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 40 through day 47 of the Russian-Ukrainian war for democracy. This week likely marked the end of the transition phase preceding the all-out war for the east of Ukraine, from Kharkiv in the north to Mariupol’ in the southeast.
I am writing this shortly after Austrian Chancellor Nehammer met with Putin and said that he “did not receive any positive impressions from the meeting whatsoever.” As I write this, the situation in Mariupol’ is taking on new flavor—fighters from the Azov Battalion defending the city claim that the Russians have used more advanced chemical weapons than phosphorus, but that they were used “without catastrophic effects. These idiots can’t even use weapons of mass destruction properly.”
This claim has yet to be confirmed. If the Russians truly have implemented what the Azov fighters are alleging, then the West will be confronted with its own promises to become more involved in case chemical weapons become deployed. It has been several hours, and neither Moscow nor Kyiv have commented on the situation yet.
Day 40: April 4
• Readers of these reports should understand that an information war may take place on battlefields that most consider unexpected. I got my start analyzing information warfare through the prism of cinema. Information warfare happens in TV commercials. There are lots of battlefields. Readers should therefore not be surprised to discover that search engines are one such battlefield. Case in point: though this is no longer the case, on April 4th, when you used DuckDuckGo to search for “Bucha,” you got images of Bucha post-occupation. However, when you searched for it in Cyrillic, «Буча», you were treated to peaceful scenes of a dainty little town. Because DuckDuckGo relies on the Russian government-owned search engine Yandex to provide results for Cyrillic searches, this was an inevitable phenomenon. Naturally, Yandex users even today are unlikely to find scenes of Bucha’s destruction straight away.
• British intelligence announced that it knew ahead of time that Russian forces would kill civilians.
• It became known that Facebook and Instagram had begun to block #Bucha and #BuchaMassacre hashtags. This would later turn out to be the result of an algorithm misinterpreting what the hashtags were being used for, but this represents another inflection point for wartime activism in an era of social media.
• Reports surfaced that Georgia, despite the planned staged referendum in South Ossetia, was still kowtowing to the Kremlin, as Russia tried to establish smuggling channels through the country.
Day 41: April 5
• European nations began expelling Russian diplomats en masse.
• Russian outlets began aggressively spreading the narrative that Ukrainian forces were using chlorine and phosphorus in the south. The Ukrainian forces were doing no such thing, but any time Russian outlets begin spreading this narrative strain in a coordinated manner, you can safely place a bet that Russian forces will shortly implement whatever they’re accusing their adversaries of using.
• The unity which was endemic in Ukraine for the first four weeks of the war began to show cracks. Any civilization has its archetypes, and Ukraine is no exception. One such archetype is the performatively, vocally hyper-patriotic Ukrainian, wearing a traditional Ukrainian vyshyvanka, insistently chanting “Glory to Ukraine!” Many Americans would recognize it as an analogue of a similar kind of performative patriotism—often lacking substance—in the United States. Every nation has its analogue. “He is the biggest patriot who screams he is the patriot the loudest.” In Ukraine, representatives of this archetype—and some others, to be fair—who happen to be in positions of power have begun to speculate on lingering areas of difficulty in Ukraine, such as Mariupol’. These people have chosen now, a time of war during which the nation must unequivocally be united, to begin indirectly jockeying for political advantage: “Why are our politicians doing nothing while Mariupol’ is still under siege? How dare they sit in Kyiv while our children in the east are dying beneath Russian bombs?” Etc. etc. etc. This distasteful opportunism, combined with the fact that 40 days of uninterrupted warfare can exhaust the most stoic among us, has begun to drain the unity that kept Ukrainians, warriors and civilians, in such spirits during the war’s first days. One hopes that these politicians will set aside certain modes of behavior prescribed to them by the archetype they represent and recalls what enabled Ukraine to be so effective on the defensive during the war. And we must not despair—after all, there is another Ukrainian archetype too: the proud, unyielding freedom-fighter who will defend liberty unflinchingly.
Day 42: April 6
• Turkey’s embassy returned from Cherkassy to Kyiv—another important data point showing how the flow of diplomacy began to more confidently redirect itself back to the capital
• Ukraine continued to show digital agility by creating another specialized Telegram chatbot, this one to crowdsource the cataloguing of Russian war crimes.
• The Kremlin continued to search for an effective strategy in a post-Bucha information war while simultaneously trying to lay the groundwork for the war’s second phase in Ukraine’s east. The activity of Russian outlets indicated that the Kremlin’s efforts would continue to be reactionary, cynically unhinged from reality, domestically and internationally toxic, and devoid of much inventiveness.
• Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinfo explicitly brought people’s attention to U.S. politicians on the Kremlin’s dime spreading disinformation. In particular, the Center singled out Tulsi Gabbard and her appearances on Fox as an obedient vector of Kremlin talking points.
• To the point of cracking Ukrainian unity: a few days earlier, three channels owned by President Zelensky’s predecessor Petro Poroshenko (Espreso TV, Pryamy Channel, and Channel 5) were taken off the air (and they have not since been restored). Poroshenko’s allies, along with unaffiliated journalists and commentators criticized the development, as no reason had been given whatsoever. Moreover, these channels firmly adhered to the guidelines set forth by Ukraine’s government and were not even remotely Kremlin-aligned—though they did go out of their way to show Poroshenko and his allies in a good light, even during the war. When Ukraine’s Council on Television and Radio was asked why this happened, a spokesperson said that the Council had not given any such order. There is a lengthier analysis to be had on this subject, but the short of it is that someone with power over or intimate connections to Ukraine’s television and radio authority decided to settle scores and ordered the channels be taken down. Unless evidence is given that these channels were indisputable Kremlin agents, we must hope that they will soon be restored, irrespective of their mostly harmless pro-Poroshenko bias.
• Remember how Russian outlets spent the preceding day accusing the Ukrainians of using chemical weapons in Mariupol? Well, would it surprise you to learn that Russian forces dropped phosphorus bombs on Mariupol’ on this day?
Day 43: April 7
• Oleksiy Arestovych confirmed that Ukrainian officials were establishing a list of names of the Russians who were in Bucha. (A few days later, it would come out that Ukrainian authorities were doing so partly with the help of facial recognition technologies).
• German intelligence echoed British intelligence from a few days earlier: the Russians had been planning to kill civilians all along.
• The activity of Russian outlets clearly revealed the Kremlin’s mounting disquiet over the prospect of heavier weaponry being delivered to Ukraine. Russian outlets tried eroding Ukrainian morale by alleging that the new weapons they were receiving were actually old and barely functioning.
• The most curious event on this day was actually a briefing by Citizen Lukashenko, who explained that over a thousand Belarusian vehicle drivers had been abducted by the Ukrainians. He proceeded to claim that Belarus had conducted a special operation to free the drivers. Addressing, among others, Russian onlookers, he said: “We conducted such a special operation, we freed all our people. We conducted it so well that even you didn’t notice it.” Now, no such operation took place. But the Kremlin has been greatly displeased with Belarusian forces’ reticence to enter the war, and Lukashenko likely staged this little scene to make it seem like he is in total alignment with the Russians.
• Concrete details of some of the rapes that were committed in Kyiv Oblast’ came to light: a 14-year-old girl, an 11-year-old boy, and a 20-year-old woman.
Day 44: April 8
• Russian outlets maintained their attempts to drown out the revelations from Bucha by pushing out the typical narrative strains, including how Ukrainians are savaging Russian POWs, how Russian nobility and compassion are on display anywhere there are Russian soldiers, and how the West is simultaneously a cynical cabal of unstoppable, hypocritical, imperialist warmongers and a helpless smattering of political amateurs way out of their league with little understanding of affairs either at home or beyond their borders.
• Heavy weaponry began to arrive in Ukraine: Slovakia transferred an S-300 anti-air system.
• A poll surfaced revealing that 98% of adult Ukrainian who fled plan to return home, 33% of them in the near future.
• Dmitry Muratov, chief editor of Novaya Gazeta and last year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient, was drenched in red paint in the Samara metro. A man yelled, “This is for our boys,” and doused him. Such is the attitude towards actual journalists in Russia.
• In a liberated settlement in Kherson, it became known that the Russians raped, among others, a pregnant 16-year-old and a 78-year-old grandmother.
• The day’s biggest event became two Russian missiles striking a train station in Kramatorsk, Donetsk Oblast, where 4,000 people were waiting to evacuate. 39 of them (including 4 children) died immediately, and over a dozen more would die from their wounds in the next few days.
In another example of Russian media’s reactionary lack of coordination, outlets had to contort themselves to make the missile strike fit their talking points. In the night, official outlets and Kremlin-associated Telegram channels heralded that “Russian forces were herding Ukrainian troops together in Donetsk” and warned locals not to use Kramatorsk’s train station to evacuate. In the morning, the missile strike happened. One of the missiles had “FOR THE CHILDREN” written on it.
Russian outlets first crowed about a successful operation to destroy Ukrainian military targets. After Ukrainian officials announced what happened, these articles and posts were quickly deleted, and Russian outlets raced to announce that Ukrainian forces had bombed the station themselves, that they wanted to disrupt the evacuation, and that it couldn’t possibly have been the Russians, who don’t even have Tochka-U missiles in their arsenal (a repeatedly disproven assertion).
This instance of rhetorical whiplash is nothing new: it is most reminiscent of the Kremlin’s communications after the shooting down of MH-17 in 2015. The first reaction was “We took down a Ukrainian military plane!” and immediately after it became clear that it was a civilian Boeing with 298 people onboard, Russian outlets pivoted to the subsequent miasma of conspiracy theories.
Day 45: April 9
• Russia’s Duma began examining a bill that would simplify the process of adopting the thousands of Ukrainian children whom they’ve kidnapped (separating them from their parents, naturally). Brings back memories from Francoist Spain, where Franco supporting-doctors simply stole women’s infants at birth and told them women that the children had died.
Day 46: April 10
• Former Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov cited sources in the Russian government to say that Russia has actually lost ~25,000 in this war rather than the ~19,500 the Ukrainians have ascertained.
• The activists blocking sanction-forbidden exports and imports on the Polish-Belarusian border called it quits after the latest package of sanctions made it formally illegal for Russian and Belarusian cargo trucks to enter the E.U.
• Russian outlets continued to push strains about how Russians taken prisoner were being mistreated.
Day 47: April 11
• Some companies have been circumventing sanctions. Shell, prominently, has been mixing 49% RU oil with 51% other oil.
• 25,000-30,000 Ukrainians are returning to the country daily.
• The Kremlin is focusing all of its outlets on intimidating or misleading the West into stopping arming Ukraine. Example: Russian outlets reported that the Slovakian S-300 has already been destroyed (not true), so “why give more weapons to these untrained goons?” Another example: “Ukrainians are surrendering en masse, and all your Western weaponry is now in our hands.”
Concluding Thoughts
(1) There are supposed to be heavy rains all along Ukraine’s eastern front. As is known, rain is not typically the friend of the attacking side.
(2) War fatigue is absolutely setting in, but it is far too early to declare any massive victories. We must take heart in each small victory, in every liberated oblast’ and every liberated village, but the ultimate victory condition is regime change in Russia and the nation’s liberalization, a process that will take decades. There are other intermediate objectives, but only this eventuality should be viewed as total victory in this war.
Regime change has been a dirty term for many since the failed military adventurism of the Bush years, but what the United States engaged in during the very beginning of the century was never coherent. Regime change is a legitimate democratic geopolitical objective when authoritarian states are involved—especially when one such state is slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians and only a fundamental change in the nation’s regime can end the butchery.
As Viktor Shenderovich said in a recent interview, it is not humanism to abstain from wishing the death of a tyrant. Likewise, it is a false liberalism to abstain from pursuing regime change—coherent regime change, buffeted by an understanding of culture, history, art, literature, and politics. Regime change must stop being a dirty term for Western ears and be acknowledged as a key objective in democracy’s war with autocracy.