Outside powers will try to tug or coax the country in one direction or another. There could be chaos, or stability.

All of that will matter hugely to Syrians on the ground. But strategically, it doesn't much matter: the seismic change is already there. Things will never be the same.

When I arrived in Beirut very nearly 50 years ago, Syria was like a huge, impregnable castle, ruled with an iron fist by Hafez al-Assad. He relied on a raft of competing Mukhabarat intelligence agencies, each more ruthless than the next, and backed by a powerful military.

In 1980, he did the unthinkable. He stretched a hand out to revolutionary, non-Arab Iran and struck an alliance with Tehran in its eight-year war with Arab Iraq, because they both hated their mutual neighbour Saddam Hussein.

For decades that Tehran-Damascus axis was the only fixed element in the region's shifting political sands. It was crucial to the creation of Hezbollah to hit back at Israel and the U.S. after the invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut in 1982.

When the Syrian castle began to crack after 2011 and Hafez's son Bashar was in imminent danger, it was Iran and Hezbollah - and the Russians - who sprang to his rescue.

It worked for a while, up to a point. But ultimately the axis failed. After Gaza, Hezbollah was decapitated and filleted by the Israelis in Lebanon, Iran cowed and isolated, while Russia was being bled white in Ukraine. It only needed a kick from the rebels to bring Assad’s flimsy cardboard citadel tumbling down.

Now the Israelis are systematically destroying any chance that Syria will again be a military power. Its navy, air force and any serious military assets have been taken out by the most intensive airstrikes Israel has ever mounted. Syria is thoroughly defanged.

And so Syria, the dawlat al-mumana'a - the State of Resistance, or defiance of Israel - is forever gone. Even if that resistance was largely fictional. Also broken is the Axis of Resistance that linked Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as distant Yemen, in a ‘Shia Crescent’ made possible because the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 removed the major obstacle to its formation – Saddam Hussein.

Iran will no longer be able to pump arms and money through Syria to Hezbollah, which survives in Lebanon as a shadow of its former self.

"This collapse is the direct result of our forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad's main supporters," crowed Israeli PM Netanyahu. With full U.S. support for this restructuring of the region's architecture (with probably more to come when Trump is back in the White House), the Israelis roam the skies unchallenged. Only Iran and Yemen remain. And for how long?

While most Syrians celebrate the demise of the hated, bloodstained dictator, the Palestinians are left even more alone, at the mercy of the region's masters, and their American enabler, as never before.

The post The end of the Tehran-Damascus axis appeared first on Coda Story.

It looks like the streaming giant is now siding with the big names of Big Tech, Google, Amazon, Meta who have all taken a side in the Middle East war and who have much to account for, according to a report by Access Now: 

Meta has been accused of censoring pro-Palestinian voices on all its platforms and possibly sharing the Whatsapp data of Palestinians with Israel. Meta has publicly denied handing over people’s data to the Israeli government, but as this newsletter notes, there is still no evidence to show that it has taken any concrete action to protect people’s privacy or to ensure that its metadata is not exploited to train and run dystopian AI systems. 

Google, under its Project Nimbus, provides Israel with advanced AI capabilities including facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking, and sentiment analysis to assess the emotional content of pictures, speech, and text, which has long been used for the surveillance of Palestinians by the IDF. Despite reports of Israel using AI-powered programs like Where’s Daddy and Lavender to isolate and destroy non-military targets, Google signed a new contract with Israel’s defense ministry in 2024 — when Google’s workers revolted over this new contract, the company fired 50 of its own employees. In a statement to Time, Google said “We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education. Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” 
Amazon, meanwhile, enables the Israeli army to store intelligence information collected via the mass surveillance of Gaza’s population on servers managed by Amazon’s AWS. Israeli military also confirmed to +972 that on some occasions, AWS services helped the IDF confirm airstrike targets. Despite this, AWS still claims to be committed to its cause of building “responsible AI.”

In a recent essay for Coda, Judy Estrin, CEO of JLABS, LLC quoted the first law of technology: it’s neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. It’s unsurprising  that in a year of horrors, Big Tech has amplified the human capacity for cruelty and war, from assisting the spread of garden variety disinformation to AI-powered weapons that methodically pick non-military targets to destroy. The steady march to this dystopian moment has come about through the slow stripping away of human rights via old-fashioned  surveillance and censorship.

You can join petitions, write to Netflix or check out the Palestine Film Index offers a selection of hundreds of Palestinian films, documentaries and writings (with links to access them all) here.

This story was originally published as a newsletter. To get Coda’s stories straight into your inbox, sign up here. 

The post What’s leaving Netflix? Palestine. appeared first on Coda Story.

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.

One million people are on the move in Lebanon, says Save the Children. With one fifth of the country’s population fleeing attacks. It is a continuing cycle of escalation, in which Israel retaliates for Iran’s recent missile attack that it launched in retaliation for Israel’s attacks. 

Nasrallah’s assassination followed a weeks-long Israeli strike on other Hezbollah leaders and their foot soldiers, using both air strikes and exploding pagers and walkie-talkies. But even before these devices began blowing up in the hands of their owners across Lebanon, killing Hezbollah members, terrifying civilians and prompting parents to unplug their baby monitors, Israel had assassinated two Revolutionary Guard generals in Syria, a senior Hamas commander in Lebanon, and the political chief of Hamas visiting Tehran, who was in Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new President, to name just a few incidents.

How did Israel get so good at finding their targets? That was the question sent in from one of our readers, this week after Nasrallah’s asasonation on September 27th. For any journalist who has ever attempted to negotiate an interview with a Hezbollah commander, let alone Hassan Nasrallah himself, the fact that Israel finally got him is simply mind blowing. 

By 2008, the year I arrived in Lebanon to take over as the BBC’s resident Beirut correspondent, Nasrallah had stopped giving interviews. We kept trying, but even trying, or even a meeting with one of his commanders involved complicated negotiations, security clearances and endless trips to the Dahieh,–the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut. 

Nasrallah’s face was everywhere in Dahieh. A local boy turned leader of mythic stature. His picture was on store and office walls; looking down from giant roadside billboards or stenciled graffiti; or in countless car bumper stickers amid the city’s chaotic traffic. 

The image of Nasrallah that Hezbollah’s efficient marketing team cultivated with plenty of care and intention was that of omnipresence and invincibility. And his historical record helped make that image resonate.

In 2000, eight years after he assumed the leadership of Hezbollah following the assassination of his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi by Israel, Nasrallah forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, ending the 18-year long occupation. 

In 2006, Hezbollah, and Lebanon, paid a devastating price for its 34-day war with Israel. But by surviving and not ceding any territory, Nasrallah was hailed as a hero by his supporters and Hezbollah went on to become Lebanon’s dominant political force as well. 

Two years later, when I was in Beirut’s southern suburbs, his portrait was on every corner and his speeches were being used as mobile phone ringtones. I felt acutely aware that Nasrallah was also literally there: in the tunnels that Iran helped Hezbollah dig and maintain under the busy hubbub of the Southern suburbs. 

But I also remember a lingering sense of a possibility of another, invisible spider web that was being weaved in the Dahieh at the time. Israel’s greatest failure during the 2006 war with Lebanon was that it failed to kill Nasrallah, the man who was behind the deaths of so many Israelis. After the war, as Hezbollah’s backers in Tehran invested heavily into modernizing the network of tunnels under the southern suburbs of Beirut, Israeli intelligence focused on building human networks, working hard to identify, cultivate and subsequently deploy every nugget of dissatisfaction and dissent that they could find. 

Reporting from Southern Lebanon, I often wondered who were the Israeli spies at Hezbollah’s crowded rallies or at dinners I attended in the suburbs. And while I could never tell who they were in Lebanon at the time, now we have proof that they were definitely there.  

Lebanon’s divided society and geopolitics made Israel’s task of penetrating Lebanon much easier. Scars of Lebanon’s civil war in the 1970s continued to ooze hatred and distrust. Israel was the enemy, but it was the region’s big powers that never let Lebanon heal: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria each supported different factions and sects within Lebanon, constantly deepening the existing divisions. 

Add to this hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the Middle East’s endless wars: Over the past decades Palestinians, Iraqis, Yemenis, and Syrians have all found shelter in Lebanon. Even the most functional governments would have struggled not to collapse under this combination of pressures. Lebanon’s government was the opposite of functional. 

Hezbollah thrived amid Lebanon’s dysfunction and corrupt, sectarian political environment. Yet many Lebanese “rejected Hezbollah's vision of perpetual war and hated Nasrallah’s recklessness for provoking the 2006 conflict with Israel. Many also correctly understood Hezbollah to be on the side of authoritarianism and theocracy,” writes Thanassis Cambanis, author of  A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Endless War, in this excellent piece. 

But for a long time, in a state that was on a brink of perpetual collapse, Hezbollah was also a force that actually got things done. Plenty of Lebanese voted for Hezbollah, not because it promised war, but because they needed a functioning state: someone to pick up garbage, keep schools open, run the government. During the 2009 elections in Lebanon that I covered, Hezbollah slogans called for war against Israel but also for better education, and for eradication of poverty and corruption. 

The problem was that the more political power Nasrallah’s party gained, the more corrupt Hezbollah itself became. Violence, corruption and economic hardship are a perfect mix for those working to recruit informants.

Assassinations of the entire command structure of the most powerful militia in the Middle East requires state of the art technology, incredible human penetration into target societies and extraordinary strategic patience. 

French media reported that Nasrallah’s arrival at Hezbollah underground HQ was leaked to the Israelis by an Iranian mole. These reports have not been corroborated, but the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad produced a jaw-dropping sound bite when he told CNN Turk that even the head of the Iranian unit countering Mossad was an Israeli agent. 

Ahmadinejad said that twenty agents in the Iranian intelligence team tasked with monitoring Israeli spying activities also worked for Israel, allegedly providing Mossad with sensitive information on the Iranian nuclear program. He said they were behind some key Mossad successes in Iran, including the assassination of the nuclear scientist they killed with a remote controlled gun, or the warehouse in Tehran where Israeli officers blowtorched their way in, stole 50,000 pages of documents and 169 discs relating to the Iran’s nuclear program within 6 hours and 29 minutes, leaving the rest of the facility untouched. 

Security experts agree that it would have taken decades of infiltration of Iranian and Lebanese command structures to pull off the operation of the scale that killed Hassan Nasrallah.

Friends in Beirut, who have lived through many explosions including the devastating blast in the  Beirut port in 2020, said they have never heard anything comparable to the blast that shook the city when Israel dropped 2,000 pound US-made bombs on a residential block in the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing many people, including Hassan Nasrallah who was hiding in a bunker 60 feet below the ground.

The ping pong of retaliations triggered by this bomb is certain to kill many more. Israel’s precision attacks are bound to impact millions of lives, in the Middle East but also all across our deeply interconnected world.

The post Decades in the Making:  The Intelligence Operation Behind Israel’s Assassination of Nasrallah 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.

As early as the afternoon of October 7th, when word first broke of Hamas’s attack on Israel, Abu-Jamei had a troubling sense of what might follow. His house sits not far from the Israeli border, and he and his family fled on that very day with little more than the clothes they were wearing. After a short stay in a school in Rafah, they went in search of a better place to live. They ended up dropping their belongings on a piece of empty land near a bit of running water. Under the circumstances, this amounted to a luxury.

Despite Israel’s monthslong attacks on Gaza, the house that Abu-Jamei and his family left behind remained untouched all through the long months they stayed in the tents. The home was still standing the day they arrived safely in Egypt, the war far behind them.

But as Abu-Jamei knows better than most people, one cannot simply leave a war behind, and attempting to will away its psychic effects is an illusory trick. He has spent his career studying trauma, war, and the psychological damage caused by violence. As a psychiatrist, he began working with patients scarred by Israel’s 2014 war with Gaza. For the past decade, he has been the director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, a mental health service provider in Palestine that affords counseling and resources to countless patients in the region.

During his first night in Cairo, sleeping quietly in a bed far from the cold night air and the flapping of the tent, the fact that he was safe provided only so much comfort. He could not help but think of his uncles and cousins who were still in tents. “I could not split both feelings,” he said. “I felt ashamed that I was out. I still feel guilty. There is survivor guilt. And that is a very uncomfortable feeling, you know?”

Abu-Jamei’s own work taught him not to be surprised by the intrusion of such thoughts. Over the years of conflict in Palestine, he’d spent many hours working with children and adults who were traumatized. Adults, he explained, could talk through their feelings and thoughts, but children often didn’t have the language or understanding for such conversations, even if they had the very real need. So, he and his colleagues would use puppets for them to act out their emotions. When words failed, they used toy planes and tanks to allow the children to construct physical scenarios. At times, however,  during the most recent bombings it was almost impossible to find toys for this work.

Abu-Jamei explained how, paradoxically, it was often when the worst bombing was over that people began reacting to the trauma. In moments like this, there was time to reflect rather than simply revert to survival instincts. That is when Abu-Jamei’s work was most important and most sought. Now that he is in Egypt, he plans to implement a telephone help line that his center has run for years but was routinely rendered useless during the war by a lack of electricity and Wi-Fi. The hope is to establish a secure phone line to psychiatrists outside of Gaza who can answer calls and work with patients stuck in the war zone.

Most people in Gaza have not been as fortunate as Abu-Jamei in finding the means to flee the war. He is the first person to recognize his privilege in being able to pay the steep price to leave, and although he is better off than many, it was still a considerable burden for him. During the ongoing bombardment of Palestine, the Rafah border crossing has emerged as the sole route out of the country. But only the fortunate few with money, foreign passports, or approved medical reasons have managed to cross this border into Egypt. The fees to cross are roughly $5,000 per adult and $2,500 per child—a sum that is out of reach for most. The “travel bureau” tasked with facilitating crossing is Hala Consulting and Tourism, an Egyptian company with reputed ties to the Egyptian security services. Once the fee is paid, a name is added to a list. Every night, those who have paid check the list on Facebook pages and Telegram channels to see who will be able to cross into Egypt the following day. If you’re lucky, you’ll be among the hundreds that cross the border every morning at Rafah.

It wasn’t until he arrived in Cairo that Abu-Jamei learned that his house had, in fact, just recently been destroyed. He and his wife spent 17 years carefully building and decorating their home. Whenever they had a bit of extra money, they put it toward a new improvement on the building—a second bathroom, a new sofa, a special refrigerator. Like many other Gazans, he kept tabs on his neighborhood during the war by looking at videos that Israeli soldiers posted on TikTok. He pulled out his phone as we talked and showed me a TikTok posted by a member of the Israel Defense Forces. It shows a truck barreling down a dirt road, empty lots and homes on either side. “See, there,” he says, pausing the video. “That’s our house.” On that day, at least, he knew because of the timestamp of the video that his home was still standing.

But the next series of photos he shows me are of rubble. His cousins can be seen walking across a pile of cinder blocks that had once been his house. “They went to search to see if they could find anything worth salvaging,” he said. But all they were able to find were one or two mismatched earrings and a brooch—“presents I’d bought for my daughters over the years” when he’d traveled abroad to give a lecture or attend a conference. “I traveled often for a Gazan, maybe twice a year, and I always brought them back gifts.”

It’s late, and Abu-Jamei and I have been speaking for several hours. The café had filled with young people clustered around tables, talking animatedly. Downtown Cairo was full of life: strolling shoppers, fashionable women walking next to young religious scholars, exuberant soccer fans watching the latest match at packed sidewalk cafes. We stepped outside to say our goodbyes on the street. Abu-Jamei stood still as the traffic of Cairo swerved by and the florescent lights of downtown shops blinked behind him. A calm man amid the noise. He stayed there on the sidewalk, talking as if he were in no hurry to say goodbye, even though I imagine he had a hundred obligations, a thousand things to do. Among them were things to buy: basic household items and new clothing for his wife and children, who were still wearing  clothes from the tents. And there were people back in Gaza relying on him for assistance. Finally, he shrugged, smiled gently and stepped out into the street to walk home. Or, what serves as home for now.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Yasser Abu-Jamei as told to Kira Brunner Don

Most of the population is severely affected psychologically and have physical ailments, but their main concerns at the moment are their basic needs. It’s reported now that in the Gaza Strip one third of the population faces level three famine—this means that there is an urgent need for food support. No one can sleep without food, but now everyone in the north of Gaza—600,000 people—are basically starving. 

I lived in a shelter for three weeks, and then moved to a tent, where I stayed with my children and my family for about three months. Tents do not have privacy. Whenever you talk, everyone listens. We were in a place with tents for my uncles and my cousins, we were all next to each other—maybe 15 families together. There is no variety of food; no fruit, for example, and vegetables are very rare and expensive. In December and January we managed to buy chicken only once; fruit only once. One chicken was about 70 shekels or $20. Who can afford that? Since there was no variety of food items, I saw that my kids were losing weight. The whole Gaza Strip was losing weight. You could see it in your friends when you meet them after two or three weeks. And it was a problem, especially for the kids.

During war time, people rarely get mental health services, unless there is a clear instance of trauma. Everyone is preoccupied with safety and finding food. But a couple of weeks after a ceasefire takes place, people notice something is wrong with their kids or themselves, and then they would start to seek mental health intervention. That’s why we usually see an influx of patients or clients two or three weeks after a ceasefire. 

I’ll give you a very clear example. A lot of people are always trying to hear news about their loved ones, about their homes, their houses, their neighborhoods—whether people that are missing have been killed, whether they have been detained, whether they are in the rubble. And they hope for the best, of course. So people are between frustration and hope all the time. When a ceasefire takes place, everyone starts to move around and go back to their homes to find out what happened, then they start to face the reality. They lost their house. They lost their loved one. You end up not only homeless but also broken. There is no place to go to. Aid takes ages to come. What can you do? And then people start to show symptoms and they start to come and visit us. 

One of the main services we offer is telephone counseling. It’s a toll free line. We were not sure that our colleagues would be able to answer the phones because of the lack of power, so that’s why we have partner organizations in the West Bank we forward our telephone line to so that their psychologist can help our people. It’s a relief.

For the last two months, we sent our psychologist to provide psychological first aid. They go to the shelters, they identify the main issues. The issues that adults and children have are a little bit different—at the moment, adults show anxiety about the future; what might happen at any moment; the bombardment, tanks. They are between desperation and depression. Others feel that there is no way out or that an end is coming close. There are a lot of family quarrels and social issues because of the pressure and the stresses and the lack of resources. A lot of disputes happen in the community. And then there are also sleep difficulties.

Children have different symptoms. Their main thing is fear. They’re just afraid and they long for their normal life. They ask when are we going to go back to school, their neighborhoods, their homes. And there is no answer to that. Then there are behavioral changes. A lot of children, especially the younger ones, become more irritable, more hypervigilant. They are more worried and agitated. They can’t stand still. And they start to be disobedient. They fight more, they become more angry, they become more aggressive. And with the night terrors and nightmares, they wake up in the middle of the night screaming. 

My youngest child is two and a half. She used to scream in the middle of the night. The conditions were really terrible. But when we moved to Rafah, the bombardment was less frequent and the nights were calmer, but it was still terrible. The good thing is that there were a lot of children in the community in those fifteen tents where we stayed. So children were spending a lot of time together playing with the sand. My wife used to joke and say that during the day, the tent was like an incubator, and sometimes she called it a greenhouse. It was extremely hot so it was good the kids could stay outside. And in the night, the tents were freezing cold.

And who are the most affected? It’s the vulnerable groups—women, children, disabled people, people with chronic illnesses. As a mental health professional, my eyes are always on the most vulnerable groups because they are more impacted and the psychological implications are more apparent. My team and I try to do our best. 

If a ceasefire happens tomorrow, it will take two or three months for caravans to come. And then the authorities, whether local or national organizations—will they prioritize mental health, or are they going to prioritize housing? We are in this struggle all the time. We feel that mental health is not prioritized compared to other health issues like emergency health. 

I do think there will be a ceasefire, but look. We live in the least transparent area in the world. You never know what’s happening. You never know what’s on the table. What’s below the table? You never know what the negotiations are really about. And even when a ceasefire is reached, you don’t know what the deal is. That’s historically what I feel. I lead one of the main civil society organizations in Gaza Strip, we’re quite known locally, internationally, quite respected for our work, and we never know what’s happening. So given that, what we have is just hope. And we do have hope, sometimes it’s stupid hope, but what else is there to do? That’s the thing that keeps you running. There is no other way.

The post Fear and hope in wartime Gaza appeared first on Coda Story.

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. 

The post The LGBTQ rights debate is testing Ukraine’s commitment to Europe 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

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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.

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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When France sent its soldiers to the Malian capital Bamako in 2013 — as part of the much-feted Operation Barkhane intended to put an end to terror attacks by Islamist groups waging IS and Al Qaeda-backed jihad — they were greeted as heroes by ordinary Malians singing paeans of gratitude.

After early successes, though, the French soldiers struggled and the relationship with Malians deteriorated to such an extent that the French were suspected of supporting the very terrorists they were meant to be fighting. 

On Facebook, a Malian activist group, “Yerewolo Debout sur les Remparts,” responded to the departure of French troops with glee, describing it as a historic triumph. The group posted a cartoon which summed up the feelings of many Malians – a French soldier on the receiving end of a giant Malian boot.

But now it's not only Malians who are celebrating the unceremonious exit of the French. The Kremlin too is delighted, happy to declare Operation Barkhane a debacle, with billions of dollars spent and the loss of thousands of lives, including dozens of French soldiers, to little effect.

If the West was hoping to isolate Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia sees an opportunity in the “global South” to gain more diplomatic influence and secure lucrative economic deals. “Russia is using Africa as a pawn to out-muscle the west,” Jean le Roux, Africa expert at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), told me.

Russia, for years now, has been adept at playing on and inflaming anti-France sentiment in former French colonies, from Mali to the Central African Republic. The Kremlin has largely succeeded in charming African leaders into tighter alliances and upsetting both the United States and particularly Europe, whose once unshakeable hold on the continent, in terms of trade, has considerably weakened.

Even now Russian trade with Africa ($14.5 billion in 2020) is but a fraction of the value of the continent’s trade with the EU (over $280 billion), China (around $255 billion) and the U.S. (over $65 billion). But Russia supplies a significant portion of Africa’s weapons, its wheat and grains, and its fertilizer.

And, as some have argued, Africa’s trading relationships with the EU are starting to chafe. In February, for instance, Odrek Rwabwogo, an adviser to the president of Uganda, wrote that “restrictive trade policies from wealthy western countries and blocs keep African countries chained to raw materials exports…while making the countries and blocs that implement them wealthier still.”

RUSSIA’S AFRICA STRATEGY

Last month, the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov undertook a five-day whistle-stop tour of Africa to talk up the growing collaboration between countries on the continent and Russia as a respite from colonial arrangements and colonial condescension from the European Union. Russia also blamed U.S. sanctions for the rising price of grains and fertilizer that had led to food insecurity and acute hunger in several African nations.

In a column, published in prominent newspapers in Egypt, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia, Lavrov wrote on July 22 that, “Our country who has not stained itself with the bloody crimes of colonialism, has always sincerely supported Africans in their struggle for liberation from colonial oppression.” Lavrov also evoked the “master-slave” dynamic that he wrote continued to characterize relationships between European powers and their former colonial possessions.

It is an argument that has been amplified on social media in recent years, particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to a receptive audience. Big Tech platforms, including the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, are notoriously lax in their moderation policies in much of the world, enabling social media in Arab countries, Latin America and Africa to be a practically unfettered space for Russian propaganda.

And Russia’s narratives are finding their mark.

In 2019, the Stanford Internet Observatory published a whitepaper describing Russia’s experiments with disinformation in Libya, Mozambique, Sudan, Madagascar, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In these six countries, the researchers concluded, Russia was “engaged in a broad, long-term influence operation.” Their tactics included posting “almost universally positive coverage of Russia’s activities in these countries,” while the posts also “disparaged the U.N., France, Turkey Qatar… most often while purporting to be local news sources.”

The researchers noted 73 Facebook pages set up by Russian agencies on Facebook alone targeting audiences in the six African countries, with as many as 8,900 posts being made across the pages in a single month. The disinformation came directly from companies linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the researchers said, whose Internet Research Agency had played havoc with the 2016 U.S. elections.

Backing up its cyberspace guerilla tactics, Prigozhin’s shadowy companies, chiefly the notorious Wagner Group, also had boots on the ground, providing paramilitary fighters and services across Africa.

THE ROLE OF THE WAGNER GROUP 

In Sudan, for instance, protests have been ongoing for over a year to remove the military junta that deposed the longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, only to hold on to power rather than create the conditions for democratic elections and a civilian government.

In Khartoum, more than a hundred protestors have been killed since October. Many more have been wounded. Democracy activist Nasr Eldin Safiyah was injured in a rally in June, the side of his head split open by a teargas canister hurled into the crowd. “I have not been well,” he told me. “But we are determined to take down this corrupt military junta.”

Standing in his way are Wagner Group mercenaries. “It’s a known fact here in Sudan that Russia supports the military junta,” Safiyah says. “Wagner is operating and training militias and they are helping them to loot our gold.” An investigation last month in the New York Times revealed that Russian firms are active in Sudanese gold country, mining tons of the precious metal and described the Wagner Group as providing “interlinked war-fighting, moneymaking and influence-peddling operations.”

As with the six African countries, including Sudan, studied in the Stanford Internet Observatory paper, Mali too has been the target of a sophisticated Russian campaign. Le Roux, the Africa expert at DFRLab, wrote back in February that a “network of Facebook pages promoting pro-Russian and anti-French narratives drummed up support for Wagner Group mercenaries prior to the official arrival of the private military group in Mali.” He added that these carefully constructed fake pages “also mobilized support for the postponement of democratic elections following a successful coup in May 2021, Mali’s second in less than a year.”

Russian president Vladimir Putin called Mali’s military leader Asimi Goita, as the last French soldiers prepared to leave, and reportedly reassured him that food, fuel and fertilizers would be made available. Goita tweeted to pointedly praise Putin’s respect for “the sovereignty of Mali and the aspirations of its population.”

Earlier this month, Russia also delivered several warplanes and a helicopter to Mali to bolster its defenses in its ongoing fight against Tuareg rebels and Islamist terrorists. And last year the Malian foreign minister visited Lavrov in Moscow in part to discuss the deployment of Wagner Group paramilitary troops in Mali. Both countries deny the official presence of Wagner Group mercenaries in Mali, describing the militants as instructors to Malian soldiers.

But a U.N. report unearthed this month by the Associated Press claimed “white soldiers” had been seen with Malian troops committing likely war crimes in the massacre of at least 33 civilians. Both U.S. and U.N. officials have confirmed the presence of Wagner soldiers in Mali. 

The Wagner Group, albeit supposedly unconnected to the Kremlin, is also playing a growing role in the fighting with Ukraine. State-sanctioned Russian media have lavished praise on the exploits of Wagner Group fighters in the Donbas region. And the presence of Wagner Group soldiers in Mali, even if it’s not clear how many, is in keeping with Russia’s intervention in the affairs of several African countries.

Prigozhin, the oligarch who controls the Wagner Group, is known as “Putin’s chef” because he apparently owes his great wealth to catering contracts signed with the Kremlin. He is also linked to Russian companies that have filed into countries like Sudan to illegally mine tons of gold which they carry away from military airports. Miners along the lawless Sudanese border with the Central African Republic accuse Russian mercenaries of massacring their colleagues and stealing their gold. Sudanese officials admit that about four-fifths of the country’s 100 million tons of annual gold exports are smuggled out of the country.

Mali, incidentally, is Africa’s third largest gold exporter.

WHAT’S NEXT?

On the day the military took power in Mali in May, last year, Malians took to the streets to cheer. Some shouted slogans in support of Russia, some raised the Russian flag and chanted “France degage!” Clear out, France. The support for Russia is real, despite groups like Human Rights Watch pointing to arbitrary detentions and torture and the connection of Wagner Group fighters to massacres of civilians.

DFRLab’s experts say Malian social media is where there is most praise for Russia and mentions of the Wagner Group. But neighboring Burkina Faso is catching up. In January, there was a military coup in the country and since then complimentary social media chatter about Russia and its influence in Africa has dramatically increased.

Burkinabe protestors have been rallying against the French presence in their country too, as French troops relocate Operation Barkhane to Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

In the last month, demonstrators in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, have burned the French flag and chanted, “France, the godmother of terrorism, get out,” and, “We are all for the liberation of Burkina Faso!”

Are Wagner Group mercenaries already packing for the 500-mile journey from Bamako to Ouagadougou?

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In Stallard’s new book, “Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea,” she analyzes how leaders in Russia, China and North Korea manipulate and distort historical narratives about war as a way to maintain and strengthen their hold on power. Stallard drew extensively on her experience reporting on the ground in all three countries.

In Russia, Putin “has elevated the memory of the Great Patriotic War to the status of a national religion,” Stallard writes. Meanwhile in China, President Xi Jinping has used World War II as a marker of the end of China’s so-called “century of humiliation.” And war narratives are especially important in North Korea, where Kim Il Sung is falsely presented as a war hero who freed the country from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and secured a victory over the United States in the Korean War eight years later.

This is history, Stallard points out, stained with a “veneer of patriotism.”

I recently spoke with Stallard on the phone. She is currently based in Washington, D.C. as senior editor for China and Global Affairs at the New Statesman. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

You set out to explore how autocrats exploit history to stay in power. How would you summarize your reporting? 

It’s about how effectively and often how cynically the leaders of these regimes have manipulated historical narratives to suit their own political purposes and to position themselves as patriotic defenders of their countries — and everyone who opposes them, therefore, as traitors. But really, first and foremost, they do this to shore up their own power and their own popular support.

I understand that the title of your book — “Dancing on Bones” — comes from a Russian activist. What does the phrase mean and why did it resonate with you?

The rough backstory is that there was this Russian activist who, with his friends, founded this grassroots movement — the Immortal Regiment — which was basically intended to be an alternative to what they felt was the very bombastic, militaristic, official commemorations of the Second World War. It was about marching quietly with photos of your relatives. But once it became very popular, and the authorities had taken it over, he gave this very exasperated interview, saying “Guys just stop, stop. Like, we all have relatives who died. It’s dancing on bones.” And to me that really spoke to the very cynical manipulation of what are devastating and personal memories and experiences.

As a means of maintaining power, how does the exploitation of these historical narratives compare to other methods? How critical is this particular method to maintain power in these three countries?

The way I think about it is that there are all of these different elements that work together very effectively, so it’s difficult to strip one out and consider it totally discretely. Timothy Frye has a quote in his book “Weak Strongman” on Putin about how it’s much easier to be a popular autocrat than an unpopular one, which for me captures it quite neatly. If you removed all references to history tomorrow, would those regimes stand? I think so. But in terms of building resilience and making the regime more secure and making it less brittle, less fragile, I think the more you can also embed and draw on these popular ideas and some of the population buys in — even if it’s not a majority — it makes the regime more secure, more resilient.

What the historical narratives have going for them is that they endure, particularly in times when there are economic problems, when the country is facing difficulties, when you’re asking people to accept a degree of hardship and sacrifice within their own lives. It’s very helpful and quite effective to be able to frame that in terms of these past struggles and external enemies that you can blame for your problems. So it’s difficult to separate them, and I think it’s important to see them as part of a toolkit or an arsenal.

It would probably be impossible to measure how much all of this costs, but it would be interesting to know the approximate price tag of the manipulation of history.

In the North Korean case, that was one of the things that struck me. There is a price tag, like with rebuilding the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang. It’s an absolutely extraordinary building in scale and ambition. The Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities is another example. Obviously we don’t know what the budget was because there’s no transparency, but in a country where there are people right now who are desperately in need of sufficient calories and where children are stunted and chronically malnourished, it is a choice to spend a conservative estimate of what must have been millions on these museums. That is a choice, when that money could go elsewhere. 

What role does state media play in these campaigns? 

Each has a slightly different tone. One of the things Russia has done more effectively than China is to make particularly state television channels very entertaining, very watchable. If you can suspend your disbelief at the content, they really have put a lot of effort into having these very provocative, very dramatic talk shows and making their messaging very appetizing. Often Chinese evening television news is very dry. It’s not something you would turn to for entertainment. But they have become much more proactive in recent years in using other mediums — particularly I’m thinking about some of the big budget films in recent years. 

In the book’s conclusion, you said you were writing its final words in January with Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s border. Russia then invaded Ukraine at the end of February. Not specifically about Russia, you wrote, “This warped version of history is the backdrop against which future wars will be fought.” What was it like for you to watch what has happened since?

It was really surreal. When Putin said that morning that it was a denazification operation, partly I felt like, “Of course,” like I should have understood that this was where this was heading. I just didn’t expect that he would go through with it. But with hindsight, of course that’s how he would frame this. I did feel like this was the ideas in the book come to life. This is the worst case scenario. I had spent a lot of time thinking about it in this abstract, theoretical sense, but to see it being used to take real people’s lives and destroy towns and cities in Ukraine is really sickening. 

What are the implications of these campaigns for people who don’t live in China, Russia or North Korea? 

I think we should all be very wary, and it’s made me very conscious of how leaders in other countries like here in the United States, and in the U.K. where I’m from — how people who have power or seek power or want to stay in power, turn to history. These historical narratives are effective because they resonate, so they can be very dangerous in the hands of people who are in power. There’s a live debate here in the United States about whether we should also focus on the darker aspects of the past or whether that’s an unpatriotic thing to do. We should problematize — to use a horribly scholarly term — as much as we can. 

That reminds me of a quote in your book about history functioning as a comfort blanket in Russia. 

Yeah, it feels really nice. It’s nice to believe you’re the hero of the story, that your country is the greatest in the world. But we should be aware that that’s also what all these other countries tell their citizens, that they’re the heroes of the story, that their countries are the force for good. I want to emphasize the unexceptional nature of the desire to do this. Leaders in all countries do draw on various versions of the past, so it’s not an exceptional impulse, but it’s been taken to extremes in these three countries. It is absolutely not only autocrats who are attracted to this idea, so we should all really be on our guard against it. 

The post How autocrats manipulate history to hold on to power appeared first on Coda Story.

The photo has already become an iconic representation of the devastation suffered by Ukrainians in the war. But years from now, what will it mean for this young woman and her child? Images of adults and children severely impacted by violence endure in public and personal memory — forever stored on the internet and making a comeback every now and then. 

Thousands of miles away, in Kashmir — home to one of the world’s longest-running conflicts — the long-term effects of an image like this can be extreme for a private individual. The consequences can be life-changing.

Consider the ordeal of Farooq Dar. In 2017, after casting his ballot in a contentious election that had led to a spike in public violence, Indian army officers famously apprehended the 33-year-old Kashmiri man, beat him and then tied Dar to the front of a jeep. They drove for 17 miles with Dar strapped to the vehicle’s spare tire, effectively using him as a human shield in a conflict zone, where the army was vulnerable to attack. 

When the vehicle came to a halt, army officers themselves snapped Dar’s picture, even as he begged to not be photographed. “In those moments, I felt like I should have never existed. My lips were bleeding and they had broken my elbow,” Dar recalled. Photos of the scene instantly went viral on social media.

The images provoked massive outrage, but the Indian army defended its actions, as did the government. Supporters of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party sold T-shirts featuring images of the incident, bearing the caption: “Indian Army saving your a**, whether you like it or not!” The incident was even recreated in a Bollywood movie.

“They were making money out of my tragedy. Indians used me terribly,” Dar told me in a recent interview.

“When they clicked my picture and uploaded it on the internet, they showed the world how brave they were without thinking about how it would ruin my life.”

Kashmir’s long-standing political conflict

The conflict in the Kashmir Valley began in 1947 with the fall of the colonial British Empire and the subsequent emergence of a relatively secular India, and Pakistan, a homeland sought by Muslims who feared a Hindu majoritarian assault. Territories like Kashmir were given the option, at least on paper, to accede to either dominion. Kashmir fell into a quagmire: it was, and still is, predominantly Muslim but was ruled by a Hindu autocrat who conditionally acceded to the Indian Union on the promise, made by India’s first prime minister, of a plebiscite in which residents of the region would decide which country they wanted to belong to. But the plebiscite never took place.

Kashmiris have lived through generations of political conflict and uncertainty ever since, with many continuing to demand their right to self-determination from an indifferent New Delhi. Their defiance has been met with the pervasive presence of the Indian army; sweeping curfews and communication shutdowns; economic isolation; extrajudicial killings and torture; and a long list of other human rights violations.

‘I cannot hide’

At first, Dar had no idea that photos of the incident had gone viral. The internet was shut down in Kashmir, as is often the case. When the connection came back, Dar discovered that he had become known as “the human shield” — a title he is still unable to escape, five years on.

People recognized him everywhere. He was suddenly unable to find a job, or even a woman to marry.

All potential matches were unnerved by what had happened to him. Eventually, a year later, Dar married a woman from the Jammu division of Jammu and Kashmir state, who had no knowledge of what had happened to him. He keeps the story from her, even now.

Dar has attempted suicide. He has thought of running away from Kashmir and starting anew, but he fears this would not be enough.

“I cannot hide. That is what the internet does to you. One share and the world knows you,” he said.

“[For as long as] the internet exists, this picture will exist. They almost killed me that day but I survived,” said Dar.

Haunted from an early age

Dar is not entirely alone. Faizan Sofi has endured a similar trauma for a decade. When he was just 12 years old, Sofi was arrested on rioting allegations, after a picture of him throwing stones appeared online.

“I was too young. It was a mistake that we promised would never be repeated,” he said.

A few days after his arrest, while Sofi was being transferred from the court to a juvenile facility, he and his younger sister sobbed as she clung to his arm. A journalist captured the moment, and soon the photograph went viral online. Although it created a wave of sympathy for the children and intense criticism of the government at the time, the photo haunted Sofi into adulthood.

In 10 years since the incident, Sofi has been arrested five more times. After the police arrested him on campus, he dropped out of school. Friends deserted him. Like Dar, he has been unable to find work. He still grapples with depression and sleeplessness.

“Over the years, I have been shown my photo so many times. And even though I know that I did not do anything wrong, it hurts,” he said.

One of the youngest people known to be facing this challenge is a five-year-old Kashmiri boy, who was famously photographed two years ago, sitting atop the body of his grandfather, who was slain in the crossfire of a gun battle that broke out in the northern city of Sopore. The boy’s family members now try to restrict his internet access, in order to prevent him from finding his own image there. They told me they wish that whomever took the photograph had blurred the boy’s face before sharing it with the world.

“We are sure that if he sees his picture someday, it will all come back to him because he has mild memories of the day that he is not able to comprehend,” said the boy’s uncle. 

Who has the right to be forgotten?

This is not a new phenomenon — photos like Nick Ut’s 1973 “The Terror of War” (also known as “Napalm Girl”) that showed a naked girl, screaming and running from a napalm attack in South Vietnam, had similar effects. But in the digital era, such images move at lightning speed, often without the scrutiny of an editor.

Anuradha Bhasin, executive editor of “The Kashmir Times,” one of Jammu and Kashmir’s oldest newspapers, said that journalists need to consider the pitfalls of uploading photographs of victims. “How is it that we circulate those pictures, and in what context?” she asks.

But she acknowledges that the problem is hardly exclusive to journalists. The very nature of digital networks — in which anyone can easily copy and re-share an image or video — guarantees that a piece of content may always exist or resurface somehow. Indeed, there is no surefire recourse for people like Sofi or Dar. But intervention by the courts or by major internet companies can make a difference, by reducing or even prohibiting their distribution.

Apar Gupta, an Indian legal expert and the executive director of the New Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation, points to “the right to be forgotten,” part of Europe’s data privacy and security law, the General Data Protection Regulation. The provision allows any person convicted of a crime, after serving their sentence or being proved innocent, to demand the erasure of their personal data. Companies like Google have built substantial systems for processing and adjudicating “right to be forgotten” claims in Europe.

Although some other jurisdictions have legal frameworks that help people assert a right to their image, most countries, India included, do not have comprehensive data protection laws that might help people facing these situations.

Gupta said that the right to be forgotten requires a clearer definition than what is on the books in Europe, as it can be subject to misuse by people in positions of power, politicians in particular, who may seek to cleanse the internet of information that might harm their reputations.

“At present, the right to be forgotten is being litigated in several cases in India where people are asking for their personal details to be removed from search engine results regarding cases in which they have litigated,” he added.

In India, a data protection bill addressing the right to be forgotten was tabled in Parliament in 2019. Although petitioners have brought data protection cases to multiple courts, the issue has yet to be backed by statute.

The internet never forgets

Social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube also have a role to play here, as major distributors of these kinds of images. But none of the leading companies provide a mechanism for people to ask that their images be removed from these sites, unless the images already violate the sites’ content rules covering things like nudity and gratuitous violence. The photos in question do not fall into this category — it is the context in which they were taken that makes them so powerful.

But artificial intelligence and human moderators at social media companies are capable of blocking content and drastically reducing its circulation, said Maknoon Wani, an incoming graduate at the Oxford Internet Institute.

“What internet providers, social media companies, and other content curators can do is limit the reach, they can try to scrub it as efficiently as possible. It can be removed to an extent that a common internet user cannot access that content,” said Wani. “A child or a person who might get traumatized because of that photo or video will not be exposed to that content.”

If social media companies allowed users to ask for content to be removed on these grounds, it could help to reduce the long-tail effects of these kinds of images for their subjects. But there is no indication that this will happen any time soon.

Zoya Mir, a clinical psychologist based in Kashmir, spoke with me about how photos like this can compound mental health issues for people in these situations, who have already experienced a serious trauma. Part of the challenge, especially for young people like Sofi, lies in finding a way to move on. For people in any conflict zone, the internet makes this uniquely difficult.

“By putting an image on the internet, we break the notion of something actually being over,” said Mir. “We put it on a continuum, that is forever.”

The post ‘I cannot hide’: Viral photos from Kashmir conflict haunt subjects for years appeared first on Coda Story.

We’e’ena Tikuna grew up hearing her grandfather’s stories of slavery.

When he was young, the substance of choice to extract from his people’s piece of the rainforest was latex. The men who invaded the land called it “white gold.”

Like many Indigenous people living in the Brazilian Amazon from the late 1800s up until the first half of the 20th century, O’i Tikuna was forced to help them tap Pará rubber trees, letting the sticky, milky liquid run into small metal buckets and then to be exported and sold. A commodity in high demand ever since the Industrial Revolution, its popularity resurged during WWII.

At first, O’i and others from the Tikuna Umariaçu territory were promised payment and gifts for their labor. But these things never came.

“We used to be easily fooled,” says We’e’ena. “We didn’t know how to speak the white man’s language. We had to learn so we could speak to them as equals.”

Today, young Tikuna people like We’e’ena are working to make sure the right information reaches those who never left their territory. Now in her early thirties, We’e’ena is bilingual. She lives and works in the city of Alter do Chão, and runs a popular YouTube channel where she discusses Indigenous culture and rights issues. She is her grandfather’s first point of contact outside the Tikuna community and a trusted source of information, especially when it comes to decisions being made by the federal government about how to manage and protect Indigenous land.

President Jair Bolsonaro’s latest bid to make mining legal on Indigenous territories has We’e’ena, O’i and the rest of the Tikuna community worried. Long known for spouting anti-Indigenous rhetoric and attempting to diminish Indigenous rights, the far-right politician has found a new, far-fetched excuse to allow mining on Indigenous land: The war in Ukraine.

As the world’s largest exporter of coffee and soy, Brazil needs fertilizer, and a lot of it. Its largest international supplier of fertilizer is Russia. But economic sanctions imposed by the West since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have caused all exports of the product to grind to a halt. This has left Brazil on edge about a possible shortage.

For Bolsonaro, Brazil’s dependence on Russia for potassium, one of the primary nutrients of NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) commercial fertilizers used in the country, is unacceptable. Opening up federally recognized and protected Indigenous land to mining, he says, would solve the problem. It’s an argument he’s been making since 2016, when he was still a member of Congress. During a plenary session that year, where he spoke about the need to use Brazil’s own potassium reserves for fertilizer production, he cited Indigenous reserves, among other things, as getting in the way.

As president, his proposed solution is to pass bill 191/2020, which would allow mining on that Indigenous land to happen. And he’s using the war in Ukraine as a political tool to drive public fear of a national food shortage, in hopes of drumming up popular support.

“POTASSIUM is our food security,” he tweeted on March 2, referring to one of the primary nutrients of commercial fertilizers used in the country. 

“With the Russia/Ukraine war, we now run the risk of a potassium shortage or an increase in its price. Our food security and agribusiness (Economy) demand of us, the Executive and Legislative branches, measures that allow us not to be externally dependent on something that we have in abundance.”

Bolsonaro insists that the potassium necessary for Brazil to produce its own fertilizers is located on Indigenous land.

The problem with that argument is that it’s not true.

According to researchers from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), two-thirds of Brazil's potassium reserves are located outside the Amazon, in the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Sergipe. Inside the rainforest, none are located on Indigenous lands that are officially recognized and protected by the federal government. Just 11% of the country’s potassium reserves are on Indigenous territories that still haven’t completed the lengthy and bureaucratic process of becoming officially recognized as Indigenous lands and protected accordingly.

“Greater independence in the production of fertilizers, including potassium, requires long-term investments in science and technology,” says Raoni Rajão, a professor of production engineering and coordinator of the Environmental Services Management Laboratory at UFMG who researches supply chain production in the Amazon.

“Allowing mining on Indigenous lands without discussing it with society will only create more problems without solving the fertilizer crisis."

Despite being false, the argument has managed to speed up the possible passage of the mining bill. Brazil’s lower house of Congress, controlled by conservative lawmakers, voted in early March to fast-track the legislation, foregoing committee debates. The bill will likely go to a vote in April.

It is unclear whether the vote will receive enough support to advance to the Senate. But one thing is certain: The rural bloc, known as the Agricultural Parliamentary Front (FPA), is sure to push for the bill to pass.

In an official statement, FPA president Sérgio Souza asserted that the FPA “defends agricultural production on Indigenous lands in Brazil.” Their plan isn’t to take away the rights of Indigenous people to their land, language and culture, he says. Rather, it is to afford them “the right to choose how they want to live economically and socially.”

For Indigenous communities, his words ring hollow and echo the false promises they’ve been offered by colonizers for centuries. Their rights are something they have had to continuously fight to protect.

Indigenous peoples from across the country will be attending the 18th edition of Free Land Camp (Acampamento Terra Livre) from April 4 to 14—an annual event in the capital city of Brasília—held to draw attention to violations of Indigenous rights and demand change. This year, one of those demands will be to put a stop to bill 191/2020.

We’e’ena Tikuna was 12 when she heard Portuguese for the first time.

Her first 11 years were spent in Tikuna Umariaçu, an Indigenous territory in the Brazilian Amazon that belongs to the Tikuna, the most populous Indigenous group in the country. There, along the Upper Solimões River, bordering Peru and Colombia, she spoke only Tikuna, learning about her people’s culture and history from her parents, grandparents, and other leaders in the community.

But her parents wanted their six children to understand more. So the family moved to Manaus, the capital city of the state of Amazonas, where the children went to school and learned Portuguese.

High school in Manaus was hard. Studying in an entirely new language and cultural environment, and faced with incessant bullying and racism, We’e’ena struggled in school. It was a painful process, but she knew it would help her in the long run. The stories she heard from her grandfather—now 88 years old and a respected shaman in the Tikuna Umariaçu community—as a child had stuck with her. She was determined to ensure that history did not repeat itself.

Now, at 33, We’e’ena is an artist, nutritionist, and Indigenous rights activist in Alter do Chão, in Brazil Pará state, which is home to several Indigenous territories and a hotbed for illegal mining. There she has access to information that otherwise might not reach her village, where her entire family still lives. She works to make sure the Tikuna know what’s going on in government buildings far from their territory—she’s able to talk to them on a regular basis thanks to Tikuna Umariaçu’s internet connection and makes the week-long boat trip back home at least once a year—but also spreads awareness to others about the destruction of the Amazon and the violations of Indigenous rights that go hand-in-hand with it on her YouTube channel and by speaking at events like TEDx Laçador.

“Our weapon, our power, today is technology, it’s the internet,” says We’e’ena. “Things used to happen in the dark of night. But not anymore.”

As Bill 191/2020 makes its way swiftly through Congress, environmentalists and land defenders worry about the impacts it could have if it passes.

Federal protections for recognized Indigenous land like the Tikuna Umariaçu territory are some of the best defenses against deforestation in the Amazon. According to a study by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), from January to December 2020, just 3% of deforestation in the Amazon region happened on Indigenous land.

But even now, illegal mining on Indigenous territories causes immense harm to both the environment and the health of those living there.

Currently, 93.7% of mining activity in Brazil occurs in the Amazon, according to data collected by MapBiomas.

Gold mining is rampant across the region, leading to destruction of the rainforest through deforestation, but also contaminating water and soil with mercury used by miners to separate the prized mineral from other substances. The mercury contaminates water used for drinking and bathing, and seeps into fish, a main food source for many Indigenous peoples. Public health research has shown that mercury is causing illness among people of all ages in Indigenous communities, and leading to developmental challenges for children.

Without federal protections of their land, the situation is only expected to get worse. For Indigenous groups like the Tikuna, passing this bill is life or death.

“We don’t want this,” We’e’ena says. “These conditions that are being created are going to kill us.”

The post Brazil’s Congress fast-tracks plans to mine Indigenous land for potassium, blaming Russia sanctions appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

How has the war changed your photography?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who are you now trying to reach with your photography?

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

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

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

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

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

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What do people misunderstand about this war?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Why is the war happening?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“I can’t go there, it’s impossible,” he said. “You can punish me and send me to another country but you can’t send me back home. I can’t live there. Maybe I’ll lose my life.” 

Mohammad, now 24 years old, asked to be identified by only his first name, owing to safety concerns. He left the countryside of Aleppo, in the west of the country, in 2016. Since then, he has lived in Turkey as a refugee. While he is terrified by the prospect of going back to his village, the Syrian regime, guided by its ally Russia, has declared that it is now time for the 6.6 million people displaced by 10 years of civil war to return to the country.

On November 11, the Russian-organized International Conference on the Return of Syrian Refugees was held in Damascus. It was clear from the invitations sent to allied nations that the main goals of the gathering were to seek money for reconstruction and to show the world that Syria is now stable enough for international sanctions against it to be lifted. 

Despite statements condemning the conference by rights groups and diaspora organizations, 27 countries attended.  

The flags on stage at the opulent Umayyad Conference Palace included those of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — known collectively as the BRICS — and Moscow’s ally Belarus. Neighboring Iraq and Lebanon were also present; the latter being the only attending nation with a significant refugee population. 

Turkey — which hosts more Syrian refugees than anywhere else in the world, with at least 3.6 million registered — was not invited. Ankara backs forces opposed to President Bashar Al-Assad in Syria and has a strong military presence in the northwest of the country. Meanwhile, the U.S. and EU boycotted the event, stressing that, under United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254, there can be no talk of refugee returns without a political settlement to the conflict. UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Syria Imran Riza attended as an observer. 

Mikhail Mezentsev, head of the Russian National Defense Management Center, opened proceedings, claiming that the Syrian government guarantees the safety of returning refugees. He then turned to the international community, demanding that it “stop the sanctions policy against the regime and unfreeze its bank accounts."

Back in Istanbul, Mohammad claimed that the Assad regime and Russia are simply putting on “a show."

“They want to show the world we are OK, and say, ‘Look we ended the war,’ but it’s not true,” he said. “We’re not safe if we go back. Maybe we get arrested, or we’re killed.”

He added that the conference was a Russian initiative to recoup its losses from the conflict. 

“Russia spent millions of dollars in the war, so they want that money back,” he said.

Addressing the conference, Ali Asghar Khaji, a senior assistant to the Iranian foreign minister, directed blame for the “bloodshed, destruction and migration of millions of Syrians” towards “an influx of terrorists backed by a number of countries.” He then announced a proposal to establish an international fund for reconstruction. 

In a statement released prior to the event, The Syrian Association for Citizens’ Dignity, a civil-rights grassroots movement, quoted Dr Marwan Nazhan, a trustee of the organization. “Clearly, the purpose of the conference is to try and secure funds from the West under the guise of reconstruction to secure the gains made through indiscriminate attacks against civilians and their forced displacement.”

Emma Beals, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute, also believes that the conference had a transactional agenda. 

“If some refugees return, it’s a way of increasing the reconstruction or humanitarian funding amount and, secondly, it helps to push a normalization narrative,” she explained. 

Syria is grappling with an acute economic crisis and civilians living in regime-held areas are forced to line up for daily necessities such as food and fuel.

Ahmad, 31, whose name has been changed for security reasons, has lived in Turkey for three-and-a-half years, after fleeing the violence in his hometown of Deir Ezzor. 

He believes the conference was a waste of time, considering there is nothing in Syria to go back to. 

“The people in Syria, they can’t live because they have no bread, they have no water, they have no electricity, they have nothing,” he said. “How can Assad bring in refugees, if he can’t take care of people living in Syria?” 

While the Syrian regime may like to see some refugees come back,as long as they have money that can be spent within the country, there is more to gain from pushing for reconstruction on humanitarian grounds. 

Fadi, 33, who also asked to be identified under a pseudonym, is originally from the suburbs of Damascus. He has lived in Lebanon for five years and insists that the Syrian regime cares only about its own interests. 

“They will take the reconstruction money for themselves,” he said, referring to Russia, Iran and the Syrian government. 

“We can describe the country as a company today, it’s like a cooperation between the Russians and Iranians. The regime will benefit the least.”

Mohammad laughed when the topic of reconstruction came up. 

“Reconstruction? That’s totally unreal. Russia lies, the regime lies, and their allies lie. Even their supporters don’t believe it,” he said. 

The area outside Aleppo where Mohammad’s family still live currently lies under opposition control. If the regime retakes it, he believes there is no chance that they will see their home again.

“They’re going to burn that house, they’re going to burn our cars, and they’re going to destroy all the street that I lived on.”

Mohammad is certain that if Russia secures reconstruction funding for Syria, only those loyal to the regime will benefit. 

“Maybe they will fix some villages in their own area, but not in ours,” he said. 

Beals explained that people who have fled bombardment of opposition-held areas by regime forces are deemed part of the opposition and stripped of property rights. Even if their towns and villages are slated for reconstruction, they will remain displaced.

“Some of these projects may mean that refugees will never be able to return home, because the area that they fled during the war has been demolished or turned into some other project that benefits regime supporters,” she said.

Beals also pointed to the obstacles that Russia will face in its attempts to raise international support. 

“It’s a very difficult place to put money into, as a private investor or humanitarian organisation trying to provide reconstruction money, because you don’t know where that money is going to go,” she said. 

She said that contracts granted for infrastructure projects are routinely awarded to individuals with close ties to the government and, therefore, continue to feed the war economy. 

Meanwhile, President Michel Aoun of Lebanon — a nation mired in its own overlapping economic and political crises — continues to push for the return of displaced Syrians. 

Ahead of the conference, Aoun told Russian Special Envoy to Syria Alexander Lavrentiev that he is “looking for a quick solution” to the refugee situation. He added that “the refugees have inflicted great losses on Lebanon.”

Even if the participation of Lebanon in the conference solidified an intent to push for refugee returns, the nation’s government remains divided. Some parties support the Assad regime and its drive to send displaced people back, while others recognize the realities on the ground and maintain that Lebanon has a duty to protect them. 

Fadi, who lives in Beirut, said he doesn’t feel pressured to move back, owing to the strong UN presence in the country and the role displaced Syrians now play in the local economy. 

“I doubt forcible returns will happen from Lebanon, plus Lebanon has become reliant on the Syrian workers,” he explained. 

Like three-quarters of displaced Syrians, Fadi hopes to be able to go back one day. However, he will only consider doing so when he feels it is safe. 

The U.N. continues to push for a political settlement in Syria, within which the welfare of returning refugees is a key consideration, but many do not feel comfortable with Assad being part of any such talks. That sentiment was illustrated by a hashtag circulating on Twitter, in both Arabic and English, prior to the conference: #No_Return_With_Assad. 

Mohammad, for one, believes that no one will trust the guarantees made by the regime and will not return until Assad is arrested and faces justice. 

“Even if peacekeepers came in for protection, they would kill you behind their backs,” he said.

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The Covid-19 pandemic hit Ukraine just as the Donbas conflict approached its sixth year. Hostilities began in 2014, when Russian-backed rebels declared the formation of independent republics in Donetsk and Luhansk. Now, both government-controlled and separatist areas in the region are suffering the economic impact of lockdown measures. 

The closure in March of crossing points between Ukrainian and rebel-controlled areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions due to the pandemic has had a severe effect. These crossings are important economic lifelines for the more than two million people who traveled through them every month before the pandemic. Their closure has also prevented students in non-government areas from traveling to university examinations, but the hardest-hit have been elderly residents of separatist areas who needed to cross into government-controlled territory to collect their pensions.

The checkpoints have now been reopened, albeit with restrictions that still make it extremely difficult for most people to pass through them. Many have been forced to take an onerous detour through Russia instead. 

According to Vitaliy Syzov, head of the think tank Donetsk Institute of Information, “It takes about 16 hours to get from one part of Donetsk to another part, through Russia, and they have to pay a fine because they cross the border illegally.” 

During the pandemic, separatist-aligned media outlets have also pushed the idea that their areas are doing a better job of dealing with the virus than Ukraine itself.

“They try to scare people that in Ukraine, the situation is worse than in Donetsk or in Luhansk,” said Syzov. According to a report from UkraineWorld, an online publication focused on countering disinformation, one narrative that caught on in pro-Russian media has been that “the West is trying to rob Ukraine during the pandemic and turn it into a colony.”

In the war-torn Donbas region, all sides have struggled with medical shortages. Ukraine as a whole is currently seeing a spike in cases that is likely to keep rising. “People are not happy with public health services on both sides,” said Orysia Lutsevych, manager of the Chatham House’s Ukraine Forum.

While reliable statistics are hard to come by, Igor Mitchnik of Drukarnia, a civil society center in Sloviansk, a city in the Donetsk region under government control, said that separatist areas were slow to take the virus seriously. “Until March they tried to pretend that Covid is not affecting them,” he explained. 

According to Syzov, separatist officials in Luhansk imposed quarantine measures opportunistically, in order to suppress a miners’ strike in June. The Donbas region is heavily dependent on coal mining and has been plunged into crisis as a result of the current global economic downturn.

If there is one bright side of the pandemic’s effect on Ukraine, it is that it may have played a part in reducing the bloodshed, as both sides have largely respected a ceasefire. “Right now we have an unprecedented situation in which we have many days without any ceasefire violation. We’ve not had such a calm situation since 2014, since the conflict began,” said Nikolaus von Twickel, an analyst at Civic Monitoring, which publishes research on the Ukraine conflict.

Photo by Alexander Reka/TASS via Getty Images

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Carillo also faces charges for allegedly opening fire and killing Santa Cruz County sheriff’s deputy Sergeant Damon Gutzwiller in the climax of an eight-day manhunt. Both Carillo, a member of an elite military security force, and the man believed to be his accomplice, Robert Justus, have been linked to the boogaloo movement.

The boogaloo is not a conventional organization. Rather, it is a decentralized grouping, following in the footsteps of numerous leaderless resistance, patriot and militia movements on the American far right. Its culture is rooted in an internet meme that has somehow managed to convince a significant number of people that starting a second American civil war would be a cool thing to do. Now, boogaloo adherents appear to be latching onto anti-racist protests in major U.S. cities.  

Taking its name from the 1980s dance movie sequel “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” the movement had up until recently been a largely online phenomenon. However, over recent months, its ideology has grown in visibility, owing to a series of heavily armed protests against lockdown measures in cities across the United States. In the past six weeks, at least six men connected to the movement have been arrested on various charges, ranging from murder to conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism.

In one recent Facebook post to a boogaloo group, a user wrote, “I just watched the President of the United States give a live address from the Rose Garden. He took no questions from the press. He has officially declared all anarchists, anti-fascists, protesters, looters, and rioters as terrorists.” In so doing, Donald Trump had “declared War on his own people,” they added.

While the boogaloo’s origin story is long and convoluted, it came into being on 4chan’s /k/ board — the libertarian sister of the far-right /pol/ board. Many members of the community describe themselves as “bois” and spend much of their time discussing the second amendment, military history and weaponry. Their online culture is characterized by colorful memes, while their real-world gatherings often form a sea of garish Hawaiian shirts, elaborate facial hair and high-velocity assault rifles.

Some followers can be described as hardline libertarians, others as anti-government radicals and accelerationists, who seek to hasten a total societal collapse and bring about the downfall of the U.S. government. Another sizable minority comprises national socialists and white supremacists, who see the boogaloo as prime recruiting ground for their cause.

The history of contemporary anti-government movements in the U.S. can be traced back to the Posse Comitatus and the John Birch Society in the 1960s, and an upsurge of militia groups following the sieges of Ruby Ridge and Waco in the early 1990s. A rich seam of resentment and suspicion of the federal government also runs through mainstream American politics and has been plain to see in conservative circles, from the Tea Party to certain sections of the Trump movement.

The boogaloo’s gaudy aesthetic may encourage some observers to not take it entirely seriously. But, while some participants are content to simply live out a bizarre online meme, others are clearly willing to kill and die in pursuit of their goals. 

Boogaloobook

With its deep online roots, the boogaloo has a presence on almost every platform — Reddit, Twitter, Discord, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok and Gab. Its two main outlets, however, are Facebook and Telegram. According to Bellingcat, 125 associated groups were operating on Facebook in late April. That number has fallen after recent events, but at the time of writing 92 are still up and running.

Their content is primarily based around anti-government memes. Given their style of communication, themes and the channels they use, it is often difficult to distinguish boogaloo groups from those of online neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements. However, since the Black Lives Matter protests began, admins of a number of boogaloo groups have sought to rebrand them in a more inclusive light. 

This has taken the form of promoting gun ownership in African-American communities as a means of defense against the police, and even embracing LGBTQ Pride events. Recently, one user wrote: “If there was ever a time for bois to stand in solidarity with ALL free men and women in this country, it is now. This is not a race issue.” 

Facebook-owned Instagram also functions as a springboard for boogaloo memes. Such content has recently taken a strong anti-law enforcement position, with users posting slogans like, “Police do not serve to protect, they serve to terrorize and murder.”

However inclusive they are attempting to appear, there is a serious problem with such positions. They are deeply revisionist and demonstrate a willingness to both erase Black identity from the recent protests and to ignore the role of racism in the killings of people of color by law enforcement agents. 

By glossing over these issues, boogaloo adherents appear to view police brutality and the government’s reaction to the Black Lives Matter protests as just another expression of an overarching and non-racialized state tyranny. Essentially, they are railing against the exact same things that they have been during their anti-lockdown protests, and nothing more. 

Boogaloogram

Telegram, meanwhile, plays a different role for the boogaloo movement. There, its accelerationist intentions are even more openly expressed. Members often distribute manuals on weapons maintenance, how to make firearms and explosives, and combat survival skills. This content is intended to be practical and implemented in real-life scenarios. Some users have even shared information on the best way to engage in a shootout with the police. 

This platform is also where Neo-Nazis most visibly attempt to advance their own racist causes within the movement. Take, for instance, this recent post, in which a user shared pictures of white-supremacist counter protests against Black Lives Matter activists: “White men need to have the capability to respond when their territory is threatened. I hope that White men across the country can see these pictures and do similar actions in their towns.”

While some boogaloo Facebook groups fly rainbow flags and post inclusive iconography, these messages prove that a significant number of individuals within the movement are willing to take violent action, based on deeply held beliefs of prejudice and division. What is more, both sides only wish to further undermine social cohesion in an increasingly turbulent nation.

As another recent Telegram post stated, “We do not wish for law and order, because it means continued existence within this rotten system. Anything which contributes to friction can only help us in the long run. Anything that contributes to stability is our enemy.”

Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images

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Beginning Monday a court in the Netherlands is holding 25 weeks of hearing after hearing to examine criminal responsibility for the downing of Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine six years ago. From my apartment in Moscow, I’ll be able to watch an online live stream of the trial where relatives of all 298 people killed finally get the chance to give statements to judges, and family members unable to come to the trial can dial in by a video feed.

On my TV screen, however, Russian state channels will simultaneously broadcast out a parallel universe of disinformation stories. It’s a familiar carousel of alternative theories and newly released “evidence” that circles through state-controlled broadcasters, gets pushed out by government-paid trolls on social media and then recycled by ordinary Russians. With each related news update Russia doubles down on its denials even against the staggering evidence that shows the Russian military supplied separatist troops with the missile that shot down the passenger plane over Ukraine’s Donetsk region.

But there’s something new looming over Russia’s coverage of the MH-17 trial. The downing of a Ukrainian passenger airplane in Iran earlier this year may have already dropped from international headlines but as Russia kicks one of its most effective disinformation campaigns back into gear, it’s the elephant in the room.

It took 24 hours for the Islamic Republic to broadcast an admission that its military accidentally shot down the plane and killed all 176 people on board on January 9. That same evening, thousands of Iranians took to the streets with the rallying cry: “Our enemy is not in America, it’s here.”

In stark contrast, we’ve lived with our growing elephant for six years, feeding him a steady diet of propaganda and denials that Russia, or even the armed rebels, had anything to do with the downing of MH17.

In Russia six years isn’t enough to understand the damage caused by this big lie. I talked to my colleague, Pavel Kanygin, who was on the ground reporting for a Russian newspaper the day of the crash in Ukraine in 2014 and asked him, why after all this time do we not confess as the Iranians did?

“This political culture of denial was crafted twenty years ago,” said Kanygin. “Our authorities prefer not to answer inconvenient questions. They’re building alternative context, a new reality and make people believe that white is the new black and the victim is an aggressor.” 

Kanygin is convinced that many members of the Russian establishment would be happy to admit guilt for what the Dutch called their 9/11, to pay their dues and be done with it. 

“But at the top there are those who hold the position: ‘Not a single step back.’ That’s why they stick it out to the very end,” said Kanygin. Iran, he says, decided to sacrifice short term loss for the long term gain while in Russia “our children will eventually have to pay compensation for the MH17 case, apologizing to Ukraine and finding a solution to the Crimean issue.”

When Iran admitted its military shot down the Ukrainian Airlines plane, one mother whose son Brice died in the MH-17 crash wrote in a private post on her Facebook page: “We also wait to hear such words from Russia, even after more than 5 years.” 

As weeks passed and news cycles have moved on from the Iran crash, we in Russia remain locked in a room with our elephant.

The post As Flight MH17 trial begins, Russia, unlike Iran, refuses to admit guilt appeared first on Coda Story.

The town of Zolote is at the center of the peace accords agreed on by representatives from Ukraine, Russia and peace-keeping forces at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). A border town split since the war began in 2014, Zolote is one of the mining communities in a valley in the eastern Luhansk region. For years the two sides in the conflict — Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops — shelled each other from entrenched positions sometimes a mere hundred yards apart in the valley.

In October Zelensky officially agreed to what’s called the Steinmeier formula which calls for both sides to move forces and hardware at least a mile and a half apart, to stop shooting and most controversially for the organization of local elections in the region. It was the first time in years that representatives from both sides put to paper and agreed on a formula for a ceasefire. However, despite what was agreed on, shelling has continued in the frontline, violating the fresh agreement and stalling the withdrawal of troops.

War transformed Ukraine’s entire eastern region known as Donbas. After a series of sham referendums in 2014, two regions in Donbas declared independence with the intent of joining Russia in the wake of its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Armed conflict erupted as the Ukrainian military fought back separatist and Russian military troops moving further into Ukraine. Five years of war have claimed over 13,000 lives and displaced over a million people from the region.

But for all of those who left, there are far more who stayed. Long lines at checkpoints and poor road conditions keep people who still live in towns like Zolote isolated from life elsewhere in Ukraine. People here are also in the crosshairs of another warzone: an information war contested in cyberspace and over the airwaves. TV and radio towers were some of the first assets seized by pro-Russian forces, ensuring that even those living on Ukrainian-held territory in Zolote and along the border zone today find themselves awash in separatist propaganda beamed out from the other side of the frontline. Via satellite, Ukrainians in the border region can also watch broadcasting from the capital Kyiv, where much of the news takes on strong editorial lines conforming to the political agenda of whichever oligarch controls the channel.

This second frontline was left out of the recent Steinmeier talks. And the battle to control the narrative of the war carries on, deepening the divides and distrust in a town already cut in two.

  Map graphic by Sofiya Voznaya

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Many of the protestors have worn t-shirts and wave banners that read: “20% of my country is occupied by Russia.”

In a five-day war in 2008 between Russia and Georgia, Russia took control of South Ossetia, a Georgian province in the country’s north.

Russian media have largely portrayed the protests as motivated by Russophobia. For many Georgians, however, Russian occupation and the country’s economic and political influence are viewed as the latest instances of colonialism and imperialism that begins with the Red Army invading an independent Georgia in 1921.

Photographer Tako Robakidze has spent more than a year with families who live along the South Ossetia line of control, a moving border that Georgians call a “creeping occupation” because the Russian military has continually pushed deeper into Georgian territory. What is it like to live under creeping occupation? This is the question Robakidze explores in “Creeping Borders.”

The project was produced with support by Magnum Foundation

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Dima and Tanya are an unlikely couple in modern-day Kiev: Dima was formerly a leader of the city’s most powerful ultra-right movement, and Tanya is an ultra-left activist and self-proclaimed anarcho-feminist.

Together Dima and Tanya fight their own battles to reinvent themselves against a backdrop of violence, loss, and instability in post-Maidan Ukraine.

Hunted by members of Ukraine’s ultra-right movement and ostracized by friends and family, the couple fights the momentum of their pasts while standing together, back to back, in a courageous tale of love and self-discovery.

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It started on August 23 with “a strong chemical smell,” Lena, a young lab assistant from Armyansk, remembered when we spoke. She thought it must have come from the Titan plant on the edge of town, which makes titanium dioxide, a whitening agent for paints and cosmetics. “At first I didn’t take much notice, because we often have chemical emissions here,” she said. But by the time she got home from work her eyes and throat were swollen and burning. “Next morning I fainted in the bath. I had an allergic reaction all over.”

Armyansk lies a short drive from the so-called Administrative Boundary Line (ABL) that has divided Crimea from Ukraine ever since Russia occupied and annexed the peninsula in 2014.

But as reports spread of what appeared to be a major health and environmental incident, authorities on both sides of the divide, in Russia and Ukraine, seemed more concerned with using the leak as a propaganda tool than addressing the needs of those affected or investigating the cause.

“No one said what was happening,” Lena recalled, as she sat smoking with a friend outside an empty Armyansk kindergarten. “The Ministry of Emergencies should have said to close the windows and stay inside. But lots of people went out and opened windows, and there was mass poisoning.” “Lots of people went out and opened windows, and there was mass poisoning.” Lena, Armyansk resident

Since Crimea’s annexation, the new Russian-backed authorities have imposed strict controls on the media, which now generally paints a positive, uncritical picture of events in the peninsula. What is reported is weighed not for factual accuracy, but to exclude dissident content and maximize propaganda value.

Fines and arrests for public dissent are a further disincentive to voicing alternative views. Lena and her friend, like everyone I met in Armyansk, would not tell me their surnames. After Yekaterina Pivovar, another local resident, spoke out about her concerns to the media using her full name, she was cautioned by the police and publicly pilloried on Crimea’s main television station.

There are no independent bodies left on the peninsula that can investigate. Neither can international agencies, with Crimea cut off from the outside world by sanctions and its disputed status.

When some local and Russian outlets picked up the Armyansk story on August 27, they reported only that there had been an emission of an “unknown substance.” The next day, Sergei Aksyonov, the man appointed by Russia to run Crimea, finally mentioned the leak. All he could say was that it was harmless, and “according to preliminary data” was emitted from the Titan factory.

The factory is owned by Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, currently in Austria fighting an extradition request from the U.S., where he faces charges of attempted bribery.

Bloggers in Crimea joined in the information battle. Those with pro-Ukrainian views posted emotional interviews with alarmed, angry locals. Others took Russia’s side and blamed the “Ukrainian terrorist government” — recycling what the Crimean authorities now said was the cause of the incident: Ukraine cutting the water supply to the factory’s waste reservoir.

Most of Crimea’s water needs used to be supplied from mainland Ukraine via a canal. After the 2014 annexation, Ukraine stopped the flow. Four years of falling water levels, coupled with a very hot, dry summer, were allegedly causing accumulated sulfur dioxide in the factory reservoir to evaporate into the atmosphere.

On September 4, some two weeks later, Aksyonov finally visited Armyansk. Distressed residents had gathered in the town’s square — a rare occurrence since under Russian laws now in force any gathering can be considered an “unsanctioned meeting” and participants detained or fined.

Aksyonov admitted that pollution levels were above normal, but insisted there was no serious health threat. The Titan factory was ordered to shut down for two weeks, and 4,000 children and their mothers were evacuated – although Aksyonov, and the government-controlled media, called it an “extended holiday.”

With the mass evacuation, Ukrainian media picked up the story. If Crimea-based outlets now report only good news, Ukraine’s media — with no accredited journalists in Crimea — now prefers only bad news casting Russia in a negative light. Ukrainian media claimed that Russian military exercises had caused the leak. Reports dubbed the incident a “second Chernobyl,” in reference to the devastating Soviet-era nuclear accident in 1986.

For the state-controlled Crimean media, this was a gift, allowing them to ridicule Ukrainian coverage instead of investigating what had happened. With many Ukrainian internet sites blocked, it is hard for people in Crimea to get any alternative news. One Armyansk resident who spoke about her concerns to the media using her full name was cautioned by the police and publicly pilloried on Crimea’s main television station.

About the only thing the two sides agreed on was to blame Firtash, the factory owner. For Russian and Crimean outlets, his nationality made him an easy target, ignoring his ties to Moscow that allow him to continue operating the plant. Pro-Ukraine outlets on the other side of the divide portrayed Firtash as selling out his nation and breaking international sanctions.

Hoping to get past the disinformation, I visited Armyansk in early September. After heavy rain, the heatwave had broken. Adults were on the streets. There was one sign of an official response: roads and buildings had been hosed down. But the air had a distinctly acidic flavor. Vegetation, especially on the northern side of town close to the factory, had turned brown or lost its leaves altogether, while a few miles south it was still green.

Nonetheless, some locals accepted the official line. “What happened? Autumn happened,” said Denis, a young man drinking coffee on a bench.

“The apples and pears are still there [on the trees], I just wash them before eating them. Just all the leaves fell off,” said Valya, a woman in her fifties selling soft drinks on the main street. She had no doubt the cause was the Titan plant, but she was apparently unconcerned.

“I was born here and I knew what it was right away,” she said. “For us, this is just normal.” Most of what she had read in the news, Valya said, was “exaggeration.” She was grateful to “our leadership for reacting in a timely manner.”

“It’s horrible, and why should we lie about it?” countered an elderly woman next to her, selling peppers from her allotment. But, she added, “Who can we complain to? We’re nothing; we’re just pawns.” One report dubbed the incident a “second Chernobyl.”

The Crimean health authorities had reportedly said there had been no increase in patients in Armyansk, and no cases of chemical poisoning. There were no patients to be seen in the hospital, nor anyone willing to talk. A group of nurses fell silent when I approached. An administrator told me only Crimea’s health ministry could comment.

I left Armyansk with a sore throat and the distinct impression — common in Russia-controlled Crimea — that people were afraid to tell the truth. The signs of pollution were obvious, although not as bad as some social media and Ukrainian reports had suggested. Locals said the evacuated children were due to return in three days.

Instead, three days later the authorities declared a state of emergency in Armyansk. Apparently another toxic gas — hydrogen chloride — had been detected.

At a news conference, Igor Mikhailichenko from the Crimean Cabinet of Ministers said that top of the list of the six likely causes was now “an emission of unknown chemical substances from the territory of the neighboring state”.

Ukrainian officials pointed the finger back. Among three possible causes they were considering was a “deliberate release of chemicals by Russia,” which they portrayed as a tactic to pressure Ukraine into resuming water supplies to Crimea. Monitors from Kherson administration bordering Crimea on the Ukrainian side said the pollution had most likely come from a one-off discharge. “We’re nothing; we’re just pawns.” Armyansk woman

There is no way to independently verify what had happened or its effect on health. A Crimea-based environmental NGO, the “Centre for Environmental Well-being”, told me it didn’t have the right expertise. Greenpeace International said there was not enough reliable information for it to be able to comment.

The state of emergency was lifted a week later, on September 23. Armyansk’s children returned to school. But earlier this month, Armyansk residents again complained of bad smells and allergies. The authorities in Crimea cracked down, and Yekaterina Pivovar was one of those who felt the effect.

She spoke to French television and the independent Russian outlet “Novaya Gazeta” about her children’s health problems, and her plan to visit the town mayor with other concerned mothers. Soon afterward, police came to her home to warn her against organizing an “unsanctioned meeting.”

That evening Crimean state TV named her as a provocateur and self-publicist spreading disinformation on behalf of Ukraine.

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The hospital in his hometown of Vuhledar, a small, shabby mining town in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, lacked the necessary specialist care. Viktor found other facilities further away where doctors offered to operate, but they wanted to charge him 5,000 Ukrainian Hyrvnia (about $190) — a commonplace act of corruption in a country where healthcare is supposed to be free.

Then a former girlfriend told Viktor about a “special program” in the region offering high-quality surgery, for free.

There was a catch, though. The hospitals involved in the program were on the other side of the frontline of Ukraine’s grinding four-year-old war, in territory held by Russian-backed separatists. And they have been offering free medical care as a way of winning support in parts of Donbas under Ukrainian government control, thus turning patients into participants in an information war.

It is called the “Humanitarian Program to Unite the People of Donbas” and, in effect, it has turned healthcare — enshrined by the United Nations as a universal human right — into a propaganda weapon. It has turned healthcare — enshrined by the United Nations as a universal human right — into a propaganda weapon.

The war in eastern Ukraine still claims weekly civilian and military casualties, and both sides have been censured for using medical facilities as military bases and targets, in defiance of international humanitarian law. The conflict has disrupted day-to-day healthcare for the local population in more mundane ways too.

The 280-mile frontline chops the Donbas region in half, between areas under Ukrainian government control and those the government calls temporarily occupied territories, held by the separatists.

Crucially, the separatists hold the two regional centers of Donetsk and Luhansk, which they have declared the capitals of their unrecognized “republics,” created and sustained by Russian support. Places like Vuhledar are trapped in a precarious limbo, still under Ukrainian government control but cut off from key services like healthcare.

For their part, the separatists call these areas “territory temporarily occupied by Kiev” and have made them a priority target for their hearts and minds campaign. Having Donetsk in their hands gives them a clear advantage in the healthcare propaganda war.

The city was the region’s main medical hub before the conflict flared in 2014, providing tertiary, or advanced, care, for most of Donbas, including Viktor’s hometown. Donetsk had a nationally recognized medical university, and the largest cancer center in Ukraine, headed by the country’s chief oncologist. Donetsk surgeons were renowned for their “golden hands.”

Much of this expertise and infrastructure has been destroyed by the war, which has decimated staff and equipment and cut medical supply lines. But the city still has some of the best medical specialists and facilities in the region.

It was Donetsk that Viktor needed to reach. Just 40 miles from his home, it took him all day because of the obstacles thrown up by the conflict.

To cross the frontline — known as the “Line of Contact” — people need a special pass from the Ukrainian security services. To get it, “you have to say your aunt lives there or something,” Viktor explained. “Then it’s checkpoints, queues, waiting everywhere, it takes ages. But I needed to save money so I went to see if they could help me.”

At least one million people cross the line every month, according to United Nations figures, braving the risk of getting caught in crossfire, as well as the bureaucratic delays. Most make the trip for family reasons, or to claim pensions or other social support. The launch of the “humanitarian program” has added to this traffic. The “humanitarian program” refers to people living under government control as “hostages”

The two separatist “republics” jointly launched the program in February 2017, promising Donbas inhabitants on both sides of the Line of Contact free healthcare, as well as education, sport and cultural events and social benefits. And they say the message is getting through.

According to their website, more than 1,200 people from Ukrainian government-controlled Donbas have crossed over for treatment since the program began for services ranging from maternity and pediatric care to cancer surgery and vaccinations.

There is no way to confirm these figures. I was denied access to Donetsk and Luhansk, and no one there agreed to give an interview by telephone. On the Ukrainian government-controlled side, people are reluctant to admit crossing the contact line for treatment. None of the patients who agreed to talk to me would give their full names.

Despite being on crutches, Viktor agreed only to meet outside on a park bench. “You never know who’s listening,” he said. But from my own research, it is clear that there is now wide awareness of the program on both sides of the frontline, and many people from government areas continue to go to Donetsk for health services, while trying to stay out of the politics of the conflict.

Kiev has not outlawed receiving medical treatment in occupied Donetsk or Luhansk. But collaborating with the separatists — or supporting their propaganda efforts — is illegal. How exactly such charges are defined is not clear, but past experience has taught both individuals and organizations to be wary of such accusations.

The Ukrainian authorities have investigated non-governmental organizations (NGOs) based in Ukraine who have provided foreign-funded medicines and other supplies to occupied Donetsk and Luhansk. NGOs working there have been banned by the de facto authorities on similar charges. Doctors have found themselves placed on blacklists run by both Ukrainian officials and the separatists, accused of being “terrorist collaborators” by one side, or of being spies by the other.

Most Donbas residents and patients, who overwhelmingly have relatives and friends on the other side of the contact line, try to avoid openly taking sides. Words and categories such as “separatist,” “pro-Russian” or “pro-Ukrainian” are rarely mentioned. But the de facto authorities in Donetsk and Luhansk do not hide their political and propaganda goals in running the health program. The de facto authorities in Donetsk and Luhansk do not hide their political and propaganda goals in running the health program.

Its official website describes people in government controlled-areas as “Donetsk and Luhansk citizens living in territory temporarily controlled by Ukraine,” and calls them “hostages.”

It continues with what reads like a call to arms: “Brothers and sisters! Countrymen! Residents of [...] all cities, towns and villages held by Ukraine! Let’s unite our efforts for survival and peace. For the fight against those sitting far away in Kiev, Brussels and Washington, who are trying to set us against each other over who will get richer from this war.”

Would-be patients for the program from government-held territory are required to write a personal appeal to the de facto “minister of health” in Donetsk or Luhansk, thus legitimizing the separatist regimes.

The program is promoted in multiple ways, including special booths on the separatist side of the Line of Contact. It has a hotline telephone number, and according to the website, gets many calls from Ukrainian government-controlled areas.

Russian and separatist-controlled media outlets also promote the program, with regular reports showing patients gratefully receiving free, high quality treatment — treatment, viewers are told, that is unavailable in Ukrainian government territory.

The reality for Viktor was not so simple. Once he finally reached Donetsk, he found himself ensnared in a kind of Catch-22 situation.

The hospital staff told him “they haven’t got the right to treat me without a doctor’s referral from Ukraine,” he recalled. But when he had asked for one before leaving Ukrainian government-controlled territory, doctors there had refused. “They said they haven’t got the right to give me a referral because it’s occupied territory,” Viktor said. “So it’s a closed circle.”

Viktor did finally get the surgery he needed for free — though only when he collapsed in Donetsk, and was taken to hospital by ambulance. Crossing over into separatist territory had possibly saved his life, and he had only good words for the medical staff there.

But in most respects, Viktor said it felt like he was being treated in the old unified Ukraine. The hospital conditions and food were terrible, he said, and patients had to provide and pay for their own medications.

“It’s just the same, and the people are the same as they were before,” he said.

When someone calls the hotline, they are asked to give their name and location, and say where they heard about the program. Then they are asked if they have a particular set top box which allows viewers in Ukraine to watch a digital package of six Russian TV channels and four channels run by the two breakaway Donbas “republics.” This is apparently a way of gathering data on the reach of these channels and their broader propaganda effect.

After that, the caller is transferred to someone introduced as a medical specialist, who advises what services are available. “Just come, and he’ll be checked and get what he needs straight away,” were the encouraging words one potential patient’s relative heard when she called the hotline.

According to the program website, around a quarter of calls to the hotline have come from people in Ukrainian government-controlled parts of Donetsk oblast or district.

Yet away from the glowing picture painted by their propaganda, the state of healthcare in the separatist-controlled territories is bleak.

According to the United Nations, the war has decimated services with a knock-on effect on health. Seventy percent of medical equipment has been put out of action. Rates of tuberculosis and HIV have risen to epidemic levels. There are an estimated 80,000 unvaccinated children and close to 100,000 cancer patients — with just three radiotherapy machines left in Donetsk.

Much of the limited medication touted as being free, such as some cancer treatment, kidney dialysis and insulin, is actually supplied by three NGOs and a handful of UN organizations still allowed by the de facto authorities to work there. Or it is provided by Russia.

But what the separatist program says about the lack of medical services in government-controlled Donbas is also true.

The frontline town of Mariinka is facing the same kind of problems as Vuhledar, cut off from the regional hub of Donetsk. It’s not a gap that can be filled quickly, explains Sergei Tkachenko, the head of Mariinka’s health department. “In my forty years in medicine, we worked in one team with Donetsk, and to start again from scratch is really hard.”

Mariinka’s understaffed clinic provides only primary healthcare. The nearest secondary healthcare facility still controlled by Ukraine was destroyed by shelling. Four of its departments, including intensive care, have been crammed into another hospital designed for a population of 20,000, but now serving at least 80,000 local and internally displaced people (IDPs).

Patients with more advanced needs are referred 85 miles away to Mariupol, where Ukrainian authorities are working to establish a regional-level hospital, or even further afield where they have to compete with local patients for services.

Or, a mere four miles away from Mariinka, there is Donetsk.

“Of course people go there,” said Tkachenko. “People go as they’ve been going for years. On their own initiative. And no one is turned away.”

Tkachenko said his staff cannot provide referrals for patients to get treated on the other side of the Line of Contact. But it’s clear that some medical specialists on the government-controlled side do help people make the trip.

Patients are required by the program to provide medical records and doctor’s notes. Several people from government-controlled towns like Mariinka, Vuhledar or Mariupol who had been to Donetsk for treatment said local doctors had “advised” them to go there, instead of providing an official referral.

“Yes maybe someone can give the advice: ‘go here’ or ‘go there’,” Tkachenko admitted. “But to send someone to an incomprehensible quasi republic — what if we send them and there’s shooting, or they say ‘you’re all separatists’ and get in trouble?” he went on. “Our doctors are very careful. You understand the consequences; to send them officially is practically a crime.”

What’s more, when patients return to Ukrainian government-held territory, their separatist-issued medical documents will not be recognized, meaning they can’t claim sick leave or disability benefits.

Viktor was given a Donetsk medical card after his surgery, but was told to hide it when he crossed the frontline on his way home. Whether this was for his own safety, or for the doctors who had signed it, he wasn’t sure. “Everyone’s afraid,” he said.

There are also cases of doctors in separatist-controlled areas advising patients to cross into Ukrainian government territory for healthcare — another sign of pre-conflict ties continuing.

Tatiana, 40 and four months pregnant, had just returned from a trip to her hometown of Donetsk to see a gynaecologist when I met her in government-controlled Mariupol. The doctor in Donetsk had referred her — unofficially — to a colleague from the city who was now living and working in Mariupol, calming Tatiana’s fears about having her child there.

“I felt relieved right away,” she said. “If my doctor says she knows him and they worked together, I know it’s alright.”

Her first two children were born in Donetsk. But she can’t have her third child there, because her husband, a policeman, was transferred to government-controlled Mariupol in 2014 and is now blacklisted in Donetsk.

Despite the potential consequences, Tatiana has crossed the Line of Contact regularly for medical services and has taken her oldest child, an eight-year-old with autism, to the Donetsk Yevtushenko Centre for Neuro-rehabilitation.

Before 2014 the Yevtushenko center was famous throughout Ukraine, with year-long waiting lists. Irina (not her real name) also recently took her autistic son to the center from Mariupol. The waiting time there is now reportedly down to a month, because of the fall in the number of patients. But she said she met other people there from government-controlled Donbas, and even from western Ukraine.

The political dimension to the program was explicit, she said, with the de facto authorities in Donetsk clearly encouraging patients to cross over. “The more people who go from Ukraine, the better. Those from Ukraine get free treatment or benefits.”

The clinic staff were different though, Irina said. Although they asked where she and her son were from and put Mariupol on the medical card “I think as far as treating people is concerned they don’t care where you’re from,” she said. “No one asked about our politics, they just wanted to help my child.” Healthcare as a tool of propaganda and soft power is not unique to Ukraine. In nearby Georgia the government offers free healthcare for people from the breakaway territory of Abkhazia

Nonetheless, Irina only agreed to talk about her trips sitting in her car with me. She plans to take her four-year-old son again on the 60 mile journey that can now take more than nine hours. “I’m a despairing mother,” she said. ”I’ll try anything.”

Healthcare as a tool of propaganda and soft power is not unique to Ukraine. In nearby Georgia the government offers free healthcare for people from Abkhazia, a breakaway territory it still claims but which is now under de facto Russian occupation. The government is building a new modern hospital in the nearest town to the boundary line, aimed at people from Abkhazia.

Ukraine is struggling to employ similar soft power since it lost its key medical institutions in the east. Government-controlled Donbas lacks not just facilities and equipment but staff, with military medics making up for 30 percent of personnel in some hospitals.

“Doctors are a problem in the whole of the east,” admitted Georgy Tuka, Ukraine’s deputy minister for Temporarily Occupied Territories.

Ukraine provides no financial or other incentives for medics to work in frontline areas. The separatist regions also suffer huge staffing deficits. But reportedly, they have a simpler solution: they just stop medical specialists trying to cross into government-controlled territory.

But it’s also a question of attitude. The Georgian government has adopted a conciliatory approach towards people in Abkhazia, distinguishing them from the Russian authorities who continue to exert control there. Ukraine tends to view all residents of Luhansk and Donetsk region that it doesn’t control as separatists and enemies. In December 2014, the government stopped pensions and other social and budget payments for people living on its temporarily occupied territories.

“There’s a wish to punish people,” Tuka acknowledged.

Those living in separatist-held Donetsk and Luhansk are entitled to claim Ukrainian pensions and other benefits only if they cross into government-controlled territory and register as an Internally Displaced Person (IDP). Even then, it’s difficult to access basic services, with IDPs last in line for medical treatment. As a result, the cross-border flow for healthcare is almost all one way — from government to non government-controlled areas.

Ukraine has offered one program of health-related assistance to people from its temporarily occupied territories. Also called the “Humanitarian Program”, it was introduced in 2014 to provide opiate substitution therapy (OST) and support for patients with long-term drug addiction from Crimea. Russia shut down OST services there after annexing the peninsula, and the same happened in Donetsk and Luhansk. The program was funded by international agencies and ended in 2016, having helped around 200 people.

The Ukrainian government is reluctant to talk about the separatist-run medical program.

“I’ve seen announcements about it. But I have no data about whether people use this program,” said Tuka, adding: “I don’t believe it works.”

International health workers familiar with the situation are similarly reticent. They would rather talk about the huge medical needs in separatist-held territory — unlike the de facto authorities there who “prefer to talk about [the ‘humanitarian program’] than the real problems they have at this moment,” said Christian Carrer from Association Internationale de Cooperation Medicale, a French foundation providing medical supplies to both sides.

But Carrer and many other aid workers agree with Donbas patients, that the remaining health specialists in separatist territory are caring professionals working in difficult conditions, and some of the services they provide — although far from all — are genuinely free.

“In Donetsk there is no corruption at least in terms of medicine,” said Carrer, describing how hospitals in Donetsk post lists at the entrance of medicines and equipment received from humanitarian organizations, so that patients know what they can get for free. “Corruption is when you have money, but they are all without money there.”

Even if there are doubts about the motives and the range of services offered under the program, simply attracting people to cross over can have an effect. Many people spoke wistfully about their experiences of being treated in Donetsk, mixed up with nostalgia for what they had lost.

“For a time I didn’t miss [Donetsk],” said Tatiana, the IDP originally from Donetsk. “I was hurt. They took away our home, people came with guns.”

But on her most recent visit she said she noticed how well-kept the city was, and the better quality of its roads compared to government-controlled parts of Donbas. “It’s such a lovely city, and people there have changed and become friendly again,” she said. “They used to be so enraged with Ukraine, or maybe some still are, but I didn’t meet them this time. Everything was easier — and now, maybe, I started to miss it.”

What both patients and doctors in Donbas miss most is the peace, normality and freedom of movement they had before 2014. And that is usually what they choose to talk about, rather than comment on the origins and geopolitics of a conflict that has split families, neighbors and work colleagues. “We have to finish this war and unite again and live as we did before: friendly and normal and everything comprehensible,” said health director Sergei Tkachenko in Mariinka.

There are few more stark examples of how the war has torn up the lives of Donbas people than the fact that, to get medical treatment, they have to accept becoming pawns in a propaganda war. “We’re just simple people and they ruined everything for us,” said Viktor. “Simple people who lived together before.”

The post Now healthcare is a weapon in Ukraine’s war appeared first on Coda Story.

His hands clasped together on his knees, he was sitting on a simple wooden bench in a small public garden in The Hague, the Dutch administrative capital.

The reason why he helped place the bench here last year is because it is within sight of an elegant villa housing Russia’s embassy to the Netherlands.

On the bench’s crossbar is a small brass plate inscribed with these words: “Waiting for responsibility and full clarity. In loving memory of all 298 passengers and crew of Malaysia Airlines MH17, July 17th 2014”.

The Boeing 777 airliner was flying from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport to the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, that day, when it was blown out of the sky over eastern Ukraine by a Russian missile. More than two-thirds of the passengers were Dutch nationals, and among them was de Borst’s then-17-year-old daughter, Elsemiek.

In proportion to its population, the Netherlands suffered a heavier loss of life that day than the United States did on 9/11. But while the attacks on New York and Washington 17 years ago had a cataclysmic effect, leading the U.S. to invade two countries and deploy troops worldwide in its “war on terror,” the most striking thing about the Netherlands’ reaction has been the lack of it.

Four years later, despite an exhaustive investigation that has uncovered compelling evidence of Russia’s complicity, the Dutch authorities have still not been able to bring anyone to justice. The government imposed limited sanctions on Russia in the immediate aftermath, in conjunction with the European Union (EU). But there has been no other punishment — even after The Hague formally accused Moscow of providing the Buk surface-to-air missile that brought the plane down, to which the Kremlin responded with the equivalent of a defiant shrug.

It is partly a story of what you could call the Dutch national character, which emphasizes reserve and due process over outward emotion and impulse. It’s partly a story of economic priorities and the Netherlands’ need for Russia’s trade and energy. But it is also a case study in Russian disinformation — because of the drip-drip of falsehoods trickled out by Kremlin officials and the media outlets they control, casting blame everywhere but Moscow.

The day the bodies of the MH17 passengers (including citizens of other countries) were brought back to the Netherlands is etched in Hans de Borst’s memory. “I remember watching like it was a movie,” he told me.

“All of the Malaysian families started acting crazy, crying and throwing themselves down on the ground and I was annoyed because of the crying people. I thought, ‘What are you doing? Just be normal,’” he said.

“And then I thought, ‘Oh yeah, Elsemiek is in one of those boxes.’ But I still didn’t cry.”

I listened intrigued. Here was this gentle man, who had lost his only daughter, the person he most cherished in life, describing how he had almost recoiled from the way other people were dealing with the same depth of loss. But then de Borst continued.

“I was also annoyed maybe that I couldn’t [cry]. That’s to do with our character. We are Dutch and it’s not something the Dutch do. But the people who are lying on the floor crying are not more sad than I am.” “I was also annoyed maybe that I couldn’t [cry]. That’s to do with our character. We are Dutch and it’s not something the Dutch do.” Hans de Borst, father of MH17 victim

I vividly remember that day too, as I waited with other journalists for the military aircraft carrying the remains from the crash site to touch down at a Dutch airbase.

There was silence as the planes came into view. A lone trumpeter played the haunting notes of the Last Post. Flags representing the 10 countries of the passengers and crew on board billowed at half-mast above our heads.

Many of the coffins carried out of the planes and past the grieving crowd were infant-sized. More than 80 of the passengers on MH17 were children.

A week later, I interviewed the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte for the BBC. He vowed that whoever was responsible for firing the missile would not “escape justice.”

But what I remember most of all was Rutte’s calm, detached tone. It felt incongruous to me so soon after this moment of unspeakable national horror—an event which, I realized, had consumed me too. As soon as the Prime Minister had answered my last question, I walked out of the camera shot, worried I was going to cry.

As journalists, it is axiomatic that we should maintain professional distance from the stories we cover. It was not as if, I told myself, I knew any of the passengers. I felt as if I was trespassing on the grief of those who did.

I was conscious of the stares of a waiting Dutch television crew.

Ever since I had first got to Schiphol airport on July 17, 2014 to follow up on reports of MH17 being shot down, covering the fallout had taken over my waking hours. I remember people dashing inside the airport, through crowds of unassuming tourists, frantically looking for someone with information about relatives they had waved off just a few hours earlier.

In the following days, we visited neighborhoods where whole families would never be coming home, and filmed inside churches filled with candles and teddy bears clutching red hearts.

Prime Minister Rutte came over to the window and awkwardly extended his arm over my shoulder. He seemed bemused that I had come close to tears. For a moment, I forgot who he was and explained my reaction.

I couldn’t understand how he could be so cold and robotic, I said. He gave the impression that he didn’t care when his people were lying dead in a “faraway unknown land,” in the words of one of the relatives I had interviewed.

I remember Rutte said he understood my reaction, but he argued that the best approach was to wait and do things properly. “Then we get the truth,” he said.

But getting at the truth has meant cutting through a shifting mist of falsehoods about MH17 propagated by Russian officials and state-controlled media outlets. The more evidence has mounted pointing to its involvement, the more Moscow has doubled down on disinformation and denial.

It started within days of MH17 being shot down. Even as the Russian government and its separatist allies in eastern Ukraine were obstructing access to the crash site for investigators, the Russian military put up one of its most senior officers to implicate Ukraine for the massacre. The Kremlin-controlled RT network (formerly known as Russia Today) gave the briefing rolling coverage on its global English language channel.

Flight MH17’s course had been deliberately changed to send it over a war zone and a Ukrainian fighter jet had shot it down, claimed Lieutenant-General A.V. Kartapolov, the deputy head of the Russian armed forces.

But the satellite images the general used to make his case were shown to have been “significantly modified or altered” by a team of arms control experts who analyzed them. Later on, Russian government-controlled media put great effort into trying to prove that the plane had been brought down by a Buk missile fired by Ukrainian government forces.

The list of alternative theories grew longer and wilder — including a claim that MH17 was actually the Malaysian airliner that had disappeared over the Indian Ocean earlier that year and that it had been deliberately flown over eastern Ukraine packed with dead bodies.

The online investigation site Bellingcat has played an instrumental role in uncovering what happened to the plane, and the attempted cover-up afterwards. It was first to identify the Buk missile itself and the Russian army unit it belonged to. The team has also named potential suspects involved in firing the weapon.

By doing so, Bellingcat’s founder, Eliot Higgins, believes that it has also helped “counter the Russian disinformation around the case.” It has been a sign “to any potential witnesses, especially those who were involved with MH17, that a lot of information is being gathered,” he said.

The Dutch-led Joint International Criminal Investigation (JIT) has also put considerable effort into probing all the alternative theories, one of its officials told me, to make sure that their case is watertight if and when they bring it to trial.

But as well as antagonizing distraught relatives, the avalanche of conspiracy theories has also helped undermine trust and sow division — a central goal of Russian disinformation campaigns. And in the years since MH17, there have been more signs of fracture in the Netherlands — with evidence that Moscow has kept working on the cracks. The more evidence has mounted pointing to its involvement, the more Moscow has doubled down on disinformation and denial.

A new far-right party, the Forum for Democracy, has been gaining ground politically. Its leader, Thierry Baudet, has openly questioned allegations of Russian involvement in the shooting down of the airliner. He also played a leading role in a successful campaign against the Netherlands supporting EU plans for closer ties with Ukraine. Nearly two-thirds of Dutch voters came out against the so-called association agreement in a referendum two years ago.

Subsequent analysis showed that Russian-linked fake news and forgeries had helped influence public opinion. One example was a widely shared video purportedly recorded by Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist “Azov Battalion,” threatening violence if the Dutch didn’t back the agreement.

Even though it was debunked as a fake spread by an infamous Russian troll factory, the video helped the no-campaign, scaring voters about the potential consequences of getting closer to Ukraine, according to one academic study. The same report also found that much of the no-campaign material had come straight from RT and another Kremlin-funded site, Sputnik.

A poll conducted at the time of the referendum by the IPSOS organization found that 19 percent of those who planned to vote against the agreement cited the shooting down of MH17 as the reason.

MH17 has had some impact on Russians living in the Netherlands too, according to those who know the community, prompting them to lower their profile. A store in The Hague that used to be known as Tsarsky (“belonging to Tsar”) has changed its name to “Smak”, a derivation of the word “taste” in Dutch, which also means the same thing for some Russians and Ukrainians. And the First Russian School of The Hague has become the Spinoza International School.

I first met Hans de Borst at his home in the small town of Monster. It was a few weeks after MH17 was shot down. He seemed more concerned about me as he laid out the coffee and raisin bread he had prepared. “I’m sure you haven’t been sleeping much.”

The living room had been transformed into a shrine to his daughter, with candles, favorite quotations, and a life-size photo of her smiling from the wall.

He felt “lucky,” he told me, when he learnt that Elsemiek had been recovered intact. Many relatives only had fragments of their loved ones returned, compounding their grief.

But he chose not to view his daughter’s body when it was repatriated to the Netherlands. The mortuary took a photo of her, in case he ever changes his mind.

She was traveling with her mother and step-family that day. Elsemiek loved cycling, playing the piano and, in de Borst’s words, going on “exotic adventures.”

The bereaved father had been aware there was a conflict in Ukraine before MH17. He had heard about it on the news. But he would have struggled to identify the protagonists or where exactly it was happening. Now, suddenly, incomprehensibly, Elsemiek had become a casualty of this war — just hours after he had kissed her goodbye.

Were the Russian-backed rebels to blame? Or the Ukrainian government and its forces? Or the Russian leader? Like other relatives, De Borst had no idea what to think at first. Four days after the plane was shot down, he wrote an open letter demanding that his daughter’s murderers own up to their crime.

“Thanks a lot, Mr Putin, rebels and leaders of the Ukrainian government, for killing my sweet and only child.”

It was a rare show of anger — also directed at his own government, accusing it of being too soft in its response. “If there were Americans or Russians on board, troops would have been sent in,” he told me at the time.

Today, he has no doubt who is responsible. “Putin has blood on his hands,” he said, citing the JIT’s most recent report as proof. It specifies that the Buk missile that brought down MH17 was made in Russia, and brought to Ukraine by a Russian army unit, the 53rd anti-aircraft brigade, based in the city of Kursk. After presenting the evidence, Prime Minister Rutte publicly blamed Russia and demanded Moscow cooperate with the criminal inquiry.

But some relatives fear the momentum is fading. This year, families have been organizing an annual memorial service themselves, with minor financial support from the Dutch government, according to relatives.

“Where are they? They’re not doing anything,” said Silene Fredriksz, who lost her only child Bryce on the plane.

She talked as she sat on her son’s bed. The covers are still rumpled, just as he left them. His girlfriend Daisy Oehlers’ slippers are in the corner, a Glamour magazine dated June 2014 lies on top of a pile scattered on a sofa.

It’s a bedroom frozen in time. Untouched since the day the young lovers rushed off to catch a flight “to paradise,” as Oehlers described it. She was referring to Bali, their intended final destination.

“In Holland grief is a taboo,” said Fredriksz. “Yes you can grieve but not too long. And speaking about your emotions is strange in Holland. What I do is strange, it’s not typical Dutch.” (Although many people use Holland to refer to the country, it is actually the name of the coastal region which forms the heart of the Netherlands)

“Every morning I open the door and say, “Morning Bryce, morning Daisy.” Of course in my head I know they are not coming home, but my heart cannot accept it.”

Fredriksz has been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Counseling didn’t work, she said. “The only thing that helps is medication. That’s what I’m taking now. It numbs.”

People don’t understand, she continued. “You know in Holland you can take 16 weeks off after you have a baby. But when you lose your baby, which is far, far more painful — physically and emotionally — you are only allowed three days off work? That says it all. That’s how we deal with death in Holland.”

Pragmatic self-interest has also played a part in tempering the Netherlands’ response to MH17. It depends on economic and political ties with other, larger countries. And, as a small nation, it is hard to act alone.

To impose stiffer sanctions, the government would have required the EU’s support, including from “Putin’s friends in Europe like Viktor Orban,” said Jan Marinus Wiersma — a former member of the European parliament and now with the Clingendael Institute of International Relations.

The Netherlands also needs Russia’s gas and its consumers, for Dutch flowers and other agricultural products. As de Borst points out, “We’re angry with Russia, but we like it when our homes are warm.”

He is now one of a small group still actively campaigning for justice for the victims of MH17. Last month, they placed 298 empty chairs in the shape of an aircraft outside the Russian mission in The Hague.

But de Borst now backs the government’s strategy. Copying the American approach of a military response, as he had suggested in the immediate aftermath, would have backfired. “Then we would have had a real fight. Maybe a Third World War, for what? That wouldn’t bring our children back. I think the Dutch approach is best.”

The Netherlands’ allies have signalled their support too. On the eve of President Putin’s summit meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Finland, the foreign ministers of the G7 countries issued a statement calling on Russia “to account for its role” in the downing of MH17.

However, one politician in the Dutch ruling coalition, Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, has been arguing for tougher measures against the Russian government. He wants to see the Netherlands introduce its own version of the U.S. Magnitsky Law to punish Putin and other senior Kremlin officials for their refusal to cooperate with the investigation.

Despite the voluminous stacks of evidence prosecutors have collected, they still need more information, including from witnesses, to identify the suspects. When they released their most recent report, the JIT issued a list of 11 questions asking for help identifying those involved.

But even if suspects are identified, they would still have to be extradited—an unlikely outcome given that there is no extradition treaty between Moscow and The Hague. And in a statement this May, Russia’s veteran Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made clear that the Kremlin was sticking to its position of defiance, dismissing the evidence that had been presented, and condemning Dutch and Australian pressure on his country as “inappropriate.”

One option is for the planned tribunal near Schiphol airport to conduct trials in absentia. Another alternative being considered is an out of court settlement. The Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok has said that the Netherlands and Australia — which had 27 nationals on the plane — would seek unspecified financial damages.

But what the families really want is justice.

When they composed their message for their memorial bench, De Borst and other relatives added three more words in Russian, which translate as: “Humanity Is More Important Than Politics.”

“I felt adrenalin,” he said, recalling the day when they carried the bench here. It sent an important message from the families, he continued, looking towards the Russian mission beyond the trees. “The Russians want to make things foggy. But we know the truth.”

Yet that may still not be enough, he admitted. “We were raised in Holland to be honest. This country [Russia] is not honest. We can’t understand it. It’s something in our DNA.”

“Maybe it’s that same DNA that keeps the tears away.”

The post Holland’s struggle with its 9/11 appeared first on Coda Story.

But this was no movie.

It was March 2014 and Russia had annexed the entire peninsula. Now a pro-Russian militia was taking over the region’s leading independent news source, the Crimean Center For Investigative Reporting.

The man in the black coat announced that from now on this would be the headquarters of the “Crimean Front” militia, because, he said, from “this building does not come true information.” But, he added, staff could return to work if they agreed to report on events in the “correct, truthful” way.

The journalists got the message, and fled to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. And the new de facto pro-Moscow authorities in Crimea have barred any independent reporting by the Center’s journalists ever since.

But for Konstantin Knyrik, the man in the black coat — then 25 years old — the raid was another stage in a burgeoning career as a Russian nationalist politician and information warrior.

Today, he has traded the militia look for smarter clothes, more in keeping with his role as the editor-in-chief of a small but growing news agency called News Front.

Set up just after Russia took control of Crimea, the agency has since carved out a reputation for its staunchly pro-Kremlin line and a steady output of stories which media monitors such as “Stop Fake” say are false or deliberately inflammatory. I traveled to Crimea to meet him.

Knyrik says his site provides “an alternative source of information for people in Europe and the U.S.,” adding that he feels “sorry for the people who believe in this bullshit published by the mainstream media in the West.”

But in an interview, he made clear that he sees himself as fighting in a conflict started by the West. “Information war was declared against Russia. It was not Russia who initiated the war.”

A former News Front insider told the German newspaper Die Zeit that the agency is directly funded by the FSB, Russia’s main domestic intelligence service.

Knyrik denies that, but there is no doubt that it is among the better-resourced players in the Russian media ecosystem, with a global reach. With 10 staff and at least 100 contributors around the world, it produces content in a growing range of languages, including Russian, English, German, French, Italian, Bulgarian and Spanish.

Germany, Europe’s largest and most powerful state, has been a favorite subject for News Front’s stories — usually imbued with divisive spin. A report that ran last year, headlined “Refugee Crisis: Riots in Schorndorf” was a typical example. It claimed that thousands of teenagers, most of them “refugees and migrants,” had started a violent rampage through the city.

But the story was false, according to Correctiv, a Berlin-based media-monitoring outfit which has been following News Front’s output.

There had been an incident in the city, said Jacques Pezet, one of the Correctiv fact-checkers, but at most just a few dozen people had been involved and it was a mixed group, not only migrants.

And when Correctiv looked into the dramatic photo used on the story — doing an image search on Google — he established that it hadn’t even been taken in Schorndorf. Instead, it had been lifted from a report on a totally unrelated protest in another German city at another time.

It was a textbook case of “how a handful of actors can reach a significant amount of people with their false information,” said Pezet, adding that this was “part of a well-established pattern of anti-German and anti-Western disinformation in News Front’s stories.”

As ever with fake news stories, the instigators have first-mover advantage and the Schorndorf “riot” story quickly spread, boosted and recycled by German far right politicians and conservative media outlets. At least 500,000 liked, shared or commented on the story according to one recent German study of fake news.

And even if they cared, few people would ever have learned that the story had been invented.

Asked for more details on how News Front reports on Germany, Knyrik refused, and declined to identify his main journalist there, citing security concerns. “I worry about his safety and the safety of all our volunteers,” he said.

Another common theme in News Front’s output is its pro-Moscow stance. It all but matches the line taken by Kremlin-controlled outlets like Russia Today (RT) or Sputnik. The former insider who spoke to Die Zeit said some of the topics News Front covers are “assigned directly by the presidential administration in Moscow.”

In his interview, Knyrik dismissed this allegation and insisted that his agency is only financed by donations from his family, friends and income from other business activities.

Though he is Ukrainian, he grew up in a pro-Russian environment. His father Sergei Knyrik, a deputy on the local council in the Crimean city of Bakhchysarai, was head of several pro-Russian organizations in the peninsula.

“Information war was declared against Russia. It was not Russia who initiated the war.”

Konstantin Knyrik

He was also a committed Eurasianist — backing the idea of creating a new Eurasian region or empire with Russia at its center. But even before he left school, Knyrik the son was showing signs of having grander ambitions.

When he was just 17-years-old, he became head of the Crimean branch of the Eurasian Youth Union (EYU), set up the right-wing Russian ideologue Aleksandr Dugin. In 2006, he attended a summer camp Dugin organized for nationalist activists, according to political scientist Anton Shekhovtsov, who has followed these groups.

Among the attendees, according to Shekhovtsov, were several people who would later play a key role in the Russian-backed “Donetsk People’s Republic,” one of the separatist territories in Eastern Ukraine.

Dugin’s vision of Eurasia meant Russia regaining full control of the Crimean peninsula, with its access to the Black Sea. And in an interview, Knyrik made clear this was his strategy too. “Our first priority is to focus on creating an empire,” he said. “The first thing to do, is to tear Crimea away from Ukraine in order to save it. To attach it to the empire.”

Even before Moscow annexed the peninsula in 2014, Knyrik was active on Vkontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, mobilizing support for Russian intervention.

Today Knyrik wears several hats, in addition to his News Front job. He has followed his father in becoming a deputy on the same city council, and he is also chairman of the Crimean branch of Russia’s far-right Rodina party.

It is one of the smaller parties in the Russian Duma or parliament, and espouses an ideology of patriotism and greater state involvement in the economy. And through the Rodina party and his news agency, Knyrik has indirect links to President Vladimir Putin himself. One of the party’s founders, Sergei Glazyev, is an advisor to the Russian leader, as well as a long-time friend of Knyrik’s News Front co-founder, Mikhail Sinelin.

For a relatively small operation, News Front appears to be having significant impact. According to the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank that tracks disinformation and propaganda campaigns, News Front is one of the most active amplifiers of disinformation in Germany, along with RT and Sputnik.

But rather than focusing so much on Russia, Knyrik says the West should be looking at its own record on freedom of expression. In his view, all the criticism it used to direct at the Soviet Union now applies to the U.S. and Europe. “There is total censorship and total absence of freedom of speech,” he said.

The West’s real goal, said Knyrik, is “to start a real war after the information war.”

The post Meet the Kremlin’s keyboard warrior in Crimea appeared first on Coda Story.