Recordings from Ukraine are flooding the social media and the Ukrainian President Zelenskyj is also reporting daily via Twitter and Co. Ukraine is online – despite the Russian attacks. The country does a lot to keep the Internet running, because an outage would have devastating consequences.
A young Ukrainian girl stands on an upturned box in an air raid shelter and sings the Disney song “Let it go”. The video went around the world just as quickly as the Ukrainian one Band that offered singer Ed Sheeran in full battle gear to perform at his solidarity concert via live video or the reports of a young person from everyday life in the bunker. Ever since Russia launched a war of aggression against Ukraine, images and videos from Ukraine have been circulating on the internet almost in real time. Ukraine is online – showing the world the brutality of the Russian attacks and the ever-increasing misery of the population in an unfiltered way.
This is possible because most of the country is still connected to the Internet, despite the siege and bombing. “The London-based company NetBlocks is currently assuming that the number of devices connected to the Ukrainian Internet has fallen by almost a quarter since the beginning of the war,” says Heiko Pleines, head of the Politics and Economics department at the East European Research Center at the University of Bremen. to ntv.de. “In most of the country, however, this is less due to technical problems and more to the fact that people in bomb shelters or on the run are less online than before in their normal lives.” However, this does not apply to all parts of Ukraine. The major Internet provider “Kyivstar” recently announced that the attacks paralyzed the service in the port city of Mariupol.
The destruction of Internet infrastructure is still far less than experts predicted because Moscow expected to need the infrastructure itself once it occupied the country, said John Ferrari, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. in the “Washington Post”. In addition, “the Russian troops in Ukraine may also need the Internet to communicate with each other.”
Good preparation
However, the main reason for the stable data supply may lie elsewhere. “The Internet probably still works in most of Ukraine because Ukraine has prepared well,” explains Pleines. In 2015, Russia hacked Ukraine’s electricity suppliers, cutting off electricity for tens of thousands of people. Since then, the country has been working on its cyber defences. “Meanwhile, no scenario is conceivable in which Russia would be able to significantly sabotage our advanced digitization,” said Ukraine’s Digital Minister Mykhailo Fedorov in an interview with “Spiegel”. Even before the war began, Ukraine was described by the business magazine “The Economist” as a leader in digital warfare.
First of all, this is due to the physical infrastructure that makes up the Internet in Ukraine. This “is well developed and often includes multiple fiber optic lines that can cover the same areas,” said Doug Madory, head of internet analysis at US firm Kentik, which monitors global data flows “Washington Post”. The Russian troops would therefore have to switch off several transmission masts in order to paralyze the Internet in an area, explains Eastern Europe expert Pleines. In addition, there are many small and medium-sized Internet providers in Ukraine that operate independently of one another but are now helping each other to repair war damage.
Providers send workers to areas where the Internet is down due to attacks or power outages to fix it. “These people are heroes, they risk their lives to keep the business running,” Minister Fedorov stressed in “Spiegel”.
The network is important for the survival of Ukrainians
The company “Kyivstar” even provides Internet services for more than 200 bunkers in the country, like that “Washington Post” reported. In addition, the country received Internet terminals from Elon Musk’s company “SpaceX”.
Ukraine does a lot to keep the internet running. Anna Litvinenko works as a research assistant at the Institute for Journalism and Communication Studies at Freie Universität Berlin with Eastern European media. She doesn’t find it surprising that Kyiv is so committed to the Internet, because “it currently also plays an important role in the lives of Ukrainians.” There are air raid warnings, but many use Telegram, Instagram, Facebook and various warning apps to see when the next bombing is coming. “The information is simply updated very quickly via the Internet,” says Litvinenko ntv.de. In war, something like that could make the difference between life and death. Digital leaflets are also being distributed at high speed, for example with tactical instructions for protection against sniper fire or the construction of road blockades.
In addition, the usual function of social media has become even more important during the war: it is the easiest way for people to keep in touch – both with their relatives and with the Ukrainian government and administration. The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj in particular relied on the direct channel from the start. On the one hand, to provide the population with information almost in real time and, on the other hand, to strengthen their stamina with daily emotional videos, pictures and speeches. He can also react to propaganda before it gets stuck in people’s minds. This is how the selfie video showing the Ukrainian President and his entire team in the capital went around the world. With the words “We are all here” he made it clear shortly after the beginning of the war that he had not fled the country.
“So we took TikTok?”
“You can’t underestimate the power of emotional encouragement,” Litvinenko explains. “Zelenskyj’s daily posts and appearances are important for mobilizing one’s own population and boosting morale.” Social media are therefore essential for connections in Ukraine. However, they are an equally important part of the country’s communication strategy.
“So we took TikTok?” Zelenskyj asked during a visit to war victims in a hospital in Kyiv. The moment was captured by a smartphone camera and is now flickering across international smartphone screens. The president had to smile at his question, as he only wanted to cheer up 16-year-old Katya, who was wounded in a rocket attack. But he’s right. The flood of images from the war zone circulating on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Telegram are almost exclusively from one warring party. Almost all were taken in by Ukrainian civilians and soldiers.
The country’s communication strategy on social media thus forms the counterpoint to Russian propaganda, which hardly shows any pictures of the war. On the contrary: On February 20, the Russian parliament passed a law that prohibits Russian soldiers from using their smartphones on duty. Moscow is obviously hoping for advantages in the area of operations security, i.e. the strategy for protecting critical data such as troop movements, writes social media expert and major in the Bundeswehr Paul C. Strobel on the website of “Friends of Army Reconnaissance Officers”. However, this approach “turned out to be a big mistake” because the interpretation of the conflict was already in the hands of Ukraine after the first few days. But what does this “victory in information warfare” bring to Ukraine in the military conflict?
permanent presence in the West
It is unlikely that one Russian bomb will fall less as a result, says Christian Pentzold from the University of Leipzig in an interview with ntv.de. “However, one cannot overestimate how important Ukraine’s permanent presence in the West is.” Daily images of injured children and grieving mothers on the Western world’s smartphones create a closeness to the Eastern European country that didn’t exist before the war. “Our knowledge of and interest in Ukraine was previously incomplete and sporadic,” says the media scientist. That has now completely changed. In addition, President Zelenskyj speaks as often as possible via video conferences in the parliaments of the world. He is in daily contact with eight to ten heads of government – with many, the exchange works easily via Whatsapp, as he recently did in an interview betrayed.
The direct communication and constant presence of Ukraine is the “signature of this war,” says Pentzold. It enables Ukraine to communicate and represent its interests in the West. The concept works: Ukraine has Western society on its side. “In addition, a strong anti-Russian climate of opinion has already emerged,” said the communications scientist. This increases political expectations: people from Great Britain, Germany and the USA are demanding that their governments take Ukraine’s interests into account. This has already worked with some of the sanctions imposed by the West – for example, one of Ukraine’s demands was the exclusion of Russian banks from the SWIFT system. When it comes to other issues, such as the oil and gas embargo, the pressure on politicians increases.
However, Ukraine does not only use social media to reach the West. “Any attempt is also being made to influence the Russian public,” explains Litvinenko. For example, the Ukrainian Interior Ministry opened a Telegram channel in Russian, on which pictures and videos of Russian prisoners of war are posted. Contrary to the propaganda from Moscow, family members in Russia should be made aware of the war, says the media scientist. In an interview with “Spiegel”, Ukrainian digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov stated the goal of contacting the Russian population: “We believe that one day there will be a turning point and people in Russia will become active.” According to Litvinenko, Selenskyj’s interview with Russian exile journalists was conducted for this reason and distributed on as many channels as possible.
The army is also online
After all, the Ukrainian army is also dependent on the Internet. On the one hand, the country has built up an IT army made up of “thousands of specialists, companies and volunteers” who not only defend themselves against digital attacks, but are also responsible for “the largest cyber attacks in Russian history”, according to the Ukrainian digital minister told the “mirror”. On the other hand, military planning also takes place online.
A government app originally intended to give the general public access to public services now gives Ukrainians the ability to report the location of Russian tanks and soldiers to their army. Social media expert Strobel writes that “troop movements, attacks and their consequences are also shared on social media and analyzed by OSINT specialists and amateurs”. The Ukrainian military intelligence service also operates its own Telegram channel “to which you can feed recordings of Russian troop movements,” says Strobel. This helps to “create an amazingly precise public picture of the situation that is constantly updated”.
Almost all areas of Ukraine depend on being online. A prolonged outage could disrupt army coordination and make lobbying in the West more difficult. For the population, however, complete decoupling from the network would be the most devastating, because a constant supply of up-to-date information would then be just as impossible as rapid contact with relatives. “In the end, missiles and tanks are decisive for the war,” says Pentzold. However, it is of national importance to keep the Internet running. “That’s why so much energy is put into it.”