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.”

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Over 400 miles north in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Ulan — a digital artist and video editor who asked not to use his full name — helplessly refreshed his social media feeds, trying to make sense of the unfolding violence. “I spent that day feeling useless, lost about what I should do,” he said. 

The next morning, Ulan responded to an Instagram story that he said “called for bloggers, video editors, fact-checkers, artists to contribute to telling the truth about what was happening on our border.” While Ulan did not take up arms with the border forces, he nonetheless felt pride in contributing his skills to another side of the conflict between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan: the one that unfolded online. 

Kyrgyzstan’s bloggers launched coordinated hashtag campaigns, produced polished videos about the conflict in English clearly meant for global audiences, and used satellite imagery to make their case about this decades-old conflict. Meanwhile, Tajikistan’s media was forced to rely on government press releases. Previous reporting also showed that Tajik journalists frequented Kyrgyz outlets for updates on the conflict.

Fighting on the border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is not a new phenomenon. Previous clashes mostly involved citizens throwing rocks at their neighbors across the border. Given that half of the 600 mile border between the two countries remains undelimited, it is difficult to manage scarce water sources. While locals have frequently sparred over springs and access to pastureland, political elites on both sides have leveraged nationalist resentment to bolster the legitimacy of their rule. However, September’s spasm of violence marks a steep jump not only in the intensity of violence, but the asymmetry in digital information campaigns.

The distance between the two Central Asian countries’ media sophistication is rooted in their starkly different political environments — and their very different relationships to authoritarianism.

The Tajikistan government requires privately owned radio stations and television channels to submit all their proposed editorial productions in a foreign language for prior approval, and journalists are routinely denied accreditation, jailed and physically attacked. Asia-Plus,  arguably the only homegrown independent media outlet left standing and whose website has been one of the most visited in the country, has had its domain blocked inside Tajikistan for several years. 

“The Tajik regime has methodically stifled the freedom of press with bans on covering various topics, persecution of journalists, prohibition for government officials to speak with media without permission, you name it,” explained Temur Umarov, a research fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Tajikistan government also curtails social media activity of regular citizens. In 2020, it introduced fines for “disseminating incorrect or inaccurate information” about the Covid pandemic. This made it impossible to fact-check official statements, causing wariness of sharing any information about Covid on social media. Facebook users who posted nongovernmental data about Covid said they were subsequently summoned to prosecutors’ offices and given official warnings. The government also amended the tax code in 2021, requiring social media bloggers to register and pay taxes on any profits from their activities, another form of leverage over online communication that likely forces many bloggers to shutter their activities. As of July, the government is reportedly working on legislation that would criminalize dissemination of “incorrect or inaccurate information” about the country’s armed forces.

While Kyrgyzstan’s government has also used the pandemic to push through laws that threaten freedom of speech and independent press, it has traditionally been a more open space for journalism and digital communication. International organizations constantly provide funding for development of new media and information literacy in Kyrgyzstan. USAID, the American overseas development agency, has since 2017 invested over $10 million in media independence. 

“Kyrgyzstan’s media market is the exact opposite of Tajikistan’s,” Temur Umarov said.

While Kyrgyzstan ranks 72 out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ annual ranking of press freedom around the world, Tajikistan is only ranked 152. “There is a lot of competition, partially because there is no one group of elites who control the narrative entirely,” explained Umarov. Kyrgyzstan’s competing political factions promote their respective narratives through the media outlets each of them control. But the rich and powerful do not enjoy perfect control over the media environment, and Umarov explained, “In such a competitive environment, the Kyrgyz media tirelessly train, develop, and try new formats.”

These new formats often play out online. “On everything that relates to accessibility and affordability of the Internet, Kyrgyzstan obviously wins,” said Timur Temirkhanov, a blogger and media trainer from Tajikistan. 

Kyrgyzstan ranks in the middle of 100 countries in the 2021 Freedom on the Net rankings, while Tajikistan didn’t even make the list. Kyrgyzstan’s Internet users enjoy the cheapest internet, the second-highest download speed and the highest mobile connection penetration rate in Central Asia. Meanwhile, Internet development in Tajikistan has been hindered by high prices, chronic meddling, over-regulation, and corruption. 

Kyrgyzstan’s relative press freedom and burgeoning IT community have fostered a tech-savvy fact-checking industry, and the country’s social media users adopted a hacker ethos in response to this latest escalation of the conflict. Administrators of massive Telegram channels toggled settings to disallow forwarding or copying of media content, which prevented Tajik social media users from analyzing and nitpicking the videos and photos coming from the Kyrgyz side. Accounts with substantial following on Facebook and YouTube coordinated mass reporting and blocking of outspoken Tajik social media accounts. And Kyrgyz accounts even launched DDOS-attacks on Tajik media outlets, including Asia-Plus.

Even though Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan both sit in the bottom 10% in global rankings of English proficiency, Kyrgyzstani social media users and media outlets leveraged slickly polished infographics and videos, many of which were produced in English, to build support in the West. Some of these videos even leveraged satellite imagery to make pro-Kyrgyzstan claims about the timeline of violence. “For once I got to use my skills not for some commercial purpose but to defend my country, to help my people,” Ulan said.

“There was no good analysis or reactions from the Tajik side, especially in English, no nuanced opinions at first. Things were very one-sided,” says Farrukh Umarov, a social entrepreneur from Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, who spent his undergraduate years at a university in Kyrgyzstan. Umarov was initially reluctant to express his opinion about the conflict online, but he described feeling taken aback by how his Kyrgyz friends disregarded every bit of information coming from the Tajik side. 

A post Farrukh Umarov uploaded to Instagram on September 19 was shared over three thousand times. He received 800 comments, many of them confrontational. “This conflict showed me that Tajikistan isn’t ready for an information war.”

When Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan reached a peace agreement on September 25, the information warfare had died down. Media outlets and bloggers in both countries have turned their attention to Vladimir Putin’s announcement of a partial mobilization and the resulting uptick in Russian emigres to Central Asia. News cycles churn on, leaving the 140,000 Kyrgyzstanis who were forced to leave their homes and the families of the 41 casualties from Tajikistan and 59 dead from Kyrgyzstan to mourn in quiet.

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