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 an attempt to chronicle key events and trends on the information battlefield from day twelve through day fifteen of the Russian-Ukrainian war for democracy. This one is longer than my previous reports.
These four days are marked by:
(1) Obstinate pro-Ukrainian rallies in occupied towns like Kherson, Berdyansk, and Melitopol’.
(2) The increasing visibility of the “bio labs” disinformation strain and Russia’s determination to convince everyone that Ukraine is behind the war crimes (e.g. it’s Ukrainian fascists killing their own civilians in Mariupol’).
(3) Kremlin-aligned outlets’ continuing inability to diversify its arsenal of narrative strains that can actually stick.
(4) The increasing ferocity and inhumanity of the Russian invaders’ attacks on civilians.
(5) The invaders’ further worsening morale, increasing surrender rates, and waning resources (think about the stalled, fuel-less column of dead metal ostensibly en route to Kyiv).
Holding all else constant, during this period, the war’s historical trajectory has become clear: Russia will be unable to conquer Ukraine. Russia will lose the war. The only remaining questions are:
(1) How many more civilians will have to die before the war ends (in large part a function of (a) when the West takes any of the necessary steps to implement a no-fly zone and (b) when a critical combination of oligarchs successfully deposes Putin and his whisperers)?
(2) How exactly will Russia’s loss manifest itself for the ruling class (for lower classes, the war is already manifesting itself as utter financial ruin)? I.e. what precisely will be the magnitude of Russia’s defeat across the economic, political, military, and geographical spectra?
Day Twelve
On the war’s twelfth day, rumors surfaced of a coup brewing in the Kremlin, with Defense Minister Shoigu allegedly at its helm. Given that these rumors made their way even into Western media, the likelihood of any such coup’s success or even existence should be taken with a sizeable grain of salt. However, much less dubious is the possibility that Shoigu is being set up as the main scapegoat for the war’s failures—once they are admitted, that is. It is difficult to predict exactly what combination of oligarchs and senior officials will be behind the nigh-inevitable coup—something that Bellingcat leader Christo Grozev echo in an interview with Dmytro Gordon on day fourteen—but Shoigu will certainly be involved in some capacity.
Day twelve also featured the third round of the feckless Russian-Ukrainian negotiations. While the Russian invaders would repeatedly violate the agreed-upon ceasefires in the coming days, the negotiations yielded an important data point: the Kremlin was ceding ground. Whereas before, the main demand seemed to be Ukraine’s capitulation, veiled behind the nonsensical “denazification” rhetoric, this time, the Russian side asked that Ukraine recognize Donbass and Crimea and commit to neutrality. As Russian losses continue to mount, it will be important to track how further Russian demands evolve—and diminish.
While the Russian orcs took control of TV and radio in the occupied city of Melitopol’, the Ukrainian TV marathon added another “commercial break” interlude to its arsenal, this one featuring all of Ukraine’s faith leaders standing united in support of Ukraine’s future and against the invasion. The holistic image of the post-war Ukraine promised by these interludes is not only a bastion of democratic liberalism, but an innately diverse, multi-faith, multiethnic one. This image stands out all the more clearly against the fact that Russian marauders in Kyiv and Zhytomyr Oblast’s had blown up two churches earlier in the day.
Russian attempts to take control of isolated parts of Ukraine’s information space continued to be met with ferocious civilian resistance. In occupied Chernobyl, the same thing happened that occurred a few days earlier in Kherson: the Russians brought in humanitarian aid and cameras to film the power plant’s staff accepting it. To their incomprehension, the Ukrainian staff refused to accept the aid. There was nothing to film. (Two days later, reports would appear of Russians simply torturing the staff of the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia in an attempt to get them to cooperate with Russian propaganda efforts).
Meanwhile, the overall narrative regarding the invaders’ awareness of their purpose began to change. More and more POWs admitted that they knew exactly what they were being sent to do. They knew ahead of time that they were headed to Ukraine. They knew why they were being sent to Ukraine. They had orders to open fire on civilians and on residential areas. And they had orders to open fire on their own comrades if they refused to carry out the previous orders. A press conference on day fourteen with several POWs would confirm these facts to international media.
And the international community itself continued to layer on more sanctions. Moreover, E.U. members implemented a ban on a slew of Kremlin-aligned TV channels, which could no longer broadcast across Europe. At the same time, YouTube banned two channels run by Vladimir Solovyov, the Kremlin’s rabidly xenophobic Goebbels wannabe.
Day Thirteen
Relatively few standout moments concerning the information war occurred on day thirteen.
Russian outlets continued scrounging for a narrative that would stick—a difficult task given that none of their disinformation could have a shelf life longer than a few minutes outside of Russia’s information space. To this end, they tried to misquote Zelensky as saying that he was open to recognizing Crimea as Russian and Donetsk and Luhansk as separate republics. (He, of course, said no such thing, because if he had, he would’ve been immediately buried by his own people. What he had actually said was that the question was bound to come up in negotiations, but any such negotiations would have to happen directly between presidents, which did not frighten Ukraine).
A moment that caused most onlookers to arch an eyebrow occurred when news dropped that the UN had forbidden its staff from calling the war a “war” or an “invasion.” The UN quickly refuted this, calling the mishap either a fake or a mistake, but nobody should find any consolation in the fact that the allegation easily passed the smell test of “things that UN could very well have done.”
In another laughable attempt at propaganda, Nataliya Poklonskaya, an aggressively anti-Ukrainian prosecutor from Crimea who switched sides to Russia after the 2014 invasion, arrived in Kherson with another truck of humanitarian aid. She was accompanied by cameramen who wanted to film her handing out food to the locals. Instead, the Ukrainian government rudely welcomed her back to the country by declaring “open season” on her head.
To Kherson’s east, the orcs besieging Mariupol’ continued to bombard the city, which faced and continues to face a humanitarian catastrophe. No heat, no running water, dwindling food. Early in the day, a six-year-old girl died of dehydration.
Day Fourteen
Day fourteen began with the same orcs bombing a maternity clinic. Mariupol’’s city council approximated that at least 1,300 people had been killed over two weeks. The word “genocide” was figuring more and more in commentators’ assessment of the situation.
In Russia, the domestic information space, which the Kremlin was trying to make impregnable through Roskomnadzor and the Prosecutor General, continued to show new cracks. The Ministry of Defense was forced to admit that are indeed conscripts fighting in Ukraine (which is technically illegal). In the same communication, the Ministry offered a masterclass in understatement, admitting that there had been “an attack” on the Russian military, and that “some soldiers” had been captured. Putin was forced to theatrically declare that he had ordered the Prosecutor General to investigate how such a thing could have possibly happened. Someone had to be punished. The façade was cracking.
At this point, Ukraine’s military leadership voiced its assessment that Russian forces had stalled severely. The invaders were no longer even really trying to advance—they were more preoccupied with holding territory that they had temporarily gained, and they had actually transferred most of their attention to the information battlefield (recall Poklonskaya’s stunt from the day before), where, as we know, the Kremlin has had little success.
Also on this day, the narrative about the United States funding bio labs in Ukraine finally spread internationally. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was confronted with the narrative, which she officially laid to rest. And, curiously, Chinese sources began echoing the narrative as well—however, in their rendition, Ukraine and Russia were nearly irrelevant to the story, and it was merely the United States’ hypocrisy that was at issue.
Finally, the Ukrainian government launched an information offensive directed at Russian pilots: you bring us one of your planes, and we accept your surrender, save your life, and pay you $1,000,000. Same deal for a helicopter, but you get half a million instead.
Day Fifteen
As of today, Ukrainian public opinion, which had already been overwhelming, has strengthened further. A new poll shows that 92% of Ukrainians are now confident in a looming military victory, up from 88% several days prior. 42% of Ukrainians, meanwhile, believe that there can be no discussion of restoring friendly relations with Russia. Russian tanks, which the Kremlin believed would be met with flowers and thunderous applause, have instead obliterated the last vestiges of good will that may have existed in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian TV marathon continues to hold down the information front. Hosts informed viewers that they should be vigilant concerning three primary disinformation narrative strains being pushed by the Kremlin:
(1) The first is a strain that appeared a few days prior: apparently, Ukrainians in Zhytomyr (just northwest of Kyiv) were orchestrating pogroms of Jews.
(2) The second strain concerned racist discrimination against foreign students in Ukraine. Though there have assuredly been instances of such discrimination on the western border, especially against African students fleeing toward Poland, these instances have since been weaponized and magnified by the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, hoping that it would eclipse reports of genocide and other war crimes being committed by Russian invaders. Western media, for which the subject of racism has been front and center for a few years, proved particularly susceptible to this narrative and fueled it for several days, though it appears to have waned slightly in the past few days.
(3) The third strain is the bio labs narrative, which had finally gone international a day earlier.
Ukrainian coders, meanwhile, continued to show their adaptability. The government released a new chatbot with whose help people could report on the Russian invaders’ movements. Moreover, the chatbot used a special program that could only be accessed by Ukrainian citizens, so Russian sympathizers and trolls cannot abuse the chatbot and send false reports.
At the end of the day, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov confirmed that Ukraine had begun preparing for the invasion in November 2021. However, as I hypothesized in an earlier report, Ukrainian leaders kept denying the impending invasion for the sake of the information war and in an attempt to minimize panic.
Defense Minister Reznikov repeated that the invaders’ advances has stalled on all fronts, that they are now simply trying to hold what ground they’ve managed to occupy, and have poured more resources into the information war—this as China’s Foreign Minister referred to the war as a “war” for the first time.
Reznikov also noted that the invaders have slaughtered more civilians in the fifteen days of war than soldiers. He said this shortly after it became known that the Russian orcs, after they killed the mayor of Gostomel’, planted mines on his body.
Concluding Thoughts
(1) In an interview with Dmytro Gordon, Internal Ministry adviser Anton Gerashchenko brought attention to a phenomenon that has gone overlooked by most commentators (not just Western, but even in Ukraine too). While it has been said many times that Putin accomplished what nobody else could (the near-total unification and rallying of the West), through this invasion, Putin also accomplished something else: the near-eradication of the Ukrainian fifth column. There are no remaining pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, and it will be just about impossible for them to exist after the war ends.
(2) Our family friend wrote to us today. She is in Kyiv, where there is no fighting currently, but where the battles in the surrounding areas (Bucha, Gostomel’, Irpin’) can be heard very well. She said her oldest daughter has been sleeping through the night. The middle daughter can’t. She cries all night, because she is scared.
(3) This should not come as a surprise, but many moments in the information war between Russia and Ukraine cannot be translated. Some linguistic aspects of the war are somewhat accessible. For example, there has been some coverage of “the Ukraine” versus “Ukraine” (tip: never use the former) and “Kyiv” versus “Kiev” (the former is the transliterated Ukrainian spelling, the latter is the transliterated Russian spelling), but much of the information war happens in the languages’ syntax. I will write about this more another time, but, try as I may to convey the information war’s key trends and events, there are some linguistically bound aspects of the war that cannot be properly communicated to an audience that does not know the involved languages. For example, many Ukrainian journalists are ironically calling the invaders “liberators,” but they write the word in Russian and they spell it incorrectly. Instead of spelling it osvoboditeli, they write asvabaditeli, taunting the invaders’ illiterate savagery. The best analogue in English would involve dipping into online meme grammar and instead of writing “liberators,” writing “LiBeRaToRs.” There are many untranslatable aspects of the information war like this.
That said, I can explain that some Ukrainian outlets (like Hromadske) are employing a fun means of disrespecting the aggressor: they publish all Russian proper nouns without capitalizing the first letter (e.g. “putin,” “russia,” “moscow,” etc.).
(4) I end with two quotes diagnosing Russia’s future and present respectively.
The first is from Russian journalist Aleksander Nevzorov, who wrote last week that “in two-three months, Russia’s most difficult problem will be deciding what to call their new country [occupying only part of the territory that Russia used to occupy].” Japan has already reasserted its ownership of the Kurile Islands. After Ukraine liberates Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, observers would be well-advised to pay attention to the fate of regions like Karelia, Kaliningrad/Königsberg, Yakutia, Tatarstan, Chechnya, and a slew of other republics forming the threadbare tapestry of Russia’s fading imperial legacy.
Perhaps the discourse concerning Russia’s post-war identity has already begun: many protesters around the world are hoisting a modified Russian flag, with the bottom red stripe replaced by a second white stripe. “No more blood.”
The second quote was uttered today by one of Ukraine’s news anchors: “Putin’s mistake was that he sent slaves to fight a nation of free people.”