Social Media at War: Putin's Superior Opponent

It's time to rehabilitate social media. In addition to all the factual nonsense and the overdose of malice that is sprayed here every day, in this situation they show us what no television station shows us: the immediate rawness of war.

Reporting from below works. We see pictures from the maternity ward in Mariupol, listen to the monotony of the rocket launchers at the gates of Kiev and watch as little Amelia sings the song "Let it Go" from the Disney movie "Frozen" in the air raid shelter.

This is not about voyeurism. It's about journalism as a principle of finding the truth. We are no longer solely dependent on the cables of the military, on the propaganda of the various warring parties and the remote diagnosis of retired generals in German TV studios. Putin speaks. And the Ukrainians disagree. And they are getting louder and louder.

Unlike most of the international television faces who, when things got uncomfortable, withdrew from the war zone to their hotel room, the reporters of real life have remained on site. They sit in the air raid shelter. They have gone to the part of their apartment that has not yet been destroyed. They are on the run. They are in resistance. They are sometimes loud, sometimes subversive. They are a guerrilla army of those affected by the war, armed with mobile phones, webcams and laptops, who fight the battle of their lives.

We are witnessing asymmetric warfare: Vladimir Putin is no longer fighting against a clearly inferior Ukrainian military force. He is also fighting against a clearly superior Ukrainian civil society that is destroying his narrative of the one Russian nation even before his tanks have even reached the capital Kiev.

These people do not want to be liberated and if they do, then by this Moscow messenger, whose liberation means their enslavement.

The President of Ukraine was the President of Ukraine even before the beginning of the war. But it was only through social media that he became the commander of public opinion. The man in the Kremlin entrenches himself behind his ten-meter-long tables. Volodymyr Zelenskyy stands in an olive green T-shirt on the street and thus on the command height. It is Putin's war and Zelenskyy's counter-offensive.

Putin threatens, he demands. Putin repels, he attracts. His weapons are not Su-27 and Kalashnikov, but Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Telegram. He fires at all times of the day from the multimedia pipes accessible to him; supported by his wife, who, as colonel of the empathetic reserve, renders a great service to him and the country.

Many speak reverently of the Leading Western power, referring to America. But in this war, the Western leading power consists of the tens of thousands who document their will to live with the beauty of the immediate and thus manifest their lack of willingness to suppress. 

Democracy, which previously often seemed complacent and weak, is being revitalized here. The Frontline employees of the West do not sit in the Pentagon, but in the air raid shelters of Odessa, Kiev, Kharkiv and Mariupol:

They don't shoot, they send. They are not silent, they tell. And each of these narratives is a stab in the cold heart of those who have been reluctant to impose harsh sanctions and arm the opposition.

If there had already been the possibility of direct communication between peoples during the Nazi regime, the Holocaust might not have shot up into this diabolical dimension. You didn't see those in the dark. The Western silence that was Hitler's most effective accomplice at the time would have been broken. The Scholl siblings might not have had to print leaflets, but could have spread and organized their resistance on Instagram.

The images of the battered creatures from the labor and extermination camps, which reached humanity only with years of delay, would have been traveling in real time at best. America and Great Britain, which for reasons that are still inexplicable to this day, refrained from bombing the train tracks for supplies towards Auschwitz, Majdanek and Theresienstadt, could never have afforded this toleration. It was Hitler's war and its failure. We have seen his war. But their failure at that time was not yet.

Social media and its protagonists embody a new power. The isolation of the victims is overcome. The veil is torn from the face of military cruelty. In Ukraine, as Diana Kinnert has observed, we experience that for many people the freedom of society is more important than their own lives. They fight it – and shame us. The good news in the midst of a bitterly evil time is this: even if Putin ends up getting the piece of land, he won't get new subjects.