When people ask “How can this be happening that two such close nations” — “brotherly” or “fraternal peoples,” as it’s often said — “are killing each other?” they are missing a crucial political piece, for which we need new terminology as well as a more complex set of lenses.
It’s helpful to compare this to the break-up of Yugoslavia, where similar questions were asked. To bewildered fellow Europeans, that break-up appeared to release an upsurge of primal, atavistic inter-ethnic violence that was incomprehensible except through the discourse of “Balkanism,” according to which the Balkans have long historically represented everything about Europe that was least European. The reality was more complex, and not all took up the effort to understand it.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine — with its inhuman fanaticism, as witnessed in the horrific assault on Mariupol (see below) and to lesser degrees in Kharkiv and other largely Russian-speaking, eastern Ukrainian cities — risks a resort to something similar, though it’s not exactly the Russophobia some have warned against.
Understanding the invasion requires examining not only the geopolitical and economic factors, which have been well covered in the western (especially left-wing) press, but also the histories and psychologies of imperialism (notably Russian), colonialism (ditto), ethnic chauvinism (especially Russian toward Ukrainians), Sovietization (of the entire Soviet population, but less so in western Ukraine, which experienced it for a shorter period), authoritarianism (Putinism) and its refusal (among Ukrainians), the draw of “Europe” for Ukrainians, and the basic connection to land that many Ukrainians feel “in their bones” even if that connection has been historically denied, if never fully severed, by those imperial/colonial histories.
Placing the Russian invasion of Ukraine into the context of postcolonial and decolonial theory can be a tricky business. This post takes a few recent articles as its starting point to explore some of its ambiguities.
Decolonization, take 1: Ukraine and Russia
Writing in e-Flux journal (and reprinted in left-wing German magazine Taz), Oleksiy Radynski, filmmaker and cofounder of Kyïv’s Visual Culture Research Center, astutely untangles the deeply colonialist underpinnings of Putin’s war on Ukraine and Ukrainians. In “The Case Against the Russian Federation,” Radynski briefly pursues two fascinating lines of argument. (Each of them has been developed in greater depth by others, but not to my knowledge combined in such a concise and currently relevant way, thus my focus on it here.)
The first argues that Putin’s, and many Russians’, anti-Ukrainianism — the “deep ethnic and political hatred towards Ukrainians” evident in his recent speeches — is a disavowal of that which threatens them internally. Ukraine today represents “a radically different Russia,” with the disavowal working in both directions.
In hernew essay for UnHerd, “The brains behind the Russian invasion,” Laruelle takes on what for some is the all-important question, “Who is the President’s Rasputin?” She examines several key candidates for such an ideological whisperer — Ivan Ilyin, Lev Gumilev, Alexander Dugin, Konstantin Malofeev, the Russian Orthodox Church’s Bishop Tikhon, the Moscow Patriarchate itself, and Putin’s close friend Yuri Kovalchuk — but argues instead that
The reality is more complex: there are multiple ideological sources who have blended to cause the disastrous invasion, all mediated through his “court” of trusted people and group of military advisers, and many of whom unite in their vision of Ukraine as a country that needs to be brought back by force into Russia’s orbit.
More complex, then, but in some ways also more banal, in that the sources of Putin’s impulses may be much more broadly cultural:
Like many of his fellow citizens, [Putin is] probably saturated by political talk shows cultivating anti-Ukrainian feelings, as well as by patriotic movies celebrating the Russian Empire’s greatness and its territorial conquests. There may be no need then to look for a doctrinal text that would have inspired him, as the memory of Russia’s empire and the subordinated role of Ukrainians in it permeates so many components of Russian cultural life.
Putin’s worldview has been built up over many years, and is more shaped by his personal resentment toward the West than by any ideological influence. Readings of the classic works of Russian philosophy which insist on Russia’s historical struggle with the West, emphasise the role of Ukraine as a civilizational borderland between both, have simply reinforced his own lived experience. [emphasis added]
Why, then, such a seemingly disastrous decision to invade a country that will fight tooth-and-nail against the invasion? She blames this on “low-level intelligence-gathering.”
And it is here that the President’s mask slips. It becomes clear that Putin is an aging and isolated authoritarian leader surrounded by advisers afraid of bringing him a realistic assessment of the likelihood of victory, thereby accelerating Russia dragging a sovereign Ukraine along with the rest of Europe towards the worst catastrophe since the Second World War.
The entire article is worth reading. It’s accompanied by a video interview with Laruelle carried out by UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers.
The collaborative New Fascism Syllabus, which provides scholarly perspectives on 20th and 21st century fascism, authoritarianism, and populism, has been publishing analyses relevant to the Russian invasion of Ukraine since that invasion began on February 24.
Omer Bartov’s bittersweet reminiscence of the beauty of Ukraine, its deeply troubled history (he is a historian of the Holocaust), and its recent “heroic efforts to reforge itself,” entitled “My Ukraine is Not Yet Lost,” is particularly moving. Bartov writes:
The war, the genocide of the Jews, the ethnic cleansing of the Poles, and the imposition of an oppressive and vengeful Soviet regime, seemed to have put an end to the world of the borderlands that lasted for centuries and, despite its many warps, prejudices, vast inequality, grinding poverty, and occasional bursts of horrific violence, was also the birthplace of much beauty and creativity, precisely because of its mix of cultures, religions, and ethnicities.
Like several of the authors, Bartov worries that all of the progress made in recent years will be undone by Russia’s violent attempt to turn back the clock to a world ruled by imperial fiat.
Two of the articles dwell on the “irrationality” of the invasion. In Andrea Chandler’s case, it is Putin’s irrationality, which she sees in full evidence in the recent events, despite her best efforts to find reason.
The only way that I can make any sense of Putin’s actions in Ukraine is to imagine a secret-police frame of decision-making in which the strategic value of territory is detached from its inhabitants. This frame exaggerates the threat that a self-reliant Ukraine poses to Russian sovereignty: if we “lose” Ukraine, we lose our “krai” – so where will our new “krai” be?
In Russian, krai (край) suggests “borderland” or “edge” (окраина), while in Ukrainian it is commonly understood as “our country,” “our land,” “in-land,” or “within-land” (україна).
In Alexander Reid Ross and Shane Burley’s “Into the Irrational Core of Pure Violence,” the irrationality is found in the “convergence” between Aleksandr Dugin‘s “neo-Eurasianism” and the war being waged by the Kremlin. While there is debate around the level of continuing influence Dugin’s neo-fascist geopolitics has on Putin’s own thinking, and so the authors may err slightly in overemphasizing it, there is no doubt that Putinism has been shaped by a broad swath of Russian ultranationalist, neo-imperialist (to the point of being messianic), Orthodox theocratic, and other far-right ideologists including Dugin, Ivan Ilyin, Lev Gumilev, Konstantin Leontiev, and cronies in the Russian media-political sphere such as Kiselyov, Malofeev, Prokhanov, and others.
The authors write:
the hypocrisy of the supposed “de-Nazification” of Ukraine can be found in the fact that the invasion has been, since 2014, the project of fascists, Orthodox ultranationalists, and Dugin’s own network of self-described “neo-Eurasianists.” From the start, the aggression against Ukraine was bankrolled by Dugin’s patron, Russia’s “Orthodox Oligarch,” Konstantin Malofeev. During the first years, on-the-ground efforts were led by Malofeev’s associates Alexander Borodai and Igor Girkin, an ultranationalist who participated in the Bosnian Genocide before becoming Malofeev’s security chief. Girkin and Dugin are listed together as among Russia’s “authentic high-principled Hitlerites, true Aryans” in a mordant article by Russian dissident Andrey Piontkovsky.
An influential figure amongst the alt-right and Europe’s fascist “identitarian” movement. Dugin’s ideology is somewhat more syncretic and convoluted than traditional Nazism: he believes in the total destruction of the modern world and the liberalism he feels it represents. This radical upheaval of the world would be followed by the rebirth of patriarchal blood-and-soil communities distinguished by a caste system ruled by warrior-priests, which he calls “political soldiers.” Dugin desires to see Moscow presiding over a Eurasian empire stretching from Dublin to Vladivostok in which Istanbul will return to Constantinople (or “Tsargrad”). For Dugin, the invasion of Ukraine represents merely the first step in this “Great Slavic Reconquista.”
With its apocalyptic struggle and “palingenetic” rebirth, Dugin’s program clearly falls into the “consensus” definition of fascism that historians like Roger Griffin have established. In 2015, Griffin himself demured from describing Putin as a fascist, and just last year referred to Putinism as a form of “resentment politics.” But seven years later, with the military invasion and the reasoning that led to it (and justifications provided for it), most of Griffin’s reservations no longer appear to hold.
Dugin’s projected alignment between Russia, Iran, India, and China appears to be incipient as Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine solidifies its own alienation from the “liberal-globalist” West.
The authors conclude:
Here, we have the irrational core of pure violence: the anti-European Europe, the anti-imperialist empire, the antifascist fascism, the anti-nationalist ultranationalism, and the defense against genocide through the obliteration of a nation’s existence and concomitant shelling of civilian targets. Without recourse to reason, Russia must resort to raw coercion, power politics, to exert its sovereignty, all while presenting its alternative to the unipolarity of the U.S. empire as the de facto liberatory choice. By offering itself as an enemy of the U.S., it hopes to court a new class of friends. Russian nationalism acts as part of the vanguard of far-right movements, helping to re-align geopolitics away from cooperation and toward a binary, illiberal opposition.
Reid Ross and Burley see the Ukrainian resistance as a struggle against imperialism that “must be universalized on the level of a struggle for freedom and equality everywhere.”
In his Commons piece, Artiukh argues that for all the useful reading on capitalism and western hegemony the western left has provided, its reflexive desire to cast the current invasion in familiar terms has resulted in failure — an incapacity to understand what, it turns out was, “impossible” for it “to imagine.”
Having faced ‘the impossible to imagine,’ I see how the Western left is doing what it has been doing the best: analysing the American neo-imperialism, the expansion of NATO. It is not enough anymore as it does not explain the world that is emerging from the ruins of Donbas and Kharkiv’s main square. The world is not exhaustively described as shaped by or reacting upon the actions of the US. It has gained dynamics of its own, and the US and Europe is in reactive mode in many areas. You explain the distant causes instead of noticing the emergent trends. [. . .]
I have been reading everything written and said on the left about last year’s escalating conflict between the US, Russia, and Ukraine. Most of it was terribly off, much worse than many mainstream explanations. Its predictive power was nil. [. . .]
Russia has become an autonomous agent, its actions are determined by its own internal political dynamics, and the consequences of its actions are now contrary to western interests. Russia shapes the world around, imposes its own rules the way the US has been doing, albeit through other means. The sense of derealization that many commentators feel – ‘this is not happening with us’ – comes from the fact that the Russian warring elites are able to impose their delusions, transform them into the facts on the ground, make others accept them despite their will. These delusions are no longer determined by the US or Europe, they are not a reaction, they are creation. [. . .]
You face a challenge of reacting to a war that is not waged by your countries.”
Responding to Jacobin‘s questions about Russia’s motives, Artiukh notes:
I think we need to take a break analyzing the US hegemony, because we know pretty much everything about it already, and very little about how Russia came to be like this beyond this cliché caricature that American scholars paint of Putin and Russia.
Some parts of the Left also needs to abandon the idea that Russia is somehow a continuation of the Soviet Union, or that it is the underdog in the imperialist fight that needs to be supported. We need to pay closer attention to what Russian scholars have done. We need to think more deeply about how the Kremlin guys picture themselves, what they imagine is happening around them and what may motivate them beyond what the West imagines is rational. [. . .]
If you listen to Russia’s officials and read their ideological manifestos, if you read people who interpret Russian foreign policy decision makers in the Kremlin — they see these apocalyptic events coming. They see the world changing to the core. They see that we live in the new world and Russia needs to find its place otherwise it will be eaten by these predators, by China or the US. They’re reasoning along the lines of “we need to act now, it’s now or never, there is time and it will either be glorious or we perish.” They also hope that they will join China in a sort of alliance. And they already need to mark their territory. The logic is: “There’s seven bad years ahead, but then we’ll have our hundred years of empire.”
The invasion continues to horrify, with casualties mounting and humanitarian corridors failing to materialize. But one of its more interesting dimensions, from the perspective of media and cultural theory, is the role of information and cyber warfare. The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel provides a good synopsis of the ways in which Ukraine has so far been “winning” the information war, but argues that it’s far from over. Others are less circumspect, and some, like Meduza’s Maxim Trudolyubov, argue that Russia lost it at the very outset, just by starting the war. The depravity of Russian disinformation, as Joanna Szostek argues, seems to know no bounds.
Peter Pomerantsev has cautioned, however, that we need to be careful with our terms here. The very notion of “information war,” he argues, may serve disinformational goals, in that it “reinforc[es] a world view the Kremlin wants—that all information is just manipulation.” To put this into a broader scholarly context, all reality may be “socially constructed,” all efforts to shape and know it simply forms of a Nietzschean “will to power,” but not all are equallydurable, desirable, or ethically and morally satisfying. Some constructs are more worth pursuing than others.
Pomerantsev notes, “Sure the Ukrainian army do all sort of psy-ops to survive. But Ze[lensky] is treating people as equals, trying to engage and inspire them—that’s not ‘information war’. It’s the opposite.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s videos are certainly one of the data points that will be studied for years after this invasion is over. Where my initial sense about his election had been somewhat skeptical, seeing it as an instance of politics as reality-TV (and reality-FB), it’s clear to everyone that Zelensky has risen to the role of a genuine “reality president,” where reality is not in quotation marks but actually breaks into and challenges viewers’ mediated images of a war taking place far away.
Ze’s videos reflecting a kind of incontrovertibility: this olive-green fatigued everyman-turned-war-hero is speaking defiantly from a bunker, a presidential office, and outdoors in front of recognized buildings in a city being slowly surrounded and intermittently bombarded. He is addressing us directly — Europeans, Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, and others — to unite for a cause we understand: the defense against a hyper-militarized, fascistic aggressor, of people trying to live normal lives in the place they know as their homeland.
Pomerantsev’s argument raises the question of what to call the opposite of “information war.” Is speaking the truth a form of waging “information peace“? By “speaking the truth” I don’t mean speaking literal facts. I mean something more like speaking ethical truths, engaging respectfully but directly with others, raising the quality and level of discourse, being open — and “open-source” — about one’s premises and goals, and so on.
As Bellingcat, Eliot Higgins, the Columbia Journalism Review, and others have shown, pro-Ukrainian cyber activists — including the ranks of #Anonymous who’ve joined the anti-Putin campaign, but also more known quantities like the Center for Information Resilience, individual bloggers like Oryx, and many others — have been much more open-source in their methods than the pro-Russian cyberwarriors (see here, here, and here for more on this). Russia’s advantages in cyberwar have arguably come from the element of surprise, which in the present case is no longer there. Bellingcat’s Higgins argues:
In terms of the information war that happens around conflict, this is the first time I’ve really seen our side winning, I guess you could say. The attempts by Russia to frame the conflict and spread disinformation have just collapsed completely. The information coming out from the conflict—verified quickly, and used by the media, used by policymakers and accountability organizations—it’s completely undermined Russia’s efforts to build any kind of narrative around it, and really framed them as the aggressor committing war crimes.
Then there are the forms of nonviolent civil resistance by everyday Ukrainians that have been going viral in social media: people stopping tanks with their bodies, road signs changed to read “Fuck you” (“Ha хуй,” which literally means something like “go fuck yourself” or “on your own dick”) and pointing back to Russia, and women like this one approaching and challenging Russian soldiers telling them to “Leave, occupiers, fascists!” and to “Put these sunflower seeds in the ground so that something grows from your bodies when you’re dead.”
For on-the-ground media theory, one could do worse than to follow Svitlana Matviyenko’s continuing “Dispatches from the Place of Imminence.” In her fourth installment, Matviyenko describes the emotional contours of life in a city just beyond the bombing (the medieval, west Ukrainian city of Kamianets-Podilskyi), interlacing this with analyses of the raging “multichannel information flow” that is her usual object of research. Matviyenko writes:
I do not want a full-scale WW3 erupting suddenly with all arsenals engaged; if indeed a No Fly Zone would cause that (I am not an expert), it would certainly bring an end to the not-yet-multiplanetary species. But, if you have already chosen us as a sacrifice in your rationalisations of our distant chaos, I wish I heard more horror in the words with which the matter of our life and death is waged so easily and with all that smartness, when one has no slightest idea how far ideological mapping could be from the dirty and blurry realities of war on the ground. When one builds these arguments hiding behind their bulletproof volumes of Nietzsche-Marx-Bataille, or using the outdated – but so comfortable – cold-war conceptual apparatuses, I swear, I see – so vividly – how theories that I teach and by which I live – turn to ashes.
If that position of Russian university administrators is surprising, it’s only because we haven’t quite internalized the fact that, as the most recent data show, most Russians still support Putin.
Information warfare has been waged successfully on Russians for many years. The damage is already long done.
Since UKR-TAZ was partly inspired by the idea of a “Temporary Autonomous Zone,” which comes from anarcho-surrealist writer Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson), and since anarchism has some history in Ukrainian political thought, identified especially with early twentieth century revolutionary Nestor Makhno, it’s fair for me to share an anarchist perspective on the current situation in Ukraine.
“War and Anarchists: Anti-Authoritarian Perspectives in Ukraine,” written in February by an anonymous collective of Ukrainian anti-authoritarian leftists (and published by the autonomists at Crimethinc), provides a detailed history of anarchist theory and practice in Ukraine’s last decade. The following paragraph summarizes the authors’ position on the current resistance to Russian invasion and occupation:
Anarchists in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia mostly support Ukrainian independence directly or implicitly. This is because, even with all the national hysteria, corruption, and a large number of Nazis, compared to Russia and the countries controlled by it, Ukraine looks like an island of freedom. This country retains such “unique phenomena” in the post-Soviet region as the replaceability of the president, a parliament that has more than nominal power, and the right to peaceful assembly; in some cases, factoring in additional attention from society, the courts sometimes even function according to their professed protocol. To say that this is preferable to the situation in Russia is not to say anything new. As Bakunin wrote, “We are firmly convinced that the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy.”
[. . .]
Is it worth it to fight the Russian troops in the case of an invasion? We believe that the answer is yes. The options that Ukrainian anarchists are considering at the present moment include joining the armed forces of Ukraine, engaging in territorial defense, partisanship, and volunteering.
Ukraine is now at the forefront of the struggle against Russian imperialism.
I have great admiration for Noam Chomsky’s intelligence and for his perseverance in presenting a detailed and informed counterpoint to extant media narratives on international affairs. But that perseverance can become bullishness when it insists upon a version of history that is one-sided and out of dialogue with so many other scholars and historians who study these things.
Chomsky’s recent analysis of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a case in point. It repeats things that are considered myths or at least half-truths by many who study Ukraine — such as the “Nato expansion” trope, which ignores the reasons why post-Soviet and East European states wanted the protection of NATO, and which in the case of Ukraine become painfully obvious. This becomes a debate over the tail wagging the dog: did Russia invade because NATO expanded? Or did NATO expand because of the fear of Russia invading? And even if the first, is NATO’s expansion really a threat to Russia, or just to Putin’s regime, which fears it (and Ukraine’s capacity for democracy) because it fears democracy?
These arguments should be made with more than just a quick nod to those experiencing the current situation on the ground. One of Chomsky’s Ukrainian translators, author and novelist Artem Chapeye, has penned a brief and somewhat angry response to Chomsky here; Taras Bilous’s piece that I shared recently is another response to this line of thought.
Aside from the fact that Chomsky’s analysis feels a million miles away from the reality that Ukrainians (and those who know them and support them) are feeling, there is something deeper in his writing that I would like to address here. This is that Chomsky writes as if we were still stuck in a (just barely) post Cold War world where the US and its allies are globally hegemonic, and in which they are ultimately responsible for all global ills — which they elicit either through their own acts (e.g., Vietnam, the Iraq War, and countless other misguided episodes) or as “blowback” via the agents that arise in response to them (from the Soviet Union to Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and Isis). This is an “anti-imperialism” that recognizes only one empire across the entirety of the last 150 years or so (and it’s not even Hardt and Negri’s globalized “Empire,” which marked an important advance on this kind of thinking).
The problem is that the world has moved on. The US is no longer the world’s uncontested global hegemon. It may try to be, but it is not likely to recover that status, especially in the wake of Trump and the social divisions that brought the country close to the point of civil war. Its economic superiority has declined, and with global geopolitics being what they are in the late fossil fuel (becoming early green-energy) era, the economic world is clearly more scrambled and multipolar.
Militarily, the US is still the world’s strongest nation, but it relies for its strength on its allies, who are not as reliable as they used to be. China’s and India’s militaries are larger by personnel, and Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal.
The US’s cultural “superiority” — which, as Gramsci showed, is essential to hegemony — has also declined: Hollywood (with its selling of the “American dream”) is hardly all-powerful, popular music comes from everywhere today, and US-led cultural liberalism finds itself entangled in struggles against variations of a cultural conservatism that are arguably, if somewhat inchoately, finding common cause across “civilizational” boundaries. Russia’s information warfare on this front has indeed been powerful in many countries.
Where the US does still maintain a clear edge is with its tech giants — Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, et al. — but these are less American than they are global, and they compete within a global mix in which Chinese (Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, et al), Russian (Yandex, VK), and other companies carve out large swaths of territory, just as China’s Belt and Road Initiative is doing that for infrastructure.
Chomsky and others writing in the classic “anti-imperialist” mode are aware of these things, but they tend to relegate them to the sidelines. This means that they miss the ways in which new alliances, and potential new hegemonies, are emerging. The fact that the populations of China and India alone account for nearly 3 of the world’s 8 billion people, that their economies now make up nearly one quarter of the world’s, and that their relationship to the US-led world order is somewhat uncertain, tells us that things are shifting. The Global South is no longer a pawn and a battlefield for the superpowers of the North. Europe’s role in all of this is also complex and becoming more autonomous from the US’s.
And if the bigger picture is more complicated than Chomsky’s view suggests, the view from the ground is all the more so. Chapeye writes:
“I beg you to listen to the local voices here on the ground, not some sages sitting at the center of global power. Please start your analysis with the suffering of millions of people, rather than geopolitical chess moves.”
Analyzing geopolitics is essential to understanding the world, but it is also a tricky game if it becomes disconnected from the ethics of real-world events. Chomsky follows the political-economic realist’s playbook: What are the material and strategic interests of the powers that be? How have they come to be this way? But that misses the possibilities of the moment and ignores the agency and desire of everyday people, whose actions can reshape the possibilities for tomorrow’s world.
1. The war in Ukraine is not a two-way conflict. Ukrainians — citizens and residents of Ukraine — are victims of an unprovoked invasion. Russian efforts to blame Ukraine, NATO, the US, and “the West” are strategies of war intended to sideline the victims and place Russian neo-imperial interests at the center of world attention. Ukraine’s very existence as an independent, sovereign, democratic, and European state is a threat to Putin’s autocratic, neo-imperial vision of Russian power. In every conversation about this war, Ukrainian voices need to be heard loudly and clearly.
2. Russian neo-imperialism is a threat to the world. Even if Russia’s military is not the strongest in the world, its nuclear arsenal is the largest, and its informational and hybrid war techniques are well honed and powerful. Their goals include weakening, if not destroying, the liberal democratic world, the world of sovereign democratic states the US and “West” at least pretend to champion. We have seen the results of this hybrid and informational warfare in the domestic politics of most western countries. They aren’t incidental; they are part of a global struggle over the fate of democracy.
3. Democracy is at stake. It goes without saying that US and other western nations have not been historically innocent in their relations with the rest of the world. Oligarchs’ wealth corrupts politics everywhere. Democracy requires constant maintenance, vigilance, and action, including action against the power of oligarchic interests to shape the conditions for life on earth. To do that effectively requires global cooperation on multiple fronts. The most urgent current battleground is Ukraine. If Ukraine falls to a kleptocratic, authoritarian, and neo-imperialist petro-state, the further spread of oligarchy, authoritarianism, and militarism will be virtually guaranteed. It is time for Putinism to fall, so that the world can work together on the urgent problems that face us.
Actions you can take
1. Call your political representatives: Urge them to support sanctions against Russia and Russians who support its government, and to support a No-Fly Zone over Ukrainian skies. (There are ways to do this that avoid direct NATO involvement.)
2. Call and speak to any friends or colleagues you may have in Russia. Russians’ support and acquiescence is what allows their government to conduct this assault. Russian state media is not allowing discussion of the reality of the war (indeed, describing it as a “war” or “invasion” is banned). Independent media have been closed down and the internet is being actively squelched. If you have any personal, professional, or organizational connections with people in Russia, now is the time to use them to share what we know is happening in Ukraine and to urge them to stand up against the invasion.
3. Reject Russian propaganda narratives. They are untrue and intended to obscure the truth. Plenty of analysis has been conducted to show how Russian state media supports its own interests by creating an alternate reality for its audiences. Domestically, this is intended to prop up the regime and its goals; externally, it is intended to confuse, obfuscate, and sow distrust in our own democratic institutions. Thankfully, our own media institutions still have the capacity to report and assess events judiciously; that capacity should be supported.
4. Donateto humanitarian as well as civil and military aid organizations. Please see the “Support Ukraine” page for a list of ways you can support Ukrainians affected by the Russian invasion.
People walk down the boulevard ‘Strasse des 17. Juni’ ahead of a rally against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Berlin, Germany, Sunday, Feb. 27, 2022. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
