It was exactly a year ago this week that, contentedly ensconced in a Cape Town hotel, I was woken in the middle of the night by an incessant pinging on my phone. Messages were pouring in from friends in Ukraine telling me that Russia’s invasion had begun. Slumbering next to me, a newspaper columnist of more refined interests was startled, after a pleasant evening, to hear me muttering and swearing about Vladimir Putin.
The insanity of Putin’s march on Kyiv shocked me. I had reported on Ukraine since March 2014, just after the war first began. I was in New Haven and watched on an oversized diner TV as men in green military uniforms without any identifying insignia walked into Crimea and hoisted the Russian flag over the Supreme Council building. Later, I listened incredulously as Putin denied they were his troops and then, yet more incredulously, as the West’s leading politicians appeared to accept this obvious nonsense. In those moments, a new era had started to dawn.
Despots are democracy’s most attentive students. Wary of becoming another Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assad, Putin was taking pains to coat his actions in the language of human rights and constitutional politics. More than this, he took care to avoid too much bloodshed. This was the brilliance of his Crimea operation. Everyone from the EU to Nato knew it was the Russians, but because there was no violence it made it hard for them to act, or gave them the excuse they needed not to.
But Putin had no intention of stopping with Crimea. I first arrived in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk in April 2014, after local “separatists”, backed and coordinated by Russia, had seized the municipal building. Thugs in masks and baseball bats were hanging pro-Russia banners over the balcony and skulking in the central square. There were roughly 1,000 of them in this city of one million: strange for a place that I was repeatedly told was so pro-Russian.
From there I moved onto Luhansk. I was inside its municipal building when a different gallery of thugs — this time armed with automatic weapons — announced the establishment of the separatist “People’s Republic of Luhansk”. Later, in the city of Sloviansk, where “protestors” seized the police station, I saw for the first time what I was certain were Russian troops: masked and without insignia. This was, I realised, now a front line. Ukraine no longer simply faced protests in the East; it was at war with Russia.
But it was a funny kind of war. Back then, Putin had no designs on marching to Kyiv and forcing Ukraine to surrender. He swiped Crimea, which many Russians had always resented being passed to Ukraine in 1954, and then sent his troops into eastern Ukraine. But this was more about enabling the Russian media to take control of information spaces and start pouring in unfiltered pro-Kremlin narratives. It was when I first encountered a term that would come to dominate our age: “disinformation”.
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