Alexander Rojavin ’20, Law & Public Policy Scholar
Alexander Rojavin is a multilingual intelligence, media, and policy analyst specializing in information warfare. He is currently working on a book on modern Russian cinema as a key battlefield in the Kremlin’s information war. He is also co-chair of the Symposium on Disinformation Studies. In his spare time, he moonlights as a published literary translator (Routledge, Slavica Publishers, forthcoming Academic Studies Press).
What follows is a chronicle of key events and trends on the information battlefield from day 48 through day 54 of the Russian-Ukrainian war for democracy. As I write this, the battle for the east of Ukraine has begun—Russian forces are attempting to break through Ukrainian lines along the entire eastern front.
I invite readers to view this site: https://uaexplainers.com/. It gets almost everything right about nearly all the relevant context about Russia and Ukraine (it cites current opinion polls from Russia, and, as Viktor Shenderovich rightly keeps repeating, there can be no sociology under an authoritarian regime, but otherwise, everything is spot-on).
An inflection point from this week has been the destruction of the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet—the symbolically named Moskva.
Day 48: April 12
- As day 48 dawned, the Russians delayed an all-out assault on the east because of the heavy rains mentioned in my last report.
- Revelations surfaced that, in Bucha, the Russians kept 25 women in a basement and raped them on a regular basis.
- In Russia, the assistant to a Communist Party MP lost his job because he asked for the removal of a gigantic “Z” painted on the facade of a building.
- Ukraine Defense Ministry stated that allegations of chemical weapon use in Mariupol’ would be checked. Naturally, this has yet to yield any results—after all, there are currently no operational forensic laboratories in the besieged city.
- Kyiv’s administration kept asking Ukrainians to delay returning home. For one, large swaths of the oblast’ must still be demined. Moreover, the threat of artillery fire is still very much real.
- In another intercepted phone conversation, a Russian invader’s wife can be heard saying, “Go on, rape those Ukrainian broads, but don’t tell me about it,” after which she giggles. “Use a condom,” she advised him.
- Russia, it turned out, has been smuggling Iraqi weapons with the help of Iran.
- As the day came to an end, two important bits of news came to light: first, Ukrainian intelligence asserted that the Kremlin was planning provocations in Belgorod and Crimea—terrorist acts designed to stoke Ukrainophobia hysteria among Russians.
- Second: Ukrainian agents arrested Viktor Medvedchuk, the Kremlin’s #1 most valuable fifth-column politician in Ukraine—whose daughter, by the way, is Putin’s goddaughter.
- Less than two hours later, Ukrainian information space became saturated with Medvedchuk memes, grounded primarily in a photo that was published after his capture. In the photo, he is sitting on a little chair, dejected and in handcuffs, and most of the memes featured him incongruously photoshopped into various other images.
Day 49: April 13
- Presidents Duda, Nauseda, Levits, and Karis (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) arrived in Kyiv in a sign of solidarity.
- Sweden announced it would apply for NATO membership in June.
- Critically, in Mariupol’, a group of Ukrainian marines fought their way through the city and joined up with the Azov Battalion fighters, strengthening their already fortified positions at the Azovstal steel plant.
- French President Emmanuel Macron maintained his habit of waffling when he refused to call what is happening in Ukraine a genocide. This, just three days after three explicit Kremlin marionettes (Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Éric Zemmour) split 52% of the vote in France’s presidential election.
- News surfaced that over half a million Ukrainians had been forcibly deported to Russia. After deportation, Russians confiscated their papers, all while preparing legislation to allow for the immediate separation and adoption of Ukrainian children.
- The Moldovan and Czech diplomatic missions returned to Kyiv, signaling further confidence in Ukraine’s ability not just to hold the capital, but to win the war.
- Kazakhstan flipped a gigantic middle finger to the Kremlin when it announced that it would not be holding a May 9th parade this year. (As a reminder for our younger readers, May 9th is V-Day, the Allies’ victory over the Third Reich, and it is a national holiday in Russia and other post-Soviet republics—though, naturally, it has been weaponized by the Putin regime, and its observation will be significantly altered in several of these republics).
- After Russia announced that it would station more troops along the Finnish border, Mark Feygin asked Oleksiy Arestovych in their daily interview: “There’s zero chance that they could open a second front, right?” Arestovych responded: “Oh yeah. A Russian colonel once told me: ‘Aleksei, never forget: the only thing that Russian army is capable of producing is memes.’” I will not stop repeating this: Western military analysts made a lethal miscalculation in their assessment of how this war would progress. This cannot be forgotten, and it must be learned from.
Day 50: April 14
- A fourth official prisoner exchange took place.
- Ukrainian paratroopers liberated several settlements ambiguously somewhere in the south—presumably in Kherson.
- Russians began to ghettoize Mariupol’, where civilians in occupied parts of the city were told to mark themselves with white tape, which the Russians have been using to mark themselves. The Russians argued that this was to save their lives, but it was more likely an attempt to mislead Ukrainian forces and trick them into shooting civilians.
- Ukrainian media continued to be in uproar (which still justifiably continues) about the Russian legislation to adopt the >100,000 abducted Ukrainian children.
- Less than 48 hours after Ukrainian counter-disinformation specialists warned that the Kremlin would stage terrorist attacks on Russian territory to stoke anti-Ukrainian hysteria, Russian forces staged a provocation in Bryansk—and strains immediately appeared in Russian outlets about how Ukrainian forces savagely opened fire on civilian targets in Bryansk.
- The week’s big news came to light: the cruiser Moskva had sunk after being hit several hours earlier. The Moskva was the flagship and pride of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the very same ship that the Ukrainian defenders from Zmiiny Island sent to hell on the war’s first day.
Day 51: April 15
- Kremlin-aligned outlets have spent the better part of three weeks spouting anything that might stymy heavy arms deliveries to Ukraine. The sinking of the Moskva and the prospect of Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO memberships have spawned a series of new narrative strains.
Regarding the Moskva, Russian media again demonstrated their reactionary nature. The official story was and continues to be that the Moskva sank because an ammunition storage exploded after a fire broke out—Russian outlets can’t assign blame to the Ukrainian forces, because that would simultaneously be acknowledging Ukrainian competence/threat AND Russian vulnerability. At the same time, the Kremlin immediately threatened to punish Ukraine/the West/whomever for the cruiser’s destruction—even though the party line holds that the helpless Ukrainians had nothing to do with the cruiser’s destruction.
As a reminder: pushing mutually exclusive narrative strains is perfectly normal for the Kremlin, though it does tend to do so more often during times of perceived crisis. Much of the Russian populace has no problem allowing both narratives to take root in their minds simultaneously. Trying to engage these narratives logically will not work, because their purpose is not to flourish logically, but affectively. All authoritarian information operations are affective.
Meanwhile, the prospect of NATO’s getting two more members in the near future caused the Kremlin to start throwing about threats at anyone willing to listen. Even though Russia’s military inconsequence has finally been laid bare for the world to see, the Russian Foreign Ministry wasted no time in threatening Finland and Sweden with vague “consequences” in case they dare join NATO.
The Kremlin’s increasingly panicked rhetoric, disorganized and mutually contradictory narrative strains, and threats connected to Western arms shipments all continued to signal the Kremlin’s perfect understanding that Arestovych’s prognosis from weeks back may well hold water: once Ukrainian forces are in possession of the heavy weaponry for which they’ve been asking, the exhausted and demoralized Russians will be overpowered by the admittedly also exhausted but far more motivated Ukrainians.
- Unsurprisingly, an intercepted RU phone call confirmed that the Russians themselves had bombed Russian city of Bryansk in a provocation.
- In another phone call, a Russian invader bragged at length about how he had tortured a captive Ukrainian—he recounted gleefully which body parts he had severed.
- In Mariupol’, the Russians exhumed the bodies of the dead and forbade holding burials. To this end, they appointed overseers to stand guard over every backyard in territories they controlled.
Day 52: April 16
- By day 52, the rate at which Ukrainian authorities were renaming things began to match the rate of 2014’s decommunization efforts. ~70 streets will be renamed in Kremenchuk, swaths of Dnipro will be renamed, the Kyiv-Moscow Friendship Square in Kyiv has already been renamed the Heroes of Mariupol’ Square, 58 streets in Uzhgorod will be renamed, and this is likely only the beginning. Putin deserves a medal for irreversibly consolidating a Ukrainian state that formed in the post-Soviet ambiguity of 1991, vociferously asserted its nationhood in the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and, finally, became a battle-forged national unit in 2022.
- Ukrainian officials’ warnings not to return home so hastily were justified when Russian forces shelled Kyiv Oblast’ again in retaliation for the destruction of the Moskva (which, of course, the Ukrainians couldn’t possibly have done).
- In an interview with CNN, President Zelensky finally provided an updated assessment of the number of UA military casualties since the first day of the war: 2,500-3,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed, ~10,000 wounded. Russian casualties by day 52 were ~20,000 killed and at least twice that wounded. The number of Ukrainian civilians killed, however, is in the tens of thousands. As the valiant Russian army has repeatedly shown, in Chechnya, in Syria, and now in Ukraine, civilians are, after all, the only targets against whom the Russians actually stand a chance.
- General Zaluzhny—the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces—brought attention to the fact that a group of 80 Ukrainian soldiers held back thousands of Russian troops on one of the approaches to Kyiv. He explicitly brought up the Spartan stand at Thermopylae, and reminded viewers that this instance was not unique, but rather one of multiple such occurrences from this war. People from democracies fight differently than soldiers from authoritarian states—they know what they are fighting for. Put another way: they understand exactly what and whose lives they are defending.
- An aside: much of the commentary and memes related to the destruction of the Moskva harkens back to an episode from 2000. Much of the commentary has been along the lines of: “Putin came with a sinking ship and is going to go with a sinking ship,” referring to the submarine Kursk, which sank in 2000 because of Putin’s inhumanity, nearly right after he became president. The Kursk was THE first and only necessary piece of evidence revealing who Putin was. Everything since—all the murders, all the exercises in senility—has simply been overkill.
Day 53: April 17
- Ukraine’s newest postmarks with the now-famous phrase from the war’s first day began to be printed, just in time for the referenced warship’s destruction—and people lined up to buy them.
- Russia’s Justice Ministry continued slapping the “foreign agent” label on high-profile YouTube bloggers, including Yuri Dud’—debatably the most high-profile RU blogger in the last few years. It took him a few weeks to explicitly condemn the war in an op-ed, and we already knew that there was nothing sacred in Russia, but, to borrow a phrase from the gaming community: the Kremlin is just running it down at this point. This is beyond spasmodic flailing.
- The day’s most important episode happened when President Zelensky flatly stated that if the Russians manage to eliminate all of Mariupol’’s defenders, then negotiations will end, and Ukraine will simply start burying the invaders. The statement was effectively an attempt to threaten them to consider whether taking Mariupol’ is worth Ukraine’s—which is being rapidly armed with heavy weaponry—stopping playing nice and eradicating Russia’s forces to the man.
Day 54: April 18
- Over a million Ukrainians have returned home since the war began.
- Chornobayivka 16.0, by the way.
- As more Russians refuse to fight, the military is seeking to coerce them by threatening their relatives.
- In Belarus, echoes of the Doctor’s Plot: Citizen Lukashenko announced that his personal physician and 35 other orthopedic traumatologists have been arrested. Luka, to put it mildly, is very afraid for his life.
Concluding Thoughts
A few hours back, Russia finally began its offensive for the east of Ukraine. Russian forces are attempting to advance along the entire eastern front. They are being rebuffed along the entire eastern front. In the directions of Kharkiv and Kherson, the Ukrainian forces are the ones advancing.
Ukraine’s victory will not be swift. The West’s victory will not be swift. We are 54 days into this war. But victory will come.
Hopefully, much of the West will learn lessons from this war, internalize why victory wasn’t swift, why victory could have been much swifter, and what will need to be done in similar situations in the future. Evil cannot be eradicated. Evil will always exist. Such is the fate of humanity. But history shows over and over that evil always loses.
Victory will come.