Hi everyone, and welcome to this fifth issue of ‘Ukrainian Pulse’, a newsletter in which I try to give you a glimpse of the conversation, debates and controversies unfolding in Ukraine at the moment. Today, our focus is going to be on a Facebook post that went viral a few days ago and triggered a storm of a discussion on Ukrainian social networks. That discussion seemed at first glance to be about Russian “psyops” and the state of the Ukrainian military, but led to some really interesting reactions on what can be said in wartime and the gap in perception between soldiers and civilians.
The post originated on Twitter. Written by an anonymous user claiming to be a Ukrainian soldier of Crimean Tatar origin, it focused on poorly-equipped military units dubbed ‘meat brigades’.
Here’s a translated extract of that post, which has since been deleted both from Facebook and Twitter:
Soldiers have this term, ‘meat brigades’. These aren’t the units popular on TV, the units in which young and handsome bearded men are recruited. These are not units that can afford to show drone footage of burning enemy tanks (because such units usually do not have drones); soldiers of such brigades are not equipped like special forces. You don't read what these soldiers say on Twitter (because they don't know what Twitter is). They use Viber to call their daughter and tell her that everything is fine. [...] They haven’t heard about rehabilitation or PTSD, though they do have PTSD [...] And I ask you - do not forget such soldiers after the war. Infantry is about honor.
The tweet didn’t get a lot of traction, until someone else took the text and pasted it on Facebook. It was then shared more than 22,000 times, with many people then simply copying the message on their own page.
The text was roundly criticized by activists, soldiers and the media space, the latter almost universally calling it a ‘fake’. “What a load of bullshit” wrote on Facebook Oleksiy Bik, a soldier and former member of the far-right ‘National Corps’ party, in a message “liked” close to 900 times and, I think, pretty representative of the general reaction. “What sucks here isn’t just the text itself, but also the absence of even a seed of critical thinking among the masses”.
“The term ‘meat brigade’ isn’t used by soldiers” claimed soldier and former volunteer Rodion Shovkoshytnyi in a Facebook message framed as a debunking of the original post, which he lambasted as a “manipulation steeped in the principles of Goebbels propaganda.” Without necessarily going that far, a huge number of pundits and outlets described the text as an example of Russian “psyops”. Ukrainian outlet Media Sapiens, which specializes in the monitoring of the Ukrainian media space, covered the controversy in an extensive piece that featured this headline: “‘Meat brigades’ in the Ukrainian Armed Forces: the naivety of Ukrainians, which played into the hands of the enemy”.
Taking a quick glance at social networks and Ukrainian media, that critical reaction looked absolutely dominant. “I may not be in contact with such a huge number of soldiers, but I haven’t heard the term ‘meat brigade’ from anyone, from any unit,” wrote journalist Nastka Fedchenko on her Facebook page. “Most importantly, none of our soldiers are as fucked up and helpless as the one in the original post [...] Wouldn’t it be scary if entire such brigades were defending you? I would be scared. But I know my army isn’t like that”.
Yet that’s also where dissenting opinions appeared. That take, and the dig at the soldier on the picture that came with the original message, triggered an angry response from Maksim Kolesnikov, a former restauranter enlisted in the Ukrainian army since 2015, who was captured by the Russian military in March 2022 and only liberated 10 months later (and quickly enlisted again).
You, lady, are defended by people who sit under fire for months on end, advance during assaults, freeze in trenches or suffer from the heat. They fight mice, wipe themselves with napkins, crawl in the mud and sleep in the sand [...] I didn’t wash myself with anything but wipes for a month, I spent all that time in the same socks that I couldn’t dry because it was winter, I was terribly dirty. [...] That picture shows a real man, a fighter coming back from a rotation at one of the heaviest areas of the front. That "bum" is defending you, lady.
Alina Sarnatska, a former women’s rights activist and current combat medic, had a similar reaction. “Everything around you is a psyops, everything except the TV marathon” she scorned in one message. In another, she specifically addressed the controversy:
Yesterday, I was arguing with people from Stratcom about this situation, saying that sometimes it is possible and necessary to write about the situation as it is. Then people from infantry battalions argued that you need to filter yourself when writing the truth, because your words will be used by Russian psyops officers. Both are true.
It is necessary to filter yourself, because a demotivated society will stop supporting the army and will not want to mobilize. But sometimes it is necessary to write the truth, because otherwise people will stop supporting the army and mobilize—because why the fuck would they do that if we've almost won anyway? Without this truth, the gap in the perception of the war between soldiers and civilians will only grow.
Both Alina Sarnatska and Maksim Kolesnikov also confirmed they personally knew the Ukrainian soldier who wrote the original message on Twitter.
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