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 32 through day 40 of the Russian-Ukrainian war for democracy. This is a period marked by Russian forces’ incomplete withdrawal from the north of Ukraine (Kyiv and Chernihiv Oblast’s), regrouping, and imminent redeployment to the east (Luhansk, Donetsk, and Kharkiv Oblast’s). Artillery fires and air strikes continue across the country.
This is also a period marked by new photographic and video evidence of the Russians’ bestiality in liberated settlements in Kyiv Oblast. As if the previous month’s evidence has not been enough to shake the West from its lingering torpor and bleating about escalation and not provoking the Kremlin, we now have visual proof of the Russians’ vile inhumanity, photos of raped and burned women, tortured civilians, dead children, mined hospitals and candy factories, and more and more and more.
This time, a little over a week, has also been marked by a realignment of the ship with the rudder—or perhaps the rudder with the ship—as Kremlin-aligned outlets rushed to keep up with the military decision-making, making sure that Russia’s narratives framed the month’s fighting as one long string of victories merely laying the groundwork for the impending battles over Ukraine’s east.
I have been considering whether my reports have been too rosy, too optimistic (similar questions have been asked of Oleksiy Arestovych). I would say three things. First, I have relied on facts where I could, providing hard evidence in support of my analysis. Any conclusions I have made heralding positive outcomes for Ukraine are anchored in an understanding of the situation on the ground, both in Ukraine and Russia, and an ability to reconcile with reality the hyperbole or understatement of all relevant information spaces—Ukrainian, Russian, and miscellaneous Western. Second, any “optimistic” conclusions I make: I—and, more importantly, clear-eyed strategists and analysts far more experienced than me—have been making thetm for many years. Russia will disintegrate. Ukraine will win (and partially has won)this war. The Kremlin junta will fall. But these are easy predictions made from a macro-historical perspective, and they are untethered from this invasion’s individual horrors, its accumulating war crimes. Which brings me to my third point: while I view it as my duty to provide the reader with concrete evidence of the aforementioned horrors, I have also tried to keep my reports pathos-less, if occasionally sardonic. Seeing today the effect that photos and videos of the genocide in Bucha are having, perhaps I miscalculated. Perhaps where I thought I risked numbing the audience to the monstrous crimes being done in Ukraine, the only way to effect any kind of seismic psychological shift is to beat people over the head with the unfiltered sadism and brutish mutilation being inflicted on Ukraine’s populace. After all, people would never have believed in the Holocaust had they not been confronted with videos of the gas chambers and piled corpses.
It is a steep cost for the West to learn, yet again, the price of complacency. The price of not having an overarching geopolitical strategy or an aspirational enough vision of the future in an age of global connection. The price of cowardice.
The price of ignorance.
Day 32: March 27
• Day 32 brought with it Chornobayivka 11.0, as Russian forces were hit at the occupied airfield an eleventh time.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensives in Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv Oblast’s, liberating several villages.
• Some Ukrainians had actually begun returning to the city of Kharkiv, some (errantly) hopeful that the city would soon be out of danger, some seeking to begin rebuilding as soon as possible.
• Russian occupiers had completely mined the hospital in the newly-liberated town of Trostyanets, Kharkiv.
• Like is drawn to like—reports came that 800 Hezbollah fighters were departing to support Mordor’s hordes ravage Ukraine.
• Most importantly on this day, President Zelensky gave an interview to the Russian outlets Dozhd, Novaya Gazeta, Meduza, and YouTube channel of the journalist Mikhail Zygar’. Russia’s Office of the Prosecutor General immediately threatened any channel that actually published any part of the interview with punitive action.
• Finally, a new joke started going around: the instant that Russia attacks a NATO country, NATO will immediately kick that country out of NATO.
Day 33: March 28
• On the heels of the Zelensky interview, Roskomnadzor ordered Novaya Gazeta to cease all activity until the end of the war. As of this moment, there is now no formal RU publication not wholly aligned with the Kremlin still operating in Russia.
• Russian troops continued to deport Ukrainian citizens en masse, in violation of international law.
• Ukrainian forces liberated Irpin’, to the west of Kyiv.
• In his daily public chat with Arestovych, Mark Feygin explained that the Russian army was using industrial smelters in occupied settlements to burn their dead, seeing as the mobile crematoriums the Russian army originally brought weren’t working very well.
Day 34: March 29
• In occupied Berdyansk, Russian occupiers put guns to the heads of media operators and told them to play Russian propaganda. They refused.
• A pattern became obvious on this day: Russian artillery had begun targeting oil depots across Ukraine, including in oblast’s that had yet to see any fighting.
• Russian Defense Minister Shoigu resurfaced only to confirm implicitly Russia’s operational defeat when he reiterated that Russia’s main goal had always been eastern Ukraine—specifically Luhansk and Donetsk Oblast’s. As I said earlier, don’t read too much into the disappearance of an official in the Kremlin. There are better indicators for gleaning authoritarian palace intrigues—at least until we see (or are told about) an actual corpse.
• Russia’s disinformation strain about bio labs in Ukraine appeared to stall when Kremlin-aligned outlets published materials saying that it would be a long time before the scandal reached full force. In subsequent days, however, the strain would evolve again, pivoting to the familiarity of accusing Hunter Biden of actually being behind the labs’ financing.
• Russian troops in northern Ukraine began withdrawing from the area—presumably to be redeployed in the east.
Day 35: March 30
• Train service resumed in liberated Trostyanets.
• Slovakia expelled 35 Russian diplomats.
• In a particularly revulsive instance, in besieged Mariupol, Russians raped a woman in front of her 6-year-old son.
Day 36: March 31
• Ukrainian intelligence intercepted a phone conversation in which a Russian invader told his wife how three tank drivers from his subdivision raped a 16-year-old and how, because they had nothing left to eat, they had begun to eat dogs.
• Elsewhere, in an entirely predictable chain of events, seven busloads of Russian soldiers were brought to the radiational medicine and ecology hospital in Gomel, Belarus. These soldiers spent the preceding few weeks digging trenches in the Red Forest, near Chernobyl, AKA one of the most contaminated areas on the planet. The radiation to which they had been exposed ensures that, however long they have left to live, their lives will not be enjoyable. In subsequent days, this tale would spread further panic among the Russian forces.
• In Georgia, the “president” of occupied South Ossetia (along with Abkhazia, one of the Russian-recognized frozen conflict areas in the country) declared that the region will want to formally become part of Russia. A few days earlier, the faux-leaders of the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk declared the same thing.
• This development finally sowed some discord between Tbilisi and Moscow: Georgia’s foreign minister declared that any referendum in South Ossetia (and Abkhazia, logically) would be illegal, considering that it is an occupied territory.
• The Hunter Biden biolabs strain gained in confidence. It is designed both to keep the narrative alive and to try to weaken President Biden domestically—especially since this strain now has a healthy life of its own abroad, including in U.S. extremist circles.
• The Russian Defense Ministry’s spokesman and (recurring butt of Arestovych and Feygin’s jokes) Konoshenkov officially voiced the new spin on what had obviously been Russia’s plan the entire time: the Kremlin’s war plan was always to force Ukrainian forces to defend large cities, including Kyiv, but never to storm the cities so as to avoid civilian casualties. After tying up and then destroying most Ukrainian forces in Kyiv, Ukraine would then have nothing to defend Russia’s true objective: Donetsk and Luhansk. I, for one, am baffled as to how we failed to divine the Kremlin’s true intentions long ago. The nearly 20,000 dead soldiers. The nearly 150 destroyed planes. It was all so obvious. Clearly, we were never meant to play eighteen-dimensional chess at this level.
• Meanwhile, in Samara (in Russia), Denis Kortunov, an adviser to the governor was fired because he posted that “Zelensky is cool.”
Day 37: April 1
• Less than 24 hours after South Ossetia declared its intention to join Russia, Georgia’s president (a largely ceremonial office following reforms in 2017) Salome Zourabishvili declared that Georgia would join in all sanctions against Russia. I urge onlookers to keep track of Georgian rhetoric on South Ossetia and Abkhazia, right alongside Japan’s rhetoric on the Kuriles and Poland’s statements on Kaliningrad. To a lesser extent, Finland might say something about Karelia, but that is significantly more far-fetched. Likewise in the case of Moldova and Transnistria.
• An intercepted phone call reveals that Russians have been destroying their own equipment and filming it, passing it off as destroyed Ukrainian equipment to their commanders.
• Kadyrov’s Chechen executioners had been busy killing people who were forcibly mobilized by Russian forces in Luhansk and who were refusing to fight.
• In Bucha, the Russians mined a confectionary factory and poisoned the cookies.
• In an attempt to improve its propaganda’s reach, the Kremlin’s forces had begun attempting to establish fiber optic cable connectivity between occupied Crimea and occupied Melitopol.
• In Maryinka, Donetsk Oblast, Russia-Mordor’s orcs opened fire on Ukrainian police delivering humanitarian aid to locals.
• Arestovych declared that Kyiv Oblast’ may be completely liberated by week’s end.
Day 38: April 2
• Immediately proving Arestovych’s prediction, Ukrainian forces liberated all of Kyiv Oblast.
• Optimistic assessments indicated that it would take at least ten days to demine the entire oblast. It will take much longer. Mushroom-hunting enthusiasts will have to stay clear of the forests north of Kyiv.
• We learned that in liberated Bucha, at least 280 civilians had been slaughtered and thrown into mass graves.
Day 39: April 3
• After Georgia’s president declared that Georgia would join in Western sanctions, Prime Minister Garibashvili backpedaled, saying Georgia will impose no economic sanctions. As a reminder, Georgia has seen its fair share of pro-Ukrainian, anti-Russian, anti-governmental protests in the last month, since it became apparent that the Ivanisvhili-controlled regime would not go against the Kremlin. (Bidzina Ivanishvili is a Kremlin-aligned Georgian oligarch who has been effectively in charge of Georgia since his candidate beat Mikheil Saakashvili in the 2013 presidential election).
• Scenes from liberated Bucha began serving as a new rallying cry (because scenes from the rest of Ukraine weren’t vivid enough?) for the West, which accelerated its slowed preparations to do more, sanction more, give more. Russia, predictably, sensing the danger, unleashed a torrent of disinformation that all the videos and photos of Bucha were staged, the people were actors, the Ukrainians killed the people themselves, the Ukrainian territorial defense was the real den of criminals, etc. etc. etc. As a reminder, the photos and videos show dead children, tortured and executed locals, and women who were burned or hanged after they were raped.
• I ask you to watch this brief video by The Washington Post depicting some of the scenes from Bucha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE32gwNFfbc
There will be more than enough evidence to convict everyone responsible for this—everyone who survives, at least. Not having enough evidence won’t be a problem. But imagine a world in which the West played correctly over the last eight years and no such evidence was even necessary because none of this ever happened. Imagine a world in which—instead of tearfully grimacing and proclaiming “Never again!!”—we didn’t let it get that far.
Concluding Thoughts
(1) We may be entering a more dynamic phase of this war, both on the ground and in the information space, so my next report will likely once again dig more deeply into changes in Russian disinformation strategy and tactics.
(2) Over 150 Ukrainian children have been killed. In Mariupol alone, at least—and this is a very conservative “at least”—5,000 civilians are dead.
As Mykhailo Podolyak said today: what more does Russia need to do for us to stop being afraid of what it might do?