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 23 through day 26 of the Russian-Ukrainian war for democracy. During this time, all previous trends have held stably.
- Russian military progress has stopped. Russian forces are now intent on at least capturing Mariupol and digging in to hold what ground they have been able to take in an attempt to fortify their position at the negotiating table—a position that continues to weaken with every day.
- Popular Western media coverage of the war continues to lag, sometimes by a full day or more. I again urge readers to follow Suspilne’s English-language coverage for the best approximation of real-time developments in the war. This coverage is reflective of dominant trends in Ukrainian information space.
- Further increasingly vengeful Russian shelling of Ukrainian cities, especially now that the Russian reserve of more accurate missiles (such as Iskander) is nearly exhausted and the invaders are turning to less accurate missiles that carry the increased possibility of civilian deaths.
Day 23: March 18
By day 23, Mordor’s orcish hordes had fired over 1,080 missiles at targets on Ukrainian soil. As a group of fresh Russian cadets was cynically thrown into the fray in Kharkiv Oblast (the entire subdivision perished), Putin explained to President Erdogan that the Kremlin’s demands of Ukraine have not changed. Neutral status. “Denazification.” Crimea and Donbass. While it is known that his advisers have been lying to him and he has not been getting the full picture, it is unclear whether this insistence is a function of believing that the war effort is going better for Russia than it really is or simply an attempt to put on a brave face when—as even Western analysts now conclude—roughly a thousand invading Russians are being thrown to their deaths each day. Whatever the matter, as the war now enters a phase of positional battles that favor the defending side, Russia’s negotiating position is not getting any stronger.
Indeed, as Russian negotiators tried to spin negotiations as “approaching Ukrainian neutrality,” Mykhailo Podolyak reiterated that Ukraine has no intent of surrendering any part of its territorial integrity. He also explained that the nature of these negotiations has been indirectly multilateral, as several other countries (potential security guarantors) are being consulted throughout the process. After all, this new agreement, whatever form it takes, must be more enforceable—or rather, simply enforceable at all—than the Budapest Memorandum, which had already crumbled to ash when Russia invaded in 2014.
Twenty-three days into the war, things had, however, begun to take their toll on many Ukrainian citizens and their sympathizers around the world, especially when confronted with the unceasing, genocidal evil besieging Mariupol, 90% of which has been ruined. Military analyst Oleksiy Arestovych, popularly labelled as Ukraine’s “national psychotherapist,” publicly declared that Mariupol was top of mind for the government but that it was impossible to lift the siege at this time. On day 26, in one of his daily streamed conversations with Mark Feygin, a Russian attorney disbarred in 2018 for his defense of anti-Kremlin clients and consistent opposition to the Kremlin, Arestovych explained that he intentionally placed himself out there so that Ukrainians would have an internal figure to blame, so as to better cope with this stage of wartime psychological trauma. As some elements of the Ukrainian government took to unrealistically and cynically criticizing what they framed as Ukraine’s inert response to the siege of Mariupol, Arestovych’s self-framing as a temporary lightning rod was vital in somewhat alleviating the psychological toll of the war—if not much else.
Separately, reports surfaced that though Assad promised the Kremlin 40,000 Syrian troops for its campaign, only some 1,000 among such reputable outfits as the Syrian army and Hezbollah were actually willing to deploy to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, in the east, all four Russian personnel transport ships in the Pacific Ocean were seen sailing by the Japanese coast. As a reminder, Japan had reminded the world a week earlier that the Kurile Islands were rightfully Japanese territory.
Day 24: March 19
On the war’s 24th day, Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya (it is commonly written as “Tikhanovskaya,” but I will instead transliterate the Belarusian spelling of her last name), the rightful president of Belarus, asked the U.N. to acknowledge Belarus as temporarily occupied. This was a signal, much as Japan’s reminder about the Kuriles, that, around the world, people are sensing blood in the water regarding Russia’s own territorial claims.
On this day, we also learned that Russian Lieutenant-General Andrei Mordvichev was slain in a Ukrainian attack on the temporarily occupied airfield of Chernobayevka in Kherson Oblast’. Mordvichev was the sixth Russian general to fall, which means that, of the estimated twenty Russian generals deployed to Ukraine, only fourteen now remain alive.
In order to maintaining the effectiveness of Ukrainian civilians in the information war, Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation posted another round of advice on how best to sustain informational hygiene—what to post, what to share, how to phrase things, how to take breaks from reading the news.
At this point, it also became (unsurprisingly) obvious that the invaders were using negotiations to adjust in an attempt to achieve possible tactical advantages. Nevertheless, not only were Russian offensives failing across the battlefield, they were being moved back. In Kyiv, for example, Ukrainian defenders managed to move the front line on the city’s western bank to a distance of 70km from the capital. Simultaneously, Ukraine’s center for coordinating POWs had begun its work, constructing shelters for captured Russians. Ukrainian officials made a point of it to draw a stark contrast to how the invading hordes were bombing civilians with how Ukraine was treating the current crop of >500 POWs, videos of whom we have seen throughout the last three and a half weeks.
Ukraine’s intelligence announced that the Kremlin’s own intelligence had finally concluded that establishing a puppet regime even in temporarily occupied regions is impossible. Kherson, which has been occupied for the better part of two weeks, continues to see daily rallies in support of Ukraine, and the picture is similar in other occupied towns. Instances continue to be documented of Ukrainians’ refusal to accept humanitarian aid from the occupying orcs, even when pressured, even in cities on the brink of humanitarian catastrophe.
In Russia, perusing the news media would give one the impression that there barely even was a war going on. Having withdrawn into itself and lacking even fictitious military victories of which to boast, Russian information space continued hosting the Kremlin’s coverage almost as if nothing were out of the ordinary. There would be occasional pieces commenting on rising inflation and prices of goods and services. Some articles on how to talk to your relatives in a time of great stress. Some outlets would pay a little more attention to the impending economic doom. Some more aggressive outlets, like Komsomolskaya Pravda, would spend more time heralding illusory military achievements and reminding everyone that Ukraine’s Jewish-Nazi fascist junta was busy killing its own civilians. But overall, when confronted with concentrated resistance, the Kremlin’s disinformation war machine, much as its military war machine, has proven itself unimaginative and incapable of effective improvisation—at least as far as audiences abroad are concerned. Russia’s domestic audience, of course, never needed much imagination to fool. As I wrote last year, Ukrainians, by contrast, have been information-war-forged in their resistance to the Kremlin’s propaganda.
Moreover, Russia’s audience has been steeped in a nearly impregnable cesspit of disinformation for many years. I am fond of a particular simile—that working with disinformation is akin to working in a lab with violently virulent organisms (hence why I call them narrative “strains”). It is impossible to be completely immune to it, and prolonged exposure will at some point warp your perspective, which is why both breaks and a varied, healthy media diet are necessary even for the most hyper-vigilant media analyst. Russia’s populace, by contrast, has had a historically low immunity to disinformation since the Soviet Union’s disintegration and has additionally spent 22 years swimming in the Putin regime’s ever-consolidating lockdown of Russia’s domestic information space. It is unsurprising—again, as nearly everything about this war is—that so many Russians continue to buy into whatever Kremlin-aligned outlets are spoon-feeding them.
Ukraine’s Culture Minister Tkachenko commented on this on day 24. He asserted that Russia’s narrative strains have completely broken in Ukraine’s information space, hence why the best the invaders could come up with was bombing as many TV towers as possible. Consequently, Russian propaganda is now turned almost entirely inwards, primarily focused on inculcating Russians against the truth for as long as possible, since there are no takers in Ukraine and so many Russian channels have been shut down globally. However, even this goal is becoming more difficult, since “they are running out of qualified liars,” who have been “fleeing the ship like rats.”
An example: the head of one of Russia’s psyops groups was severely reprimanded for having failed to establish a “Kherson People’s Republic.” See above: the impossibility of puppet regimes even in individual occupied territories.
Finally on this day, Oleksiy Arestovych accurately pointed out an important moment: Ukraine has resisted implementing wartime censorship. While the Ukrainian government regularly issues advice and pleas to both civilians and media, there has been no formal censorship implemented in three and a half weeks of war. “Democracy,” as Arestovych said, “is more important.”
Day 25: March 20
On the Belarusian-Ukrainian border, unrest continued to bubble as Kremlin officials kept replacing Belarusian officers with Mordor’s own. Ukrainian intelligence nevertheless reported on the imminent possibility of a Belarusian attack on western Ukraine—Volyn and Lviv oblast’s.
As the day ended, having destroyed much of the city but unable to take it, Russian troops demanded that Mariupol surrender by morning. In response, the government wished them a speedy path right to hell.
It is worth noting that by this point, as Arestovych points out, the orcs had spent nearly four weeks on the battlefield. Typically, personnel do two-week rotations. However, as Russia has no one with whom to replace the troops currently deployed, that is not a possibility. Barring whatever meager reinforcements the Kremlin is able to scrape together, the vast majority of Russia’s deployed troops will be physically and psychologically exhausted for the remainder of this war. For the past several days, this exhaustion has already manifested as reduced attempted Russian offensives, shellings, and air raids.
Two more bits of important information surfaced on this day.
First, Ukrainian intelligence had previously confirmed everyone’s suspicions that Putin is isolated from most of the Russian elite and that he is even more afraid of a coup now than before. Intelligence now asserted that one camp among the Kremlin’s leadership is actively trying to figure out how to remove him—via an “illness,” poisoning, or otherwise remains to be determined. Moreover, they are looking to install Bortnikov, the head of the FSB, as his successor.
While this is a juicy bit of intelligence that should be taken with a grain of salt, there is logic to this assessment. For this segment of the elite, elevating Bortnikov, who has fallen out of grace with Putin over the FSB’s inability to provide accurate intelligence on Ukrainian mindsets and proclivity for resistance, would weaken Kadyrov. Reasonably, these oligarchs and ministers do not want to see an ambitious, unscrupulous warlord who only answers to Putin taking over the Kremlin’s reins. (Kadyrov himself had met in person with Secretary of the Security Council Patrushev last week, when the latter flew to Chechnya’s capital city Grozny). We know that the FSB has been leaking intelligence to Ukraine (recall the column of Kadyrovites who were killed soon after arriving in Kyiv Oblast). Ukrainian intelligence can comfortably publish information of this coup, (1) because of its potential to sow a little extra chaos in the Kremlin, (2) because it further boosts Ukrainian morale, and (3) because it is unlikely to derail any such coup attempts, considering that the already-paranoid Putin is being kept in the dark—in large part by an increasingly uncooperative FSB—anyway. Thus, while we cannot accept this allegation for certain fact, it can quite conceivably be true.
The second important news to drop: Slovenia announced that it will return its diplomatic delegation to Kyiv and urged other E.U. members to do the same. This is massive indicator of confidence of (1) Ukraine’s impending victory and (2) the relative safety of being in Kyiv. It is also an explicit acknowledgement of the need to accelerate the speed at which diplomatic channels between Ukraine and Europe operate during the remaining phases of this war.
Day 26: March 21
Today, we learned of further unrest in Belarus, as Tsikhanouskaya announced that Belarusian partisans have been stopping Russian trains and damaging Russian equipment to prevent it from entering Ukraine.
In the digital realm, hackers had managed to take control of VKontakte’s (reminder: Russia’s Facebook analogue) official channel and used it to send messages to Russian users, informing them of the war’s realities and statistics.
As I was writing this report, Arestovych posted that Ukrainian forces have hit the occupied Chernobayevka airport in Kherson Oblast for a seventh time.
Finally: in under four weeks of this military campaign, more Russians have died than in ten years of the Soviet-Afghan War. Over 15,000 Russians have been thrown to their inglorious deaths on the fields, rivers, swamps, and woods of Ukraine.
The number cannot be matched by the number of fallen Ukrainian soldiers. The number of murdered Ukrainian civilians, however, is significantly closer.
Concluding Thoughts
(1) A plea to this report’s readers: if you are reading or listening to a commentator who seriously discusses or entertains the possibility that Russian might install a puppet regime in Kyiv, then you must realize that this person still does not understand the situation in Ukraine. It was unfeasible for the Kremlin to install a puppet government in Kyiv before the war began. Now? There is barely a fifth column left in Ukraine. The level of Ukrainian unity and anti-Russian sentiment is unprecedented. If anything, it will have to be tamped down, so that it doesn’t morph into explicit nationalism or even chauvinism. But a puppet regime controlled by the Kremlin? It was laughable when the Kremlin brought Yanukovich to Minsk, expecting to install him in Kyiv. Laughable. Russia might try to wipe Ukraine off the face of the earth, but it will never control Ukraine, and anyone saying that the Kremlin might succeed in doing so should visit Ukraine and talk to the locals.
(2) Aside from commenting that democracy outweighs wartime censorship, Arestovych has also said another important thing: democracies must not create idols. Building up godlike idols runs counter to how a democracy must function. To this point: the West must stop building up President Zelensky as a god. Western audiences may well want him to take over as leader of the free world, he may be the star of myriad memes, the popular Servant of the People (more or less the Ukrainian equivalent of West Wing) may be trending on Netflix, but he cannot be turned into a memetic, larger-than-life pseudo-deity. I myself argued in 2019 that he was the single person best equipped to prosecute the information war against the Kremlin. But when a democracy starts hero-worshipping a little too much, it sets itself on a slippery slope that might lead somewhere other than a democracy. President Zelensky has played the role of Ukraine’s president in this war perfectly. But he is human. He has made mistakes and will make more. He is certainly the leader that Ukraine needed at this time, and he might well be the leader the entire West needs. But let us evaluate him on his well-deserved merits—without transforming him into Zeus. And if you really want to help him and Ukraine, then check out this site, which lists all the many ways in which you can tangibly help: https://linktr.ee/razomforukraine.
(3) There is a Russian idiom: “the thief’s hat is the one that burns.” It means “the guilty mind betrays itself.” Why is this relevant? Because if the Kremlin accuses someone else of doing something, that means that either the Kremlin has already done that very thing or it is preparing to do it.