The War, day 18th
Good morning and sorry for the silence. First I was on vacations and then the Russians flooded my desk. Deutsche Welle has a very strong presence in the region and has been doing wall-to-wall coverage and Conflict Zone has been following suit by increasing our interviews and slightly shifting our format… all of that to say that I have excuses.
Media in Europe is slightly shell-shocked because, indeed, this was simply not expected on European soil. What indeed is the daily currency for Africa, vast swaths of Asia and Latin America has not been visited upon Europe since the early 90ies.
It is not merely the war, which Crimea, the rattling of sabers in Banja Luka, the flashes of violence in Northern Ireland might have prepared us for. Indeed, the nightmare unfolding in Ukraine is much closer to something that we saw for the last time in Bosnia in the 90ies. Mariupol has become Sarajevo and both the destruction of the city and the deliberate targeting of civilians–many of them children–are reminiscent of the horrors in the Balkans.
The Russian end-game seems to be complete devastation and the main target besides the national infrastructure and public assets—loss now estimated in 100bn euros—is the civilian population. Ukrainian sources and European intelligence sources are reporting that intercepted communications have shown that the hits on civilian targets were deliberate.
The postcards of the terror multiply rapidly and the Ukranian government in internal exile has done a remarkable job in turning the broader international public into its witness by way of what might become the benchmark of war propaganda and communications.
If Ukraine is winning some and losing some battles on the field, its public relations campaign has crushed the Russian media operation. The overwhelming might of the Ukrainian media machine can be best seen in the way that Western powers respond to Kiev demands of sanctions, military aid, etc. If Russia has been all but bankrupted in less than two weeks, it is in great measure thanks to the overwhelming superiority of the Ukrainian public relations machine and the demands it helps to place and push on the western public sphere and, thus, its representatives.
The difference between Zelensky and Putin (or Lavrov or Nebenzya at the UNSC) helps to account for a lot of the public perception of the conflict. In an interview with Vice, which ran this weekend, Zelensky showed how skilled and experienced he is in working in front of cameras. Not only Zelensky has built a well-rounded unlikely war hero fashioned after idea of American heroism, he has also produced a leader for the times. The Vice interview, produced with all the manicured care of the brand, was one of several versions of a treatment that had been developed over the past 15 days. In fact, one can see a similar version in the German BILD–clunkier and flat much in the style that German television produces– one for Sky News Warm lights, chiaroscuros, intimate proximity with the interviewer and I can imagine that there will be more in the next few days.
Now, compare that to Putin’s perpetual palor in his empty palatial banquet table and what you can see is not merely two contrasting images in style but two diametrically opposed ideas of power but more importantly of humanity. Indeed, the interesting aspect of the Ukranian media articulation of the war has been to fundamentally show Ukraine and Ukranians from the child in the hospital treated for bullet wounds all the way to the president as expressions of heroic, warm but ultimately also fragile humanity, and this in contrast to the inhumanity of the Russian war machine but much more importantly, its personification in the occupant of the Kremlin.