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In difficult circumstances, the media should have been guided by the medical principle of ‘do no harm’, carefully checking every headline and every comment. But now the trend is different.
Dmytro Lykhoviy, journalist, officer of the Main Communications Directorate of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, for DM
At the end of the third year of the great war, the predictions of pessimists are coming true: the closer we get to the likely end of active hostilities, the harder it will get for the country. Part of this deterioration is the crisis situation in the information field. I don't know about you, but it seems to me that this field is increasingly ‘going to pieces’. I say this as a person who deals with daily monitoring of the information space and keeps a monthly ‘register of quarrels’.
Do you remember how in 2022 we were all developing work rules on the fly? What to write about and what not to write about, what not to photograph or post, who to trust and who to criticise and obstruct. The current problems in the media field have been gradually resolved, mainly by their own efforts, through self-regulation. With a few exceptions, martial law was free of censorship.
This is probably great. After all, Ukraine is not Russia. It is home to freedom-loving people who react very painfully to restrictions on their freedoms (as proven by the two Maidans).
However, this is a double-edged sword. On social media and in the media, the carriers of healthy criticism are increasingly being joined by politically biased and bought voices. Convinced of their own rightness, ‘useful idiots’ are hard to distinguish from paid Russian ‘bots’. Together, they create an increasingly depressing information picture that affects public sentiment.
The pendulum is swinging, and those who would have been roundly shunned three years ago are now almost mainstream public opinion.
The armed forces are still the bearers of the greatest trust of society. But we somehow missed the moments when, for the average citizen, dodging was no longer a shame but was perceived as a ‘basic’ choice, a ‘factory setting’ of a person liable for military service. When the Armed Forces began to be divided into the front, the rear and the ‘cannibals from the Territorial Centres of Recruitment and Social Support’ - although in each case, we are talking about soldiers of the same army who rotate, are seconded, and the TCR is largely made up of wounded frontline soldiers, fulfilling plans to replenish their former units. Now, it seems, we have reached the point where soldiers are opposed to officers. The next step is to ‘promote’ the thesis that ‘we did not send you there’.
Recently, the Texty website has published a study on how Russia creates and disseminates a whole set of manipulative theses that target different groups of the Ukrainian population, fuelling chaos, prejudice and divisions along all possible lines. Servicemen are being pumped with information about the impossibility of demobilisation, transferring everyone to the infantry, butcher generals, ‘you have no one to fight for’, etc. Conscripts and their relatives are told emotional stories about the cruelty of the TCC. Military personnel in the TCR are told that the authorities will ‘betray’ them when they escape. Veterans are told that no one needs them. Volunteers are told that the government is stealing their help. Pensioners and IDPs — that the government has abandoned them to their fate. Farmers — that they are about to be expelled from their land. Workers — that they will be replaced by migrants from Asia. All together — that another ‘anti-Ukrainian plan’ to squander our rare earth metals is ready.
All this is happening against a backdrop of growing public fatigue and apathy. Of course, not everything is going smoothly in the army and in public administration. The negative public perception of the TCR is primarily due to real problems in the TCR, which have only become more complicated over the years. However, things would not have been so bad if Russian propagandists had not parasitised on problematic issues and if the FSB networks had not attracted Ukrainian mouthpieces to their side.
And this is where we come to emphasise the role of our media in these processes. Especially the classical influential media with a large audience, which are the basis of the country's information field and are quite capable of determining the trend of public opinion even with one false term or comment, not to mention presenting a larger array of information.
Bam — and now the anti-mobilisation lobby has screens to support its manipulative narratives. And Russian PSYOP makers do not have to invent anything about the failures of the Ukrainian Armed Forces — they just need to disperse the content of Ukrainian media.
In such difficult circumstances, the media should have been guided by the medical principle of ‘do no harm’, carefully checking every headline and every comment. Instead, even the media on IMI's ‘quality list’ often behave with the grace of an elephant in a china shop.
Take the events of late January and early February. A new ‘month of TRC’ in the information space, which is obviously not without the ‘assistance’ of the Russian ‘office’. After all, how else can we perceive several consecutive explosions of explosive devices in territorial recruitment centres in different regions of Ukraine, which are carried out ‘blindly’ by hired ‘shahids’? They coincide with the promotion of several ‘muddy’ stories related to mobilisation on social media and in the media, aimed at further discrediting the TRC.
For example, all Ukrainska Pravda needs to do is use the phrase ‘TRC employee’ in its headline, and that's it — bots and other useful idiots have an argument to support the Russian message that is being multiplied on social media: ‘TRC employees are not military personnel, but rear rats/people catchers,’ ‘TRC employees are not allowed to carry weapons,’ and so on.
Or the more recent situation with the injury of Stepan Bilchenko, a mobilised laboratory technician from Lviv University. This is a classic example of the tail wagging the dog and some of the leading media along with it. Many of them based their news on manipulative posts by the victim's friend, Vladislav Kononov, and the LGBT rights organisation Gender Stream, which were spread on Facebook. Both pages have now corrected their initial posts, which referred to Bilchenko's ‘abduction’ by the TRC, the allegedly illegal circumstances of his mobilisation, his erroneously stated position at the university, and so on. But it was the first emotionally charged information about Bilchenko that went viral on the Internet — and influenced public opinion. As it soon became clear from the reports of the police and army structures, he was not beaten by the furious TRC members. He had already been mobilised and jumped out of the car on the way to the training centre of the Air Assault Troops.
There is an accusation that communication between the state and the army is too late. But, dear friends, keep in mind that this is not a simple case. It has been circulating on the Internet for a day and has been subject to a lot of speculation and interpretation. It will take effort and time to find out the real circumstances of the events in Lviv and near Zhytomyr. The responsibility of communicators is high. While many media outlets, in the pursuit of efficiency and views, have adopted a simplistic approach. They crowed, and then whatever happens, happens. And so, day by day, such bricks are used to build walls that separate society from the TRC, from the army, from the state with all its ‘bouquet’ of problems during martial law.
A separate set of issues facing the media is the choice of newsmakers and commentators. Zhdanov, Svitan, Arestovich and their ilk have already become memes, but for some media outlets, they still remain the shapers of clickbait headlines. And it's one thing when they try to explain the peculiarities of the hostilities without having access to detailed operational information. It's another thing when commentators openly manipulate the audience through self-confident predictions and promises without taking any responsibility for it.
Very often, the blame lies not so much with the hype lovers themselves as with TV presenters and news editors who try to get simple answers to complex questions from speakers and often forget to quote the comment in its entirety with reservations (‘not necessarily so, but, if’). Of course, the consumer of information seeks shortened forms of its presentation — that's why Telegrams and TikToks are so popular. But, again, we are talking about the increased responsibility of the ‘fourth estate’, which the media share with those they [simplistically] quote. So, for example, the ‘promise of coffee in Crimea’ can turn from a funny meme into a big disappointment and change the mood in society almost 180 degrees.
Moreover, there are media outlets that are becoming the mouthpieces of openly destructive commentators who sometimes ‘fight’ against their own army and state. Some ‘opinion leaders’, political technologists for hire, are already obviously working in the format of an election campaign, promoting the agenda of specific political forces or towers. But this does not prevent them from being quoted in the news. And the most annoying are the cases when the media legalise an outright Moscow agency. It doesn't even make much of a secret of the fact that it is sitting abroad, delivering shells to Skabeeva, participating in roundtables funded by Russian oligarchs. These MPs and ‘negative bloggers’ focus their efforts again on manipulations and fakes about the TRC and the situation on the frontline. And this is at a time when the Russians have already launched a real terrorist war against the TRC in the rear, with bombs and tripwires.
I would also like to highlight another trend. It is when reputable journalists, analysts and politicians, who do a lot of good for the Armed Forces and are largely the drivers of positive change, hype and shift the focus. After all, it is well known from theory that even if you mix most of the true information with less false information, you will get the effects of the ‘rotten herring’ or the infamous ‘40 to 60’ methods.
A recent example is the influential journalist and blogger Yuriy Butusov, who has a stream with his thoughts on Oleksandr Syrskyi's year as Commander-in-Chief.
There is no doubt that Yuriy is in close contact with combat brigades, combatants, company commanders and has a lot of information from the front. As a journalist, he also has the right to make an informed judgement. At the same time, Yuriy agrees with the commander-in-chief in many areas and confirms many sections of General Syrsky's article ‘A Year at the Head of the Armed Forces’. However, it is difficult to understand the journalist when he starts torpedoing the statements of the General Staff on principle — for example, in terms of statistics on damaged and destroyed Russian equipment and personnel.
Butusov alludes to the General Staff's notes and denies the information that in 2024, more enemy manpower and weapons were destroyed than in previous years of the war. He says that we are indeed killing a lot of Russians, but the number of videos of the destruction does not allow us to confirm this statement.
He acknowledges that 2024 was a year of rapid development of strike UAVs, FPVs and drop bombs. At the same time, as part of the competition of unmanned units, there is a rigorous verification of damage at a level other than the Armed Forces. It is known that the results of the drones' work account for 2/3 of all targets hit in a year. At the same time, Butusov himself agrees that it is impossible to collect all the videos of the hits, and the figures from the Oryx OSINT project are also lower than the real ones. So, where is the room for notes? Where is the need for them? The General Staff did not change the calculation methodology and did not manipulate statistics.
In many points of the report, Yuriy does not actually deny what he wrote, but at the same time, expresses his own subjective opinions on side topics so that the viewer gets the impression that the journalist is exposing the army authorities. For example, he denies the statement of the commander-in-chief that the basic training of mobilised people in training centres has improved over the year. But it is true: it was bad, but now it has improved, and the basic training lasts a month and a half instead of 30 days. There are already examples of recruits undergoing pre-service training at the expense of combat brigades. An additional adaptation period has also appeared on the agenda. What's the point in denying the obvious if the combat brigades themselves acknowledge in their reports that the mobilised recruits are better trained than the six weeks?
Another important section. Yuriy says that the army command is ‘misleading’ both society and the government when it allegedly continues to advocate the need to create new brigades. But there are already decisions on this matter announced by both the President and the Commander-in-Chief: a moratorium on the creation of new mechanised brigades, the launch of a mechanism for the transition to a corps system (by the way, when a journalist discloses the numbers of brigades that will form the basis of new corps, this is classified information, and the enemy should not know it).
A lot has happened in a year, and the Commander-in-Chief writes: ‘The creation of new mechanised brigades helped to bring fresh units to the Kursk offensive. Thanks to this, we were able to withdraw three brigades of airborne assault troops from Donetsk region to restore their combat capability, manning and rearming them, which yielded results.’ This was indeed the case: before the Kursk operation, the airborne brigades were withdrawn from Donbas, restored and strengthened, and they proved themselves in the Kursk region. Again, where is room for complaint here, especially if Butusov acknowledges the success of the Kursk operation of the Armed Forces?
After all, it's not about names but about approaches and principles. If we are working for victory, we should not sow ‘betrayal’ where there is none.
Since the introduction of martial law, the media environment, along with society, has gone through several cycles. There was uncertainty, fear of the unknown, concentration of efforts, consolidation, and mobilisation. Then there was getting used to it and adaptation. Routine and loss of concentration. For some, it is a loss of guidance and financial base. Some have learnt to survive in such difficult conditions. Others refuse to comply with standards, either unwittingly or deliberately.
In my opinion, there is every reason for the Commission on Journalistic Ethics, which has recently withdrawn from the public debate, to finally show itself. And we all need to take a breath, exhale, and find common ground. And to think about the challenges of the new situation, when USAID grant funding seems to have been suspended for good, but there are options for hidden advertising and the purchase of media and media professionals with easy oligarchic and Russian money.
Meanwhile, we are approaching even more difficult challenges than we have faced so far.
This is not about traffic or elections. It is about understanding everyone's role and, I emphasise once again, responsibility.
We need to save the state. The Ukrainian state will exist as long as the Ukrainian army exists in it. Ukrainians have already learnt this lesson. More than a hundred years ago, it ended in disaster.
From the editors. We are ready to give the floor to the journalists and media mentioned by Dmytro Lykhovoy in his column, including Yuriy Butusov, so that he and other journalists can express their positions.
