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.

The post A Ukrainian filmmaker photographs a sinister landscape appeared first on Coda Story.

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.

This story was made possible by the Pulitzer Center. It was originally published in Stranger’s Guide.

The post As the war drags on, Ukrainian refugees wonder: should we go home? appeared first on Coda Story.

It was during those slow, meandering rooftop conversations that ventured into every aspect of our lives—from crushes and struggles with identity to global politics—that I was handed the gift of a Senegalese lens to re-examine and better understand my own story. 

I grew up in the nation of Georgia, where as a child I lived through the violent collapse of the Soviet Union and learned—primarily from my parents—that instability and chaos were a small price to pay for the triumph of Georgia’s centuries-long struggle for independence. Among many contradictions that laced my childhood was the fact that I learned Russian, the Soviet lingua franca, from my half-Polish, half-Armenian mother, who would force me to read War and Peace in the original, but also insisted that my formal education be conducted in Georgian—and that I was to never trust anything that came from an appointed authority, especially one in Moscow.  

It was not until I sat on that Dakar rooftop that I thought of my mishmashed identity as a byproduct of colonialism. Just like me with Russian, Khadim loved all the opportunities that French, the language of his historical oppressor, had unlocked for him. Like me, he had a native-level appreciation for the language of a country he’s never lived in, and a nuanced understanding of a culture he was never part of. But unlike me, he was acutely aware of the price he had paid for that access. “I never thought of Russian in the same way that Khadim thinks of the French, but I think I also have a love-hate relationship with it,” I wrote in my journal that particular evening. “It is weird how it represents oppression and opportunity at the same time.” 

My old journal documents my awe (or was it envy?) at the deep awareness that Khadim and his friends possessed when it came to understanding how the historic legacy of French colonialism in West Africa affected their personal journeys. It is a record of my delight over the similarities I discovered between the Senegalese saint Cheikh Amadou Bamba, who led a pacifist struggle against French colonialism, and the Georgian orthodox saint and healer Father Gabriel, who was tortured and sentenced to death by the Soviets after he set a 26-foot portrait of Lenin on fire in 1955.

Today, “colonialism,” with all of its many prefixes and subcategories, often feels like an overused term: there is neo-colonialism and tech-colonialism, post-colonialism and eco-colonialism, settler colonialism and internal colonialism. I could go on—the list is so long, it feels tedious. And yet, no other word at our disposal can quite capture the historical continuity of domination and oppression that is the root cause of so many of the world’s current troubles. 

Every one of us is a carrier of a colonial legacy, either as a victim or the beneficiary—or sometimes both. Colonialism is the system of oppression that our world is built on. As we obsess with decolonizing everything from our schools to industries and corporations, it is useful to remember how easily our understanding of colonialism can be manipulated unless we first decolonize ourselves. 

My story is both typical and telling. My parents may have cherished Georgia’s freedom from Moscow, but somehow I had still bought into a widely accepted myth that the Soviet Union was an anti-colonial power. Both at my Soviet school, and later at university in the United States, I was taught that colonialism was something that Western countries did to Africa, Asia, and the Far East. It was only when I went to Senegal and stumbled upon the depth and ease with which I was able to relate to the anti-colonial part of the West African identity that I began to realize that I, too, was a product of “colonialism.” Until then, the struggle of non-Russian Soviet republics for independence was compartmentalized in my mind as something qualitatively different from the plight of formerly colonized people elsewhere.

Like the Black Lives Matters protests in the United States and the reckoning with anti-Black racism that followed, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 triggered a profound reconsideration of colonialism, including demands for restructuring and amends, from across the periphery of Russia’s historical empire;  a backlash from Russia itself followed. 

From Central Asia to the Baltics, from the Caucasus to Poland, activists, academics, historians, journalists, and ordinary citizens were suddenly digging up long-hidden stories of oppression, deportations, ethnic cleansing and “Russification” policies that the Kremlin had imposed on them over the centuries. Their stories were different, but the point they were making was the same: Russia’s war in Ukraine was a quintessentially colonial conflict, part of the centuries-long cycle of relentless conquest and subjugation.  

Across Russia’s former empire, this struggle to break away from subjugation has defined generation after generation. Today in Georgia, the children of those who in 1989 protested against—and helped end—the Soviet Union are out on the same streets, protesting against the current government’s attempts to take their country off its pro-European course and bring it back into Russia’s fold.

“Do not fear! We will win honorably,” read one poster held up by three women who joined tens of thousands of protesters in May 2024 on the streets of Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. The words are more than a hundred years old and belong to Maro Makashvili, a young Georgian woman who wrote them down over a century ago just as the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution helped end Tsarist rule in Russia. For Georgia, the revolution meant freedom from two centuries of domination by  its northern neighbor and, finally, a chance to write its own story.

Few know that in those years, Georgia emerged as one of the most progressive democracies in Europe, a place where women could vote and minorities were granted rights. Young Maro Makashvili watched it all and documented Georgia’s ambitious experiment with democracy in her diaries. The experiment ended, abruptly and tragically, when Bolshviks invaded Georgia in 1921, annihilating the country’s intellectual and political elite, violently forcing Georgia into the USSR and rewriting the country’s history to fit the Soviet narrative. 

“To me, Maro Makashvili lives on in every beautiful, strong, smart, young woman protesting in the streets today,” said Tiko Suladze, a Tbilisi resident who held up Maro Makashvili’s portrait at the recent anti-Russian, anti-government demonstration.

The sentiments Makashvili described in her diaries during this time talk of freedom for women—and her whole country. These are ideas that resonate today with those living in the trenches of the long war against Russian imperialism. Ukraine is its current and bloodiest epicenter, but its frontline stretches across Russia’s vast former empire. You wouldn’t know it, though, listening to mainstream media in the West that explain the war through the prism of a geopolitical struggle between Moscow and Washington and, inadvertently, diminish the actual struggle of people on the frontline. This happens, in part at least, because we have a narrow definition of what colonialism is.

The very nature of Russian colonialism doesn’t fit the Western definition of oppression. Over the centuries, while European powers conquered overseas territories, Russia ran a land empire that absorbed its neighbors. While Europeans instilled the notion that their subjects were “different” from them, Russians conquered using another device: “sameness.” In the Russian colonial system, which was subsequently refined by the Soviets, subjects were banned from speaking their language or celebrating their culture (outside of the sterilized version of a culture that was sanctioned by Moscow). In exchange, they were allowed to rise to the top. In 2022, while dropping bombs on Kyiv, Vladimir Putin launched an audaciously counterintuitive campaign that positioned him as the global anti-colonial hero. The Russian Ministry of Culture announced that thematic priorities for state-funded films in 2022 included promotion of “family values,” depiction of cultural “degradation” of Europe, and films on “Anglo-Saxon neo-colonialism.” 

Piggybacking on the Soviet legacy of support for anti-colonial movements, and banking on people’s genuine disillusionment with the double standards of American foreign policy in places like the Middle East, Putin ordered his diplomats in Africa, Latin America and Asia to double down on the anti-colonial message. Using social media, the Russian propaganda machine beamed the same message, targeting newsfeeds of left-leaning audiences in the West, as well as immigrant and Black communities in the United States. 

The tactic worked. In 2023, I found myself at a small conference in Nairobi that brought together a dozen or so senior editors and publishers from across the African continent, a Ukrainian journalist, an exiled Russian editor, and myself. The conference was hosted by Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, a German foundation affiliated with the country’s center-right Christian Democratic Union. The foundation, which despite its association is independent from the CDU, is a big player in media development in Africa. And it was concerned about the growing spread of Russian narratives across the continent, which prompted them to organize the conversation. 

In the room in Nairobi, there was plenty of sympathy toward Ukraine and plenty of concern about clearly malicious disinformation campaigns undertaken by influencers across Africa. But there were also compelling explanations as to why Africa is currently finding Moscow’s messages more persuasive than those being pushed by the West.  

Ukraine, my African colleagues explained, was perceived as a “Western project.” Delivered primarily through Western diplomatic and news channels, the Ukrainian message in Africa was met with resistance because of the West’s perceived refusal to account for the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. “You may call it whataboutism, but it is grounded in real questions that no one has answered,” one African editor said. Russia’s message, on the other hand, “lands well and softly,” Nwabisa Makunga, an editor of the Sowetan in Johannesburg, told me at the time. The challenge for her team, she explained, was to objectively navigate overwhelmingly pro-Russian public sentiment and a widespread belief that Ukraine caused the invasion.

During my trip to Nairobi, one of the editors shared an unpublished op-ed sent to him as an email from the Russian Ambassador to Kenya, Dmitry Maskimychev. It read: “If you look at the leaders of the Soviet Union, you will find two Russians (Lenin, Gorbachev), a Georgian (Stalin), and three Ukrainians (Brezhnev, Khruschev, Chernenko). Some colonialist empire! Can you imagine a Kenyan sitting on the British throne? Make no mistake, what is currently happening in Ukraine is not a manifestation of Russian ‘imperialism’ but a ‘hybrid’ clash with NATO.” It is an effective message that lands equally well with many Western intellectuals who continue to argue about the rights and wrongs of NATO enlargement and not the fact that a sovereign country has the right to break away from its colonial masters. 

Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko is among the most prolific voices when it comes to comparing Russian and Western colonial styles. He is also the one who first introduced me to the idea of “sameness” as an instrument of domination. The message of Western colonialism was: “ ‘you are not able to be like us’, while the message of Russian colonialism was ‘you are not allowed to be different from us,’ ” he explained at the Zeg Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi in 2023. While there were differences in the way the Russians and the Europeans constructed their empires, the result was the same: violence, redrawn borders, repression of cultures and languages, and annihilation of entire communities. 

The idea of “sameness as an instrument of domination” also explains why most well-meaning Russians I meet often seem weirdly unaware of their country being perceived as a colonial master. There are, of course, notable exceptions, but for the most part even the most liberal Russians I know seem utterly disinterested in engaging on the issue of colonialism with the country’s former subjects like myself.  Soon after the Ukraine invasion, I asked a prominent liberal Russian journalist whether he was going to introduce the topic of colonialism to his equally liberal, Russian audiences. He seemed genuinely insulted by the suggestion. “We are not colonialists!” he said. 

One reason why the debate about colonialism is largely missing from the Russian liberal discourse is because Russia is still missing from the debate about colonialism in the West. Yermolenko believes that when it comes to colonialism, the Western intellectual elite went from one extreme in the 19th century to another in the 21st. “They went from saying, ‘we are the best and no one can compare to us’ to saying, ‘we were the worst and no one can compare to us,’ ” Yermolenko says. 

Georgian historian Lasha Bakradze takes the argument a step further: “At the heart of this inability to understand, accept and analyze other forms of colonialism lies, paradoxically, the West’s own colonial mentality. This is where skeletons of Western colonialism are really buried.” 

For two decades, these self-imposed limits of Western debate about colonialism have given the Kremlin an enormous propaganda advantage, enabling Putin to position Russia as an anti-colonial power, and himself as the champion of all victims of European colonialism. They have also shaped our own, self-imposed, compartmentalized frameworks through which we understand oppression. 

“To this very day, the core of decolonization for me is about being able to learn and tell your own full story in your own words and being able to follow the narrative of your choice,” argues my friend, Ukrainian journalist Maksym Eristavi, whose book Russian Colonialism 101 is a succinct record of one part of Russia’s colonial adventures: invasions. “This means being able to dissect what is authentic in you and what is programmed by the colonizer.”   

But the process of deconstructing your own narratives can be a fraught and deeply uncomfortable experience. Take well-meaning Western academic institutions, for example, which have traditionally taught history and the languages of Russia’s former colonies in Central Asia and the Caucasus within their Russian studies departments. The war in Ukraine triggered a reckoning in American universities, where professors started debating how to teach imperialism and colonialism in Russia. 

Because of the invasion and Western sanctions, some Russian language studies programs could no longer send their students to Russia, and many reached for an easy solution: send them instead to places where Russian is spoken because it’s the language of the oppressor. It is only now that I learn about Americans coming to Georgia to learn Russian that I feel simultaneously angry at the colonial behavior of supposedly liberal arts institutions And embarrassed that at age 20, I did not once question the decision to go to Senegal to study French. 

It is impossible to paint a singular portrait of colonialism. But it is possible and necessary to listen and respect each of their voices. It is only through listening to the multitude of oppressed voices—from Gaza and Yemen, Georgia and Ukraine, American reservations and former slave plantations—that we will begin to understand the systems of oppression and patterns that run through it.

“Colonialism is about trauma first,” says Maksym Eristavi. “The trauma of your identity being violated, erased, reprogrammed. The trauma of losing your roots, figuratively and quite literally. The goal of the colonizer is to make you feel small and isolated. To ensure that you think that your arrested potential is your own fault.”

“At last my poor country will be blessed with freedom,” the young Georgian Maro Makashvili wrote in her diary in 1918. When the Red Army invaded Georgia in 1921, occupying the country for the next seventy years, thousands of Georgians were killed. Among them was Maro. Today, Maro Makashvili is a national hero. But unless her story becomes part of the global anti-colonial narrative, oppressors—in Russia and beyond—will continue to win.

The post When sameness becomes a colonial tool of oppression appeared first on Coda Story.

Yet, nearly two years later, Memorial has not closed down. Its staff, led by mostly aging, bookish historians, have not just forestalled their demise but steered the organization to the razor’s edge of Russian political dissent.

It has no headquarters and no legal status in Russia. Its bank accounts are frozen and its programming has been pushed to the Moscow sidewalks. Yet, at a time when nearly all independent Russian media are operating in exile and Kremlin critics have been jailed, silenced or left the country, Memorial, in many ways, is roaring: publishing books, monitoring the ongoing trials of Ukrainian prisoners of war in Russia, offering free consulting to the relatives of people who disappeared during Soviet times on how to search archives for information, advocating for the growing list of political prisoners in Russia, and expanding its offices outside the country.

None of this is happening in the shadows. Memorial organizes regular “Topography of Terror” tours in Moscow, with one route going right up to the doorstep of Butyrka, one of Russia’s most notorious prisons during the Soviet era. The excursion ends with participants sitting down to write letters to the new generation of Russians imprisoned on politically motivated charges and awaiting trial inside the 250-year-old facility. Tickets sell out almost immediately.

“Our work could not stop for a single day,” historian and Memorial founding member Irina Scherbakova said.

Its annual “Returning the Names,” when people line up to read aloud the people killed by the Soviet regime, took place online on October 29 in cities across the world. Set up by the group in 2007, the event used to be held in front of the former KGB headquarters in Moscow, lasting twelve emotional hours but for the last few years, Moscow authorities have denied the group a permit.

While Memorial has worked under Kremlin intimidation for years, the war in Ukraine created an entirely new reality for an organization pursuing a mission to investigate Soviet-era crimes and expose present-day political abuses. In one of the most horrific recent cases highlighted by Memorial, Russian poet and activist Artyom Kamardin was raped with a dumbbell by law enforcement officers in September 2022 during a raid on his home after he posted a video online reciting an anti-war poem.

Memorial has withstood dismantling attempts thanks to a survival strategy put in place by its founders. Memorial is not a single organization, as its members like to remind the public, but a movement. Since its founding in 1987, the group has grown into a sprawling, decentralized network of organizations and individuals resilient against the Kremlin’s targeting.

There are more than 200 Memorial members and volunteers working globally, with just under a hundred left in Russia. With each local branch registered independently, it would take 25 separate court cases to entirely shut down the network inside the country. There are satellite offices in Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine. Earlier this year, two shuttered Russia-based Memorial organizations re-registered outside the country under new names in Switzerland and France.

“From the very beginning we knew we didn’t want a hierarchy,” explained Scherbakova. “We always knew that this was a grassroots story. If there had been a hierarchy, Russia would have destroyed us a long time ago.”

Memorial’s affiliate offices abroad have long been largely made up of local historians studying the Soviet period, but now many branches are absorbing staff that fled Russia.

The Prague office has become in the past 18 months a new headquarters of sorts. Today, the staff is a mix of Czechs and Russians. At the age of 70, the director of Memorial’s library, Boris Belenkin, fled Moscow for Prague last year. Belenkin calls the space a new “place for life” where Memorial workers can once again hold seminars, organize research fellowships and host visiting scholars.

From the Prague office, Memorial is also re-launching one of its most beloved programs: an essay-writing contest in which students in Russia were asked to delve into 20th century history. The contest had been run since 1999 in participating schools across 12 time zones before being called off in 2021. Finalists were flown out to Moscow to present their work at Memorial headquarters. For many students from far-flung regions, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see their country’s capital. Over the years, schools dropped the program, caving to pressure from local officials and concerned, “patriotic-minded” parents.

Within Russia, pressure on staff continues to escalate. The director of Memorial’s branch in the Siberian city of Perm was arrested in May for “hooliganism” and has been in pre-trial detention ever since. Offices in Yekaterinburg and other cities face routine harassment and arbitrary fines from local authorities, pushing some to the verge of closing. A prominent Memorial historian, Yuri Dmitriev, is currently serving a 15-year sentence at a prison in what Memorial says is a politically motivated case. Both men are currently being held in facilities that were once part of the Soviet Gulag camp system.

In Moscow, nine Memorial members including Alexandra Polivanova, a programming director who leads the Butyrka prison tour, have become the targets of an ongoing criminal investigation. In May, authorities charged Memorial board member Oleg Orlov with “discrediting” the Russian military, a new crime in Russia that can carry a prison sentence of up to five years. In court in September, Orlov was asked to defend his denouncement of the war in Ukraine as well as his career documenting human rights abuses for Memorial in Chechnya and the wider Caucasus region, as well as in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine. On October 11, the court found Orlov guilty and fined him. The government prosecutor requested that Orlov undergo a mental health evaluation, citing his "heightened sense of justice, lack of self-preservation instincts, and posturing before citizens."

Memorial believes the criminal cases against Moscow staff are motivated by their ongoing advocacy for political prisoners in Russia. Memorial Center, which is the organization’s human rights branch, runs a database of people imprisoned under politically motivated charges and is often cited by international organizations. It also publishes regular updates on the prisoners and their cases, features interviews with their family members and organizes letter writing campaigns. Today, there are 609 people on Memorial’s list — a number that has tripled in the past five years.

Scherbakova, Memorial’s director and a historian of the Soviet Union, says this number is higher than during the late stages of the Soviet Union.

“In my opinion, today’s situation is much scarier and crueler,” said Scherbakova.

Memorial has been in the Kremlin’s crosshairs since it condemned Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea and other territories in eastern Ukraine in 2014. The government’s most powerful legal tool is the Foreign Agents Act, legislation designed to pressure groups and individuals who receive funding from outside the country. Passed in 2012 and expanded in 2020, the law imposes up to five years of imprisonment for failing to comply with an exhaustive system of tedious financial reporting and bureaucracy.

Russian authorities have also used the foreign agents law to target  individuals. In mid-October, Russian police detained Alsu Kurmasheva, a Prague-based journalist at Radio Free Europe with dual Russian-American citizenship, for failing to register as a foreign agent when she traveled to Russia for a family emergency. If convicted, Kurmasheva faces up to five years in prison.

Authoritarian leaders around the world have since adopted similar legislation to quash dissent at home.

“Today, being a spy, a counter-revolutionary, a Trotskiest, all of that has been folded into the term ‘foreign agent,’” said Belenkin, the Memorial library director and a founding member of Memorial who was added to the Kremlin's foreign agents list in 2022.

In 2021, the government brought Memorial before the Supreme Court, alleging that it had violated the law by failing to label a handful of social media posts with boilerplate text disclosing that Memorial is classed as a foreign agent. But by the closing argument, prosecutors dropped any pretense of holding Memorial accountable for a few unlabeled social media posts. Instead, the general prosecutor, Alexei Zhafyarov, took to the floor to dramatically rail against the group.

“Memorial speculates on the topic of political repression, distorts historical memory, including about World War II, and creates a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state,” said Zhafyarov, mocking Memorial for “claiming to be the conscience of the nation.”

“Why, instead of being proud of our country, are we being told we must repent for our past?” Zhafyarov asked the courtroom.

Russia’s Supreme Court is led by Chief Justice Vyacheslav Lebedev, who began his career sending anti-Soviet dissidents to Gulag camps in the 1980s and managed to stay in power following the collapse of the USSR — one of many Soviet officials who survived the transition to democracy.

Grigory Vaypan, part of Memorial’s defense team, said that ultimately this was an opportunity to expose the government’s real motivation for bringing the group to court and state for the historical record what Memorial’s closing was really about. “Zhafyarov rose, and instead of telling us about those posts on Twitter and Instagram, he said, ‘We should close Memorial because Memorial is pursuing a narrative that is not in the interest of the state,’” said Vaypan. “They needed to close Memorial because Memorial messed with the government’s narrative that ‘we, the Russian state, the state that won the Second World War, are unaccountable to the world.’”

“Re-reading the closing argument now makes much more sense to me than it did back then,” said Vaypan. “What the prosecutor said was a prologue to the war.”

Memorial lost an appeal in the Supreme Court in March 2022 as Russian troops marched to Kyiv. The war has left members asking themselves the same question that is echoing across Russian civil society: How did things go so wrong?

At Memorial, an initiative dedicated to preventing the return of totalitarianism to Russia, the invasion of Ukraine has led to a difficult, at times contentious, internal re-examination of its own legacy.

“We’re trying to understand what wasn’t right in our work over the past 35 years: How we didn’t build up cooperation with Russian society, how we failed to see different, more complex forms of discrimination and oppression,” Polivanova, the programming director, said. “We had blind spots in our work to the point where, in a sense, we all allowed this terrible war to happen.”

There was a mixed global reaction last year when the Nobel committee announced that the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize would be shared among Memorial, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties and Ales Bialiatski, a human rights advocate from Belarus. The director of the Ukrainian organization Oleksandra Matviichuk praised Memorial’s work but refused to be interviewed alongside Yan Raczynski, who accepted the award for Memorial in Oslo. Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany called the shared recognition “truly devastating” in the context of the ongoing war, launched by Russia in part from Belarusian territory.

Not everyone at Memorial thinks the group should be judged through the lens of Russia’s war and hard turn towards authoritarianism.

“Without question, a medium-sized organization, with limited resources, and even with our network, could not change anything,” said Belenkin, director of Memorial’s library, in regards to the war. “Memorial is not relevant here.”

But Polivanova, who operates the tours and is a generation younger than much of Memorial’s leadership, believes that Memorial must re-examine its own legacy in connection to the war. The ongoing discussion among Memorial members on this topic has been “very difficult,” she said. She has reworked her tour lineup, with one of the new Moscow excursions dedicated to the Ukrainian human rights activist Petro Grigorenko.

Born in a small village in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya region in what was then the Russian empire, Grigorenko rose through the ranks of the Soviet Army to become a World War II hero and a major general. At the height of his career in 1968, Grigorenko broke with the Soviet Army by speaking out against the invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring. Punishment came swiftly: He was arrested in Moscow, diagnosed as criminally insane and underwent punitive psychiatric treatment, a practice that has re-emerged under President Vladimir Putin. Somehow, Grigorenko managed to continue speaking out for the cause of long-persecuted Crimean Tatars, dared to criticize the Soviet narrative of the Second World War, and founded the Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki Groups before being exiled.

“In the past, we didn’t consider this story to be so important,” Polivanova said. “This historical perspective was not stressed at Memorial.”

The updated tour lineup that includes Grigorenko’s life in Moscow has had a surge in popularity since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Over the past year and a half, Polivanova has had to triple the number of weekly walking tours and still isn’t able to keep up with demand. Registration fills up almost immediately after dates are announced.

The tours are one of the rare public forums available to Russians to discuss the war. “People are really engaging,” Polivanova said. In September 2022, she added readings of Ukrainian poetry written by authors killed during Stalin’s purges to a tour of a mass grave site in Russia’s northeast. On many excursions, participants start to take over, she said, drawing direct comparisons between the cruelty of Soviet repression and news of Russian atrocities in Bucha, Mariupol and other frontlines in Ukraine.

The tours have also attracted a different kind of participant. “Patriotic” activists crashed the organized outings for weeks at a time last fall, threatening those in attendance and publicly denouncing members of Memorial as “traitors.” Since then, Memorial started to require that participants provide links to their social media accounts when registering for a tour.

As people line up for Memorial’s tours, the government’s attempts to reverse many of Memorial’s decades-long efforts to seek accountability for crimes committed under communism remain relentless.

In September, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service debuted in front of their offices a looming statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, who founded the infamous Soviet political police apparatus. The statue was almost an exact copy of a Dzerzhinsky monument that stood for decades in front of the Moscow headquarters of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s secret police and intelligence agency. In 1991, Russians who had gathered to protest for an end to totalitarian Soviet rule and a transition to democracy tore it down. Today, the spymaster, ally of Lenin and Stalin, architect of the Red Terror, stands again in Moscow.

The post Surviving Russia’s control appeared first on Coda Story.

“Why are there no Belarusian food trucks at this festival?” an attendee asked her, his voice tinged with frustration. Tsikhanouskaya had been thrust into a global spotlight after she ran for president in place of her husband — who was jailed by the Belarusian regime in May 2020. She paused before answering: It was possible to talk to the organizers.

Three years after a brutal crackdown on peaceful protests in Belarus sent a new round of exiles into neighboring countries with a wellspring of energy for changing the regime, the mood at the festival was subdued. Dissidents who not long ago were anticipating another revolution had reevaluated the situation: Nothing major could be done for now. 

Hope for political change had run aground against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and, not coincidentally, a worsening climate of repression inside Belarus. Russia’s grip on the government of “Europe’s last dictator,” Alexander Lukashenko, has only tightened, with Moscow using Belarus as a staging ground for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Days before the festival in Poland, Wagner fighters had crossed into Belarus, invited by Lukashenko after their failed armed rebellion in Russia, a move that brought the Belarusian leader even closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Tutaka Festival was billed as the “festival of the awakened.” It had two aims: to celebrate Belarusian culture and to give Belarusian dissidents scattered across Eastern Europe an opportunity to meet up. Belarusian rock bands were the headline acts, but time was also given to panels on showing solidarity with the 1,513 political prisoners in Belarus and on renewing political activism. At the festival’s opening ceremony, an announcer observed that they were so close to the Belarusian border “that even the mosquitos were from home.”

Tsikhanouskaya had traveled to Poland from her base in Vilnius, the capital of neighboring Lithuania, to update exiles on her work. Since her forced departure from Belarus in August 2020, she has hosted informal Q&As on open video calls. Among the few hundred people who attended the festival on its opening day, around 50 huddled around to hear her speak. Following the first question, about the food trucks, another attendee asked if Tsikhanouskaya had visited art galleries on her diplomatic trips around the world. One person asked, as a joke, if she had a doppelganger, while someone else wondered if sanctions placed on Belarus should be eased in return for the release of political prisoners. There were no questions about when Tsikhanouskaya thought she might return home. 

A 38-year-old festival goer who was attending with friends after two years of exile said he no longer felt optimistic at all. “I don’t see real power in them,” he told me, referring to the opposition movement as a whole. “They do a lot to support our paperwork, but I don’t see how they can change the situation in Belarus. The Belarusian regime has become too strong.”

When Lukashenko claimed victory in the August 2020 election, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest. Although it was not the first time that Belarusians had come out to protest election outcomes, 2020 was different. This time, many more citizens had mobilized. Factory workers went on strike, with some even heckling Lukashenko, calling for him to “go away.” The protests rippled out from Minsk, the capital, to smaller cities such as Gomel. Members of Lukashenko’s security forces left to join the protesters. Even after Tsikhanouskaya left the country, the protests continued without her. By the fall of 2020, it looked like Lukasheko’s time in office could be up. But it wasn’t to be. With the help of Russia, which promised military support, the old guard hung on.

It wasn’t long before the security services responded with excessive force. According to Human Rights Watch, almost 7,000 people were detained and held under inhumane conditions. At least two protestors were killed. Thousands fled the country fearing arrest or imprisonment. The repression of democratic voices in Belarus continued long after people were forced to leave the streets. 

Lukashenko, who has been president since 1994, responded to the protests by further unraveling the country’s constitution and centralizing even more power around himself — in what political scientists call a personalized dictatorship. In a move to ensure no one ever challenged his power again, Lukashenko had Belarusians arrested for sharing pro-democracy Facebook posts or even wearing white and red, the colors of the flag that came to symbolize the 2020 protest movement. Sanctions from the EU and the U.S. did not deter the regime. Instead, it leaned more and more on Russia for economic support. 

Dissidents and exiles looked on with mounting consternation as these events unfolded. Tsikhanouskaya initially encouraged people back home to publicly protest. But as the repressions grew, and as Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine, she began to tell them to wait for the right moment to trigger the next revolution. A few Belarusians ignored her calls and formed a group known as the “Rail Partisans” to disrupt Russian military supply lines in southern Belarus near the border with Ukraine. Members of the group were arrested and later sentenced to over 20 years in prison. 

The heady days of 2020 began to fade, and exiled Belarusians questioned the optimism that had once sustained them. Tsikhanouskaya was increasingly viewed as more of a celebrity symbol rather than a viable presidential successor. Challengers to her status, such as the former Culture Minister Pavel Latushko, set up their own organizations. Other figures, such as Valery Tsepkalo, another 2020 presidential candidate who initially fled to Moscow, became outwardly hostile, accusing members of the exiled opposition of financial mismanagement. All of this signaled to dissidents that key players in the exiled opposition were focused on self-aggrandizement and petty politics rather than the democratic struggle.

I learned about the Tutaka Festival from Anatoli, a 35-year-old dissident who fled Belarus two years ago after he was prosecuted on trumped-up charges for participating in the 2020 protests. (Anatoli asked that only his first name be used for the safety of family members who are still in Belarus.) He had grown up in the eastern Gomel region dreaming of a world beyond Belarus’ borders. His family’s resistance to Lukashenko in the mid 2000s had resulted in his expulsion from a local sports team and tarnished his future prospects. Having learned English, he managed to move to the U.S. as a student in 2009. He lived in Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and California, working in IT and running profitable side hustles. But after a motorcycle accident, he returned home in 2017.

Anatoli felt he had come back to a country he could live in. Although Belarus still relied heavily on Russia for bilateral trade and loans to the tune of billions of dollars, Lukashenko had started to improve relations with the European Union. The Belarusian government didn’t pretend to share the EU’s democratic values, but it saw an opportunity to diversify trade away from Russia. In order to keep the door with the EU open, Lukashenko allowed some democracy-promoting organizations to set up shop.

There is an unwritten rule common to many authoritarian regimes: As long as you didn’t engage in serious opposition politics, the government largely left you alone. Anatoli continued to work in IT and began an import-export business. He built friendships and volunteered when the Covid-19 pandemic hit (while Lukashenko prescribed driving tractors and drinking vodka as a cure). But the 2020 election changed Anatoli’s tolerance quotient. “I had to get involved,” he told me when we met in Vilnius on a recent summer afternoon.

Shortly after taking to the streets in August 2020, he was arrested and thrown into Minsk’s notorious Okrestina jail for three days, where he was kept in a 215-square-foot cell with 80 other people. Upon his release, he went back onto the streets and attended protests most Sundays.

Anatoli was enamored by the unity shown by Belarusians. “I had faith when I went to the protests, I believed that something could change,” he told me. But he was targeted by security forces again and, in mid-2021, he left the country. 

From the relative safety of Lithuania, Anatoli looked around at the world of the exiled opposition. What he saw were fractured and bickering groups, a situation he likened to Ivan Krylov’s fable “Swan, Pike and Crawfish,” a tale of three animals who failed to carry a loaded cart because they were each spinning “backwards,” “skywards” and “towards the sea.” Everyone wanted to do the right thing, but they were consumed by infighting and one-upmanship. It was frustrating, Anatoli said, to see the energy that swirled around Minsk in August 2020 being weakened in export.

Also in Lithuania, Tsikhanouskaya was setting up her office. From the outset, her young team sought diplomatic and financial support from the U.S. and the E.U. and took meetings with high-level politicians, such as the former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel. When Lukashenko ordered the grounding of a Ryanair flight traveling through Belarusian airspace that was carrying Roman Protasevich, a dissident who helped to steer the 2020 protests, Tsikhanouskaya’s office kept up the pressure for Western sanctions. Protasevich later became a Lukashenko spokesperson, after trading his freedom for a change in his public position on the regime. But there were also rumblings from exiles, like Anatoli, suspicious that members of Tsikhanouskaya’s team were ultimately concerned with future-proofing their own careers.

A conversation with exiles about Tsikhanouskaya will almost always turn to Franak Viacorka, the 35-year-old spearheading her team’s agenda. Known for his intellect and for being a demanding boss, Viacorka has been referred to as the democratic movement’s gray cardinal, the shadow power in the office. It’s a characterization he rejects. He sees himself instead as the “toxic handler,” a term he came across when reading up on business management: a person who deals with toxicity, frustration and apathy. Viacorka is a smooth communicator — having frequently engaged with the international press over the past three years and worked as a journalist himself — and he speaks in neat, quotable sentences.

Viacorka told me there was more support for Tsikhanouskaya than two years ago but recognized that there was also frustration. “What people don’t understand is that Sviatlana and the office is only as strong as the people around her, as strong as the movement,” he said. He also told me that Tsikhanouskaya fights sexist headwinds, the idea “that a woman cannot be successful on her own accord.” 

We first met at the Tutaka Festival where he had camped with a group of friends and colleagues. In Vilnius, where we sat down to talk, Viacorka was in full work mode, getting ready for an event to commemorate the anniversary of the 2020 protests. He had been with Tsikhanouskaya’s office almost from the beginning, when he fled Minsk for Kyiv and then turned his attention to Vilnius to help Tsikhanouskaya establish herself in exile. Since then, Viacorka has “connected the dots,” helping his boss understand the history of Belarus’ opposition and chart the path forward. But to many on the outside, he seems opportunistic. In Anatoli’s eyes, “he’s been raised as a politician” and should be treated with caution. Viacorka told me he harbors no political ambitions.

There is a dizzying array of organizations vying for attention in administering the Belarusian opposition in exile. They include Tsikhanouskaya’s office, the Coordination Council, the United Transitional Cabinet and the National Anti-Crisis Management organization. To Anatoli, it seemed all these groups were too busy vying for power among themselves rather than bringing about genuine change to their country.

So, instead of becoming involved with any of them, he began to help out with grassroot organizations that centered around sport. He was convinced that a revolution in Belarus was not possible while the country was still traumatized by the events of 2020. With emboldened security services, he told me, people wouldn’t risk taking to the streets unless a monumental event took place. “The person who will actually change things will be an outsider,” he said. “Look at Zelenskyy, he worked under the radar for years.”

Since early 2022, Anatoli and his friends have turned their attention to helping Ukraine in whatever way they can. They organized aid and medical supplies for both the Belarusians and Ukrainians who were fighting on the frontline and for refugees. When the invasion began, hundreds of Belarusians rushed to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian army. Their hope was that a Ukrainian victory would also herald the end of Lukashenko’s rule, but as the war dragged on, the number of Belarusian volunteers is reported to have declined.

In fact, the exiled opposition’s relationship with the Ukrainian government has been strained since the early days of the war. The Ukrainian government has been slow to oppose Lukashenko, who has not formally joined the war. Lithuania’s former foreign minister, Linas Linkevicius, told me that Tsikhanouskaya’s early position on Russia had cast doubt in the mind of Ukraine’s leaders. “Tsikhanouskaya still had the hope of talking to Moscow during the 2020 protests and that is something that hasn’t played well with Kyiv,” he told me. 

In February, Zelenskyy’s advisor Mikhail Podolyak gave a damning critique of the Belarusian opposition, telling Lithuanian media that Ukraine does “not see any reason to develop these relations, because we do not see a clear anti-war activity on the part of the opposition.” When asked about a formal meeting between Zelenskyy and Tsikhanouskaya, Podolyak said that the Ukrainian president did not see value in it.

But since the invasion, Tsikhanouskaya has been fervently anti-Russia, arguing that only a victorious Ukraine can bring a new dawn to Belarus. When I met Tsikhanouskaya briefly on the sidelines of the Tutaka Festival, I asked her about her relationship with Zelenskyy. Before answering, she took a long pause, her deep brown eyes scanning for the right words. The relationship was changing, she said: “At the beginning, they didn’t even want to communicate with us because they didn’t want to irritate Lukashenko. But now, it’s evident that Lukashenko is on the side of the Kremlin.”

I asked her about the exiles and dissidents and their allegations of ineffectiveness leveled against her team. Tsikhanouskaya said that although momentum has waxed and waned over the course of the last three years, her team was working toward that moment when the Belarusian system is suddenly disrupted and an opportunity for real change emerges. Others in exile must stay the course and not wait for everybody else to do the work, she said. 

Anatoli gave me his response when I told him what Tsikhanouskaya had said. “The longer you’re in exile, the more you need to start thinking about where else you can build your life,” he said.

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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.

The post The Kremlin revises a textbook to dictate future understanding of Russian history appeared first on Coda Story.

As Lithuania joined the ranks of countries across the globe imposing sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine, LRT saw an avalanche of likes and shares descend upon its Facebook page. Posts that would normally receive 40 or 50 views were getting tens of thousands of interactions. And roughly half of the comments posted by LRT’s suddenly enormous audience espoused pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian sentiments — an unusual dynamic in a country where support for Ukraine has been strong since the first days of the invasion. Analysis by Debunk, a Lithuanian disinformation research group, later found that much of this activity was driven by accounts situated in either Asia or Africa. This was a coordinated effort, one that almost certainly relied on automated accounts or bots. 

Now, a bill moving through Lithuania’s parliament is attempting to rein in this kind of activity. Representatives are deliberating on a set of proposed amendments to the country’s criminal code and public information laws that would criminalize automated account activity that poses a threat to state security. 

Under the changes, it would become a crime to distribute “disinformation, war propaganda, [content] inciting war or calling for the violation of the sovereignty of the Republic of Lithuania by force” from “automatically controlled” accounts. Violators could face fines, arrest or even three years’ imprisonment, depending on the particulars of the content in question.

The legislation is also expressly written to hold major social media platforms accountable for this kind of activity. It would empower the Lithuanian Radio and Television Commission to issue content and account removal orders to companies like Meta and Twitter.

Proponents of the legislation argue that social media companies have been ineffective in the fight against digital disinformation in Lithuania. In an explanatory note, lawmakers said the amendments would “send a clear message to internet platforms that an ineffective or insufficient fight against this problem is unacceptable and has legal consequences.”

“Right now, there is no regulation or legislation against bots,” said Viktoras Dauksas, the head of Debunk, the disinformation analysis center. But, he noted, “you can deal with bot farms through dealing with Meta.”

Twitter is a target of the policy too. In January 2022, a month before the invasion, U.S.-based disinformation researcher Markian Kuzmowyczius uncovered a bot attack on Twitter that falsely claimed that the Kremlin was recalling its diplomatic mission to Lithuania due to malign U.S. influence in the country. Removing diplomats is often a signal that the threat level to a country is high.

More than Meta, Twitter has long been a hub for automated accounts of all kinds. This was a key talking point for Elon Musk, who vowed to tackle the problem of malicious bots once the company was in his possession. While the company’s account verification policy has zigged and zagged since Musk’s takeover, it also appears to be honoring more requests for content removals that it receives from governments than it did under Jack Dorsey — in what could be a boon for Lithuania.

As for Meta, what the company terms “coordinated inauthentic behavior” has long been a violation of company policy, but its track record on enforcing this rule is mixed. The proposed amendments in Lithuania are meant to put the company on notice so that it is prepared to respond to requests from Lithuanian authorities in this vein. This is nothing new for Meta, which has faced regulatory measures around the world that are intended to ensure that content on the platform adheres to national laws. But Lithuania is among the smallest of countries that has attempted to bring the company to heel in this style. 

Germany’s 2017 Network Enforcement Act, casually referred to by policymakers as “Lex Facebook,” requires platforms above a certain size to remove illegal content, including hate speech, within 24 hours of receiving notice or face fines that could easily rise to tens of millions of euros. India’s 2021 IT Rules require large platforms to establish offices in the country and to dedicate staff to liaise with government officials seeking content removals or user data. In each case, the company has ultimately opted to comply, and it’s easy to see why. India represents Meta’s largest national market worldwide — it is unquestionably in Meta’s best interest to stay in good standing with regulators. And Germany’s position within the EU would have made it politically risky for the company not to fall in line.

But can Lithuania expect the same results? In December, Meta responded to allegations that Facebook was blocking pro-Ukrainian content in Lithuania and even sent representatives to Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, to discuss the matter with policymakers. But two months later, Meta issued a formal response to Lithuanian politicians insisting that the platform's moderation principles were applied equally to both sides of the conflict and that the algorithm did not discriminate. The incident highlighted the small Baltic nation’s willingness to stand up to the tech giant as Facebook continues to be the most widely used platform in the country. But it also demonstrated Meta’s confidence in asserting its power in the region.

A month later, the heads of state from eight European countries, including Lithuania, wrote an open letter to tech firms calling on them to fight disinformation that “undermines” peace and stability.

Weeding out harmful bots is a complicated exercise in any country that wants to uphold freedom of expression. Although the proposed amendments would only apply to bots spreading information that is already prohibited under Lithuanian law, the criminalization of activity by an automated account still treads into relatively new territory. Lithuanian supporters of the two amendments, including Dauksas, argue that a clear line can be drawn between trolls, who are often people or profiles for hire, and bots, who Dauksas says should not be afforded human rights protections. Scholars like Jonathan Corpus Ong, an associate professor of global digital media at the University of Massachusetts, take a different stance. “Even in a bot farm, there are humans clicking the buttons and directing these armies of automated accounts. The distinction between human and automation is more nuanced and there are many layers of complicity,” he argues.

Speaking from the sidelines of TrustCon, a meeting of cyber security professionals in San Francisco, Ong was eager to stress that blunt force regulation is often not the answer to the complex set of challenges that arise when combatting bots. 

“We all agree that some regulation is necessary, but we need to be extremely careful about using punitive measures, which could create further harm,” he said. 

In Ong’s view, we need to be cautious about what kind of information is shared between platforms and governments and what data is exchanged between platforms and law enforcement agencies, all of which would depend on sustained levels of trust and transparency. While Lithuania is rated “Free” in Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World” report, such legislation could pave the way for new forms of censorship in countries where democracy is under pressure or has been eroded completely.

Underlying all of this is also a persistent dearth of independent research on these dynamics, research that would require full cooperation from companies like Meta and Twitter where the vast majority of operations like these play out. Calls for more transparency around bot and troll farms have been ongoing from analysts and scholars, but, so far, no social media platform has been open to independent audits of their own investigations, Ong said.

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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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Since coming to power in 2015, the conservative-nationalist Law and Justice party has been accused of subverting democracy by stacking the courts with sympathetic judges, seizing control of state media and targeting women’s reproductive rights. But what brought Polish people out to the streets — in the largest demonstration since the 1980s — was a new law that will set up a government commission to investigate alleged Russian influence in Poland between 2007 and 2022.  

The proposed nine-member commission will have the power to investigate individuals suspected of being unduly influenced by the Kremlin, and hold open hearings into their conduct. 

Opponents of the legislation argue that it is intended to punish opposition politicians ahead of pivotal parliamentary elections this fall. The legislation has been compared to McCarthyism, a purge of individuals suspected to be under socialist and communist influence in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s.

It's not just Poles who are infuriated by the Russian influence law. It has also rattled allies in the United States and the European Union who have relied on Poland, a NATO member, to act as a key transit hub for military aid to Ukraine since early 2022. In a statement, the U.S. State Department said that the law “could be used to block the candidacy of opposition politicians without due process.” The EU, which was already in a bitter feud with Law and Justice over Poland’s democratic backsliding, took legal action against the Polish government, saying the commission violated EU law.

Perhaps in response to such criticism, Polish President Andrzej Duda proposed significant amendments to the law just days after signing the bill. Following parliamentary approval, current members of parliament will no longer be able to sit on the commission, and the commission will no longer be given the power to ban people from holding public office. An appeal process against the commission’s decisions will also be instituted. Still, opposition politicians argue that while the worst effects of the law have been mitigated, its undemocratic spirit remains intact, with opposition politicians being smeared as Putin’s puppets.   

The proposed commission is an example of how the Polish government has used the fallout from the war in Ukraine to mask its undemocratic maneuverings at home. “We’re seeing two Polands, the good Poland, which is supporting Ukraine, and the bad Poland, which continues to demolish the rule of law,” said Jakub Jaraczewski, a research coordinator at Democracy Reporting International, a think tank in Berlin. “The war in Ukraine has allowed the Polish government to cast themselves as the good guys.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Law and Justice party has increased its standing on the world stage and cemented Poland as a European power. In February, U.S. President Joe Biden visited Warsaw, where he praised Poland for its staunch support for Ukraine and its commitment to democratic values. “Thank you, Poland,” he said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you for what you’re doing.”

One reason why Law and Justice continues to appeal to swaths of the Polish electorate is its successful redrafting of history to justify its illiberal agenda. By using the memory of malign Russian influence in Poland, the Polish government is casting itself as the country’s protector. 

While the party evokes history and Russia’s war in Ukraine to justify controversial anti-democratic legislation, it has to tread carefully around another historical memory seared in the national psyche.

On July 11, Law and Justice will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the bloodiest day of the Volhynian massacres. Located in northwest Ukraine, Volhynia was once a part of Poland. Between 1943 and 1945, armed Ukrainian nationalists slaughtered whole villages full of Polish people in a bid to prevent a post-war Poland from asserting sovereignty over Ukrainian-majority regions. Over 50,000 Poles were murdered. In retaliation, Poles killed an estimated 10,000 Ukrainians. 

The Volhynian massacres have hung over Polish-Ukrainian relations since the end of communist rule. While Poland declared Volhynia a genocide in 2016, consecutive Ukrainian governments have stood firm on their position that there is a need for reconciliation and forgiveness on both sides. Ukraine has always rejected the claim that the events in Volhynia were a genocide.

In March 2023, the head of the Ukrainian parliament, Ruslan Stefanchuk, said during a visit to Warsaw that Ukraine would work with Poland to accept “the truth, no matter how painful it may be.” It appeared to be a way forward for Poland and Ukraine. But, aware of national sensitivities, particularly in an election year, a spokesperson for Poland’s foreign ministry chastised the Ukrainian government soon after for failing to understand “that the issue of Volhynia is very important for Poles.” He went on to demand that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “should take more responsibility” and apologize for the massacres. Ukraine’s ambassador to Poland described the comments as “unacceptable” in tweets that were later deleted. 

“There is a problem between Polish historical memory and Ukrainian historical memory about Volhynia,” Jan Pisulinski, a professor of history at Rzeszow University in eastern Poland, told me, referencing Ukrainian historians who claim that the massacres were not perpetrated by Ukrainian nationals but were instead peasant killings. “But,” he added, “the Law and Justice party’s so-called historical policy is disappointing because it is manipulative in how it serves the contemporary interests of the government.” 

It is unlikely that the Polish government will soften its position as the anniversary approaches. It’s an occasion that will be watched by Russian propagandists who have previously used Volhynia to try to drive a wedge between Poland and Ukraine. Earlier this month, I met Marta, who was standing outside the Ukrainian embassy in central Warsaw to express solidarity following the June 6 blast that destroyed the Kakhovka Dam. She told me that in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she didn’t believe the Volhynia massacres needed to be commemorated in the same way this year. “My grandfather,” she told me, “hated Ukrainian people because of Volhynia, but now we need to stand against Russia and leave the past in the past.”

The need to stand up to Russia, argue the Polish protestors who gathered in Warsaw in early June, cannot come at the cost of Poland’s hard-won democracy. At the protests, the people I spoke to expressed no fear of Russian influence, only anger toward the Polish government. 

Grzegorz Schetyna, a former leader of Civic Platform, Poland’s main opposition party, told me that it was “key to stand together with other democratic opposition parties at this march.” He was confident that the momentum of the protests could be bottled and used to unify Poland’s traditionally chaotic opposition before the general election, which is expected to be held in October. 

“We are going to these elections to win and to right human wrongs,” former Prime Minister Donald Tusk shouted into the loudspeaker under the searing sun that day. Tusk, critics say, is the primary target of the government’s urgent efforts to investigate “Russian influence” because he is the biggest threat to Law and Justice retaining power.

Despite the impressive turnout on June 4, not all the demonstrators were convinced it would be enough. “Poland is here,” Tusk said. “No one will silence us!” But Paul, a 71-year-old from Warsaw, told me he wasn’t so sure. “Support for the other side is too big,” he said with a shake of his head before disappearing into the crowd.

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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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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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The protests erupted on March 7 after the ruling Georgian Dream party began pushing through a controversial draft law that, if successful, would have required independent media and civil society organizations receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “agents of foreign influence.” By March 9, Georgia’s government had backed down. Some 130 people arrested during the protests were promptly released, and on March 10 an emergency parliamentary sitting was hastily arranged to kill the bill. 

For outside observers, Georgian Dream’s spectacular U-turn may have signaled the end of an outwardly bewildering episode in the country’s politics. In reality, the story is likely far from over.

Dubbed “Putin’s Law” by demonstrators in Georgia, the governing party’s foreign agents bill echoed the measures used to crush dissent in Moscow after they were introduced in 2012. “It’s the trajectory of such laws that makes them frightening,” said Hubertus Jahn, a professor of Russian history at the University of Cambridge. “The impact [in Russia] has been massive. No NGO is operative [and] once these organizations are closed, an open civil society is no longer possible.” Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, the Kremlin has weaponized restrictions against those deemed “foreign agents” such that virtually all opposition voices have now been jailed, driven underground or forced abroad. 

“[Georgian Dream] has implemented hate and the inability to accept differences of opinion,” Gia Pailodze, a 66-year-old filmmaker, told me at the demonstration in Tbilisi last week. “It’s the same psychology you see at work in Russia.” Many Western commentators saw the protests as evidence that while the Georgian government has Russian sympathies, the Georgian people believe their future lies with Europe.

Russia for its part denied the protests in Georgia have anything to do with Russia, claiming, as Georgian Dream does, that the draft bill was based on a United States law stemming from the 1930s that requires lobbyists and advocates for foreign governments, organizations and individuals to disclose their related activities and compensation to the U.S. Department of Justice.

After the bill was withdrawn, Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, noted on Telegram that “Georgia lost the chance of sovereignty.” He claimed the street protests in Georgia were a product of Washington’s “soft power” rather than organic popular anger.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, also blamed the United States. He said that Salome Zourabichvili, the president of Georgia who expressed support for the protesters, was “addressing Georgians from America.” Zourabichvili was on a visit to New York to attend a United Nations summit. Peskov, referring to the U.S., said “someone’s visible hand is trying to add an anti-Russian element.” He also referred to “provocations” and the Kremlin’s “great concern.”

Others were less diplomatic. 

The Twitter account for “Russia’s MFA in Crimea,” Russia’s self-proclaimed Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the annexed region that is flagged as a Russian government organization, threatened protesters who were calling for the resignation of the Georgian government. “We recommend,” read the tweet, “to recall a similar situation in Ukraine in 2014 and what it finally led to!” Since 2008, Russia has consolidated its control over the Georgian territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the Caucasus, which constitute more than 20% of Georgian land. According to some reports, the protests over the draft bill led to security forces in the occupied areas conducting military exercises. As an example of saber rattling, this was comfortably topped by the RT editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, who called for a nuclear strike on Georgia.

In the weeks leading up to the protests in Georgia, critics had pointed out that the draft law — titled “Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence” — represented only the latest evidence of a growing authoritarian slide in a nation once held up, in the words of one former U.S. diplomat, as “a beacon of democracy in an ocean of autocracy.” A state security leak in 2021, for instance, appeared to have revealed mass surveillance of voices critical of the administration. And prominent journalist Nika Gvaramia, a critic of the government, was handed a prison sentence last year on charges that his supporters, human rights groups like Amnesty International and even the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi have said appear more motivated by a vendetta than justice.

But to truly understand how a country still subject to the Russian occupation got to the point of trying to implement an analogue of the Russian law, it’s important to grasp the fraught geopolitics at play. When Georgian Dream assumed office in 2012, it was on a mandate to preserve peace and stability after the disastrous 2008 war with Russia. In pursuing that mandate, Georgia has long sought to tread an exceptionally fine line between deepening its ties with historic allies in the West and avoiding any provocation of the Putin regime. 

This delicate balancing act became significantly more difficult, arguably impossible, with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, as Western nations called on Georgia to join sanctions against Russia and provide material support to Ukrainian forces. Georgian Dream rejected those calls, instead launching unprecedented verbal attacks against the United States and the European Union. The Georgian administration’s relationship with the Putin regime, by contrast, has only grown warmer. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has even praised Georgian Dream for not becoming “another irritant” to the Kremlin with their decision to remain largely neutral on the conflict. 

In 2022, $2.5 billion worth of business with Russian companies turned Russia into Georgia’s second-largest trading partner after Turkey, in turn raising international concern that Georgia may be acting as a conduit for sanctions evasion. Talks remain ongoing about the prospect of resuming direct flights between Moscow and Tbilisi for the first time in over three years. 

But roughly 85% of Georgia’s population is in favor of joining the EU. After war broke out in Ukraine, the EU undertook to fast-track Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova’s applications for candidacy status — but while Ukraine and Moldova were waved through in June, Georgia’s bid was deferred because of an apparent lack of willingness to implement necessary reforms. 

Amid the doubling-down on anti-Western rhetoric that has followed, the foreign agents bill was received as a blatant attempt on the part of Georgian Dream to sabotage the country’s remaining prospects for integration with the EU. Not least given that the draft law was in fact first tabled by People’s Power, a vehemently anti-U.S., anti-EU party faction, and that its provisions actively contravened the European Charter on Human Rights, to which Georgia is a signatory.

“We want a European democracy and the new law is against that path,” said Giorgi Zhvania, a 35-year-old IT manager who was at the protests in Tbilisi. This, he said, “will divide Georgia. It’s Russian politics: divide and conquer.” Among the demands the EU is making of Georgia, say experts, is “deoligarchization,” a meaningful effort to counter the influence of vested interests over Georgian politics and public life. 

It’s an open secret that Georgian Dream’s billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, by far the country’s wealthiest businessman, remains the party’s gray eminence though he formally left politics — not for the first time — in 2021. Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, members of the European Parliament have repeatedly called for him to face sanctions for his long-standing links to powerful Russian business interests, leaving no illusions about what is meant by “deoligarchization.” But, said Julie George, a professor of political science at City University New York, “by definition, Georgian Dream cannot abandon Ivanishvili.” And so, she added, “the bid to enter the EU — not for the EU, or the Georgian people, but for Georgian Dream — ended last year.”

Last week’s protests may have been successful in achieving their immediate goal, but the government’s U-turn was not without some notable qualifications. The vast majority of ruling party MPs conspicuously failed to turn up and vote the foreign agents law down on March 10, instead leaving the process of withdrawing it to be largely carried out by the woefully fragmented parliamentary opposition. 

Referring to domestic and international coverage of events, Georgian Dream said that a “machine of lies was able to present the bill in a negative light and mislead a certain part of the public.” The party said it would be making efforts in the near future to clarify “what the bill was for and why it was important.” 

Indeed, party chairman Irakli Kobakhidze has since been quick to lavish praise upon the draft law’s authors for helping expose NGOs and independent media as subversive “LGBT propagandists” and opponents of the Georgian Orthodox Church, bent on dragging Georgia into the war in Ukraine and returning to power the widely-despised former government of imprisoned opposition figure Mikheil Saakashvili. According to Britain’s Sky News, which got in touch with Saakashvili through his lawyer, the former president says he has been poisoned and is “in bed all the time” and in “excruciating pain.” He warned Georgians to be wary of “the vengeful mood of the oligarchs' regime.”

It’s difficult to forecast what the wider implications may be should Georgian Dream choose to continue on its current trajectory. The message of the protests, say some analysts, is an embrace of the EU and the West. And Georgia is due to hold elections in 2024 with its new constitutionally-mandated proportional representation electoral system, intended to make all votes contribute to the final results. 

“After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia established not a perfect democracy,” said Stephen Jones, the head of Harvard University’s Georgian Studies Program, “but one that to a degree protected citizens’ rights and allowed some sort of public space for discussion.” Further democratic backsliding, he told me, means that will go, “and that’s a tragedy for Georgians.”

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“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.

Zelenaya Lenta — Russian for “green ribbon” — is one such initiative. Their manifesto is simple. It calls for people to hang green ribbons in public places to signal their opposition to the war. People in more than 200 cities have taken part in the action, and ribbons flutter on crosswalks, handrails and even bathroom stalls, from densely trafficked Moscow neighborhoods to far-flung Siberian villages. “It’s safe when everything else is forbidden,” one organizer involved with the Green Ribbon campaign told Coda Story.

In the early days of the invasion, people tied green ribbons to their backpacks or wore them in their hair. Some posted pictures of the ribbons and other anti-war symbols on social media. At its peak, the campaign saw upwards of 500 photographs of green ribbons daily. But authorities caught on quickly. In March 2022, a lawyer from Chita received a $200 fine for “discrediting the Russian army” because she had a green ribbon tied to her bag. Activist Nikolai Rodkin was fined $400 on the same charge when he laid flowers and green ribbons at a vigil for fallen Ukrainian civilians in Omsk, in southwestern Siberia. 

As the dangers of speaking out against the war have become more and more apparent, the Green Ribbon movement has adapted. Organizers developed a Telegram bot where activists could share photographs of their work anonymously. Today, a group of five people, three of whom have left Russia, coordinate Green Ribbon’s digital presence. They repost submissions to Instagram, TikTok and a public Telegram channel.

Another primary objective of the campaign is to guide people to accurate information about the war, something that is difficult to come by for most Russians today. Activists scrawl hashtags on their green ribbons that lead to the campaign’s social media pages, where followers will find links to independent news outlets and images of the war’s destruction that are nowhere to be seen in Russian state media. One recent Instagram post featured videos of flattened cities in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Another post offered details on the numbers of Russian soldiers injured during the war and plans to deploy hundreds of thousands more to Ukraine.

The campaign has seen steady participation from activists in Moscow and St. Petersburg — the traditional centers of protest in Russia — as well as Ekaterinburg, Kaliningrad and Sochi. Green Ribbon built a map to show how far the movement stretches. While the organizer couldn’t say precisely how many ribbons have been hung, they estimated it was at least 10,000. The organizer asked Coda not to use their name, for fear of reprisal by the state.

Beyond activist circles, do these efforts make a difference? It may be tempting to see the campaign’s geographic spread or follower counts as an indicator of how the Russian public thinks about the war. But the numbers are still relatively low, and the anonymous nature of the campaign makes it difficult to discern how many people are truly engaged. 

“There’s a very strong, unsubstantiated assumption that because the regime is repressive, the majority opposes the war but is just afraid to vocalize,” said Maria Popova, a professor of political science at McGill University. Journalists and researchers in both Russia and the West are skeptical of public polling, which often has low response rates and where social pressures to give certain answers can distort the numbers. And experts warn against taking reports of high support for Putin and the war at face value. 

The campaign can’t resolve the question of public opinion, but it does offer a view into the nature of Russian opposition and its patterns of protest. The organizer was clear that Green Ribbon is not really an organization but a structureless movement. “There’s no management or commands from above,” they said. Maria Sidorkina, an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, likened Green Ribbon to the massive anti-regime demonstrations in Bolotnaya Square in 2011 and other leaderless protests that have been around in Russia for many years.

Opposition has been fragmented throughout the war, at times for tactical reasons. Groups like the Feminist Anti-War Collective and the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists are set up in individual cells as a way to limit damage to the broader organization. Working independently can leave anti-war activists feeling isolated. The Green Ribbon organizer said that green ribbons on the street help activists realize they are not alone. “There are a lot of us, and this sense of community has been an important outcome of Green Ribbon,” they said. 

For Popova, the emotional well-being of Russian opposition should not be the end goal of protest movements like Green Ribbon. Popova, who helped to draft the “Statement of concerned Canadian scholars on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” instead emphasized the importance of changing people’s minds. “I’m not judging them by whether they’re making a difference, but whether they’re trying to make a difference,” she said. “The goal should always be to try to reach more people and convince or convert them somehow.”

Media outlets in Kazan, Arkhangelsk and St. Petersburg have covered the appearance of green ribbons in their cities, and journalists with Radio Free Europe’s Siberian service interviewed a woman who hung ribbons all over Ekaterinburg. Even the U.S. Embassy picked up on the protest action and included an image of a green ribbon in an anti-war propaganda video.

Green ribbons have also garnered attention from audiences that are outright hostile. “We receive many threats and photographs of green ribbons that have been torn and burned,” said the organizer. But they see these responses as a sign of the movement’s effectiveness, so long as they can maintain participants’ anonymity. In short, they said, “if they fight us, then we are doing everything right.”

The post Is Russia’s anti-war movement changing people’s minds? appeared first on Coda Story.

My colleague at the Calvert Journal, a website that covered contemporary art and culture in the post-Soviet world which I edited until its closure in February 2022, had written a short article about Kazantsev’s protest. In it, Kazantsev compared the risk of speaking out in Russia to Beethoven’s last piano sonata — the strange, existential Op. 111 sonata with which he ended that concert. 

“You will either get a response from the audience, or it will end badly,” he told me on a call from his home in Germany, where he moved with his wife and two children last summer. “There is a similar feeling” in Beethoven’s Op. 111, one of the few sonatas which has a very special ending. 

Kazantsev’s post-concert remarks were brave and risky. There had been widespread crackdowns on protests across Russia two months prior. But it was his choice of metaphor that moved me most. 

Beethoven’s last sonata is the execution of what the composer had attempted to do with the few sonatas that preceded it. With this arietta, Beethoven broke with the tradition of composition — of sonata form — which had dominated for over a century and in doing so marked the end of the Classical era and the start of the Romantic period. The arietta expresses something that had yet to have a codified language. It was revolutionary, and thus, in part, a farewell. 

Russian art is now largely in exile. Kazantsev is one of the estimated 900,000 Russians who have fled the country since the invasion of Ukraine. The exodus has touched almost every area of Russian society, but especially the Russian cultural world. Author Lyudmila Ulitskaya and theater director Kirill Serebrennikov now reside in Germany. Cult rock singer Zemfira and actress and director Renata Litvinova fled to France. Singer Monetochka left Russia for Lithuania. Pussy Riot’s Masha Alyokhina, who evaded house arrest and left Russia in April, now wanders Europe. 

The scattering has been global, but it's the countries with relaxed visa rules for Russian citizens that have, inevitably, become hubs for Russians. It was to Tbilisi, Georgia that young filmmaker Kantemir Balagov fled following the start of the invasion. Literary bloggers Zhenya Kalinkin and Daria Kasya only recently left Tbilisi to make a new life in Argentina. Contemporary artist Dagnini, who arrived a few days after the war began, still lives and practices art from her apartment in a Tbilisi suburb.

When ideas are prevented from entering politics, they are often redirected into art, whose abstraction and need for interpretation make them, by definition, harder to police. As a result, culture often ends up as one of the last islands of free thought under authoritarian regimes. When despots turn their attention to artistic censorship, we know things are taking a darker turn. 

The historical precedents for Russian artists working productively in exile are plenty: writers Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, painters Lidiya Masterkova and David Miretsky, dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. But for those artists whose subject was Russia itself, success was often scarce. 

For the generation of performance artists, those who responded directly to Putin’s Russia and who came to define the last two decades of Russian art, exile will likely look quite different. 

From Voina and Pussy Riot to Pyotr Pavlensky and Elena Kovylina, the most affecting art under Putin were sensational and explicit acts of defiance against the specificities of Russia’s debasement. As a result, these artists entered, perversely, into a kind of symbiosis with the regime. How they recalibrate their confrontation with a Russian state now physically distant from them will be interesting to watch. 

“In the U.K. you don’t have a totalitarian regime, that's why you can’t see the black and white border,” Pussy Riot’s Masha Alyokhina told me during a recent midnight phone call. “For Russia it’s clear. Either as an artist you're protesting or you’re decorating the regime. Both exist. An in-between does not.” Alyokhina, speaking to me from Reykjavik where she had just opened “Velvet Terrorism - Pussy Riot’s Russia,” the first overview exhibition of Pussy Riot’s work, was late to our call having just finished graffitiing a blue-and-yellow sign on a wall. It read, “War 3963 km,” with an arrow pointing in the direction of Ukraine. 

“We’ve done these in around 15 or more cities,” Alyokhina said. “Our graffiti imitates a road sign. There’s no name of the city, just the word “war” and the number of kilometers to the Ukraine border and an arrow. It’s a reminder to people that war is not as far away as we think. In Western Europe people think it’s not about them, that it’s far away.”

For their 40-second Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012, Alyokhina and Nadya Tolokonnikova were both arrested for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" and sentenced to two years in prison. The severity of the punishment was alarming and, considered a decade later, a marker for a new phase of deepening repression under Putin. Performance art became a key battleground. Because it was in culture and the arts that those who had the most to gain from a more liberal government — the urbanite middle class — lived. 

“In a way, I almost feel better now, because before the war there was an illusion of control,” said Zhenya Kalinkin, one half of the YouTube podcast duo “What Would I Do If Not Read,” who moved to Buenos Aires. 

Beginning in 2012, Russian cities underwent beautification projects. While redeveloping parks and widening pavements, this beautification literally laid the ground for slick new galleries and revamped Soviet-era factories financed by the oligarchs. It was here, in the Garage Center for Contemporary Arts, Strelka, and art clusters like V-A-C foundation and Winzavod that the young and liberal came to socialize and shape a burgeoning art scene — all under the support and financial backing of the men that kept Putin in power. The Calvert Journal, too, was first conceived as a platform where edgy young artists could show off their work to the English-speaking world. 

It wasn’t just that this veneer of artistic bohemia masked a lack of fundamental freedoms and dulled the urgency to demand them. It was that it caused a strange kind of displacement. Often struggling with Russian exhibitions, museums relied heavily on imported shows, and international big names like Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami made the Russian art world look like the art world in Western Europe — but, in fact, it was far from it.

Art is never objective, and it is only in context that we can hope to understand what it might mean. Subversion, after all, can only exist in the face of repression, rebellion only ever a counterbalance to the presence of control. This Potemkin art scene of the 2010s mimicked the West and so fostered an environment where it was not abnormal to be apolitical, which many wrongly took to represent relative freedom. Putin’s great success during these years was “managed democracy,” a sinister concept that meant Putin would always win. There was a creative offshoot: managed art.

It is now incredible to think that in 2011, the street-art group Voina received a state-funded prize for spray-painting a giant phallus onto a bridge in St. Petersburg which, when risen, faced the local FSB headquarters, erect. Three years later, by 2014, the Ministry of Culture pulled funding from Russia’s largest international documentary film festival, Artdocfest, for the “anti-state” views of its director.

It was then that the artist Oleg Kulik, most famous for his performance impersonating a dog, reduced the artist’s choice either to fighting against the forces of oppression or currying favor with them. The artist, according to Kulik, can choose “to bite or to lick” — not a dilemma that exists in democratic countries.

“It’s doubtlessly the role of art to get through to people in Russia,” said Pussy Riot’s Alyokhina, whose exhibition is giving its proceeds to children’s hospitals in Kyiv. “We cannot assess our impact, not right now. We can continue what we are doing and have a hope that people will see it and something inside them will change. It’s just not the moment to give up.” 

In a way, attempts to define contemporary Russian art is a process of discounting all the things it is not. “Art doesn’t have to be totally understood. What’s important is an emotional response,” said 35-year-old performance artist Dagnini. In her Tbilisi apartment, where she’s been living since moving to Georgia in February 2022, a number of her artworks hang off the walls. 

“In Russia, you’re not taught to be a human. You are taught to be part of something great,” she said. “Literature is part of the issue because it’s part of the imperialistic way of looking at things. We were taught Russian literature as part of a cult of being great.”

"I didn’t leave Russia voluntarily. And I can’t return. So I guess you could call me an exile,” said performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky. Leaning against a white bookcase in his Paris apartment, Pavlensky becomes animated when our conversation turns towards power, which forms the core of his work. During his time in Russia, he was regularly arrested. 

In Pavlensky’s 2013 performance, called “Fixation,” he nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones in Moscow’s Red Square to protest Russia’s transformation into a police state. It launched his notoriety as one of Russia’s most provocative artists. All of his performances, from “Segregation,” where he sliced his right earlobe off outside Moscow’s Serbsky psychiatric center to protest the police’s return “to the use of psychiatry for political goals,” to “Carcass,” when he wrapped himself, naked, in barbed wire, to represent the individual’s position within the legal system, have involved Russia’s state instruments of power: police officers, court judges and prosecutors among them.

“In my acts, I get people of power to participate in my art. I am getting representatives of power to act as part of art. They are participating in my thoughts and the things I’ve thought up. The subject of power becomes the object of art,” he said.

Fleeing to Paris in 2017 following allegations of sexual assault, Pavlensky was, in a way, the acid test for radical Russian artists who are now transplanting their practice outside of Russia. Pavlensky’s first performance in Paris was called “Lighting”: he set fire to the doors of the Banque of France, which “has taken the place of the Bastille, and bankers have taken the place of monarchs,” as he declared at the time. It caused outrage, and Pavlensky was charged with property damage. 

His second project, “Pornopolitique,” was a short-lived website that was to be the first porn resource featuring political bureaucrats and other representatives of power. On the site, Pavlensky posted a video he had procured of a Paris mayoral candidate masturbating. The politician subsequently withdrew from the race, and Pavlensky was charged with invasion of privacy and dissemination of images of a sexual nature without consent. The French media, which had fawned over his work in Russia, turned against him and eventually “stopped talking about my work at all,” Pavlensky said.

For Pavlensky, the key to artistic integrity and freedom is a consistent artistic vision. The question of relevance in exile, of the necessity of reinvention in a shifting environment, is complex. When I argue that the inflammatory artistic language Pavlensky used in his performances in Russia means something else in the French context, he demurs. In his work, Pavlensky says, the context is simply power, no matter the national context or the specifics of its abuse: “There is power here in France too. Power here is no less strong than in Russia.”

For all the Russian artists who thrived pursuing non-political art in exile, there are counterexamples of Soviet dissident artists who, following emigration to the West, changed their practice and lost relevance. It’s the likes of Boris Mikhailov, a trailblazing Soviet Ukrainian photographer whose less provocative work following emigration to the West Pavlensky rails against. 

“As an artist, you need to declare what you do and carry on with it. To change it in the way these artists did is to be a traitor of your own art,” Pavlensky said. 

With how increasingly dangerous it became to voice any dissent in Russia during the 2010s, bravery in the face of oppression became the metric by which the West assessed Russian contemporary art, breathlessly paying attention to any act that incurred a police response. This reaction contributed to a misunderstanding of the influence of this art as a force within Russian society. For Western validation, good Russian art didn’t just have to be independent, it had to be working in opposition to the state.

One of the primary ways in which nations come to terms with their past is through stories, be they told through literature, art, film or some other medium. It is their importance that makes them vulnerable to manipulation, to being warped by authoritarian regimes and re-employed as instruments of control.

The poison of Russian propaganda over the war in Ukraine may have created a facade of denial, but it is precisely that: a facade. Sooner or later, Russia will have to confront the horrors taking place across Ukraine at its hands. It is the artists who will have to find a way to tell the stories that will open their eyes, and ours.  

Sitting in Dagnini’s apartment, there is one work which stands out. It’s a replica of the painting “Rozh” — meaning “Rye” — by 19th century Russian landscape artist Ivan Shishkin. I’ve seen the image before. Its calm, pastoral scene of rye fields is reproduced and hung in homes and buildings across Russia due to its supposed representation of Russia’s quintessence. “This image is important and painful to look at, because it’s the painting every Russian school kid should write an essay about at some point,” says Dagnini. “You’re meant to think of land, patriotism. I found out that the painter himself wrote on the other side of this painting: ‘Freedom, expanse, rye, God’s grace, Russian wealth,’” says Dagnini. “He used these big words that can be lethal when used in propaganda and for a state’s agenda.” 

Dagnini created the replica after the war in Ukraine started, adding the name of the painting over the image with one letter changed. The word that now overlays the wheat fields reads “LOZH”: LIE.

The post Russian performance art in the time of Putin appeared first on Coda Story.

But just like at the start of the invasion, physical resistance to mobilization soon began to fade. Russian resistance to the war today is mostly an online operation, and Telegram has become its central platform. With Facebook and Instagram banned under an “extremism” law, and Russian social media giant VK under almost direct control of the Kremlin, Telegram has offered a relatively safe harbor where one can find Russians expressing grief, anger and frustration about the war. But this comes right alongside political narratives and disinformation from across the spectrum and plenty of tall tales from the twisted world of conspiracy theories. It is from these foundations that an organization called the Council of Mothers and Wives has sprung into existence.

The Council launched its Telegram channel on September 29, just days after Putin instituted the partial draft, and now has more than 23,000 followers. Behind it is Olga Tsukanova, a 46-year-old mother who had a brief moment in the limelight when a video she posted on VK went viral. In the video, Tsukanova spoke of how her son was pressured on two separate occasions to sign a contract to be “voluntarily” sent to the front. “I address all Russian mothers,” she said into the camera. “Stop winding snot on your fist and crying into your pillow. Let’s band together.” After her video touched the hearts of mothers across the country, she decided to create the Council.

When I first sat down to read through the channel, I found testimony about conditions on the front and stories of families’ difficult experiences after their loved ones were drafted. In its second post, the Council demanded practical information about the deployment: How much training would draftees receive? What winter clothing would they be issued? How would food be organized? All were reasonable demands, given the news that Russian troops were hugely under-equipped for war. Pictures of supporters across the country, mailing their demands to the authorities, right up to the office of President Putin, followed.

But then another side of the channel began to emerge. Again and again, when I clicked through the links shared, I found myself on the page of another organization, the National Union of the Revival of Russia (OSVR). Established in 2019 to restore “the destroyed state of the USSR,” the OSVR looks longingly at the bygone days of the Soviet Union. It also fosters conspiracy theories on the coronavirus and 5G. According to the OSVR’s manifesto on partial mobilization, which was shared by the Council on Telegram, the war in Ukraine was “started by Chabad adherents” to build a “new Khazaria” on the territory of Russia and Ukraine — an antisemitic conspiracy theory that is grounded in the geography of the medieval Khazar empire and has prospered since the invasion. The OSVR is led by Svetlana Lada-Rus, a conspiracy theorist who believes that a third force is committing atrocities in Ukraine and has claimed that dangerous reptiles from the planet Nibiru would fly to earth and unleash chaos.

The OSVR’s influence on the Council is not an accident. Tsukanova spoke at an OSVR meeting in October and was a member of the now-defunct Volya party that Lada-Rus once led. Tsukanova told a reporter from Novaya Gazeta that the OSVR helped her to create the Council: “A lot of effort is needed for this, without the support of like-minded people, it is difficult to do this. The movement itself supported me.” Both women hail from Samara, a small city near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan.

“Internationally there has been a slight misinterpretation, or at least a superficial understanding, of this [Council] movement that is not to be confused with the more long-standing Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia,” Jaroslava Barbieri, a doctoral researcher on Russia at Birmingham University, told me. “If you look at Olga Tsukanova’s social media prior to the announced [partial] mobilization there is not so much talk about the so-called military operation, actually you will find content about conspiracy theories, a rogue government,” she said. “That is a bit more emblematic of a broader political stance of the members of this Council of Mothers and Wives.” 

In addition to promoting OSVR materials, the channel also features a not-so-healthy dose of anti-vax propaganda. Coda Story’s partners at Democracy Reporting International ran an analysis of the channel and found that more anti-vaccination content was reposted in the first week and a half of its existence than content that could be described as clearly anti-war.

This peculiar cocktail of quackery, conspiracy and seemingly genuine grief about the war maintained a steady beat until mid-November, when the Council staged a public demonstration. On November 14 and 15, 2022, members of the group picketed the Western Military District headquarters in St. Petersburg where they demanded the return of mobilized troops from the Belgorod region near the border with Ukraine. Eager to get media attention, the group stressed on their Telegram channel that “no anti-war statements” were made, only a wish to open “dialogue with officials” about “specific shortcomings.” After the event, the Council got some national media coverage, which they hailed as a success. 

Several days later, Putin announced plans to meet with a select group of soldiers’ mothers on the outskirts of Moscow. Handpicked for their association with pro-war NGOs, or for their outright support of the so-called special military operation, these were the women the Kremlin wanted to use to calm fears around mobilization. “This is a sensitive topic for [Putin],” said Maxim Alyukov, a research fellow at the King’s College Russia Institute. “The government perceives this issue of mothers and wives as a more dangerous issue than some kinds of political criticism, because it is something which can resonate with the public, and that’s why [the Kremlin] ran their own council of mothers and wives,” he told me.

For Tsukanova and her followers, the roundtable was a snub. They duly took to social media to air their grievances. “[Putin] wants to declare real mothers and wives extremists and agents. CIA?”, one Telegram post read. International media also took note. The BBC ran clips of Tsukanova saying that the Russian authorities were “absolutely” afraid of women. Democracy Reporting International’s modeling for Coda Story shows that, in the midst of these events, the Council’s Telegram channel saw a significant increase in followers. 

Soon, the Council’s VK page was blocked on orders from the Prosecutor General’s office and a car carrying Tsukanova was stopped in Samara under the pretext of a drug search while the passengers were questioned. But while thousands have been arrested for their anti-war activism, and others subjected to exile, the Council has been able to continue its work weaving concerns about mobilization with the world of conspiracies. Pro-Kremlin media have been quick to point out links to the OSVR, and Russia’s pro-government, anti-cult organizations have also taken pains to call out the Council and accuse them of being provocateurs. The Center for Religious Studies, led by Alexander Dvorkin, also accused the OSVR of being financed by Poland and Ukraine, a common tactic used to undermine anti-war individuals and groups in Russia.

For Jakub Kalensky, a senior analyst at the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, criticism from these corners is not surprising. “This might be very beneficial for you [as the Kremlin], if you have an anti-mobilization organization that is headed by questionable characters,” said Kalensky. “You can use their background to discredit the anti-mobilization position as a whole, this is a hypothesis we could work with,” he told me. 

In this landscape, Russia’s anti-war activism has become ever more fragmented. Years of authoritarian rule have hollowed out the country’s civil society and stripped people of the ability to express dissent without serious repercussions. More than 2,300 people have been arrested in anti-war street protests since the partial mobilization was announced. In March 2022, legislation was introduced imposing prison sentences of up to 15 years for spreading “fake news” about the so-called special military operation. The war has only made the stakes higher, no matter which side you’re on. 

Motivations for subscribing to Telegram channels undoubtedly vary — from a desire to stop mobilization to an outright anti-war, anti-Putin position. Groups that gain traction are quickly branded as extremist by the authorities. Those that aren’t often attract suspicion as having some nefarious link to the FSB, Russia’s security service. “There has been a history of infiltration of different opposition movements by the FSB either directly by speaking to members of those movements or most probably trying to send different messages to make them less appealing to different audiences,” Kasia Kaczmarska, a lecturer in politics and international relations at Edinburgh University, said. “This can sometimes work via multiple channels which the FSB is capable of organizing.” 

“It's important to highlight these more complex networks and the processes of how certain institutions came about, to not conflate them with genuine anti-war movements,” Barbieri, the Birmingham University doctoral researcher, added. “We also need to start thinking about how these disinformation narratives could also work as a coping mechanism for people so as not to face the reality of how the war in Ukraine began.”

Meanwhile the Council of Mothers and Wives continues to grow. As the full-scale invasion approaches its one-year anniversary, the channel blasts out condemnations of the mobilization alongside the wholesale promotion of conspiracy theories. It’s clear that the channel offers solace for some people, a place to vent their frustrations with a war they didn’t want in their lives. But for its leaders, it may be better understood as a vehicle for bringing an organization on the fringes of society to a new, and much more influential, audience.

This story was produced in partnership with Democracy Reporting International

The post Grief and conspiracy collide in Russia’s ‘Council of Mothers and Wives’ appeared first on Coda Story.

The fallout from the war in Ukraine

This year, we have been tracking how propaganda around this war has been weaponized in Europe and around the world, particularly in Africa. In our weekly newsletter Disinfo Matters, we’ve stayed on the story of Russian wartime disinformation, such as the Kremlin’s use of social media to spread its narratives. We have also highlighted how Ukrainians have turned to photography and music, among other things, to mourn the Russian invasion, to express defiance and to point toward a brighter future. A major development has been the extensive, even unprecedented, use of technology like killer robots and drones in a war otherwise characterized by grinding, wearying ground battles in which heavily outnumbered Ukrainian forces have managed to force Russia to retreat from some occupied territories. While the story of the Russian invasion has been one of boots on the ground, including Russia calling up its reserves, an extraordinary and dystopic subplot is how this war, as one of our writers noted, is “serving as a testing ground for cutting edge, but unproven, technology.” Sign up here for the newsletter we are launching in 2023 that will be entirely dedicated to covering the global fallout from the war in Ukraine.  

Rewriting history

2022 has been marked by governments and regimes around the world seeking to influence, inflect and even entirely rewrite their national histories. Some of this has taken the form of quite literally rewriting school textbooks to reflect political trends and ideologies. One of our Big Ideas dove deep into revisionist agendas in Poland, Spain, the Channel Islands, Northern Ireland and Lithuania. In each of these places, uncomfortable questions are being asked about national identity. 

How, for instance, should Poland reflect on its wartime history? A right-wing government is using the country’s National Institute of Remembrance to spin a nationalist narrative about Polish heroism in the face of Nazi atrocities. It embraces and promotes a vision of Polish resistance, of ethnic Poles helping the country’s Jewish community, while refusing to countenance a serious conversation on Polish collaboration in Nazi crimes. Collaboration is also a taboo topic of conversation in Alderney, one of the Channel Islands occupied by the Nazis where they built concentration camps. Nazi crimes on British soil have been buried far into the recesses of the national memory but, some historians argue, it’s time to revive those memories. 

A simmering, resentful silence continues to hold in parts of Northern Ireland over the Troubles, decades after the Good Friday Agreement. Is it possible to simply draw a line under the violence without also finding a way for people to be told the truth, to grieve together and to move forward without burying the past? This is a question that echoes in Spain's Valley of the Fallen, where a national pact of forgetting has failed to erase the cataclysmic violence of the Spanish Civil War. People still want answers, even as others claim answers are no longer possible or too politicized. Meanwhile, the politicization of medieval symbols has created rifts between Lithuanians and Belarusians, as each nation clings to versions of its distant history as guides to present-day national identities.  

Cross-border repression 

Governments reaching across borders to harass and persecute their own citizens, whether digitally or physically, is an increasingly prevalent phenomenon that scholars label transnational repression. Some of the worst offenders include China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran. We have written about the few Uyghur journalists and translators who are able to tell their stories about the harassment they have suffered in Xinjiang. Surveillance tactics and censorship have made it difficult for members of the Uyghur diaspora to speak out against the atrocities of the Chinese authorities both within and outside China’s borders. Just months ago, the FBI indicted men it said had been helping Chinese authorities to execute a campaign to force political dissidents living in the United States to return to China. So alarmed are some members of Congress that they have introduced a new bill to jail those convicted of helping authoritarian regimes to attack dissidents based in the U.S. for up to 10 years. While this would be a significant deterrent and a recognition of the threat certain regimes pose to their own citizens abroad, questions remain about enforcement and sincerity when the United States’ close political relationships with countries such as Saudi Arabia come under pressure. This is a theme that Coda will devote much of its energy to reporting on as 2023 unfolds. 

Climate denial and pseudohealth

The ongoing Russian aggression in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis are contributing hugely to climate anxieties, as European countries desperate for alternative energy relationships ignore their commitments to combating climate change by signing deals to exploit natural gas resources in Africa. Shifts to sustainable forms of transportation in the U.K. have stirred up virulent online debates over environmental policies. Shortages of medicines at the center of TikTok trends, such as diabetes pills touted as miracle weight loss aids, are affecting patients who are struggling to access their regular medication. Meanwhile in India, the government’s ideological priorities mean that it is pushing Ayurvedic medicines that have been insufficiently tested as a “natural” homegrown alternative to Western science. In the United States, radical anti-trans actions have been a focus of Coda’s coverage, including bomb threats to children's hospitals. Legislation passed in states like Florida have underscored attempts to push harmful rhetoric on transgender issues, rather than paying attention to experts or, indeed, trans people. 

The age of nostalgia

Our latest Big Idea series takes on our “infatuation with a mythologized history.” The series ranges widely. In Cambodia, the Vietnamese, rather than the Khmer Rouge who ruled Cambodia at the time, are blamed for the genocide of nearly two million people. In California, grieving the losses wrought by climate change revives the term “solastalgia” — the desolation felt by those who see their homes ripped away before their eyes. In Hungary, a right-wing government rejects the Europeanization of Hungary in favor of tracing its roots to a glorious, imperial Turkic past. And in Kuwait, the globalization of the 1990s was a way of life, rather than a trendy academic term, until the Iraqis invaded and forced Kuwaitis and expats alike to wrestle with questions of identity and home. Nostalgia for an imagined past, a somehow superior past, has contributed significantly to what we might also describe as an age of anger, a period in which countries around the world have become increasingly fractious and divided. Nostalgia has distorted the way in which we look at ourselves — our history and our present. It is a theme that threads through and connects many of the issues we cover at Coda and will continue to cover over the next year.

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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.”

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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.”

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A self-described historian of German fascism, the septuagenarian might be best known for having spotted a dilapidated 19^th century Tudor-style castle while driving through the former East German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in the 1990s. Inspired by the castle’s name — Marxhagen — she decided to buy it. She moved in, decorated the place with Marxist paraphernalia and tried and failed for a quarter of a century to turn it into a Marxist think tank (one German TV report dubbed her the “Communist in the Castle” and noted that she spent more time battling building contractors than capitalism). In 2018, she sold it to a private investor.

Kaltenbacher claims to own no radio and no television and boasts that while she has seen no images of the current war in Ukraine, she has nonetheless come to the exact same conclusions as Vladimir Putin has — namely, that an attack on Ukraine was a necessary act of self-defense against the encroachments of the West.

Riding through the Tiergarten, she had to pedal slowly. Decked out in a torso-sized sandwich board quoting Hemingway praising the Red Army and clutching a bouquet of red carnations, she wobbled a little, as she came to a halt at the police barrier.

Informed that she would have to remove the placard as well as the orange-and-black St. George ribbon pinned to her chest before she would be let through, Kaltenbacher became animated. What about her right to free speech? What about the supposedly free West? “That’s not our construction site,” replied the amiable policeman — using a German idiom that means he’s just not the right guy to talk to about that.

In Germany, Kaltenbacher is part of a minority fringe. But with the second phase of Russia’s war on Ukraine, some of those people have found themselves front and center, splashed across the pages of German newspapers, and giving interviews on TV. These fringe groups’ activities — and German officialdom’s ham-handed responses — have garnered international ire, shed light on shifting domestic faultlines and raised questions about Russian disinformation activities in the country.

Most Germans do not share the pro-Russian views espoused by Kaltenbacher and the elderly crowd of far-left peaceniks and die-hard communists into which, having shed her bicycle, sandwich board, and ribbon, but still clutching her carnations, she soon disappeared. 

In fact, a poll taken by the ZDF Politbarometer, a long-running television program, showed that Germany’s recent announcement that it would provide Ukraine with heavy weapons had been met with a robust 56% approval.

But German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been tepid in his support of Ukraine (the Ukrainian ambassador, in a superb use of idiom, dubbed him a “thin-skinned liver sausage” after Scholz rejected an invitation from Zelensky to come to Kyiv), and consequently has seen approval of his handling of the Ukraine crisis fall from 72% to 49%, with 43% of respondents saying he was doing a bad job.

Meanwhile, the more hawkish, outspokenly anti-Moscow Green Party foreign minister Annalena Baerbock won 70% approval of her handling of the war.

There is, however, one way in which the crowd at the Soviet War Memorial was representative of a trend in Germany. Namely, that the extremist landscape is changing as traditional ideological divisions blur. “There’s a lot of mishmash going on at the moment,” said Jan Rathje, a senior researcher at the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy.

The pandemic saw a diverse group of anti-establishment conspiracy ideologues (a group that goes by the name “Querdenker” in Germany) adapt the anti-vaccination movement; they also starting marching side-by-side with neo-Nazis, among others. When the war in Ukraine began, Rathje said, “the ‘Querdenker’ more or less embraced pro-Russian disinformation.”

These conspiracy narratives have spread. In one study conducted by Rathje’s group, in Germany “nearly one-fifth of respondents tend to agree with conspiracy ideological statements about the Russian war of aggression.”

“Extremism is changing — not disappearing,” agreed Martin Emmer, a political science professor at Berlin’s Free University, who noted that just because extremists no longer cleave  to traditionally left- or right-wing ideologies, that does not mean they are not still capable of disruption and even violence. “We know that influencers, particularly from Russia at the moment, take every chance to destabilize western society.”

He added, however, that Covid disinformation and Russian propaganda have not really taken hold here. “It worked better in countries like France and even the U.S.,” he said. “In the election last year, you saw more or less a decline in extremism, and growth in the centrist parties. German civil society is quite resilient compared to other countries. The support for democracy and political norms is quite high.”

Thus the tenor of the German crowd gathered in the Tiergarten, from which the cry of “Nazi” emanated now and then in the Ukrainian ambassador’s direction, was an outlier. Of the more than 3,500 demonstrations related to Russia’s war on Ukraine that took place throughout Germany from the end of February to late April, the vast majority were in support of Ukraine, according to Mediendienst Integration, which collated information from various German states’ Offices of Criminal Investigation.

Many of Germany’s three dozen or so pro-Russian demonstrations were “Autokorsos,” or car rallies. Ostensibly organized by private individuals, the first took place on April 3, the day photos of the Bucha massacre went around the world. Some 400 cars strong, it drove from one end of Berlin to the other, past the main train station, a central processing point for Ukrainian war refugees arriving in Berlin.

Despite the organizers having registered their demonstration with the police, the car rally took the city by surprise. It was, as the newspaper “Die Zeit” put it, a wake-up call of sorts: “the first sign that Russia’s attack on Ukraine would have an impact on how we live together here in Germany.”

Indeed, the made-for-TV images that emerged — seas of car-hood-sized Russian flags, Soviet flags, bellicose pro-Russian chants, honking — were troubling. For some, they were terrifying: a notice that made the rounds in Ukrainian refugee chats warned that the drivers would get out of their cars at night and look for people on the streets wearing Ukrainian symbols.

Car rally participants praised Putin, said they had no problem with him bombing apartment blocks and maternity wards, complained about discrimination against Russian-speakers here in Germany, and denied the images from Bucha were real. It raised the question of just what was going on, and how this could happen.

“For me, it looks like a provocation,” said Russian-born German author Wladimir Kaminer, in a television interview shortly afterwards. “A private person registers this demonstration, then just happens to really quickly have 900 friends, all of whom just happen to have two meter by two meter Russian flags on hand, and they drive — exactly on this day, when we see the horrible photos of civilians killed in Bucha go around the world — through the streets of Berlin?”

In the days that followed, politicians and the press condemned the Berlin car rally. Stefan Evers, Berlin’s general secretary for a center-right political party, called the images disgusting. “These fascist nutcases can keep driving straight to Moscow, and stay there,” he tweeted. Berlin politician Stephan Standfuss told the Tagesspiegel newspaper that intelligence services would need to look into the extent to which the car rallies “were being directed from Moscow.”

But the boisterous, flag-waving pro-Russian rallies continued to take place in German cities over the next weeks. These were fueled, in part, by made-up stories about violence against Russian speakers that, with the help of the Russian embassy, spread like wildfire among Russian-speaking communities.

Germany has 3.5 million Russian-speaking citizens; of these, about 2.4 million people are ethnic Germans, whose forefathers emigrated to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great. Under Stalin, these ethnic Germans were persecuted. Since the 1970s, Germany has offered this group the option to return as German citizens.

But Germany has been slow to recognize that it is, de facto, a land of immigrants, said Free University’s Martin Emmer, resulting in feelings of isolation and exclusion. Propaganda exploits these feelings. “What Putin does in his speeches is basically provide a framework for people to be friends with Russia — ‘Russia fights fascism.’ It’s amazing how flexible our brains can be.”

In addition, many Russian-speaking Germans continue to get their news and entertainment from Russian state television. Nostalgic shows and wartime dramas showing the Soviet Union freeing the world of Nazis shape people’s perceptions, says Free University researcher Anna Litvinenko. “It’s interesting how even people who escaped the Soviet Union and moved to Germany are also nostalgic,” she said. “It’s this instrumentalization of memory.”

As May 9, the date of Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, approached, the Tagesspiegel newspaper wrote that 150 riders in a large pro-Putin Russian motorcycle group called the Night Wolves were expected to take part in a Red Army memorial march. Telegram channels were reportedly mobilizing pro-Putin Russians across Germany to get in their cars that morning and head to Berlin’s Treptower Park war memorial.

The city of Berlin decided to act. Just before the weekend, Berlin’s head of police announced a two-day ban not only of Russian flags and military trappings (including the orange-and-black St. George ribbon, a Russian military symbol), but the Ukrainian flag, as well.

The move was immediately denounced. “You cannot draw an equivalence between the flag of the victims, and the flag of the Russian aggressor,” said Stefan Evers, the politician, in a phone call on Monday, after images of the Berlin police confiscating a 80-foot-long Ukrainian flag in Tiergarten went around the world. “The political signal it sends is disastrous.”

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, weighed in: “Berlin made a mistake by prohibiting Ukrainian symbols,” he wrote, on Twitter. “Taking a Ukrainian flag away from peaceful protestors is an attack on everyone who now defends Europe and Germany from Russian aggression with this flag in hands.”

On May 9, Putin’s speech came and went. Towards midday, at the foot of Brandenburg Gate, where the Berlin Wall once stood, a group of mostly Russian speakers gathered with black and white photos of their grandparents for a spooky “Immortal Regiment”-style parade.

Later, at Treptower Park, a giant war memorial built by the Soviets in 1945, the Night Wolves hadn’t arrived; nor was there any news of a giant car rally from all over Germany headed this way. Inside the vast memorial, many of the German peaceniks and communists (including Kaltenbacher, the former castle owner) who had attended the Ukrainian ambassador’s wreath laying the day before were here again, along with Reichbuergers (a disparate group of monarchists and antisemitic far-rightists who do not believe in the existence of the modern Germany state), and representatives of the official German Communist Party.

At one end of the vast, shallow bowl-shaped landscape stands the memorial’s main centerpiece — an enormous statue of a Soviet soldier stepping on a giant swastika, on top of a pedestal on top of a hill. At the foot of this hill, the crowd included a Swiss mathematician who said the French and Germans were to blame; a completely bald, very muscular German who said he was here to support Russia fighting Nazis in Ukraine; and a German community theater actress whose social media includes a video of herself demonstrating the use of a Hitler salute to practice Covid-distancing.

Most Ukrainians had stayed away from Treptower Park — where, ultimately, only a handful of Night Wolves and no massive car rally materialized. But Daria and Bohdan, who did not want to give their last names, decided to come. In her mid-20s and studying in Berlin, Daria said she was there to pay tribute to her grandmother, and the suffering the Second World War, which wreaked havoc on her grandmother’s childhood, had brought on her family. “A lot of Ukrainian families have this story,” she said.”It’s important to remember.”

Her boyfriend put it differently. He stood in the hot sunshine, reflecting off the giant white walkway, next to one of the memorial’s many bas relief blocks featuring gilt quotations from Joseph Stalin. “I think that Russia cannot celebrate victory over Nazis,” said Bohdan, “because it is a country of Nazis today, and they are destroying our country, right now, like the army of Hitler.

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This was not part of the Russian Federation’s renewed assault on the Donbas and eastern Ukraine, but rather the extensive rehearsals for the May 9 Victory Day parades. This year the Russian state has invested its annual commemoration of Soviet victory in the Second World War — its statement of military might — with additional significance. Video clips of the rehearsals in Moscow and St. Petersburg circulated on social media. Spectators posed for photographs and videos, Russian press agencies circulated videos and details of the rehearsals on their telegram channels, western news outlets shared footage. Preparations for Moscow’s parade began much earlier. By April 19 soldiers were already pounding the parade ground in Albino, a small rural town outside Moscow.

In the late Soviet era details of Victory Day parades were closely guarded secrets. But in 2022 the Russian Ministry of Defense released detailed plans of the parade order, including the units, weapons, and aircraft involved. Victory Day preparations can be followed more closely than ever before.

The centrality of May 9 in the Russian national calendar and consciousness seems well established, an almost inviolable moment in Russian public life. In April 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, preparations for the 75th anniversary of the Second World War’s end continued. The rehearsals of nearly 15,000 soldiers tightly packed on the Albino military proving ground were memorably captured in a video, featuring some expressive Russian swearing, which went viral on social media. The parade was not canceled but rather postponed for two months.

It is testimony to the power of the public ritual and its propaganda value that they have been understood as a sacred element of national war memory with deep historical roots. May 9 and Victory Day commemorations, however, were at heart an invented tradition, a carefully choreographed statement of memory politics with a long and complicated history. It might seem, at least superficially, that Putin’s regime continued a Soviet tradition, but the reality as many historians have demonstrated was more complicated. Victory Day parades invoke history and exploit historical symbols, but they have also shaped history and its meaning.

According to the Ministry of Defense, 11,000 soldiers, 131 units of military hardware, and 77 aircraft have been involved in and will participate in Moscow’s parade. The RIA Novosti press agency has reported that a group of MiG-29 fighter jets will overfly Red Square in a Z formation, “in support of members of the special operation in Ukraine.”

There has been speculation for weeks that Vladimir Putin required decisive military breakthroughs and tangible victories to present before the people at the May 9 parades; that Putin will formally declare war on Ukraine in a May 9 speech on Red Square, dismantling the notion of his “special military operation” and issue a general mobilization; and even more recently that Russia will include 500 Ukrainian Prisoners of War, a clear contravention of the Geneva convention. These predictions may turn out to be true, but they all attest to the enduring importance of Victory Day in the Russian, and indeed to the western, political imagination.

Whereas Europe marked Victory Day on May 8, 1945, the Soviet Union’s announcement of victory came one day later, on May 9. It became the date on which the anniversary of the war’s end in Europe was marked, overshadowing the end of the war in the Soviet East in September 1945. The celebrations in 1945 that marked May 9 were spontaneous and unscripted. People gathered on the streets to sing, dance, and drink, celebrations independent of the Stalinist party-state. The first Victory Parade took weeks of planning and was scheduled for June 24, 1945. 40,000 soldiers from specially selected regiments marched across Red Square, as Stalin and other party leaders watched from Lenin’s mausoleum.

As befitted a closely choreographed propaganda spectacle, it was filmed and photographed for posterity. It signaled a return to a more regimented post-war politics, society, and culture, reinforcing the Stalin cult. All subsequent victory parades were in dialogue with this occasion. It is no coincidence that the website giving details of the units participating in the 2022 parade also publishes documents from Ministry of Defense archives detailing preparations for the first victory parade.

The June 24, 1945 parade was a dramatic moment in Stalinist public culture, but this effort was not sustained. On May 9 of the following year, in 1946, the day was not marked by a military parade. Indeed, May 9 was recategorized as a normal working day in late 1946, with the result that victory day in May 1947 was afforded less attention. This is often understood as the beginning of a more repressive phase of memory politics. It was not that the state encouraged forgetting; much about the war was too painful and divisive to be confronted. For nearly two decades Victory Day was marked by informal get-togethers of old comrades, political meetings, and firework displays, not grandiose military parades.

It was not until 1965 and the 20^th anniversary of the war’s end, that another parade was organized. They were reserved for landmark anniversaries in 1985, 1990, and only becoming an annual fixture after the 50^th anniversary in 1995. What seems like a deeply rooted historical ritual is relatively new.

Common elements, for example the prominence of the Victory Banner, remain. Yet throughout the post-Soviet period the dynamics of memory on display were in flux. The commemorations of the 1990s were more modest than Soviet parades, a product of economic crises, restricted budgets, and the collapse of the Soviet symbolic repertoire.

Under Vladimir Putin, however, a slicker presentation has signaled a more assertive Russia, trumpeting its military might and great power ambitions to domestic and international audiences. Putin’s first parade in 2000 was just two days after his first presidential inauguration. Since 2005 the media management of victory parades has become increasingly sophisticated. Clever camera shots and polished productions have turned the parade into a media event, choreographed for viewers at home. 

It has become the most important holiday in the civic calendar, commemorating a moment in the national past that all citizens are told they can proudly celebrate. There was a time when foreign politicians, statesmen, and diplomats attended Victory Day parades. In May 1995, for example, Bill Clinton and John Major both attended. But, since 2014 and Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine, foreign, particularly western leaders, have ceased attending.

As the number of remaining veterans of and eyewitnesses to the Second World War dwindles, Russian war memory has ossified, becoming as clunky as the T-34 tanks that have become a commemorative prop. Approaching war memory through the prism of a sacred victory has long served to justify the sacrifice and loss of life in war but creates difficulty with the multiple stands of the Soviet and Russian war experience that sit uncomfortably with this framework. So much of the horror of war, the pain, suffering and human costs are excluded from this sanitizing celebration of victory and heroism.

The set-piece parades in Moscow and St. Petersburg frame Victory Day through the priorities and objectives of the state. War memory has long been harnessed for political purposes. But people do not always operate within the official structures of memory. Since 2011, when its popularity grew, some Russians have participated in Immortal Regiment parades, where citizens carry photographs of deceased relatives who participated in the Second World War. 

Others might watch a Soviet war film on television, visit a relative’s grave, or finish a bottle. Beyond the Red Square pomp, local war memories and commemorative practices abound. A recent volume of essays has examined how Victory Day celebrations are marked in cities, locales, and spaces across Russia, in formerly Soviet occupied territories in eastern Europe, and beyond. It demonstrates how commemorative activity can be local and regional, how these have changed over time and frequently depart from official scripts.

Outside Russia, diasporic communities have long structured their own Victory Day commemorations around Soviet war memorials in their cities and communities. In 2015 Immortal Regiment parades were organized in over forty countries, many of these with significant Russian communities.

On May 9, 2022, eyes will be focused on Red Square, ears on Vladimir Putin’s words.  However, a better indication of changing memory politics and the importance of the cult of the Great Patriotic War to Russian political culture may be apparent in how Victory Day is marked in Russian occupied Ukraine.

Putin made a surprise visit to Crimea on Victory Day in 2014. And since 2015, Victory Day parades were unfurled in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s republics, which frequently featured military equipment in contravention of the 2015 Minsk agreements. What happens in Kherson, Melitopol, and Berdyansk, all Russian occupied cities, may be as instructive as the ceremony on Red Square.

Regardless of where Victory Day is marked, the use and abuse of history and war memory is likely to be intermingled with Russian nationalism, militarism, and wider geopolitics. It will be a toxic combination.

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A recent documentary follows the trek of these massive trees as they are uprooted and transported across Georgia and replanted in the private seaside park. But most Georgians may never see it on the big screen.

Salome Jashi’s 90-minute film “Taming the Garden” premiered across Europe last spring, and has finally come home to Tbilisi. But after the film’s premiere last week, the Georgian Film Academy abruptly canceled all other screenings of the film.

In a late message to the film’s creator, the Academy said the film would “divide public opinion.” Jashi said she took this as a clear message that Ivanishvili did not want the film distributed in Georgia. It was a shock, she said, even after spending four years documenting the absurd extremes Ivanishvili will go to satisfy his wishes.

Having made his money in Russia in the 1990s in extractive industries, banking and real estate, Ivanishvili today is the country’s richest man and the founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party. His fortune — an estimated $5.77 billion — is about a third of Georgia’s GDP. In 2021 Ivanishvili announced he was leaving politics and returning to a private life, but his opponents say he is still exerting his power over the country from behind the scenes.

While several cafes and non-profits have offered to host showings of “Taming the Garden,” no major cinema will take Jashi’s documentary, which is set to premiere in U.S. theaters this summer. The censored screenings come amid a tumultuous political moment in Georgia, where 20% of national territory is occupied by Russia. In 2008, Georgia fought its own war with its northern neighbor. The war in Ukraine has put Georgians on high alert, as Georgian authorities have opposed sanctioning Russia and Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream party has gone so far as to sue the country’s president Salome Zourabichvili for speaking out in support of Ukraine. The war also has become a stress test for the government’s commitment to EU integration. Opposition politicians and protestors at the country’s frequent anti-government rallies have long said that this commitment is only skin-deep. 

Katia Patin spoke to Salome Jashi about her film in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the film getting pulled from screens last week on April 28. Can you explain what happened and why it’s a big deal?

The film started its life in Sundance, then the Berlinale, it was nominated for the European Film Awards, which are like the European Oscars, it was released in Germany, Switzerland, U.K. and it will go to the United States. However in Georgia, it cannot go to the cinemas. There is no cinema that can show the film.

The president of the Georgian Film Academy academy decided that the film is too political and should not be shown. And by “too political,” he said, this is a film that “divides people according to their political beliefs.” This has never happened in independent Georgia, never.

What did their decision and their explanation tell you about Georgia in 2022?

I think this confirms how the system works. The system works according to subordination and subordinates who try to guess what their superior might think. In this case the superior of the Film Academy is the Minister of Culture. Her superior is either the prime minister or Bidzina [Ivanishvili] himself.

This is the system that has been created under the rule of Ivanishvili. This is the system of self-censorship, trying not to upset the boss, not to have political or business trouble.

Our country has the ambition to become part of the EU. It is something very, very important to me and the people around me. But certain parts of the government — the Ministry of Culture — do not comply with EU values. Openly we are going towards the EU but clearly what the government is doing, it complies more towards Russia. It is a tightening of screws and the marginalization of free institutions and free expression.

Ivanishvili is absent from the film — his name is only mentioned a few times — but by following his project the viewer gets to know him in a way. Did making the film change how you think about him?

I was much more critical of him before. It doesn’t mean that I’m not critical now. But I realized what I learned through making the film is that it’s not only him. Power is not taken by one person. It’s a whole system. There are other people involved in it starting from his personal assistant and ending with a person in the village. It’s not just him to blame, it’s also each and every one of us. 

I think this is what changed in my relationship with him. Of course when someone has a lot of money and power he can control much more but it is up to each one of us to resist it. 

That sounds especially relevant to many of the conversations happening now around a collective guilt that many ordinary Russians bear for the war in Ukraine.

It’s not just about guilt. In the case of Russians it is important to understand this collective guilt because something bad has already happened. I think it’s more correct for us to talk about responsibility, being responsible to freedom and to independence.

During filming I observed that there are individuals who are responsible to people in power but ultimately every person is responsible to be free and independent. Here in Georgia it is a problem. People are afraid not to lose their job, their reputation. We know where this will go, this will go towards Russian authoritarian rule. And then we will complain that we live in an authoritarian country but in fact we contributed to it ourselves.

Bidzina’s park was covered extensively by Georgian and international media. However you chose a different, very specific style for your film and this story. What were you hoping to accomplish?

Information is one thing and it’s less of what I’m interested in. I’m interested in creating an inner experience, a space where this story can be experienced and a person can make their own conclusions. We did not want to offer consultations. That’s what TV does, at least in Georgia. And to create not just an experience for the brain but for the heart. This sensual experience is important because some things are not concrete but very abstract. They cannot be named or identified. They can only be felt.

I think the film does not show one dimension of what happened. The film shows multiple opinions, it shows people who praise him and people who are upset about what is happening. It is open to interception. I thought that he would like the film.

There’s very little dialogue in your film. Instead you take the viewer through long shots of how the trees are uprooted, the way the trees move when they’re floating across the sea, the sound of branches breaking as a tree rides on a truck. Why did you choose a more abstract approach to tell this story?

I tried to give symbolic meaning and metaphorical meaning to things. I tried to present the tree, which is the main protagonist, as not just a tree, but as something else. Same with Ivanishvili, he’s not just Ivanishvili but rather he represents a man, an “X” man with power. I wanted to show this local story to a wider audience and have them relate to it.

The feedback I get is that the film creates a kind of fairytale where Ivanishvili is a mythical figure. He does not belong here and now. 

I had this fear that we were depicting a certain thing happening in time. And I had this fear that after a couple years it won’t be relevant. But I think this film is still very relevant. One because Ivanishvili is still — unofficially — in power. And second, because his rule is becoming more powerful. The political institutions that they supervise are becoming more controlling of the country and of people and the media. It’s all more obvious now. People see it more obviously now.

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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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“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.

TikTok restricted its services in Russia in early March, citing Russia’s "anti-fake news" law, but many users are circumventing the restrictions all the same. And plenty of the platform’s one billion monthly users worldwide continue to comment and report on the war, while others are using the tool to spread related disinformation through commentary, dance challenges, and lip-syncing trends.

Here are some of the widespread trends that social media researchers have uncovered on TikTok:

1. In early March, U.S.-based media watchdog Media Matters published a report by researcher Abbie Richards identifying 180 TikTok users who had posted nearly-identical videos showing a person kneeling while holding an English-language sign that condemns “Russophobia” and invokes “info wars.” Captions typically include the hashtags #RussianLivesMatter or #RLM.

Richards notes that the video captions also include strikingly similar typographical errors, indicating that they are part of a highly coordinated effort. Some gave themselves away: In what could only have been an error, some of the video captions included Russian-language instructions, such as “You can publish, description: Russian Lives Matter #RLM.”

2. Media Matters also spotted Russian influencers on TikTok making hand gestures to form the letter “Z” while doing a viral TikTok dance. Z has become a symbol of support for Russia’s military. In a more bizarre trend, young women posed for selfies by making the Z letter with their hands, proclaiming that this is how “real women” take selfies.

3. A report by VICE showed how Russian TikTok influencers have been recruited by an anonymous Telegram channel to post videos with pro-Kremlin messaging about the invasion, in exchange for payment. Operators of the Telegram channel instructed the TikTokers, some of whom have over a million followers, to justify the attack on Ukraine by defending their own people against the government in Kyiv. This aligns with Putin’s false narrative that the Ukrainian government has systematically targeted Russian-speaking people in the ongoing conflict between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian government in the eastern Donbas region (Putin has even referred to this as a genocide).  TikTok influencer Yarra_M observed how people in dozens of these videos appear to be using the exact same script as one another, with some simply reading it from their phones.

4. Marieke Kuypers, a Dutch user who describes herself as an “unofficial TikTok fact-checker,” recently noticed TikTok users amplifying Putin’s rhetoric of justifying Ukraine’s invasion by pointing to NATO’s role in the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and its airstrikes in Kosovo in 1999. These actual events came in response to violence by Serbian forces against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, following years of conflict over Kosovo’s attempts to secede from Serbia. But in the videos, TikTokers act out a dialogue between Russia and Ukraine, where Ukraine refuses to stop bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 (although this never actually happened) and then in 2022 the roles are reversed, with Ukraine pleading to stop the shelling and Russia refusing to do so.

5. In the days leading up to the invasion, when Russia recognized the eastern territories of Donetsk and Luhansk (both located in the Donbas region) as independent republics, more than 1,000 Russian TikTokers started posting videos that used a mirror effect. Videos featured people fist-bumping their own reflections, pretending to be “two brothers,” Donbas and Russia, and lip-syncing to a Russian song, “Brother for Brother.” The hashtags read: “We don’t leave our own behind,” and “We’re together,” in line with the Kremlin’s misleading message that people in the Donbas need to be saved from the “Nazi” Ukrainian government and that Russia will come to their rescue. 

The videos were first spotted by reporters for the popular independent Russian news site TJournal, which is now blocked in Russia, among other media outlets featuring opinions that dissent from the Kremlin narrative. Soon other TikTokers started using the same trend and filter to mock influencers who had “sold” their videos for government propaganda.

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A frantic international effort is underway to preserve Ukraine’s digital history and Russia’s media archive. The stakes, say internet archivists, include how the war and contemporary Ukraine are remembered.

A team of over 1,300 volunteers at a newly launched global initiative called Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online are racing to preserve hundreds of thousands of websites. Archivists from the National Electronic Archive of Ukraine, the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress are trying to save copies of news publications, digital archives of museums, local government pages, exhibitions and more. 

Archivists are able to save copies of websites through capturing a website’s code with a number of what are called “crawling” tools.

“As far as we can tell, no one has done web archiving at this scale in a war before,” says Quinn Dombrowski, a project administrator at Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online and a technology specialist at Stanford University’s Library. “Our goal is not to create an archive that people will study somewhere safely in the West. Our goal is to repatriate this data back to the Ukrainains.”

The war between Russia and Ukraine has opened the door to the wide scale destruction of their internets — for very different reasons. Ukraine's digital record faces annihilation from military invasion; Russia's internet destruction has been ordered from within. But people in both countries are now grappling with a shocking reality: their online records can disappear. The reality is now dawning that that their nation’s internet is fragile and impermanent

Websites are going offline in Ukraine for a number of reasons, from power outages, to local servers being destroyed by shelling, to hosting bills going unpaid. “When you get right down to it, it’s cables, it’s hardware, it’s things that exist in the physical world even though we think of the internet as a different sphere,” said Dombrowski.

Dombrowski’s archiving initiative has set up a list of websites for volunteers to archive, prioritizing websites for organizations located in cities under siege or with active air raid warnings.

Their efforts point to one of the internet’s best kept secrets: the fragility of the internet.

Christopher Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science says he often encounters misconceptions about the internet’s durability. “What happens is people get shocked on both ends of the spectrum. Things that you thought would be persistent, go away. And things that feel like they should be ephemeral, stick around. Both of those things are true.” What lives on is determined by “power and resources,” he says, with a lot of what we think of as “junk” data, such as our browsing history and other user behavior information, actively maintained by governments or companies using it for revenue.

The archiving of websites and databases for the most part has not been incorporated into disaster or military preparedness. In the U.S., emergency digital archiving initiatives have sprung up after events like Ferguson in 2014, Hurricane Maria in 2017, and the election of President Donald Trump. After these events, volunteers captured websites, social media posts and federal databases before they were lost or they were taken down by government officials.

There is a growing awareness among the public for the importance of web archiving, according to Abigail Grotke, assistant head of the digital content management section at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Grotke joined the Library when it first began web archiving in the early 2000s. Today, the Library’s digital archive is one of the largest of any government body. By the end of 2021, over 100 web archive specialists have captured 21.7 billion digital documents or 2.827 petabytes.

The Library of Congress is in the process of switching their operations to a digital first approach. “In the past if something was available in both print and digital, we would prefer the print. But we’re switching focus now where digital is preferred,” said Angela Cannon, a reference specialist at the Library. Last summer the Library had to freeze its social media archiving work due to persistent barriers enacted by tech companies and the technological challenges in archiving content from private profiles and accounts.

“It’s been frustrating but it’s not just our problem,” said Grotke, pointing out that it’s something archivists around the world are trying to solve.

Cannon, the reference specialist at the Library, says this becomes especially important in regions around the world where public figures and politicians almost exclusively use social media for messaging.

“Increasingly politicians are not bothering with websites,” Cannon said. “If you’re not talking to traditional newspapers, and you’re not going on television, it is most definitely going to matter in the future. That’s a gap in our collecting, so how do we document that for our researchers?”

When Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine began, Grotke and Cannon say their team’s first step was to increase the frequency of “crawls” for Ukrainian government sites and selected Russian sites.

While many governments, including Ukraine’s, have dedicated national digital archives, Russia is one of the few that does not. Instead, Russia has Ivan Begtin, a transparency advocate in Moscow who for over a decade has led a small team of archivists. Their work has new urgency as the Kremlin erases swatches of the Russian-language web.

“In the next month and a half many publications and cultural websites can disappear entirely,” said Begtin.

Since the war, dozens of independent Russian media sites have been blocked by the Kremlin for violating censorship laws banning the use of the word “war” in coverage of Ukraine. More quietly, hundreds of smaller publications, Russian cultural websites and online projects have gone offline as many western hosting services stopped accepting payments from Russia.

The list of websites archived by Begtin and his team of three in the past few weeks gives a snapshot of the current shattered state of freedom of expression in Russia. He prioritizes content that “forms our contemporary history, what people are going to use to write books and textbooks one day.”

The National Digital Archives, Begtin’s self-funded project, has captured content from independent news publications such as the Insider, Colta, Tjournal, Paper — all now blocked in Russia — along with websites like the “Forum of Kostroma Jedi,” a chapter of Star Wars enthusiasts that was recently listed as an “undesirable” organization by federal authorities; and dozens of historical memory projects from Memorial, Russia’s oldest civil rights group shuttered in December 2021 by court order.

The work is grueling and dangerous. “How much longer I can keep this up for, I’m not so sure,” said Begtin.

For years Russia’s internet existed as an unregulated bastion of free speech, pirated films, music and software. Its transformation into one of the most censored corners of the internet in the world has gone hand in hand with the transformation of Russian politics, said Begtin.

“This is a story of the erosion of your sense of freedom, the erosion of democracy, the erosion of people’s faith in themselves. Because many thinking people in Russia today speak in these words: there is nothing I can do to change what is happening.”

Begtin’s one-man crawl of the Russian web is a far cry from the wave of initiatives backing up Ukraine’s digital records. Dombrowski, the technology specialist at Stanford, says there is a much broader international conversation that has to happen around digital archiving, cultural heritage, and conflict.

“It’s inspiring when everyone comes together to do something to support this effort,” she said. “On the other hand, it represents a fundamental failure of infrastructure. It should never come to random people archiving Ukrainian websites on their laptops.”

Of all the work Dombrowski, who studied medieval East Slavic languages, managed to preserve in the past few weeks, one site was especially vivid: the website of a small museum in the Ukrainian city Novhorod-Siverskyi dedicated entirely to the medieval epic poem, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, famously translated into English by Vladimir Nabokov. The poem’s original manuscript was destroyed in 1812 when Moscow burned to the ground during the Napoleonic wars.

“I studied the poem in grad school and when I saw what this museum was about, my heart just stopped,” Dombrowski remembers. “Our automatic processes had failed so I manually went through each page on their website. There were 83 pages. I clicked on every image. I downloaded everything I could and saved the file. The thought of this beautiful museum being under attack, I immediately burst into tears.”

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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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The post Ukraine’s music reveals the past and points to the country’s future appeared first on Coda Story.