The Long War #13
PARIS, France—One very mundane memory came back to my mind recently: I was taking a stroll through Kyiv’s Shevchenko park while doing an interview with an American humanitarian worker when we were politely interrupted by a CNN journalist, desperate to find an English-speaking Ukrainian to talk to. It was almost exactly one year ago, Kyiv was full of foreign journalists waiting for a war few believed would actually happen, and many of these journalists were starting to run out of things to do. It feels kind of surreal to think back on this period.
It won’t surprise anyone if I say that, since then, Ukraine has received more media attention than ever before in its history. Just look at these two pieces of data, a Google Trends graph showing the interest in the search “Ukraine” in the US since 2014, and another graph illustrating the percentages of stories featuring the word “Ukraine” in top US publications since 2013.
Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the 2004 Orange revolution, the 2014 Maidan revolution and the annexation of Crimea—none of these compare to the torrent of media attention that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Beyond the massive interest that logically came with the biggest land war on European soil since World War 2, I think this war might also have been, at least in its initial phases, one of the most crowded, journalistically speaking. Thousands and thousands of journalists, young and old, veteran or utterly inexperienced, suddenly came to Ukraine, a country so much more easily accessible than other hot spots like Iraq or Syria.
But, as with pretty much anything related to this war, the main question to me is how it has changed Ukraine. It’s maybe too early to see the large-scale effects of this media attention—the main one I can see is the way Kyiv has been vindicated with its narrative of Ukraine as a defender of Western civilization against Russia. It’s a storytelling that Ukrainian officials were already pushing in the years before the invasion, but that didn’t enjoy that much traction in the West until Russian tanks started pouring through the border last year.
The smaller-scale effects are easier to observe. For example, the arrival of thousands of journalists with no previous experience of Ukraine sprouted a large ecosystem of fixers, producers and lobbyists all looking to support (and, sometimes, influence) foreign media workers.
Another really interesting consequence of the focus on Ukraine has been the attempt by Ukrainian media themselves to capitalize on this attention to try and find an audience outside of Ukraine. Before the war, the Kyiv Post was pretty much the only Ukrainian, English-language media. But now, several major Ukrainian outlets and many more obscure ones also publish stories in English: NV, Ukrainska Pravda, Babel, The Village Ukraine, The Kyiv Independent, Hromadske, Lb.ua, Zaborona, Kharkiv-based Gwara Media, investigative outlet Slidstvo, Interfax Ukraine, Texty (which produces fantastic maps and infographics), Zn.ua and probably others. Whether these stories actually manage to reach foreign audiences, I don’t know. But it does show that keeping Western attention focused on Ukraine is perceived as crucial by almost everyone in Ukraine, from the president to small regional outlets.
Something to read
Foreign Affairs / The Long War in Ukraine (I really couldn’t avoid mentioning a piece that shares this newsletter’s title. The argument the author is making is fairly obvious—the West needs to come to terms with the likely possibility that the war won’t end quickly and prepare for a long-term confrontation with Russia— but it bears repeating at a time when attention tends to hyper-focus on things like the battle of Bakhmut)
Reuters / Ukrainian swamps make attack from Belarus unlikely - for now (What a quote: “The unit's spokesman, Serhiy Khominskyi, said that help in making the terrain unpassable had also come from an unlikely ally: the local beaver population. "When they build their dams normally people destroy them, but they didn't this year because of the war, so now there is water everywhere," he said.”)
The Fix / How we are running a city online newspaper amidst the war
The Record / Pro-Ukraine hackers leak Russian data in hopes someone will make sense of it
Wall Street Journal / Russia Claims Success in Ukraine’s Soledar as Moscow Names New War Commander (Most interesting in this piece is the reported worry from some Ukrainian and Western analysts that “Kyiv has allowed itself to be sucked into the battle for Bakhmut on Russian terms, losing the forces it needs for a planned spring offensive as it stubbornly clings to a town of limited strategic relevance.” It’s a claim that is pretty much impossible to independently assess as it relies on casualties figures—state secrets in both Ukraine and Russia. So far, Ukraine has avoided falling into the trap of holding territory for the sake of holding territory, but it’s clear that Russia has managed to give Bakhmut symbolic significance way beyond the limited strategic significance of the city)
Something to watch
It’s been a while since I had watched “The Great War”, a fantastic YouTube channel that provided day-by-day coverage of World War 1. It has now branched out to more general historical documentaries, and, a few months ago, put together this excellent video on the Soviet-Ukrainian War.
Something else worth checking out
State Emergency Service of Ukraine (in Ukrainian) / Interactive map of areas that could potentially be contaminated by explosive objects