After months of sabre-rattling, last week Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, finally gave the order to invade Ukraine, and the world’s attention was diverted from Covid and vaccines to the most significant armed conflict in Europe since the Second World War. A constantly online audience is bombarded with endless updates and stories from the front line of a war that, like all modern wars, is being captured on video and broadcast to the world in real time, via social media as well as by traditional news organisations. But even as we witness events almost first-hand, we have already been liberally exposed to one of the many dreadful companions of war: agenda-driven, fake news.
One of the first stories from the war to capture the attention on the West was of the courage and sacrifice of soldiers stationed with the military outpost on Snake Island, a small, rocky piece of Ukraine in the Black Sea with a significant strategic importance. Viral video clips appear to show the soldiers telling a Russian warship to “f*ck off” when asked to surrender, after which the Russians bombarded the island, killing all 13 Ukrainian servicemen. But in fact, there were over 80 soldiers on Snake Island and while they did tell the Russians to “f*ck off,” they also surrendered to a man. Another widely shared story told of The Ghost of Kiev, a heroic fighter pilot who single-handedly was responsible for shooting down six Russian fighter jets. But the existence of mysterious pilot is yet to be verified and he appears to be simply an urban myth.
Sometimes a simple photo is all that is needed to tell a story – including one that isn’t actually true. The 2015 Miss Ukraine, Anastasia Lenna, was hailed as an example of how Ukrainian civilians are taking up arms to fight the Russians, but the photo that went viral shows her holding an Airsoft rifle, a type of toy gun for use in a combat game. A picture appearing to show former world heavyweight champion and now Kiev mayor, Vitali Klitschko, taking up position in the field with a machine gun also went viral, but is in fact from a military drill in March last year. A widely shared photo claimed to be from Ukraine was actually showing Israeli airstrikes on Gaza in 2021. And it is not just ordinary people who get it wrong. Former Swedish Premier and Co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, Carl Bildt, tweeted a photo of two children saluting a Ukrainian tank which dates to 2016. NDTV India ran with another photo from the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, claiming a picture of a girl squaring up to a soldier was from Ukraine when in fact it was taken in Gaza all the way back in 2012.
In fact, major news organisations are not to be trusted at all – but we already knew that, especially after the continued propaganda that has permeated the last two years, as governments and mainstream media has fought relentlessly to ensure that their preferred narrative around Covid, lockdowns, and vaccines stands unopposed. But in a fast-moving scenario like a war, separating truth from fake news is even harder than it normally is. At best, anyone with an agenda, and that includes most (if not all) media outlets, filters reality through a lens coloured by what they would like to see or simply fails to fact-check their sources. At worst, deliberate propaganda presents only evidence to support their narrative. They run with half-truths if they are helpful to the story they are determined to tell. Sometimes, they deliberately lie. Of course, on social media one must be equally wary, not least because the big tech platforms have taken it upon themselves to curate the content users upload and ban what they deem to be “misinformation,” but what is often simply opinions that challenge the mainstream narrative. The current narrative around Ukraine is one of Russia being the bad guy, and the stories we hear reflect that: Snake Island, The Ghost of Kiev, etc, they all portray Ukrainians as heroes and Russians as villains.
This is certainly not totally off the mark. The war is happening on Ukrainian soil; it is Ukraine’s cities that are being destroyed and her people who are being killed as collateral damage in a war Russia started. The soldiers on Snake Island may have lived but many of their compatriots have given their lives in defence of their nation, though of course, Russia has suffered losses too. The war appears, to a large extend, simply to be a vanity project for Mr Putin, who at 69 years old seems to have decided that the time has come for him to restore old USSR territories to the Russian empire. But underneath this alluringly simple narrative lies a complicated story of geopolitical tug-of-war; of the military industrial complex’s perennial drive for war; of NATO encroaching deep into the former Eastern bloc and interfering in what Russia sees as her traditional sphere of interest. This war will be no different than any other war, there will be bad actors on both sides. The real world is complex and we must be wary of fake and agenda-driven stories. It is not enough to consume the news: it must be interpreted.