“They’re shooting smoke at protesters.”

“They broke doors.”

“They brought an armored vehicle.”

In Aarhus, Denmark, Hemad Nazari lay in bed, refreshing his phone.

It was early evening in Iran on January 8, when the messages began arriving from Rasht, the northern city where he grew up.

Nearly two hours later, another message appeared: “We are trapped in our home.”

Then the messages stopped.

For the next eight days, Hemad heard nothing from his family.

 went dark, many of them lost more than newsfeeds and timelines. They lost the thin, fragile thread that kept them tethered to home: a mother’s voice message, a sibling’s “I’m okay,” the banal proof that life was still going on.

Nazari lives in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city. He works for a real estate company. He’s a photographer, an active part of the local climbing community, and over the past year, he has been cycling across the world with his girlfriend.

It looks and feels like freedom. And in many ways, it is.

But Nazari hasn’t set foot in Iran for eight years. In that time, he has met his parents three times — twice in Turkey, once in Nepal.

As for now, with a nationwide internet blackout still in effect amid a flickering, faltering peace process, he can, like everyone else around the world, only watch — and wait.

Hemad Nazari left Iran in 2016, at 27. He was not at the time a political exile. He was a civil engineer with a steady job and a passport that made most borders difficult to cross. He wanted to travel. To see the world. To live somewhere else for a while.

The sanction-ridden Iranian economy was in a state of collapse. Nazari’s salary, once worth a few hundred dollars a month, shrank rapidly as the currency fell. Saving money became meaningless. Planning a future felt abstract — a concept more than a tangible goal.

So he left. He went to Vietnam first. Then Nepal, Georgia, Turkey. What began as travel, slowly turned into something more permanent.

“I didn’t leave because I thought Iran would change,” he told me. “I left because I could see that it wouldn’t.”

And it wasn’t because people were satisfied, or afraid of change. The January protests, in which many thousands of Iranians were killed, were no eruption, no sudden flaring of anger.

Since 2019, Iran has experienced three major waves of mass protest. That year, demonstrations sparked by a sudden rise in fuel prices spread rapidly across the country. The response was immediate. There was, typically, a near-total internet shutdown and, according to a Reuters investigation, as many as 1,500 people may have been killed during the crackdown. Human rights groups said more than 10,000 people were arrested during and after the protests, with many of them held incommunicado and at risk of being tortured or facing capital punishment.

The demonstrations ultimately collapsed under isolation and fear.

For Nazari, whose travels had enabled him to put distance between himself and his homeland, the 2019 protests made it apparent that Iran was no longer an option for him, no longer a place he wanted to call home. He was not a persona non grata. There was no letter. No summons. No official declaration. Nothing that could be quoted or appealed.

Instead, he had changed.

When the internet inside Iran is shut down, information can only escape through fragments: phone calls, short videos, people with rare access still intact. From abroad, Iranians like Nazari become intermediaries by default. He translated. Shared. Verified. Some of his posts were picked up by Persian-language television channels broadcasting from outside Iran, including BBC Persian and Iran International. Channels watched closely by the authorities.

Nazari did not think much of it at first. He was not an activist by profession. He did not belong to an organization. He was simply using his name, his language, his access. But others who had said less had been detained on arrival in Iran. Cartoonists. Writers. Ordinary social media users. Some disappeared into prison for years. Some emerged broken. Some did not emerge at all.

“You don’t need to be told,” Hemad says about knowing he couldn’t go back. “You understand.”

In early 2020, after Iranian forces shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane and initially denied responsibility, crowds returned to the streets. Once again, arrests followed. So did the silence.

Hemad Nazari’s activity increased again. His real name was public. His face was visible; he didn’t hide. It was a choice he made despite the risk not just to himself, but to his family. “If they can’t get to you,” he told me, “they get to the people around you.”

Since then, eight years have passed.

“It’s not that I chose not to go to Iran,” he says. “It’s that every time I tried, the door closed again.” He does not refer to it as exile. But, in a manner of speaking, he had been made stateless, effectively stopped from going home, from seeing his family, from resuming the life he knew.

By  late December 2025, daily life in Iran once again became untenable. Food prices surged, paychecks were worth less every day, and families thought only about short term survival, unable to think even a month ahead.

According to Nazari, official inflation figures — though already extremely high — failed to capture the reality on the ground. By February, he told me, the cost of basic goods rivaled those in Denmark. Wages, he said, stagnated “at around $110 or $120 a month, with many people earning much less than that.” The minimum wage, the official figures from Iran’s Supreme Labor Council show, increased by 45% and still only reached $110 per month.

“The protests were fuelled by the economy,” Hemad says. “When shopkeepers and traders joined, it was a sign that frustration had reached a boiling point. But people don’t just want better prices. They want freedom. They want new leadership.”

In Rasht, his hometown in northern Iran, even families with children took to the streets in protest. “In my city, a lot of mosques are gone,” he says. “They burned them down. That tells you something.” What struck Nazari most, though, was not only who was protesting, but what they were saying, what they appeared to want. 

“For the first time, the main chant on the street was the name of the prince,” he told me. “The son of the former shah: Reza Pahlavi.” Nazari is quick to stress that he himself is “principally a believer in democracy.” But the chants were telling. 

“For 40 years, only loyalists dared utter the name Pahlavi. Now it’s spoken openly across all layers of society,” It was not about restoring the past. Instead, suggests Nazari, “for the first time, we had a plan.” People, he says, “were asking, ‘what happens if the regime collapses?’ And for the first time, there was an answer.”

In January, there was, as Nazari describes it, a rare sense of readiness among people he knew inside Iran. Friends who had never protested before were sending messages saying they would go. Family members spoke with a kind of cautious hope. This time, it felt different. It felt like change was possible.

Two days earlier, the son of the former shah had issued a public call for people to take to the streets on January 8 and 9 — not to follow a detailed program, but to say openly what they had long been afraid to say. 

From Denmark, Nazari watched the buildup hour by hour. On January 8, as protests reached their peak, the internet went dark. The blackout was not unprecedented. Iran’s authorities had used these tactics before. Inevitably, as access disappeared, reports of mass arrests and the use of live ammunition to dispel crowds spread through the few remaining channels still connected to the outside world. 

In Rasht, Nazari’s close friends sent him a video from their apartment window. Smoke drifted through the street. Shouting echoed between buildings. Gunfire cut through the noise.

During the blackout, Nazari continued to receive fragments of information — through people with Starlink terminals, through friends who still had limited access. By January 10, the informal network of activists and diaspora Iranians he was part of believed that at least 2,000 people had been killed.

Eventually, his mother managed to call him. “We’ve been trying to reach you,” she said. With international charges for calls piling up every second, they had been trying to call him for days. Since that brief call, contact has been sporadic. A snatched few minutes. And then silence again.

“People showed everything they had,” Nazari says of the protests. “They did what they could do.” He’s trying not to romanticize what happened in January, he tells me. He’s not saying, he insists, that the protests were heroic. “Iranians,” he says, “are just desperate.” As for Nazari, he tells me up until the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, he was “constantly debating whether to go home.” Right now, he adds, “it could have severe consequences, potentially a death sentence.” But, he pauses, “if it comes to civil war, I will go. My life doesn’t matter.”

For years, Nazari believed — as many Iranians did — that pressure, negotiations, sanctions, or appeals to international institutions might eventually force the regime to change. Over time, that belief had eroded. By January, he says, “it was gone.” It’s why he supported the attacks on Iran by Israel and the U.S., the execution of Ayatollah Khamenei and key regime figures.

“I’ve been saying for years that they are not going to leave peacefully,” he says. “They will fight. If the choice is that many people die, including me and my family, but the country becomes free — and then in 10 years we are back as a people, it will be worth it.”

He stops himself.

“I don’t say this because I like death, I say it because I don’t see another way. There is no peaceful path left.”

But  the hope Nazari felt when Donald Trump said the United States would respond forcefully if Iranian authorities continued killing their own people, has also now died.

On February 28, when U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian leadership and critical infrastructure began, some diaspora Iranians gathered to celebrate what they saw as the fall of a regime figurehead they had opposed for decades. Others responded with shock, caution, or grief, warning of what might follow.

In Denmark, where roughly 25,000 people of Iranian origin live, that divide played out in public. In Aarhus, several hundred Iranian Danes gathered in the city center with flags, music and open calls for regime change. Some thanked the U.S. and Israel for the strikes. At the same time, a pro-regime memorial for Ayatollah Khamenei in Copenhagen drew around 200 participants.

Their response to U.S. actions were playing out in a country where the broad view of the U.S. as a friend and force for good in the world had shifted sharply. In Denmark, as war in Iran broke out, people were still thinking of Greenland and Trump’s threats to annex the territory. In a January 2026 poll, 60% of Danes said they now see the U.S. as an opponent rather than an ally, while just 17% still considered it an ally.

Among Iranians, inside Denmark as in the wider diaspora, this ambivalence towards the U.S. is all too familiar. In a recent article in the Dagbladet Information, Iranian-born activist Nahid Riazi warned against celebrating a war that seemed to have little to do with emancipation for Iranians.

“Who says that war brings freedom?” she wrote. “It is us who are being hit. It is our children who are being destroyed.” 

Nezari says he has heard this argument. He does not dismiss it. But, he asks, “what is the alternative?” If the war stops, he says, “and the regime stays, how do you guarantee they won’t keep killing people like they have since 1979? How do you guarantee they won’t start the street executions again?”

Trump, despite the failure of the first 21 hours of peace talks in Pakistan, continues to say the war is “very close to over,” that the Iranian government wants to make a deal. A deal, presumably, that enables them to stay in power.

The Islamic Republic may have been dealt a devastating blow, but it remains intact. Its leadership structure has shifted but not collapsed. To Nazari, that does not show resilience so much as the nature of the system itself.

He rejects the idea that the Islamic Republic functions like a government in any conventional sense. It behaves, he says, more like a cartel or an armed network — something held together not by institutions, but by force and succession. Too many powerful men remain alive, still able to operate. And a system like this, he argues, does not surrender because its center has been hit. It keeps going until every center is removed.

“Not until all the heads are cut off,” he says.

But U.S. attempts to bully the world into joining a war where the goals remain so varied and nebulous have been unsuccessful. The popularity of the war inside the U.S., even among Trump supporters, is low. The uncomfortable question now is what comes next — and whether anything has truly changed.

Still, Nazari argues that the current state of purgatory, in which the war is neither ongoing nor over, is not evidence of failure, but of what was always going to happen.

“We were not living in Iran,” he says. “We were living in a military compound with cities in between.” Even if negotiations resume, he believes something irreversible has already happened. The fact that the regime’s leaders now have to hide underground means, to him, that there is no real return to the old order.

“There’s no going back to how it was,” he says. But for now, Nazari is still in Denmark. His family is still in Iran. He still holds his phone close, hoping for news. Any news. Like Iranian exiles everywhere, and like the war itself, he is trapped in stasis, caught between distance and a sense of responsibility to his homeland — deeply involved, fundamentally powerless, yet unable to look away.

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She was speaking at an International Atomic Agency summit hosted by France. Just days before the summit, French president Emanuel Macron spoke — a nuclear submarine looming behind him — of the need to increase the country’s stockpile of nuclear warheads for the first time in several decades. “In this dangerous and uncertain world,” Macron said, “you have to be feared if you want to be free.” 

In February, the ‘New START treaty’, a mutual agreement between Russia and the U.S. to reduce and limit their nuclear arsenal, officially expired. The U.S. said China had conducted secret tests and that Beijing had to be part of any future non-proliferation agreement. For its part, the Chinese accused the U.S. government of seeking to mask its own expansionist ambitions. In the wake of the Iran war, started apparently because the Iranian regime was just days away from securing a bomb, other countries have spoken openly of their nuclear ambitions. After the start of the Iran war, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un spoke pointedly about preparing a nuclear-ready navy while inspecting a new destroyer and observing the testing of nuclear-capable cruise missiles. Even Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said Poland “will not want to be passive when it comes to nuclear security in a military context.”

On X, Tusk posted that Poland is in talks with France about joining its nuclear deterrence program. “We are arming together with our friends,” he wrote, “so that our enemies will never dare to attack us.” France is the only nuclear-capable European country, its systems (unlike the UK’s) completely independent of the U.S. and its new deterrence framework will include collaborations with Germany, Poland, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium. Macron is calling France’s new strategy “advance deterrence,” a willingness to spread French nuclear armaments across the continent. A senior Pentagon official said the U.S. would “obviously at a minimum strenuously oppose” European countries seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. The U.S., as part of a NATO agreement, already deploys over 100 nuclear weapons in Europe — in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. 

Europe’s anti-nuclear tradition grew out of grassroots movements in the 1970s. In West Germany, protests against a planned nuclear plant in the small wine-growing town of Wyhl began when local farmers feared pollution would destroy their land and crops. By the 1980s, millions of Europeans were protesting nuclear weapons and the deployment of NATO missiles across the continent, bringing nuclear security debates into the public arena and pushing governments toward disarmament efforts. The political impact of those protests were long-lasting. Across Europe, nuclear energy programs were curtailed or abandoned entirely. Denmark banned nuclear power plants in 1985, Germany shut down its last nuclear reactors in 2023, and several countries imposed strict limits on nuclear development. Nuclear technology, whether for energy or weapons, remained politically toxic in much of Europe. But, as Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen said European deterrence “is necessary because the military threat from Russia is expected to increase,” and its reliance on U.S. military support can arguably no longer be taken for granted.

At the Paris summit, China, Brazil, Belgium and Italy all signed up to a pledge to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050. South Africa signed the pledge earlier this month. The war in Iran has once again made clear that the world must wean itself off fossil fuels. The U.S. — which imposed additional tariffs on India for buying Russian oil and thus helping to finance the continuation of the war in Ukraine — has, since the start of the attack on Iran, told India it can continue to buy Russian oil. Delhi promptly bought 30 million barrels of Russian crude oil. But this month India also signed a deal with Canada to receive uranium to expand its nuclear energy program. But in 1974, Canada provided India with nuclear technology for peaceful uses that were promptly put towards the building of nuclear weapons. Nuclear collaborations between the two countries were suspended for decades. It’s not a coincidence that those ties are once again being revived in the current geopolitical context. A growing clamor for nuclear energy has clear proliferation risks.

While France has been talking about greater nuclear deterrence, most European states are speaking about a revival of nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels and as a means to achieve climate goals. The vast energy requirements of AI and data centres is also prompting nations to adopt an “atoms for algorithms” strategy, to be, as Macron said, “at the ​heart ​of ⁠the artificial intelligence challenge.” But to talk about energy alone is to ignore the appeal nuclear deterrence has for nation states trying to navigate dangerous geopolitical straits. Iran was attacked ostensibly because it was on the verge of having a bomb. Favored nations such as Saudi Arabia are able to sign nuclear pacts that remove non-proliferation guardrails, but the actions of the U.S. and Israel in Iran will make the bomb attractive to many more as a national security strategy.

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For even the largest militaries, it is an almost impossible task to identify, select and then precisely locate such a high volume of targets. But the U.S. military had some help. Claude, the “next generation AI assistant” built by Anthropic, was used in the planning of ‘Operation Epic Fury’. This, even though the Department of War recently labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk”.

Anthropic is one of the world’s leading AI companies. Together with Palantir, another Big Tech company, it has been working since 2024 with the Pentagon to embed its systems in military decision-making – creating what is arguably the operating platform of present-day U.S. warfare and intelligence. Even though secretary of defense Pete Hegseth said the company “delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal” and that the government would “cease all use of Anthropic's technology,” the company is too integrated into modern U.S. warfare for it not to be essential to the U.S. attack on Iran. The question might be not whether companies like Anthropic can ringfence their tech but whether the Pentagon might just commandeer it. 

Craig Jones, an academic who studies automated kill chains at the University of Newcastle, has told reporters that “the AI machine is making recommendations for what to target, which is actually much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought.” Similar AI systems have been used by Israel to coordinate its bombing campaign in Gaza, which is among the most destructive in human history. 

Among the first hits in the United States and Israel’s aerial bombardment of Iran was the Shajarah Tayyebeh primary school for girls, in the southern town of Minab. It was a Saturday morning, and school was in session. According to Iranian state media, at least 165 people were killed, mostly young girls between the ages of seven and 12. Another 96 were severely injured. Eyewitness and open source intelligence reports corroborate the claims of mass civilian casualties. Both Iran and Israel have denied responsibility. The United States has said it is “looking into” allegations that the school was destroyed by one of its missiles. Maybe, given the volume of the bombardment, they’ve lost track. 

It is too soon to know why the school was targeted – or whether it was an error. Either way, the U.S. military’s reliance on AI raises difficult questions.

AIs get things wrong all the time. Maybe it’s an extra finger in an AI-generated image, or a ‘hallucinated’ reference in a research report. Or, maybe, an algorithm sends a missile to the wrong address. That’s why Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that weapons “that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets” are simply not reliable enough. That position — along with Anthropic’s refusal to allow Claude to be used for mass domestic surveillance (although they are just fine with foreign surveillance) — led to the Pentagon cancelling a $200-million contract with the company on Friday, the day before the attacks on Iran began. The Department of War immediately signed a new deal, minus any ethical guardrails, with OpenAI.

Anthropic’s confrontation with the Pentagon has burnished its reputation as an “ethical” AI company. But it may have found its ethical backbone too late. Critics argue that even within Anthropic’s “red lines”, there is enormous potential for abuse, while a “human in the loop” does not necessarily prevent mistakes — raising questions about who, exactly, is responsible when these mistakes result in fatalities. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for Palestine, accused Amazon, Google and Microsoft in a 2025 of being “complicit in genocide” for providing cloud storage systems to the Israeli military. Anthropic’s integration into the U.S. military has been much deeper.

While Israel and the U.S. are waging an AI-powered war, Iran is responding with a technological revolution of its own. The Islamic Republic has pioneered the production of low-cost one-way attack drones, most notably the Shahed-136, which costs just $34,000 to produce and as much as $4 million to shoot down. These are battle-tested: Russia has launched an estimated 57,000 Shahed-type drones in its war against Ukraine. Despite U.S. reliance on its own high-tech AI-powered systems, an American version of the Shahed also made its debut, alongside Claude, in the attack on Iran. 

In response, Iran has aimed more than 1000 drones at neighboring Gulf states since the war broke out on Saturday. Hundreds have been shot down, but even the most sophisticated air defences struggle with this sheer volume, and dozens have struck their targets, threatening to prolong this war and cause more damage to U.S. allies than anticipated. It is significant that these targets included at least three Amazon data centers in Dubai and Bahrain. Just last month, Amazon announced that it was making Anthropic’s Claude available to its Middle Eastern customers. Claude experienced two global outages this week — it is not clear if these were related to the data center attacks. 

Tech evangelists promise that artificial intelligence will, one day, cure cancer, end poverty and greatly increase our quality of life. But the new technology’s most obvious impact has been on warfare. For those with access to them, AI systems like Claude make it dramatically easier to bomb hundreds of targets at the same time — and much harder to figure out who is accountable when something goes wrong. On Truth Social, Donald Trump — who has promised to stop wars, not start them — posted approvingly that technology and munitions now mean Wars “can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully.” 

As the bombing of Iran continues, we are not far from a time when AI not only parses data to select targets, it actually chooses when to pull the trigger. And advanced AI models have far fewer qualms, for instance, about deploying nuclear weapons than humans faced with similar scenarios. One day, when — if — war crimes investigators are able to pin down exactly who is responsible for killing dozens of young girls in Minab, tech bosses may find themselves implicated alongside military and political leaders. “The AI did it” can’t be their defense.

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Throughout my nearly five years in Tehran at the turn of this century, speculation about his health and longevity was a near-constant background hum. He was reported, or rumoured, to be mortally stricken by prostate cancer, his constitution already weakened by an assassination attempt in 1981 that left his right arm largely useless. Who would succeed him was far from clear, and the object of further speculation. 

As he lived on into more recent times, reaching the same age of 86 attained by his predecessor – the Islamic Republic's founding father Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – the prospect of his demise became a more immediate issue, though the question of succession remained equally shrouded in uncertainty. As Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei was the commanding voice behind the ruthless crackdown that took the lives of tens of thousands of citizens early this year in the latest and greatest of many escalating protests, at which the slogan "Marg Bar Diktator!" — Death to the Dictator! — became an increasingly prominent slogan. 

Their wish was confirmed to be true at 5 a.m. local time on Sunday morning by Iranian broadcasters. The previous morning, Khamenei’s compound in Tehran was demolished as the Israeli-American onslaught got under way while the Ayatollah was heading a meeting of the Defence Council. That ensured that top military figures were also killed, including the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Pakpour, the Army Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Musavi, and Khamenei's top military adviser, Ali Shamkhani, who had been wounded but survived the attack in June last year. 

The Iranian leadership appears to have been caught by surprise, as it was last year when the opening Israeli strike, which culled many top military leaders as well as nuclear scientists, was launched between two rounds of indirect negotiations between Iran and the U.S. Oman, which was mediating the talks, was furious then, denouncing Israel as the real destabilising factor in the region. 

Perhaps the Iranian leaders — and the Omani mediators — thought that such a dirty trick could only be pulled once. But it has happened again, with no evidence that the talks in Geneva had broken down. The chief Omani negotiator, Badr Albusaidi, was livid. Only hours before the strike, he was in Washington for meetings “to explain that a peace agreement between the U.S. and Iran is now within reach. No nuclear weapons. Not ever. Zero stockpiling. Comprehensive verification. Peacefully and permanently. Let’s support the negotiators in closing the deal.”

After learning of the attack, he expressed his outrage in another tweet: “I am dismayed. Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined. Neither the interests of the United States nor the cause of global peace are well served by this. And I pray for the innocents who will suffer. I urge the United States not to get sucked in further. This is not your war.”

But Donald Trump and the U.S. were already thoroughly sucked in, and it was indeed their war, or at least his. According to the Israelis, the date had been decided jointly weeks before, after months of planning. Which meant that the Geneva negotiations, focused on the nuclear issue, were simply deceptive camouflage designed to give time for the U.S. to complete the marshalling of its biggest naval and air buildup in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

Trump and the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu soon made it clear that the campaign now had little to do with the niceties of Iran's nuclear programme: the agenda was regime change in Tehran, and a surprise attack to decapitate the regime was an essential element. 

With Iran's air defences largely taken out in last year's 12 days of war, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Hundreds of air, missile and drone strikes were carried out on missile launchers, military bases and other targets around the country, with inevitable "collateral damage", including a girl's primary school in the southern town of Minab where scores of children were reported killed.

The Iranians did their best to live up to their dire warnings of deadly reprisals against Israel, and against American bases and allies on the Arab side of the Gulf and elsewhere. Missiles hailed down on airports and other installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and even Oman, despite its active mediation. While some U.S. bases may have been hit, so too were many civilian sites such as Dubai's iconic Burj al Arab hotel. Explosions too are being heard in Beirut, after Hezbollah fired rockets and drones at northern Israel to "avenge" Khamenei's death and the Israel Defense Forces struck back.

Air traffic was halted throughout a region rich in international hubs, sowing chaos worldwide. Iran's declaration that the strategic Strait of Hormuz was closed to shipping forced cargo shippers to suspend the voyages that transport some 20% of the world's oil and a lot of liquid gas, causing tremors through international markets. Once again, a decision taken by a tiny circle of men in Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran instantly rewired daily life, reminding us who actually gets to pull the global emergency brake.

What all this would do to Iran's relations with the Arab side of the Gulf was one of many open questions. While Oman was actively mediating, the other Arab oil states had been pressing the Americans not to allow a campaign that would predictably destabilise the region, and declaring their airspace not available for any hostilities. But any sympathy for Tehran quickly evaporated when the missiles started flying in: the Gulf Arab states closed ranks.

Trump and the Israelis made it clear that this was not one quick spectacular strike, but an ongoing campaign that would last days, perhaps even weeks. Presumably at the end, Iran would find its missile capabilities "obliterated," in Trump's favourite term, along with any nuclear activities. 

Once the bombs stop falling, Trump and Netanyahu urged, the Iranians should come out of their basements and take over a government that would be theirs for the taking. A historic opportunity that would likely not recur for generations, Iranians were told. 

But it is hard to imagine such regime change being wrought remotely from the skies. The regime lost little time in filling the leadership vacuum, setting up a three-man ruling council in line with the constitution, composed of the President, Masood Pezeshkian, the head of the Judiciary, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi from the Council of Guardians. All regime loyalists, and the latter two noted hard-liners. So business as usual as far as they are concerned. But the fact is that the assassination of the Supreme Leader and the attendant bludgeoning of the regime's capabilities will inevitably usher in a new and unpredictable phase in Iran's turbulent history.

On the streets, reactions were fractured: jubilation in areas that had long chanted “Death to the dictator”, state-promote mourning in others, but also fear and a grim resignation, an understanding that power vacuums are often filled with fresh repression or civil war.

A smooth transition to a peaceful democracy is about the least likely scenario among the many possibilities. So too is an imminent return of the monarchy, with a comeback by Israeli-backed Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah ousted by the 1979 revolution. So far there has been no sign visible to the outside world of a split in the ranks of the defenses built up by the Islamic Republic, which still has regular military forces numbering around 400,000, Revolutionary Guards of up to 190,000, and its auxiliary militia enforcers, the Basij, who may be able to mobilise around a million at street level. 

There must be much anger among regime loyalists, which may fall on the heads of any opposition protestors who imagine they can move in and take over the reins of government from the bombed-out wreckage of the Islamic Republic. The U.S. military is not likely to be able to remain engaged in the detail of defanging the regime once the main thrust of the campaign is done. But Israel likely will. Its equivalent of the CIA, the Mossad, has spent years building up formidable intelligence at street level, and will be doing its utmost to continue hamstringing the regime from within and fomenting opposition.Among the many unanswerable questions is whether all this will lead simply to chaos and fragmentation, which is probably Israel's preferred outcome, or to a more compliant regime willing to compromise with the U.S. in order to get crippling economic sanctions lifted. As Trump concedes the war might last weeks, who knows what Iran will eventually emerge from the smoke and the rubble?

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If anybody hoped that the man on whose word it all hangs, President Donald Trump, might clarify his intentions in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, they were disappointed. 

Speaking 36 hours before a third round of indirect and ultimately inconclusive talks with the Iranians in Geneva on Thursday, he said, "My preference is to stop this problem through diplomacy but one thing is for certain, I will never allow the world's number one sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon...they want to make a deal, but we haven't heard those secret (sic) words, 'We will never have a nuclear weapon.’”

In the run-up to the Geneva talks, led on the U.S. side by real estate moguls Steve Witkoff and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Iranian officials voiced optimism that a deal could be struck and insisted they would be flexible on the nuclear issue. Various formulas were being bandied around, such as Iran sending abroad half of its estimated 300kg of highly enriched uranium and diluting the rest under supervision, participating in a regional consortium for peaceful enrichment and so on. 

In theory, for Iran to say "We will never have a nuclear weapon" should not be an issue — it has said all along that it is not pursuing that goal, which is banned by a fatwa. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X this week that Tehran “will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.” Which begs the question as to why it has enriched uranium to 60% — short of weapons grade but well beyond the levels needed for peaceful civilian purposes.  

Witkoff and Kushner will be vigilant for signs of Iranian duplicity and foot-dragging. But with another set of talks ending with no deal apart from promises of more talks, both sides might simply be playing for time, Iran to delay the feared blow, and the U.S. to finish assembling the assault force, its biggest mobilization of naval and air power in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

There is strong apprehension in the region that the huge and costly U.S. buildup must mean business. American bombs and missiles would hit Iran. The Iranians would make good on their threat to make it a regional war, not a symbolic retaliation as happened in the 12-day war in June last year after American bunker-buster bombs hit Iran's nuclear facilities in Isfahan, Natanz and Fordow. This time Iranian missiles would target U.S. military assets, bases on the Arab side of the Gulf and elsewhere, and perhaps oil installations. And Israel. The Israelis would hit back hard. Hezbollah in Lebanon would do its best to join in, prompting a further massive Israeli response. 

There were ominous straws in the wind. The U.S. withdrew non-essential personnel from bases in the Gulf, and from its embassy in Beirut. The Israelis reportedly warned Lebanon that if Hezbollah joined in, they would hit back at government targets, including Beirut airport, which were unscathed throughout the earlier hostilities. They stepped up their daily attacks on suspected Hezbollah targets, including a big missile attack on February  20 on the eastern Beqaa valley which left 12 dead, including eight Hezbollahis. Since the November 2024 ceasefire, Hezbollah has not fired so much as a peashooter at Israel while well over 400 of their people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon.

Does all this mean the doomsday scenario is inexorable? Are the Americans set on a clear game plan, with identified objectives and the means to attain them?

Apparently not. Trump is reportedly receiving divided counsel from his advisers, military and political, some more hawkish and others more cautious than others. Above all, he has an eye on the looming mid-term elections in November. He was elected on a platform of ending the "forever" wars in the Middle East, yet could be on the brink of starting another one, which would not go down well with part of his MAGA base or the public in general. 

The signs are that he was hoping the swashbuckling display of power would intimidate the Iranians into buckling. Witkoff admitted Trump was puzzled that Iran had not capitulated. “Why, under this pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do?’ And, yet, it’s sort of hard to get them to that place,” he told Fox News. Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi explained: "It's because we're Iranian."

Trump's adrenalin was clearly set pumping by the adventure in Venezuela, where a similar military buildup culminated in the operation to abduct President Nicolas Maduro. But Iran is not Venezuela. It is a highly militarized regime which has spent 47 years preparing its internal and external defences, and which has different power bases that make it hard simply to decapitate. There is no magic bullet that might not set the region on fire. 

Taking out the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i (who is also a religious leader, and this is Ramadan) would not be likely to bring about a change in regime behavior as in Venezuela. Bringing the regime down altogether would require a prolonged and detailed campaign that the U.S. military machine might not be able to sustain. 

That's where Israel comes in. Some White House advisers reportedly believe it would play better politically for Israel to strike first rather than the U.S., and thus force Iran to retaliate. Like Trump, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a man with an eye on impending elections (October at the latest) is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who makes no secret of his ambition to see the Iranian regime brought down. Netanyahu — backed by almost the entire Israeli political spectrum — is clearly champing at the bit, but aware of the danger of being seen to drag the U.S. into a potentially messy embroilment. One reason perhaps for the unusually discreet nature of Netanyahu's sixth visit to the White House on  February 11 — in through the back door, no lovefest press appearances. 

Which may also actually have been a sign that the two allies might not be on the same strategic page. Plunging Iran into fragmentation and chaos would absolutely fit Israel's playbook, but not necessarily America's. The two are working at cross-purposes in Syria, where the Israelis are pushing against a strong central government which the U.S. is supporting, even against its erstwhile Kurdish allies in the north-east. 

If there are two constants in the current equation, they are that the Iranian people’s disillusionment and rage against the regime will not go away, and neither will Israel's desire to overthrow it. But if Trump does not share that goal, he will have to find a face-saving way to wriggle off the hook he has created with his ostentatious military buildup. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter.Sign up here.

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The post The phoney war: Will the U.S. strike a decisive blow against Iran? appeared first on Coda Story.

TRIPP is more than a photo-op or a vanity project. The South Caucasus, particularly since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has become an area of critical strategic value as a corridor between East and West and a new arena of superpower competition. “Vance is not well known for flying around the world just for fun,” said Svante Cornell, Research Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Stockholm. “The U.S. is serious about the TRIPP Corridor and they want everybody in the region to know that.” 

Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars over disputed Nagorno-Karabakh since the late-1980s, as the Soviet Union collapsed. It has been a brutal, society-shaping conflict, followed in 2023 by Azerbaijan’s rapid takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh and the flight of nearly the entire ethnic Armenian population.

Russia, though formally cast as a mediator, spent years manipulating the conflict: arming both sides, managing ceasefires and preventing resolution in a familiar imperial tactic later perfected in Ukraine: manufacturing and freezing instability until it could be turned into full-scale war on Moscow’s terms. But Trump changed the narrative by brokering a peace that has continued to hold. In December, officials from both countries discussed “lasting peace” and a “joint future” at a summit in the Qatari capital Doha. Armenia and Azerbaijan are also deep in discussion about integrating their energy systems. And Washington is now trying to lock that peace into concrete: rails, roads, and fiber that physically re-route the region away from Russian and Iranian gatekeeping.

This, wrote Trump on Truth Social recently, “was a nasty War… but now we have peace and prosperity.” For once, the self-congratulation isn’t entirely empty. Trump – who has confused Armenia for Albania and talked about settling its war with “Aber-baijan” in Davos just weeks ago – can legitimately take credit for making geopolitical gains in what Russia considered its backyard. 

The US president has repeatedly quoted Vladimir Putin as telling him: “‘I cannot believe you got this war settled’... cause it’s his territory.” That line matters because the South Caucasus is to Russia what the Caribbean Basin and the Panama “backyard” once was to the United States: a strategic near-abroad where outside powers aren’t supposed to build permanent leverage. 

Hemispheric defense, the Trump administration has made clear when it comes to Latin America, is at the heart of its defense strategy and that it expects other superpowers to be similarly focused on their spheres of influence. Thus, Russia’s inability to be a reliable ally to Armenia will be seen as weakness to be preyed upon by rival powers. Armenia is now even talking to Turkey, a historical adversary, about opening their shared border and establishing diplomatic relations.

Still, Armenia remains a member of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union and has its railway networks handled by Russia’s RZhD national rail operator — a factor Russia tried to use in an attempt to get involved with TRIPP. “Regarding the 'Trump Road' project, as it's being called, we confirm our readiness to explore possible options for our involvement,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova said in January. Armenia’s Parliament Speaker shot down the possibility as “absurd.”

As for Azerbaijan, Trump said on Truth Social that part of Vance’s visit to Baku would be dedicated to “the sale of Made in the U.S.A. Defense Equipment,” a prospect that won’t please Moscow.

Georgia, once considered Washington's closest partner in the South Caucasus, is notably absent from JD Vance’s itinerary and being left behind is as consequential as being included.

For two decades, Georgia’s power and growing prosperity came from being the corridor: the place where pipelines, highways, and rail lines had to pass if Europe wanted Caspian energy without Russian control. The Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline was the signature project of that era, an “East–West energy corridor” literally running through Georgia. TRIPP threatens to redraw that map. A corridor through southern Armenia that becomes the new headline route doesn’t just “leave Georgia behind” — it means Georgia loses its most significant geopolitical bargaining chip because transit was the card it could play with Washington, Brussels, Ankara and Baku.

Now, as Washington invests in a new flagship corridor, countries like Georgia that fall outside it are forced to hedge. Over the past decade, Georgia has deepened ties with China through trade deals, cultural exchanges, and visa-free travel, while simultaneously sliding back toward Russia despite Moscow’s 2008 invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Under the Georgian Dream government, repressive legislation and violent crackdowns on protest have widened the gap with the EU and the U.S. Georgian prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze has appealed directly to Trump for a reset, but TRIPP makes clear where Washington’s priorities now lie. With Azerbaijan and Armenia at the heart of a new U.S.-backed route, influence in the South Caucasus is reorganizing around infrastructure — and power is flowing along it.

TRIPP, even if it exists just on paper for now, indirectly challenges the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, a network of railways, ports, pipelines, and trade corridors aimed at boosting international trade under Beijing’s leadership. It enables the moving of goods while bypassing Russia and, where possible, Iran — an approach that became more urgent after 2022. And it undermines China, which has been busy paving routes to Iran. Both countries have been in intense contact with Central Asian countries and last summer inaugurated a railway route that connects China and Iran through Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. 

The South Caucasus is just a small piece in a puzzle that fits together over 140 Belt and Road countries — and Cornell is skeptical about the scale of China’s ambition versus its actual investment. “Belt and Road maps include a lot of infrastructure in this part of the world that has nothing to do with China,” he told me. “Most everything that's been built in the region has been built as a result of the funding from the countries in the region, not by Chinese funds.“  In keeping with this strategy, a fully operational TRIPP might be seen by China as a benefit, a way to trade while avoiding unreliable maritime routes. But researchers in China say that the problem will be if TRIPP “becomes securitized or if Washington leverages its control for geopolitical influence.” And with U.S. foreign policy increasingly waged as a battle with China for resources and global influence, TRIPP could become a threat to Chinese influence in the region. 

Vice President Vance’s visit is a sign of sustained U.S. engagement in the region and a sign that Trump’s attention has not waned after a ceremonial peace agreement in Washington.

The simplest way to read TRIPP is as a 27-mile project with an outsized consequence: it reorders who controls the “land bridge” between Europe and Central Asia and it tells every capital nearby who Washington thinks matters. 

And China will have to prepare for an economic standoff in terrain it once assumed was ripe for Chinese dominance. Russia, meanwhile, finds itself on slippery ground, no longer the indispensable broker it once was in its immediate neighborhood. TRIPP also adds an unexpected edge to the Ukraine-shaped narrative of a Trump administration willing to accommodate Moscow at every turn, suggesting instead a relationship that is less uniform and more selectively disruptive than it first appears.

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The post A Trump corridor through the Caucasus appeared first on Coda Story.

The first two rounds, which began last month, have seen the Union Solidarity and Development Party, the party of the military junta, grab a substantial lead, putting it on course to form the next, notionally civilian, government. Only 131 of the country’s 330 townships are holding the elections in full, a further 118 townships are holding partial polls in areas the military controls, while polls in 65 townships have been canceled or suspended because of fighting. Opposition parties, including Aung Saan Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, which won the last election in a landslide, have been forcibly dissolved. Criticism of the election has been criminalized.

ASEAN, the 11-nation regional bloc of which Myanmar is still officially a part, has said it will not recognize election results. The United Nations said the election “seems nearly certain to further ingrain insecurity, fear and polarization throughout the country.” And the European Union described the election as a “sham” before it even began. But Myanmar’s military junta does have powerful support. China has propped up the military regime in exchange for access to resources, and the Myanmar election was only announced after discussions between Xi Jinping and Min Aung Hlaing. Election observers include officials from Belarus, Russia, India and Nicaragua. And in September, Hlaing visited Moscow, signing agreements to cooperate on nuclear energy and space exploration, and to protect each other from international justice. 

This month, Myanmar’s military was forced to defend its conduct in the Hague, as hearings began at the International Court of Justice where it stands accused of of perpetrating a long-running genocide against the Muslim Rohingya minority. Already, by 2018, as hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled Myanmar, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had described the situation as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” In 2019, The Gambia approached the ICJ to file a lawsuit against Myanmar, the first filed on behalf of a persecuted people by a third party. The hearings, which have only just started and could take years to conclude, will nonetheless still have implications and set judicial precedents for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the ICJ.

Not that it has stopped Myanmar’s military from continuing to use methods, since deposing the democratically elected government in 2021, such as “arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings, and indiscriminate attacks on civilians”  that Human Rights Watch said amounted to “war crimes.” Even now, the country is embroiled in bloody conflict. Over 170 armed resistance groups have coalesced to seize 42% of the country. Heavy bombing and artillery fire are commonplace throughout the country. Over 3,5 million people have been displaced into the likes of Thailand and India, 7,700 have been killed by the military, and over 30,300 arrested of which 630 are children.

A local medic from the mountainous Chin State, large swathes of which are rebel-held, told me she had been detained by Myanmar military forces while giving medical assistance to rebels. “My ankles and wrists were chained,” she said, “and wooden blocks were used as restraints.” She was beaten and threatened with sexual assault and said she could smell the dead bodies of other detainees.

This is the backdrop in which Myanmar goes to polls for the final phase of the elections. Despite ASEAN’s rejection of the results, China insists elections are a way out of the civil war and towards stability. In a recent column in the “South China Morning Post”, an analyst argued that “China is the only country with the clout, experience and contacts to talk and make deals with all sides.” Myanmar is a critical supplier of rare earths to China.

Given the transactional foreign policy that has become a cornerstone of Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States, it’s perhaps not surprising that the White House too has been warming to Myanmar’s military government. As the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela and acquisitive, imperial interest in both Greenland and Canada show, all relations with foreign countries are seen exclusively in terms of economic and strategic value. Normalizing relations even with Myanmar’s authoritarian regime would be palatable if it delivered access to rare earths and caused unease in Beijing.

The United States, through USAID, played a strong supporting role in Myanmar’s elections in 2015 and 2020 and in 2024 warned about the deteriorating “human rights crisis” in the country. But in July last year, Myanmar’s military leader Hlaing sent Donald Trump a letter complimenting his “strong leadership.” It was a response to a letter from Washington outlining the tariff imposed on exports from Myanmar, a communication that the military junta treated as acknowledgement of its status as the legitimate government. The Trump administration then appeared interested in a dialogue with the Myanmar military junta about access to rare earths. Just weeks later, in what the Trump administration said was a coincidence, it lifted sanctions on individuals and companies connected to the junta.

Also in July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a cable to U.S. diplomats advising them to refrain from criticizing foreign elections as “consistent with the administration’s emphasis on national sovereignty.” And in November, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said that Myanmar had “made notable progress in governance and stability” and had “plans for free and fair elections.” It was a remarkable statement of faith in a junta accused of genocide and of overthrowing a democratically elected civilian government, but consistent with the Trump administration’s prioritizing of transactional partnerships over moral principles. From January 26, Myanmar nationals will no longer be eligible for temporary protected status in the U.S., with the Trump administration citing the elections as evidence that Myanmar was safe.

With Russia, China and the U.S. in the Myanmar military’s corner, the implication is clear. The new Great Game is the global tussle for minerals and resources, making Venezuela, Greenland, Canada and Myanmar, among others, the new spheres of superpower hostility.

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The post The Yangon playbook: Why military rule is being legitimized appeared first on Coda Story.

Sara’s story: 

I became an exile in 2015 when I had to leave Syria. I'm originally from the South, but I was studying in Damascus at the time. By 2015, things had become really complicated. Bombs were falling every day. I love my homeland. But there was something I noticed—people didn't see the future anymore. And that was much scarier. People were in survival mode. There was no more looking forward to anything. I just needed to build a better future, but I never expected to become an exile.

When I was a child, I didn’t have any notion of borders. Back then, we had family in Lebanon because my grandfather was born there before the Sykes-Picot agreement [the 1916 treaty that carved up the Ottoman empire between Britain and France], and as kids we travelled easily between the two countries. My Lebanese aunt and cousins visited us often, and we visited them. These borders existed, but to me they felt light, almost invisible, there was always this connection, and I never questioned it. After 2011, everything changed. My father was on his way to Lebanon for my cousin’s funeral when someone warned him to go into hiding because the Assad regime was after him. That moment marked the first time we felt the border as a wall, the first time we were cut off from part of our family.

The moment I left, in my head it was simple: I'm leaving for a few years, I'll study, things will get better, and I'll come back. I never imagined it would be this difficult. I didn't have much knowledge about exile beforehand. In those first years in France, I was just adapting.

When I had to leave Syria in 2015, each border became an obstacle to cross, each one a huge ordeal—two months spent trying to cross them to reach my mother in France. The situations were often dangerous, sometimes requiring long walks. I developed this very physical connection to borders. We would wait in camps for days. You see the border, a gate that opens and closes controlled by others and they decide when you can pass. You just sit and wait, sometimes for hours, and then when it opens you go. This was the case between Greece and Macedonia.

But today—it's going to be almost ten years now—I question this a lot. What is exile? Especially with the policies around it in Europe. Why do I have to prove my existence every day? I try to integrate in all the ways that are expected of me. I speak the language fluently, I completed my studies, I learned the culture, I work, I pay my taxes, everything that is supposed to make me a "good refugee," a good example. I have done all of it.

But belonging is something else. It cannot take root in a society where I am constantly asked to justify myself, to tick every box, and still it is never enough.

As a political refugee, I only have a travel document. I have no Syrian papers. And it clearly states that I cannot go to Syria. If I enter the country, I lose my residency. I would have to give up the life I've built here just to visit my family, to see my father, to be present when my grandfather died. I don't have the option to go back and forth, to keep any real connection with home.

At first I tried to accept it—I told myself that living here means losing certain privileges. But going home is not a privilege. Seeing your family members for the last time is not a privilege—it's simply life, the bare minimum. Laws that deny this are profoundly dehumanizing.

When I think about borders, for me it's not only geopolitical—they are actual walls. I have no choice; it stands right there, impossible to cross. That's the real meaning of a border: the physical, unyielding reality of it. It's a block.

Photography is my way of giving form to things. Exile is not a physical space, it's not tangible. I live in exile. But where is that? What is that? And yet it's real. I don't feel connected to any physical place. But photography allows me to materialize something. I create a space through these photos. I'm trying to visualize exile.

The day I left Syria, the night before, my phone broke and deleted all of my images. I left Syria with nothing—no photos of my life with my friends, no memories. I had lost everything. During the journey from Syria to France, I chose not to document anything because I didn't want it to be part of my life. So I refused to record it.

A few years later, as I realized I was starting to forget, I began to panic. My fear wasn't only about forgetting the events—it was about losing the feelings, the personal experiences that give them meaning. I thought about the importance of documenting and archiving—not just for myself, but for collective memory. If I forget, and no trace remains, what happens to our struggles, our narratives? What happens to the shared memories, to the archives?

I don't know if art or photography can really make political change, but they help me connect with people who share similar experiences. Understanding these stories helps me process my own, it supports me mentally. Sometimes people here say, "You're lucky—you have a story to express." And I think, please, take my story and give me a normal life instead.

If I had a normal life, I wouldn't hold onto these themes so tightly. I cling to them because they're my reality—I don't have another choice.

Of course, I think it's important to work on these subjects, to talk about exile and displacement. But it's equally important to remember that the real hope is that one day no one will have to live these stories in the first place.

I'm 29. I came here when I was 19. In February it will be 10 years. I was talking with a friend who visited from Syria recently. She lives in Damascus, she's a filmmaker. I feel guilty when I talk to Syrians who are still inside. I feel like I left them or abandoned them. Because of that guilt, I'm always careful when I talk about my suffering in exile, since many people see living in Europe as a kind of privilege. But she was telling me that after traveling for just a week, she felt exhausted and thought, "I need to go home." And I told her, if you want to understand my feelings, it's exactly what you're feeling now, but for 10 years. I never stopped feeling like I'm traveling. It never stops.

The post On the edge of home: A Syrian photographer’s story of exile appeared first on Coda Story.

The images rolling through my mind of what I had seen over four humanitarian missions were already apocalyptic. I tried to picture “worse”. The children and adults I saw, in a crush of bodies, faces frozen in a grimace of despair and grief as they held out their empty pots. I tried to amplify the deadened eyes, the lethargic movements of starving people, and the soundtrack of desperate voices not quite drowned out by the incessant buzz of drones overhead. 

Mohammed, INARA’s physical therapist in Gaza City, had sent me a couple videos of Souhaib, a little boy he’s treating. Souhaib had woken up one morning unable to move. He was admitted to the ICU and then spent a month in the hospital, but his condition did not change all that much. 

The doctor’s preliminary diagnosis was acute flaccid paralysis – most likely a rare disease known as Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), a rapid-onset muscle weakness caused by the immune system damaging the peripheral nervous system. But that diagnosis hasn’t been confirmed and cannot be confirmed in Gaza because the tests Sohaib needs aren’t available. All anyone can do is to give Sohaib physical therapy and hope that the paralysis doesn’t move to his involuntary nerves, his internal organs, which would lead to death. 

Soubaib is malnourished, his head looks unnaturally big with its shock of blond hair, but Mohammad manages to coax smiles and giggles out of him as he moves his limp limbs. Souhaib is not the only child suffering in this way. There has been a spike in cases of suspected GBS. Where normally there would be one or two cases annually, now there are dozens, a byproduct of the lack of sanitation and lack of food. In Gaza, people’s bodies – especially those of children – have become too weak to fight infection. 

“It’s like we’ve been issued a death sentence, only it’s a slow and excruciating execution” Mohammed messaged me on the day that famine, according to the United Nation’s IPC scale, was officially confirmed in Gaza City. Not that the people there needed a report to know that they were starving and being starved. 

Hunger related deaths have soared to more than 400, including 145 children.

Ever since Israel implemented its full blockade on humanitarian trucks when it broke the ceasefire back in March there has been nothing “sustainable” or durable in what we, or frankly any of us in the humanitarian community, do or are allowed to do. We require Israel’s permission to pick up our pallets from the crossing point, to move waste, to fix bombed water lines, to cross through red zones and within the vast majority of Gaza, basically to do just about anything. In theory it’s meant to protect us from Israeli strikes. In reality, it’s always a gamble. Gaza is the deadliest place for humanitarians.

In May, Israel and the United States established the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, replacing a pre-existing and proven system of at least 400 distribution points with just four located inside Israel’s red zones. Since then, more than a thousand people have been killed by Israeli guns, drones and tanks, just trying to get food from these locations. Doctors Without Borders, whose staff regularly receive mass influxes of casualties following violence at GHF sites, plainly stated: “This is not aid. This is orchestrated killing.’

Under international and U.S. pressure, Israel has been allowing a “trickle” of aid trucks to enter Gaza along with those carrying commercial goods destined for the market where few can afford the astronomical purchase costs. 

A parcel of fresh vegetables weighing six kilograms (around 13 pounds) – not anything brought from the outside, but local produce from the few greenhouses still accessible – costs around $120. When the vegetables are delivered, I’m struck by how little children are grinning and grabbing at a cucumber like it’s candy on Halloween. 

My INARA team goes to visit the home of a mother who showed up at our Gaza City clinic utterly beside herself and hysterical. Her twin boys’ bottoms scream with angry red diaper rash. Her husband holds out the can of baby formula with barely two scoops left. And one of her daughters ducks her head in shame as her mother shows our team her shaved head, raw with scabs from scratching because she had lice. The team returns with whatever they’ve been able to scratch together: a little shampoo, soap, baby formula and diapers.

One of the boys tells Yousra that it’s his birthday the next day. His mother says that all he has been asking for is bread. Not cake. Gazan children don’t even dare to dream of cake. Yousra returns, having searched for hours, on her own time, with a “bread cake”. As many loaves as she was able to find and a single candle. 

The boy’s smile is pure magic. 

“I had to do it,” Yousra told me later. “I just had to give him a little bit of joy.”

When I read the news, some days ago, about Israel dropping leaflets over Gaza City, ordering its one million residents to move south, I was in a panic. 

I breathed a sigh of semi-relief when I heard from Yousra, when she finally got a signal on her phone. 

And then Yousra sends a message and video that just shreds me.

“I didn’t want to leave my sons (7 and 10) alone while I was at work in case there was an evacuation order or a bombing, so I took them to my sister’s house” Yousra said. “We saw a very young girl lifting very heavy jerry cans, so I asked my older son to get out of the car to help her. I wanted my son to have this empathy, to help her and to know how exhausting her situation is.” 

“Don’t worry”, though, Yousra continued. “We are strong enough to support others. We are here for our families, for the team, and for the people.” 

Yet there is no strength in the world that can withstand the level of bombing that is raining hell beyond hell down on Gaza. And as Israel launched its ground offensive in Gaza City this week, sending in thousands of troops, there has been a crushing sense of finality. That people, forced to flee, are saying goodbye to their city, their homes, for the last time. 

Our staff in Deir al-Balah, in the middle of the Gaza Strip,  have been providing those evacuated from the north with fresh vegetable parcels purchased from the market. I was sent a video of a boy laughing as he bit into a tomato. “I can’t wait for my mom to make salad,” he says. “I’m so hungry!”

Earlier this week Mohammed tried to scout out a possible location for a tent for himself and his elderly parents. He sent me a video of the traffic jam along Gaza’s coastal road, people who are heeding Israel’s warning to leave the city. 

Others are still stuck in the city, even as the Israeli tanks enter. “No one knows what to do”, he says. “I’m watching people in the street, they are just going around in circles, gasping and crying about how they can’t leave, don’t know where to go or how to get there.”

Mohammed, himself, feels deeply conflicted about leaving. “Arwa,” he tells me, “we didn’t evacuate when most people did last time, but I think we are going to have to this time. It burns me inside, it burns. It’s so painful. Where does this road end?” What answer is it possible to give him? “I wish,” he wrote, “I wish not to be displaced from our land. And to not be then displaced to Egypt. And to not then be displaced to South Sudan etc etc.”

He knows, like everyone in Gaza, how the Israelis and the Trump administration casually float ideas about where Gazans can be moved, how easily their land can be emptied. 

That time has now come. Our primary care clinic, which was seeing 120 patients a day in Gaza City, has been moved further west, towards the coast. Four of our staff are refusing to leave and will continue to operate it for as long as they can. 

The rest of our staff have now been forcibly evacuated further south, into tents and concrete rooms with no running water or electricity. 

“You know Arwa,” Yousra says after spending 12 hours stuck in a sea of human misery making its way south, “it’s what you don’t see in the videos. It’s the women just sitting along the side of the road with one plastic bag between their legs, too tired to walk.” She’s struggling to find the words to express what she’s witnessed. And what keeps her going. “I want to live,” she tells me. “Not because I’m scared of death. I want to live so I can keep testifying to what we endured and have to endure every day while the world just watches and does nothing. And I want to live, so I can keep helping my people.”

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It doesn’t appear to matter how many more civilians die in the meantime. “Israel values the work of journalists, medical staff, and all civilians,” Benjamin Netanyahu posted on social media on August 25 responding to global condemnation following the deaths of five journalists in an attack on Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip. Since the war in Gaza began in October, 2023, at least 197 journalists have been killed according to the Committee to Protect Journalists which has described Israel’s actions as “the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented.” Al Jazeera, the Qatari-based news network, puts the number at over 270. 

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, speaking at a Catholic festival in Rimini, said the killings were “an unacceptable attack on press freedom and on all those who risk their lives to report the tragedy of war.” British prime minister Keir Starmer called the bombing in Khan Yunis “completely indefensible.” On X, the German foreign ministry said it had “repeatedly called on the Israeli government to allow immediate independent foreign media access and afford protection for journalists operating in Gaza.” Spain described it as “a flagrant and unacceptable violation of international humanitarian law.” 

Given the near universal condemnation, will anything be done to hold Israel to account? “More governments are showing a willingness in recent months to call out Israel for its failure to protect journalists and to call for transparent investigations into their killings,” said Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “But,” she told Coda, “they still stop short on taking any concrete measures - such as sanctions, or conditions on trade agreements or weapons sales - that could force Israel to uphold its obligations under international law.”

Earlier this month, on August 10, Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif, was killed in Gaza City alongside several of his colleagues. Israel admitted to targeting al-Sharif, describing him as “masquerading” as a journalist. “A terrorist is a terrorist,” Israeli diplomats said, “even if Al Jazeera gave him a press badge.” 

According to intelligence sources who spoke to Israeli publication +972 Magazine, the IDF established a special “Legitimization Cell” after October 7, tasked not with security operations but with gathering intelligence to bolster Israel's media image. The unit specifically sought to identify Gaza-based journalists it could portray as Hamas operatives, driven by anger that Palestinian reporters were “smearing Israel's name in front of the world.” Whenever global criticism intensified over the killing of journalists, the cell was instructed to find intelligence that could publicly counter the narrative. "If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists, then immediately there's a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent—as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable," one intelligence source told +972 Magazine. Intelligence gathered was passed directly to American officials through special channels, with officers told that their work was vital to allowing Israel to continue the war without international pressure.

In its initial inquiry into Monday’s bombing of Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, Israel claimed a camera at the hospital was “being used to observe the activity of IDF troops, in order to direct terrorist activities against them.” International journalists have no independent access to Gaza. It would be, Ginsberg said, “one way to help force a change in the narrative being pushed by Israel that all Gazan journalists are terrorist operatives and therefore none can be trusted.” Ginsberg told Coda that of the cases of journalists and media workers killed by Israel, CPJ has so far “deemed 26 to be deliberate targeting… these are the cases where we are clear that Israel would have known the individuals killed were journalists and nevertheless targeted them.”

Journalists, as civilians, are protected under international law. Targeting them is a war crime. Yet, Ginsberg notes, since “international journalists and human rights investigators do not have access to Gaza,” it has “hampered documentation.” And “more disturbingly,” she added, “the dehumanization of Gazan journalists and Gazans more generally means there has not been the collective outrage that should accompany any killing let alone killings of this magnitude.”

Israel has already said that the deaths of journalists in the attack on Nasser Hospital were a "tragic mishap" that resulted from legitimate security operations. The recent UN Security Council vote on an immediate ceasefire (14 out of 15 members supporting, only the U.S. withholding) signals Israel’s growing isolation. But American support is all Israel needs to continue its war. As the killings of journalists continue to be explained away, without evidence, as the killing of terrorists, the window for independent reporting in Gaza has likely closed. The systematic targeting of Gazan journalists isn't collateral damage, it's strategic silencing ahead of what may be the war's final phase.

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The Iranian defense minister’s trip to Qingdao - his first foreign visit since the ceasefire with Israel - was meant to signal solidarity within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a block that includes Russia, India, and Pakistan. But the SCO, despite its ambitions, could only muster a joint statement of “serious concern” over Middle East tensions when Iran was being bombed by Israel - a statement India refused to sign. This exposed the stark limits of alternative alliances and the growing difficulty of presenting a united front against the West. In Qingdao, Andrei Belousov, the Russian defense minister, warned of “worsening geopolitical tensions” and “signs of further deterioration,” a statement that’s hard to argue with.  

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, Trump relished his role as global peacemaker, claiming credit for an uneasy Israel-Iran truce - a truce that Russia welcomed while being careful to credit Qatar for its diplomatic efforts. Russia itself reportedly played a supporting role alongside Oman and Egypt. But the real diplomatic heavy lifting was done by others - and Russia’s own leverage  was exposed as limited. 

Once the region’s indispensable power broker, Moscow found itself on the sidelines. Its influence with Tehran diminished, and its air defense systems in Iran—meant to deter Israeli and later American strikes—were exposed as ineffective. With Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria collapsed, the Kremlin is acutely aware it cannot afford to lose another major ally in the region. As long as the Iranian government stands, Russia can still claim to have a role to play, but its ability to project power in the Middle East is now more symbolic than real. The 12-day war put Russia in an awkward position. Iran, a key supplier of drones for Russia’s war in Ukraine, was unimpressed by Moscow’s lack of support during the crisis. Even after signing a 20-year pact in January, Russia offered little more than “grave concern” when the bombs started falling. Similarly to the SCO, BRICS, supposedly the alternative to Western alliances, could only issue a joint statement, revealing just how thin multipolarity is in practice.

Enter the new narrative spin

For years, Vladimir Putin has argued that the West’s “rules-based order” is little more than a tool for maintaining Western dominance and justifying double standards. His vision of multipolarity is not just anti-American rhetoric—it’s a deliberate strategy to appeal to countries disillusioned by Western interventions, broken promises, and the arrogance of those who claimed victory in the Cold War. Russia has worked to turn Western failures—from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Libya to the global financial crisis—into recruitment tools for its own vision of “civilizational diversity.” Multipolarity, in the Kremlin’s telling, is about giving every culture, every nation, a seat at the table, while quietly reserving the right to redraw the map and rewrite the rules when it suits Moscow’s interests.

For a time, this approach was paying off. Russia’s anti-colonial and multipolar rhetoric resonated well beyond its borders, particularly in the Global South and among those frustrated by Western hypocrisy. 

But across the periphery of Russia’s historical empire, from Central Asia to the Baltics, from the Caucasus to Ukraine and Georgia, Russia’s multipolar message is seen not as liberation but as yet another chapter in a centuries-long cycle of conquest, repression and forced assimilation - a reality that continues to define the struggle for self-determination across Russia’s former empire.  Here, Russia’s message of “sameness” has long served as a colonial tool, erasing languages, cultures, and identities in the name of imperial unity. 

The recent conflict in the Middle East has forced Moscow to adapt its “multipolarity” messaging yet again. As its limitations as a regional power became impossible to ignore, Russian state media and officials began to reframe the conversation—no longer just championing multipolarity, but openly embracing the language of empire. In this new narrative, ‘empire’ is recast not as a relic of oppression, but as a stabilizing force uniquely capable of imposing order on an unruly world. The pivot is as much about masking diminished leverage as it is about projecting confidence: if Moscow can no longer dictate outcomes, it can still claim the mantle of indispensable power by rewriting the very terms of global legitimacy.

As we peered into the abyss of World War III, Russian state media pivoted: suddenly, ‘empire’—long a slur—was rebranded as a stabilizing force in a chaotic world.

This rhetorical shift has been swift and striking. Where once the Kremlin denounced imperialism as a Western vice, Russian commentators now argue that empires are not only inevitable but necessary for stability. “Empires could return to world politics not only as dark shadows of the past. Empire may soon become a buzzword for discussing the direction in which the world’s political organization is heading,” wrote one Russian analyst. The message is clear: in an age of chaos and fractured alliances, only a strong imperial center—preferably Moscow—can guarantee order. But beneath the surface, this embrace of empire reveals as much uncertainty as ambition, exposing deep anxieties about Russia’s place in a world it can no longer control as it once did.

Inside Russia, this new imperial rhetoric is both a rallying cry and a reflection of unease. In recent weeks, influential analysts have argued that Iran’s restraint—its so-called “peacefulness”—only invited aggression, a warning that resonates with those who fear Russia could be next. Enter Alexander Dugin, the far-right philosopher often described as “Putin’s brain,” whose apocalyptic worldview has shaped much of the Kremlin’s confrontational posture. Dugin warns that if the U.S. and Israel can strike Tehran with impunity, nothing would stop them from finding a pretext to strike Moscow. This siege mentality, echoed by senior officials, is now being used to justify a strategy of escalation and deterrence at any cost.

Dugin’s views were echoed by Konstantin Kosachev, chair of the Russian parliamentary foreign affairs committee: “If you don’t want to be bombed by the West, arm yourself. Build deterrence. Go all the way—even to the point of developing weapons of mass destruction.”

But for all the talk of “victory,” by all sides post the 12-day war,  the outcomes remain ambiguous. Iran insists its nuclear ambitions are undimmed. While Israel and Trump’s team says Iran is further from a bomb than ever before – still, the facts are murky and the region is no closer to peace. As one Russian analyst remarked, the normalization of “phoney war” logic means that everyone is arming up, alliances are transactional, and the rules are made up as we go along.

If the only lesson of the 12-day war is that everyone must arm themselves to the teeth, we’re not just reliving the Cold War—we’re entering a new era of empire-building, where deterrence is everything and the lines between friend and foe are as blurred as ever.

In a world where old alliances crumble and new narratives emerge, the true battle, it seems, is not just over territory or military might, but over the stories that define power itself. Russia’s pivot to an imperial narrative reveals both its ambitions and its anxieties, highlighting a global order in flux where legitimacy is contested and the rules are rewritten in real time. Understanding this evolving empire game is essential to grasping the future of international relations and the fragile balance that holds the world together.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Research and additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

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Democrats are looking to block the deals. Apart from the potential corruption alleged by legislators – the many personal deals the president also inked while on his trip – they criticized the sale of weapons to the UAE at a time when it was prolonging a civil war in Sudan that the U.N. has described as “one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century.”

Earlier this month, a Sudanese politician said Trump’s trip to the Gulf was a “rare opportunity” to make a decisive intervention in a war that is now into its third year. In 2023, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Sudan’s army and the rebels signed a peace treaty in Jeddah. It lasted a day. Despite the involvement of both Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the conflict – Sudan has accused the UAE of being directly responsible for the May 4 drone attacks on the city of Port Sudan – there was no mention of it during Trump’s visit.

Since April 2023, Sudan has been convulsed by civil war. The fighting – between the Sudanese army and the RSF rebel forces, primarily comprising Janjaweed militias that fought on the side of the army in the Darfur conflict back in 2003 – has cost thousands of lives and displaced over 12 million people. Tens of millions are starving.

In May, the fighting intensified. But on Monday, Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, announced the appointment of a new prime minister  – career diplomat Kamal Idris. The African Union said Idris’s appointment was a “step towards inclusive governance.” But there is little sign of the fighting stopping. In fact, Port Sudan, where much of the humanitarian aid entered into the country, was targeted in drone attacks this month, forcing the U.N. to suspend deliveries. The Sudanese army has said renewed fighting with the RSF will force it to shut down critical infrastructure that its neighbor South Sudan needs to export its oil. South Sudan’s economy is almost wholly dependent on oil. The threat of economic collapse might force South Sudan, which became independent in 2011, to join in the Sudanese civil war. 

This week, the Trump administration was accused of “illegally” dispatching migrants to South Sudan. A judge said such an action might constitute contempt, but the Department of Homeland Security claimed the men were a threat to public safety. “No country on Earth wanted to accept them,” a spokesperson said, “because their crimes are so uniquely monstrous and barbaric.” The Trump administration’s extraordinary decision to deport migrants to South Sudan, a country on the verge of violent collapse and neighboring a country mired in civil war, is in keeping with his attitude towards the region. The decision, for instance, to shut down USAID only exacerbated the food crisis in Sudan, with soup kitchens closing and a loss of 44% of the aid funding to the country. 

With Trump fitfully engaging in all manner of peace talks, from Gaza to Kyiv to Kashmir, why is Sudan being ignored? Given the transactional nature of Trump’s diplomacy, is it because Sudan has nothing Trump wants? In April, for instance, the Trump administration attempted to broker peace between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda in Washington, offering security in exchange for minerals. In this colonial carving up of resources, perhaps Trump is content to let his friends in the UAE control Sudan’s gold mines and ignore a civil war he might otherwise try to stop. 

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Outside powers will try to tug or coax the country in one direction or another. There could be chaos, or stability.

All of that will matter hugely to Syrians on the ground. But strategically, it doesn't much matter: the seismic change is already there. Things will never be the same.

When I arrived in Beirut very nearly 50 years ago, Syria was like a huge, impregnable castle, ruled with an iron fist by Hafez al-Assad. He relied on a raft of competing Mukhabarat intelligence agencies, each more ruthless than the next, and backed by a powerful military.

In 1980, he did the unthinkable. He stretched a hand out to revolutionary, non-Arab Iran and struck an alliance with Tehran in its eight-year war with Arab Iraq, because they both hated their mutual neighbour Saddam Hussein.

For decades that Tehran-Damascus axis was the only fixed element in the region's shifting political sands. It was crucial to the creation of Hezbollah to hit back at Israel and the U.S. after the invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut in 1982.

When the Syrian castle began to crack after 2011 and Hafez's son Bashar was in imminent danger, it was Iran and Hezbollah - and the Russians - who sprang to his rescue.

It worked for a while, up to a point. But ultimately the axis failed. After Gaza, Hezbollah was decapitated and filleted by the Israelis in Lebanon, Iran cowed and isolated, while Russia was being bled white in Ukraine. It only needed a kick from the rebels to bring Assad’s flimsy cardboard citadel tumbling down.

Now the Israelis are systematically destroying any chance that Syria will again be a military power. Its navy, air force and any serious military assets have been taken out by the most intensive airstrikes Israel has ever mounted. Syria is thoroughly defanged.

And so Syria, the dawlat al-mumana'a - the State of Resistance, or defiance of Israel - is forever gone. Even if that resistance was largely fictional. Also broken is the Axis of Resistance that linked Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as distant Yemen, in a ‘Shia Crescent’ made possible because the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 removed the major obstacle to its formation – Saddam Hussein.

Iran will no longer be able to pump arms and money through Syria to Hezbollah, which survives in Lebanon as a shadow of its former self.

"This collapse is the direct result of our forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad's main supporters," crowed Israeli PM Netanyahu. With full U.S. support for this restructuring of the region's architecture (with probably more to come when Trump is back in the White House), the Israelis roam the skies unchallenged. Only Iran and Yemen remain. And for how long?

While most Syrians celebrate the demise of the hated, bloodstained dictator, the Palestinians are left even more alone, at the mercy of the region's masters, and their American enabler, as never before.

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It looks like the streaming giant is now siding with the big names of Big Tech, Google, Amazon, Meta who have all taken a side in the Middle East war and who have much to account for, according to a report by Access Now: 

Meta has been accused of censoring pro-Palestinian voices on all its platforms and possibly sharing the Whatsapp data of Palestinians with Israel. Meta has publicly denied handing over people’s data to the Israeli government, but as this newsletter notes, there is still no evidence to show that it has taken any concrete action to protect people’s privacy or to ensure that its metadata is not exploited to train and run dystopian AI systems. 

Google, under its Project Nimbus, provides Israel with advanced AI capabilities including facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking, and sentiment analysis to assess the emotional content of pictures, speech, and text, which has long been used for the surveillance of Palestinians by the IDF. Despite reports of Israel using AI-powered programs like Where’s Daddy and Lavender to isolate and destroy non-military targets, Google signed a new contract with Israel’s defense ministry in 2024 — when Google’s workers revolted over this new contract, the company fired 50 of its own employees. In a statement to Time, Google said “We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education. Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” 
Amazon, meanwhile, enables the Israeli army to store intelligence information collected via the mass surveillance of Gaza’s population on servers managed by Amazon’s AWS. Israeli military also confirmed to +972 that on some occasions, AWS services helped the IDF confirm airstrike targets. Despite this, AWS still claims to be committed to its cause of building “responsible AI.”

In a recent essay for Coda, Judy Estrin, CEO of JLABS, LLC quoted the first law of technology: it’s neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. It’s unsurprising  that in a year of horrors, Big Tech has amplified the human capacity for cruelty and war, from assisting the spread of garden variety disinformation to AI-powered weapons that methodically pick non-military targets to destroy. The steady march to this dystopian moment has come about through the slow stripping away of human rights via old-fashioned  surveillance and censorship.

You can join petitions, write to Netflix or check out the Palestine Film Index offers a selection of hundreds of Palestinian films, documentaries and writings (with links to access them all) here.

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When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022 the documentary filmmaker Oleksandr Techynskyi quickly moved his wife and two teenage daughters out of the country and took a job translating for a foreign TV crew covering the war. Where he once spent his days making lyrical films, he now spends endless hours crisscrossing the country in a car full of foreign journalists. With his own work on hold and his family in Germany, his days are now defined by the war and the road.

But almost as if he couldn’t help himself, he picked up a camera and began snapping photos from inside the car. At first, he tried taking photos of what he saw in a traditional journalistic style that he thought would attract foreign media outlets. But the straightforward shots of devastation left him cold.

Then he began taking a different approach. He imagined his new photos as stills from a movie. He was the protagonist in a car driving through a land of the living dead. “This is an apocalyptic noir that shows our present—heavy, leaden clouds and ruined homes,” he says, referring to his new images. “The car passes people resembling zombies with empty eyes.” Stopping amid these ruins inevitably leads to the death of the protagonist. “He himself will turn into a zombie, and he will also wander the mazes of war-torn cities,” says Techynskyi, who everyone calls Sasha.

The TV crew that employs Sasha works on rotations: two weeks on, then two weeks back in Europe to rest. But for Sasha there is no break. As soon as he’s done with one team, he picks up a fresh one at the Polish border. “I clearly remember only the endless road,” he says. “When I have an unexpected weekend, I come home. There is no one there. My wife and children have been evacuated. I wander around the house and can’t find a place. I can’t sleep. It is a black hole. Here the nausea is even stronger.” Rather than stay home, he asks for another assignment escorting a fresh crew of TV journalists back into the war. “I want to go back,” he says. “At least I feel alive there.”

I first met Sasha in 2017 when he was my translator on a reporting trip. It was only a handful of years ago, but the world was far different then. Ukraine’s democracy was young and the country was an intoxicating mix of independent idealists, wayward politicians, corrupt businessmen, and a new breed of artists and bohemian free spirits. Back then, Sasha split his time between the eastern city of Dnipro, where his wife and daughters lived, and Kyiv, where his art and friends thrived. He spent his days creating intimate, wide-ranging documentaries that won international awards. He documented everything from the Maidan Revolution to stories of baggage carriers sleeping by the side of the road and the lives of fishermen of the Ukraine River Delta.

Sasha’s films explore profound, sweeping concepts, but always with a quiet, poetic eye. The films are empathetic without being simplistic and always attuned to the absurdity of human existence—hallmarks of a true Ukrainian. There is one scene in particular from his documentary about the Maidan Revolution that encapsulates this. In the film, a group of young protesters pull down a tall stone statue of Lenin that once stood on a large pedestal in the middle of the street. The protesters find a sledgehammer and begin hacking away at the toppled figure. As a reporter in eastern Europe in the early 90s I’d witnessed many a Lenin statue dismantled, sometimes with a simple slow-moving crane that reached down and elegantly plucked it out of the ground. Other times with a violent crowd enthusiastically chanting; hoping to eradicate the past and move feverishly forward into that new unknown future.

On this particular night in Ukraine Sasha’s film captures an old Soviet man stumbling amid the crowd as if in a fever dream. “Please,” he said. “No. Please.” Sasha filmed him as he slowly lowered his body onto the bust of the newly toppled Lenin begging the crowd to stop. He leaned down and kissed Lenin’s head. The crowd, wild and full of ferocity, watched him bemused. But no one touched him. He was a man from their shared Soviet past crying as he watched the world as it once was crumbling around him. “Come away, father,” said one protester gently. “Kiss it and say goodbye,” said another. “In 1917, you overthrew us; now it’s your turn to be overthrown.” A young woman pleaded with him to leave and scolded the crowd for jeering him. “He’s old enough to be your father,” she said. Finally, two men escorted him away, staring down anyone in the crowd who might dare to touch him.

But that was before. Before the 2014 annexation of Crimea; before Russia’s full-on bombardment and systematic destruction of the country. That was when Ukrainians felt the future was entirely in their own hands. Overthrow the president, end corruption, cull through the bank accounts of the oligarchs. The catch words in those days were transparency, freedom, and democracy. And for the first time in years, these lofty goals seemed like an actual possibility. Of course, this new possibility was not pristine but it was beautiful all the same, the way real possibility always is. The way the future actually works.

When I first met Sasha, Ukraine was barely an afterthought to the west. It was just one of the last of the formerly Soviet countries to find its footing in the new capitalist word. Maidan was three years in the past, and a low-level war with Russia was playing out in the east. Just troublesome enough to keep Ukraine from having a serious chance at entering the European Union or NATO. The West was far from intent on getting into a proxy war with Russia. This could go on for years—and did. Eight years, in fact, of Russians picking off a number of young men every week. Enough to keep the flames of war burning, but not enough to stir the ire of the West.

It was around that time that Sasha and I traveled down to Dnipro to interview soldiers recently wounded in the fight against Russia. I knew that few, if any, in the West would be interested. I even suggested we not bother the men, that it felt false or worse. “No one will want this story,” I told Sasha in the hospital parking lot. This was before Ukraine became the darling of the West. Before Volodymyr Zelensky spoke by video at the Grammys, before Manhattan boutiques showcased Ukrainian flags in their shop windows, and before scores of Western journalists poured into the country, tracking down any quotes they could get from soldiers and fleeing villagers.

Sasha just shrugged. “It doesn’t matter that no one will read this. The men will like it,” he said. “They’re village boys. An American journalist standing at their bedside, and a woman. It’s something. They will say patriotic things and feel better.” So, we went inside the hospital and walked through rooms lined with beds full of newly wounded soldiers.

Sasha was right. The men were eager to talk, and every one of them spoke of the same thing: the glory of Ukraine, the bravery of their comrades. How much they loved their family and wanted to die for their country. Only one man was silent. The day before, both his legs were blown off by a Russian grenade. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling, the blood soaking through the white gauze bandages wrapped on his limbs that only hours earlier had been cut just above the knee. Sasha and I looked at each other. Sasha shook his head, I nodded and we both walked quietly past the bed.

When Vladimir Putin unleashed Russia’s full force invasion earlier this year, I immediately texted Sasha to see how he was. Over the next several months we kept an easy correspondence of texts and phone calls. At first, it was hard to know how bad things would get, and where or when the Russians might attack. During one of our first phone calls after the invasion he was in a dark humor, a bit stoic as if preparing himself for death. “I’ve had my adventures,” he told me. “If I die, I die.” Then he got quieter and said he now felt real joy when he saw a Russian soldier lying dead on the ground. “I am afraid of what I am becoming,” he said.

These days, I think of Sasha as I once knew him—as he still is, even now—forever lighthearted, laughing and talking animatedly, sharing wild thoughts. I remember our long drive back from Dnipro to Kyiv in the rain. The windshield wipers flip-flopped back and forth as he rattled on in his enthusiastic way. Trucks passing us in gusts of water and rain. He was on a jag about a new idea that had just occurred to him. “Maybe I am a feminist,” he declared. I remember being amused, but he was dead serious and wanted to discuss the possibility for the next hour. He couldn’t stop talking, and the wipers swished back and forth, as if trying to keep up with him.

Sasha was not supposed to be an artist; he was supposed to work in the diamond mines of Siberia with his father and brother. He was born in Ukraine during Soviet rule to a father who worked long, hard hours in the Ukrainian coal mines of Donbas. But when a mining accident broke both his father’s legs it was enough to provoke his father to make a change. Looking for a better life, he moved his wife and two sons to Siberia and took a job as a mining engineer. That’s where Sasha spent most of his youth. The family returned to Ukraine only after the fall of the Soviet Union. His father, though, was never entirely able to find a place for himself back in Ukraine. He lost his job, he lost his wife, he lost his family. The collapse of the Soviet Union took everything. “In the end, he found a way to save what he could save,” says Sasha. “He took my young brother and headed back to Siberia.”

And that is where his father has stayed for 22 years—all of Putin’s reign. There, Sasha’s father watches Russian TV and rarely uses the internet. “He’s totally out of understanding of what’s really going on.” When father and son talk on the phone, Sasha might try to explain what’s happening in Ukraine now, how whole cities have been decimated by Russian shelling. But his father is awash in Russian propaganda. “He doesn’t believe me,” Sasha says. “He is polite. But I can hear his skepticism.” Rather than being angry with his father, Sasha is patient, even generous. “His life was tough and now in a way he’s finally found some peace,” he says. “He doesn’t want to get out of his bubble.”

Sasha, meanwhile, spends every day immersed in war. We texted one night after he’d spent hours at the mass grave site in Izium where 440 bodies were found. He worked all day with the television crew as they filmed the bodies at the site. Some victims had their hands tied behind their backs. Some were children. Some were tortured or killed, by chance, in a bombing. In the midst of everything, Sasha pulled out his own camera and took a black-and-white photo of emergency workers clad in white suits and masks, quietly standing in line before the police tape surrounding the exhumation area. That night he posted the photo on Facebook, titling it “Lifeguards in the Pines.”

Gatherings such as these have become a kind of morbid homecoming for Sasha. They are where Ukrainian journalists run into each other, where they meet and catch up with friends. “You are on the road,” says Sasha, “and then in the end at the newly liberated town, the new mass grave, you are standing there and hugging your journalist friends that you haven’t seen for a long time.”

Sasha has become more at ease with himself and the war around him. As if he and others are simply becoming more accustomed to death. Recently, he told me about a friend, “a real peaceful guy, you know the type who likes to sit and catch fish from the bank of the river.” But now, Sasha tells me, this friend “can’t go to sleep without watching YouTube clips of the murder of Russians. This is a common thing. It makes sense—there is no other way for us.”

Sasha continues: “Russia wants us to be all the same. No love, no education, no future, no choices. We aren’t just fighting against brutality—we are fighting against slavery.” He lists the freedoms that Ukrainians are in danger of losing: freedom of speech, freedom to be gay, freedom to simply be a person. “Of course, we must win, or Russia will just continue to swallow all the other post-Soviet countries too. Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia,” he pauses. “Belarus is already swallowed.”

There is now talk of a fresh wave of military conscriptions. “One beautiful day, I will receive a conscription letter,” Sasha says with a laugh. If that day comes, he will need to report to the conscription center. “After that, everything can happen,” he says. “If I receive a conscription, of course I will go.” He pauses. “And take whatever will come.” The work he’s doing with the European TV crew also helps the war effort—news of Ukraine inspires EU countries to send more money and resources. But he is clear he won’t mind if he’s called up.
“Yes,” I say to him, “but it’s different to hold a gun than a camera?”
“Yeah, but you know,” he says, laughing, “to kill Russians, that would be a pleasure.”

Sasha’s daughters are 13 and 16. “The main thing for me now is to keep them as far as possible from the war,” he tells me. “I want them to be usual teenagers with usual teenager problems. Not teenagers heavily traumatized by the war.” He then mentions his fear that his daughters might lose some of their joyfulness. “I’m just a happy person,” he says. “I was this way from the beginning. My wife is like that too. No matter what happens, you can’t break those kinds of natural things inside of me.” He stops. “Small things make for happiness,” he says. Then I realize he means something profound. “Small things save lives.”

This story was originally published in Stranger’s Guide.

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One million people are on the move in Lebanon, says Save the Children. With one fifth of the country’s population fleeing attacks. It is a continuing cycle of escalation, in which Israel retaliates for Iran’s recent missile attack that it launched in retaliation for Israel’s attacks. 

Nasrallah’s assassination followed a weeks-long Israeli strike on other Hezbollah leaders and their foot soldiers, using both air strikes and exploding pagers and walkie-talkies. But even before these devices began blowing up in the hands of their owners across Lebanon, killing Hezbollah members, terrifying civilians and prompting parents to unplug their baby monitors, Israel had assassinated two Revolutionary Guard generals in Syria, a senior Hamas commander in Lebanon, and the political chief of Hamas visiting Tehran, who was in Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new President, to name just a few incidents.

How did Israel get so good at finding their targets? That was the question sent in from one of our readers, this week after Nasrallah’s asasonation on September 27th. For any journalist who has ever attempted to negotiate an interview with a Hezbollah commander, let alone Hassan Nasrallah himself, the fact that Israel finally got him is simply mind blowing. 

By 2008, the year I arrived in Lebanon to take over as the BBC’s resident Beirut correspondent, Nasrallah had stopped giving interviews. We kept trying, but even trying, or even a meeting with one of his commanders involved complicated negotiations, security clearances and endless trips to the Dahieh,–the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut. 

Nasrallah’s face was everywhere in Dahieh. A local boy turned leader of mythic stature. His picture was on store and office walls; looking down from giant roadside billboards or stenciled graffiti; or in countless car bumper stickers amid the city’s chaotic traffic. 

The image of Nasrallah that Hezbollah’s efficient marketing team cultivated with plenty of care and intention was that of omnipresence and invincibility. And his historical record helped make that image resonate.

In 2000, eight years after he assumed the leadership of Hezbollah following the assassination of his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi by Israel, Nasrallah forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, ending the 18-year long occupation. 

In 2006, Hezbollah, and Lebanon, paid a devastating price for its 34-day war with Israel. But by surviving and not ceding any territory, Nasrallah was hailed as a hero by his supporters and Hezbollah went on to become Lebanon’s dominant political force as well. 

Two years later, when I was in Beirut’s southern suburbs, his portrait was on every corner and his speeches were being used as mobile phone ringtones. I felt acutely aware that Nasrallah was also literally there: in the tunnels that Iran helped Hezbollah dig and maintain under the busy hubbub of the Southern suburbs. 

But I also remember a lingering sense of a possibility of another, invisible spider web that was being weaved in the Dahieh at the time. Israel’s greatest failure during the 2006 war with Lebanon was that it failed to kill Nasrallah, the man who was behind the deaths of so many Israelis. After the war, as Hezbollah’s backers in Tehran invested heavily into modernizing the network of tunnels under the southern suburbs of Beirut, Israeli intelligence focused on building human networks, working hard to identify, cultivate and subsequently deploy every nugget of dissatisfaction and dissent that they could find. 

Reporting from Southern Lebanon, I often wondered who were the Israeli spies at Hezbollah’s crowded rallies or at dinners I attended in the suburbs. And while I could never tell who they were in Lebanon at the time, now we have proof that they were definitely there.  

Lebanon’s divided society and geopolitics made Israel’s task of penetrating Lebanon much easier. Scars of Lebanon’s civil war in the 1970s continued to ooze hatred and distrust. Israel was the enemy, but it was the region’s big powers that never let Lebanon heal: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria each supported different factions and sects within Lebanon, constantly deepening the existing divisions. 

Add to this hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the Middle East’s endless wars: Over the past decades Palestinians, Iraqis, Yemenis, and Syrians have all found shelter in Lebanon. Even the most functional governments would have struggled not to collapse under this combination of pressures. Lebanon’s government was the opposite of functional. 

Hezbollah thrived amid Lebanon’s dysfunction and corrupt, sectarian political environment. Yet many Lebanese “rejected Hezbollah's vision of perpetual war and hated Nasrallah’s recklessness for provoking the 2006 conflict with Israel. Many also correctly understood Hezbollah to be on the side of authoritarianism and theocracy,” writes Thanassis Cambanis, author of  A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Endless War, in this excellent piece. 

But for a long time, in a state that was on a brink of perpetual collapse, Hezbollah was also a force that actually got things done. Plenty of Lebanese voted for Hezbollah, not because it promised war, but because they needed a functioning state: someone to pick up garbage, keep schools open, run the government. During the 2009 elections in Lebanon that I covered, Hezbollah slogans called for war against Israel but also for better education, and for eradication of poverty and corruption. 

The problem was that the more political power Nasrallah’s party gained, the more corrupt Hezbollah itself became. Violence, corruption and economic hardship are a perfect mix for those working to recruit informants.

Assassinations of the entire command structure of the most powerful militia in the Middle East requires state of the art technology, incredible human penetration into target societies and extraordinary strategic patience. 

French media reported that Nasrallah’s arrival at Hezbollah underground HQ was leaked to the Israelis by an Iranian mole. These reports have not been corroborated, but the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad produced a jaw-dropping sound bite when he told CNN Turk that even the head of the Iranian unit countering Mossad was an Israeli agent. 

Ahmadinejad said that twenty agents in the Iranian intelligence team tasked with monitoring Israeli spying activities also worked for Israel, allegedly providing Mossad with sensitive information on the Iranian nuclear program. He said they were behind some key Mossad successes in Iran, including the assassination of the nuclear scientist they killed with a remote controlled gun, or the warehouse in Tehran where Israeli officers blowtorched their way in, stole 50,000 pages of documents and 169 discs relating to the Iran’s nuclear program within 6 hours and 29 minutes, leaving the rest of the facility untouched. 

Security experts agree that it would have taken decades of infiltration of Iranian and Lebanese command structures to pull off the operation of the scale that killed Hassan Nasrallah.

Friends in Beirut, who have lived through many explosions including the devastating blast in the  Beirut port in 2020, said they have never heard anything comparable to the blast that shook the city when Israel dropped 2,000 pound US-made bombs on a residential block in the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing many people, including Hassan Nasrallah who was hiding in a bunker 60 feet below the ground.

The ping pong of retaliations triggered by this bomb is certain to kill many more. Israel’s precision attacks are bound to impact millions of lives, in the Middle East but also all across our deeply interconnected world.

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Ukrainian journalist Svitlana Oslavska documents war crimes testimonies for The Reckoning Project, which comprises a team of Ukrainian and international journalists and legal experts established in 2022 to record, collect, and conserve witness testimonies of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. She spent a day with one of the local war crimes prosecutors who investigates the Russian army’s misdeeds in the south of Ukraine. 

One woman among the bombardments

In the city of Mykolaiv in July of 2022, Viktoriia Shapovalova drove to work as usual, parked, got out of the car, and immediately realized there was complete silence all around her. It is said that you don’t hear anything when you are in the epicenter of an air strike. And that was exactly what was happening. A missile hit a building some 150 meters away from her. The houses that stood between Shapovalova and the explosion attack saved her life. Remembering the feeling she had when a shell exploded nearby, she said it is “like your soul is being turned inside out”. 

Shapovalova witnessed most of the bombardments and missile attacks on Mykolaiv, a city that, before 2022, had a population of 470,000. She was there during the hardest days the city experienced during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

In the spring of 2022, the Russian army struggled to capture Mykolaiv, a regional capital located between Odesa and Kherson. Failing to seize the city, it started attacking its residential quarters with artillery and missiles. 

There was a period when artillery shelling occurred every two or three hours. Residents who stayed in the city adapted to this routine. Shapovalova spent nights in a shelter; a basement of a nine-storey block, with her teenage daughter. But life had to go on, so after the morning shelling attacks–which usually happened around six or seven in the morning– she prepared breakfast, walked her dog, and hurried to work. She knew there would be two or three quiet hours before the next shelling and, during that time, she could work.

In the spring of 2022, at age 37, Shapovalova was appointed chief of the war crimes department at the Mykolaiv regional prosecutor’s office. Before that, as was the case with most of the Ukrainian prosecutors, her work was not connected with war issues. After her appointment, she, like thousands of her colleagues, had to re-train as a war crimes investigator, diving into the topic of international humanitarian law. As part of the war crimes prosecutors training, Shapovalova had a chance to visit the Hague and the International Criminal Court. 

During the first two years of the full-scale invasion, Russia conducted more than 2,500 civilian infrastructure attacks in the city of Mykolaiv and the surrounding region, according to The Tribunal for Putin initiative. After an attack, the prosecutors team, together with the war crimes investigators from the Ukrainian security service and the police, as well as the emergency services, all go to the site to document what happened. The attacks often take place at night, which means Shapovalova would often work without sleep for the 24 hours after an attack. She must stay at the site of an attack until the last body is taken from under the rubble. 

Shelling of residential neighborhoods and other civilian infrastructure of Mykolaiv comprises about 70% of the 2,500 war crimes Shapovalova and her team is now investigating in the region. She says her experience of living in the city during all the attacks helps in her job: “I was there, I remember a lot.” But nearly every week, she spends at least one or two full working days out of her office, in the field. 

Witnesses are both eager and afraid to talk

The east and south of the Mykolaiv region were occupied in the spring of 2022 and liberated after eight months, in November of the same year, together with the right bank of the Dnipro and the city of Kherson. Since then, Shapovalova’s team of 10 war crimes prosecutors investigates atrocities in the once-occupied towns and villages.  

On the day I joined Shapovalova and her two colleagues, they met at an agreed-upon spot at 9am and headed to the north of Mykolaiv, to a small village that was occupied during the first half of March in 2022. The plan is to collect and document as many witness statements as possible. A team of lawyers from the not-for-profit Global Rights Compliance accompanies the prosecutors on this trip. GRC is specialized in international humanitarian law, and Ukrainian prosecutors need support to deal with thousands of war crimes cases. The lawyers are present during the interviews with witnesses, they read interrogation protocols, and advise Shapovalova’s team of war crimes prosecutors where exactly violations of international humanitarian law lie and what evidence has to be collected. In Shapovalova’s words: “They help us with the quality of justice.”  

In the front seat of the car, Shapovalova makes several calls to invite colleagues to a training session about OSINT investigations. “Good morning, how are you doing?” she starts every conversation with these simple words. In the context of possible night attacks, the question and the answers become meaningful. 

The cars turn from the motorway onto a dirt road. A herd of sheep with a shepherd crosses the road. We drive slowly between empty fields. “We’re going to meet the village's head first. He and his family were abducted by the Russians.” Shapovalova explains the plan for the day, adding that such field trips are often unpredictable. 

And she is not wrong. The car suddenly stops having come upon an  impassable stretch of road. The driver must walk around to find a detour. It’s a cloudy day, several degrees above zero, and we see no other cars on this village road. Finally, the driver finds a bypass across a forest strip nearby, but before we go, he has to uproot several small trees. 

But we are fortunate. Such an off-road maneuver wouldn’t have been possible in the southeast of the region, which was under occupation for eight months and where Russians left mines all over the fields. In the first weeks after liberation, the war crimes prosecutors started visiting towns and villages. “We called the mine clearance service, asked them to clear, for instance, a police building,” Shapovalova explained. “And after that, we went there to collect evidence.” Humanitarian mine clearance teams are working every day, but still, many fields and forests are surrounded by red signs that read “Stop! Mines.”

The village head is a thin man of around 50. The skin on his face suggests he works a lot in the open air. Shapovalova starts with some informal questions about realities under the Russian occupation. She already knows that this man had been abducted by the Russians and beaten, but he did not report this incident to the police after the village was liberated. 

“What for? We’re alive, and that’s enough,” he replies to Shapovalova’s argument that this was a violation of laws and customs of war. “Are you going to investigate this?” the man goes on in a skeptical tone. “That’s why we’ve come here.” Shapovalova is patient. She understands the man needs more time to trust her. She is also aware many people don’t want to discuss publicly what happened to them because they are afraid Russia may occupy the region again. 

Thus, Shapovalova changes the topic to the situation in the village in general. Several houses were destroyed by shelling, their owners have no ownership documents on those buildings, and that’s why they have trouble getting aid to rebuild them. Shapovalova promises she will look into it and see how she can help.   

Finally she comes back to the reason for our visit. “We have to document these crimes even if you don’t believe we will investigate them,” she says.  The village head goes outside to smoke a cigarette, when he returns he agrees to give a formal interview. One of the prosecutors stays to record his testimony on video, and Shapovalova goes on to meet the next witness–a woman whose son was shot by the Russian soldiers. 

The woman starts talking almost as soon as we step over the threshold. “They came to the house, tied him up, took him away, and abused him for two days. Then they took him to a forest, tied his hands with a wire, and shot him. He survived and crawled to a nearby village.” Her words show that she shares the confidence of many Ukrainians who lived through the occupation: that the perpetrators must be identified and punished. “Of course, I’ll testify. Why not when this happened?”

The array of Russia’s war crimes

What happened to the village head and the woman’s son is not unique but  common during the Russian occupation. 

According to international humanitarian law civilians are under the protection of the occupying force. But while talking to the people from the occupied territories, Shapovalova routinely recorded incidents of abductions, arbitrary detentions, and tortures. 

In one village, a local man was killed and his wife was abducted. A bag was thrown over her face, and she was brought to a trench where soldiers harassed and taunted her, at some point even pouring liquid on the 50 year old woman saying: “We’ll burn you and we will be looking at how Ukrop's mother is burning.” Ukrop is a derogatory term for Ukrainians and the soldiers used it to refer to her son who fought in the Ukrainian army. She spent five days in detention. During the first days, interrogations took place every hour. The same questions were repeated again and again, asking her about things she had shared on her social media pages and about her son. And then, as suddenly as she was detained, she was released. No one provided any reason for her detention. 

In another village of the region, a local mayor was abducted when he was trying to deliver 300 loaves of bread to people in the village. He was tortured with electric jolts and beaten. He spent three months of unlawful detention in several detention centers. 

And in another village, the Russians murdered an elderly local school teacher. Soldiers took him from his house. The teacher's wife looked for him everywhere in the village and nearby, riding a bicycle from one building where the Russian military were stationed to another. Finally, his mutilated body was found. It lay covered with a mattress in a shallow pit near one of the buildings known to the villagers as occupiers’ headquarters.

These are just some accounts recorded by The Reckoning Project team in the Mykolaiv region. Its researchers documented hundreds of similar cases in various parts of Ukraine that were under Russian occupation. Male and female village heads, volunteers and activists, former soldiers, or anyone who owned a weapons even just for hunting were often the first victims of arbitrary detentions, torture, and murder. 

“The occupying Russian forces neglected their obligations to safeguard the Ukrainian populace. Instead, they viewed Ukrainians under occupation solely through a security lens,” says Raji Abdul Salam, The Reckoning Project’s chief legal data archivist. They categorized, he explains further, civil and humanitarian actions, such as the right to access information, freedom of movement, and adequate housing, as potential security threats. This approach of prioritizing security-based measures over humanitarian considerations deprived Ukrainians of their fundamental human rights and exacerbated the suffering caused by the conflict. 

Justice is slow, and the prosecutors must work fast

To determine who was responsible for any given bombardment isn’t easy as it’s necessary to prove who gave an order. Investigating tortures and arbitrary detentions is difficult for another reason: survivors often don’t know a lot about the identity of their abductors and torturers. 

In most of the incidents documented by the researchers of The Reckoning Project, the Russian soldiers tried to conceal who they were: they did not provide their names, wore no insignia, and covered their faces with masks. They tied blindfolds around the eyes of their captives or put bags on their heads so that people would not be able to recognise who was torturing them. 

“The soldiers deliberately obscure their identities to evade accountability for their actions, including looting, extrajudicial killings, and unlawful detentions”, says Abdul Salam, adding that in over 90% of testimonies the researchers of The Reckoning Project collected state that the Russian soldiers were hiding their identity. 

“This underscores the complicity of the Russian military leadership, as their failure to take disciplinary measures on the ground condoned and facilitated these grave breaches of international law,” Salam explained. “The consequence of this unchecked misconduct was a relentless onslaught on the Ukrainian populace, inflicting untold suffering and trauma.”

On our way back, Shapovalova reflects on the mistrust many people have on perspectives of justice and punishment for Russian war criminals: “I understand this. Justice is a long process, and the victims want it right now. But the main task for the prosecutors is to collect the highest quality evidence.”

It’s almost 6pm when we come back to her office. Shapovalova is planning to stay at work for several more hours. She says 10 minutes of rest was enough to continue with a lot of paperwork after a day in the field. 

There is a large map of Mykolaiv on the wall of her office, with a small piece of paper pinned to it. A date is printed on it, “October 13th, 2022”. On this day, Russia allegedly attacked Mykolaiv with S-300 missiles that hit a residential block. Seven people died in that attack, one of them a child. The attack happened at night, when people were in their beds. When I Google this incident, I find images of a five-storey residential building. Its destroyed upper middle part looks like it was bitten away by some monster. 

This case is already in the courts. The investigators found a man, a resident of Mykolaiv, who passed information about this civilian building with no military objects nearby to the Russians. Besides this there are several other incidents of war crimes Shapovalova’s department has now passed to the court. They are about the inhuman treatment of civilians: imitation of shooting to death, and about the organizers of a detention center in one village of the region, where people were kept for several days in horrible conditions. The trials are ongoing. 

According to Shapovalova, those incidents have enough evidence for prosecutors to charge the Russian combatants with committing war crimes. Investigations of all the crimes, Shapovalova explains, will take years. This understanding, she continues, along with the fact that tomorrow may simply not come, motivates her to accelerate her work. 

Besides that, she adds, important online evidence, like Russian channels on Telegram, are deleted since they understand those posts and videos could one day also be used as evidence. 

Most of the trials for Russian war criminals in Ukraine are now conducted in absentia. The victims may not be satisfied with this result, but the prosecutor explains that it is not only important a particular soldier would be punished. “By proving a particular crime, we prove the guilt of the main perpetrator. For proving his guilt at the Tribunal, not only our verdicts would be taken into account, but also our evidence base,” says Shapovalova.  

The day after I left Mykolaiv I read the news about another Russian attack on the city and in the region. I go to the page of the Mykolaiv regional prosecutor and see the photos of war crimes prosecutors working on the site of the attack, Shapovalova among them.

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The post A day In the life of a Russian war crimes prosecutor in Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

This story was made possible by the Pulitzer Center. It was originally published in Stranger’s Guide.

The post As the war drags on, Ukrainian refugees wonder: should we go home? appeared first on Coda Story.

As early as the afternoon of October 7th, when word first broke of Hamas’s attack on Israel, Abu-Jamei had a troubling sense of what might follow. His house sits not far from the Israeli border, and he and his family fled on that very day with little more than the clothes they were wearing. After a short stay in a school in Rafah, they went in search of a better place to live. They ended up dropping their belongings on a piece of empty land near a bit of running water. Under the circumstances, this amounted to a luxury.

Despite Israel’s monthslong attacks on Gaza, the house that Abu-Jamei and his family left behind remained untouched all through the long months they stayed in the tents. The home was still standing the day they arrived safely in Egypt, the war far behind them.

But as Abu-Jamei knows better than most people, one cannot simply leave a war behind, and attempting to will away its psychic effects is an illusory trick. He has spent his career studying trauma, war, and the psychological damage caused by violence. As a psychiatrist, he began working with patients scarred by Israel’s 2014 war with Gaza. For the past decade, he has been the director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, a mental health service provider in Palestine that affords counseling and resources to countless patients in the region.

During his first night in Cairo, sleeping quietly in a bed far from the cold night air and the flapping of the tent, the fact that he was safe provided only so much comfort. He could not help but think of his uncles and cousins who were still in tents. “I could not split both feelings,” he said. “I felt ashamed that I was out. I still feel guilty. There is survivor guilt. And that is a very uncomfortable feeling, you know?”

Abu-Jamei’s own work taught him not to be surprised by the intrusion of such thoughts. Over the years of conflict in Palestine, he’d spent many hours working with children and adults who were traumatized. Adults, he explained, could talk through their feelings and thoughts, but children often didn’t have the language or understanding for such conversations, even if they had the very real need. So, he and his colleagues would use puppets for them to act out their emotions. When words failed, they used toy planes and tanks to allow the children to construct physical scenarios. At times, however,  during the most recent bombings it was almost impossible to find toys for this work.

Abu-Jamei explained how, paradoxically, it was often when the worst bombing was over that people began reacting to the trauma. In moments like this, there was time to reflect rather than simply revert to survival instincts. That is when Abu-Jamei’s work was most important and most sought. Now that he is in Egypt, he plans to implement a telephone help line that his center has run for years but was routinely rendered useless during the war by a lack of electricity and Wi-Fi. The hope is to establish a secure phone line to psychiatrists outside of Gaza who can answer calls and work with patients stuck in the war zone.

Most people in Gaza have not been as fortunate as Abu-Jamei in finding the means to flee the war. He is the first person to recognize his privilege in being able to pay the steep price to leave, and although he is better off than many, it was still a considerable burden for him. During the ongoing bombardment of Palestine, the Rafah border crossing has emerged as the sole route out of the country. But only the fortunate few with money, foreign passports, or approved medical reasons have managed to cross this border into Egypt. The fees to cross are roughly $5,000 per adult and $2,500 per child—a sum that is out of reach for most. The “travel bureau” tasked with facilitating crossing is Hala Consulting and Tourism, an Egyptian company with reputed ties to the Egyptian security services. Once the fee is paid, a name is added to a list. Every night, those who have paid check the list on Facebook pages and Telegram channels to see who will be able to cross into Egypt the following day. If you’re lucky, you’ll be among the hundreds that cross the border every morning at Rafah.

It wasn’t until he arrived in Cairo that Abu-Jamei learned that his house had, in fact, just recently been destroyed. He and his wife spent 17 years carefully building and decorating their home. Whenever they had a bit of extra money, they put it toward a new improvement on the building—a second bathroom, a new sofa, a special refrigerator. Like many other Gazans, he kept tabs on his neighborhood during the war by looking at videos that Israeli soldiers posted on TikTok. He pulled out his phone as we talked and showed me a TikTok posted by a member of the Israel Defense Forces. It shows a truck barreling down a dirt road, empty lots and homes on either side. “See, there,” he says, pausing the video. “That’s our house.” On that day, at least, he knew because of the timestamp of the video that his home was still standing.

But the next series of photos he shows me are of rubble. His cousins can be seen walking across a pile of cinder blocks that had once been his house. “They went to search to see if they could find anything worth salvaging,” he said. But all they were able to find were one or two mismatched earrings and a brooch—“presents I’d bought for my daughters over the years” when he’d traveled abroad to give a lecture or attend a conference. “I traveled often for a Gazan, maybe twice a year, and I always brought them back gifts.”

It’s late, and Abu-Jamei and I have been speaking for several hours. The café had filled with young people clustered around tables, talking animatedly. Downtown Cairo was full of life: strolling shoppers, fashionable women walking next to young religious scholars, exuberant soccer fans watching the latest match at packed sidewalk cafes. We stepped outside to say our goodbyes on the street. Abu-Jamei stood still as the traffic of Cairo swerved by and the florescent lights of downtown shops blinked behind him. A calm man amid the noise. He stayed there on the sidewalk, talking as if he were in no hurry to say goodbye, even though I imagine he had a hundred obligations, a thousand things to do. Among them were things to buy: basic household items and new clothing for his wife and children, who were still wearing  clothes from the tents. And there were people back in Gaza relying on him for assistance. Finally, he shrugged, smiled gently and stepped out into the street to walk home. Or, what serves as home for now.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Yasser Abu-Jamei as told to Kira Brunner Don

Most of the population is severely affected psychologically and have physical ailments, but their main concerns at the moment are their basic needs. It’s reported now that in the Gaza Strip one third of the population faces level three famine—this means that there is an urgent need for food support. No one can sleep without food, but now everyone in the north of Gaza—600,000 people—are basically starving. 

I lived in a shelter for three weeks, and then moved to a tent, where I stayed with my children and my family for about three months. Tents do not have privacy. Whenever you talk, everyone listens. We were in a place with tents for my uncles and my cousins, we were all next to each other—maybe 15 families together. There is no variety of food; no fruit, for example, and vegetables are very rare and expensive. In December and January we managed to buy chicken only once; fruit only once. One chicken was about 70 shekels or $20. Who can afford that? Since there was no variety of food items, I saw that my kids were losing weight. The whole Gaza Strip was losing weight. You could see it in your friends when you meet them after two or three weeks. And it was a problem, especially for the kids.

During war time, people rarely get mental health services, unless there is a clear instance of trauma. Everyone is preoccupied with safety and finding food. But a couple of weeks after a ceasefire takes place, people notice something is wrong with their kids or themselves, and then they would start to seek mental health intervention. That’s why we usually see an influx of patients or clients two or three weeks after a ceasefire. 

I’ll give you a very clear example. A lot of people are always trying to hear news about their loved ones, about their homes, their houses, their neighborhoods—whether people that are missing have been killed, whether they have been detained, whether they are in the rubble. And they hope for the best, of course. So people are between frustration and hope all the time. When a ceasefire takes place, everyone starts to move around and go back to their homes to find out what happened, then they start to face the reality. They lost their house. They lost their loved one. You end up not only homeless but also broken. There is no place to go to. Aid takes ages to come. What can you do? And then people start to show symptoms and they start to come and visit us. 

One of the main services we offer is telephone counseling. It’s a toll free line. We were not sure that our colleagues would be able to answer the phones because of the lack of power, so that’s why we have partner organizations in the West Bank we forward our telephone line to so that their psychologist can help our people. It’s a relief.

For the last two months, we sent our psychologist to provide psychological first aid. They go to the shelters, they identify the main issues. The issues that adults and children have are a little bit different—at the moment, adults show anxiety about the future; what might happen at any moment; the bombardment, tanks. They are between desperation and depression. Others feel that there is no way out or that an end is coming close. There are a lot of family quarrels and social issues because of the pressure and the stresses and the lack of resources. A lot of disputes happen in the community. And then there are also sleep difficulties.

Children have different symptoms. Their main thing is fear. They’re just afraid and they long for their normal life. They ask when are we going to go back to school, their neighborhoods, their homes. And there is no answer to that. Then there are behavioral changes. A lot of children, especially the younger ones, become more irritable, more hypervigilant. They are more worried and agitated. They can’t stand still. And they start to be disobedient. They fight more, they become more angry, they become more aggressive. And with the night terrors and nightmares, they wake up in the middle of the night screaming. 

My youngest child is two and a half. She used to scream in the middle of the night. The conditions were really terrible. But when we moved to Rafah, the bombardment was less frequent and the nights were calmer, but it was still terrible. The good thing is that there were a lot of children in the community in those fifteen tents where we stayed. So children were spending a lot of time together playing with the sand. My wife used to joke and say that during the day, the tent was like an incubator, and sometimes she called it a greenhouse. It was extremely hot so it was good the kids could stay outside. And in the night, the tents were freezing cold.

And who are the most affected? It’s the vulnerable groups—women, children, disabled people, people with chronic illnesses. As a mental health professional, my eyes are always on the most vulnerable groups because they are more impacted and the psychological implications are more apparent. My team and I try to do our best. 

If a ceasefire happens tomorrow, it will take two or three months for caravans to come. And then the authorities, whether local or national organizations—will they prioritize mental health, or are they going to prioritize housing? We are in this struggle all the time. We feel that mental health is not prioritized compared to other health issues like emergency health. 

I do think there will be a ceasefire, but look. We live in the least transparent area in the world. You never know what’s happening. You never know what’s on the table. What’s below the table? You never know what the negotiations are really about. And even when a ceasefire is reached, you don’t know what the deal is. That’s historically what I feel. I lead one of the main civil society organizations in Gaza Strip, we’re quite known locally, internationally, quite respected for our work, and we never know what’s happening. So given that, what we have is just hope. And we do have hope, sometimes it’s stupid hope, but what else is there to do? That’s the thing that keeps you running. There is no other way.

The post Fear and hope in wartime Gaza appeared first on Coda Story.

A slender man of 54, with piercing blue eyes and a gentle manner, Andrii knew that if anything happened to him on the battlefield, Yurii, his partner of nearly 25 years, would not be able to make medical decisions on his behalf. If Andrii died, Yurii would not be allowed to pick up his body from the morgue or arrange a funeral. Under Ukrainian law, the love of Andrii’s life would be little more than a stranger.

Following the 2014 Maidan revolution that overthrew a pro-Kremlin leader and installed a president dedicated to pursuing integration with the West, Ukraine took a handful of steps toward protecting its LGBTQ population, including an amendment to Ukraine’s labor code that made it illegal to fire a person on the basis of their sexuality. “The Ukrainian LGBTQ movement never had any support from our authorities until around 2015,” Andrii told me. 

But past gay pride parades in Kyiv have been marred by violence, and the country of 43 million people has stopped well short of offering the full civil rights of citizenship to gay people. This could all change if those pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to protect the civil rights of LGBTQ people achieve their aims. LGBTQ soldiers have been particularly influential in changing public opinion. An estimated 200 people who openly identify as gay serve in the Ukrainian military, upending existing ideas of what constitutes a national hero.

So far, the country has taken fitful steps toward protecting gay rights. After the invasion, a petition for Ukraine to amend Article 51 of its 1996 constitution — which states that “marriage is based on the free consent of a woman and a man” — gathered 25,000 signatures, enough to necessitate a presidential review. Zelenskyy’s office replied that Ukraine’s constitution “cannot be changed during a state of war or emergency.” The response did say that the government would look into the legalization of civil partnerships, which would extend certain financial benefits to LGBTQ couples, but exclude others, such as adoption rights. 

For Ukraine, the fate of proposed LGBTQ protections during the war with Russia carries special significance. Russian President Vladimir Putin has framed Russia’s invasion as an existential holy war that pits Russia’s blood-and-soil religious, political and social values against Ukrainians who support a jaded, morally corrupt West. He has called LGBTQ people vessels of Western amorality, targeting them for violence and censure inside Russia, and enacted a law that banned children from accessing any media that positively portrays LGBTQ identities. Any legislative protection extended to LGBTQ people in Ukraine now would be cast as a cultural rebuke of Putin’s — and by extension, Russia’s — worldview. 

It’s not only in the war between Russia and Ukraine that LGBTQ rights have become a singular litmus test for whether a country has decided to evolve toward a more tolerant vision of society or to join the wave of emerging authoritarian states around the world. A crucial legal battle is currently underway at India’s Supreme Court, in what could be a landmark moment for LGBTQ communities in the country. The increasingly authoritarian government of Prime Minister Narenda Modi is pushing back against the legalization of same-sex marriage, calling it an “urban elitist concept.” The hearing is expected to go on for at least two weeks. A favorable verdict would be historic and would make India only the second country in Asia, after Taiwan, to legalize same-sex marriage. 

In Hungary, the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has vowed to defend a law that bans the use of materials seen as promoting homosexuality and gender change at schools. A case before the Court of Justice of the European Union, which interprets EU laws to make sure they are applied equally in every EU member state, has the potential for a clash with Hungary, where Orban’s insistence on preserving the law has reinforced Budapest’s increasingly authoritarian bent. 

Andrii, the man called up to fight, did what he could to mitigate his lack of civil rights. He went to a notary and drafted his will to ensure that his partner Yurii could at least inherit the apartment they owned together in Kyiv — the city that the couple has called home since fleeing Luhansk in 2014, when fighting erupted there between Russian proxies and the Ukrainian military. Yurii would not be entitled to death benefits should Andrii pass away.

“I don’t refuse to protect my country, it’s my duty. But I don’t have my ordinary rights,” Andrii told me recently when we met in central Kyiv. After following his military’s summons, he received a temporary deferral. This allowed him to continue his work with Nash Svit, one of Ukraine’s oldest LGBTQ rights organizations. Andrii co-founded the organization in 1997, just six years after the fall of the Soviet Union, at a time when the gay rights movement in the region was only beginning to stir.

Since then, progress on equality has been blocked by Ukraine’s religious institutions and ultra-conservative groups. Same-sex marriages and civil partnerships are not recognized by the state. But the Russian invasion has changed minds. Some Ukrainians, who were previously unsure of their personal views on LGBTQ rights, are taking a pro-gay rights position simply because it is contrary to Moscow’s. While around 41% of Ukrainians do not support “the introduction of a registered partnership for same-sex couples similar to ordinary marriage,” a growing number are uncomfortable with the rights of soldiers in wartime being undermined because of their sexual identity.

Ukraine follows a global trend in which negative attitudes towards LGBTQ people can be deeply entrenched in the country’s armed forces. It’s a situation that has been exacerbated by disinformation pumped out by Russia. Detector Media, a media research group, has tracked the rise of false pro-Russian social media narratives about Ukrainian troops having AIDS “because they are gay.” This has made some members of the Ukrainian military sensitive to any steps taken to encourage the acceptance of gay soldiers. When LGBTQ Military, an NGO fighting for equality in Ukraine, promoted the establishment of a gay-fiendly unit in the armed forces in 2021, the head of PR for Ukraine’s army told local media that reports of a so-called “Ukrainian LGBTQ battalion” were false and accused LGBTQ Military of having Russian origins. LGBTQ Military continue to deny this allegation.

For many LGBTQ soldiers, the flurry of talk around equal rights has sparked hope over the past year. Vlad, a cadet from the southern Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, told me that official recognition of same-sex partnerships would mean real freedom for him. Currently based in Odesa, the 18-year-old endured years of bullying. When he joined LGBTQ Military, he found power in numbers. “I took an example from the guys who have already come out,” he told me in a Telegram message.

Among Ukrainian lawmakers, the leading voice on equal rights for LGBTQ people is Inna Sovsun, a 38-year-old opposition member of parliament from the eastern city of Kharkiv. We met last month at a Crimean Tatar restaurant in Kyiv. A few days before, she had proposed a law on same-sex partnerships that received bipartisan co-sponsorship. The bill would offer an alternative path to official same-sex partnerships, as Zelenskyy’s government drags its feet on the legislation it promised in its 2021 National Human Rights Strategy.

“For a while we were thinking that we should introduce a bill which would give the right to same-sex partnerships only to those where one person was in the military as that would have a greater chance of getting through parliament,” she told me. “But we decided against it because that would be discriminatory.”

And it’s good timing. Her new bill could help mitigate a wave of negative publicity that is expected to follow a pending judgment by the European Court of Human Rights, in Maymulakhin and Markiv v. Ukraine. The case, filed in 2014, was brought against Ukraine by a gay couple who claimed the state discriminated against them by refusing to legally recognize same-sex family partnerships.

“The argument I am going to use is: We are going to have to use this legislation to pre-empt this negative decision against us,” Sovsun told me. Depending on where things land, Sovsun’s bill could give policymakers a way to demonstrate a concrete commitment to equal rights straight away. 

But support for LGBTQ equality legislation will not come easy on the floor of Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, where the Ukrainian Council of Churches wields considerable influence. In a statement issued in late March, the organization said it was “outraged” by Sovsun’s bill, alleging that it threatens “both the institution of the family and the value foundations of Ukrainian society as a whole.” Ultra-conservatives will also coalesce against the law. The mayor of the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk declared that “a gay cannot be a patriot.”

Recognizing the long odds of receiving legal recognition of same-sex marriage, some of Ukraine’s soldiers have gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure their wishes are respected in death.

Last November, Leda Kosmachevska, a 33-year-old woman from Crimea, received a call from a childhood friend. Would she marry him? The man on the other end of the phone had been in a committed relationship with another man for 15 years.

She thought it through and agreed. 

Leda wasn’t surprised when she got the call, she said. Her friend had been in the army since March 2022, and she was well aware of the kinds of pressures and discrimination that gay people face in Ukraine.

“He doesn’t have any close relatives and was raised by his grandmother,” she told me. “We’ve known each other since we were eight. He told me he was gay when we were 18.”

The two friends talked through the logistics. They laid out the terms around his medical care, what to do if he went missing, funeral arrangements. As their conversations continued, Leda grew more comfortable with the idea of being a liaison between her friend’s actual partner and the state. But she was also nervous. The stakes were incredibly high.

Leda wrote about what she was doing on Facebook. She posted her story with a high-quality photograph of herself, sitting on a sofa, wrapped in a white sheet. She explained to me that her public name, Kosmachevska, is different from what appears on her official documents. This was done, she said, to protect her friend, and herself, from hostile actors.

When the post went viral, her story ricocheted around Ukrainian media and became another example of the extraordinary measures some Ukrainians have taken to protect each other in wartime. It also triggered a torrent of abuse from Facebook users who tried to shame her. Still, she left the post up.

“There are people who will use those details to apply to the courts and say the marriage is fictional,” she said, but “my friend is still on the frontline fighting for our country.”

Tusha Mittal contributed additional reporting to this article. 

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But just like at the start of the invasion, physical resistance to mobilization soon began to fade. Russian resistance to the war today is mostly an online operation, and Telegram has become its central platform. With Facebook and Instagram banned under an “extremism” law, and Russian social media giant VK under almost direct control of the Kremlin, Telegram has offered a relatively safe harbor where one can find Russians expressing grief, anger and frustration about the war. But this comes right alongside political narratives and disinformation from across the spectrum and plenty of tall tales from the twisted world of conspiracy theories. It is from these foundations that an organization called the Council of Mothers and Wives has sprung into existence.

The Council launched its Telegram channel on September 29, just days after Putin instituted the partial draft, and now has more than 23,000 followers. Behind it is Olga Tsukanova, a 46-year-old mother who had a brief moment in the limelight when a video she posted on VK went viral. In the video, Tsukanova spoke of how her son was pressured on two separate occasions to sign a contract to be “voluntarily” sent to the front. “I address all Russian mothers,” she said into the camera. “Stop winding snot on your fist and crying into your pillow. Let’s band together.” After her video touched the hearts of mothers across the country, she decided to create the Council.

When I first sat down to read through the channel, I found testimony about conditions on the front and stories of families’ difficult experiences after their loved ones were drafted. In its second post, the Council demanded practical information about the deployment: How much training would draftees receive? What winter clothing would they be issued? How would food be organized? All were reasonable demands, given the news that Russian troops were hugely under-equipped for war. Pictures of supporters across the country, mailing their demands to the authorities, right up to the office of President Putin, followed.

But then another side of the channel began to emerge. Again and again, when I clicked through the links shared, I found myself on the page of another organization, the National Union of the Revival of Russia (OSVR). Established in 2019 to restore “the destroyed state of the USSR,” the OSVR looks longingly at the bygone days of the Soviet Union. It also fosters conspiracy theories on the coronavirus and 5G. According to the OSVR’s manifesto on partial mobilization, which was shared by the Council on Telegram, the war in Ukraine was “started by Chabad adherents” to build a “new Khazaria” on the territory of Russia and Ukraine — an antisemitic conspiracy theory that is grounded in the geography of the medieval Khazar empire and has prospered since the invasion. The OSVR is led by Svetlana Lada-Rus, a conspiracy theorist who believes that a third force is committing atrocities in Ukraine and has claimed that dangerous reptiles from the planet Nibiru would fly to earth and unleash chaos.

The OSVR’s influence on the Council is not an accident. Tsukanova spoke at an OSVR meeting in October and was a member of the now-defunct Volya party that Lada-Rus once led. Tsukanova told a reporter from Novaya Gazeta that the OSVR helped her to create the Council: “A lot of effort is needed for this, without the support of like-minded people, it is difficult to do this. The movement itself supported me.” Both women hail from Samara, a small city near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan.

“Internationally there has been a slight misinterpretation, or at least a superficial understanding, of this [Council] movement that is not to be confused with the more long-standing Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia,” Jaroslava Barbieri, a doctoral researcher on Russia at Birmingham University, told me. “If you look at Olga Tsukanova’s social media prior to the announced [partial] mobilization there is not so much talk about the so-called military operation, actually you will find content about conspiracy theories, a rogue government,” she said. “That is a bit more emblematic of a broader political stance of the members of this Council of Mothers and Wives.” 

In addition to promoting OSVR materials, the channel also features a not-so-healthy dose of anti-vax propaganda. Coda Story’s partners at Democracy Reporting International ran an analysis of the channel and found that more anti-vaccination content was reposted in the first week and a half of its existence than content that could be described as clearly anti-war.

This peculiar cocktail of quackery, conspiracy and seemingly genuine grief about the war maintained a steady beat until mid-November, when the Council staged a public demonstration. On November 14 and 15, 2022, members of the group picketed the Western Military District headquarters in St. Petersburg where they demanded the return of mobilized troops from the Belgorod region near the border with Ukraine. Eager to get media attention, the group stressed on their Telegram channel that “no anti-war statements” were made, only a wish to open “dialogue with officials” about “specific shortcomings.” After the event, the Council got some national media coverage, which they hailed as a success. 

Several days later, Putin announced plans to meet with a select group of soldiers’ mothers on the outskirts of Moscow. Handpicked for their association with pro-war NGOs, or for their outright support of the so-called special military operation, these were the women the Kremlin wanted to use to calm fears around mobilization. “This is a sensitive topic for [Putin],” said Maxim Alyukov, a research fellow at the King’s College Russia Institute. “The government perceives this issue of mothers and wives as a more dangerous issue than some kinds of political criticism, because it is something which can resonate with the public, and that’s why [the Kremlin] ran their own council of mothers and wives,” he told me.

For Tsukanova and her followers, the roundtable was a snub. They duly took to social media to air their grievances. “[Putin] wants to declare real mothers and wives extremists and agents. CIA?”, one Telegram post read. International media also took note. The BBC ran clips of Tsukanova saying that the Russian authorities were “absolutely” afraid of women. Democracy Reporting International’s modeling for Coda Story shows that, in the midst of these events, the Council’s Telegram channel saw a significant increase in followers. 

Soon, the Council’s VK page was blocked on orders from the Prosecutor General’s office and a car carrying Tsukanova was stopped in Samara under the pretext of a drug search while the passengers were questioned. But while thousands have been arrested for their anti-war activism, and others subjected to exile, the Council has been able to continue its work weaving concerns about mobilization with the world of conspiracies. Pro-Kremlin media have been quick to point out links to the OSVR, and Russia’s pro-government, anti-cult organizations have also taken pains to call out the Council and accuse them of being provocateurs. The Center for Religious Studies, led by Alexander Dvorkin, also accused the OSVR of being financed by Poland and Ukraine, a common tactic used to undermine anti-war individuals and groups in Russia.

For Jakub Kalensky, a senior analyst at the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, criticism from these corners is not surprising. “This might be very beneficial for you [as the Kremlin], if you have an anti-mobilization organization that is headed by questionable characters,” said Kalensky. “You can use their background to discredit the anti-mobilization position as a whole, this is a hypothesis we could work with,” he told me. 

In this landscape, Russia’s anti-war activism has become ever more fragmented. Years of authoritarian rule have hollowed out the country’s civil society and stripped people of the ability to express dissent without serious repercussions. More than 2,300 people have been arrested in anti-war street protests since the partial mobilization was announced. In March 2022, legislation was introduced imposing prison sentences of up to 15 years for spreading “fake news” about the so-called special military operation. The war has only made the stakes higher, no matter which side you’re on. 

Motivations for subscribing to Telegram channels undoubtedly vary — from a desire to stop mobilization to an outright anti-war, anti-Putin position. Groups that gain traction are quickly branded as extremist by the authorities. Those that aren’t often attract suspicion as having some nefarious link to the FSB, Russia’s security service. “There has been a history of infiltration of different opposition movements by the FSB either directly by speaking to members of those movements or most probably trying to send different messages to make them less appealing to different audiences,” Kasia Kaczmarska, a lecturer in politics and international relations at Edinburgh University, said. “This can sometimes work via multiple channels which the FSB is capable of organizing.” 

“It's important to highlight these more complex networks and the processes of how certain institutions came about, to not conflate them with genuine anti-war movements,” Barbieri, the Birmingham University doctoral researcher, added. “We also need to start thinking about how these disinformation narratives could also work as a coping mechanism for people so as not to face the reality of how the war in Ukraine began.”

Meanwhile the Council of Mothers and Wives continues to grow. As the full-scale invasion approaches its one-year anniversary, the channel blasts out condemnations of the mobilization alongside the wholesale promotion of conspiracy theories. It’s clear that the channel offers solace for some people, a place to vent their frustrations with a war they didn’t want in their lives. But for its leaders, it may be better understood as a vehicle for bringing an organization on the fringes of society to a new, and much more influential, audience.

This story was produced in partnership with Democracy Reporting International

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In fact, this year’s renewal of Russia’s war in Ukraine emerged from pre-existing twisted narratives. Espousing an alternative reality, Russian President Vladimir Putin has grounded his “special military operation” in false claims that Kyiv was orchestrating a genocide against Russian speakers in the country. He has unfurled a web of lies about the Ukrainian government having Nazi sympathies. Putin’s venomous dislike of the truth has now resulted in thousands of deaths in Ukraine and millions of people displaced.

Since late February, the disinformation frontlines in this war have evolved. At first the disinformation from Moscow was pushed out by state-backed media outlets and a worldwide web of influencers and allies. But as sanctions limited the reach of Russian state broadcasters, and social media platforms attempted to curtail information pollution about the war, the Kremlin’s disinformation machine worked to influence the Russian diaspora and shore up support from vulnerable domestic media globally. 

As the conflict dragged on, some organizations have profited from the ad revenue accrued from Russian lies. An investigation by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Yandex, the Russian version of Google and a Nasdaq-listed organization, helped “sites pushing false Russian claims make thousands of dollars a day through on-site adverts.” 

As the war shows little sign of slowing down, and with 2023 on the horizon, here are some of the key disinformation moments from the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Russia thought it could take Ukraine within a week. As tanks rolled across the border from Belarus and residents in Mariupol witnessed the brutal destruction of their city, a Belarusian-linked hacking group called Ghostwriter began to target the accounts of Ukrainian military and public figures. Like the tank assault on Kyiv, their campaign failed, and when it became clear to the Kremlin that the Ukrainians could successfully defend their country, the tone of the disinformation changed. The new messaging attempted to gaslight the world. Speaking on March 3 at a security council meeting in Moscow, Putin said that the “special military operation is going strictly according to schedule.” Since then, the same refrain has been used in spite of crushing Russian defeats both in the war and in the court of public opinion. But, as laid out by the Canadian government, “Russia wouldn’t need to mobilize another 300,000 citizens if its illegal war of aggression in Ukraine was going as planned.”

One of Moscow’s most incendiary lines of disinformation came early on in the war when the country’s Foreign Ministry claimed that special forces had found documents showing “evidence” of U.S.-financed military biological experiments in Ukraine. Playing off fears that the conflict would see casualties from the use of biological or chemical weapons, this disinformation flew around the world. It got the backing of Chinese officials, who had previously tried to distance themselves from the war. “This Russian military operation has uncovered the secret of the U.S. labs in Ukraine, and this is not something that can be dealt with in a perfunctory manner,” a Chinese spokesperson said at the time. In the United States, where the government was scolding Russia for its information war, QAnon conspiracy theorists were quick to capitalize on the disinformation to buttress their own narratives.

The mass murder and torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian troops in Bucha became evident to the world in early April. At least 458 people were killed in this town west of Kyiv, their bodies left scattered on roads, in shallow mass graves and in destroyed buildings. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, children were among those who were unlawfully killed. The horrors of Bucha not only showed the world the brutality of Russian troops but crushed Moscow’s claims of superior military prowess. The Kremlin’s rhetorical response was to falsely assert that the massacre was faked by Ukrainian forces to provoke Russia. In the following weeks, Putin and his spokespeople would deny any responsibility for the same horrors that emerged in Irpin and Izium. To this day, Moscow claims its forces do not target civilians. 

The war in Ukraine has caused the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II. According to the U.N. there are approximately 7.8 million refugees from Ukraine across Europe, while 4.8 million people have received temporary protection. But even as Europeans threw open their doors to those fleeing the Russian advance, pro-Russian websites and social media accounts were able to circumvent EU sanctions and effectively spread disinformation about the refugee population. Allegations that Ukrainian refugees were financially well off, that they were depleting resources for native populations and presented a security threat to host countries were widely shared. In the Czech Republic, Russian disinformation poured into the physical world when, in September, over 70,000 people took to the streets of Prague to protest the Czech government, Russian sanctions and assistance given to refugees.

The hybrid war in Ukraine mirrors the Syrian experience. Rife with Russian disinformation, the Syrian civil war marked its 11th year in March. Meanwhile, on the African continent, the Wagner mercenary group is pushing disinformation through powerful social media influencers to shore up support for its war in Ukraine and involvement in local conflicts. The Kremlin’s disinformation machine in 2023 will not slow down.

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Over 400 miles north in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Ulan — a digital artist and video editor who asked not to use his full name — helplessly refreshed his social media feeds, trying to make sense of the unfolding violence. “I spent that day feeling useless, lost about what I should do,” he said. 

The next morning, Ulan responded to an Instagram story that he said “called for bloggers, video editors, fact-checkers, artists to contribute to telling the truth about what was happening on our border.” While Ulan did not take up arms with the border forces, he nonetheless felt pride in contributing his skills to another side of the conflict between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan: the one that unfolded online. 

Kyrgyzstan’s bloggers launched coordinated hashtag campaigns, produced polished videos about the conflict in English clearly meant for global audiences, and used satellite imagery to make their case about this decades-old conflict. Meanwhile, Tajikistan’s media was forced to rely on government press releases. Previous reporting also showed that Tajik journalists frequented Kyrgyz outlets for updates on the conflict.

Fighting on the border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is not a new phenomenon. Previous clashes mostly involved citizens throwing rocks at their neighbors across the border. Given that half of the 600 mile border between the two countries remains undelimited, it is difficult to manage scarce water sources. While locals have frequently sparred over springs and access to pastureland, political elites on both sides have leveraged nationalist resentment to bolster the legitimacy of their rule. However, September’s spasm of violence marks a steep jump not only in the intensity of violence, but the asymmetry in digital information campaigns.

The distance between the two Central Asian countries’ media sophistication is rooted in their starkly different political environments — and their very different relationships to authoritarianism.

The Tajikistan government requires privately owned radio stations and television channels to submit all their proposed editorial productions in a foreign language for prior approval, and journalists are routinely denied accreditation, jailed and physically attacked. Asia-Plus,  arguably the only homegrown independent media outlet left standing and whose website has been one of the most visited in the country, has had its domain blocked inside Tajikistan for several years. 

“The Tajik regime has methodically stifled the freedom of press with bans on covering various topics, persecution of journalists, prohibition for government officials to speak with media without permission, you name it,” explained Temur Umarov, a research fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Tajikistan government also curtails social media activity of regular citizens. In 2020, it introduced fines for “disseminating incorrect or inaccurate information” about the Covid pandemic. This made it impossible to fact-check official statements, causing wariness of sharing any information about Covid on social media. Facebook users who posted nongovernmental data about Covid said they were subsequently summoned to prosecutors’ offices and given official warnings. The government also amended the tax code in 2021, requiring social media bloggers to register and pay taxes on any profits from their activities, another form of leverage over online communication that likely forces many bloggers to shutter their activities. As of July, the government is reportedly working on legislation that would criminalize dissemination of “incorrect or inaccurate information” about the country’s armed forces.

While Kyrgyzstan’s government has also used the pandemic to push through laws that threaten freedom of speech and independent press, it has traditionally been a more open space for journalism and digital communication. International organizations constantly provide funding for development of new media and information literacy in Kyrgyzstan. USAID, the American overseas development agency, has since 2017 invested over $10 million in media independence. 

“Kyrgyzstan’s media market is the exact opposite of Tajikistan’s,” Temur Umarov said.

While Kyrgyzstan ranks 72 out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ annual ranking of press freedom around the world, Tajikistan is only ranked 152. “There is a lot of competition, partially because there is no one group of elites who control the narrative entirely,” explained Umarov. Kyrgyzstan’s competing political factions promote their respective narratives through the media outlets each of them control. But the rich and powerful do not enjoy perfect control over the media environment, and Umarov explained, “In such a competitive environment, the Kyrgyz media tirelessly train, develop, and try new formats.”

These new formats often play out online. “On everything that relates to accessibility and affordability of the Internet, Kyrgyzstan obviously wins,” said Timur Temirkhanov, a blogger and media trainer from Tajikistan. 

Kyrgyzstan ranks in the middle of 100 countries in the 2021 Freedom on the Net rankings, while Tajikistan didn’t even make the list. Kyrgyzstan’s Internet users enjoy the cheapest internet, the second-highest download speed and the highest mobile connection penetration rate in Central Asia. Meanwhile, Internet development in Tajikistan has been hindered by high prices, chronic meddling, over-regulation, and corruption. 

Kyrgyzstan’s relative press freedom and burgeoning IT community have fostered a tech-savvy fact-checking industry, and the country’s social media users adopted a hacker ethos in response to this latest escalation of the conflict. Administrators of massive Telegram channels toggled settings to disallow forwarding or copying of media content, which prevented Tajik social media users from analyzing and nitpicking the videos and photos coming from the Kyrgyz side. Accounts with substantial following on Facebook and YouTube coordinated mass reporting and blocking of outspoken Tajik social media accounts. And Kyrgyz accounts even launched DDOS-attacks on Tajik media outlets, including Asia-Plus.

Even though Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan both sit in the bottom 10% in global rankings of English proficiency, Kyrgyzstani social media users and media outlets leveraged slickly polished infographics and videos, many of which were produced in English, to build support in the West. Some of these videos even leveraged satellite imagery to make pro-Kyrgyzstan claims about the timeline of violence. “For once I got to use my skills not for some commercial purpose but to defend my country, to help my people,” Ulan said.

“There was no good analysis or reactions from the Tajik side, especially in English, no nuanced opinions at first. Things were very one-sided,” says Farrukh Umarov, a social entrepreneur from Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, who spent his undergraduate years at a university in Kyrgyzstan. Umarov was initially reluctant to express his opinion about the conflict online, but he described feeling taken aback by how his Kyrgyz friends disregarded every bit of information coming from the Tajik side. 

A post Farrukh Umarov uploaded to Instagram on September 19 was shared over three thousand times. He received 800 comments, many of them confrontational. “This conflict showed me that Tajikistan isn’t ready for an information war.”

When Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan reached a peace agreement on September 25, the information warfare had died down. Media outlets and bloggers in both countries have turned their attention to Vladimir Putin’s announcement of a partial mobilization and the resulting uptick in Russian emigres to Central Asia. News cycles churn on, leaving the 140,000 Kyrgyzstanis who were forced to leave their homes and the families of the 41 casualties from Tajikistan and 59 dead from Kyrgyzstan to mourn in quiet.

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When France sent its soldiers to the Malian capital Bamako in 2013 — as part of the much-feted Operation Barkhane intended to put an end to terror attacks by Islamist groups waging IS and Al Qaeda-backed jihad — they were greeted as heroes by ordinary Malians singing paeans of gratitude.

After early successes, though, the French soldiers struggled and the relationship with Malians deteriorated to such an extent that the French were suspected of supporting the very terrorists they were meant to be fighting. 

On Facebook, a Malian activist group, “Yerewolo Debout sur les Remparts,” responded to the departure of French troops with glee, describing it as a historic triumph. The group posted a cartoon which summed up the feelings of many Malians – a French soldier on the receiving end of a giant Malian boot.

But now it's not only Malians who are celebrating the unceremonious exit of the French. The Kremlin too is delighted, happy to declare Operation Barkhane a debacle, with billions of dollars spent and the loss of thousands of lives, including dozens of French soldiers, to little effect.

If the West was hoping to isolate Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia sees an opportunity in the “global South” to gain more diplomatic influence and secure lucrative economic deals. “Russia is using Africa as a pawn to out-muscle the west,” Jean le Roux, Africa expert at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), told me.

Russia, for years now, has been adept at playing on and inflaming anti-France sentiment in former French colonies, from Mali to the Central African Republic. The Kremlin has largely succeeded in charming African leaders into tighter alliances and upsetting both the United States and particularly Europe, whose once unshakeable hold on the continent, in terms of trade, has considerably weakened.

Even now Russian trade with Africa ($14.5 billion in 2020) is but a fraction of the value of the continent’s trade with the EU (over $280 billion), China (around $255 billion) and the U.S. (over $65 billion). But Russia supplies a significant portion of Africa’s weapons, its wheat and grains, and its fertilizer.

And, as some have argued, Africa’s trading relationships with the EU are starting to chafe. In February, for instance, Odrek Rwabwogo, an adviser to the president of Uganda, wrote that “restrictive trade policies from wealthy western countries and blocs keep African countries chained to raw materials exports…while making the countries and blocs that implement them wealthier still.”

RUSSIA’S AFRICA STRATEGY

Last month, the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov undertook a five-day whistle-stop tour of Africa to talk up the growing collaboration between countries on the continent and Russia as a respite from colonial arrangements and colonial condescension from the European Union. Russia also blamed U.S. sanctions for the rising price of grains and fertilizer that had led to food insecurity and acute hunger in several African nations.

In a column, published in prominent newspapers in Egypt, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia, Lavrov wrote on July 22 that, “Our country who has not stained itself with the bloody crimes of colonialism, has always sincerely supported Africans in their struggle for liberation from colonial oppression.” Lavrov also evoked the “master-slave” dynamic that he wrote continued to characterize relationships between European powers and their former colonial possessions.

It is an argument that has been amplified on social media in recent years, particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to a receptive audience. Big Tech platforms, including the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, are notoriously lax in their moderation policies in much of the world, enabling social media in Arab countries, Latin America and Africa to be a practically unfettered space for Russian propaganda.

And Russia’s narratives are finding their mark.

In 2019, the Stanford Internet Observatory published a whitepaper describing Russia’s experiments with disinformation in Libya, Mozambique, Sudan, Madagascar, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In these six countries, the researchers concluded, Russia was “engaged in a broad, long-term influence operation.” Their tactics included posting “almost universally positive coverage of Russia’s activities in these countries,” while the posts also “disparaged the U.N., France, Turkey Qatar… most often while purporting to be local news sources.”

The researchers noted 73 Facebook pages set up by Russian agencies on Facebook alone targeting audiences in the six African countries, with as many as 8,900 posts being made across the pages in a single month. The disinformation came directly from companies linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the researchers said, whose Internet Research Agency had played havoc with the 2016 U.S. elections.

Backing up its cyberspace guerilla tactics, Prigozhin’s shadowy companies, chiefly the notorious Wagner Group, also had boots on the ground, providing paramilitary fighters and services across Africa.

THE ROLE OF THE WAGNER GROUP 

In Sudan, for instance, protests have been ongoing for over a year to remove the military junta that deposed the longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, only to hold on to power rather than create the conditions for democratic elections and a civilian government.

In Khartoum, more than a hundred protestors have been killed since October. Many more have been wounded. Democracy activist Nasr Eldin Safiyah was injured in a rally in June, the side of his head split open by a teargas canister hurled into the crowd. “I have not been well,” he told me. “But we are determined to take down this corrupt military junta.”

Standing in his way are Wagner Group mercenaries. “It’s a known fact here in Sudan that Russia supports the military junta,” Safiyah says. “Wagner is operating and training militias and they are helping them to loot our gold.” An investigation last month in the New York Times revealed that Russian firms are active in Sudanese gold country, mining tons of the precious metal and described the Wagner Group as providing “interlinked war-fighting, moneymaking and influence-peddling operations.”

As with the six African countries, including Sudan, studied in the Stanford Internet Observatory paper, Mali too has been the target of a sophisticated Russian campaign. Le Roux, the Africa expert at DFRLab, wrote back in February that a “network of Facebook pages promoting pro-Russian and anti-French narratives drummed up support for Wagner Group mercenaries prior to the official arrival of the private military group in Mali.” He added that these carefully constructed fake pages “also mobilized support for the postponement of democratic elections following a successful coup in May 2021, Mali’s second in less than a year.”

Russian president Vladimir Putin called Mali’s military leader Asimi Goita, as the last French soldiers prepared to leave, and reportedly reassured him that food, fuel and fertilizers would be made available. Goita tweeted to pointedly praise Putin’s respect for “the sovereignty of Mali and the aspirations of its population.”

Earlier this month, Russia also delivered several warplanes and a helicopter to Mali to bolster its defenses in its ongoing fight against Tuareg rebels and Islamist terrorists. And last year the Malian foreign minister visited Lavrov in Moscow in part to discuss the deployment of Wagner Group paramilitary troops in Mali. Both countries deny the official presence of Wagner Group mercenaries in Mali, describing the militants as instructors to Malian soldiers.

But a U.N. report unearthed this month by the Associated Press claimed “white soldiers” had been seen with Malian troops committing likely war crimes in the massacre of at least 33 civilians. Both U.S. and U.N. officials have confirmed the presence of Wagner soldiers in Mali. 

The Wagner Group, albeit supposedly unconnected to the Kremlin, is also playing a growing role in the fighting with Ukraine. State-sanctioned Russian media have lavished praise on the exploits of Wagner Group fighters in the Donbas region. And the presence of Wagner Group soldiers in Mali, even if it’s not clear how many, is in keeping with Russia’s intervention in the affairs of several African countries.

Prigozhin, the oligarch who controls the Wagner Group, is known as “Putin’s chef” because he apparently owes his great wealth to catering contracts signed with the Kremlin. He is also linked to Russian companies that have filed into countries like Sudan to illegally mine tons of gold which they carry away from military airports. Miners along the lawless Sudanese border with the Central African Republic accuse Russian mercenaries of massacring their colleagues and stealing their gold. Sudanese officials admit that about four-fifths of the country’s 100 million tons of annual gold exports are smuggled out of the country.

Mali, incidentally, is Africa’s third largest gold exporter.

WHAT’S NEXT?

On the day the military took power in Mali in May, last year, Malians took to the streets to cheer. Some shouted slogans in support of Russia, some raised the Russian flag and chanted “France degage!” Clear out, France. The support for Russia is real, despite groups like Human Rights Watch pointing to arbitrary detentions and torture and the connection of Wagner Group fighters to massacres of civilians.

DFRLab’s experts say Malian social media is where there is most praise for Russia and mentions of the Wagner Group. But neighboring Burkina Faso is catching up. In January, there was a military coup in the country and since then complimentary social media chatter about Russia and its influence in Africa has dramatically increased.

Burkinabe protestors have been rallying against the French presence in their country too, as French troops relocate Operation Barkhane to Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

In the last month, demonstrators in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, have burned the French flag and chanted, “France, the godmother of terrorism, get out,” and, “We are all for the liberation of Burkina Faso!”

Are Wagner Group mercenaries already packing for the 500-mile journey from Bamako to Ouagadougou?

The post Russian trolls and mercenaries win allies and good will in Africa appeared first on Coda Story.

In Stallard’s new book, “Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea,” she analyzes how leaders in Russia, China and North Korea manipulate and distort historical narratives about war as a way to maintain and strengthen their hold on power. Stallard drew extensively on her experience reporting on the ground in all three countries.

In Russia, Putin “has elevated the memory of the Great Patriotic War to the status of a national religion,” Stallard writes. Meanwhile in China, President Xi Jinping has used World War II as a marker of the end of China’s so-called “century of humiliation.” And war narratives are especially important in North Korea, where Kim Il Sung is falsely presented as a war hero who freed the country from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and secured a victory over the United States in the Korean War eight years later.

This is history, Stallard points out, stained with a “veneer of patriotism.”

I recently spoke with Stallard on the phone. She is currently based in Washington, D.C. as senior editor for China and Global Affairs at the New Statesman. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

You set out to explore how autocrats exploit history to stay in power. How would you summarize your reporting? 

It’s about how effectively and often how cynically the leaders of these regimes have manipulated historical narratives to suit their own political purposes and to position themselves as patriotic defenders of their countries — and everyone who opposes them, therefore, as traitors. But really, first and foremost, they do this to shore up their own power and their own popular support.

I understand that the title of your book — “Dancing on Bones” — comes from a Russian activist. What does the phrase mean and why did it resonate with you?

The rough backstory is that there was this Russian activist who, with his friends, founded this grassroots movement — the Immortal Regiment — which was basically intended to be an alternative to what they felt was the very bombastic, militaristic, official commemorations of the Second World War. It was about marching quietly with photos of your relatives. But once it became very popular, and the authorities had taken it over, he gave this very exasperated interview, saying “Guys just stop, stop. Like, we all have relatives who died. It’s dancing on bones.” And to me that really spoke to the very cynical manipulation of what are devastating and personal memories and experiences.

As a means of maintaining power, how does the exploitation of these historical narratives compare to other methods? How critical is this particular method to maintain power in these three countries?

The way I think about it is that there are all of these different elements that work together very effectively, so it’s difficult to strip one out and consider it totally discretely. Timothy Frye has a quote in his book “Weak Strongman” on Putin about how it’s much easier to be a popular autocrat than an unpopular one, which for me captures it quite neatly. If you removed all references to history tomorrow, would those regimes stand? I think so. But in terms of building resilience and making the regime more secure and making it less brittle, less fragile, I think the more you can also embed and draw on these popular ideas and some of the population buys in — even if it’s not a majority — it makes the regime more secure, more resilient.

What the historical narratives have going for them is that they endure, particularly in times when there are economic problems, when the country is facing difficulties, when you’re asking people to accept a degree of hardship and sacrifice within their own lives. It’s very helpful and quite effective to be able to frame that in terms of these past struggles and external enemies that you can blame for your problems. So it’s difficult to separate them, and I think it’s important to see them as part of a toolkit or an arsenal.

It would probably be impossible to measure how much all of this costs, but it would be interesting to know the approximate price tag of the manipulation of history.

In the North Korean case, that was one of the things that struck me. There is a price tag, like with rebuilding the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang. It’s an absolutely extraordinary building in scale and ambition. The Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities is another example. Obviously we don’t know what the budget was because there’s no transparency, but in a country where there are people right now who are desperately in need of sufficient calories and where children are stunted and chronically malnourished, it is a choice to spend a conservative estimate of what must have been millions on these museums. That is a choice, when that money could go elsewhere. 

What role does state media play in these campaigns? 

Each has a slightly different tone. One of the things Russia has done more effectively than China is to make particularly state television channels very entertaining, very watchable. If you can suspend your disbelief at the content, they really have put a lot of effort into having these very provocative, very dramatic talk shows and making their messaging very appetizing. Often Chinese evening television news is very dry. It’s not something you would turn to for entertainment. But they have become much more proactive in recent years in using other mediums — particularly I’m thinking about some of the big budget films in recent years. 

In the book’s conclusion, you said you were writing its final words in January with Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s border. Russia then invaded Ukraine at the end of February. Not specifically about Russia, you wrote, “This warped version of history is the backdrop against which future wars will be fought.” What was it like for you to watch what has happened since?

It was really surreal. When Putin said that morning that it was a denazification operation, partly I felt like, “Of course,” like I should have understood that this was where this was heading. I just didn’t expect that he would go through with it. But with hindsight, of course that’s how he would frame this. I did feel like this was the ideas in the book come to life. This is the worst case scenario. I had spent a lot of time thinking about it in this abstract, theoretical sense, but to see it being used to take real people’s lives and destroy towns and cities in Ukraine is really sickening. 

What are the implications of these campaigns for people who don’t live in China, Russia or North Korea? 

I think we should all be very wary, and it’s made me very conscious of how leaders in other countries like here in the United States, and in the U.K. where I’m from — how people who have power or seek power or want to stay in power, turn to history. These historical narratives are effective because they resonate, so they can be very dangerous in the hands of people who are in power. There’s a live debate here in the United States about whether we should also focus on the darker aspects of the past or whether that’s an unpatriotic thing to do. We should problematize — to use a horribly scholarly term — as much as we can. 

That reminds me of a quote in your book about history functioning as a comfort blanket in Russia. 

Yeah, it feels really nice. It’s nice to believe you’re the hero of the story, that your country is the greatest in the world. But we should be aware that that’s also what all these other countries tell their citizens, that they’re the heroes of the story, that their countries are the force for good. I want to emphasize the unexceptional nature of the desire to do this. Leaders in all countries do draw on various versions of the past, so it’s not an exceptional impulse, but it’s been taken to extremes in these three countries. It is absolutely not only autocrats who are attracted to this idea, so we should all really be on our guard against it. 

The post How autocrats manipulate history to hold on to power appeared first on Coda Story.

The photo has already become an iconic representation of the devastation suffered by Ukrainians in the war. But years from now, what will it mean for this young woman and her child? Images of adults and children severely impacted by violence endure in public and personal memory — forever stored on the internet and making a comeback every now and then. 

Thousands of miles away, in Kashmir — home to one of the world’s longest-running conflicts — the long-term effects of an image like this can be extreme for a private individual. The consequences can be life-changing.

Consider the ordeal of Farooq Dar. In 2017, after casting his ballot in a contentious election that had led to a spike in public violence, Indian army officers famously apprehended the 33-year-old Kashmiri man, beat him and then tied Dar to the front of a jeep. They drove for 17 miles with Dar strapped to the vehicle’s spare tire, effectively using him as a human shield in a conflict zone, where the army was vulnerable to attack. 

When the vehicle came to a halt, army officers themselves snapped Dar’s picture, even as he begged to not be photographed. “In those moments, I felt like I should have never existed. My lips were bleeding and they had broken my elbow,” Dar recalled. Photos of the scene instantly went viral on social media.

The images provoked massive outrage, but the Indian army defended its actions, as did the government. Supporters of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party sold T-shirts featuring images of the incident, bearing the caption: “Indian Army saving your a**, whether you like it or not!” The incident was even recreated in a Bollywood movie.

“They were making money out of my tragedy. Indians used me terribly,” Dar told me in a recent interview.

“When they clicked my picture and uploaded it on the internet, they showed the world how brave they were without thinking about how it would ruin my life.”

Kashmir’s long-standing political conflict

The conflict in the Kashmir Valley began in 1947 with the fall of the colonial British Empire and the subsequent emergence of a relatively secular India, and Pakistan, a homeland sought by Muslims who feared a Hindu majoritarian assault. Territories like Kashmir were given the option, at least on paper, to accede to either dominion. Kashmir fell into a quagmire: it was, and still is, predominantly Muslim but was ruled by a Hindu autocrat who conditionally acceded to the Indian Union on the promise, made by India’s first prime minister, of a plebiscite in which residents of the region would decide which country they wanted to belong to. But the plebiscite never took place.

Kashmiris have lived through generations of political conflict and uncertainty ever since, with many continuing to demand their right to self-determination from an indifferent New Delhi. Their defiance has been met with the pervasive presence of the Indian army; sweeping curfews and communication shutdowns; economic isolation; extrajudicial killings and torture; and a long list of other human rights violations.

‘I cannot hide’

At first, Dar had no idea that photos of the incident had gone viral. The internet was shut down in Kashmir, as is often the case. When the connection came back, Dar discovered that he had become known as “the human shield” — a title he is still unable to escape, five years on.

People recognized him everywhere. He was suddenly unable to find a job, or even a woman to marry.

All potential matches were unnerved by what had happened to him. Eventually, a year later, Dar married a woman from the Jammu division of Jammu and Kashmir state, who had no knowledge of what had happened to him. He keeps the story from her, even now.

Dar has attempted suicide. He has thought of running away from Kashmir and starting anew, but he fears this would not be enough.

“I cannot hide. That is what the internet does to you. One share and the world knows you,” he said.

“[For as long as] the internet exists, this picture will exist. They almost killed me that day but I survived,” said Dar.

Haunted from an early age

Dar is not entirely alone. Faizan Sofi has endured a similar trauma for a decade. When he was just 12 years old, Sofi was arrested on rioting allegations, after a picture of him throwing stones appeared online.

“I was too young. It was a mistake that we promised would never be repeated,” he said.

A few days after his arrest, while Sofi was being transferred from the court to a juvenile facility, he and his younger sister sobbed as she clung to his arm. A journalist captured the moment, and soon the photograph went viral online. Although it created a wave of sympathy for the children and intense criticism of the government at the time, the photo haunted Sofi into adulthood.

In 10 years since the incident, Sofi has been arrested five more times. After the police arrested him on campus, he dropped out of school. Friends deserted him. Like Dar, he has been unable to find work. He still grapples with depression and sleeplessness.

“Over the years, I have been shown my photo so many times. And even though I know that I did not do anything wrong, it hurts,” he said.

One of the youngest people known to be facing this challenge is a five-year-old Kashmiri boy, who was famously photographed two years ago, sitting atop the body of his grandfather, who was slain in the crossfire of a gun battle that broke out in the northern city of Sopore. The boy’s family members now try to restrict his internet access, in order to prevent him from finding his own image there. They told me they wish that whomever took the photograph had blurred the boy’s face before sharing it with the world.

“We are sure that if he sees his picture someday, it will all come back to him because he has mild memories of the day that he is not able to comprehend,” said the boy’s uncle. 

Who has the right to be forgotten?

This is not a new phenomenon — photos like Nick Ut’s 1973 “The Terror of War” (also known as “Napalm Girl”) that showed a naked girl, screaming and running from a napalm attack in South Vietnam, had similar effects. But in the digital era, such images move at lightning speed, often without the scrutiny of an editor.

Anuradha Bhasin, executive editor of “The Kashmir Times,” one of Jammu and Kashmir’s oldest newspapers, said that journalists need to consider the pitfalls of uploading photographs of victims. “How is it that we circulate those pictures, and in what context?” she asks.

But she acknowledges that the problem is hardly exclusive to journalists. The very nature of digital networks — in which anyone can easily copy and re-share an image or video — guarantees that a piece of content may always exist or resurface somehow. Indeed, there is no surefire recourse for people like Sofi or Dar. But intervention by the courts or by major internet companies can make a difference, by reducing or even prohibiting their distribution.

Apar Gupta, an Indian legal expert and the executive director of the New Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation, points to “the right to be forgotten,” part of Europe’s data privacy and security law, the General Data Protection Regulation. The provision allows any person convicted of a crime, after serving their sentence or being proved innocent, to demand the erasure of their personal data. Companies like Google have built substantial systems for processing and adjudicating “right to be forgotten” claims in Europe.

Although some other jurisdictions have legal frameworks that help people assert a right to their image, most countries, India included, do not have comprehensive data protection laws that might help people facing these situations.

Gupta said that the right to be forgotten requires a clearer definition than what is on the books in Europe, as it can be subject to misuse by people in positions of power, politicians in particular, who may seek to cleanse the internet of information that might harm their reputations.

“At present, the right to be forgotten is being litigated in several cases in India where people are asking for their personal details to be removed from search engine results regarding cases in which they have litigated,” he added.

In India, a data protection bill addressing the right to be forgotten was tabled in Parliament in 2019. Although petitioners have brought data protection cases to multiple courts, the issue has yet to be backed by statute.

The internet never forgets

Social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube also have a role to play here, as major distributors of these kinds of images. But none of the leading companies provide a mechanism for people to ask that their images be removed from these sites, unless the images already violate the sites’ content rules covering things like nudity and gratuitous violence. The photos in question do not fall into this category — it is the context in which they were taken that makes them so powerful.

But artificial intelligence and human moderators at social media companies are capable of blocking content and drastically reducing its circulation, said Maknoon Wani, an incoming graduate at the Oxford Internet Institute.

“What internet providers, social media companies, and other content curators can do is limit the reach, they can try to scrub it as efficiently as possible. It can be removed to an extent that a common internet user cannot access that content,” said Wani. “A child or a person who might get traumatized because of that photo or video will not be exposed to that content.”

If social media companies allowed users to ask for content to be removed on these grounds, it could help to reduce the long-tail effects of these kinds of images for their subjects. But there is no indication that this will happen any time soon.

Zoya Mir, a clinical psychologist based in Kashmir, spoke with me about how photos like this can compound mental health issues for people in these situations, who have already experienced a serious trauma. Part of the challenge, especially for young people like Sofi, lies in finding a way to move on. For people in any conflict zone, the internet makes this uniquely difficult.

“By putting an image on the internet, we break the notion of something actually being over,” said Mir. “We put it on a continuum, that is forever.”

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The post ‘I cannot hide’: Viral photos from Kashmir conflict haunt subjects for years appeared first on Coda Story.

We’e’ena Tikuna grew up hearing her grandfather’s stories of slavery.

When he was young, the substance of choice to extract from his people’s piece of the rainforest was latex. The men who invaded the land called it “white gold.”

Like many Indigenous people living in the Brazilian Amazon from the late 1800s up until the first half of the 20th century, O’i Tikuna was forced to help them tap Pará rubber trees, letting the sticky, milky liquid run into small metal buckets and then to be exported and sold. A commodity in high demand ever since the Industrial Revolution, its popularity resurged during WWII.

At first, O’i and others from the Tikuna Umariaçu territory were promised payment and gifts for their labor. But these things never came.

“We used to be easily fooled,” says We’e’ena. “We didn’t know how to speak the white man’s language. We had to learn so we could speak to them as equals.”

Today, young Tikuna people like We’e’ena are working to make sure the right information reaches those who never left their territory. Now in her early thirties, We’e’ena is bilingual. She lives and works in the city of Alter do Chão, and runs a popular YouTube channel where she discusses Indigenous culture and rights issues. She is her grandfather’s first point of contact outside the Tikuna community and a trusted source of information, especially when it comes to decisions being made by the federal government about how to manage and protect Indigenous land.

President Jair Bolsonaro’s latest bid to make mining legal on Indigenous territories has We’e’ena, O’i and the rest of the Tikuna community worried. Long known for spouting anti-Indigenous rhetoric and attempting to diminish Indigenous rights, the far-right politician has found a new, far-fetched excuse to allow mining on Indigenous land: The war in Ukraine.

As the world’s largest exporter of coffee and soy, Brazil needs fertilizer, and a lot of it. Its largest international supplier of fertilizer is Russia. But economic sanctions imposed by the West since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have caused all exports of the product to grind to a halt. This has left Brazil on edge about a possible shortage.

For Bolsonaro, Brazil’s dependence on Russia for potassium, one of the primary nutrients of NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) commercial fertilizers used in the country, is unacceptable. Opening up federally recognized and protected Indigenous land to mining, he says, would solve the problem. It’s an argument he’s been making since 2016, when he was still a member of Congress. During a plenary session that year, where he spoke about the need to use Brazil’s own potassium reserves for fertilizer production, he cited Indigenous reserves, among other things, as getting in the way.

As president, his proposed solution is to pass bill 191/2020, which would allow mining on that Indigenous land to happen. And he’s using the war in Ukraine as a political tool to drive public fear of a national food shortage, in hopes of drumming up popular support.

“POTASSIUM is our food security,” he tweeted on March 2, referring to one of the primary nutrients of commercial fertilizers used in the country. 

“With the Russia/Ukraine war, we now run the risk of a potassium shortage or an increase in its price. Our food security and agribusiness (Economy) demand of us, the Executive and Legislative branches, measures that allow us not to be externally dependent on something that we have in abundance.”

Bolsonaro insists that the potassium necessary for Brazil to produce its own fertilizers is located on Indigenous land.

The problem with that argument is that it’s not true.

According to researchers from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), two-thirds of Brazil's potassium reserves are located outside the Amazon, in the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Sergipe. Inside the rainforest, none are located on Indigenous lands that are officially recognized and protected by the federal government. Just 11% of the country’s potassium reserves are on Indigenous territories that still haven’t completed the lengthy and bureaucratic process of becoming officially recognized as Indigenous lands and protected accordingly.

“Greater independence in the production of fertilizers, including potassium, requires long-term investments in science and technology,” says Raoni Rajão, a professor of production engineering and coordinator of the Environmental Services Management Laboratory at UFMG who researches supply chain production in the Amazon.

“Allowing mining on Indigenous lands without discussing it with society will only create more problems without solving the fertilizer crisis."

Despite being false, the argument has managed to speed up the possible passage of the mining bill. Brazil’s lower house of Congress, controlled by conservative lawmakers, voted in early March to fast-track the legislation, foregoing committee debates. The bill will likely go to a vote in April.

It is unclear whether the vote will receive enough support to advance to the Senate. But one thing is certain: The rural bloc, known as the Agricultural Parliamentary Front (FPA), is sure to push for the bill to pass.

In an official statement, FPA president Sérgio Souza asserted that the FPA “defends agricultural production on Indigenous lands in Brazil.” Their plan isn’t to take away the rights of Indigenous people to their land, language and culture, he says. Rather, it is to afford them “the right to choose how they want to live economically and socially.”

For Indigenous communities, his words ring hollow and echo the false promises they’ve been offered by colonizers for centuries. Their rights are something they have had to continuously fight to protect.

Indigenous peoples from across the country will be attending the 18th edition of Free Land Camp (Acampamento Terra Livre) from April 4 to 14—an annual event in the capital city of Brasília—held to draw attention to violations of Indigenous rights and demand change. This year, one of those demands will be to put a stop to bill 191/2020.

We’e’ena Tikuna was 12 when she heard Portuguese for the first time.

Her first 11 years were spent in Tikuna Umariaçu, an Indigenous territory in the Brazilian Amazon that belongs to the Tikuna, the most populous Indigenous group in the country. There, along the Upper Solimões River, bordering Peru and Colombia, she spoke only Tikuna, learning about her people’s culture and history from her parents, grandparents, and other leaders in the community.

But her parents wanted their six children to understand more. So the family moved to Manaus, the capital city of the state of Amazonas, where the children went to school and learned Portuguese.

High school in Manaus was hard. Studying in an entirely new language and cultural environment, and faced with incessant bullying and racism, We’e’ena struggled in school. It was a painful process, but she knew it would help her in the long run. The stories she heard from her grandfather—now 88 years old and a respected shaman in the Tikuna Umariaçu community—as a child had stuck with her. She was determined to ensure that history did not repeat itself.

Now, at 33, We’e’ena is an artist, nutritionist, and Indigenous rights activist in Alter do Chão, in Brazil Pará state, which is home to several Indigenous territories and a hotbed for illegal mining. There she has access to information that otherwise might not reach her village, where her entire family still lives. She works to make sure the Tikuna know what’s going on in government buildings far from their territory—she’s able to talk to them on a regular basis thanks to Tikuna Umariaçu’s internet connection and makes the week-long boat trip back home at least once a year—but also spreads awareness to others about the destruction of the Amazon and the violations of Indigenous rights that go hand-in-hand with it on her YouTube channel and by speaking at events like TEDx Laçador.

“Our weapon, our power, today is technology, it’s the internet,” says We’e’ena. “Things used to happen in the dark of night. But not anymore.”

As Bill 191/2020 makes its way swiftly through Congress, environmentalists and land defenders worry about the impacts it could have if it passes.

Federal protections for recognized Indigenous land like the Tikuna Umariaçu territory are some of the best defenses against deforestation in the Amazon. According to a study by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), from January to December 2020, just 3% of deforestation in the Amazon region happened on Indigenous land.

But even now, illegal mining on Indigenous territories causes immense harm to both the environment and the health of those living there.

Currently, 93.7% of mining activity in Brazil occurs in the Amazon, according to data collected by MapBiomas.

Gold mining is rampant across the region, leading to destruction of the rainforest through deforestation, but also contaminating water and soil with mercury used by miners to separate the prized mineral from other substances. The mercury contaminates water used for drinking and bathing, and seeps into fish, a main food source for many Indigenous peoples. Public health research has shown that mercury is causing illness among people of all ages in Indigenous communities, and leading to developmental challenges for children.

Without federal protections of their land, the situation is only expected to get worse. For Indigenous groups like the Tikuna, passing this bill is life or death.

“We don’t want this,” We’e’ena says. “These conditions that are being created are going to kill us.”

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The post Brazil’s Congress fast-tracks plans to mine Indigenous land for potassium, blaming Russia sanctions appeared first on Coda Story.

As Russian forces maneuver to encircle Ukraine’s capital, Sennik continues posting her ethno-photography for her 43,500 followers but with a new format: a jarring juxtaposition of her pre-war archive alongside the images of war such as bombed out homes and civilian evacuation. “The world I show through my art is being destroyed right now,” Sennik wrote the morning of February 24, the start of the Russian invasion. In a conversation edited for length and clarity, Sennik explained what she is trying to convey today with her photography.

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A post shared by Anna Senik (@annasenik)

Can you first tell us about the situation where you are now?

In Kyiv, nearly all the roads have been blocked from the west, the south, partially from the north, but as of today, the city is still not fully surrounded by Russian forces. The only way for Russians to get at us is the open sky. The city is getting hit directly by rocket attacks, apartment buildings are being bombed left and right, residential and private buildings, shopping malls, the city center, the outskirts, all over.

I joined the Territorial Defense on the first day. I was at the enlistment office by lunchtime picking out firearms. The Territorial Defense group is all made up of volunteers. There are other women within our battalion, but I’m the only one in our division. For me this was a logical step because it’s my second military experience. The first time, in 2014, I was part of a volunteer battalion. After this I worked in photography and thought that phase of my life was over. But when you’re woken up in the morning from being bombed you’re left with only one choice. And that’s why I’m here again.

How has the war changed your photography?

Originally it was a way to present Ukrainian culture to the world but now my job is to explain what is happening here. I publish my archival images mixed in with photos that I’ve taken now or photos other eyewitnesses sent to me. I really wanted to use this contrast because I can’t shake off the feeling of having my life stolen from me. When I look back, I realize that I had a wonderful life. I had the chance to do my favorite kind of work that was tied to culture and beauty.

And now I’ve lost all of that. Right now someone is trying to physically destroy that life. Even museums are being bombed. Several of my friends have died already. The world where I used to live is being destroyed around me. I wanted to show that contrast. The peace in Ukraine that was in my photos and what is happening to that peace now.

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One of your most popular recent posts was a series of posed WWII-era images you took of couples in 2013 mixed in with photos taken in recent days of real Ukrainian couples being forced to say goodbye to each other. Why did you share this?

These photos were part of a photo shoot from the spring 2013, so even before the revolution. I was later reminded of them almost a year later when the first volunteer battalions were heading to the east of Ukraine. Young women would come to say goodbye to the men in the same way. 

In 2013, these seemed like scenes from the past, from a history that cannot be repeated. How can there be a war again? How can these kinds of farewells be said again?

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So much of Russia’s propaganda and Putin’s remarks have fixated on denying the existence of distinct Ukrainian identity and culture. Do you feel like your work counteracts that false narrative?

I worked for a long time in political communications but my art was never meant for propaganda messaging. I do it just because I love it.

The fact that it can have this effect, that’s not because of me. Beauty is the only language everyone can understand because it can touch all of us. Beauty and this contrast that I’m presenting has allowed me to reach lots of people.

Who are you now trying to reach with your photography?

Ukrainians are already motivated. I don’t think we can possibly get any more motivated than we are today. Ukraine must be the most united country in the world right now. But this war has gone on for three weeks and the world’s attention is already waning. I want to show foreigners what is happening, to show them who we are, what kind of beautiful people we have and how we are saving that. But to also show people what is being done to us: videos of people being killed, of children who have been killed. 

Sometimes people write to me and they say they support me but it’s really difficult to look at the images I am sharing. And I understand them completely. Not a single psychologically normal person should feel ok looking at this. But this is our reality and I’m obliged to share it.

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There is a massive flow of information, videos, and photography from Ukraine. How do you decide what to publish?

What’s the point in publishing photos of dead Russian soldiers when you can instead show the kind of destruction they have caused: ruined homes, civilians evacuating while being shot at, bombings. My role here is to record this and to create an Instagram account of war crimes. 

I don’t try to overstate what I’m doing, I think it is a drop in the ocean, but if it helps tell a few hundred more people about what is happening then that’s great.

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What do people misunderstand about this war?

I think generally people outside Ukraine believe that this war with Russia is a problem just for Ukraine. But that’s not true. Aggressive governments with dysfunctional presidents are problems not just for neighboring countries but for the whole world. 

TV hosts on propaganda channels across Russia are already drawing up maps of what the Baltic states would look like if Russia grabs more territory. We can laugh it off, but half a year ago those maps were of Ukraine and look at what’s happening around us today.

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A post shared by Anna Senik (@annasenik)

After the war, how do you think this period in your life will affect your photography?

I don’t think I’ll be photographing war themes in the future. Probably the opposite. I’ve had enough. Instead I’ll focus on things that are absolutely peaceful and beautiful. Because we will all get our fill of war now.

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"He's running away from this Buk I think — or maybe to that side?" asks one drone operator, watching a black speck — a Russian soldier — on the screen. "Maybe something fell off and he went to check what it was. He's just running back and forth," says another, as the speck changes direction.

“Position” flashes at the top of the screen, before the Buk explodes into a voluminous cloud of black smoke. Applause and excited cheers break out in the control room. "Finally!" says one operator. "What fireworks," adds another.

The successful hit was one of a growing number of drone strikes conducted by the Ukrainian military against Russian targets using Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones. The footage, shared by the Ukrainian defense ministry and immediately spread online, has only come to enhance the idea of the drones stealthy power, sneakily bringing destruction to lines of Russian tanks or ammunition from afar and then displaying the grainy evidence for all to see. The Ukrainian embassy in Turkey tweeted footage of a Bayraktar TB2 exploding a column of Russian artillery in a white sparkling cloud alongside a phrase that roughly translated means “thank God for Bayraktar.”

This kind of publicity is a boon for Turkey, which has long held ambitions as a global drone superpower, eagerly demonstrating their use of this homegrown technology across the world, from Nagorno-Karabakh to Libya and northern Syria. But through drone sales, Turkey is also developing an international reputation as a country that will step in with easily available, cheaper and reliable drone technology where other nations like the United States enforce export controls, or at the very least ask questions about how their technology is used. 

Ukraine has transformed if not rehabilitated the image of Bayraktar TB2s, with the drones now seen as an essential tool in the fight for democracy on the edge of Europe rather than a flying predator employed in asymmetrical warfare or by governments willing to use them to attack civilians. 

Part of this transformation rests on the drones’ ability to record strikes, making them an essential eye in the sky for Ukraine’s information war as much as their aid to action on the ground. Though Ukrainian forces are clearly maximizing the drones’ effectiveness, taking out columns of Russian artillery or even using cheaper commercial drones to help them aim at enemy lines, Ukrainian authorities have so far declined to release clear data on how many times they have successfully employed Bayraktar TB2s or precisely where the strikes took place, including when asked for this story.  

Ukraine’s drone arsenal numbers at most fifty. Yet the drones are the only piece of military hardware that comes with an inbuilt camera, setting them apart from the Javelins and MANPADS also used to fend off the Russian advance, and allowing Ukraine to display footage of the strikes to boost morale and galvanize international support for their fight.

Turkish military analyst Arda Mevlutoglu compared the drones' fight against larger Russian equipment to a David versus Goliath battle. "This might be the reason why the Ukrainian military gives them so much emphasis in their public relations campaign," he said. "Footage showing destroyed equipment, particularly sophisticated equipment or slain enemy troops multiply the psychological effect. Even if not much equipment is destroyed, the dissemination of such imagery through social media creates a snowball effect, which is very useful for propaganda warfare."

Aided in no small way by Clash Report, a Twitter account with 169,000 followers believed to have links to the Turkish military due to its unique access to battle footage, suddenly the name Bayraktar has become a rallying cry for Ukrainian freedom. The Kyiv zoo named a baby lemur Bayraktar, days before Ukrainian police forces named a German Shepherd puppy "Special Bayraktar," for his ability to bark and warn others of incoming explosions. The Ukrainian Land Forces composed an ode to the drones, featuring spoken word praise over a kaleidoscope of jingly electronic xylophone sounds.

Clash Report took what was previously a low quality video accompanying the song, showing a Bayraktar TB2 drone cruising over a blue sky, and tweeted a replacement showing footage of drone strikes timed to the beat, an instant viral hit.

Sinan Ulgen, director of the Istanbul think tank the Center for Economics and Security Policy, labeled the drones a “matter of national prestige,” for Turkey, one so domestically popular that it transcends contentious local politics. The drone program, he explained, has helped Turkey propagate an international image as a technologically astute and ambitious power that has successfully manufactured a cheap but highly effective piece of technology. “There, Turkey can compete in the big leagues,” he said.

Bayraktar TB2s are estimated to cost $1 million to $2 million each, up to a tenth of the price of a U.S.-produced Reaper drone. “There are more able drones in the world, these are not the most capable. There are also cheaper ones,” Ulgen said. But with its drone program, “Turkey has found and developed a soft spot in terms of combining price and capability.” 

This makes Turkish drones cheaper than American or Israeli drones, but more capable than Chinese drones, according to Ulgen. “It’s also one of the armed drones that now boasts considerable warfare experience, it has a proven track record,” he said.

Turkey, a NATO member with ties to both Russia and Ukraine, has been trying to navigate how to promote the drones’ success without angering Russia, even after Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visited Kyiv in early February and expanded an agreement to manufacture Bayraktar drones in Ukraine. Turkey imports almost a third of its natural gas from Russia, depends on Moscow for foreign currency inflows, and even provoked U.S. sanctions in 2017 by purchasing Russia’s S400 missile defense system. The threat of any kind of backlash from Moscow looms over the Turkish government, which is trying to manage the fallout from an ongoing economic crisis that has seen the lira lose half its value in just one year. Foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu put it bluntly in a recent interview with Turkish television: “We can't afford to take sides," he said. 

Footage of Bayraktar TB2s blowing up columns of Russian targets seems unlikely to smooth the Kremlin’s grievances with Turkey and risk damaging Turkey’s position as a negotiator between the two sides. Deputy Foreign Minister Selim Kiran felt the need to emphasize recently that Turkey's drone sales to Ukraine remain, in his words, private sales not "aid from Turkey."

In 2005, on a bleak airstrip surrounded by cornfields, a young engineer and MIT graduate named Selcuk Bayraktar attempted to convince an assembled group of observers that Turkey could become a great drone power. After providing them with a demonstration of his small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAV's, bumpily taking off and landing on the small runway, he gave a passionate speech arguing that Turkey had the capability to lead the world in drone production if they invested in his vision.

It could all be so simple, he explained, extending his hand in the air as if to show a smooth path to the future. "Turkey can be number one in the world in five years," he declared.

Bayraktar has become something of an Elon Musk figure in Turkey, with a fanbase obsessively following his creations and who view him a technological savant. His work is tightly bound up with his country's ambitions as a global power, particularly a desire to show that it can stand on its own and produce vital technology without depending on weapons imports, particularly from the United States. Bayraktar's prediction about the growing power of drones also turned out to be correct, aided by Turkey's decision to sell his drones to any country willing to purchase them and his 2016 marriage to President Erdogan's youngest daughter.

“The marriage possibly gave them an edge in the end phase, in terms of becoming a client of the Turkish government, but also having the strong international backing of the government,” said Ulgen, the analyst.

Bayraktar’s success has not always been well received internationally, including at his alma mater. Physicist Max Tegmark provoked outrage in Turkey earlier this year when he said of Bayraktar: "I'm ashamed we trained him here at MIT." Baykar, the company which manufactures Bayraktar TB2s and where Bayraktar is chief technology officer, did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

Bayraktar’s ambitions have long proved in sync with those of his father-in-law, who has frequently declared that his aim is to see Turkey manufacture its own technology and eschew any reliance on partners like the United States. “Our goal is a fully independent Turkey in the defense industry,” Erdogan declared earlier this year at the launch of a new ship operated by the country’s intelligence services.

Turkey began by using Bayraktar's drones for strikes targeting Kurdish militants in northern Iraq and later Syria, where observer organizations such as Airwars found that strikes have also claimed civilian lives. Turkey states that in northern Syria alone, the drones clocked in 1,129 strikes over four months in 2018. The strikes quickly formed part of what some analysts labeled Turkish "techno nationalism," fuelled by heavily edited YouTube videos of the drones taking off from airstrips in southern Turkey, followed by drone footage filmed over the mountainous region of northern Iraq.

Domestically-produced drones, particularly TB2s, have since formed a central pillar of Turkish efforts to reshape warfare and alter the outcome of regional conflicts to see results favorable to Ankara.

In April 2020, opposing forces loyal to the Libyan warlord General Khalifa Haftar accused militia groups in Tripoli of using a Turkish drone to strike a food convoy, killing at least five civilians. In the same year, Tukey’s decision to provide Azerbaijan with Bayraktar TB2s enabled Baku to reclaim territory from Armenia in a war over the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh. International organizations opposed Turkey’s drone sales to Azerbaijan which reportedly updated online videos of its drone strikes and broadcast them on screens throughout the capital.

A report by the Armenian National Committee of America examining Bayraktar technology found American, Canadian, British, German, Swiss and French components, including American radio manufacturer Garmin, which responded that the technology was intended for civilian use only and pledged to prevent its further misuse. Last year, Canada withdrew export licenses to Turkey for optical sensors and targeting systems made by a Canadian company, citing the technology had been used inside Bayraktar TB2s deployed in Nagorno-Karabakh without consent.

But these controversies have not dented sales. "What armies want to do is use technology that's battle tested so they're not the ones trying to debug along the way,” said Sarah E. Krebs of Cornell University, a political scientist and former U.S. Air Force veteran who has worked with drones.

Qatar and Morocco acquired TB2's, while Tunisia recently acquired a small drone fleet from TAI, another Turkish drone company, despite a tense relationship with Turkey. Ethiopia, which has bought several kinds of drones including Bayraktar TB2s, is accused of using the drones in attacks that killed dozens of civilians. An investigation by POLITICO found photos of fragments of the MAM-L bomb exclusively carried by Bayraktar TB2s at the site of an attack on a school holding internally displaced people, including children.

While Bayraktar was facing scrutiny about the use of his drones in Nagorno-Karabakh, a burgeoning new Eastern European market was forming. Ukraine reportedly bought six Turkish drones and three ground control stations in 2019, but last year dramatically upped their demand and bought another twenty-four. That year, Poland became the first NATO member to purchase Bayraktar TB2s. As Russian forces began massing on Ukraine's borders, other countries concerned by Russian advances such as Lithuania and Latvia both publicly mulled purchasing Turkish drones.

By last year, Bayraktar TB2s had acquired an international reputation as a cheap and deadly piece of technology, primed to become a pillar of Ukraine’s successful war narrative. Ukraine even paraded a TB2 through the streets of Kyiv during independence day celebrations last August, and later broadcast footage of a lone drone strike on a Russian howitzer, a large artillery weapon, in Donbas in October — the first salvo in their efforts to use the drones as messaging and not just weaponry.

Russia’s defense ministry began seemingly chasing the success of Ukraine’s drone videos weeks into their invasion, publishing heavily edited black-and-white footage that they claimed showed two of their helicopters launching missile strikes on Ukrainian military equipment. This included brief scenes showing the attack helicopters honing in on their targets, a fun-house mirror version of the videos produced by the Ukrainian side.

Russia, which possesses its own domestically-produced drone army estimated to number around 500, seems to have been caught unawares by Ukraine's drone fleet. "The Russians have been an amazing mix of arrogant and inept," said Peter Warren Singer of the New America Foundation, who has written extensively about how drones are reshaping warfare. Russian forces, he said, assumed a quick march towards Kyiv and so delayed deploying air power against the drones, initially giving them space to operate. "So there was open air for the Ukrainians to fly drones that move slower than a World War One biplane," he said. 

Drones like Bayraktar TB2s, Singer said, allow one side to quickly acquire an instant air force without the risk of human injury or the time required to train pilots and risk more expensive equipment. They have become part of Turkish efforts to show the many unconventional ways to deploy drones, normalizing their use beyond counterinsurgency or attacks on limited targets. “The uses shift from being counterterrorism, going after individual human targets, to using them in civil wars and conventional wars. That’s where Turkey was one of the key actors leading the way, because that’s how they’re utilizing it.”

Bayraktar himself, after tweeting a message of support for Ukraine, seems content. He recently posted a video showing the successful test flight of a new, far larger UAV, the Akinci B while Baykar has boasted of a design for an unmanned fighter aircraft. His drones may soon have company in Ukraine, after President Joe Biden announced that the United States would send drones to Kyiv, likely U.S.-made Switchblades. 

"What was once abnormal or considered science fiction is like the new normal of war," said Singer. Turkey’s rise to dominance as an international drone power may not change warfare alone, but it is increasingly showing how countries can deploy drones in battle while using footage of their strikes to wage war over the narrative.

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The post Turkey’s drones had a bad reputation. The war in Ukraine has changed that appeared first on Coda Story.

Everyone should answer the question: what do we want? To continue supporting the fascist regime in Ukraine, which is hazing its people with propaganda, just like the Germans did before World War Two. Or we finally install peace, putting an end to the ongoing war that has been happening for eight years, and saving our beloved country. 

Across seven time zones, in Moscow, teachers received detailed instructions on how to talk about the country’s invasion of Ukraine, now in its fifth day. The instructions were so detailed, in fact, that it gave exact answers to the possible questions their students may ask:  

Q: Why is the war happening?

A: NATO enlargement and its approach to Russia’s borders is a threat to all of us. There are sad cases of Iraq, Libya and Syria. What’s more, Ukraine could create nuclear weapons. Considering the current regime in that country it’s a direct threat to Russia.

Russia’s government started its first attempts to control the education narrative a few days before the invasion when a 24-year-old teacher in a regional school woke up to an unusual message in one of her WhatsApp groups.

“We ask you to conduct a special class between 24 and 25th of February on this topic,” the message from the school administration said. It linked to Vladimir Putin’s speech in which he called Ukraine an “inalienable part” of Russian history and said Russians and Ukrainians as people “bound by blood.” In this televised address, he said parts of Ukraine needed to be defended from an impending “genocide” and warned Ukraine’s exceptional levels of corruption had to be dealt with.

The regional minister of education had signed a letter of instruction to teachers stating that the main objective of the special class is “to instill patriotism and pride for the country.” The letter was soon shared on social media. In Crimea, the Ukrainian region annexed by Russia in 2014, the ministry of education replicated the same objectives.

Teachers in at least seven other regions of Russia were sent similar instructions to conduct a special class to indoctrinate schoolchildren with Putin’s arguments for the Ukraine invasion, either via official letters sent to school principals or informally via chats with individual teachers. Local media outlets have reported the special classes are to begin March 1.

“History is happening before our eyes! The most important historical events, which will enter the history books of many generations of Russians, are taking place,” read a social media post published by the ministry of education in the Kaluzhsky region, which is near Moscow. 

The instructions have met with immediate resistance from teachers. “I plan to teach my children as usual. I will not say anything,” said a teacher who asked to be identified by only her first name, Dasha, because she feared she would lose her job for a second time. “I had already lost my job once for signing a petition from teachers, and then there wasn't even a war.” Dasha is not the only dissenting teacher. As of March 1 more than 4,300 teachers from across the country have signed an official address to the government opposing the war. 

The Kremlin has aggressively pushed its messaging not only to schools. It has provided sanctioned language about the war — including that it not to be called a war — to organizations as diverse as newsrooms and theaters across the country. 

Pushback against the Kremlin’s point of view has had consequences. Over the weekend, an independent teachers union shared a screenshot of a message they received from a teacher at a college near Moscow that she had been summoned into a meeting with the school director after signing an online petition. In the Siberian city of Omsk, a university professor was questioned and threatened by federal police after announcing his opposition to the war on social media.

All of which reminds parents of the Soviet era. “My grandmother brought up my mother during the Stalin era with my father locked in the gulag. I was brought up in the Brezhnev era. I always remember my mother's words: never mention in school what we say at home. And I raise my children the same way,” said Yulia, a mother of three in Moscow who declined to state her full name out of fear for her safety.

Controlling the conversation in schools is part of the government’s strategy of tightening censorship and controlling the digital space, and come on the heels of restricting access to social media platforms, passing highly intrusive data collection laws on tech companies, and years of criminal prosecutions for social media behavior, including simply liking a Facebook post the government finds objectionable. 

On February 24, the day Russian forces invaded Ukraine, Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor announced that all Russian media must only publish or broadcast official information on the war provided by the government.

Under government pressure, Facebook took actions against several Russian state media outlets for spreading allegedly false messages about Russia’s invasion. It blocked RIA Novosti for 90 days and removed its access to Facebook Ads. The news agency said it considered Facebook’s decision “another blatant violation of freedom of speech by the American social network” and appealed to Roskomnadzor to resolve the issue. The regulator responded by advising the population to switch to homegrown social media platforms.

“Roskomnadzor is trying to install a military censorship in Russia,” Tikhon Dzyadko, editor-in-chief of Russia’s last independent broadcast news station, Dozhd, wrote on Twitter. Dozhd has been labeled a “foreign agent” by the Russian government and must post warnings about its content.

At least 16 media outlets have been blocked by Roskomnadzor since the start of the war.

On February 25, Russia announced it was limiting access to Meta’s platforms. 

The crackdown has extended to theaters. Mayakovsky Theater, an important cultural center in Moscow, received a government email “to refrain from any comments on the course of military actions in Ukraine,” warning that anyone who chose to make comments critical of the invasion would be “letting the theater down.” Any negative comments would be “regarded as treason against the Motherland,” the message read. 

Elena Kovalskaya, director of the Meyerhold Center, resigned in the face of censorship. She posted on Facebook that “it is impossible to work for a murderer and receive a salary from him.”

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