The Long War #37
War and video game competitions, the fate of Serhiy Shefir, and unreliable polls
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On March 31, Ukrainian esports team “Natus Vincere” (better known as Navi) won the PGL Major Copenhagen, a prestigious tournament held on the newly-released first-person shooter Counter-Strike 2, and claimed the $500,000 cash prize. It was a major achievement, two years after the Russian invasion forced the organization to transform itself.
Most of this newsletter’s readers probably aren’t familiar with the world of professional video game competitions. It isn’t as niche as you may think—a peak of 1.8 million viewers watched the PGL Major Copenhagen’s final match, and even that number is dwarfed by the more popular esports out there.
But is it a world that has, maybe more than any non-virtual sport, been profoundly shaken by the Russian invasion. And for the competitive scene of the 20-year-old shooter Counter-Strike, a game where players from Eastern Europe have long been dominant, the impact was even more far-reaching.
Esports have always had this one geopolitical quirk in the way it divides world regions for many of the top leagues: you’ll usually have Asia, North America, Europe… and the CIS. The Commonwealth of Independent States, the international organization set up by Belarus, Russia and Ukraine in the last days of the Soviet Union, has long been an empty shell devoid of any relevance, but became a convenient label to group Eastern Europe and Central Asia without having to say “Former Soviet Union”.
That term was always a misnomer, of course. CIS teams hailed from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Moldova or Belarus. What seemed to unite them was a shared Soviet past and a relative geographic proximity. What actually united them was language: CIS teams were, really, Russian-speaking teams.
That has been changing. Last summer, Ukrainian esports organization Navi announced it had signed contracts with Finnish player Aleksi "Aleksib" Virolainen and Lithuanian player Justinas “jL” Lekavicius. This was a massive change of direction, esports outlets commented: for the first time, the Ukrainian team was “going international”. The fact that Navi had technically almost always been an international team, made of a mix of Ukrainian and Russian players, was considered beside the point, with everyone understanding that “going international” really meant one thing: the in-game language players would now use was going to switch from Russian to English.
The 2022 Russian invasion hit Navi, a Kyiv-based organization of about 170 employees, particularly hard. When it started, the Counter-Strike roster was in the middle of a competition in Poland, at the IEM Katowice, one of the most prestigious events of the year. The two Ukrainian players, Valeriy ‘b1t’ Vakhovskiy and Counter-Strike superstar Aleksandr ‘s1mple’ Kostyliev remained in Poland, while the remaining three Russian players rushed home. Navi and several other esports organizations first attempted a middle-ground in their handling of ties with Russia, keeping Russian players and coaches who had agreed to leave Russia and relocate abroad. “We are not going to work with people who live in Russia and who pay taxes to the Russian Federation” Navi CEO Yevhen Zolotarov told the Washington Post a month after the beginning of the invasion. Ultimately however, all the Russian players from the Navi Counter-Strike roster ended up leaving the team (with several later joining Cloud9, an American esport organization).
The invasion also popped the carefully crafted apolitical bubble that esports often lived in—particularly in the case of Navi after 2014, as the mixed Ukrainian/Russian rosters raised some eyebrows outside of the esports scene (though that did not prevent president Volodymyr Zelensky from congratulating the team in November 2021 following their victory in the PGL Stockholm CS:GO Major). Contrast this with today, when the team used the opportunity of the final in Copenhagen to raise more than 5 millions UAH for the third assault brigade and has a a charity effort supporting the Ukrainian military going for two years now.
Something to read
NV (in Ukrainian and Russian) | Zelensky’s revolution of cadres. Why did the president kick off a reshuffle in the presidential office and what awaits the cabinet of ministers | April 4
A nice primer from NV on the recent reshuffle inside the Ukrainian apparatus that focuses more specifically on dismissals inside the powerful office of the president—including those of deputy heads Andrii Smirnov and senior aide Serhiy Shefir.
Shefir’s dismissal is particularly interesting to me. Shefir used to be a big deal: he was a producer and scriptwriter at Kvartal 95, the production company that made Zelensky a household name, and one of the president’s best friend. When Zelensky the comedian became Zelensky the president, Shefir also became a symbol of an early presidency in which the Ukrainian president surrounded himself with close figures from his TV and movie days.
And then Shefir disappeared. He was targeted by an assassination attempt in September 2021, when his car was riddled with bullets five months before the Russian invasion started. After that event, he vanished from the public scene, something the Russian invasion did not change, and his role became utterly unclear (I haven’t dug deep enough to be entirely positive, but I’m pretty sure the public comment he made about his dismissal was his first since the assassination attempt).
The “Kvartilization” of the state apparatus wasn’t really a thing anymore by the time the Russian invasion started, so I don’t think Shefir’s dismissal has a lot of implications on that front (Ukrainska Pravda referred to his and Smirnov’s dismissal as the “de-kvartalization” of the office of the president, but that happened several years ago already).
Ukrainska Pravda (in Ukrainian) | Volodymyr Paniotto: Zaluzhnyi's resignation was immediately reflected in Zelensky's rating | April 2
An extensive interview of Volodymyr Paniotto, the director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (the country’s most reliable polling agency) and one of Ukraine’s most well-known and well-respected sociological analysts. Lots of interesting tidbits in here, from the headline confirmation that the dismissal of top general Valery Zaluzhny hit Zelensky’s popularity, to his view that social tensions (between Ukrainians who stayed in Ukraine and those who settled abroad for example) are heightened by social media (“The situation is bad because a lot is written about it on social networks, and [Ukrainians abroad] read them. And this is one of the factors that can prevent people from returning, because they can perceive such aggression as a danger.”)
Overall however, this interview didn’t really dismiss the uneasiness I’ve felt towards some polling data in Ukraine these past two years. The interview kicks off with the often-repeated figure about Ukrainians’ belief in victory which, Paniotto says, has remained at a steady 90%. It’s always been a very loaded and vague question (with the meaning of “victory” becoming particularly blurry once the first couple of months of the war had passed) that has become pretty much useless to understand how Ukrainians really feel about the war. My main gripe with this question is that, in a society facing invasion, asking someone whether they believe in victory is akin to asking them whether they’re patriots—it’s a question that, from the point of view of the respondent, has a very clear right and wrong answer.
And it’s when you take this specific question seriously that you get headlines like “Why Ukrainians are still so optimistic”, a statement bafflingly out of touch with the reality of how Ukrainians actually feel and yet “backed” by polls. Another recent example that jumped out to me is a poll by the Rating agency claiming that only 12% of Ukrainians now speak Russian at home. There is absolutely no doubt that the Russian invasion has accelerated linguistic changes and pushed a lot of Russian speakers to switch, partially or completely, to the Ukrainian language. But the claim that 88% of Ukrainians exclusively speak Ukrainian at home… is simply not true.
This isn’t to say that all polling data coming out of Ukraine should be discarded—there is a lot of polling being done in the country right now, and most of it is valuable and full of insights. But it’s worth being careful.
ICYMI
Stories from legacy Western media published over the week-end (and today)
The New Yorker / Battling Under a Canopy of Drones
The New York Times / When Home Is Now the Front Line
Financial Times / Russia changes tack on targeting Ukraine’s energy plants
Bloomberg / North Korea’s Ballistic Missiles Are Getting Valuable Battlefield Testing in Ukraine
The New York Times / Pardoned for Serving in Ukraine, They Return to Russia to Kill Again
The Wall Street Journal / Ukraine’s ‘Mad Max’ Trawls Swamps and Minefields for Shells
The Washington Post / At energy plant bombed by Russia, Ukrainian workers, and a cat, toil on
Associated Press / The true toll of the war in Ukraine is measured in bodies. This man brings them home, one at a time
I wouldn't be too suspicious of polling in Ukraine per se. Of course there are complexities with sampling a displaced population, and those living under occupation (and KIIS's director usually explains these complexities in his methodological notes, which are always worth a read), but polling in Ukraine is not fraught like it is in some places in the west with non-response bias or, in the case of election polling in the US, identifying the universe of likely voters.
It's more accurate to say polling doesn't give the full picture -- nor is it designed to, especially on complex, emotional topics facing a nation at war. This is where qualitative research (focus groups) is extremely revealing. What do Ukrainians mean when they say they are optimistic? What does victory mean? Why are some folks switching to Ukrainian and under what circumstances? Having watched dozens of focus groups in the last six months, I promise you that while the polls are interesting, the focus groups provide the kind of depth and nuance you find lacking, and frankly, will break your heart. I advise clients that they should believe the polls, but understand the limits of a four or five response closed scale in revealing everything about what's going on.