In the eyes of Western observers, Putin is often portrayed as a wild, uncontrollable beast — which, in reality, is not entirely accurate. At least one of Putin’s rumored and illegitimate children, Elizabeth Rudnova, lives in Europe — the very Europe that Russian propaganda paints as the “true aggressor,” pushing poor Ukraine into war against
The war between Russia and Ukraine is not an ordinary conflict between two states. The men (and women) across the trenches speak the same language, share the same traditions, and their faces also look very similar.
Ukrainian identity is being reinvented by war. Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture and Information Policy has helped to orchestrate this reinvention through social media campaigns – #standwithukraine – while engaged in a daily struggle against Russian cyber attacks and direct artillery bombardment. At the same time, self-organising groups like the North Atlantic Fellas Organisation seek to
The conflict in Ukraine offers unexpected insight into a military construct which has previously been mostly theoretical. The scenario of Ukrainian ground forces fighting beneath an information domain dominated almost exclusively by American intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, while no US forces fight in the conflict, is what 1990s military theorists and strategists described as a ‘vertical coalition’.
