“Wars in Europe rarely start on a Wednesday,” reassured Russian ambassador Vladimir Chizhov in Brussels on February 16. According to him, Russia would not invade Ukraine that Wednesday, nor in the coming week. On Thursday, January 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded his neighboring country. That same day, residents of Kiev fled into air raid shelters.
The many images on social media from Kiev in which people are hiding underground seem to be a reality from another time. Were not air raid shelters the result of the barbaric warfare of the twentieth century?
How they resisted during World War II by distributing illegal pamphlets, Ukrainians under attack are now opposing Russia by spreading information online.
The official twitter account of Ukraine has discontinued its usually cultural content about idyllic mountain landscapes and musical pioneers, to share English-language updates on the fight against Russia from official Ukrainian sources and channels. On the morning of the attack shared the account features a print of a proud Adolf Hitler caressing a little Putin on the cheek. Underneath the text: “This is not a ‘meme’, but our and your reality at the moment.” The tweet with more than one and a half million likes made the page the headquarters of the Ukrainian online resistance. Anti-Russian memes were shared from all over the world.
Meme or not, on the day of the Russian invasion, socials were flooded with pictures of Putin as the villain. The Official Ukraine Account early his followers in a tweet to “tag” Russia and tell the country what they think. What followed was an explosion of expressions that fall under a new genre in internet culture: the war meme. Putin is compared to Hitler on several resistance memes. In one such picture, Hitler and Putin sit side by side in class and Putin looks at the Nazi leader and his work with the caption 1939.
This online Ukrainian meeting point is more than a distributor of digital pamphlets. It actively uses social media as a weapon of resistance against Russian disinformation about the situation. In a retweet by the American journalist Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic warned of the Russian spread of false military information to make Ukraine surrender. In the comments under the tweet, videos and photos are checked for authenticity by what appears to be amateurish fact-checkers.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a very historic event, set at a time of extraordinary historic development: a war is raging in the middle of Europe that is being followed by the whole world on mobile phones. We see the anxious and sleepless sheltering Ukrainians on our telephone screen.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 28, 2022