Historically, the Industrial Revolutions have been key points in changing gender roles

Originally published on Global Voices

Women World Leaders at COP26. Image by Scottish Government from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

By Brian Malika, founder of One More Percent and Advisory Board member at Digital Democracy Initiative.

Long before the onset of the first industrial revolution around 1760, it is recorded that early humans used crude weapons to hunt, employed basic methods to fish in shallow waters, and toiled with their bare hands to plant and harvest. In general, history books only paint society before 1760 as a period of equal struggle for all. However, this is not accurate, as there was a form of stratification based on socially defined gender roles that placed women and girls in a lower class compared to men. This meant that women, girls, and even children were classified as property alongside “cattle.” They performed the hardest jobs with their bare hands, lacked the right to consent, and couldn't decide their future or that of society. 

First industrial revolution

In the beginning of the 1760s, a revolution occurred that saw humans use water and steam to mechanize farm production as well as the spinning jenny invention that transformed the textile and cloth industry. Many other developments in iron processing made smelting much easier. These advancements led to accelerated mass production and increased economic growth in some parts of the world.

However, even though the first Industrial Revolution was a leap forward for human civilization, it laid the foundation for many social injustices. For example, with the introduction of mechanization, men could now access large chunks of land for farming, thanks to tractors that were more efficient than labor provided by human hands. 

On the contrary, women and girls were pushed to tend to the needs of men and their families, assume care of the household, and were often at the mercy of men who benefited from huge profits and territories because of mechanization. The first industrial revolution made stronger economies and stronger men and popular media. But the end of this era limited a woman's role to serving the needs of men, children, and the household.

Second industrial revolution

Coming to the second industrial revolution, from around 1870 to 1914, the discovery of modern energy sources like electricity phased out the dependence on steam and water to fuel the mechanization of production. This era saw the development of lightbulbs, telephones, air brakes, airplanes, refineries, and other machines that used modern electricity as a source of energy. 

From a gendered perspective, the second industrial revolution happened at a time when patriarchal dominance was high, therefore enabling men to travel more with ease at the expense of women via the use of modern ships, planes, and automobiles to discover and explore the world. Men were also able to spread their ideas in newspapers and TV more than women in this era. 

Unfortunately, because of the improved effectiveness of artillery machines and communication tools for the surveillance and transport sector, men were at the forefront of starting wars and conflicts, including the First World War. Interestingly, this period saw a small progress in gender equality as more women were needed to replace the men who went to war. Consequently, there was an increase in white-collar employment for women, allowing them to work as teachers, clerks, and in factories, unlike before. 

Still, research shows that women and girls could not access higher-paying jobs or managerial positions. They were denied opportunities to study medicine, engineering, or law and were confined to low-paying, menial jobs. They were not allowed to vote, let alone be elected into leadership positions.

But even in these difficult times, some women made strides and made their mark on society. Baroness Bertha von Suttner, a talented Austrian writer, wrote against war and violence in her novel entitled “Lay Down Your Arms” which propelled her to be the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Marie Skłodowska-Curie, a Polish-French physicist and chemist, overcame numerous hurdles to receive Nobel prizes in Chemistry and Physics. She became the first woman to win the Nobel prize and the first person to win it twice. While studying uranium's rays, she discovered new elements and named them polonium and radium. She further coined the term “radioactive” to describe them.

Third industrial revolution

After the two world wars, the 1950s ushered in the third industrial revolution. This period saw the development of the first computers, automated communication and transport systems, and the advent of the internet.

During this era, women-led movements and rights groups demanded their space in social, economic, and political spheres in a more organized and conscious manner than before. These movements led to unprecedented accomplishments, such as  Sirimavo Bandaranaike becoming the world’s first woman prime minister by leading Sri Lanka in 1960. Also, in 1966, Indira Gandhi became India’s first and only woman prime minister as of 2025. This wave also led to Margaret Thatcher becoming the United Kingdom's prime minister between 1979 and 1990, making her the first woman to lead a developed country.

During the third industrial revolution, the famous World Conference on Women took place in Beijing, China, in 1995, which brought together women activists globally to enact a 12-point legal framework aimed at achieving equality between women and men, boys and girls, in social, economic and political areas of society. The Beijing Conference bore fruit by urging governments to mainstream gender as a pathway to achieve equality. This principle guided the drafting of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, with gender mainstreaming as a key pillar.

Other notable gains for women and girls during the third industrial revolution include more women leading countries, Wangari Mathai becoming the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Malala Yousafzai receiving a Nobel Peace Prize at 17 years old, and Katie Bouman leading the development of an algorithm for imaging black holes.

On the downside, women still faced barriers in gaining equal access to education. Meanwhile, health issues like the HIV epidemic significantly harmed women and girls globally and created long-term barriers to accessing equality in some areas.

Fourth industrial revolution

Fast-forward to today, we find ourselves in a unique era where, unlike previous revolutions, the third and fourth industrial revolutions are happening simultaneously!

We are experiencing a time when the internet is intertwined with digital technologies and deeply embedded in our social, economic, political, and even physical human anatomy.

Simultaneously, we are less than five years away from 2030, when the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are expected to be actualised, including the agenda for reducing inequalities for women and achieving gender equality.

It is frightening that in any year, fewer than two percent of women and girls in tech start-ups receive investor funding and grants to prototype or scale their innovations globally, with some parts of the world seeing statistics as low as zero percent.

Also, 50 percent of women and girls could not resume their normal jobs after COVID-19. This reality has effectively pushed back our prior achievements in gender equality.

As we navigate the fourth industrial revolution, we must be deliberate in ensuring that projected technological gains, such as that of blockchain, benefit African women and girls. One example is ensuring that African women and girls can access education and gain financial independence, which is hindered by only 20 percent of women on the continent having access to bank accounts today.

Also, we must find ways to ensure that emerging technologies in agriculture promote non-land-based farming since only 15 percent of women own farmable land globally, making it difficult for them to influence agricultural production.

Lastly, I  hope that the fourth industrial revolution will make it easier for women and girls in vulnerable settings to use their phones to report instances of gender-based violence directly to the police and file court proceedings. This can be made possible by funding tech solutions that address the needs of women and girls who are victims and survivors of gender-based violence.

I am hopeful that inclusive technology is the missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle needed to bridge the gap in gender equality as we enter the future of tech-based industrial revolutions.

Filming a documentary about illegal landfill is dangerous business

Originally published on Global Voices

An undated photograph of Croatian journalist Melita Vrsaljko at work in the offices of Faktograf. On July 16, she was attacked in her home over her reporting. Photo: Faktograf, used with permission.

This article is based on coverage by Meta.mk. An edited version is republished here under a content-sharing agreement between Global Voices and Metamorphosis Foundation. 

The members of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN) issued a condemnation of the attack against the journalist of Croatian fact-checking service Faktograf that took place on July 16 near near Zadar. As reported by Faktograf, award-winning journalist Melita Vrsaljko, a fact-checker who works on their Climate Portal, was physically attacked while working in the village of Nadin.

Initially, an elderly man attacked her on public property in Nadin while she was passing by an emerging illegal dump with a cameraman working on the development of a documentary film. Later, she was attacked again, this time in her home, also in Nadin. The daughter of the original attacker, after Vrsaljko opened the front door, started hitting her and attempted to take her mobile phone.

The Zadar Police Department reported:

Policijskim postupanjem je utvrđeno da je 36-godišnjakinja došla na adresu prebivališta oštećene, gdje ju je verbalno, a potom i fizički napala, pri čemu joj je mobitel iz ruke bacila na tlo.

Police procedures determined that a 36-year-old woman came to the victim’s address, where she verbally and then physically attacked her, throwing her mobile phone from her hand to the ground.

The attackers, Iva Perić and Ivan Vrsaljko, are sister and father of powerful local politician Dario Vrsaljko. Regional news portal of the Adriatic region Morski.hr, which republished photos and videos from the attack, originally shared via Facebook, noted that both of them are donors and prominent members of the ruling political party HDZ.

Lawyer Vanja Jurić warned that “although there are witnesses and video recordings, the police have, as far as is known, mischaracterized these attacks as offenses against public order and peace, in which allegedly the victim herself equally participated.” She said she will file a complaint against the police because they have not taken the actions they could and should have to protect journalist Vrsaljko in line with the provisions of the Criminal Code.

Faktograf documented the attack on their web page.

Screnshot of Faktograf story on the attack against journalist of the Climate Portal covering illegal landfill near Zadar, Croatia. Photo: Faktograf.hr. Used with permission.

The European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN) immediately issued a press release condemning the attack. Said Ana Brakus, co-founder and executive director of Faktograf:

For years, Faktograf – Association for the Informed Public, has endured violent threats. Our journalists have been repeatedly subjected to harassment and attacks, yet this physical assault on Melita Vrsaljko in her own home marks an unprecedented and appalling escalation of violence. She is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker, a hard and honest worker, completely dedicated to providing the public with the highest quality journalism. Faktograf will offer Melita our wholehearted support, and we call on you to join us in condemning this appalling act.

EFCSN pointed out that sadly, this incident is part of an alarming trend of threats and harassment directed at fact-checkers worldwide. In Croatia, Faktograf has faced such threats and harassment in the past, although never physical violence, which is part of what makes this incident so concerning. EFCSN stressed:

It is imperative that we address this escalating issue with the seriousness it deserves. Fact-checkers play a critical role in safeguarding public discourse and ensuring that citizens are informed with accurate information. We urge all stakeholders to support and protect fact-checkers as they continue their vital mission in the face of adversity.

The International Fact-Checking Network joined colleagues in Europe in deploring the  attack on the Faktograf journalist. Faktograf is a verified signatory to the IFCN Code of Principles.

EFCSN and IFCN member from North Macedonia Metamorphosis Foundation joined the condemnation, together with the newsrooms of the fact-checking service  Truthmeter.mk, Meta.mk news agency and the news portal in Albanian language PortAlb.mk.

Метаморфозис ги повикува хрватските државни институции експедитивно и недвосмилено да го истражат нападот на новинарите на Фактограф на кои им е потребна заштита од вакви напади бидејќи проверувачите на факти кои ги адресираат клучните прашања што ги засегаат нашите општества.

Metamorphosis calls upon the state institutions of the Republic of Croatia to expeditiously and unequivocally investigate the attack on the Faktograf journalists, who require protection from such assaults because fact-checkers address the key issues of public interest concerning the societies in the Balkan region, across Europe and world over.

Metamorphosis team empathize with all targets of harassment against freedom of expression, as they have been subjected to similar attacks including a coordinated smear campaign, which has been going on for years. It intensified with the most recent wave of attacks in February this year. These attacks, as the previous  ones, caused an outcry of journalist community and were reported to the Ministry of Interior and the Public Prosecutors Office of Republic of North Macedonia. However the competent authorities have not taken steps to address the issue so far.

Polish fact-checking outlet Demagog also expressed support for Faktograf and EFCN statement in a Twitter/X post in Polish and English.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, issued a demand to Croatian authorities to “swiftly investigate two attacks made against reporter Melita Vrsaljko in relation to her environmental reporting and take steps to ensure her safety.” The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), and the Center for Democratic Transition (CDT) from Montenegro publicly expressed support for  the  endangered journalists.

In May 2023 Faktograf published results of the research “Harassment of Fact-checking Media Outlets in Europe” covering 41 newsrooms. “Fact-checkers frequently experience attacks from political and other public actors, as well as harassment on social networks. The exposure to intimidation, disinformation and incitement campaigns online is considerable, but largely invisible to anyone outside the ‘community.’ It somewhat disproportionately targets women [and] it is more intense in countries that do not have strong democracies and vibrant media environments…” the survey noted.  

Fact-checkers stand at the front line of fighting disinformation, which often goes hand in hand with hate speech, fringe politics, antidemocratic and extreme ideologies. Previous research [by the ICFJ]  has already established that reporting on disinformation “seems to be a particular trigger” for harassment. Bad actors who use manipulative tactics to achieve political goals and/or radicalise their target audiences, have already made fact-checkers regular and frequent targets of their online campaigns. Similar is true of actors who use false or misleading information opportunistically, to profit off of existing advertisement models which largely favour clickability over credibility.

However, this vulnerability, which comes with being “first responders” in the struggles against information disorder and its many derivatives, is not sufficiently recognized by relevant stakeholders who have the ability to influence it. The survey concluded that:

Harassment against fact-checkers, therefore, needs to be recognized as a systemic problem, with full awareness of its intentions to discredit both individual fact-checking outlets and general efforts against disinformation.

Kadare became the symbol of how Albanians wanted to be perceived

Originally published on Global Voices

Kadare in his Tirana flat, now a museum. Screenshot from video “Former home of Albanian author Kadare becomes a museum | AFP” on the AFP News Agency YouTube channel. Fair use.

The news of Albanian writer Ismail Kadare's death on July 1 has circulated quickly, stunning global readers and fans, who also include many writers, some of whom are from Central Europe and the Balkans where he enjoyed a particular fame.

Ismail Kadare was born in Albania in 1936, studied in his country and the Soviet Union, spoke Russian and French fluently, and produced a large body of novels that tackled sensitive issues such as autocracy and relations with the Soviet Union and China. In 1990, he managed to leave his country for France, where his books became widely translated and published across the world, and where he achieved a cult following among francophone readers. He was nominated 15 times for the Nobel Prize in literature. After 1991, he seldom returned in Albania but died at the age of 88 in Tirana.

In this 1988 video (in French) of France's cult TV show about literature, “Apostrophe,” he elaborates on his relationship to Albanian identity and his own writing:

Global Voices interviewed writers from Central Europe and the Balkans to reflect on Kadare's legacy.

Gazmend Kapllani. Photo by Stephanie Mitchell, used with permission.

Gazmend Kapllani is a polyglot Albanian–American author and journalist who lived for over twenty years in Athens, Greece. He now lives in Chicago where he directs the Albanian and Southeastern European Studies Program at DePaul University. His last novel “Wrongland” is now available in English. He shared his reaction with Global Voices over an email:

Ismail Kadare is a writer of enormous talent who lived and wrote in the age of extremes, under regimes that hated talented writers like him. That’s why he and his work constitute a kind of paradox. That doesn’t mean that Kadare was a dissident. One could say that the regime and the writer, in their everyday interactions, got along mostly on good terms. But that doesn’t define the core of Kadare’s work. What defines his work is his unmatchable intuition as a writer. Kadare had a deep knowledge and intuition of what one might describe as the “Albanian collective soul” and “Albanian collective psyche.” From this point of view, he must be thought in the company of Balkan writers like Ivo Andrić or Nikos Kazantzakis. He knew the weaknesses and the nightmares, the tragedies and the dreams, the failures and the virtues of Albanians and their tumultuous history. He mastered the modern art of the novel. He knew how to make a forgotten and isolated small nation and language at the Mediterranean crossroads between West and East attractive and meaningful to Western readers — or at least to Western critics. He achieved that under impossible circumstances that will continue to generate discussions, controversies, and debates. That’s why his outstanding work should be understood as a paradox and at the same time as Noah's Ark of modern Albanian literature and language.

Margo Rejmer, photo used with permission

Another author who also sits at the crossroad of different cultures of Central Europe and the Balkans is Margo Rejmer, a Polish writer and journalist who lived extensively in Romania and Albania and wrote two non-fiction books about her own experience as a Central European observing two societies deeply traumatized by their Communist past, “Dust and Blood” and “Mud Sweeter than Honey,” both awarded by numerous literary prizes in Poland. Rejmer lives between Warsaw and Tirana, and in a Facebook post that she wrote and gave permission to translate and republish, she says:

Mirana Likar. Courtesy photo by Ana Pavlenič, used with permission.

Slovenian writer Mirana Likar shared her reaction with Global Voices via email:

When in my teens I started creating my own library, Kadare's novel “The General of the Dead Army,” translated into Serbian, was one of my first books. At that time, I most probably didn't understand the author's messages. Later, for the sake of my own writing, I returned to the issues of dying at the time of war. I found many answers to my questions in the novel. The writer's life is also inspiring, because it bears witness to the notion that even in the harshest tyranny, one can escape — into writing. And change everything. This seemed like an important message for all of us who lived in one-party states.

In neighboring North Macedonia, the Association of Writers of Macedonia issued the following statement on their Facebook page:

Денес, во 88 година од својот живот, светот го напушти Исмаил Кадаре, најголемиот албански писател на ХХ век, автор на повеќе книги проза, поезија и есеи, автор на сценарија и на пиеси. Својот најпознат роман „Генералот на мртвата војска“, го објавил на возраст од 26 години. Неговиот лик и дело ќе останат силна инспирација за голем број автори членови на Друштвото на писателите на Македонија. Вечна му слава.

Today, in the 88th year of his life, Ismail Kadare, the greatest Albanian writer of the 20th century, left this world. He was an author of many books of prose, poetry and essays, screenplays and plays. He published his most famous novel, “The General of the Dead Army,” at the age of 26. His character and his works will remain as strong inspiration for many authors who are members of the Association of Writers of Macedonia. Eternal glory to him.

There is a clash between ideas of security and asylum

Originally published on Global Voices

Barbed wire fence. Photo by Ed Hinchliffe on Unsplash

Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski announced on the evening of June 22 that the authorities are currently considering closing two operating border crossings on the border with Belarus, writes independent Belarus media outlet Belsat. “Given Belarus's actions, we are considering closing all border crossings,” said Sikorski as reported by Business Insider. 

According to Sikorski, the government is currently determining “whether this is harmful to the economy.” “The Finns closed the border crossings with Russia, and the problems ended,” added the minister. He did not provide any further details.

As DW reported, Finland saw around 1,300 migrants arrive at its checkpoints with Russia in late 2023. In response, the country indefinitely closed its entire border with Russia in April 2024. 

Dr. Stephen Phillips from the Institut for Human Rights at the Abo Akademi, FInland, wrote in an email to Global Voices: 

I've been following the developments on the Poland–Belarus border. On that border we are seeing now a clear clash between ideas of security and asylum, with the security voices by far the louder. When this security driven approach dominates there is a very real risk that safety of migrants and international law becomes less of a focus, or is sidelined entirely. Like in Finland, the talk in Poland is of instrumentalized migration driven by a hostile foreign state, not of the humanitarian needs of those on the move. This sets a potentially dangerous path away from protection and respect for fundamental rights.

Following the European Union's sanctions on Belarus for a disputed presidential election, thousands of Middle Eastern and African migrants began arriving at Belarus's border with Lithuania in the summer of 2021.

As reported by DW, Poland and the Baltic states accuse Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka and Russia of coordinating this influx, which has escalated into a prolonged border crisis. Border guards from Poland and its neighbors have halted around 150,000 illegal crossing attempts, mostly into Poland. Polish border guard spokesperson Andrzej Juzwiak stated in an interview with DW that the crisis is due to Belarus's actions, creating an artificial migration route. EU officials believe Russia and Belarus are attempting to destabilize the EU, with 90 percent of migrants at Poland's border holding Russian visas.

Meanwhile, as Global Issues reported in April 2024, the migrant crisis at the Belarus–EU border remains dire, with rights groups decrying brutal push backs by border guards on both sides since it began in summer 2021. The repression of NGOs in Belarus has forced many to cease aiding migrants, leaving them with limited humanitarian help. Despite some international organizations providing services, activists fear it is insufficient. Enira Bronitskaya of the Belarusian NGO Human Constanta, now operating from Poland, noted the increased violence and lack of support for refugees due to the criminalization of activism in Belarus.

Additionally, EU border guards in Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania have been accused of violent and inhumane methods against migrants, systematically breaching their rights to claim asylum. Bartek Rumienczyk of the Polish NGO We Are Monitoring (WAM) reported numerous instances of physical abuse and ignored asylum pleas, leaving migrants stranded in terrible conditions between borders. Joanna Ladomirska of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) described this area as a “death zone,” where refugees are trapped between EU fences and Belarusian razor wire, with no access for NGOs to provide necessary aid.

In Poland, local places that are remote are named “Tajwan”

Originally published on Global Voices

Lin Wei-Yun Górecka (林蔚昀), photo used with permission

Taiwan and Poland are distant not just geographically but also culturally, yet they share a long history of bilateral cultural relations that is little known outside of the circle of researchers and experts on the subject. One of them is Wei-Yun Lin-Górecka (林蔚昀), a Taiwanese literary translator of Polish literature, who is also a researcher, poet, and writer and is the first Taiwanese to have been awarded the Polish Cultural Merit Medal by the Polish Ministry of Culture. She recently released a new non-fiction book “世界之鑰” (“The Keys of the World”) in which she covers Taiwan-Polish cultural history.

Following several meetings in Taipei, Global Voices interviewed her in Chinese over email to find out more about this very peculiar cultural bridge.

Filip Noubel (FN): How did you get interested in Poland and its language? 

林蔚昀: 2000年左右，我在愛丁堡唸書時，看到一家波蘭海報店，走了進去⋯⋯受到波蘭海報深深吸引，尤其是薩多夫斯基（Wiktor Sadowski）的海報。雖然那時候我一個波蘭字都看不懂，但我決定，有一天一定要去波蘭看看。後來，我開始閱讀波蘭文學，包括維卡奇（Witkacy）的《水鴨》（Kurka wodna）、貢布羅維奇（Witold Gombrowicz）的《伊沃娜，柏甘達的公主》（Iwona, księżniczka Burgunda）、塔德烏什．魯熱維奇（Tadeusz Różewicz）的詩⋯⋯當我讀了布魯諾．舒茲（Bruno Schulz）的作品，我決定要去波蘭學波蘭文，然後有一天要翻譯他的作品。後來，我真的翻譯了他的《鱷魚街》（Sklepy cynamonowe，在台灣出版是用Ulica krokodyli作為書名）和《沙漏下的療養院》（Sanatorium pod klepsydrą）分別在2012和2014年出版。之後十幾年，我一直翻譯波蘭文學。

Wei-Yun Lin-Górecka (WYLG) Around 2000, I was studying in Edinburgh, and one day I saw a shop selling Polish posters,  walked in… and became deeply attracted by Polish posters, especially those by Wiktor Sadowski. Although I couldn’t understand a word of Polish at the time, I decided that one day I must visit Poland. Later, I began to read Polish literature, including Witkacy‘s “Kurka wodna” (The Water Duck) and Witold Gombrowicz’s “Iwona, księżniczka Burgunda” (Iwona, Princess of Burgundy), Tadeusz Różewicz‘s poems… When I read Bruno Schulz, I decided to go to Poland to learn Polish, and that one day, I would translate his works. Later, I actually translated his “Sklepy cynamonowe” (“The Cinnamon Shops”, published in Taiwan under the title “Ulica krokodyli” – “The Street of Crocodiles”) and “Sanatorium pod klepsydrą” (“Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” ), which were published in 2012 and 2014 respectively. For more than ten years, I have continued to translate Polish literature.

Cover of Lin Wei-Yun Górecka's latest book 世界之鑰 (The Keys of the World). Photo used with permission.

FN: Poles have been writing about Taiwan, which was known under the Portuguese name Formosa since the 17th century. In your book, you identify dozens of locations called “Tajwan” or “Formoza”, as they are known in Polish, that are associated with locations that are remote or connected to water. Why is that?

林蔚昀： 波蘭的「台灣」和「福爾摩沙」之所以叫做「台灣」和「福爾摩沙」，和一九五○年代全球性的歷史事件如韓戰、國共內戰息息相關。當時，國共內戰在波蘭人民共和國被大幅報導，人們經常在報紙上看到，在電台上聽到台灣（通常是「美帝傀儡」、「蔣介石最後浮木」、「中共要解放台灣」這一類的），對台灣這個名字有印象，於是開始用「台灣」來稱呼他們周遭環境中的事物，通常是長得像座島（或真的是座島，在海上、湖中，或是下雨的時候與世隔絕）、遠離中心、很窮（戰後台灣在波蘭人心目中很窮苦，當時台灣也確實很窮苦）、治安不好的地方。但是我有去統計、研究過，這些地方多半還是因為「遠離中心」才被稱為台灣，即使是那些被認為是因為「混亂」和「貧窮」所以才被稱為「台灣」的地方，一開始命名的原因也是「遠」.

The reason why places in Poland are called “Tajwan” or “Formoza” is closely related to global historical events in the 1950s, such as the Korean War and the Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. At that time, the Chinese civil war was widely covered in the People's Republic of Poland: People often saw it mentioned in newspapers, and heard on the radio about Taiwan – usually described as “a puppet of US imperialism”, or as “Chiang Kai-shek's last driftwood”, and slogans such as “the Chinese Communist Party wants to liberate Taiwan”. Thus they formed an impression of the name Taiwan, and began to use the term”Tajwan” to refer to things in their own environment that usually looked like an island, or indeed were real islands, whether on the sea, in a lake, or underwater. It then extended to places that become isolated in heavy rain weather, places located far away from the center, or very poor (in Polish mindset of the time, Taiwan was a very poor place after the civil war, and indeed it was), or unsafe. I have conducted my own research and came up with statistics showing that most of these places are still called Taiwan because they are “far away from the center.” The locations initially called “Tajwan” because of being associated to social chaos or poverty have also retained that name, but also because they are considered remote.

FN: Is Poland increasingly recognizing Taiwan’s unique identity and culture? Or is Taiwan still labeled and viewed as “the other China” or “the good China”?

林蔚昀：我必須很遺憾地說，很多時候台灣依然被貼上「另一個中國」或「好中國」的標籤並被視為「好中國」⋯⋯這個現象在波蘭漢學家和波蘭國際關係學家之中，特別嚴重，而且他們的想法難以改變。不過，也開始有部分中生代和青年學者開始注意到台灣獨特的認同和文化，這是好事，但這樣的人目前還不夠多。相較之下，我反而覺得一般民眾比較好溝通。我在做地名研究的時候，訪談了波蘭四十八個地方的居民（這些地方有叫做「Tajwan」或是「Formoza」的地方），我除了問他們當地「Tajwan」和「Formoza」的由來，也有問他們對台灣知道些什麼？對台灣有什麼了解？許多人對台灣的了解很模糊，有些人一開始也會覺得台灣是「好的中國」、「民主中國」，但當我開始和他們談台灣有什麼獨特文化，台灣有什麼漂亮的山⋯⋯他們就開始對台灣有認識、有興趣。我覺得，重點是要找到共同的語言、共同感興趣的事。我希望這樣的溝通對話可以提升波蘭人對台灣的認識，甚至認同。這麼做的人也不只是我，也有許多台灣人這麼做，我們都在做國民外交。

WYLG: Unfortunately, I have to say that Taiwan is still often labeled as “the other China” or “the good China” and regarded as “the good China”… This phenomenon is a serious problem among Polish sinologists and Polish international relations scholars. It is extremely difficult to change their mindset. However, a number of middle-age and young scholars are beginning to notice Taiwan's unique identity and culture. This is a good thing, but such people are still very few. In comparison, I think the task is much easier when dealing with average Poles. When I was doing research on the names of those locations, I interviewed residents of forty-eight places in Poland (some of these places are called “Tajwan”, others “Formoza”). In addition to asking them about the origins of the local “Tajwan” and “Formoza”, I also asked them what they know about Taiwan. Many people have a vague understanding of Taiwan, and while some may indeed still think that Taiwan is “the good China” or “the democratic China” at first, yet when I start telling them about Taiwan's unique culture and beautiful mountains Taiwan, they begin to understand and become interested in Taiwan. I think the key is to find a common language and common interests. I hope that this kind of communication and dialogue can enhance Polish people’s understanding – and even recognition- of Taiwan. I am not the only one doing this, there are many Taiwanese people engaging in this kind of people’s diplomacy.

FN: You are also a translator of Polish literature in Taiwan. How is Polish literature received here?

林蔚昀：波蘭文學在台灣的能見度以及受喜愛的程度滿高的。知名度最高的應該是安傑．薩普科夫斯基的《獵魔士》系列，在台灣讀者讀到小說之前，許多人就已經玩過電玩《巫師》。繪本作家亞歷珊卓‧米契林斯卡（Aleksandra Mizielińska）和丹尼爾‧米契林斯基（Daniel Mizieliński）的作品如《地圖》（Mapa）、《出發吧！環遊世界國家公園》（Którędy do Yellowstone?）也很受歡迎。但是除了這些比較大眾的文學之外，其他作家如朵卡萩（Olga Tokarczuk）、布魯諾．舒茲、辛波絲卡（Wisława Szymborska）、柯札克（Janusz Korczak）、沙博爾夫斯基（Witold Szabłowski）的作品也有忠實的讀者。台灣一個很特殊、有趣的現象是：台灣讀者對波蘭的作品共鳴度很高（可能是因為台灣讀者覺得，波蘭和台灣一樣都有受壓迫的歷史），而且台灣讀者在讀和波蘭歷史相關的作品時，會投射到自己身上。比如，台灣讀者在讀沙博爾夫斯基講中東歐國家威權歷史的《跳舞的熊》（Tańczące niedźwiedzie），會想到台灣的威權歷史、民主化的困難過程以及去除不掉的威權遺緒。我也想到了這個，這是為何我引進這本書給台灣出版社，這是為什麼這本書在台灣賣得這麼好。另外，台灣讀者在讀辛波絲卡的〈時代的孩子〉（Dzieci epoki）、〈結束與開始〉（Koniec i początek）時，也會想到自己的時代也是一個「政治的時代」，所有的一切都被政治影響，沒有什麼「文化／運動歸文化，政治歸政治」這種事。因為他們覺得這些詩也描述了台灣的社會，他們於是在一些社會運動場合（從太陽花到反課綱運動，到支持香港的反送中行動，到最近的青鳥行動）用〈時代的孩子〉、〈結束與開始〉或辛波絲卡其他的詩來做政治的表態。這是一個非常有趣的現象，表示許多台灣人對波蘭文化、歷史、文學有很深的共鳴。可惜，目前在波蘭無法看到同等的共鳴，但我相信有一天會有這樣的共鳴，無論要等多久，無論結果如何，我會朝這個方向繼續努力。

WYLG: Polish literature is highly visible and popular in Taiwan. The most famous work is probably Andrzej Sapkowski‘s series “The Witcher“: Before Taiwanese readers read the novels, many people had already played the video game “The Witcher”. Picture book writers Aleksandra Mizielińska and Daniel Mizieliński who wrote “Map” (“Map”) and “Let's Go to National Parks Around the World (Którędy do Yellowstone?) are also popular. But other writers such as Olga Tokarczuk, Bruno Schultz, Wisława Szymborska, Janusz Korczak, and Witold Szabłowski also have loyal readers. There is a very special and interesting phenomenon in Taiwan: Taiwanese readers resonate well with Polish books, (probably because Taiwanese readers feel that Poland, like Taiwan, has a history of oppression), and thus they also read works about Polish history. This is a form of self-projection. For example, when Taiwanese readers read “Dancing Bears” (Tańczące niedźwiedzie) by Szabłowski about the authoritarian history of Central and Eastern European countries, they immediately think about Taiwan's authoritarian history, the difficult process of democratization, and the indelible legacy of authoritarianism. I also thought about this. This is why I introduced Szabłowski's book to a Taiwanese publishing house and why this book sells so well in Taiwan. In addition, when Taiwanese readers read Szymborska's poem “Children of the Age” (Dzieci epoki) and “The End and the Beginning” (Koniec i początek), they can relate because their own experience in Taiwan is one of a “political era”.  When it comes to the influence of politics, there is no such thing as “culture/social movement belongs to culture, and politics belongs to politics.” Taiwanese readers felt that Szymborska's poems also describe Taiwan's society, thus they used “Children of the Age” in social movement situations (including the 2014 Sunflower protest movement,  the 2015 anti-Black Box curriculum movement, the 2019 anti-extradition law movement in support of Hong-Kong, and the May 2024 Blue Bird protest movement, as well as “End and Beginning” and other poems to make political statements. This is a very interesting phenomenon, which means that many Taiwanese people relate to Polish culture, history, and literature. It is a pity that we cannot see the same resonance in Poland at present, but I believe that one day, it will happen. No matter how long it takes and no matter what the result is, I will continue to work hard in this direction.

Read more: A snapshot of Taiwan's Sunflower movement ten years later

The geopolitical equivalent of ‘cancel culture’

Originally published on Global Voices

Screenshot of RussiaPost article, used with permission.

Grigory Ioffe, analyst at the Jamestown Foundation, questions the rationale of Western policy toward Belarus, which is undermining its economic foundations and putting into question its survival as an independent state, thereby leading to total dependence on Russia. Global Voices republishes his opinion piece with permission from RussiaPost. It has been edited and shortened for clarity. 

NATO’s take on Belarus

The NATO summit in Vilnius took place just 30 km (19 miles) from the Belarusian border. In the final document from the summit, Belarus was mentioned seven times, but only once as an entity able to act on its own: “We call on Belarus to stop its malign activities against its neighbors, to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, and to abide by international law,” the document proclaims. 

The remaining six references invoke Belarus only in conjunction with Russia, which is using Belarusian territory and infrastructure for aggression against Ukraine; is integrating with Belarus militarily; is deploying its nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory, and is sending its own private military company across the common border. In other words, Belarus is considered not as a master of its domain but as an extension of Russia. 

To be sure, such a take on Belarus is not new. Dozens, if not hundreds of publications in the Belarusian opposition media and of the Belarusian service of Radio Liberty share this perspective.

And yet when Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda referred to Belarus as “no longer independent” but rather a “province of Russia,” the Belarusian opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who has enjoyed Lithuanian hospitality since August 11, 2020, took issue with Nauseda’s remark. “Such an interpretation creates a wrong perception of Belarus in the world and contributes to even greater isolation of our country and our people. Belarus is not a province of Russia, and the Belarusian people will not allow it to become one.” 

The problem, however, transcends national pride. Who bears responsibility for the surge in Belarus’s dependency on Russia since 2020? The usual answer is Alyaksandr Lukashenka. He cracked down on mass protests over rigged elections in August 2020; in 2021, he organized a migrant crisis on the Belarus-Poland border; the Lukashenko regime continues to keep behind bars some 1,500 people that human rights groups qualify as political prisoners. Furthermore, Minsk allowed Russia to use Belarusian territory to stage attacks on Ukraine. The collective West, including the EU, could not help but react and imposed six packages of sanctions on Minsk. Meanwhile, Tikhanovskaya’s cabinet not only approved of that but constantly demanded more and tougher sanctions.

The geopolitical equivalent of ‘cancel culture’

What was achieved as a result? Did Minsk relent on political prisoners? On the contrary, the situation has become worse. Did Minsk cut back on military cooperation with Russia? No, it has only strengthened. Still, something critical was, in fact, achieved: what Siarhei Bohdan, a Belarusian historian working for the Free University of Berlin, called a semi-blockade. Bohdan subjected this phenomenon and its implications to an in-depth analysis. In view of its importance, here are a few short points of this analysis. 

Minsk has been trying its best to diversify its transportation routes since obtaining independence, particularly in the 2010s, putting emphasis on connections via such ports as Ventspils, Latvia; Klaipeda, Lithuania; Gdansk, Poland, and Odesa, Ukraine.  At the same time, Minsk was not in a hurry to obey when Moscow demanded (for the first time in 2016) that refined oil products produced from Russian crude oil be rerouted to Russian seaports. 

Up until the 2020 presidential election, Minsk tried to reinforce transit diversification. Thus, as of January 2020, Lukashenko held a vision whereby only 30-40 precent of oil is purchased from Russia, whereas 30 precent is purchased elsewhere and entering via Klaipeda, and the remaining 30 precent comes via Odesa. 

However, following the imposition of punitive Western sanctions, Minsk eventually (in February 2021) signed an agreement with Russia about rerouting its refined oil exports to Russian ports.

Further on, following the diversion of the Ryanair flight in May 2021, Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine closed their airspace to Belavia, Belarus’s major carrier. On June 4, 2021, the EU closed its airspace to all Belarusian planes. In response to the air blockade and the EU’s decision to halt cooperation with Belarus, Minsk refused to do border protection “spadework” — it stopped keeping potential illegal migrants from approaching EU borders. A migrant crisis ensued.

Thus, by early 2022, Belarus found itself in a semi-blockade maintained by all of its neighbors except Russia. This and Minsk’s resulting reliance on Russia compelled the Belarusian government to make unprecedented concessions to Moscow. 

In addition to severing economic ties between Belarus and Ukraine after the outbreak of the war, the EU imposed new sanctions on Belarus, including transit restrictions. This was part of the economic war waged against Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine, but not a realistic plan to persuade Minsk to change its course.

In January 2023, Lithuania denounced an agreement on principles of transborder cooperation. After that, in February, Poland closed all border crossings except one for cars and one for semi-trailers.

Thus, the semi-blockade of Belarus subjects its citizens to collective punishment by artificially undermining the economic basis of their well-being.

The blockade of Belarus, believes Bohdan, calls into question its survival as an independent state. Specific decisions of EU members in the areas of transport and transit from the spring of 2022 onward imply a refusal to recognize any difference between Belarus and Russia. They lead not only to the delegitimization of the existing Belarusian state but also to the absolute dependence of Belarus on Russia in all areas, including relations with third countries.

Given Bohdan’s analysis, the answer to the question of who is to blame for Belarus becoming an extension of Russia no longer seems obvious. 

One constant is Lukashenko himself. A bad guy once and for all, in the eyes of the West, he has been at the helm for 29 years straight. The second constant is Belarus’s never-subsiding desire to diversify its ties, an existential requirement for a midsize landlocked country like Belarus.

In contrast, the only true variable in the equation is the West’s Belarus policy. 

A legitimate question suggests itself. Is the policy just a binary choice between evil and good, the former being Lukashenko’s rule and the latter Europe’s idealistic vision for Belarus?

Or perhaps a policy is more of a visionary and nuanced course of action mediated by policymakers’ homework on the country in question (its history, internal divisions and polling) and their arrival at a certain compromise between values and interests? It does not seem that this second option is even considered. Consequently, Western politicians appear to be chasing their own tails. Everything possible is being done to convert Belarus into an extension of Russia only to express an outrage over this specific outcome.

A similar situation exists in multi-track diplomacy between the West and Belarus. On the one hand, despite vastly diminished and leaderless embassy staffs, Belarus still maintains diplomatic relations with all Western countries.  On the other hand, the provisional cabinet headed by Tikhanovskaya tries its best to hog the covers. A Radio Liberty article on her cabinet’s relations with the West maintains, quite seriously, that “Western leaders now resolve Belarusian issues” almost exclusively with Tikhanovskaya’s cabinet, whereas contacts with official Belarusian diplomats are “devoid of depth” and are more “thematical than political.” One analyst even suggested that Lukashenko “would love to be in Tikhanovskaya’s place” because she has met with so many Western leaders, whereas Lukashenko is shunned by them.

Considering, however, that Tikhanovskaya has no way of affecting anything in Belarus, the latter remark is bizarre. Tikhanovskaya’s meetings with Western leaders are replete in symbolism (“we support democracy”) but offer nothing in terms of practicality. In the meantime, Western journalists keep on soliciting interviews with Lukashenko to make up for the deficiency of contacts that really matter.

It is Russia that has been absorbing more Belarusian export products. In 2022, Belarusian exports to Russia exceeded those of the previous year by a whopping 40 percent, which compensated for half of the losses incurred due to access to Western markets being cut off. Minsk is making efforts to offset the rest through its trade with other countries.

In summary, while badly damaging Belarus’s ability to act on its own and not achieving any positive results, the blockade of Belarus by its Western neighbors has been manifestly counterproductive, leading to excessive dependency on Russia. On top of that, conducting Belarus-related talks primarily with entities that have little to no clout in Belarus itself only makes matters worse. If this conclusion was worth substantiating despite being overly straightforward, it is primarily because Western foreign policymakers are not on friendly terms with common sense. Not always at the very least.

Education has a special role to play in the continually expanding relations between Central Europe and Taiwan

Originally published on Global Voices

Screenshot from YouTube channel of Global Taiwan Institute. Fair use.

Taiwan and Central Europe did not prioritize mutual relations until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which they suddenly developed much more intensive ties around public health diplomacy that have evolved today to a much more robust and diverse relationship.

For Central Europe, China dominated their main foreign policy and trade agenda after Beijing launched in 2012 its program of Cooperation with Central Europe, known in Chinese as 中国-中东欧国家合作, which built on its Belt and Road Initiative. Yet a series of setbacks in major projects as well as political changes in Central Europe are seeing this massive project lose momentum as some states also leave the organization. The China Index shows how Beijing is present in a number of countries of the region such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia.

At the same time Taiwan kicked off a new policy by sending masks, elevating its visibility among the general public in Central Europe, and continuing to invest in high technology and industries in the region, as well as developing Taiwanese tourism in the region, in effect counterbalancing Beijing's political, economic and cultural influence.

To understand the new direction of strengthened Taiwan–Central Europe relations, Global Voices spoke to Marcin Jerzewski who heads the Taiwan Office at the European Values Center for Security Policy, a Czech think tank present in Taipei since 2020.

The interview took place in English via email after a meeting in a café in Taipei.

Marcin Jerzewski. Photo used with permission.

Filip Noubel (FN): How do you explain this rather recent rapprochement between Central Europe and Taiwan, and how do you see it evolving since the second invasion of Ukraine?

Marcin Jerzewski (MJ):  The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic increased exchanges between Taiwan and Central Europe, as, during that period, Beijing demonstrated a lack of transparency in communicating disease-related developments with the rest of the world. The pandemic and China’s response further undermined Beijing’s crumbling reputation in Europe, which was negatively affected by unfulfilled promises of lucrative economic deals and controversies surrounding China’s investment in strategic infrastructure throughout the region (the deep-sea port of Klaipeda in Lithuania serves as an illustrative example).

Meanwhile, Taiwan offered an antithetical model for addressing pandemic-related challenges, based on the principles of transparency and trust. While European countries, including those in the central part of the continent, struggled to secure sufficient stockpiles of personal protective equipment, Taiwan embarked on the strategy of “mask diplomacy”,  successfully utilizing the donations of sorely needed materials as a tool of public diplomacy. Increasingly, the island country is viewed as a “like-minded partner” of Central European democracies. This normative alignment also facilitated the perception of Taiwan as an alternative trade and investment partner in East Asia.

Since the onset of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, Taiwan is able to further capitalize on its “Taiwan Can Help” approach. Specifically, government leaders and civil society alike demonstrated considerable goodwill towards the people of Ukraine, which manifested itself in successful fundraising and collection drives. Amid the growing confluence of strategic interests between Moscow and Beijing, Taiwan stands out as an ally of Ukraine and the broader region of Central Europe. It is noteworthy that while China calls for “resolving the humanitarian crisis” in its 12-point peace plan, in 2022, Taiwan provided 18 times more funds to Ukraine than China: USD 41 million vs USD 2.1 million (CNY 15 million).

FN: To take practical examples, how do Poland and the Czech Republic align or diverge in their view and inclusion of Taiwan in public and political discourse?

MJ: Particularly since Petr Pavel’s assumed the presidency, Prague’s position vis-a-vis Beijing is clear and consistent across the executive branch and the two legislative chambers. China is viewed as a competitor and a source of national security threats, and the interactions between both countries are minimal. While the Czech Republic, unlike the Baltic states, has not formally withdrawn from the 14+1 cooperation framework, Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský declared that the framework had “neither structure nor future.” Parties which previously advocated for closer ties between Prague and Beijing, including social democrats and Communists, do not currently have any seats in the parliament, which further limits the possibility of potential dissent on the China question.

The situation in Poland is considerably different. Even within the ruling Law and Justice Party (PIS) there is a lack of a unified voice on China-related issues. Some high-ranking party officials, such as Anna Fotyga, MEP, lead the conversation about broadening engagement with Taiwan. Meanwhile, others, including Member of Sejm [Parliament] Marek Suski and Senator Grzegorz Czelej, both active in the Poland–China Parliamentary Group, engage with and openly praise policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Further tensions have developed since the expansion of the Russian war against Ukraine in 2022. Poland is now witnessing growing tensions between President Andrzej Duda, representing a more accommodating stance toward China, and the government of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, which has grown increasingly wary about cooperation between Beijing and Moscow.

FN: What are the most promising areas of collaboration but also mutual understanding between Central Europe and Taiwan, in your view?

MJ: Education has a special role to play in the continually expanding relations between Central Europe and Taiwan.

Firstly, educational programs aimed at expanding the capacity of Central European countries in strategic technologies (such as semiconductors) are necessary for establishing a foundation for practical cooperation in the future, in areas such as investment and inclusion of the countries of the region in global supply chains. We should thus pay close attention to the scope and performance of initiatives such as the recently announced Taiwan Semiconductor Scholarship Program.

Secondly, the experience of long established programs such as the US Fulbright Program demonstrates that people-to-people exchanges constitute one of the most effective tools of public diplomacy. Taiwan currently seeks to position itself as a normative actor who can act as a like-minded peer for other liberal democracies. Taiwan needs to build coalitions in democratic countries which will elevate the importance of cooperation with Taipei on legislative and executive agendas. By attracting international students and promoting people-to-people exchanges, Taiwan has an unparalleled opportunity to strengthen its reputation amid democratic electorates.

FN:  In what way is China still playing a role in Central Europe that can disrupt that rapprochement?

MJ: We ought to bear in mind that Central Europe is not a monolith. While some countries, including the Czech Republic and Lithuania, clearly pivoted away from Beijing and towards Taipei and other countries in the Indo-Pacific region, others, such as Hungary, continue to maintain amicable relations with Beijing. To a large extent, the current positive dynamics in relations between Central Europe and Taiwan can be attributed to fortuitous (from Taipei’s perspective) arrangements in national legislatures of Central Europe. Coalitions of centrist and center-right parties in Prague and Vilnius have openly pursued what they call “value-based foreign policy,” which prioritizes expanding political, economic, and cultural ties with “like-minded” democratic countries such as Taiwan. Nevertheless, it is possible future coalitions might be more reluctant to continue the process of deepening and broadening ties with Taiwan at the expense of cooperation with China. It is thus imperative that Taiwan works towards institutionalization of its ties with Central European partners, through international arrangements and multi-annual frameworks such as scientific collaboration programs or student exchanges. The institutionalized format of engagements with Taiwan would be more difficult to undermine than more ad-hoc exchanges realized in the form of high level visits or memoranda of understanding which are not acted upon.

Students, teachers, librarians, pensioners and pilots contribute to enriching Wikipedia content

Originally published on Global Voices

High resolution areal photo from Jaworzno in Poland, preserving the memory of nature area, made through an innovative initiative by Wikipedia Poland. Photo by Wikipedia user WiktorPilot, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Various global ranking lists usually place Wikipedia among the top ten most visited websites in the world. In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) it also ranks quite high, while the local language versions often serve as primary source for educational content. Aware of its impact, various enthusiastic groups from the region are finding ways to enrich Wikipedia content. This post lists some recent examples.

CEE Wikipedians shine in #1Lib1Ref initiative

Twice a year since 2016, in January and May, the #1Lib1Ref campaign invites librarians to improve Wikipedia articles by adding citations. This year, Wikipedia community blog Diff reported that Wikipedia in Serbian had the top score for third time in a row, with 38 editors who edited 5,461 articles and added 12,689 references.

#1Lib1Ref event in state library in Belgrade, Serbia, feat. Gordana Gomirac from Wikimedia and awarded 2nd place top editor Žana Gnjatović, librarian from Sombor. Photo by Wikipedia user Gzanag, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nikolina Šepić, a pedagogy student from Pančevo, retained the title of top editor, which won her media acclaim in 2022 also. This year she has added 6600 references.  The other top editors were also from Serbia: librarian Žana Gnjatović, and pensioner Liljana Sundać, a member of Serbia’s Senior Citizen project. 

Dozens of Serbian media conveyed this positive news, from Radio Television of Vojvodina, to state agencies  Tanjug and tabloid Telegraf,  framing it as national success and  a point of national pride.

#1Lib1Ref runner ups were Wikipedia in Polish with around 4,000 edits in more than 2,000 articles and the French version with 1,871 references.

Diff blog noted that the wider CEE region also had a strong showing:

…29 editors of Romanian Wikipedia edited more than 600 pages; 16 editors of Bosnian Wikipedia gave reliable sources to more than 160 pages; we also salute the five editors in both Serbo-Croatian and Croatian Wikipedias; the four enthusiastic Czech Wikipedia’s editors, and the four Macedonian Wikipedia editors who managed to edit more than 700 pages! Let us close this CEE trip with a special mention to Ukrainian editors, who closed this year’s campaign with more than 50 users, and made over 1000 useful edits in 700+ articles on various topics.

Polish pilots make free-to-use aerial photos

Wiktor Pawuska, Anna Kosobudzka and the senior pilot Jarosław Pytel engaged in the ‘Landing on the screen with Wikipedia’ project. Photo by Wikimedia user WiktorPilot, CC BY-SA 4.0

Since 2020, Wikimedia Polska has been implementing the long-term Wikiszkoła (Wiki-school) program, which uses small grants to engage teachers and students to develop various activities and projects. This fund helped the ‘Landing on the screen with Wikipedia’ Project to produce high resolution areal photos to be used as resource for the encyclopedia.

This project, conducted in and above the Southern Polish city of Jaworzno, is brainchild of Wiktor Pawuska, a licensed pilot and a student of the Vocational and Continuing Education Center in Jaworzno, and his teacher Anna Kosobudzka. They used their Wiki-school grant to pay for airplane flights aimed at taking photos of Jaworzno and the surrounding area from a bird’s eye view, placing the 31 aerial photos in Wikimedia Commons resources, and then illustrating selected entries with new articles under free licenses. ​​

The project also created synergies with other local institutions, by staging an exhibition of aerial photos in cooperation with the Municipal Public Library and the Promotion Office of Jaworzno, which attracted the attention of visitors for several weeks.

Enriching the Macedonian Wikipedia with rock music info and photos

In North Macedonia, Art House Karev, an organization of teachers and students from the Nikola Karev High School in Skopje, cooperates with the civic association GLAM Macedonia to teach teenagers how to upload music-related content to the Wikipedia in Macedonian language. They organize workshops for high school students who are updating the articles about music bands.

The children learn how to find information from publicly available sources, such as the VBU Music Registry, the biggest public record database documenting music production from North Macedonia, and music published by local artists abroad. This information comes in handy in amending the data on musical bibliographies.

Tošo Filipovski, the author of the Macedonian Rock Encyclopedia with his book. Courtesy photo provided by him, with permission to republish.

Art House Karev has been working with copyright holders to obtain information from proprietary sources. For instance, they have received permission from music scholar and rock enthusiast Tošo Filipovski, the author of the Macedonian Rock Encyclopedia (Македонска рок енциклопедија) to use their articles for updating the biographies of musicians. This encyclopedia is only available in hardcopy format as a volume of 333 pages, containing the histories of 333 Macedonian rock bands, active from the 1960s to the present day.

Filipovski attended a workshop for ten young Wikipedians in Skopje on April 5, and besides giving them approval to use his articles, he provided them with digital copies of articles from his encyclopedia, in order to help them update the rockers’ bios more easily and efficiently. Vasil Buraliev, the founder of the VBU Music registry, also participated in the event, and noted that they will apply Creative Commons licenses to original photos of music bands from their archive,  to serve as illustration for students’ articles.

Meanwhile, Russia attempts to force censorship

However, its not rosy for all Wikipedians in the CEE region. A big challenge to Wikipedia's integrity comes from the Russian Federation, which has repeatedly been trying to censor it by inflicting monetary punishment against Wikimedia Foundation, based on its laws that support networked authoritarianism since 2013.

This trend intensified after the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Several days later, Russia swiftly adopted a draconian law criminalizing any media coverage or social media posts about the war that diverge from the state agenda. In May that year Russia used a law on “domestication” of IT companies to declare the local branch Wikipedia Foundation a subject of its censorship laws.

In July 2022, at behest of Roskomnadzor, state executive agency responsible for monitoring, controlling and censoring Russian mass media, a Moscow court fined Wikimedia Foundation  RUB 5 million rubles (USD 91,000) for refusing to remove what it termed disinformation from Russian-language Wikipedia articles on the Ukraine conflict, including “The Russian Invasion of Ukraine,” “War Crimes during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine,” and “Massacre in Bucha.”

The series of such court cases started in April 2022, and, during the following year, over seven had been filed, including the latest concluded in April 2023 imposing a fine of RUB 2 million rubles (USD 24,500) on Wikimedia Foundation for refusing to remove an article on Russian-language Wikipedia called “The Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Oblast.”

For many Russians, the lives they are building abroad are a one-way ticket

Originally published on Global Voices

“No to war” is written on a snow in Kyrgyzstan. Photo by author, used with permission by Global Voices.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has ruined the lives of millions of people. First and foremost, it destroyed the peaceful existence of Ukrainians, now fearlessly fighting for their country and fleeing from the war in astonishing numbers. But it has also fundamentally changed the lives of many people from the aggressor country, Russia and its dictator-ruled neighbor, Belarus.

The Russian regime assumed it had a carte blanche to increase repressions internally, thus squeezing out the last remnants of the open dissent.  The only way out left for some Russians who did not agree to be complicit in the war was to flee abroad, to the world where no one was waiting for them.

Read more: Anti-war Russians find a new home in Turkey

Global Voices spoke to Russians and Belarusians who found it impossible to stay in the country that started the invasion.

In Poland, the emigrants do not equal the country they are running from

Poland has had difficult relations with Russia. It opened its doors to the fleeing Ukrainians and is building a wall on the border with Russia in Kaliningrad.

Shortly after the invasion, Elena found herself in Warsaw because it was easier for her to go there: “There is no need for sworn translations; there are opportunities to apply for a residence permit for work or study.” For her, this departure is a one-way ticket: “I have lived in Belarus since childhood. After the post-election crackdown on the protests in Belarus in 2020, it became scary to stay there.”

Soon it will be a year since the war started, and for many Russian speakers life is divided into before and after. Elena has long accepted that the war will not end tomorrow.

It can be difficult and scary for people to run from Russia, where the media writes about “two hundred years of organized hatred.” Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, state-aligned media had been eagerly reporting about “Russophobia” in the “collective West.”  But the reality is very different from the picture created by propaganda. Elena notes:

The Poles have suffered enough from the imperial habits of first Tsarist Russia, then the Soviet Union. But they do not equal the country  and the people.

Elena is now working and studying in Poland, although it is difficult have long-term plans. She adds:

Our world is beautiful. Despite the inadequate Imperials and their fan club. And the world is big, you don't have to live in a country that hurts you.

Kyrgyzstan has become a new home

Kyrgyzstan is a former Soviet republic located in Central Asia. Previously, for economic reasons, the flow of migrants from Kyrgyzstan to Russia was numerous, but now, for political reasons, this flow has turned into opposite direction.

Lesya chose this country because of its proximity; other reasons being that there are a lot of people that understand Russian, the country has familiar food and climate, and relatively comfortable prices:

First of all, I wanted to run away, no matter where. We didn't plan on the timing of how long we'll be here. Ideally, I would like not to depend financially on my country [Russia] and find myself a place where there will be a “home,” which we have been deprived of.

Despite the fact that Kyrgyz culture and some of the traditions were oppressed during the Soviet period (as everywhere, Russification was encouraged), the Kyrgyz managed to remain their traditions, which according to Lesya, include maintaining openness, the ability to live and solve problems together as well as hospitality. Lesya notes:

Now I don’t shy away from the sight of the police, I don’t delete objectionable words in instant messengers, as I did in Moscow, where the police could easily check your phone in the subway.

She hopes that someday it will be possible to return home again, but this may not happen in the coming years:

I have already gotten used to the idea that such terrible things as war are happening “at home,” in my homeland. I was depressed for a long time, I was ashamed to do anything, draw, enjoy life, because now someone is suffering at this very moment.

Georgia: let's move on

Georgia is very careful in its political relations with Russia today. It has a history of Russian invasion in 2008, and some latest polls showed that many Georgians do not support a non-visa regime between two countries.  At the same time, it is focused on joining NATO and the EU. But it was Georgia that received a lot of departing Russians. Although the official language of the country is Georgian, many people here speak Russian and English, which makes life much easier for new migrants.

Among them is a girl ჯუნო [which reads as Juno], who, until February 24, despite all the problems in her native country, never imagined herself living outside of Russia: “The need to choose another country for a long stay took me by surprise. Without an open Schengen visa, the list of options quickly dwindled to a dozen. Georgia won.” There are many reasons: “First of all, I have been here before and understood what this country is like; Russians can still stay here for a whole year without a residence permit; there is comfortable taxation and the ability to open a bank account and register an individual entrepreneur; and, finally, there are wonderful people, amazing nature, mild climate,” she says.

Over a month and a half since the announcement of mobilization in Russia, Georgia received more than 700,000 Russians, of which 100,000 people stayed. ჯუნო notes: “In all the time that I have been here, I have never faced aggression. The locals are either neutral or friendly, and I'm grateful for that attitude.”

Read more: Georgia facing backlash over possible flight resumption with Russia

Some Russian companies relocated all their employees, along with their families, to Georgia. Even before 2022, the country offered the “Work from Georgia” program to support the country’s economy: foreigners working remotely were invited to participate in it.

ჯუნო also works remotely and keeps in touch with family and friends who have remained in Russia: “I can say that in Russian society, many are fooled by propaganda, and people need time to figure it out. I keep in touch with Russia because my family and friends are there who couldn't leave. And that is why I have to be very careful in choosing the wording in my answers to them.”

Israel: the Promised Land

Valeria considers her story banal: “I left Russia because I can’t and don’t want to be silent, and I don’t want to go to jail for this either.” She had no relatives or friends in Israel and, despite the existing right to obtain citizenship of the country (because of her Jewish descent), before the war, she connected her life only with Russia, never having visited Israel even as a tourist.

According to her, many Israelis worry that most of those who came after the start of the war are those who would simply wait it out, and leave soon. Some Russians leave after receiving an Israeli passport, while others plan to stay.

In Russia, Valeria went to protests up to the last moment. But now she no longer believes that those who support the war can be persuaded. She closely followed the political agenda and watched the flourishing of state propaganda in the country, so the stage of acceptance of what was happening came quickly.

Read more: ‘We are asking for forgiveness that we know we will never receive': In Russia, people are bringing flowers to monuments of Ukrainians

“It is important for me that my daughter grows up as a person who values herself, her freedom, including freedom of speech. I want it to be up to her to decide where she will live, what she will do, what ideas she will support. Unfortunately, now in Russia people are deprived of these opportunities,” adds Valeria.

Amid persecution, violence, or judgement, many queer folks turn online

Originally published on Global Voices

A screenshot of Google maps (Jakarta). Composed by Sydney Allen via Canva

Global Voices has extensively cataloged the pressures, violence, hate speech, and oppression queer people face all over the world. Whether it is violence against trans sex workers in Azerbaijan, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Kazakhstan, opposition to the Gay Games in Hong Kong, or crackdowns on LGBTQ+ education in Brazillian schools, it is well documented that queer people often face a litany of abuse and discrimination that their cis-straight counterparts do not. 

The threat of persecution, violence, or judgement is why many queer people turn to anonymous online spaces to build community and relationships, seek support, and share their experiences. Sometimes when the communities around us are hostile and harsh, the internet can become a place of refuge and comfort — this is particularly true for LGBTQ+ people in rural communities or societies that see queer people unfavorably.

One such sanctuary is Reddit. Reddit, calling itself “the front page of the internet,” is a US-based platform that allows users to anonymously post, share content, and start discussions via “subreddits” — groups focused on a particular theme or issue. Because of its broad usecase, Reddit, in many ways, seems like a microcosm of the internet — there are abhorrent sexist and biggoted subreddits, creepy spaces built for objectification, but also spaces for positivity, humor, activism, and identity-based gathering. That is where the r/Queer and r/LQBT subreddits come in. 

r/Queer’s tagline is “We are here, we are Queer. Get used to it!” It describes itself as “An open forum to discuss/share things of interest to the LGBTQIA+ community. Lightly moderated, this is meant to be an open forum foremost, but no bigotry will be tolerated.”

Both subreddits cover a range of topics: posts where users ask advice about changing their name after gender transition, webinars for queer family support groups, celebration posts of queer couples after aniversaries or marriage, posts from Pride celebrations, and of course, an abundance of jokes and memes.

Users often anonymously share jokes and uplifting images related to the queer community, such as this rainbow blackboard where a business shows support for its queer customers.

Do not enter if…
byu/66cev66 inqueer

People also frequently share memes mocking homophobic or intolerant viewpoints, such as the following, where a user points out the hypocrisy of “protecting the children” by shielding them from LGBTQ+ identities.

Oh wow, it's almost like it was never about the children and was just about shitting on queer people
byu/mevastrashcorner inlgbt

While the majority of reddit users are based out of the US, Canada, and Europe, according to data analytics platform Semrush, it is a global platform that attracts people from all over the world, as seen in these posts from East Africa, Warsaw, and Cuba.

Our aim is create a free LGBTIQ zone in East Africa and Africa at large, we have rights to love and enjoy all the beauty of our countries with our Gender identity
byu/wrightie2021 inqueer

This year Warsaw Pride is hosting Kyiv Pride and Poland and Ukraine are going together
by inlgbt

Yay Cuba!
byu/66cev66 inqueer

Unfortunately, in some countries, such as Indonesia, China, North Korea, and Turkey, Reddit is banned for hosting what Turkey and Jakarta officials called “pornographic content,” or, in the case of China, for hosting material deemed offensive to the state.

Queering the map

A screenshot from the site Queering the Map.

Another example of an anonymous online queer space is Queering the Map (QTM). Queering the map is a community-driven online mapping project where users anonymously share their experience as a queer person, physically marking their location with a pin on Google’s world map. The database has over 86,000 submissions from nearly every country, including posts in 23 languages. It was started in 2017 by Canadian artist and trans activist Lucas LaRochelle. 

In an interview with Sissy Screens, an online queer media platform, LaRocehelle discussed the impersonal nature of many social media platforms today, and how the platform’s anonymity, allows for creator intimacy and vulnerability.

I think intimacy is one of the things that’s so special about Queering The Map, which in many ways is lacking from dominant social media platforms. … QTM allows you to publish and write outside the confines of the user profile, which often asks that we ‘perform’ by creating and curating a version of ourselves that is marketable. Users leave behind an intimate trace of their life that is not tied in perpetuity to their other digital selves. … the act of contributing to QTM is an act of sharing one’s story for the collective. It becomes an act of giving, one that is decidedly different to the kind of self-promotion that we’re often asked to do in other digital spaces.

The space has a wide range of entries. There are poems, love stories, and proposals, such as this story from Peru:

Te vi por primera vez aquella noche en la reunión que hice en mi casa. No creí que vendrías, pero lo hiciste y cuando te vi sentí esa sensación en el estómago del que todos hablan. No preciso entrar en detalles porque sabes lo hermosa que fue esa noche. Sólo quiero que sepas que aunqu pasen muchos más años, nada podrá borrar aquel recuerdo. Te extraño.

I saw you for the first time that night at the gathering at my house. I didn't think you would come, but you did and when I saw you I felt that feeling in my stomach that everyone talks about. I don't need to go into details because you know how beautiful that night was. I just want you to know that even if many more years pass, nothing will ever be able to erase that memory. Miss you.

And this poem from Beijing, China:

甜蜜和勇敢的秘密都藏在了那些与语句里, 印在了日夜穿梭的胡同的沥青地面上, 是水蒸气, 在那片院落的空气中轻轻飘荡. 墙和窗还有树叶, 它们都知道, 知道所有的事.

The secrets of sweetness and bravery are hidden in those words, printed on the asphalt floor of the alley that we traveled day and night. They are water steam that floats gently in the air of that courtyard. The leaves, the walls, the windows, they know everything.

There are also stories of funny dates and jokes: “this town is gayer than it seems, you just need to look closely. ;) -your ex-local lesbian,” reads one post from in Livno in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

Some users post serious stories of violence, coming out, and the challenges of being queer. 

One user in  Naru Island, Japan, wrote: “Called my parents on Facetime and came out to them at a party. I was 22. It was terrifying.” Another in Nagasaki, Japan, said, “In 2014, a beautiful girl I was dating told me that [we] could never be because she was looking for the person she wanted to spend her life with and that would ‘never be you because you're a girl’. Broke my little lesbian heart for the first time, but it was an important experience for me to have.”

Another person in Java, Indonesia, wrote: “Hometown, comforting yet suffocating. Peaceful but i feel out of place. Im queer im indonesian and i exist.”

The map is a visual representation of community: proof that queer people are not alone, but also offering them the security and protection only available through anonymity. One Queering the Map user in Abidian, Coté d Ivoire, summed it up perfectly: “We are everywhere.”

Unfortunately, these anonymous spaces are coming under threat. As people come to rely more on digital technology, online anonymity is disappearing. Some state governments have mechanisms to monitor citizens and track their online activity, and some private companies are seeking to retract users’ right to anonymity, forcing them to tie their accounts to their identity. However, as it stands, there still remain a few beacons of internet anonymity — spaces that are worth fighting for.

One-women-orchestra promoting the music of Lipka Tatars and Karaims

Originally published on Global Voices

Screenshot from Cicha & Pałyga TATARSKA / TATAR ALBUM – official YouTube video. Fair use.

Polish folk artist Karolina Cicha, singer, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and one-woman-orchestra is trying to use the language of music to overcome historical prejudice toward minority groups in Europe. In this interview  with Global Voices, she explains why she performs the music of minorities in Poland, either alone or with her fellow artists.

For many minority groups, being othered is a familiar experience. But music can offer a path toward intercultural dialogue and cross-cultural perspective sharing. Because music is often a key cultural and national identifier — consistent across generations — music can preserve cultures and prevents their unnatural assimilation amid prejudice or discrimination from the majority.

Karolina Cicha explained:

Everything I have to say about it is somewhere between the melodies. Music speaks more than words. It is the language of emotions. She is beauty. You have to go to a concert or listen to an album [in order to understand it].

These humanizing efforts are in line with the thinking of German “philosopher of existential pessimism” Arthur Schopenhauer, who suggested in his “The World as Will and Representation” that music is a universal language that can reveal our inner selves and desires and can be a language of comprehension and acceptance, helping us to avoid falling into prejudice and to protect ourselves from eternal suffering.

Through her music, Cicha highlights the multidimensionality of Polish and East European culture. In 2017, together with Bart Pałyga, she recorded the album Tatar Album (Płyta Tatarska), with songs by the Crimean and Volga Tatars, which pulled from 1397 traditions and sounds, when the first mention of the Tatars in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania dates back.

The Tatars, specifically Lipka Tatars, have been part of the Polish landscape since the 14th century. Like many of their kind, Lipka Tatars were part of the bigger Turkic Muslim family, writing in Arabic script, and speaking Tatar, however, during the assimilation processes in Poland (through so-called Polish-centrism), much of this culture and history was lost — though activists and artists have started to revive the Tatar heritage in recent years.

Karolina Cicha, who was born in Poland’s region Podlasie, discussed why she is drawn to Tatar music:

Many Tatars live in my home region. They moved to Poland over 600 years ago, grew into Polish culture and at the same time did not forget about their identity and Islam.

However, even before this album full of Tatar music, Karolina recorded another album Wieloma językami (Nine Languages), which featured songs from other Polish minorities, such as Belarusians, Lithuanians, Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Roma, and two songs of the Tatar national minority.

However, she is not done discovering the sounds of minorities. In August 2022, she came to Czech Plzeň Old synagogue together with Patricja Betley and Karolina Matuszkiewicz, in traditional national dress, to present the songs of the Karaims (the only Turkic minority who profess Judaism).

from the left Patricja Betley, Karolina Cicha, Karolina Matuszkiewicz during their performance of Karaim music in Old Synagogue in Plzen, photo by Elmira Lyapina, used with permission.

…When it comes to the Karaites, this minority is also present in Poland and very dynamic in terms of organization. It was the Polish Karaites themselves who asked me to arrange and develop their music.

Karolina does not simply introduce the music of minorities — she also sings in their languages:

I am very interested in minorities, hence the desire to learn the phonetics of languages. While learning the language, you must also learn about the culture and view of the world of a given minority.

When introducing the musicians at the Karaims music concert in Plzeň Synagogue, the third secretary of the Lithuanian embassy to the Czech Republic, Kristina Baubinaitė, noted that UNESCO considers the language of Karaites as severely endangered, praising KArolina's role in the process of its preservation. In 2021 Karolina published an album full of Karaim music called Karaimska mapa muzyczna.

This Polish musician is also conducting intensive research on the artifacts, sounds, and histories songs in the other languages; for example, for Tatar Album, she visited Crimea, Tatarstan, and Kazakhstan.

I have been traveling abroad with the music of minorities living in Poland since 2014… The story about the context of the song is a very important element of each concert. I prepare them separately. The presence of some songs is important precisely because of this context, which says a lot about the struggles and sufferings of a given minority. Many people find compassion in this and allow them to see their country and their lives with a larger perspective.

Through these performances, she tells the community's stories: introducing the minority group, highlighting the main elements of the music, sharing the community's goals and its representatives, and teaching the public about the song's composers or creators. Her Tatar Album included pieces of Crimean Tatar songs, such as Ey Güzel Qırım. This piece explores a tragic page of Crimean Tatar history — the mass deportation from Crimea in 1944 — as well as stories of Karaims who started to move from Crimea to Lithuania and Poland in the 14th century, continuing into the 19th and 20th centuries.

We usually meet with a good reception of our music. People are often surprised that in a Slavic country there are minorities originating from the Turkic language group. The presence of Belarusians, Ukrainians, or Lithuanians in the region is hardly surprising, but few people know about Tatars or Karaims, even in Poland itself

When Cicha is asked what she enjoys the most about this kind of music, she replies within Schopenhauer’s realm of musical universalism:

I have no musical education. I am self-taught. I learned everything by ear like village musicians… In music, I'm interested in universal emotions and how they manifest themselves through a local song. I don't limit myself to world music. For example, I have just recorded the album ‘SAD’, which I co-create with Sw@da, who is the creator of electronic music.

According to Schopenhauer, even artists are not protected from life's suffering. However, the remuneration for the artist is the pure, true, and profound knowledge of the inner nature of the world.

To listen to Karolina Cicha's music and celebrate the diversity of musicians, culture, and languages in Poland, check out Global Voices’ Spotify playlist here.

The man-made famine from 1932 to 1933 killed millions of Ukrainians

Originally published on Global Voices

Passers-by and the corpse of a starved man on a street in Kharkiv, Ukraine, USSR, 1932. Public domain photo by Alexander Wienerberger — Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer, via Wikipedia.

Many Ukrainians marked the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor by sharing the memories passed on by their families about the experience of the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. That got me wondering how informed the world at large was about it at the time.

The Holodomor, a term that can be translated as “mass murder by hunger,” was part of the wider famine that affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Kuban in southern Russia, Kazakhstan and the Caucasus. However, the Moscow regime's actions included repressively targeting the Ukrainian peasant populations and depriving them of food, leading scholars and governments to classify it as genocide. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, “of the estimated five million people who died in the Soviet Union, almost four million were Ukrainians.”

Before November this year, Ukraine and 14 other countries recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide against Ukrainians by the totalitarian regime of Joseph Stalin. By the 90th anniversary this year, Germany, Ireland, Moldova, Romania, Brazil, the Czech Republic and the Vatican, as well as the Belarus opposition in exile also did so, raising the number to 22.

Deliberate repressive measures that targeted Ukrainians in the USSR in 1932 and 1933 included appropriating Ukrainian grain while closing off the border between Ukraine SSR and other Soviet republics, and prohibiting the transport of food to affected areas.

In Ukraine, Holodomor Memorial Day is commemorated every fourth Saturday of November. However, remembrance of the Holodomor is not commonplace outside of Ukraine. Therefore, many Ukrainians used social networks as a way to raise awareness especially because they see the ongoing Russian aggression against their country as a continuation of the same imperial repression.

Journalist Margo Gontar, for example, explained how her great-grandfather used his boots to steal grain from a warehouse to feed the family:

My great-grandfather Mykola was tall and handsome man. When Soviets started Holodomor – they were taking food from Ukrainians, were starving us – Mykola got a job at grain warehouse. Every time he went to work, he put on boots with wide lapels and walked around the warehouse.

— Margo Gontar (@MargoGontar) November 26, 2022

Other accounts listed short, heartbreaking excerpts from family oral histories.

#Holodomor youngest brother of my grandmother died without food. His dad, my grandgrandfather, went to Moscow from Ukraine for get some food for his wife and 5 children. When his came back, his son, Vasily, was already died. He was smallest, weakest.Never forgive you, russia

— levkin (@levkin35239116) November 25, 2022

On the other hand, historian Taras Bilous offered an “unconventional” story about how the father of his Russian grand-grandmother smuggled a bag of grain from the Lipetsk region in Russia to the Donbas in Ukraine.

Today is Holodomor Memorial Day.

Probably, most Ukrainians (with the exception of Western Ukraine, which was not part of the USSR then) have a family story about the Holodomor. Me too, but a little non-conventional. pic.twitter.com/RQYBVed5wC

— Taras Bilous (@ahatanhel) November 26, 2022

Reading these testimonies, I began to wonder what my own ancestors who lived in the 1930s knew or could have known about these events. I couldn't get any first-hand accounts from my own grandparents since they are all deceased, so I decided to look for archived copies of newspapers from that time period available in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, using the online archive of the National Library of Serbia.

I doubt any of my grandparents read them at the time because they were just kids in 1932, but I think they reflect the public awareness within the Yugoslav media sphere at the start of the famine.

The first such article, from the front page of the newspaper Vreme from Belgrade published on November 30, 1932, is short enough to be translated in its entirety.

Ужасна глад у Совјетској Русији

Глад је већа од оне 1921  године

Варшава, 29 новембра. — Пољски листови објављују онеспокојавајуће вести о глади у Русији. Садашња глад, у погледу ужаса, надмаша глад иѕ 1921 године. Цене намирница  скачу из дана у дан, и достижу већ фантастичне бројеве. Пола килограма масла продаје  се данас ѕа 20 рубаља (400 динара), кило сапуна за  20 рубаља, четврт литра млека за  четири рубље…

Чак и страни инжињери пате од ове несташице, јер се у провинцији ништа не може купити, чак ни са страним валутама. Ова ситуација изазвана је нарочито отпором сељака против политике совјетске владе.

По пољским листовима странци говоре нарочито о запуштеном стању земљорадничке културе. Сама „Правда“ бележи, да је коров по њивама у Кавказу висок преко једног метра. (Време)

Horrible Hunger in Soviet Russia

The famine is worse than the one in 1921

Warsaw, November 29. — Polish newspapers publish disturbing news about hunger in Russia. The current famine, in regard to the horror, surpasses the famine of 1921. Grocery prices increase day by day reaching fantastic amounts. Half a kilogram of oil is sold today for 20 rubles (400 dinars), kilo of soap for 20 rubles, quarter liter of milk for four rubles…

Even foreign engineers suffer from these shortages, because nothing can be bought in the provinces, even using foreign currencies. This situation was caused by peasant resistance to the policies of Soviet government.

Polish newspapers quote foreigners’ accounts on the neglected state of the agriculture. Even [Soviet regime newspaper] “Pravda” notes that weeds in the fields in Caucasus has grown over one meter tall. (Vreme)

It should be noted that awareness of the context of Soviet Russia, including the famine of 1921–1922 resulting from the Russian Civil War, was quite high in Yugoslavia, which at the time sheltered over 40,000 refugees or White Russian émigrés who escaped communist rule during the early 1920s. 

The prices listed in the article are enormous, even if one considers that the official Soviet currency exchange course always overvalued the ruble. The New York Times from December 31, 1931 notes that “the ruble is nominally worth 50 cents.” Using an inflation calculator, we get the nominal value of one 1932 ruble as around USD 11 in today's money. Therefore, the prices listed in the article, adjusted for inflation, would be as follows: 1 kilogram of oil about USD 440, 1 kilogram of soap, USD 220, 1 liter of milk, USD 176.

The “foreign engineers” mentioned in the article were a major factor in the USSR at the time. The industrialization that was a priority of Stalin's regime relied on imported know-how and technology from the West, including the prolonged stay of US experts engaged in building Soviet factories.

A major reason for the Holodomor was the USSR's need to increase grain exports in order to acquire hard currency to pay foreign companies for such imports, especially those related to building military-industrial plants.

In its issue of January 1, 1933, in an article with the sensationalist headline “Civil War in Russia,” which referenced a German newspaper, Vreme reported that the peasant unrest had grown beyond the levels of “dissatisfaction,” “sedition” or “uprising.”

Реон је цео југ и југоисток совјетске Уније. Званични назив овога што се тамо одиграва јестее борба против кулака. Међутим за све је јасно да су то не кулаци већ баш колхозници, тј. они сељаци који су вођени самом совјетском влашћу. И сада се совјетска власт ухватила у коштац са њима борећи се за свој даљи опстанак и живот!
Узроци су сасвим јасни: потпуна пропаст економске политике. Виљем Штајн, добро обавештени московски дописник „Фосише цајтунг“ пише: „Пропаст социјалистичке земљорадње више се не може оспоравати“. Исто тако добро обавештени „Социјалистички весник“ доноси чланак под насловом „Ишчезла је друга Пјатилетка“ и ту позивајући се на совјетску штампу прича о томе како се после „свечаних фанфара за време припрема друге пјетилетке” та реч потпуно изгубила из стубаца совјетских новина.
Пропаст на пољопривредном фронту и пропаст на индустријском фронту!
Зар то нису озбиљни узроци грађанског рата?

The affected area (district) is the whole South and South East of the Soviet Union. Official designation of what is going on there is a fight against “kulaks” [rich counter-revolutionary peasants].
However it’s clear to everybody that these are no kulaks, but kolkhozniks, i.e. those peasants that had been led by the Soviet authorities themselves. And now the Soviet government is fighting with them, struggling for its further survival and life!
The reasons are quite clear: complete disaster of the economic policies. Wilhelm Stein, well informed Moscow correspondent of the Vossische Zeitung wrote that the “demise of socialist agriculture can't be denied no longer.” The similarly well informed Socialist Newspaper has an article titled “Disappearance of the  second Five Year Plan,” noting that after “much fanfare during the preparations of the second Five Year Plan”  this term had no longer been mentioned in the Soviet press.
Disaster at the front of agriculture and the front of industry!
Are not these reasons enough for a start of Civil War?

The article then provides details about the punitive expedition taken by the Soviet regime, led by seasoned Bolshevik and long-term Central Committee member, Anastas Mikoyan (1895–1978).

Сада су један део Украјине на левој обали Дњепра, затим Донски округ и Кубањ где је устало неколико хиљада козака, Вороњешка и Курска губернија, доњи ток Волге, северни Кавказ и Закавказје стављени под власт трупа ГПУ које се боре против оних који “искривљују партијску линију”. Целокупна ова војска била је под командом Микојана, чији се штаб, као и у добро старо време, налазио у нарочитој железничкој композицији. На расположењу “главнокомандујућег” било је око 20.000 комуниста, чланова партије, окривљених због проневера, крађа и сличних дела, хтела им се пружити могућност да својом ревношћу и добром службом оперу своје раније грехе, и да се истакну у борби за “социјалистичку отаџбину”.
Са овом војском тренираних чекиста и злочинаца – комуниста, Микојан је почео свој посао “умиривања” на простору већем но што је цела Средња Европа.

Now a part of  Ukraine on the left bank of Dnipro, then the area of Don and the region of Kuban, where several thousand Cossacks have risen, as well as the governorates of Voronezh and Kursk, the lower Volga River basin, Northern Caucasus and Transcaucasia are placed under rule of  GPU [the USSR  state security service and secret police from 1923 to 1934] troops, who fight “those who skew the Party line.” This whole army was under command of Mikoyan, whose headquarters, like in the good old times, was stationed in a special train. The “commander in chief” had at his disposal around 20,000 communists, party members accused of embezzlement, theft and similar crimes, who were given an opportunity to clean up their earlier sins, and show themselves in the  fight for the “socialist fatherland.”  With this army [composed] of trained members of Soviet secret police Cheka and communist criminals, Mikoyan started his job of “pacifying” this  area which is larger than the whole Central Europe.

The reprisals were so harsh that they incited a collective protest by all Communist Party and administrative institutions of the Stavropol Governorate. After GPU troops executed 200 kolkhoznik members of Komsomol, the population of Nogai Steppe (in the North Caucasus, today southern Russia) attempted to acquire any weapons to meet the advance of Mikoyan's punitive expedition, staging ambushes. The resistance included the assassination of the GPU head in Tiflis i.e. Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.

Front page of Belgrade daily Vreme from January 1, 1933, with an article ‘Civil War Russia.’ Image based on digitized newspaper from the Serbian National Library. Public domain.

According to the Vreme article, Moscow tried to defuse the tensions by sending Andrei Bubnov (1883–1937) to take charge. He executed or arrested some of the most notorious Mikoyan underlings, while Pravda blamed the local Communist Party officials for the “failure of the general policy line, the failure of the Five Year Plan and the collectivisation.”

At the end, article author A.R.K. Parfenov notes that “purges” are expected, as workers and regular Communist Party members with clenched teeth dream of the need for the “strong arm” that will change the direction. He noted that the rhetoric is similar to the one before the start of the October Revolution and that communist leadership is dismayed in expectation of major changes.

The two articles in this post offer but a glimpse of the situation, and much further research would be needed to get the full picture of how much the world outside of the Soviet Union knew about the horrible events of the 1930s. The Holodomor resulted in an estimated seven to 10 million victims of starvation at first, but also subsequently of related consequences. At first glance, it seems that the ethnic cleansing and genocide aspects were not discussed in the international press.

The Stalinist purges that the second article warned about, and the Gulag system that was operational till the 1950s, directly killed over one to two more million humans (including Commander Bubnov in 1937).

Understanding and remembering these events is an essential first step to preventing a reprise of similar horrors, especially at a time when a Moscow regime is stealing Ukrainian grain, again.

A community on Poland's Baltic coast looks for answers in the sand

Originally published on Global Voices

Children are interested in nature and cause-and-effect relationships. They, therefore, represent enormous potential. Photo by Michał Karmelita, used with permission.

When I was a child, I always wondered why seabirds ate plastic garbage. Many of us have seen those pictures of albatrosses dying from eating loads of plastic. But birds have perfect eyesight! So why do they eat something that looks nothing like their natural meal? This is the story of what I discovered as I was determined to find an answer.

When as a little girl I used to conduct tests giving different kinds of food to ducks or swans. For example, oatmeal: they ate that right away. If I threw a leaf in the water, they would immediately know that it was not good and would not eat it. It took them a fraction of a second to recognize whether I was throwing some oatmeal or a carrot in pieces into the water. So why is this perfect vision failing the birds when they are to distinguish fish or krill (their natural food) from a piece of plastic?

The answer to this question came gradually. First, scientists understood that sea birds use not just sight, but smell as well. Using their sense of smell, these animals navigate, search for food, and even recognize parts of the world. Then, a few years ago scholars discovered that sea birds can eat plastic, not necessarily because it looks like their food, but because it actually smells like it. It turned out that plastic garbage that floats on the surface of the oceans begins to release a very characteristic substance after some time. It is called dimethyl sulfide – DMS for short.

The wrack line is a common place for plastic in coastal areas. Photo by Michał Karmelita, used with permission.

A whole ecosystem of microorganisms, small plants and animals quickly begins to form on the plastic waste drifting in the ocean. It is some of them that produce DMS. You probably know this smell: it emits in our kitchen when we cook, for example, cabbage or seafood. Unfortunately, DMS is a substance that is found in large amounts in the feeding grounds of seabirds. For example, where there is a lot of krill swimming. Therefore, seabirds associate this sulfur smell with dinner.  As they fly long miles guided by their noses and then fly hungry to a place where it smells like dimethyl sulfide, they are easily fooled. They conclude that if something smells like food, it probably is food. They also cannot afford to starve; sometimes they look for feeding grounds for a long time, so when they arrive, they are really very hungry.

Community science

So we know that plastic is harmful to animals. And that we should find some solutions: not only to limit its production and use but also to remove these synthetic fragments that are already circulating in the environment. However, to come up with solutions, we first need to find out exactly how much plastic can be found in seas and on coastlines, and how this plastic migrates in nature.

Beach in Gdynia on Poland's Baltic coast. Photo by: Michał Karmelita, used with permission.

Unfortunately, looking for small plastic pieces (mesoplastic) requires a lot of precision and data volume. In order to count the mesoplastic on shores, it is necessary to carefully sift the sand, and not just look at its surface. Scientists themselves are unable to do this because they have too few hands to work. Therefore, the importance of “citizen science,” also known as community science.

Citizen science is an initiative where ordinary non-scientists, as well as the local community, can help professional researchers. Their tasks are very different: sometimes they help analyze data (like NASA Feature Hunter), sometimes they count animals in reserves (like Iguanas from Above) and sometimes they collect samples. The latter example worked very well for analyzing mesoplastic. I have always believed that the best results are achieved when you think globally and act locally because then you benefit not only the planet but also your local community. The same assumption was made when I started coordinating the mesoplastic citizen science project at the science center where I work.

Citizen scientists help in the search for mesoplastics. Photo by: Michał Karmelita, used with permission.

The methodology of the project was planned by the Institute of Oceanology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, based in Sopot in northern Poland. The project is coordinated by the partner Experiment Science Centre in Gdynia (Gdynia, Sopot and Gdańsk together form the Tricity). The tasks of the Polish Academy of Sciences in the project consist mainly in developing the methodology, analysis and interpretation of data. The Gdynia science centre, on the other hand, primarily took on: raising awareness of the local community, organizing volunteers, leading the community through the project, organizing joint trips to the beach, conducting mesoplastic field lessons with schools, and informing about the project in seniors clubs, etc. Both organizations carry out their tasks pro bono, and the data obtained during the research is of the Open Science type: everyone has access to it and can use it in any way.

Huge response

The project of searching for mesoplastic on the Polish coast became very popular with the local community. The first cycle of the project ran from September 2021 until this July, and therefore lasted an entire school year, with over 500 inhabitants of the Tricity and its vicinity applying to participate. The youngest participant was two years old, the oldest over 60. Together, they organized over 300 field trips and sifted a total of over 500 liters of sand in search of miniature plastic particles. They all volunteered to search for the mesoplastic and to get as much information as possible about its distribution.

What are the results of this research conducted by community scientists so far? I think, that the most important value is the change of social attitudes of people who took part in the project, including 15-year-old Ola:

 I think that for me a turning point was finding artificial, acrylic… nail in the sand. A plastic nail, can you imagine that ?!–  It's hard to find a more useless invention, something we don't really need, something we use because we find our own nails… too natural or something. And then we go to the beach, such a plastic, artificial nail will fall into the sand, and then some seagull or tern will mistake it for food and die because of it. It made me think a lot.

The volunteers did not come only from Poland, however. As the Experiment Science Centre cooperates with the European Solidarity Centre (an international program of the European Commission, in which young people can take part in volunteering projects), some of the citizen scientists on the project came from other countries: Spain, France or Turkey. Eva, a volunteer from Spain talked about her experience:

As a citizen science project it doesn’t require very complicated materials or methods, you can find everything you need to use at home and it’s accessible to anyone, even if you don’t like science! You can participate with your family, your friends or even alone. It just takes around an hour, in which you can also see the beach from another point of view than the usual one: observing the sand composition, the biodiversity present or just paying attention to the sound of the sea. For me it was a way to be more aware of the amount of mesoplastic we could find in the beach and to better understand the problems they can cause, making me to think twice when I buy or I’m going to throw away any plastic bag or packing.

Emilie from France added:

I would say that collecting mesoplastics is not only useful but also fun to do. It's like going on a treasure hunt, while helping science!

But the change in social attitudes is not the only result of the project. The analyzes show that among the mesoplastic found by volunteers of the Experiment Science Centre in Gdynia, there are no fragments of disposable straws, cutlery or cups. What does this show? The fact that the ban on placing single-use plastic products on the market, introduced by the European Commission in 2021, is bringing early results. In previous studies, this type of disposable accessories accounted for a large proportion of garbage. Currently, there are none at all.

So what's the next step? First of all — keep going. It is possible to join the project by contacting Experyment Gdynia.

Russia's attendance may derail Jokowi's summit goals

Originally published on Global Voices

Indonesian President Joko (Jokowi) Widodo (Left) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (Right) shaking hands in 2016. Courtesy of Wikimedia commons used via (CC BY 4.0)

The 2022 G20 conference, an intergovernmental meeting of the world’s largest economies, is scheduled to be held in Bali, Indonesia on November 15 and 16. This year’s G20 is being chaired by Indonesian President Joko Widodo (Jokowi), who is facing pressure from allies to ban Russian representatives due to Russia’s war against Ukraine. Some nations are threatening to boycott meetings where a Russian representative is present.

Though Ukraine is not part of the G20, after initial proposals by the US and Canada, there has been a cacophony of calls in recent weeks for Jokowi to invite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the summit — calls that are becoming harder and harder to ignore.

Russian Ambassador to Indonesia Lyudmila Vorobieva said, “There is no need to draw attention from economic issues to a political crisis which is not related to the agenda of the G20 forum,” while the Ukrainian Embassy in Jakarta said Ukraine “will accept such an invitation” from Indonesian officials.

On April 14, the Kremlin announced that Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov will be attending the conference virtually.

As more details surface about Russia’s alleged war crimes against Ukrainian civilians, the US and countless other world leaders are getting more aggressive in their rhetoric around the war, with US President Joe Biden even referring to Putin as a “war criminal” and calling Russia’s human rights abuses in Ukraine “genocide” — an inflammatory step in international diplomacy.

Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said allowing Putin to attend the G20 would be a “step too far,” and representatives from Canada and Europe have also called to ban Russia from this year’s event.

And caught in the middle is Indonesia.

Pressures from all sides

The G20 will be the first major international conference since Russia invaded Ukraine and is an opportunity for the international community to take a stance on the war.

Thus far, Indonesia has said it will remain “impartial” around the decision to allow Putin or other Russian representatives to attend. Indonesia official Triansyah Djani explained that the archipelago will follow the rules and guidelines established in the G20, which in this case, means inviting Russia. 

Indonesia dalam mengetuai berbagai konferensi atau forum atau organisasi baik itu dalam konteks badan-badan PBB pada saat kami memimpin dewan keamanan di PBB atau ASEAN atau organisasi lainnya selalu berpegang pada aturan, prosedur yang berlaku, demikian juga di G20.

Indonesia in chairing various conferences or forums or organizations, whether in the context of UN agencies, when we lead the security council at the UN or ASEAN or other organizations, always adheres to the rules, procedures that apply, including at the G20.

Jokowi is receiving pressure from all over the world for his lukewarm stance. One Twitter netizen wrote:

@g20org @G20Australia 

Russia's finance minister plans to attend G20 meeting next week, Indonesia.

The Russian finance minister must be shunned and not allowed to participate in any portion of the meeting.

Tell him he is not wanted, go home.

Another citizen questioned why Indonesia is still inviting Russia, sharing a video of civilian refugees in Ukraine after an apparent bombing from Russia (warning: video contains graphic images).

Kramatorsk: Rusia is a global pariah Why Indonesia is still inviting Russia to the upcoming G20 summit in Bali despite the invasion of Ukraine?

Care to comment?
Mahasewa Paytren Introvert BEM Nusantara Adian Jokowi Ucup BEM SI #Kramatorsk #Russia #Rusia #Ukraine #Ukraina https://t.co/ramfaxF17S

— Herry (@HerryNapit) April 9, 2022

In a press conference, one Indonesian official Effendi Simbolon called Jokowi’s position naive and urged him to take decisive action as the current Chairman of the G20, instead of simply acting as an “event organizer.”

In a press conference at the White House, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said, “We believe that it cannot be business as usual for Russia in international institutions and in the international community.” US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen went on to say that the US will boycott some G20 meetings where a Russian representative is in attendance. “I've made clear to my colleagues in Indonesia that we will not be participating in a number of meetings if the Russians are there.”

This bold stance by US and Western politicians is rankling some citizens, who see it as another example of Western overreach in global south countries. Some are turning online to express their irritation, with one user tweeting:

Dear Mr. @jokowi

Indonesia should not be dictated by any other countries especially America.

If the President removing Russia from G20, u will show real face of Indonesia that we are not independent.

Even so, some G20 members are debating whether to remove Russia from the group altogether. In a March press conference, Biden said he supported removing Russia from the grouping. However, it is unclear whether the current procedures even allow for the ejection of a G20 member, as each member state would need to reach a consensus on the decision. Thus, Russia is unlikely to be officially removed.

China has already said that it supports Russia’s continued involvement in the G20 as it views it as an “important member” and reportedly asked Jokowi not to allow discussions of the war onto the G20 agenda, according to reports by the South China Morning Post. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin also emphasized, “No member has the right to remove another country as a member.”

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has also expressed support for Putin’s attendance at the conference. 

On Tuesday, March 23,  Poland’s development minister Piotr Nowak asked the US to consider removing Russia from the G20 and allowing Warsaw to join instead. Saying that there should be “no place for Russia in the G20” after it “violated the rules of international cooperation by attacking Ukraine. … Poland deserves a place in the G20 as the second fastest developing country in the world in the last 30 years.” 

Jokowi’s conundrum

Indonesia's G20 poster, with the theme “Recover together, recover stronger.” Photo from Wikicommons, used via (CC BY 4.0)

Indonesian officials reportedly hoped to use this year’s conference to gain the nation more leverage and recognition on the international stage.

Unfortunately, Russia’s presence and the boycotts that follow may put Indonesia in a political bind and foil Jokowi’s agenda. Jokowi — known for his strong economic focus and conservative foreign policy stances — planned to use the summit to address COVID-19 economic recovery and development efforts. The theme of this year’s conference will be “Recover Together, Recover Stronger.” 

There is a risk — particularly if Putin or Zelenskyy attend the event — that Russia’s war on Ukraine may hijack the summit and draw attention away from other major action items. 

Indonesia generally skews toward a “free and active” foreign policy, avoiding involvement in conflicts with major powers. It has taken a fairly neutral stance on Russia’s war on Ukraine. While it has made general statements about ending the war and signed the UN resolution calling for peace, Jokowi has refused to implement sanctions on Russia, will not refer to the war as a “war,” and thus far has not named Russia directly in any statement about the invasion. It also abstained from voting on a UN resolution to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council. 

To complicate matters, some polls show that a majority of Indonesians support Russia in this war.

“Our research shows 95% of TikTok users and 73% of Instagram users in Indonesia supports Russia after Zelenskyy said Ukraine needs assistance from NATO and the West,” Dudy Rudianto, founder of Jakarta-based data analysis firm Evello, told VOA’s Indonesian Service.

This could be fueled by anti-Western attitudes as Zelenskyy has repeatedly appealed to NATO and Western governments in his attempt to stave off Putin. There has also been a barrage of pro-Russia propaganda pushed in Indonesian cyberspace. As the largest Muslim majority nation in the world, some Indonesian citizens harbor a deep distrust of the US after the so-called “War on terror” in the early 2000s and the bout of Islamophobic policies that followed.

Yohanes Sulaiman, a lecturer in international relations at Universitas Jenderal Achmad Yani in Bandung told Al Jazeera:

[Pro-Russia Indonesians] do not like and trust the United States. People saw the US attacking Afghanistan and Iraq in the past for reasons that were considered fabricated like the 9/11 conspiracy and the lack of Weapons of Mass Destruction. This has had an impact on them questioning the credibility of news sources, in the sense of the US mass media. Many state that they can’t just accept news from the US without reading the other side — but the root of this is their distrust of the US in general.

Like many nations in South and Southeast Asia, Indonesia also has positive historic ties to Russia.

These factors only make Jokowi's role more difficult as he has to balance alienating many other G20 members by allowing Russia to participate — potentially tanking his summit goals in the process — or appearing overly accommodating to colonialist Western governments, which may harm his position with his own constituents.

For more information about this topic, see our special coverage Russia invades Ukraine.

The free flow of information is a crucial tool to counter disinformation.

Originally published on Global Voices

Keyboard warfare. Photo by Global Voices, CC BY 3.0.

This article explores the link between disinformation and cybersecurity that could lead to different effects on society, in relation to the current events in Russia and Ukraine

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, nations across Europe rose to respond to the crisis, raising questions, not only about its consequences for the affected countries and beyond but also about various implications around disinformation and digital rights.

As technology has progressed rapidly over the years, resulting in a digital revolution, a number of security experts concluded that certain advancements could lead to “hybrid wars” in which cyberweapons and disinformation may become a type of weapon in psychological warfare around the globe. Similarly, the current pandemic has been accompanied by a so-called “infodemic” as well. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the practices of information that influence our everyday lives, as an essential part of maintaining the world’s security and stability.

What is disinformation?

Disinformation, also known as black propaganda, is the dissemination of misleading information that can undermine democratic trust, while posing a notable threat to many aspects, including security, without the target audience being aware of its influence. A strategic approach that critically understands the political context and the various ulterior motives is required to tackle disinformation. Some of the risks commonly associated with disinformation are massive false dilemmas, populist narratives, or public apathy.

It has been used throughout history, from Roman–Persian Wars (54 BCE — 628 CE), throughout WWII Nazi propaganda (when the term “big lie” was coined, describing a lie so colossal that no one would question it), to  recent years in which the phenomenon became widespread with the rise of social media platforms and the controversial 2018 Cambridge Analytica case.

According to the updated 2021 EU Policy Department for External Relations Study on Disinformation and Propaganda, the best weapon against it is “critical media literacy.” This makes it a cybersecurity issue since social media platforms often serve as its primary amplifiers.

The disinformation front

At present, the disinformation war continues in real time. According to TIME, the Kremlin ran a multi-method disinformation campaign while invading Ukraine to manipulate the public narrative. Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba stated:

According to intelligence, Russia plans a massive false flag operation to ‘dehumanize’ Ukrainians and accuse Ukraine of alleged inhuman actions. Don’t trust fakes. Ukraine defends its land in a just and defensive war. Unlike Russia, we don’t target kindergartens and civilians.

— Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) February 25, 2022

Cindy Otis, a disinformation researcher and former CIA analyst interviewed by TIME, identifies one of the main tactics as disinformation in the battlefield that intimidates and demoralizes the Ukrainian military and civilian population. Russian propaganda has been especially widespread through Telegram, a popular messaging app that uses end-to-end encryption.

On February 26, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and YouTube faced pressure over the war, which highlighted big tech’s difficulties to moderate content at scale. Facebook, Google, and Twitter removed user profiles that violated the guidelines by spreading disinformation, in addition to imposing other limitations, such as demonetization and prohibiting them from running ads.

As of March 4, Russian regulators banned Facebook and Twitter in response to their limitations on Russian state-owned media outlets, such as RT, stating that such restrictions violated the key principles of freedom of information. The Russian parliament also passed a law punishing the intentional spreading of “false information” about the military with fines and a jail term up to 15 years of prison. Subsequently, several Western media outlets suspended reporting in Russia.

Meanwhile, Russia’s internet regulator Roskomnadzor's ban of Facebook and Instagram on March 14 resulted in a 2,000% rise in demand for VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) in Russia.

Meanwhile, Western countries continuously receive an immediate stream of information from a number of different sources, which may often create an information overload — inevitably, some of it is disinformation shared from one news outlet to another, either as deliberate media manipulation, or inadvertently.

ABC has one such example: First Draft’s Australian bureau editor Esther Chan pointed out a 2020 video supposedly showing warplanes over Ukraine that was shared an hour after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s declaration of war, but was not. Another viral post seemingly showing footage from battle turned out to be a clip from a video game. Croatian media outlet Index.hr had also recently issued an article debunking all false information they had mistakenly published about the war, so far.

The cyber front

Experts claim that cyberattacks are a central part of modern warfare and quickly spread across the global economy through supply chains. Just before the military invasion, a group of Russian hackers carried out a series of cyberattacks targeting Ukrainian government, banking, defense, and aviation websites, which affected the systems in Latvia and Lithuania that had particular connections with the Ukrainian government.

At the same time, hackers led by the Anonymous group declared cyberwar on Russia. Afterward, RT.com was declared to be under a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, in which the target is flooded with traffic, thus disabling the normal workflow. The Kremlin and the State Duma websites were periodically disabled allegedly due to DDoS attacks as well.

Amid the Russia–Ukraine crisis, the ECB requested European banks across the eurozone to increase their cyber defenses, declaring that the issue should be a top priority in the midst of intensified geopolitical tensions, according to Reuters. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine could spread to other countries, following warnings issued by Western security officials, as did EUObserver. 

Map of Ukraine with plastic soldiers. Photo by Global Voices, CC BY 3.0.

In an effort to assist countries under cyberattack, the EU activated a Cyber Rapid Response Team consisting of 8–12 national cybersecurity officials of 6 European countries  —  Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, and Romania — which was deployed across Europe.

On February 26, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for digital transformation, announced on Twitter the creation of an IT army for defense and counterattacks, calling “digital talents” to join the resistance effort.

While long-term consequences are still difficult to assess, experts say they are more concerned with institutional than personal attacks, DW reports.

Disinformation and freedom of expression

There is an ongoing dilemma around disinformation, censorship, and freedom of expression, particularly as governments introduce regulation of social media in the interest of addressing false information. Platform companies have their own moderation policies, which have sometimes drawn criticism of restricting legitimate speech. While governments can take a direct role in promoting transparent content moderation online, there’s also a risk that some governments may label critical content as disinformation, thus limiting free speech.

In the report “Disinformation and Freedom of Opinion and Expression,” Irene Khan, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, examined these threats in the context of disinformation:

“…the free flow of information is a critical element of freedom of expression and places a positive obligation on States to proactively put information of public interest in the public domain, and promote plural and diverse sources of information, including media freedom. It can be a valuable tool for countering disinformation.”

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (ECHR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) enshrine the right to freedom of expression. Freedom of expression may be restricted in accordance with Article 10 of the ECHR and Article 19 of the ICCPR which require all restrictions to be provided for by law and to be necessary for the legitimate aim of respecting the rights and reputations of others and to protect national security, public order, or public health or morals.

At the EU level, given that disinformation and misinformation represent an evolving threat, there are many initiatives against them highlighting, among other things, the need for cooperation, fact-checking, and building societal resilience and credible sources of information, especially in cyberspace.

Evidently, the rise of new technologies is heavily impacting aspects of modern-day life — the extent of this crisis still remains an open question. In the midst of the rapid growth of online information and disinformation, it’s important to foster a quality societal dialogue that aims to connect individuals, rather than isolate them from each other.

For more information about this topic, see our special coverage Russia invades Ukraine.