — in his view, the problem partly stems from births being terminated. “If every year we lose a city the size of Padua, the demographic decline is comparable to that caused between 1918 and 1920 by the Spanish flu,” said Fontana. 

In fact, Italy is currently facing population loss, a brain drain of young and talented people leaving the country in the hundreds of thousands every year. Fontana claims mass immigration  — alongside same-sex marriage and gender fluidity — will “wipe out our community and traditions.”

Outlawing abortion as a way of addressing demographic challenge is a tactic deeply rooted in the history of European fascism, said Neil Datta, executive director of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive rights. “It puts women and their procreative role in some sort of nationalist objective, producing more babies for the glory of the nation,” Datta said. 

When Fontana was elected speaker of the lower house of Italy’s Parliament, protesters took to the Piazza Dante in Naples dressed in the dystopian red robes of the Handmaid's Tale. “We dressed up as handmaids to recall the novel and TV series in which women are subjected to constant violence, so that their only role is to be a reproducer,” one protester told journalists. Members of parliament also staged a protest at the appointment, holding up a banner saying “No to a homophobic, pro-Putin president.” 

Others celebrated. On the World Congress of Family’s official news site, an article enthusiastically praised Fontana’s rise to high political office. “Lorenzo Fontana is the Parliament Speaker,” the article read. “One of us.”

The post As Italy’s Meloni plays it moderate, her political lieutenant draws a hard right line appeared first on Coda Story.

This was 2014, during the first Russian invasion of Ukraine. After the Ukrainian army pushed Russian-backed forces out of the city, Garmash joined a group of volunteers who quickly got to work, scrubbing and fixing their hometown. But one thing they couldn’t fix was the fallen television tower that had once overlooked the city. Russian-backed militants used it to beam the Kremlin’s message at residents of Slovyansk during the three month long occupation and destroyed it before they left. 

“How will we get the local news?” Garmash remembers asking a local journalist as they cleaned up a street in Slovyansk that July. “There will be no local news,” she replied. 

She was wrong. Within weeks of that conversation, Garmash launched a new media site and named it 6262.com.ua, a reference to Slovyansk’s city code. 

“People really needed local news. And all I needed to provide it was the internet and social media,” Garmash tells me.

By the time Russia invaded again, in February of 2022, Garmash was running the city’s most popular, most trusted local news site. But as Russian tanks rolled towards Kyiv and Western sanctions kicked in, local journalism in Slovyansk was silenced once again. This time, it seems that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — not Russia — was to blame.  

“People we serve no longer get our news in their Facebook and Instagram feeds. In that sense what is happening with Facebook is not all that different from what happened with the TV tower back in 2014,” Garmash tells me.

‘WE CAN’T GET THEIR VOICES OUT’

Meta has mobilized resources in response to the war in Ukraine, and the company says it is taking the issue of disinformation around the war seriously. Staffers sent us this statement two weeks ago:

"We're taking significant steps to fight the spread of misinformation on our services related to the war in Ukraine. We've expanded our third-party fact-checking capacity in Russian and Ukrainian, to debunk more false claims. When they rate something as false, we move this content lower in Feed so fewer people see it, and attach warning labels. We also have teams working around the clock to remove content that violates our policies. This includes native Ukrainian speakers to help us review potentially violating Ukrainian content. In the EU, we've restricted access to RT and Sputnik. Globally we are showing content from all Russian state-controlled media lower in Feed and adding labels from any post on Facebook that contains links to their websites, so people know before they click or share them.” 

I read it to Andrey Boborykin, who manages some of the biggest Facebook publishers in Ukraine, in addition to serving as the executive director of Ukrayinska Pravda, one of Ukraine’s largest dailies. He laughs.

The organic reach of Russian propaganda voices in the West has indeed been curbed — Facebook is blocking pages for RT and Sputnik in the EU, as noted above. But for Ukrainian publishers, none of this makes much difference. 

Ukrainian newsrooms are being flooded by graphic images from the frontlines of the war. It’s newsworthy, at times vital content that is in public interest but it is impossible for editors to know what they are allowed to publish on Facebook and Instagram because Meta, Boborykin says, “never made attempts to identify key controversial topics and provide additional guidance to publishers on how to treat these topics on their platform.” 

And even where there are rules, they are confusing and inconsistent. Here is just one example: it is impossible to cover the war in Ukraine without mentioning Azov Battalion, a key group fighting Russians in eastern Ukraine. But a mere mention of Azov Battalion can be considered a violation of community standards. The punishment for such a violation is a “strike” and several strikes could result in their accounts being blocked or suspended. 

Recently, Meta made a temporary change to its hate speech policy, allowing calls for violence against Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion. But when Ukrayinska Pravda posted stories about Azov Battalion cheering after hitting the enemy targets in Mariupol their pages got “strikes.” 

Things are especially dire for publishers on the frontlines: dozens of small, independent newsrooms in eastern Ukraine, who have recently lost their ability to promote their posts to their communities. 

“We woke up one day to the news of invasion, and the next day to the news of all of our Facebook and Google ad accounts being blocked. We contacted both. Google fixed the issue within twelve days. We are still waiting for Facebook,” Garmash told me. 

Boborykin says restricting advertisement is normally used by Meta to curb what the company calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior” of state-backed accounts who use ads to promote propaganda, hatred and fake news. Blocking ad capabilities is part of Meta’s effort to combat disinformation on its platform. But what is happening in eastern Ukraine illustrates something else. It is an example, Boborykin says, of platforms applying a “one-fits-all” policy without any attempt to understand the local context. 

“If you are a small publisher from eastern Ukraine, there is a high chance that right now you don’t have any advertising capabilities and you have your pages blocked,” says Boborykin. 

As a result, Boborykin says 31 newsrooms, including 6262.com.ua, are experiencing a massive drop in Facebook revenue and audience. In addition to his day job, Boborykin works with the Media Development Foundation and is currently running emergency fundraisers for local Ukrainian newsrooms. Limits that Facebook has imposed on them, he says, are affecting wartime fundraising too. 

“We can’t promote their pages, we can’t get their voices out,” Boborykin says. “It’s crazy because it means that [local publishers] are cut off from their communities. And many of them are already cut off physically, because they’ve had to flee. If they don’t flee they work under shelling. It’s crazy that they have to be dealing with technical constraints imposed by Facebook on top of it all,” he says. 

In early March, in order to continue operations, Valerii Garmash moved most of his 14-strong team away from the frontline in eastern Ukraine, keeping only a few journalists in Slovyansk. “In extreme times like this, people need information more than ever. But they are no longer seeing us on their feeds,” he says.

On Facebook, in what appears to be the result of new company policies on Ukraine, 6262.com.ua has seen an 80% drop in audience since the war began. The numbers are similar on Instagram. Financing independent journalism is never easy, but Garmash has taken a unique approach, providing spin-off services like video production and social media consulting to local businesses.

Garmash says his team runs 25 business pages on Facebook alone. The local vet clinic, the city’s pharmacy and a clothing shop are among 6262.com.ua’s clients. But now they can’t get on the feeds of their community members either.

I asked Meta staffers I am in touch with whether they are aware of the huge losses that their company’s policy brought to small and struggling independent publishers in Ukraine. Their reply reads that “Meta remains committed to building systems that promote and protect news content on our platforms, in order to help news publishers, large and small, better make money and serve their local communities.”

“We can't respond to the specific claims reported on by Coda Story as these details were not shared with us prior to publication,” the statement goes on “but we do partner with international institutions such as Reuters and ICFJ as well as regional and local organizations — including in Ukraine — to train journalists and newsroom professionals and get a better understanding of the challenges they face.”

In the last two months, staffers at 6262.com.ua have contacted Meta at least 40 times. They have yet to receive a response. 

NO ANSWER: A GLOBAL PROBLEM

The experience of the team of 6262.com.ua is playing out for independent media across eastern Ukraine, and even beyond its borders. 

We recently profiled two independent newsrooms in Georgia, a country also partly occupied by Russia, that saw their audiences decline by as much as 90%t after Facebook blocked some of their posts about the war in Ukraine. The reasons why the posts were blocked are unclear, but both newsrooms suspect that they were reported by Russian trolls. 

After the piece was published, a Facebook representative asked me to pass on his personal details to the journalists we profiled and promised to review their cases. I did and journalists followed up with Facebook directly. Two weeks have gone by, and neither television station has gotten a clear answer from Facebook. 

An estimated 26 million people in Ukraine use Facebook every month. “These platforms are crucial for us,” Boborykin says. Having worked across the African continent and closely watched Facebook’s controversies in places like Myanmar, Boborykin says he has no illusions about Meta’s business model, or any issues with it, for that matter. The problem, he says, is the way that Meta deals with people and organizations they like to call partners. 

“What they have done in the case of Ukraine is 1% of what they could have done,” Boborykin says. “Have better news partnerships, reach out to local publishers, make lists of people and media organizations that you trust. Reply to their messages.” 

What would you say to Mark Zuckerberg if you met him? I ask Valerii Garmash, the founder of 6262.ua before we hang up. 

“I’d tell him that in Ukraine he is violating his own mission,” Garmash says. “He set up Facebook to give people power to build communities. He is destroying ours.”

This story originally ran in our weekly Disinfo Matters newsletter that looks beyond fake news to examine how manipulation of narratives, rewriting of history and altering our memories is reshaping our world. We are currently tracking the war in Ukraine. Sign up here.

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The post Fleeing Russian bombs while battling Facebook. A Meta problem Ukrainian journalists did not need appeared first on Coda Story.

“You cannot post or comment for 3 days”

“You can’t go live for 63 days”

For Afghan journalist Shafi Karimi, the list of restrictions that Facebook has imposed on him goes on and on. “I am blocked and I am losing an audience, and people are losing vital information,” says Karimi, who is covering Afghanistan from exile in France.

He is not the only one. From Afghanistan to Ukraine, and much of the rest of the non-English speaking world, journalists are losing their voice. Not only because of the increasingly oppressive governments that target them, but also because policies created in Silicon Valley are helping oppressors of free speech peddle disinformation. 

Over the past month, Karimi has sent numerous appeals to Facebook, but has gotten no reply. And so last week, Karimi pushed his way through a champagne-sipping crowd of journalists and media representatives at a reception that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, threw at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. 

The festival is one of the industry’s key annual events and a rare opportunity for journalists like Karimi to speak to big tech company representatives directly. 

Karimi found a Meta staff member and, shouting over the crowd, tried to explain to him how all independent voices on Afghanistan are being affected by Facebook’s poorly thought-out policy that seems to indiscriminately label all mentions of the Taliban as hate speech and then summarily remove them. He explained that Facebook is an essential platform for people stuck in the Taliban-imposed information vacuum and that blocking those voices benefits first and foremost the Taliban itself. The Meta representative listened and asked Karimi to follow up. Karimi did – twice – but never heard back. 

As Karimi was pleading with one Meta employee, I cornered another one across the crowded reception hall, to deliver a similar message from a different part of the world. A friend working for an independent television station in Georgia had asked me to pass on that her newsroom had lost a staggering 90% of its Facebook audience since they began covering the war in Ukraine.  The station, called Formula TV, made countless attempts to contact Meta but received no response. 

Was there anything these Meta staffers could do to help?

‘Facebook pages of real, independent journalism are dying’

“We went from reaching 2 million people to reaching 200,000,” Salome Ugulava, Formula’s chief digital editor told me. The drop followed a warning they received from Facebook after its algorithm flagged a quote from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as hate speech. The post, which she showed me, was merely a translation into Georgian of a post by Zelensky himself. 

This seemingly technical error caused the station to lose 90% of its audience, but also a chunk of its revenue. “Monetization has been suspended. It is a harsh punishment,” Ugulava said. 

The Tbilisi-based opposition TV station Mtavari saw similar declines when it ran a story about Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian volunteer paramilitary group that has been defending Mariupol, where some of the worst atrocities of the war have occurred. Facebook removed the story on grounds that it was “a call to terrorism.” The Azov Battalion is controversial because of the far-right and even neo-Nazi leanings of many of its members, but only Russia categorizes it as a terrorist organization. 

“We were already under constant attacks from Georgian government troll farms, but since the invasion Russian-backed organizations began reporting us too. Azov incident was one of many,” Nika Gvaramia, the channel’s Director General told me. 

Gvaramia says many of the Ukraine-related stories that Mtavari posted in early March were taken down by Facebook in early April, weeks after they were first published and seen by millions of people. The Mtavari team has good reason to believe they are being reported by Kremlin-backed accounts. 

“The worst part is that there is no warning mechanism, there is no obvious criteria for these takedowns and appeals to Facebook take weeks … Facebook pages of real, independent journalism are dying,” Gvaramia said. His channel’s engagement, he said, dropped from 22 million in early March to 6 million in early April.  

For a place as small as Georgia (population 3.5 million) the consequences of these takedowns are huge. Like in many countries outside the West, Facebook has become the nation’s virtual public square – the place where people gather to discuss and debate their future. This discussion is existential in Georgia, because the future is so precarious: twenty percent of the country is already occupied by Russia, and many fear that Ukraine’s invasion will push Georgia further into Moscow’s embrace. Kremlin-funded disinformation campaigns have put independent media covering the situation under massive pressure. When media outlets like Formula TV and Mtavari disappear from people’s Facebook feeds, the very ideas of liberal democracy disappear from the public debate. 

“The power that Facebook has is scary. The way it is using it is even scarier,” a Russian journalist, who did not want to be named due to security concerns, told me. Her account was suspended after she was reported to Facebook by numerous accounts accusing her of violating community standards. She suspects the accounts that reported her were working on behalf of the Russian government. Like Karimi, who says Facebook is helping the Taliban, she says Facebook’s policies are aiding Vladimir Putin’s agenda. 

“Silicon Valley is helping Putin to win the information war. It is insane and it has to stop,” she said “But we don’t know how to tell them this, because it is impossible to speak to them directly.”

None of this is new

Meta has been accused of promoting hatred and disinformation around the world before, from Nigeria to Palestine to Myanmar where the company was famously accused of fueling the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. And experts in regions like the Middle East and Africa have noted that even though tech platforms are failing to adequately address the content crisis around Ukraine, they have brought a faster and more robust public response in this case than in places like Syria or Ethiopia. 

With each new crisis, Meta has made new promises to better account for all the cultural and linguistic nuances of posts around the world. The company even put out an earnest-sounding human rights policy last year that focused on these issues. But there’s little evidence that its practices are actually changing. Facebook does not disclose how many moderators it employs, but estimates suggest around 15,000 people are charged with vetting content generated by Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users globally. 

“It is like putting a beach shack in the way of a massive tsunami and expecting it to be a barrier,” one moderator told me. I cannot name him, or say where he is, because Facebook subcontractors operate under strict non-disclosure agreements. But he and other people with access to moderators told me that the Ukraine war is the latest proof that Facebook’s content moderation model does more harm than good. 

Facebook moderators have 90 seconds to decide whether a post is allowed to go up or not. From Myanmar to Ukraine and beyond, they are dealing with incredibly graphic images of violence or highly contextual speech that typically doesn’t line up with Facebook’s byzantine rules on what is and is not allowed. The system, in which posts live or die depending on a quick decision of an overworked, underpaid and often traumatized human, takes a toll on the mental health of the moderators. But it is also damaging the health of the information ecosystem in which we live. 

“The weight of this war is falling on outsourced moderators, who have repeatedly sounded the alarm,” says Martha Dark, director of Foxglove Legal, a UK-based tech justice non-profit group that is working on issues of mistreatment of Facebook content moderators around the world.   

“Despite its size and its colossal profits, Ukraine has shown that Facebook's systems are totally unequipped to deal with all-out information war,” says Dark. “No one is saying moderating a war zone is an easy task. But it's hard to shake the sense that Facebook isn't making a serious effort at scaling up and fixing content moderation – because to do so would eat into its profit margins. That's just not good enough,” Dark said.

Facebook has pledged to reply to my questions about the cases of Shafi Karimi from Afghanistan and FormulaTV in Georgia in the coming days – I’ll report on it as soon as I hear back. In the meantime, my contacts there offered this response, which is attributed to a “Meta spokesperson”: 

"We're taking significant steps to fight the spread of misinformation on our services related to the war in Ukraine. We've expanded our third-party fact-checking capacity in Russian and Ukrainian, to debunk more false claims. When they rate something as false, we move this content lower in Feed so fewer people see it, and attach warning labels. We also have teams working around the clock to remove content that violates our policies. This includes native Ukrainian speakers to help us review potentially violating Ukrainian content. In the EU, we've restricted access to RT and Sputnik. Globally we are showing content from all Russian state-controlled media lower in Feed and adding labels from any post on Facebook that contains links to their websites, so people know before they click or share them.”

It’s true that the company has deplatformed some of the most prominent sources of Russian disinformation, such as Russian state broadcasters. And we can’t know what impact some of these other measures are having, due to the company’s lack of transparency about its actual day-to-day content moderation decisions. But the real power of Facebook, which is arguably the most potent communication tool in the world at the moment, lies in organic, peer-to-peer shares and that’s where so much disinformation flourishes. 

“We can no longer cover the war,” says the Georgian journalist Salome Ugulava. “Our followers are not seeing us on their feeds.” 

It’s not just Facebook: Twitter is facing similar accusations of doing a terrible job policing its platform when it comes to Ukraine. “You are failing,” tweeted journalist Simon Ostrovsky who is covering Ukraine for PBS Newshour. “Hundreds of sock puppet accounts attack every tweet that counters the Kremlin narrative, meanwhile you fall for coordinated campaigns to suspend genuine accounts.”

This story originally ran in our our weekly Disinfo Matters newsletter that looks beyond fake news to examine how manipulation of narratives, rewriting of history and altering our memories is reshaping our world. We are currently tracking the war in Ukraine. Sign up here.

The post How Silicon Valley is helping Putin and other tyrants win the information war appeared first on Coda Story.

Maria Sonevytsky’s work has something to say about that. She has been studying Ukrainian national identity and Ukraine’s historical music for years. A professor of anthropology and music at Bard College, she is the author of Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine. In a conversation edited for length and clarity, she spoke to me about how Ukraine’s musical inheritance can provide context and insight into Ukrainian history and national identity.

Tell me about your work in Ukrainian music and how it helps shed light on the current situation.

I decided that I wanted to divide my research between Crimea and western Ukraine.

And what I started observing was that many people had very complex feelings about whether they wanted Ukraine to go in the direction of the European Union or Russia. Everyone I spent time with was not in favor of going toward Russia, but they were also critical of the European Union. They didn't have simple ideas that Europe was some sort of utopia. I saw this expressed constantly through music.

My project started because Ruslana, a Ukrainian pop star, won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2004. It was a really big deal for some people. They believed, “Uh-huh! Finally, we can show that Ukraine is part of Europe.” For others, it was very embarrassing. They said, “Eurovision is kitsch, and this is not how we want our Ukraine to be defined.” 

It became a very fascinating glimpse into just how complex it is to think about how people want to position themselves. So music became a lens through which I could view how culture was, in some ways, imagining a future for Ukraine.

Why is this important? 

I think that's so important, especially when we're talking about traditional music. I'm usually writing about some sort of hybrid music that uses a combination of traditional gestures with popular music forms. But even when we're talking about just traditional music, these are all also forward-facing. They're expressing a wish for the future — even if just a wish for the survival of a past. 

Right now, what we're seeing is not only a denial that Ukraine has a past, but a rejection on the part of the Russians that there could be a Ukrainian future. And these musicians are saying, “No, we have a past and we are projecting it also into the future.”

It's not a simple history. It's a very complicated history. Ukraine has had a very complicated relationship to its project of statehood, as do many other countries around the world, including Russia. But Ukrainian history exists and we can actually hear it if we listen to the history of Ukrainian music.

Your book discusses how music got dragged into Russia’s propaganda on Ukrainian nationalists and Nazis. Could you tell me more about that?

There's one chapter in the book about the Maidan revolution, the band called The Dakh Daughters, and their performance of a song, that they did not want to claim had politics, but they performed it during the revolution and sure enough, the Russian internet immediately started calling them neo-Nazis, neo-fascists.

This is about how Ukrainians are not allowed the possibility of existing as anything but nationalists, that Russian propaganda does not let them have any agency outside of nationalism. And the Dakh Daughters are a clear example of a group that actually wanted so much not to be pigeonholed as Ukrainian musicians. They wanted to be just musicians, they didn't want to have to serve the state. But they did want to show their support. They ended up performing this quite apolitical song and immediately were called neo-fascists. 

If you know the Russian playbook, this is a very old strategy, it goes back to the Russian Empire and it was prevalent in the Soviet Union as well.

What has surprised you the most in your study of how Ukrainian musicians think about Ukraine’s history?

I'm writing a book on the late-Soviet Ukrainian rock scene and specifically in Kyiv. And I'm writing about the first Ukrainian punk rock band to sing in Ukrainian, Vopli Vidopliassova. 

They are all Russian-speaking, and as one of the members told me, they all grew up in the "Russkiy Mir” [Russian world]. They started singing in Ukrainian, and they claimed that at the time, it really wasn't a political statement. They just thought it sounded cool. And they were making fun, in some ways, of the stereotypes of Ukrainians as these kind of hopeless hillbillies.

Most of the band members have now switched to speaking only in Ukrainian for different reasons. In one interview, [a band member] came to understand himself as a formerly colonized subject in a way that he did not understand himself to be in the 1980s. In the 1980s, he really just thought of himself as a punk rocker in Kyiv and wasn't really that concerned about Ukrainian identity. But in the 1990s, when he started learning about the history of Ukrainian poets who had been repressed and reading the books that had been censored, he started understanding that some of this internalized feeling of inferiority had been part of a colonial campaign.

This has been really poignant for me, to hear these people as they learn and understand the degree to which Ukraine has been targeted by deliberate campaigns that say they have no history of their own, that they have no culture of their own.

I've always asked myself, is it fair to think about Ukrainians as colonized people? There's no question they were in the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yes, these were colonized peoples, but they were divided between empires. The Soviet Union is a much more complicated case. It wasn't exactly an empire. And of course, Ukrainians were central in leading it at times.

What songs have you been thinking about as you watch the war in Ukraine?

One of the songs I've been thinking about a lot lately is the song “1944” by Jamala, a singer with Crimean Tatar heritage and who has crossed the border with her children, but whose husband has remained behind to defend their home.

When she wrote and performed it in 2016, it was really a plea to understand the plight of Crimean Tatars after the forced occupation of Crimea. And now it's become a plea to understand the plight of the whole of Ukraine.

I've been thinking a lot about Taras Kompanichenko, who has been a key figure in the revival of 17th-to-19th century repertoires. He is now serving in the army and playing music to boost morale for Ukrainian soldiers.

And I'm thinking about very ordinary musicians, non-celebrities, who are playing music on the streets of Odesa or on the streets of Kyiv in defiance of this unjust war. I think these ordinary acts of defiance, these people playing music on the streets as they're surrounded by barricades and sandbags, have been incredibly moving to watch.

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In the last week, he’s been in some truly bizarre corners of the internet. He’s unearthed a network of QAnon influencers who believe Trump’s pronunciation of “China” is really a secret message about Ukrainian involvement in the origins of Covid-19. He’s drilled down into a conspiracy theory claiming there are U.S.-run bioweapon labs in Ukraine. He’s exposed fake Twitter accounts, like one purportedly owned by a Brisbane realtor that’s likely been hacked and transformed into a “Crypto QAnon Fascist” account.

In a conversation edited for length and clarity, Owen Jones talks about how exposing disinformation plays into the hands of bad actors — but someone’s got to do it.

You spend your life studying disinformation patterns and going down some pretty bizarre internet wormholes. How did you get into this world?

I've always been very fascinated by the notion of deception — of what is true and what is not.  Growing up, my mum had a mental illness that was not diagnosed, but there were delusions involved. And sometimes she’d say things that I knew were demonstrably not true. I think just growing up around that, I became very astute at determining what was far-fetched and what was plausible. I think that subliminally played into it. 

When it comes to the Ukraine invasion, what narratives are you interested in at the moment? 

I’m kind of obsessed with the biolab one right now.

Us too. We’ve been covering the biolab story for years — because the Lugar Lab, an American-run research lab in Georgia, has been the subject of sustained Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns for a long time, claiming it’s really waging germ warfare. How has the biolab conspiracy theory come into play during the Ukraine invasion?

An independent Bulgarian journalist — who has actually made a documentary about the Georgian lab — tweeted that the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv had deleted documents about a biological program that they had. Now these documents are actually available so it wasn’t true, I think there were just some broken links. But it was enough to get over 12,000 retweets. And it was amplified by so many people — crucially, by Chinese diplomats.

Chinese state media also picked it up, asking, “What is the U.S. government trying to hide?” And now QAnon is basically saying that Ukraine created Covid. Every time I talk about QAnon I feel like I’m losing my mind.

If one person tweets a crazy conspiracy theory about a biolab — no one cares, right? You’ll ignore it. But if you have one thousand, two thousand people tweeting, and then state officials, you have to address it as a media organization. And then by doing that you're redirecting resources to discussing something, debunking it, and so on. And suddenly you’re not talking about the invasion of Ukraine or civilian suffering any more. That's part of the success of any propaganda agent, just getting journalists and researchers to redirect their resources.

Do you think we’d be better off if we just didn’t address these conspiracies at all? 

The thing is, we don’t have a choice but to direct resources to it. Because we have to intervene in the information space. Otherwise it would just be a deluge. It’s not like we have control of the information, or can tell the state or bad actors not to use propaganda. Unfortunately, the system that exists is one that facilitates deception. So we do have to step in. 

You’ve got a book coming out in the U.K. on April 28 called Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East, due to be released in the U.S. this summer. At Coda we report on “currents,” and one of these encompasses authoritarian tech. We have our own idea of what that means — but I’m interested in hearing what it means to you. 

I see it exactly as the authoritarian use of tech. I would say if you look at digital authoritarianism generally, it includes surveillance, censorship. But it also includes social manipulation and harassment, targeted persecution.

I think when people think of authoritarianism, it's very state centric — they think of governments using tech. But the authoritarian use of tech is actually multiple actors, both existing in authoritarian regimes and outside them. And the West, or the Global North — whatever you want to call it — comes together to engage in these authoritarian practices too. Pegasus is a good example. Or Lynton Crosby, in London, using Facebook campaigns to whitewash Mohammed Bin Salman. You have these reputable companies in Mayfair, with shiny offices, doing these nefarious kinds of activities.

Tell me a bit more about how disinformation plays a part in authoritarian tech. 

Without the information space, digital authoritarianism is kind of meaningless because I think authoritarianism requires not just coercion, it requires attempts to persuade. You could call it cognitive hacking.

I think deception is often a better term than disinformation. Because deception incorporates the means of distributing that information as well as the content. You could, for example, have one thousand bot accounts spreading something truthful, but because they're bots trying to give the illusion that they're real, it's still deceptive. So I think deception is a better, broader term.

How would you describe the traction that the propaganda offensive against Ukraine has gained? 

I'd say for the first week or two, the dominant narrative was very clear. It was “Russia has invaded Ukraine. This is egregious. This is horrible.” It felt like everyone was on a similar page. 

Then we started to see the #IStandWithPutin hashtag creeping out — which was heavily pushed by inauthentic accounts. And then the narrative began to divide support for Ukraine. There was a concerted attempt to redirect attention away from Russia and Ukraine, by painting the conflict as Russia versus NATO, Russia versus the West. 

We were seeing people not necessarily being unsympathetic to Ukraine, but redirecting their attention, focusing on Western hypocrisy as opposed to a Russian invasion. 

We're now seeing the right, and the QAnon accounts, embracing a Trumpist legacy of suspicion of Ukraine. And that taps into what they’re interested in — the idea that the U.S. government is complicit in some shady goings on in Ukraine.

And then we’re seeing relative successes like the biolabs narrative. And gradually, the waters are getting muddied.

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As Russian forces maneuver to encircle Ukraine’s capital, Sennik continues posting her ethno-photography for her 43,500 followers but with a new format: a jarring juxtaposition of her pre-war archive alongside the images of war such as bombed out homes and civilian evacuation. “The world I show through my art is being destroyed right now,” Sennik wrote the morning of February 24, the start of the Russian invasion. In a conversation edited for length and clarity, Sennik explained what she is trying to convey today with her photography.

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Can you first tell us about the situation where you are now?

In Kyiv, nearly all the roads have been blocked from the west, the south, partially from the north, but as of today, the city is still not fully surrounded by Russian forces. The only way for Russians to get at us is the open sky. The city is getting hit directly by rocket attacks, apartment buildings are being bombed left and right, residential and private buildings, shopping malls, the city center, the outskirts, all over.

I joined the Territorial Defense on the first day. I was at the enlistment office by lunchtime picking out firearms. The Territorial Defense group is all made up of volunteers. There are other women within our battalion, but I’m the only one in our division. For me this was a logical step because it’s my second military experience. The first time, in 2014, I was part of a volunteer battalion. After this I worked in photography and thought that phase of my life was over. But when you’re woken up in the morning from being bombed you’re left with only one choice. And that’s why I’m here again.

How has the war changed your photography?

Originally it was a way to present Ukrainian culture to the world but now my job is to explain what is happening here. I publish my archival images mixed in with photos that I’ve taken now or photos other eyewitnesses sent to me. I really wanted to use this contrast because I can’t shake off the feeling of having my life stolen from me. When I look back, I realize that I had a wonderful life. I had the chance to do my favorite kind of work that was tied to culture and beauty.

And now I’ve lost all of that. Right now someone is trying to physically destroy that life. Even museums are being bombed. Several of my friends have died already. The world where I used to live is being destroyed around me. I wanted to show that contrast. The peace in Ukraine that was in my photos and what is happening to that peace now.

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One of your most popular recent posts was a series of posed WWII-era images you took of couples in 2013 mixed in with photos taken in recent days of real Ukrainian couples being forced to say goodbye to each other. Why did you share this?

These photos were part of a photo shoot from the spring 2013, so even before the revolution. I was later reminded of them almost a year later when the first volunteer battalions were heading to the east of Ukraine. Young women would come to say goodbye to the men in the same way. 

In 2013, these seemed like scenes from the past, from a history that cannot be repeated. How can there be a war again? How can these kinds of farewells be said again?

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So much of Russia’s propaganda and Putin’s remarks have fixated on denying the existence of distinct Ukrainian identity and culture. Do you feel like your work counteracts that false narrative?

I worked for a long time in political communications but my art was never meant for propaganda messaging. I do it just because I love it.

The fact that it can have this effect, that’s not because of me. Beauty is the only language everyone can understand because it can touch all of us. Beauty and this contrast that I’m presenting has allowed me to reach lots of people.

Who are you now trying to reach with your photography?

Ukrainians are already motivated. I don’t think we can possibly get any more motivated than we are today. Ukraine must be the most united country in the world right now. But this war has gone on for three weeks and the world’s attention is already waning. I want to show foreigners what is happening, to show them who we are, what kind of beautiful people we have and how we are saving that. But to also show people what is being done to us: videos of people being killed, of children who have been killed. 

Sometimes people write to me and they say they support me but it’s really difficult to look at the images I am sharing. And I understand them completely. Not a single psychologically normal person should feel ok looking at this. But this is our reality and I’m obliged to share it.

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There is a massive flow of information, videos, and photography from Ukraine. How do you decide what to publish?

What’s the point in publishing photos of dead Russian soldiers when you can instead show the kind of destruction they have caused: ruined homes, civilians evacuating while being shot at, bombings. My role here is to record this and to create an Instagram account of war crimes. 

I don’t try to overstate what I’m doing, I think it is a drop in the ocean, but if it helps tell a few hundred more people about what is happening then that’s great.

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What do people misunderstand about this war?

I think generally people outside Ukraine believe that this war with Russia is a problem just for Ukraine. But that’s not true. Aggressive governments with dysfunctional presidents are problems not just for neighboring countries but for the whole world. 

TV hosts on propaganda channels across Russia are already drawing up maps of what the Baltic states would look like if Russia grabs more territory. We can laugh it off, but half a year ago those maps were of Ukraine and look at what’s happening around us today.

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After the war, how do you think this period in your life will affect your photography?

I don’t think I’ll be photographing war themes in the future. Probably the opposite. I’ve had enough. Instead I’ll focus on things that are absolutely peaceful and beautiful. Because we will all get our fill of war now.

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"He's running away from this Buk I think — or maybe to that side?" asks one drone operator, watching a black speck — a Russian soldier — on the screen. "Maybe something fell off and he went to check what it was. He's just running back and forth," says another, as the speck changes direction.

“Position” flashes at the top of the screen, before the Buk explodes into a voluminous cloud of black smoke. Applause and excited cheers break out in the control room. "Finally!" says one operator. "What fireworks," adds another.

The successful hit was one of a growing number of drone strikes conducted by the Ukrainian military against Russian targets using Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones. The footage, shared by the Ukrainian defense ministry and immediately spread online, has only come to enhance the idea of the drones stealthy power, sneakily bringing destruction to lines of Russian tanks or ammunition from afar and then displaying the grainy evidence for all to see. The Ukrainian embassy in Turkey tweeted footage of a Bayraktar TB2 exploding a column of Russian artillery in a white sparkling cloud alongside a phrase that roughly translated means “thank God for Bayraktar.”

This kind of publicity is a boon for Turkey, which has long held ambitions as a global drone superpower, eagerly demonstrating their use of this homegrown technology across the world, from Nagorno-Karabakh to Libya and northern Syria. But through drone sales, Turkey is also developing an international reputation as a country that will step in with easily available, cheaper and reliable drone technology where other nations like the United States enforce export controls, or at the very least ask questions about how their technology is used. 

Ukraine has transformed if not rehabilitated the image of Bayraktar TB2s, with the drones now seen as an essential tool in the fight for democracy on the edge of Europe rather than a flying predator employed in asymmetrical warfare or by governments willing to use them to attack civilians. 

Part of this transformation rests on the drones’ ability to record strikes, making them an essential eye in the sky for Ukraine’s information war as much as their aid to action on the ground. Though Ukrainian forces are clearly maximizing the drones’ effectiveness, taking out columns of Russian artillery or even using cheaper commercial drones to help them aim at enemy lines, Ukrainian authorities have so far declined to release clear data on how many times they have successfully employed Bayraktar TB2s or precisely where the strikes took place, including when asked for this story.  

Ukraine’s drone arsenal numbers at most fifty. Yet the drones are the only piece of military hardware that comes with an inbuilt camera, setting them apart from the Javelins and MANPADS also used to fend off the Russian advance, and allowing Ukraine to display footage of the strikes to boost morale and galvanize international support for their fight.

Turkish military analyst Arda Mevlutoglu compared the drones' fight against larger Russian equipment to a David versus Goliath battle. "This might be the reason why the Ukrainian military gives them so much emphasis in their public relations campaign," he said. "Footage showing destroyed equipment, particularly sophisticated equipment or slain enemy troops multiply the psychological effect. Even if not much equipment is destroyed, the dissemination of such imagery through social media creates a snowball effect, which is very useful for propaganda warfare."

Aided in no small way by Clash Report, a Twitter account with 169,000 followers believed to have links to the Turkish military due to its unique access to battle footage, suddenly the name Bayraktar has become a rallying cry for Ukrainian freedom. The Kyiv zoo named a baby lemur Bayraktar, days before Ukrainian police forces named a German Shepherd puppy "Special Bayraktar," for his ability to bark and warn others of incoming explosions. The Ukrainian Land Forces composed an ode to the drones, featuring spoken word praise over a kaleidoscope of jingly electronic xylophone sounds.

Clash Report took what was previously a low quality video accompanying the song, showing a Bayraktar TB2 drone cruising over a blue sky, and tweeted a replacement showing footage of drone strikes timed to the beat, an instant viral hit.

Sinan Ulgen, director of the Istanbul think tank the Center for Economics and Security Policy, labeled the drones a “matter of national prestige,” for Turkey, one so domestically popular that it transcends contentious local politics. The drone program, he explained, has helped Turkey propagate an international image as a technologically astute and ambitious power that has successfully manufactured a cheap but highly effective piece of technology. “There, Turkey can compete in the big leagues,” he said.

Bayraktar TB2s are estimated to cost $1 million to $2 million each, up to a tenth of the price of a U.S.-produced Reaper drone. “There are more able drones in the world, these are not the most capable. There are also cheaper ones,” Ulgen said. But with its drone program, “Turkey has found and developed a soft spot in terms of combining price and capability.” 

This makes Turkish drones cheaper than American or Israeli drones, but more capable than Chinese drones, according to Ulgen. “It’s also one of the armed drones that now boasts considerable warfare experience, it has a proven track record,” he said.

Turkey, a NATO member with ties to both Russia and Ukraine, has been trying to navigate how to promote the drones’ success without angering Russia, even after Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visited Kyiv in early February and expanded an agreement to manufacture Bayraktar drones in Ukraine. Turkey imports almost a third of its natural gas from Russia, depends on Moscow for foreign currency inflows, and even provoked U.S. sanctions in 2017 by purchasing Russia’s S400 missile defense system. The threat of any kind of backlash from Moscow looms over the Turkish government, which is trying to manage the fallout from an ongoing economic crisis that has seen the lira lose half its value in just one year. Foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu put it bluntly in a recent interview with Turkish television: “We can't afford to take sides," he said. 

Footage of Bayraktar TB2s blowing up columns of Russian targets seems unlikely to smooth the Kremlin’s grievances with Turkey and risk damaging Turkey’s position as a negotiator between the two sides. Deputy Foreign Minister Selim Kiran felt the need to emphasize recently that Turkey's drone sales to Ukraine remain, in his words, private sales not "aid from Turkey."

In 2005, on a bleak airstrip surrounded by cornfields, a young engineer and MIT graduate named Selcuk Bayraktar attempted to convince an assembled group of observers that Turkey could become a great drone power. After providing them with a demonstration of his small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAV's, bumpily taking off and landing on the small runway, he gave a passionate speech arguing that Turkey had the capability to lead the world in drone production if they invested in his vision.

It could all be so simple, he explained, extending his hand in the air as if to show a smooth path to the future. "Turkey can be number one in the world in five years," he declared.

Bayraktar has become something of an Elon Musk figure in Turkey, with a fanbase obsessively following his creations and who view him a technological savant. His work is tightly bound up with his country's ambitions as a global power, particularly a desire to show that it can stand on its own and produce vital technology without depending on weapons imports, particularly from the United States. Bayraktar's prediction about the growing power of drones also turned out to be correct, aided by Turkey's decision to sell his drones to any country willing to purchase them and his 2016 marriage to President Erdogan's youngest daughter.

“The marriage possibly gave them an edge in the end phase, in terms of becoming a client of the Turkish government, but also having the strong international backing of the government,” said Ulgen, the analyst.

Bayraktar’s success has not always been well received internationally, including at his alma mater. Physicist Max Tegmark provoked outrage in Turkey earlier this year when he said of Bayraktar: "I'm ashamed we trained him here at MIT." Baykar, the company which manufactures Bayraktar TB2s and where Bayraktar is chief technology officer, did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

Bayraktar’s ambitions have long proved in sync with those of his father-in-law, who has frequently declared that his aim is to see Turkey manufacture its own technology and eschew any reliance on partners like the United States. “Our goal is a fully independent Turkey in the defense industry,” Erdogan declared earlier this year at the launch of a new ship operated by the country’s intelligence services.

Turkey began by using Bayraktar's drones for strikes targeting Kurdish militants in northern Iraq and later Syria, where observer organizations such as Airwars found that strikes have also claimed civilian lives. Turkey states that in northern Syria alone, the drones clocked in 1,129 strikes over four months in 2018. The strikes quickly formed part of what some analysts labeled Turkish "techno nationalism," fuelled by heavily edited YouTube videos of the drones taking off from airstrips in southern Turkey, followed by drone footage filmed over the mountainous region of northern Iraq.

Domestically-produced drones, particularly TB2s, have since formed a central pillar of Turkish efforts to reshape warfare and alter the outcome of regional conflicts to see results favorable to Ankara.

In April 2020, opposing forces loyal to the Libyan warlord General Khalifa Haftar accused militia groups in Tripoli of using a Turkish drone to strike a food convoy, killing at least five civilians. In the same year, Tukey’s decision to provide Azerbaijan with Bayraktar TB2s enabled Baku to reclaim territory from Armenia in a war over the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh. International organizations opposed Turkey’s drone sales to Azerbaijan which reportedly updated online videos of its drone strikes and broadcast them on screens throughout the capital.

A report by the Armenian National Committee of America examining Bayraktar technology found American, Canadian, British, German, Swiss and French components, including American radio manufacturer Garmin, which responded that the technology was intended for civilian use only and pledged to prevent its further misuse. Last year, Canada withdrew export licenses to Turkey for optical sensors and targeting systems made by a Canadian company, citing the technology had been used inside Bayraktar TB2s deployed in Nagorno-Karabakh without consent.

But these controversies have not dented sales. "What armies want to do is use technology that's battle tested so they're not the ones trying to debug along the way,” said Sarah E. Krebs of Cornell University, a political scientist and former U.S. Air Force veteran who has worked with drones.

Qatar and Morocco acquired TB2's, while Tunisia recently acquired a small drone fleet from TAI, another Turkish drone company, despite a tense relationship with Turkey. Ethiopia, which has bought several kinds of drones including Bayraktar TB2s, is accused of using the drones in attacks that killed dozens of civilians. An investigation by POLITICO found photos of fragments of the MAM-L bomb exclusively carried by Bayraktar TB2s at the site of an attack on a school holding internally displaced people, including children.

While Bayraktar was facing scrutiny about the use of his drones in Nagorno-Karabakh, a burgeoning new Eastern European market was forming. Ukraine reportedly bought six Turkish drones and three ground control stations in 2019, but last year dramatically upped their demand and bought another twenty-four. That year, Poland became the first NATO member to purchase Bayraktar TB2s. As Russian forces began massing on Ukraine's borders, other countries concerned by Russian advances such as Lithuania and Latvia both publicly mulled purchasing Turkish drones.

By last year, Bayraktar TB2s had acquired an international reputation as a cheap and deadly piece of technology, primed to become a pillar of Ukraine’s successful war narrative. Ukraine even paraded a TB2 through the streets of Kyiv during independence day celebrations last August, and later broadcast footage of a lone drone strike on a Russian howitzer, a large artillery weapon, in Donbas in October — the first salvo in their efforts to use the drones as messaging and not just weaponry.

Russia’s defense ministry began seemingly chasing the success of Ukraine’s drone videos weeks into their invasion, publishing heavily edited black-and-white footage that they claimed showed two of their helicopters launching missile strikes on Ukrainian military equipment. This included brief scenes showing the attack helicopters honing in on their targets, a fun-house mirror version of the videos produced by the Ukrainian side.

Russia, which possesses its own domestically-produced drone army estimated to number around 500, seems to have been caught unawares by Ukraine's drone fleet. "The Russians have been an amazing mix of arrogant and inept," said Peter Warren Singer of the New America Foundation, who has written extensively about how drones are reshaping warfare. Russian forces, he said, assumed a quick march towards Kyiv and so delayed deploying air power against the drones, initially giving them space to operate. "So there was open air for the Ukrainians to fly drones that move slower than a World War One biplane," he said. 

Drones like Bayraktar TB2s, Singer said, allow one side to quickly acquire an instant air force without the risk of human injury or the time required to train pilots and risk more expensive equipment. They have become part of Turkish efforts to show the many unconventional ways to deploy drones, normalizing their use beyond counterinsurgency or attacks on limited targets. “The uses shift from being counterterrorism, going after individual human targets, to using them in civil wars and conventional wars. That’s where Turkey was one of the key actors leading the way, because that’s how they’re utilizing it.”

Bayraktar himself, after tweeting a message of support for Ukraine, seems content. He recently posted a video showing the successful test flight of a new, far larger UAV, the Akinci B while Baykar has boasted of a design for an unmanned fighter aircraft. His drones may soon have company in Ukraine, after President Joe Biden announced that the United States would send drones to Kyiv, likely U.S.-made Switchblades. 

"What was once abnormal or considered science fiction is like the new normal of war," said Singer. Turkey’s rise to dominance as an international drone power may not change warfare alone, but it is increasingly showing how countries can deploy drones in battle while using footage of their strikes to wage war over the narrative.

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TAULT, a non-profit literary agency and translation house, works with dozens of prominent Ukrainian authors and translators to spread Ukrainian contemporary literature in the English-speaking world. When Russia invaded last month, TAULT launched a project to publish essays and dispatches translated from Ukrainian.

I asked Kate Tsurkan, a translator, editor and the associate director at TAULT, for her recommendations of first-person accounts written by Ukrainian writers to better understand the war. Here are the five books available as English translations that she recommended.

1. “Absolute Zero” by Artem Chekh. Translated by Olena Jennings and Oksana Lutsyshyn.

Kate Tsurkan: “He is a writer but he joined the army in 2015 and this book is based off of a post that he started writing on Facebook during the war, and he transformed it into a book afterwards.

There's a very funny episode where in his military barracks, they adopt a kitten who has cerebral palsy and they fight over who will cuddle with the cat until he starts pissing in all of their sleeping bags and causing havoc for them. But he also has horrible stories like one when a husband tells his wife the things that they see on the front lines and she dies from a heart attack. It's filled with very interesting standalone anecdotes that portray the banality and the grotesque horror of war and how it affects not only soldiers, but people who are trying to get updates from back home. Chekh actually went back. He enlisted. He is on the frontlines again right now, unfortunately.”

2. “Mondegreen” by Volodymyr Rafeenko. Translated by Mark Andryczyk.

“When we are talking about first-person perspectives or memoir, I think we have to expand our perception and understanding of that because a lot of writers use their personal experiences to explore the world through fiction, for example. Volodymyr Rafeenko is from Donetsk. He was an internally displaced person when the war started.

It's very autobiographical, or an autofiction, we could say, because this is a book about a man from Donetsk who gets displaced because of the war and ends up in Kyiv, much like Rafeenko himself. The text is very visceral. It's interwoven with not only his memories of Donetsk before the war, but of his ancestors who had to deal with Russian aggression. And it deals on a large level with language, because this is the first novel that Volodymyr Rafeenko wrote in Ukrainian. Prior to that, he wrote several novels in Russian. He starts to explore not only the isolation that one feels when you are forced to flee your home, but also the isolation one feels when you start to switch from one language to another. And along with that from one culture, one mentality, to another.” 

3. “Apricots of Donbas” by Lyuba Yakimchuk. Translated by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky & Svetlana Lavochkina.

“I think poetry can also be very autobiographical, in a sense. Yakimchuk is from Luhansk, and she became very famous for this poetry collection. It was released by Lost Horse Press to great acclaim. Yakimchuk's poetry is very interesting because it deals with a very heavy topic about military combat, about death, war, violence, but she uses very feminine language, sometimes even rather childlike language, to offer this visceral look into war. She's absolutely one of the greatest poets, I think, in Ukraine today.”

4. “The Country Where Everyone's Name is Fear” by Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky.

“This is a poetry selection that Ilya Kaminsky, the famous poet, edited and the Khersonsky couple really explore the ideas of propaganda, of relations between Ukraine and Russia, of this historical roots of the conflict and how the trauma from decades, even centuries ago still influences relations between Ukraine and Russia today. This is also an example where the autobiographical makes its way into poetry.” 

5. “A New Orthography: Poems” by Serhiy Zhadan. Translated by John Hennessy & Ostap Kin.

“It's from several of Zhadan's recent collections, from several of his recent collections from Ukrainian. He's exploring not just soldiers' perspectives of the war, but that of grave diggers, priests. He has a really empathetic way of looking at the situation because he is from Luhansk himself.”

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The post How Ukrainian writers have experienced the war in Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

As he looked at the sun setting behind the Kremlin walls from a police van, thousands of miles to the west, a prestigious Italian photo exhibition of Gronsky’s work was canceled. “There is a time to firmly affirm the right of peoples to live in peace and a time to open up to dialogue and confrontation, without violence and death being invited to the table,” the exhibition's curators announced.

Like many Russians opposed to the current regime, Gronsky has found himself in an increasingly worrying situation. Outside Russia, businesses and media organizations have stampeded out of the country, halting operations and imports to Russia. The ruble has been crashing. International flights are canceled and visa centers have closed their doors. Inside Russia, the regime has banned words like “war” and “invasion,” censoring the remaining media and intensifying its propaganda campaigns.

Gronsky spoke about art and disinformation in a time of war and the reasons he’s staying put in Russia for now in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

When the exhibit was canceled you said that you were devastated to see art take the blow in this way, but that you understood the motivations behind it. 

As a Russian person I feel powerless, ashamed and furious about everything that's going on. I cannot influence it in any way and I perfectly understand that blame as a result will be put on everything Russian: Russian culture, Russian language and that in the nearest hundred years people will not make films about Nazis, but about awful Russians. Overnight, from being strange, mysterious, aggressive, foolish people we turned into monsters and we will not be able to wash this blame off for a very long time, it's terrible. I am afraid that my son will hide the fact that he is half Russian when he grows up.

How is your work now received abroad?

I have to say I get a huge amount of support from Italy. I get 10 to 15 emails a day with just words of support. I had a group exhibition, a collaboration between the Reggio Emilia region and the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg. It was canceled not because I was Russian, but because all collaborations with Russian state institutions were canceled. But I recently got an email from Reggio Emilia inviting me to the festival as a private artist. I don’t think I can go now. It's really important to distinguish between Russian aggression, the Russian state, Russian artists, and Russian culture. 

Meanwhile back at home there is huge pressure, censorship, and mass detentions of protesters — which have included you.

It's not the first time I've been detained at a rally, but it's nasty. When I showed up, I shouted out “No to war!” I was immediately grabbed by my arms and legs, and dragged. I still have this big scratch on my face. I was held for 12 hours at the police station. On March 16 there will be a trial and I will most likely be given a rather large fine.

There’s this feeling of powerlessness. It’s clear that I haven't changed anything [in Russia] but it's impossible not to go out. There are no other options at all. I can't vote, I can't sign a petition. I have to physically present my body as someone who disagrees because all elections and all polls are rigged. And in order to be seen at least in some way, you have to let your body be beaten, which is humiliating, but there is no other option in Russia today.

There is another issue that many Russians opposed to the regime face, which is dealing with their relatives who are pro-Putin and pro-war. This is the case in your own family.

My mom thinks I'm a traitor. It's not a joke. It's not an argument like between someone who likes tea and someone who likes coffee. It's a huge shock to her, despite that for the last 10 years we were more or less aware of the fact that we have different views. I understood that she watches Russian television. She understood that I supported the opposition and we avoided talking about it, but now of course the war has exacerbated it so much that it is a very sharp conflict between us, with tears, with curses. Now everyone understands how serious and catastrophic the situation is. But people who watch Russian TV have this idea that while this is all terrible, we have no other choice. We will fight the whole world, to the last man, but the truth is on our side. The other half of the Russian population have a feeling that we are involved in a heinous crime and will be paying for it all our lives. Our children will be paying the price.

Do you try to make her change her mind? 

It's very difficult, it's such a radical, intransigent position and they have so much rage. The version of events that the state media offers is constructed so that it's not just a version of events, but a complete picture of the world in which everything is explained very clearly. This perfect structure of “the whole world is against us” finds fertile ground in Russia. People believe that we are fighting an evil fascist force, although in fact we are the fascist state that is trying to invade other countries. The amazing thing is that this cheap, talentless construction that's being imposed on everyone — it works, it is amazingly effective. It's a nightmare, how effective this brainwashing is.

Many are urgently leaving Russia. What about you?

I do not plan to flee the country yet. I'm in an advantageous situation, I have little to lose. My parents are in Estonia and they support Putin, but my son is in Latvia. If my child lived in Russia I would have run away a long time ago. I am worried that some of the posts that I wrote on Facebook in support of Ukraine have now become a criminal offense in Russia, but I still decide not to delete them. I don't know, I'm scared but I can't keep quiet either.

It’s scary. When I was a kid we were told a lot about World War II and the Nazi occupation. I often thought about what I would do if I lived at that time and the Nazis invaded and occupied, how I would resist. And now some of those childhood fantasies are coming back again. I just never imagined that I would end up on the fascist side instead of the occupied side. I can't even imagine what's going on and how to put it all together and create a coherent image of the world that I can live in.

No one is bombed in Moscow. Life in general is almost the same as it was a month ago. This is also a shock because I know of the nightmare happening in Ukraine, but my home is fine, the street is fine, the shop offers the same goods, maybe some prices have risen, but there is no sign of a nightmare.

And I see that most people live with the version that this war is some foreign policy nonsense somewhere far away. People honestly believe that after a couple of days everything will go back to normal; it's just some political games. And at the same time there is a feeling that I am inside a cartoon because I've never seen such grotesque evil, such obvious grotesque evil. There’s always been shades of gray everywhere, everything was so complicated and suddenly, for the first time in my life, everything is simple. There is absolute evil that cannot be justified in any way. But I don't know how much strength I have in me, how far I am willing to go in resisting it. I am human after all.

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Or is it a terrible break with that past, the result of Putin’s separation from reality during two years of pandemic isolation?

Analysts, politicians, security and military experts are arguing over it now.

“I wouldn't want to slip into that temptation to look back and say, ‘We've missed something that was obvious all the way along.’ It wasn't obvious,” said Ben Noble, Russian politics professor at University College London and co-author of ​​”Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future?”

“And that's the reason why lots of people are shocked, not only internationally, but also domestically, including members of the political and the economic elite in Russia.”

Precious N Chatterje-Doody, a politics and International Studies professor at Open University, U.K. and author of “Russia Today and Conspiracy Theories” also believes locating a premeditated grand plan in Putin’s actions is wrong. 

“One of the constant features of Putin's state leadership has been that he likes to make things unclear and to have multiple options. And in hindsight, he looks like a master chess player that had this planned all along,” she said. “I don't think that's usually true. I think he's a pragmatist. So he gives himself multiple options. It keeps people guessing. And then he kind of responds to situations as they occur.”

It’s impossible to read Putin’s mind. But Chatterje-Doody, Noble and other political scientists, journalists and writers, who have closely studied the country’s politics, identify political forces in Russia that the Putin government has harnessed to build the authoritarian state we see today. Here’s the breakdown.

Why is Putin claiming there are powerful Nazis in Ukraine?

“It's often misunderstood in the West, especially that Russia never reckoned with its totalitarian past, with mass repressions in the thirties under Stalin, basically a genocide of its own people,” said Olga Khvostunova, a Russian journalist and a researcher at the Institute of Modern Russia, in New York City.

Instead, Putin began emphasizing that Russia is a descendant of the powerful Soviet Union, the regime that saved the world from Nazism and crafted his rhetoric around it, especially during periods when he suffered from political unpopularity, said Khvostunova.

Instead of offering a unifying vision of the future that could lead to better post-Soviet Russia, Putin recycled the past. “What he offered as a unifying platform for the Russians was the vision of the past, which is, by the way, a very significant part of the fascist ideology — the great past that we need to restore,” said Khvostunova.

Putin’s campaign focused on glorifying the Soviet regime’s victory of Nazism, but distorted or minimized the history of mass repressions and massacres.

“It's basically the idea that Soviet soldiers paid for world freedom from Nazis and with their own blood, and this is used as a kind of constant refrain. It's like a key feature of contemporary Russian national identity,” said Chatterje-Doody.

Deflecting contemporary events onto World War II tropes also has been a key part of Putin’s narrative around the Ukraine invasion. Like most effective political propaganda, it has resonated at times because it contains a grain of truth. In the 2014 pro-democracy protests in Kyiv that ousted a pro-Russian president and in the subsequent war in the eastern Donbas region, military units aligned with neo-Nazism, like the Azov Battalion, were a part of Ukraine’s National Guard. In the 2019 elections, Ukraine’s far-right couldn’t even gather enough votes to enter parliament, and a Jewish comedian was elected president in a landslide victory. 

“What better way to weave doubt about the prevailing narrative in the West than to pick genuinely true bits of information and make them seem more significant than they are,” said Chatterje-Doody.

Strengthening the state against foreign interference

Since 2012, Russia has a law that allows the government to label NGOs and individuals receiving funds from abroad as “foreign agents,” subjecting them to reporting their every purchase at stores.

Informing this legislation is a foreign interference narrative that holds outside powers responsible for destabilizing the country.

“By claiming that the domestic opposition are traitors, the authorities can turn around and say, ‘you’re members of the opposition, but you are acting as agents of the West. You are traitors. You're not members of the loyal opposition,’” Noble, the University College London professor, explained. 

But it is in the last couple of years that the law has been applied much more aggressively against journalists and independent Russian newsrooms like Meduza, TV Rain and Mediazona.

Noble said the underlying message to the Russian populace is a powerful one. “You are not a critical independent journalist pointing out real problems in the country. You are creating false narratives and you are being paid and supported by people in the West. And the goal, your goal and those of your paymasters, the puppeteers, is to undermine the country.”

Protecting ‘traditional values’

The government’s repressive turn crystallized in campaigns against the LGBTQ community, portraying them as liberals out to destroy “traditional family values.” In 2013, Putin criminalized “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” 

Putin’s “anti-wokeness” ramped up support among right-wing and conservative politicians and influencers internationally. Russia has become the important power behind the World Congress of Families — a network of right-wing Christians opposing same-sex marriage and abortion. Putin has strong ties with far-right European politicians including Marine Le Pen, of the National Rally party in France, former Italian deputy prime minister and leader of Italian far-right League party Matteo Salvini, and Milos Zeman, the president of Czech Republic.

“It's quite a savvy, communicative strategy in a lot of ways because this anti-political correctness or anti-wokeness movement is actually gaining a lot of ground in the West, especially online,“ Chatterje-Doody said. “And when you look at how the Russian regime tries to use the online environment — sowing seeds of dissent by using particular small facts and weaving them into something bigger — this is a really big social debate it can get involved in.”  

Understanding the arc of Putin’s thinking provides some clarity on current events, according to Sam Greene, the director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London.

“It is about understanding how it is that Vladimir Putin came to be in a position where this war makes sense to him — it doesn't make sense to anybody else but it makes sense to him,” Greene said. “It also helps explain why it's so difficult for ordinary Russians, who don't like the war, to do anything about it.” 

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Everyone should answer the question: what do we want? To continue supporting the fascist regime in Ukraine, which is hazing its people with propaganda, just like the Germans did before World War Two. Or we finally install peace, putting an end to the ongoing war that has been happening for eight years, and saving our beloved country. 

Across seven time zones, in Moscow, teachers received detailed instructions on how to talk about the country’s invasion of Ukraine, now in its fifth day. The instructions were so detailed, in fact, that it gave exact answers to the possible questions their students may ask:  

Q: Why is the war happening?

A: NATO enlargement and its approach to Russia’s borders is a threat to all of us. There are sad cases of Iraq, Libya and Syria. What’s more, Ukraine could create nuclear weapons. Considering the current regime in that country it’s a direct threat to Russia.

Russia’s government started its first attempts to control the education narrative a few days before the invasion when a 24-year-old teacher in a regional school woke up to an unusual message in one of her WhatsApp groups.

“We ask you to conduct a special class between 24 and 25th of February on this topic,” the message from the school administration said. It linked to Vladimir Putin’s speech in which he called Ukraine an “inalienable part” of Russian history and said Russians and Ukrainians as people “bound by blood.” In this televised address, he said parts of Ukraine needed to be defended from an impending “genocide” and warned Ukraine’s exceptional levels of corruption had to be dealt with.

The regional minister of education had signed a letter of instruction to teachers stating that the main objective of the special class is “to instill patriotism and pride for the country.” The letter was soon shared on social media. In Crimea, the Ukrainian region annexed by Russia in 2014, the ministry of education replicated the same objectives.

Teachers in at least seven other regions of Russia were sent similar instructions to conduct a special class to indoctrinate schoolchildren with Putin’s arguments for the Ukraine invasion, either via official letters sent to school principals or informally via chats with individual teachers. Local media outlets have reported the special classes are to begin March 1.

“History is happening before our eyes! The most important historical events, which will enter the history books of many generations of Russians, are taking place,” read a social media post published by the ministry of education in the Kaluzhsky region, which is near Moscow. 

The instructions have met with immediate resistance from teachers. “I plan to teach my children as usual. I will not say anything,” said a teacher who asked to be identified by only her first name, Dasha, because she feared she would lose her job for a second time. “I had already lost my job once for signing a petition from teachers, and then there wasn't even a war.” Dasha is not the only dissenting teacher. As of March 1 more than 4,300 teachers from across the country have signed an official address to the government opposing the war. 

The Kremlin has aggressively pushed its messaging not only to schools. It has provided sanctioned language about the war — including that it not to be called a war — to organizations as diverse as newsrooms and theaters across the country. 

Pushback against the Kremlin’s point of view has had consequences. Over the weekend, an independent teachers union shared a screenshot of a message they received from a teacher at a college near Moscow that she had been summoned into a meeting with the school director after signing an online petition. In the Siberian city of Omsk, a university professor was questioned and threatened by federal police after announcing his opposition to the war on social media.

All of which reminds parents of the Soviet era. “My grandmother brought up my mother during the Stalin era with my father locked in the gulag. I was brought up in the Brezhnev era. I always remember my mother's words: never mention in school what we say at home. And I raise my children the same way,” said Yulia, a mother of three in Moscow who declined to state her full name out of fear for her safety.

Controlling the conversation in schools is part of the government’s strategy of tightening censorship and controlling the digital space, and come on the heels of restricting access to social media platforms, passing highly intrusive data collection laws on tech companies, and years of criminal prosecutions for social media behavior, including simply liking a Facebook post the government finds objectionable. 

On February 24, the day Russian forces invaded Ukraine, Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor announced that all Russian media must only publish or broadcast official information on the war provided by the government.

Under government pressure, Facebook took actions against several Russian state media outlets for spreading allegedly false messages about Russia’s invasion. It blocked RIA Novosti for 90 days and removed its access to Facebook Ads. The news agency said it considered Facebook’s decision “another blatant violation of freedom of speech by the American social network” and appealed to Roskomnadzor to resolve the issue. The regulator responded by advising the population to switch to homegrown social media platforms.

“Roskomnadzor is trying to install a military censorship in Russia,” Tikhon Dzyadko, editor-in-chief of Russia’s last independent broadcast news station, Dozhd, wrote on Twitter. Dozhd has been labeled a “foreign agent” by the Russian government and must post warnings about its content.

At least 16 media outlets have been blocked by Roskomnadzor since the start of the war.

On February 25, Russia announced it was limiting access to Meta’s platforms. 

The crackdown has extended to theaters. Mayakovsky Theater, an important cultural center in Moscow, received a government email “to refrain from any comments on the course of military actions in Ukraine,” warning that anyone who chose to make comments critical of the invasion would be “letting the theater down.” Any negative comments would be “regarded as treason against the Motherland,” the message read. 

Elena Kovalskaya, director of the Meyerhold Center, resigned in the face of censorship. She posted on Facebook that “it is impossible to work for a murderer and receive a salary from him.”

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The White House vehemently denied the claim, but the report reinforced the cyberwar threat hovering over the Russian invasion of Ukraine. After Biden announced sanctions against Russia on Tuesday, American officials warned businesses and local governments to brace for the possibility of ransomware attacks, which have been held up as a possible strategy for Russia to blunt the impact of sanctions from the U.S. and Europe. Russia is widely known to be a hotbed of ransomware activity. 

Ransomware attacks rose by more than 60% globally from 2019 to 2020, and nearly 75% of revenue generated from ransomware attacks in 2021 went to Russian-linked hackers, recent analyses have found. Increasingly, ransomware attacks share the same outcomes as disinformation campaigns, spreading social and political instability, fostering chaos, and eroding faith in government and institutions. As Russia mounts a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, is a global cyber conflict on the horizon? 

Richard Forno, director of the graduate cybersecurity program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County discusses the cyber threat landscape in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.  

Everything is obviously moving very quickly. There are reports that the Biden administration was presented with options for cyberattacks against Russia, such as disrupting internet access and shutting off power, which the White House then vehemently denied. How are you thinking about this moment and the cyber threat?

I just published an article about the big picture and what this means for cyber in the United States.  

In general, the big money quote is this shows that cybersecurity, all cybersecurity, is local. It’s not something that happens in a vacuum on the internet in cyberspace. It has local in-purse ramifications. And geopolitics, i.e., the war, the invasion of Ukraine, events around the world can have cyber consequences here at home.

Not just for large companies and pipelines, infrastructures. But for everybody. Whether it’s a home user whose network might get compromised because they’re working from home, or they’re an individual who can’t fill up their gas tank because there’s been a hack of a pipeline and they can’t get fuel to the gas stations. So, there are a lot of consequences that can result from something that started kinetically, with explosions and missiles and tanks, halfway around the world.

There’s been some conversation about if this could kick off a genuine tit-for-tat cyberwar. What do you think?

I kind of cringe at the word cyberwar. It’s kinda catchy, but the reality is that it’s a tool in a nation’s arsenal. Certainly, Russia and the U.S., in some ways, have shown that they’re not afraid to use it. It’s a tool that can certainly be escalated in its use. 

The Russians and Chinese and others have been mapping out our infrastructure for decades precisely to have that knowledge available for situations like this where they might want to escalate.

It could very easily get into a tit-for-tat kind of a situation.

I talked to a cybersecurity expert a few months ago about the risks of geopolitical cyberwar and responding to cyberattacks from other countries in kind, and his position was that it’s very risky because he believes that the U.S.’s defenses around cyber are poor. Do you agree with that?

I totally agree. We, the United States, have always viewed offensive cyber as sort of the cool, sexy aspects of cyber. But cyber defense is kind of routine and boring and an everyday humdrum. It’s not as sexy, not as glamorous. And I think he’s exactly right in this regard. We’ve gotten better over the years, but I think when you look at where the dollars have gone, the interest has gone – political interest – it’s more on the offensive side looking at our adversaries while we continue to have this soft cyber underbelly in our infrastructure. Russia has addressed cyber much more holistically and completely than we have.

Cyber attacks have also targeted Ukrainian government and business websites. Can you explain how they could have effects that ripple outside of the country?

I don’t think it’s one-to-one, like if this happens in Kyiv, this happens in New York. I don’t think that’s the case. One doesn’t necessarily lead to another at a technical level. So Russia launches cyberattacks against the Ukrainian government, banks, etc. Where I see the probability of cyberattacks going beyond Ukraine is if the West retaliates in some way. Then it opens up a Pandora’s box where Russia can say ‘ok, we’re going to come after the U.S., the U.K., other countries and launch cyberattacks that way.’

But if malware is unleashed on Ukrainian companies operating globally, that could cause worldwide damage, couldn’t it?

Oh certainly. If you’re a large multinational company and you’re doing business in Ukraine, you may become targeted intentionally or caught up in an attack and that could have spillover ramifications.

A U.S. official recently warned after the first round of sanctions against Russia that there could be some sort of retaliatory ransomware attacks that could help Russia blunt the impact of sanctions and that’s something companies should be bracing for. Are you concerned about that as well?

Yes. Ransomware continues to be the go-to cyberattack that we’re seeing these days, whether it’s by a criminal group or a nation-state. It would not surprise me to see ransomware attacks launched by Russia or endorsed by Russia. It happened before, in 2015 with the NotPetya attack. Again, that was Russia in Ukraine but it impacted the rest of the world.

Ransomware is one easy attack. I could also see them finding ways to target specific infrastructures, or nodes in infrastructures, to disrupt critical resources. That’s a more labor-intensive approach. With cyber, like with nuclear weaponry, you can’t un-ring the bell. It’s out there.

What do you think is the most responsible thing to be doing at this moment as everything is escalating so quickly for people, businesses, governments, and companies worried about attacks?

The most responsible thing is vigilance. I’ve got a book coming out soon on local government cybersecurity here in the U.S. Nearly one-third of U.S. local governments could not tell you if they’re under attack or have been compromised. That’s pretty scary. You have to be extra vigilant. Not paranoid, but realize that one or two glitches that you didn’t normally expect to see happen, you might want to stop and think is this normal, or am I being caught up in something.

What are you not seeing or hearing discussed in the media in conversations about cybersecurity right now?

What was interesting to me this week is the number of articles and stories in the media talking about cyber. Not just in broad terms but as it affects businesses, and the tone was a little more intimate and personal than I’ve seen similar types of stories during other conflicts over the years. 

You look at places like local governments, hospital systems –they’re soft targets. They don’t have deep pockets to hire large cybersecurity teams to monitor networks. They’re left vulnerable in a situation like this were it to escalate even further.

It’s rare to see a cyber story leading the evening news. And yet there it was, I think it was NBC, a cyber warning. You don’t see that too often. And even with the Colonial Pipeline, it wasn’t starting off with here’s the warning from the government. And the tone conveyed to me a different approach than previous media coverage.

It underscores the level of vulnerability we face as a modern society. Here’s an example. I was at the dentist this morning and my dentist told me that on her way into the office, she stopped off to get gas. There were like 10 other cars ahead of her. This is a panic, or a growing panic. What if a cyberattack shuts down gas distribution? How am I going to fill up my car? That’s where cyber meets the real world.

In our ransomware Big Idea, we talked about how these kinds of attacks create mass panic and that can be an important strategic dimension of these attacks. The impact of attacks is not just practical, it’s also psychological.

Exactly, it all feeds in. Cyber is no longer just hackers but includes very much influence and disinformation using cyber capabilities. That’s been happening in Europe and in Ukraine. It keeps us employed.

I think the ball is kind of in the Russians' court as to what the next steps would be. I would not be surprised to see retaliation of some sort. More economic sanctions were announced this afternoon. There may be some cyber stuff along the way. I don’t know. It’s only 12 hours old. We are in the first innings of this.

The post The threat of ransomware attacks looms over the Russian invasion of Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

The eight-year conflict in eastern Ukraine has often been drowned in disinformation and tainted political narratives. Belorusets set out to correct this. I spoke with her about the importance of telling unheard stories, in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book shows what everyday life has been like for eastern Ukrainian factory workers, florists, manicurists, cosmetologists since 2014. Why did you decide that these fragmentary stories had to be told?

In this tragic situation in eastern Ukraine, violence emerges as an unnatural reality imposed from outside. Discussions usually center around big politics and trying to stop the aggressor. And that's normal. But my work allows me to look at the situation in more detail, to go deeper to the level where the interpersonal is more important than big politics.

I wanted to make this part of reality more visible and reaffirm its right to exist. A right that is very easily overlooked during radical military violence and in international discourse that acts not on behalf of a person, but a continent, country or region.

In one of the stories, “The Stars,” women sheltering in basements decide when it’s safe to go outside based on horoscopes. They don’t know if they are being shelled by Russian-backed militants or the Ukrainian troops and some of them even believe it’s Canada bombing to get the town’s coal. Was the story meant to illustrate the dizzying effect of a constant information war?

In 2014/2015 the Ukrainian media did not know what to do with this catastrophe. The inhabitants of these towns found themselves under attack. And, if before, every single killing of this kind without a trial would have been a crime requiring press and investigation, the new situation was different. People were dying in the streets from shelling, and the media said nothing about these victims, neither Ukrainian nor Russian. Moreover, Russian media began their toxic work of completely distorting the reality, creating numerous contradictory, inconsistent interpretations of events. 

The sharp devaluation of one's own life and these media mirages, media hallucinations, led to all kinds of rumors being spread among the residents of many small towns in Donbas. But most fundamentally, you wished to trust yourself more than any external sources of information. But how do you find your own credibility when there's fire under your feet? This is what my story is about.

Why are most of the protagonists in stories women? 

I didn’t want to bring everything to women’s bodies or women’s voices. But it turned out that the majority of people, whose experience stuck with me or seemed to me important, were women.

Many women were very honest with me exactly because they thought their experience wasn’t as important as that of men and hence so insignificant that talking about it wasn’t even dangerous. The conflict between self-negation and self-expression of those women — these elements seemed very valuable to me while writing.

Yet for me it’s very important to bring this not exclusively to women’s experiences but rather to the experiences that are most often seen among women, the experiences of living through those events as if from the second row of history.

What do people get wrong about how war affects people?

Sometimes, especially in the cities on the frontline, the collateral damage is coming from the Ukrainian side, not only from the Russian side. People live with the constant feeling of danger and incredible unfairness. 

Often people from Kyiv go to these places, like international journalists or people trying to help, and they ask these people what they think about politics. Sometimes they say, "We hate the Russians and the Ukrainians, leave us alone." And these very honest words are often used against them, that they are not patriotic enough, or they're not pro-Ukrainian enough. Maybe they don't understand what the political stakes are, but in my view, it's a very Soviet attitude towards people whose situation is so far from any kind of normalcy that you cannot force them to have some kind of “right” view. 

I think these people are heroes because they are trying to go on with their everyday peaceful life in a war zone. And maybe they can show us all how you can remain a person in a conflict, in the situation telling you, "You are not a human now, you can die every day just because you are crossing the street."

There’s a recurring character in your stories — Andrea. At times she gets very excited about the future but at other times she is very pessimistic about her own life as well as Ukraine’s future, and her presence is always fleeting. What is her role in your book?

The character of Andrea is all about love, about infatuation and connection between two women. She sounds negative and is complaining but complaining is the start of becoming a revolutionary. She is about the relations among different realities in Ukraine, about their capacity to simultaneously hate and love one another. Because in the contexts of such diversity, even mutual dislike can be productive, becoming the part of the exchange, which can be a stage to growth and development.

The post Exploring the everyday lives of the people in eastern Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

Tertishnik’s village was once a backwater, best known for smuggling petrol and cigarettes across the poorly guarded border. But, in 2018, a tall barbed wire fence was erected by Russia along a street named Friendship of Nations, splitting the community into two: Milove in Ukraine and Chertkovo on Russian territory. The smuggling has stopped, and now relatives and neighbors on opposite sides of the street have to travel to border checkpoints to visit each other. 

The divisions in the village, and the country, have imposed a heavy economic and social cost on Milove, but when asked how his life has changed, the first thing Tertishnik mentions is the coronavirus — and vaccination in particular. The 73-year-old is angry because Ukraine does not use Russia’s Sputnik V shot, so he has to receive one of the several Western formulas registered for use in Ukraine.    

“I think Sputnik is better, because it’s been through so many tests and is being used in lots of countries,” he said. “These others, their quality is questionable. Even the media often says so.”  

The pandemic has created a tidal wave of disinformation in nations across the world. But in Ukraine, the conflict over lockdowns and vaccinations has been deepened by the fault lines of a war between government forces and Russia-controlled separatists in the east of the country since 2014. So far, the conflict has claimed 14,000 lives. It has also entrenched divisive narratives over whether Ukraine should look west towards Europe or east to Russia, that have led people like Tertishnik to favor an unobtainable Russian vaccine over the ones freely available at their local hospital. 

Tertishnik’s preference for Sputnik V is strongly linked to nostalgia for the Soviet era, which he remembers as a time of order, certainty and harmony. Economic hardship, the new borders separating him from neighbors and family, and conflicting media messaging — he says he watches both Russian and Ukrainian TV — have exacerbated his sense of grievance. Conversations with him are peppered with assertions that Russians and Ukrainians were friends for centuries before the West interfered, and that Ukraine is little more than a Western puppet state. 

To date, less than 10% percent of the population have had one or two coronavirus shots. Pandemic conspiracies and vaccine hesitancy can be found across the nation’s social and political spectrum. A survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in April found that 53% are not willing to be vaccinated, mainly because they fear that the shots have not been sufficiently tested. 

However, the biggest numbers of those uncertain or unwilling to be vaccinated were in the eastern and southern regions which are traditionally more Russia-oriented. A March survey by the independent research organization Rating Group Ukraine found consistently more vaccine hesitancy and refusal among supporters of the three main pro-Russian opposition parties in Ukraine. Those respondents were also more likely to trust Sputnik V than other vaccines.  

Ukrainian politicians don’t have to be pro-Russian to criticize the government’s pandemic response and vaccine policy. But research published in April by the European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic service, has detailed how Russia’s “vaccine diplomacy” drive has used state-controlled and proxy news outlets, along with social media, to undermine trust in Western-made vaccines, EU institutions and vaccination strategies. A report from the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre identifies how this disinformation campaign in Ukraine aligns with broader attempts to divide society and turn the country’s vector from west to east.

In February this year, the Ukrainian government announced it would not register Russian Sputnik V. Most of the EU, including France, Germany and Italy, had also not approved it, citing missing clinical trial data. But the Ukrainian government ruling explicitly bans Covid-19 vaccines developed or produced in an “aggressor state.”  

The ban provided a prime opportunity for Russian media, and pro-Kremlin media in Ukraine, to accuse the government of committing “genocide” of its people for political purposes. It also tied neatly into the long-term disinformation narratives that divide the country, accusing the West of pushing Ukraine into war in 2014 and, now, of experimenting on Ukrainians with vaccines, to the benefit of big business. 

While Ukraine negotiated for vaccines from the EU and the World Health Organization’s Covax program, Russia scored a propaganda goal by providing Sputnik V to separatist territories in east Ukraine.

The pandemic had already damaged increasingly tenuous ties between Ukraine and the eastern and Crimean territories it lost to Russia in 2014. Pre-Covid-19, more than a million people, mostly residents of separatist territory, crossed the de facto border in east Ukraine every month. When politicized quarantine restrictions restricted crossings, those people were largely deprived of family contact, jobs, Ukrainian pensions and other benefits, in addition to a shared information space.   

Ukraine initially closed all the de-facto borders with what it refers to as its “temporarily occupied territories” in March 2021, as part of a strict nationwide Covid lockdown. The government was keen to emphasize the alleged disastrous level of coronavirus infections in Russian-controlled territories, although real figures were impossible to come by. Restrictions were lifted after three months, but immediately imposed by separatists in the east and Russian-annexed Crimea, who cite Ukraine’s inability to cope with the coronavirus crisis. 

The separatist-imposed restrictions have remained in place ever since. Currently people must provide numerous documents to justify their trip over the de-facto border in order to obtain permission to cross at a set date and time. Just one crossing there and back is allowed a month. 

Konstantin Reutsky, who heads the Ukrainian NGO Vostok-SOS providing assistance to residents on both sides of the frontline, believes there is no epidemiological justification for the separatist-imposed restrictions. Instead, he says, they are just another tactic in the information war. Ukrainian media is blocked on separatist-controlled territory — and even in some adjoining Ukraine-controlled areas — and Russian and separatist media portray Ukraine as on the verge of economic and social collapse. With access closed, people have no opportunity to see that in fact Ukraine is rebuilding and developing areas close to the frontline. 

Russia and separatist authorities “don’t want people to see that things are better on this side,” said Reutsky. “Covid was an excuse.” 

Crossing points and vaccines

After a peak in spring this year, when coronavirus infections were reaching 15,000 per day, it is hard to see how Ukraine’s currently low rates of less than 1,000 new cases a day can justify the ongoing restrictions. Ukraine’s extensive building program in the east includes a whole new crossing point on the de facto border, with banking and postal services and a center for processing Ukrainian documents and benefits. This crossing, however, has never been opened due to disagreements for which each side blames the other. 

Meanwhile, Stanitsia Luhanska in Ukraine is one of only two crossing points with separatist territories now open. Queuing to navigate the jumble of fences and kiosks on the Ukrainian-controlled side, travelers have to contend with a number of coronavirus-related complications on Ukraine-controlled territory too. A free bus service to the Ukrainian checkpoint stopped when the crossing temporarily closed last year, and has not been reinstated. Until recently, Ukrainian authorities required that inhabitants of the separatist territories take a Covid test on arrival, but took months to provide free tests.  

In June, Ukraine hit back in the Covid vaccine propaganda war. It began a long-promised government program of free vaccination for inhabitants of annexed Crimea and the separatist “republics,”, describing the move as a response to “medical genocide” against Ukrainians living under Russian occupation. 

People can book an appointment by registering online or calling a hotline, and can choose locations near the front in east Ukraine and Crimea. Those who have registered for vaccination are allowed to skip the queue at the Ukrainian checkpoint. By mid-July, 393 people had registered for the program, according to the Ukrainian Ministry for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories. 

In Stanitsia Luhanska, vaccination with the Chinese CoronoVac is available for people from the separatist “Luhansk People’s Republic” (LPR) twice weekly in the primary medical center. Located in Stanitsia Luhanska hospital, the center is an island of bright new renovation in a building otherwise much in need of repair. On a recent swelteringly hot day, a family had traveled over 100 km from Alchevsk in the LPR, to renew their Ukrainian bank cards and for their 28-year-old daughter, Yelena, to be vaccinated.

“I’ve been waiting for this program,” Yelena said. The announced supplies of Sputnik V to the LPR ran out in April, she said, when priority groups such as medics and police were vaccinated. Since then, the only option was to travel to Ukrainian government-controlled territory, or, for Russian passport holders, to Russia. 

“I don’t like the propaganda around it,” she added. “But there’s propaganda on both sides.” 

Yelena found out about the Ukrainian program from the social media page of a Ukrainian NGO. “Those who want to find information discover ways of finding it,” she said. “And those who are okay with Russian propaganda don’t need alternative sources of information.”

Yelena said that there was a good deal of anti-vaccine sentiment in Alchevsk, as well as theories that the virus was artificially created or doesn’t exist, and distrust of the Ukraine program. 

“None of my relatives, except my parents, think it’s a good idea to come here,” she said. “Even my father was, like, ‘How do you know they’ll give you a vaccine? There’s a shortage of vaccines in Ukraine’. He’s skeptical, he doesn’t trust the government.”

Yelena’s experience at the clinic did not change her father’s mind, but by the end of their visit her mother, trembling with nerves, also got her first shot. 

While people like Yelena make the complicated journey west over the frontline to get a vaccine in Ukraine, Natalia Kravchenko, a doctor administering the program in Stanitsia Luhanska, would prefer to look east. She yearns for Soviet-era health care and research which she considers to still be effective and strong in Russia.

“I, personally, would like to be vaccinated with Sputnik V. I was born in Russia and have a Russian mentality,” said Kravchenko, who is in her 50s. “But we inject with what they give us. It’s all politics. We were friends and now we’re enemies. What can you do?”       

One village, two vaccine drives

Back in Milove the local hospital, which is being renovated as part of a $235 million European Investment Bank program for east Ukraine, had vaccinated just 410 people by mid-July from a population of 5,800. A mobile brigade from a nearby town is also providing shots.

“Everyone reads on the internet,” said Iryna Smyrnova, the hospital’s head of secondary medicine. “They all call now and ask, ‘What vaccine is it?”

The majority who do get vaccinated in Milove are keen to get Pfizer or AstraZeneca shots manufactured in the U.K. or Europe, according to Smirnova. Not because they think those vaccines are any more trustworthy than others, but because the vaccination certificate will allow them to leave both government and separatist Ukraine and travel abroad. 

Even Tertishnik has registered to get a Western vaccine. “I don’t think it’s better, I think Sputnik is better, but those up top decided,” he said. 

When asked for the reasons behind his decision, he replied, “I want to live a bit longer, and see my grandchildren.”  

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The new partnership was announced via the official Facebook page of the State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection on October 16. “We are ready to work closely with Huawei to ensure and improve cyber defense and cybersecurity in Ukraine,” said Yuriy Schyhol, head of the state communications service, in a separate statement on the agency’s website. “I am convinced that our interaction will strengthen the state's defense against cyber threats.”

Soon after, any mention of the partnership was inexplicably scrubbed from the agency’s website and social media accounts, but not before hundreds of Ukrainains commented on the announcement. Huawei’s post about the partnership, however, is still public on its Ukrainian Facebook page.

The public reaction: “Thank you for reminding everyone of what is wrong with your office,” wrote one user, named Taras Yemchura, on Facebook. Another poster asked “Who made this decision? 11th graders?” The negative feedback continues to pour in on news pieces about the deal and on social media.

The expert view: Andrei Baranovich, a member of the activist group Cyber Alliance, said that his first concern is how Ukraine plans to partner with Huaewei while working with the U.S. government and military on its information security. 

“Allowing a company suspected of working for the Chinese state to come near the government is just unacceptable,” he said. “I don’t see a logical explanation for why, out of all the available vendors in secure telecommunications, they sign a deal with Huawei.”

Why this matters: As the world’s largest manufacturer of cellular technology, Huawei’s close ties with China’s government and military have raised concerns in a number of countries over security risks posed by its equipment. In August, the United States, one of Ukraine’s closest allies, dealt the company what many experts referred to as a “lethal blow” by blocking the use of any American-made components in its products.

The bigger picture: With the U.S. banning the sale of its technology to Huawei, the company now has to rework its rollout of 5G. The European Union has decided, in light of the U.S. sanctions, that it is just too risky to rely on Huawei for the setting up of 5G networks on the continent. The Finnish company Nokia and Sweden-based Ericsson have now stepped in. The U.K. government will also phase out all Huawei 5G technology by 2027.

Additional reporting by Oleksandr Ignatenko

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