The world continues to hold its collective breath while watching the unfolding events from Ukraine and the recent fall of Mariupol to Russia. We wonder if other towns will fall, or if there will be total destruction on Ukrainian cities, as war crimes trials begin.
“The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.” Thus begins a gut-wrenching, and widely shared, reflection by Mstyslay Chernox - an Associated Press reporter who, along with his colleague Evgeniy Maloletka, was the last international journalist inside the heavily besieged city of Mariupol - on his coverage of the carnage that Russian forces have wreaked there. Chernov and Maloletka set off for Mariupol over one month ago, arriving early the next day, one hour before Russia invaded Ukraine. “Few people believed a war was coming, and by the time most realized their mistake, it was too late,” Chernov recalls. “One bomb at a time, the Russians cut electricity, water, food supplies and finally, crucially, the cell phone, radio and television towers. The few other journalists in the city got out before the last connections were gone and a full blockade settled in.” The deaths, he says, “came fast.”
In the weeks since Russia attacked, brave journalists like Chernov and Maloletka, serving both Ukrainian and international outlets, have kept the world apprised of the horrors of the war, a commitment to documentation for which several colleagues have already lost their lives. Their efforts have been aided by Ukrainians’ daily acts of citizen journalists on social media. They have been supplemented, too, by distant reporters and researchers who have harnessed open-source intelligence to track the broader shape of the war. Even before it began, analysts were able to observe Russia’s troop buildup around Ukraine’s borders; as Buzzfeed has reported, the Middlebury Institute, in California, spotted that Russia had invaded before Putin announced it, after noticing an apparent “traffic jam” on Google Maps. Analysts like those at Middlebury have since been “tweeting their findings on the timescale of rolling news,” BuzzFeed noted, while satellite companies have provided actual rolling-news outlets with “near real-time images” of troop movements, strikes and their damage, and more.
The widespread availability of such sources, especially compared to prior wars, has reduced our collective reliance on official gatekeepers. As BuzzFeed reported, though, the world of private satellite imagery is not immune from concerns about the strategically selective publication of evidence. (Some of the same companies providing imagery to news outlets have separate contracts with the United States military.) And, of course, cannot tell us everything. Bloomberg’s Marc Champion noted recently, that while analysts were quick to spot the dispersal of a Russian military column north of Kyiv a few weeks ago, for example, it was harder to say what it meant. Franz-Stefan Gady, a research fellow at International Institute for Strategic Studies in the UnitedKingdom, told Champion that despite unprecedented levels of monitoring, “the fog of war still applies.”
This observation strikes me as being more generally applicable. News consumers have access to a lot of information coming out of Ukraine. But key details remain elusive or unconfirmed. And, in this age of information overload, the sheer breadth of sources available to us - with their competing observations and analyses, not to mention motives - can itself feel disorienting. I have seen so many opinions written before the war about the need for caution and healthy skepticism in assessing claims about the Russian threat amid a complex and multi-sided information war. A month after the threat actualized, that need clearly persists, as does the information war, with Russia: pumping out industrial quantities of brutally dishonest propaganda about its actions and Ukrainian leaders countering it with a dexterity that seems to have surprised many observers.
In the run-up to Russia’s invasion, United States intelligence agencies took the unusual step of briefing the public on their (often dire) assessments of Putin’s plans, typically without evidence, despite reporters’ (sometimes exasperated) requests for it. The United States intelligence community, it goes without saying, has a checkered recent past - see: the Iraq war and, much more recently, the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban - and so the exasperation was warranted. This time, however, the warnings proved correct - and if the Biden administration’s decision to shout about them did not ultimately deter Putin, it did at least pre-bunk parts of his casus belli by shining a light on them. United States intelligence, as one recent headline put it, has consequently enjoyed something of a reputational “renaissance,” not least in the eyes of many journalists and experts. News reports about various aspects of the war are still leaning into official warnings on a daily basis. (One example from recently: that Belarus might soon send troops to join Russia's War, which has happened.)
The insight of Western officials, while apparently impressive so far, is not perfect, however. (US and NATO leaders are reportedly struggling, for example, to gauge the status of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.) It is also worth remembering that while the Biden administration’s pre-invasion assessments were broadly, and in some cases specifically, right, they were sometimes off the mark. From the outside, it is tricky to assess, in such cases, whether the intelligence erred or whether its accurate disclosure prompted Putin to reconsider his options. Even the latter scenario, however, is a reminder that the United States was, and remains, an actor in an information war here, not a neutral observer. Its warnings coming to fruition does not change that fact.
Nor is the information war easy to conceptually separate from the physical conflict. Recently, for example, Russia claimed that it had used a hypersonic missile - a weapon that flies very fast and is adept at evading missile defenses, but is not known to have ever been used in combat - to destroy a Ukrainian munitions store. Headlines in various Western outlets relayed the claim or treated it as fact: CNN was quick to report that United States officials had confirmed the use of the weapon, and one of its military analysts cited it as a potential game-changer. In the days that followed, however, Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, rejected the "game-changer" characterization, while an anonymous defense official told reporters that the United States had not independently confirmed usage. Numerous experts suggested, given the apparent details of the strike, that if Russia did fire such weapons, it may have done so more to sow fear than for any concrete military advantage. “We media types risk doing Russia’s propaganda work for it by inflating the significance of this supposed launch,” Politico’s Alexander Ward and Quint Forgey warned not too long ago. (Even without adding hype, the word “hypersonic,” repeated without context, sounds scary enough.)
Pretty much since the war began, we have also seen conflicting assessments - from Western officials, outside analysts, and media commentators - as to who is winning the war, and what metrics we might use to judge that. This question, too, is wired into the information war. Take troop losses. Recently, United States intelligence reported that 7,000 Russian soldiers may have been killed to that point - a staggering figure that officials nonetheless couched as a conservative estimate. Recently, an article pegging the figure nearer to 10,000 appeared on the website of a pro-Kremlin tabloid and stayed there for six hours before it was removed. The paper blamed hackers. The Kremlin declined to comment and claimed not to have any information on casualty numbers. The last time it offered a count, it was 498.
Civilian casualty numbers are hard to pin down as well, with the true number likely much higher than the confirmed count, not least in Mariupol, where the barbaric Russian blitz continues. Accounts of the horror are still making their way out, not least via those who have escaped it, but communications in the city remain crippled, and the situation is murky. Nor are Chernov and Maloletka still there to document it; they were evacuated by Ukrainian soldiers who feared that Russia might capture the journalists and force them to publicly disavow their reporting, which might have fatally undermined the strongest evidence the world has of Russian atrocities there.
Chernov notes that Russia’s information blockade in Mariupol served two purposes: impunity for Russian crimes, and seeding chaos. Even residents of the city have lacked a clear picture of what is going on; by the time Chernov left, some had taken to believing lies that Russia was feeding it via the only radio broadcast left in operation. Others relied on Chernov and Maloletka to tell them what was going on with the war beyond their city limits in the absence of other news sources, all as the journalists worked to send their stories in the opposite direction. “We were the last journalists in Mariupol,” Chernov says. “Now there are none.”
So, the information war continues.
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