Putin is losing the digital war

We have grown more accustomed than ever to living our lives through screens thanks to the Covid pandemic. Now the world — both those living and dying in the deadly horrors in Ukraine, and those looking on — are experiencing what is, so far, the first fully on-screen digital war. 

The modern technological means of communication, which become more essential each day, have not yet been shut off in the warzone. This has dramatically altered the way the war is being fought and how the world community has reacted to it.

Without the instant availability of thousands of images of what was happening and the many selfie appeals from President Zelensky and ordinary Ukrainians, would the West have united and reacted to the crisis so quickly and cohesively?

Before the invasion on 24 February, this was already a war like no other. US and UK intelligence agencies were mindful of the damage done by the unsubstantiated allegations of Weapons of Mass destruction in Iraq. 

This time Washington and Westminster reversed their habitual secrecy and effectively made their intelligence about Moscow’s military build-up an open-source. 

Putin countered with his own propaganda for foreign eyes, starting online with his essay on “One Rus”, moving on to the new treaties with NATO proposed in December, culminating in staged pictures of troop “exercises” on Ukraine’s borders to the East and North and in the Black Sea and the televised meeting of the national security council in which Putin broadcast his deceitful backing for two independent statelets in Dombas. 

The signalling from the Kremlin was unusual for a pre-war phase. It was also a tactic that failed; Ukraine was not cowed into accepting Russia’s take-over as an inevitability not worth resisting. 

Technological advances, including Google Maps and Google Earth, left Western authorities with no credible alternative to being open. While in Ukraine, physical efforts to cover up or misdirect road signs — Second World War resistance style — seem sadly pointless, except as picture opportunities. To this day you can call up serviceable maps of Ukraine on a smartphone.

Once the invasion began, online communications were not shut down. Instead, this war is proceeding in what was already a tech-savvy, digital and “wired” battle zone. As a rule in the past attackers have tried to try to take out the C³ — command, control and communications — transmitters of their victims. Defending regimes also tend to clamp down on communications between their citizens, as ironically, Russia, the aggressor is now doing. 

Until now, Russia has struck many civilian targets including hospitals but not communications networks. Instead, they’ve been making use of them. This largely seems to be because the publicly available services are better than the military alternatives. Russian commanders are known to be using phone networks to communicate on encrypted systems rather than their own unsecure radios.

The Russians can also use social networks to eavesdrop on Ukrainian activity and to pinpoint activity by people with phones. Then there is the suspicion that they want to preserve the communications infrastructure because they will need it to maintain control should they manage to subdue Ukraine.

While the Ukrainians are still able to communicate relatively freely, Putin’s priority has been to obstruct the flow of information back home. One macabre manifestation of this, which could be a morale-sapping rumour, is that mobile crematoria have been included in the battle force so that body bags of the fallen will not have to be repatriated.

Russian troops have had their phones confiscated, although this has not been carried out effectively. According to The Sun, some of the invaders found their phones pinging with local matches on dating apps as they moved across the border. Ukrainian networks have now excluded Russian phone numbers; as a result the invaders now try to plunder phones from Ukrainians. 

Canny use of social media helped President Volodymyr Zelensky, and his party win power. He was already a video star, with thousands of likes for clips from his TV appearances. 

The Ukrainian government kept up its digital presence once in power and has encouraged the people to get online as well. Zelensky’s speech, beamed onto the screens in the House of Common this week, was a British first, but just one of the daily digital media coups with which he is rallying his nation. His ministers are joining in. 

Thirty-one-year-old Mykhailo Fedorov is the first Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine and Minister of Digital Transformation. Before this “digital war” he was pushing the “state on a smartphone” project, aiming to have all government services available on it, many of them operating automatically.

Now, Fedorov is concentrating on pressurising businesses and media outlets giving comfort to Russia. 

Arguably the Ukrainian government’s efforts and the self-generated content put up by social media have both heartened the resistance to the Russians in Ukraine and animated support and sympathy for them abroad. 

Access to communication has also meant that the west’s mainstream media have digitally reported this war in a way not seen before. Since the first Gulf War, viewers have been accustomed to intrepid journalists reporting from the receiving end of military attacks. 

Some “ Scud Studs” achieved international fame. But it has always been an inherently risky business — especially when both “sides” attack those who send out signals independently. This was a factor in the deaths of both the ITN reporter Terry Lloyd during the Iraq invasion and Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times in Syria.  

In this war, the cameraman Yevhenii Sakuni was killed in the shelling of Kyiv TV tower, and the roving Sky correspondent Stuart Ramsay was injured when his team came under fire. But so far, live foreign broadcasters have not been targeted systematically in the Russian assault, although prudently most anchors have now moved west from Kyiv. Wherever they are this means that British and other western audiences are seeing something they have never seen before: familiar presenters anchoring regular news bulletins live from an active war zone. In other conflicts, this would be analogous to doing the show live from Berlin, Stalingrad, Kuwait or Baghdad. 

Such bravery in the cause of informing the public is possible because the broadcasters are operating freely and from “our side”. Openly and correctly, they identify with their hosts. This is done instinctively; the reporters are not “embedded” as we saw in the Middle East, where control over what is reported is traded for “access” to military units. 

Taken with the excellent and intimate coverage of the migrations forced by the war, digital technology has brought us closer to this war as it happens, with self-generated content feeding into mainstream media and back again. As Alice Crossley reported here, there have been billions of hits related to Ukraine on just one social media platform, TikTok. 

Everyone knows that digital media are a mixed blessing. In open platforms, there is an unending battle against lies, distortions and fake news. One can only boil with anger at the British officiousness demanding that refugees “upload” documents and biometric tests, simply because they can, thanks to technology.

But President Putin has miscalculated. Far from frightening people in Ukraine and the West the myriad images on our screens have brought us closer together and created new platforms to organise and resist his viciousness. 

We can only hope that the digital channels of communication stay open as the desperate and brutal next phase of the Russian attack gets underway.