A Mediated View of the War in Ukraine

Sometime in the early hours of Thursday morning, video clips of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine started making their way around the Internet. Enormous plumes of black smoke billowed into the peachy daybreak skies of Kharkiv and Kherson. On the other side of the country, a cell-phone video, filmed from what appeared to be an apartment window in Lutsk, zoomed in over a road—where cars, taxis, and buses still travelled—to show an explosion in the distance. A flock of startled birds flew off, and the Ukrainian voices behind the camera registered the shock that the whole world seemed to be feeling: the Russians were coming, and they had brought all their bombs, tanks, and missiles with them.

The conflict was notable for how much the public already knew about it. The Biden Administration proactively declassified intelligence about Russia’s intentions in Ukraine, as a means to both foil Putin’s false pretenses for starting the war and expose his real motivations: to restore mid-century Soviet order. Another thing was made clear early on: the U.S. would not be intervening. Ukraine isn’t in NATO. The U.S. and its allies, which have adopted a series of tough economic sanctions against Russia, have no treaty obligation to defend Ukraine, no matter how sympathetic the country’s predicament might be. Whatever kind of spitball spin Fox News hosts and J. D. Vance have tried to put on things—stoking the idea that the White House is angling to send in ground troops—the Administration has said repeatedly that it won’t get involved militarily. Yes, there will be worthy endeavors, such as providing weapons, sharing intelligence, and assisting refugees, but our geopolitical might is mostly on hold for fear of conflict with a nuclear power. Crass as it may sound, the war in Ukraine is, for Americans, more of a media experience than anything else. Mostly what we will do is watch.

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Watching a war in 2022 means digesting packaged bits from a buffet of human suffering. There is a never-ending supply of man-on-the-street interviews, podcasts produced in the dead of night—under the spectre of death—and TV broadcasts filled with dire B-roll. Maybe we are bearing witness? That’s certainly the high-minded spin, the motivating virtue of conflict journalism. If that’s the case, on Thursday, February 24th, I bore witness on an early car ride to the doctor’s office. There were speeches to catch up on: Putin proclaiming the need to “de-Nazify Ukraine,” and Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s first Jewish president, pleading for peace. Between historical explanations of Ukraine and Russia’s relationship, I came across chilling, though thinly sourced, reports that the invading Russian Army would be followed by mobile crematoriums. My mind flashed to the Afghan war memorial I’d seen when I’d visited Yekaterinburg a few years ago: an iron soldier, sitting with a Kalashnikov in hand, head downcast, the names of all the dead encircling him—a memorial to a war that people resented.

We are so deluged by information about the situation on the ground, from every angle, that some have called this the TikTok War. I read a piece in the waiting room of the doctor’s office about how Russians were shocked by Putin’s aggression, how analysts chalked up his obsession with the restoration of the U.S.S.R.’s borders to pandemic-era isolation. As crowds of protesters took to the streets in St. Petersburg, reports on Twitter showed videos of what were apparently Russian aerial attacks on an airport near Kyiv. President Zelensky announced that a hundred and thirty-seven Ukrainians died that day. I was sitting among mostly pregnant women, all quietly gestating and scrolling; later, I’d see a video of NICU nurses in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro, tending to their tiny patients laid out on benches in a makeshift bomb shelter.

Through Twitter, you could be swept into portals of essential local reporting, like that of the Kyiv Independent, which reminded me of the way that I’d used the app during the Arab Spring. A decade ago, it had been a novel realization that an uprising could be documented from the ground up, in painstaking detail, complete with video evidence. The view felt intimate in a way that standup shots of news anchors in Brooks Brothers and flak jackets could never achieve. These past few days, news obsessives could feel that they had a similarly well-rounded grasp on the military, diplomatic, historical, and human contours of the Ukrainian conflict, in no small part because of civilian-filmed videos, such as one of a bombing in a neighborhood in Kharkiv with the soft crying of a woman audible in the background.

Most major U.S. newspapers have some sort of around-the-clock live blog of events. There are stark feats of photojournalism everywhere, and compelling interviews with some of the half a million Ukrainians fleeing their homes. Zelensky’s 2006 turn on a dance competition show has gone viral—the actor turned wartime President has easily become the foremost Internet hero in all of this. He is also, if the Russians take control of the country, almost certainly a dead man. The story of defiant Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island telling an invading Russian warship to “go fuck yourself,” before being killed, was inspiring but not true; the Ukrainian Navy now says that the soldiers are all all alive. You can find many videos of everyday Ukrainians learning how to make Molotov cocktails and signing up for street patrols to defend their country. Harder to find—rightfully so—are images of the civilians dead from cluster-bomb attacks.

The immersive experience of Ukraine coverage—that constant tending to our phones, the endlessly refreshed video feed of action in the country’s streets and bomb shelters—makes us feel deeply involved in the conflict, even from a position of relative impotence in the West. We feel digitally proximate to the war, thanks to wall-to-wall coverage. Yes, there’s a tangled web of Eurocentrism and racism that makes Americans more outraged at a war in Europe than one in Syria. There are parts of that scrolling that feel prurient. Are we bearing witness or simply watching things in a faraway place go boom? We both shrink from and seek out the macabre. But that connectivity—war as media experience—is still human connection. And it is perhaps as close as we get to empathy across borders and through the fog of an unfolding war.

The journalist Hussein Kesvani described online response to these first days of the war in Ukraine as “memeification, the marvel-isation, the spectacle of an ongoing war rendered as entertainment.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with creating heroes—“Casablanca” was made in the midst of the Second World War, an homage to the righteousness of the Allied cause in the face of Fascism. But war is also hell—trite but true. It’s a dead Russian soldier lying on the ground, covered in snow, abandoned, and a six-year-old dying in front of her mother. While we might feel connected to the struggles in Ukraine through stories of bravery and valor, they’re not the full story. And it’s also probably about to get much, much worse for the defiant Ukrainians. They might be winning the hearts and minds of the world via social-media dispatch, but there is a long column of Russian tanks that has yet to roll into their capital city.