Mediaboss Marketing

In September,1949, two Ukrainian agents working with the C.I.A. landed near Lviv, in what was then the Soviet Union. They were the vanguard of an operation that would acquire the code name Redsox. Its aim was to connect with anti-Soviet insurgents fighting by the tens of thousands in Ukraine, as well as in smaller numbers elsewhere on Russias rim. Soviet moles betrayed the program, however, and at least three-quarters of the Redsox agents disappeared. By the mid-nineteen-fifties, Moscow had quelled Ukraines rebellion while forcibly displacing or killing hundreds of thousands of people. The C.I.A.s glancing intervention was ill-fated and tragic, an internal history concluded.

Since Vladimir Putin ordered Russias unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, on February24th, the United States has acted as if to redeem itself; the Biden Administration has led its NATO allies to airlift planeloads of Javelin anti-tank weapons and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Ukrainian forces, while pledging billions of dollars more in military assistance and imposing punishing sanctions on Russias economy and Putins lite. More than three weeks after the crisis began, the mood in Western capitals remains pugnacious and emotive. Last week, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, appeared by video before Canadas Parliament, and, the next day, he addressed a joint session of Congress. In both venues, politicians rose to applaud and chanted an improbably viral invocation of Ukrainian glory: Slava Ukraini!

Yet NATO has declined to provide Ukraine what Zelensky has repeatedly soughta no-fly zone to ground Russian warplanes or a transfer of fighter jetsfor fear that such actions would bring the U.S. and Russia into direct combat. We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine, Joe Biden reiterated on Twitter recently. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent. The President is, of course, right about that, and yet, as Russian planes and artillery daily pound Ukrainian apartment buildings and hospitals, he can surely understand why Zelensky is pressing for more.

Zelensky has been justly celebrated for his personal courage and his adaptations of Churchillian rhetoric for the TikTok era. His presentation to Congress last week was a study in discomforting moral provocation. He invoked Pearl Harbor and September 11th to describe Ukraines daily experience under Russian missiles and bombs, then showed a graphic video depicting the recent deaths of children and other innocents. Later that day, Biden called Putin a war criminal and announced a new package of military supplies, including anti-aircraft systems and drones. The aid may help, but it cannot relieve Zelensky of the terrible predicaments he must manage in the weeks ahead. Ukraine may be facing a long war costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of its citizens, a war that may not be winnable, even with the most robust assistance that NATO is likely to provide. In any event, NATOs greatest priority is to strengthen its own defenses and dissuade Putin from attacking the alliance.

Zelenskys alternative may be to pursue a ceasefire deal with Putin that could require Ukraine to forswear future NATO membership, among other bitter concessions. In the light of Putins annexation of Crimea, in 2014, and his years-long armed support for pro-Russian enclaves in Ukraines east, such a deal would be unstable and unreliable. Still, Zelensky appears torn. Even as he asked Congress last week to do more for Ukraines war effort, he pleaded with Biden to lead the world to peace, and he recently signalled his willingness to bargain with Putin on Ukraines relationship with nato. The countrys past failure to win admission to the alliance is a truth that must be recognized, he said.

It has become common to describe Russias invasion as a watershed in history comparable to 9/11 or to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The war in Ukraine marks a turning point for our continent and our generation, President Emmanuel Macron, of France, said earlier this month. Perhaps, but some of this speculation about Europes destiny and the future of Great Power competition may be premature. Certainly, the war has already produced a humanitarian disaster of shocking and destabilizing dimensions. Three million Ukrainians have fled their country. The 1.8million of them who have gone to Poland constitute a population roughly the size of Warsaws. If the fighting drags on and Ukraine implodes, the country will export many more destitute people, and, as happened in the former Yugoslavia during the nineteen-nineties, it may also draw in opportunists, including mercenaries and extremists.

Meanwhile, Russias economy, according to the International Monetary Fund, could shrink by thirty-five per cent this year under the weight of Western sanctions. Putins oligarchs and enablers can endure the loss of super-yachts and private jets, but a sudden economic contraction on that scale would crush ordinary Russians and inevitably cost lives. (Our economy will need deep structural changes, Putin acknowledged last week, adding, They wont be easy.) Russias isolation from large swaths of global banking and trade, and its loss of access to advanced U.S. technologies, could last a long time, too: democracies often find it easier to impose sanctions than to remove them, even when the original cause of a conflict subsides. (Ask Cuba.) When the history of this era is written, Putins war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger, Biden said in his recent State of the Union address.

Still, some introspection may be in order. In his address, the President also declared that, in the battle between democracy and autocracies, democracies are rising to the moment. But Europe is troubled by illiberal populism, including in Poland. And Donald Trumpwho, just two days before Russia rolled into Ukraine, called Putins preparatory moves geniusretains a firm hold on the Republican Party, and appears to be all in for a relection campaign in 2024. As long as Trumps return to the White House is a possibility, Bidens declarations will require some asterisks.

Every night for three weeks now, Zelensky told Congress, various Ukrainian cities, Odessa and Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Sumy, Zhytomyr and Lviv, Mariupol and Dnipro, have endured attacks. We are asking for a reply, for an answer to this terror. Ukraine is an unlucky country, and the restoration of its independence and security may be a long and costly project, but it is one the U.S. cannot afford to abandon again.

The rest is here:
The Complexities of the Ukraine Dilemma - The New Yorker

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu attends a news conference after talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Russia March 16, 2022. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/Pool

Register

ISTANBUL, March 20 (Reuters) - Turkey's foreign minister said in an interview published on Sunday that Russia and Ukraine were nearing agreement on "critical" issues and he was hopeful for a ceasefire if the two sides did not backtrack from progress achieved so far.

Russian forces invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. President Vladimir Putin has called Russia's actions a "special operation" meant to demilitarize Ukraine and purge it of what he sees as dangerous nationalists. Ukraine and the West say Putin launched an aggressive war of choice.

Foreign ministers Sergei Lavrov of Russia and Dmytro Kuleba of Ukraine met in the Turkish resort town of Antalya earlier this month with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu also attending. The discussions did not yield concrete results.

Register

But Cavusoglu, who also travelled to Russia and Ukraine last week for talks with Lavrov and Kuleba, told Turkish daily Hurriyet that there had been "rapprochement in the positions of both sides on important subjects, critical subjects".

"We can say we are hopeful for a ceasefire if the sides do not take a step back from the current positions," he said, without elaborating on the issues.

Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin, speaking to al Jazeera television, said the two sides were getting closer on four key issues. He cited Russia's demand for Ukraine to renounce ambitions to join NATO, demilitarisation, what Russia has referred to as "de-nazification", and the protection of the Russian language in Ukraine.

Ukraine and the West have dismissed Russian references to "neo-Nazis" in Ukraine's democratically elected leadership as baseless propaganda, and Kalin said such references were offensive to Kyiv.

Kyiv and Moscow reported some progress in talks last week toward a political formula that would guarantee Ukraine's security, while keeping it outside NATO, though each sides accused the other of dragging matters out. read more

Kalin said a permanent ceasefire could come only through a meeting between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. But he said Putin felt that positions on the "strategic issues" of Crimea and Donbas were not close enough for a meeting.

Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 while part of the eastern industrial Donbas region was seized by Russian-backed separatist forces that year.

NATO member Turkey shares a maritime border with Ukraine and Russia in the Black Sea, has good relations with both and has offered to mediate between them.

It has voiced support for Ukraine, but has also opposed far-reaching Western sanctions imposed on Moscow over the invasion.

While forging close ties with Russia on energy, defence and trade and relying heavily on Russian tourists, Turkey has sold drones to Ukraine, angering Moscow.

Turkey also opposes Russian policies in Syria and Libya, as well as Moscow's annexation of Crimea.

President Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly said Turkey will not abandon its relations with Russia or Ukraine, saying Ankara's ability to speak to both sides was an asset.

Register

Reporting by Ali Kucukgocmen; Editing by Mark Heinrich

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

View original post here:
Turkey says Russia and Ukraine nearing agreement on 'critical' issues - Reuters

Officially, the port city of Kherson was one of the first in Ukraine to fall under Russian control.

It's a strategically valuable city, straddling both the Dnieper River and the Black Sea, and home to more than 280,000 people.

Analysts say controlling Kherson offers much to Russia's forces by both blocking Ukraine's access to the sea and linking the territories in Donetsk and Luhansk with the peninsula of Crimea.

But the occupation is not proving comfortable according to messages Sky News has received from a Ukrainian local resistance volunteer in the city on Friday, communicated through a contact in the UK.

Pictures taken over several days from the city show protesters carrying the Ukrainian flag filing past Russian vehicles emblazoned with the letter Z - and Russian soldiers aiming their weapons at civilians.

The messages offer a glimpse of life under Russian occupation. These are the volunteer's words:

Life in Kherson at the moment in relation to other cities is relatively calm.

Fights are going on in the vicinity of the city.

Kherson is completely occupied by Russian invaders.

The military is constantly moving around the city, but the Ukrainian flag continues to hang over the City Council.

The occupants tried to hold a fake referendum, but the population of the city came out to protest and frustrated all their plans.

Due to the complete blockade of the city, there are big problems with food supplies.

The big shops are closed. Mostly small retail outlets operate and agricultural products are brought from the suburbs.

Children sit in shelters; schools and kindergartens do not work. The outskirts of the city are destroyed, many victims among the local population.

The invaders are robbing stores. But life in the city goes on, people help each other.

And in general, the population of the city is patriotic. Glory to Ukraine!

Ukrainian television is turned off in the city today. It is possible to watch the broadcast of Ukrainian TV via the Internet.

Volunteers have organised in the city in different microdistricts, one of them includes me and my friends.

We deliver medicines and products to orphanages and hospitals that are given by businessmen and citizens who are not indifferent.

About the resistance by the occupiers, every day there are demonstrations under Ukrainian flags, thousands of citizens come out to protest.

Of course there are problems with water and electricity, but the city authorities are trying to repair the damage as much as possible.

What will happen next with food is not known, the occupiers do not let the humanitarian cargo pass.

They want the townspeople to take food from them, but no one takes their help. We all believe in the imminent victory of the Ukrainian army.

But a lot depends on the determination and support of our Western friends.

I will not write to you about the hostilities and the participation of me or any of my acquaintances in hostilities or resistance, for obvious reasons.

I can only say that on a signal the Earth will burn under the feet of the invaders.

Read the original here:
Ukraine war: A glimpse inside Kherson, the city occupied by Russian forces, through the eyes of a Ukrainian resistance volunteer - Sky News

Many have called the invasion of Ukraine the worlds first TikTok war, and experts say it is high time for the short video platform once known primarily for silly lip syncs and dance challenge to be taken seriously.

Some politicians are doing just that. In a speech, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, appealed to TikTokers as a group that could help end the war. Last week, Joe Biden spoke to dozens of top users on the app in a first-of-its kind meeting to brief the influencers on the conflict in Ukraine and how the US is addressing it.

But even as world leaders increasingly legitimize the platform, others continue to dismiss it as frivolous. The White House meeting was lampooned on Saturday Night Live in a skit, and mocked relentlessly on Twitter, while the Republican senator Josh Hawley scolded Biden for asking teenagers to do his job.

Experts say this mentality is a mistake.

TikTok is constantly overlooked and deprioritized by people who do not take the time to understand it, said Abbie Richards, an independent researcher who studies the app. Many of the problems we are seeing with it today stem from this false idea that it is just a dancing app.

Ukraine-related content on TikTok has exploded since the country was invaded on 24 February, with videos tagged #Ukraine surpassing 30.5bn views as of 17 March. One report from the New York Times found that, proportionally, Ukraine content on TikTok outpaces that on platforms more than twice its size.

With that dramatic rise came an influx of misinformation and disinformation. Videos of unrelated explosions were re-posted as if they were from Ukraine. Media uploaded from video games were passed off as footage of real-life events. Russian propaganda went viral before it could be removed.

We saw immediately from the start of the conflict that TikTok was structurally incompatible with the needs of the current moment regarding disinformation, Richards said.

TikTok has a number of features that make it uniquely susceptible to such issues, according to a paper published by Harvards Shorenstein Center on Media titled TikTok, the War on Ukraine, and 10 Features that Make the App Vulnerable to Misinformation.

Its core features prime it for remixing media, allowing users to upload videos and sound clips without attributing their origins, the paper said, which makes it difficult to contextualize and factcheck videos. This has created a digital atmosphere in which it is difficult even for seasoned journalists and researchers to discern truth from rumor, parody and fabrication, researchers added.

Design features within the app also create an easy pathway for misinformation, researchers say. Users post mostly under pseudonyms; the date of upload for videos is not prominently displayed, complicating attempts to contextualize content; and the newsfeed structure with each video taking up the entirety of a users screen makes it difficult to seek out additional sources.

Unlike on Facebook, where the users feed is filled primarily with content from friends and people they know, TikToks for you page is largely content from strangers determined by the companys opaque algorithm.

And the more a platform relies on algorithms rather than a chronological newsfeed, the more susceptible it can be to mis- and disinformation, experts say. That is because algorithms favor content that gets more engagement.

One thing that is common across all platforms is that algorithms are optimized to detect and exploit cognitive biases for more polarizing content, said Marc Faddoula, a researcher at the TikTok Observatory where he studies the platform and its content policies. Disinformation is very engaging for users, so it is more likely to appear on feeds.

These issues are exacerbated by the age and size of TikTok. The app is relatively young, launched in 2016, and has grown rapidly to 130m in the United States and more than 1bn globally. Though smaller than Facebook, which has 230m users in the US and 2.9bn globally, the platform is facing many of the same issues with fewer resources and less experience.

TikTok is continuing to evolve after it saw usership soar during the pandemic-induced lockdowns of 2020, said Emily Dreyfuss, a researcher at Harvards Shorenstein Center on Media who co-authored the research paper.

That is when we really started to see a shift from what people thought was just an app for teenagers to do viral dance tricks to a real part of the cultural conversation, she said.

TikTok has, like many other social media companies, scrambled to keep up with the onslaught of disinformation about the war in Ukraine.

It uses a combination of algorithms and human moderators to manage the platform, spokeswoman Jamie Favazza told the Guardian, with teams that speak more than 60 languages and dialects including Russian and Ukrainian. It has rushed out the launch of a state-controlled media policy to address propaganda put out by Russian entities.

We continue to respond to the war in Ukraine with increased safety and security resources to detect emerging threats and remove harmful misinformation, Favazza said.

Meanwhile TikTok added digital literacy tips on its Discover page to help our community evaluate and make decisions about the content they view online. It has for years voluntarily released transparency reports about what content it has removed.

But researchers say there is more to be done. Despite these moves, some state-controlled media accounts such as RT remain on the app, though access to them has been banned in the EU.

Richards, the TikTok researcher, noted that a disinformation campaign she studied for a recent report remains on the platform, with dozens of videos using the caption Russian Lives Matter continuing to rack up thousands of views.

In many ways TikTok has been far more responsive to criticism than its predecessors, including social media giants such as Facebook. But while the company is dutifully flagging misinformation and cracking down on Russian state content, reining in disinformation on a mass scale is becoming more complicated than ever as influencers power grows.

Well-followed accounts have an outsized influence on what media their followers consume, regardless of how much expertise they actually have in a given subject matter. Studies show consumers are substantially more likely to trust a recommendation from someone they follow on social media than a traditional advertisement, and the same goes for information shared online.

TikTok is driven by a culture that values individual creators and platform-specific microcelebrities, the Shorenstein Center paper argued, making influencers and people with large followings particularly susceptible to inadvertently sharing inaccurate or manipulated content.

Influencers have great incentive to enter the discourse about a breaking news event or ongoing crisis, since these posts can boost users profiles; even one viral video can popularize an entire account, the paper said.

Meanwhile, very few checks and balances exist in terms of how they operate in the online media space, said Dreyfuss, noting that they operate in similar media spaces as journalists with far less training or media literacy, such as how to factcheck false claims that even seasoned researchers struggle to detect.

There is no formal accountability for influencers and they are often catering only to the whims of their fans, Dreyfuss said.

Experts say it is urgent that legislators and the general public take this collision of massive influence with little accountability seriously. In inviting top influencers to the White House, the Biden administration took a meaningful step in that direction.

For their part, influencers are also recognizing the power that they hold. One 18-year-old TikTok star with more than 10.5m followers told the Washington Post she sees herself as a White House correspondent for Gen Z who is there to relay the information in a more digestible manner.

Continued here:
TikTok was just a dancing app. Then the Ukraine war started - The Guardian

There is a fascinating tension in the British attitude to war and military matters. When he wrote about England in 1941, George Orwell said his home country was defined by the gentleness of its civilisation, and such a hatred of war and militarism that flag-waving and patriotic boasting were always the preserve of a small minority. Events over the past 40 or so years have perhaps proved him wrong: from time to time, a widely shared jingoism has been brought to the surface of our national life, focused either on actual conflict as happened when Britain fought for the Falkland Islands or some hare-brained proxy for it, such as Brexit. But there is something about Orwells portrayal of people with an innate distaste for bellicose posturing that still rings true, across all the countries of the United Kingdom.

Among certain politicians, by contrast, there is far too little of that kind of thinking. Over the past three weeks, the unimaginable awfulness of what has happened in Ukraine and the fact that Vladimir Putins invasion is such a matter of moral clarity has encouraged a lot of rhetoric and posturing that has been shrill, banal and full of a misplaced machismo. The war, says one Tory MP, is Boris Johnsons Falklands moment. The vocal Conservative backbencher Tobias Ellwood a former soldier in the Royal Green Jackets, and now an active reservist insists that the wests response shows weve lost our appetite, weve lost our confidence to stand up: to stand tall. And while he and other Tory MPs including zealous believers in Britain breaking from the EU, suddenly holding forth about the urgent need for international unity have been making sense-defying demands for Nato to impose a no-fly zone, some of the cabinet have come out with their own very unsettling pronouncements, seemingly thinking that if Putin talks tough, they should talk tougher. When Sajid Javid was asked about the recent Russian attack on a Ukrainian military base only about 10 miles from the countrys border with Poland, we saw the strange spectacle of the health secretary apparently embracing the prospect of nuclear war: Lets be very clear if a single Russian toecap steps into Nato territory, there will be war with Nato.

With the chancellor Rishi Sunaks spring statement arriving on Wednesday, a familiar sound is getting louder: Conservatives demanding more money for the military, even though the UK currently spends the fifth-largest annual sum in the world (after the US, China, India and Russia). For well over a decade now, most Tories have been united in the belief that just about every public service is best cut to the bone and subjected to endless lectures about inefficiency. But defence is suddenly a glaring exception: Labour may have credibly identified 13bn of departmental waste since 2010, but that seems to be no barrier to calls for a spending rise of about 25%.

If you want a flavour of the thinking at work, a good place to start is a recent piece in the Sunday Telegraph by the former Brexit minister David Frost. He reckons that western muscle memory is returning and we are getting back to the principles that helped us to win the cold war. He says: We are going to have to spend more on defence and that will mean tough choices. We all know what those are likely to be: the price of our supposedly central role in a reshaped world may well be paid in social care, education, childrens services and all the rest.

Though he would presumably express opposition to cuts elsewhere, Keir Starmer has joined in the calls for more military cash, which snugly fits the Im not Jeremy Corbyn narrative of his leadership. Given Starmers apparent determination to follow the example set by his New Labour forebears, and Tony Blairs recent offer to help his old party with policy advice, we should be listening hard to what the latter has to say. Last week, he published an essay about the Ukraine crisis. Its most sobering passage ran thus: When Putin is threatening Nato and stoking fear of nuclear conflict, there is something incongruous about our repeated assurance to him that we will not react with force. Naturally enough, Blair also wants more money for the armed forces. We are awake, he says. Now we must act. This the same register he used at the start of the war on terror, when he talked about shaken kaleidoscopes and the need to reorder this world around us. Hearing it again is not exactly reassuring.

As is usually the case, Boris Johnsons tone swings between the serious and utterly crass. At this weekends Tory spring conference, he and his colleagues parroted the familiar argument that the war demands an end to woke ideas and criticisms of British history (which actually sounds like a milquetoast version of Putinism), and he made that grotesque comparison of Ukrainians to Brexit voters. When caught in a more sensible mood, he has also counselled a measure of caution and level-headedness. Its very important that we dont get locked into any kind of logic of direct conflict between the west and Russia because thats how Putin wants to portray it as a fight between him and Nato, he told the Economist last week. It isnt. This is about the Ukrainian people and their right to defend themselves. This line was repeated on Sunday. But around him, there still swirl very dangerous currents.

Back in the 1980s, as Ronald Reagan speculated about a limited nuclear war in Europe and we were warned about the prospect of an accidental nuclear exchange, I grew up with a cold sense of fear. Now a new generation has to face not just those same anxieties, but the existential threat of the climate emergency and the prospect of regular global pandemics. Not surprisingly, there is a growing crisis in childhood mental health: a sign not just of failing public services, but arguably of a system of power and politics that does not ease such visceral fears, instead endlessly inflaming them.

In a situation as fragile as this, belligerent talk can have terrifying consequences. It also tends to highlight the way Westminsters armchair generals neglect their duty of care to their own citizens. I am now having conversations with my 12-year-old daughter about the prospect of nuclear annihilation. I tell her itll be all right, but her and my fears are hardly helped by the reckless words we sporadically hear from some of those supposedly in charge.

Yes, the world has clearly changed. Even if liberal values are always damaged and compromised by people in power, that does not mean that they are not still the best hope we have, something Putins passage into something close to fascism makes plain. But those same values not to mention the delicate stuff of geopolitics and diplomacy demand nuance and calm. Moreover, there is one thing we overlook at our peril: that however much we spend on our military, our social fabric needs to be resilient and secure enough to cope with a new reality of constant shocks and disruptions, and at the moment it is anything but. In this dreadful moment, these seem to be things in danger of being forgotten. I worry about that. I think we all should.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist. To listen to Johns podcast Politics Weekly UK, search Politics Weekly UK on Apple, Spotify, Acast or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday

See the original post:
The Tories bellicose posturing on Ukraine is dangerous - and unfair to us - The Guardian