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One more week of Jason and I digging through the old archives. He’s just returned from vacation and I’m just about ready to sit in a chair like a normal human again. Thanks for bearing with us.
Today I’ve strung together two of our oldest episodes about Russia and Ukraine. Episodes 14 and 18 show how much can change in less than a decade. The first is a discussion of the invasion of the Donbas in 2014 from someone who witnessed it.
I wanted to highlight this episode because we sometimes forget that Russia didn’t invade Ukraine in February 2022. It escalated a conflict that had been simmering since 2014. After the Euromaidan protests in 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and then moved Russian soldiers—remember the “little green men?”—into the Donbas to stoke a separatist movement.
The conflict froze from 2014 until February 23, 2022. At the time, a lot of people—including myself—believed that Russia would be in and out of Ukraine quickly. This started in 1991 when it aided South Ossetia against Georgia. The Georgians accused Russia of sending troops along with helping to broker a peace deal. It happened again in 1992 in Transnistria. Ethnic Russians fought for independence in the region of Moldova. Russia brokered a peace that sent in troops to act as a de facto occupying force. It happened again in 1992 against Abkhazia and followed the familiar template. The region broke away from Georgia, the region claimed independence, and Russia sent in troops to stabilize the region.
Then came the wars in Chechnya, two wars that happened in 1994 and 1999. Both were brutal. The second saw the political rise of Putin and the installation of a puppet government in 2000. Insurgency came and, in some regions, still exists, though the Kremlin declared the war officially over in 2009.
In the summer of 2008, Russia once again broke off a piece of Georgia. The country tried to retake pieces of South Ossetia. Russia retaliated in a war that was over in just five days.
The war in Ukraine, which really began in 2014 and only escalated in 2022, has dragged on eight years. It’s another Chechen War, with all its attendant brutality. The first episode in today’s two pack goes back to the start of the conflict and explains how confusing, surreal, and deadly it all was.
Russian disinformation is no longer king
I first read Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible in 2014 after its publication and around the time of the invasion into the Donbas. He was an early guest on the show, a former reality TV producer in Russia, and a smart man who understood the Russian information space better than anyone I’ve spoken with.
There was a narrative running through military circles at the time that the Russians were masters of something called “asymmetric warfare,” a new kind of war that combined irregular forces like the little green men and insurgent movements in East Ukraine with manipulation of the information space. Russia was, it turned out, really good at flooding the zone with shit.
After the 2016 election, the mainstream press picked up the narrative. Many a feckless cable news host and op-ed pundit spent countless hours telling America that Russia was so good at media manipulation that Moscow swung the election in Donald Trump’s favor. This conspiracy theory obsessed millions of Americans during Trump’s presidency.
The truth of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election is more complicated and nuanced than a simple substack post can elaborate on. The simple version is that Russia spent some money on Facebook ads, but not a lot, and that some Russian officials had inappropriate conversations with Trump officials. Was it bad? Yes. Did it sway an entire presidential election? No.
What it did do is feed into the narrative of Russia’s ability to manipulate the information space. They were too good at Online, many of us thought. With their troll farms and state-backed YouTube channels, who could the world compete?
That’s all fallen apart since Russia invaded Ukraine. It turns out that Russia’s ability to churn out propaganda is no match for real time satellite imagery of its tanks stuck in the mud and countless videos of military disasters uploaded to Telegram channels by its own soldiers.
My favorite is this video of a Russian soldier using a PKM to destroy a Ukrainian S-300 TEL at close range. The results are a disastrous fireball that probably injured someone. Why would you upload this to Telegram? I don’t know. But, as an ex-U.S. Marine told me recently, Russia can’t control “100,000 soldiers who are just doing soldier shit.”
The Marine is the notorious shitposter @iAmTheWarax who has lately taken to wrangling a cadre of like-minded people on Twitter who troll the hell out of Russian officials on social media sites. They even chased a Russian diplomat offline for a few days. Their memes are stunning and they’re proof that Russia just can’t quite troll the West like it used to.
That’s why I wanted to dig up this old interview with Pomerantsev, because it’s an interesting look at the past. That’s what both of these episodes are, a look at the past that helps us understand the surreal future we find ourselves in.
Angry Planet will be back with a new episode next week. Stay safe until then.
image: Yevgen Nasadyuk photo.
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