The governmental crisis in Ukraine has just been solved: Volodymyr Groysman is the new Prime Minister of Ukraine. It is one of the rare Ukrainian realities agreed on.
Since early 2014 it’s more and more difficult to tell what’s true in this Ukrainian crisis – or hybrid war, or armed conflict, or Russian intervention, or struggle for freedom, or…? The pro-Urkainian side tells stories in its way, the pro-separatist one in its very own, too.
For example about the Buk rocket that took down the MH17 airplane. And what about the referendum on Crimea? And the funerals for Russian soldiers that are said to have fought in Eastern Ukraine? And the Ukrainian neo-Nazi corpses?
Ukraine is a war of information and disinformation with several aspects:
- Firstly: The sheer number of news we’re flooded which is overwhelming and sometimes drowning the attempt to focus on the important.
- Secondly: People live in their information bubbles. I talked lately to a couple from Eastern Ukraine – „of course“, they said, „people in Eastern Ukraine are having certain opinions. We’re being bombed with Russian propaganda every day.“ Others are sucked into bubbles by their Facebook newsfeed.
- Thirdly: It’s about old and deeply rooted – and thus easily to active – enemy images. Russian media speaks of the Ukrainian politicians as of the fascist devil. Western media has its black-white pattern of a mix of neo-sovjet and neo-czarist Russia.
- Fourthly: Ukraine has long not been on the map of many reporters. Suddenly people have to write about the crisis that don’t understand the country (I am at the beginning of this process), don’t understand or speak Russian (I do) or Ukrainian (I understand a little). There are not many correspondents in Ukraine now – a lot of reporting on Ukraine is done from Warsaw or Moscow.
- Fifthly: People’s trust in media is undermined – both by the „enemy’s side’s propaganda“ and a loss of claimed objectivity and – sometimes – due diligence in reporting….
Just to name some points that make it hard to build solid knowledge and opinion on Ukraine. It’s a feeling of uncertainty people left with a lot after having consumed news on Ukraine.
Like this one: The New York Times lately had a telephone interview with the President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko. In the interview Poroshenko admitted to have stashed half a billion Dollars in offshore accounts and that he didn’t want to return the money to Ukraine – also for tax reasons.
Did he really just admit that? The NYT editors remained sceptical and became even more after some research.
When the call found its way to Youtube, the president’s office told the NYT that the people to post the interview were „connected to some Russian official bodies and executing their orders“.
Were Russian authorities backing this fake interview? Was it some youngsters making fun or testing the research capabilites of the NYT? What did really happen – what is the reality? It’s still unclear.
Just one thing seems to be 100 percent clear in Ukraine. The NYT editors wrote they found themselves in a „propaganda war between Russia (…) and Ukraine“.