Just after midnight, Zelenskyy warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces would storm Kyiv in "vile, cruel, and inhuman" fashion, according to a translation by Max Seddon, the Moscow bureau chief at Financial Times.
"We have to persevere tonight," said Zelenskyy. "The fate of Ukraine is being decided right now. The night will be hard, very hard, but there will be a morning."
After another excruciating night spent in bomb shelters, basements, and subway stations, the residents of Kyiv awoke with the city still in the hands of mayor Vitali Klitschko and the Ukrainian government still under Zelenskyy's control.
Several apartment units were destroyed by Russian missiles, and at least 35 people, including two children, had been wounded as of 6:00 a.m. local time, according to Klitschko.
Rescue workers evacuate a wounded person after a missile struck a residential building during Russia's military assault on Kyiv, Ukraine on February 26, 2022. (Photo: Ukraine Emergency Service/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
The mayor added that while "there are no Russian troops in the city," people should remain underground as additional air attacks are expected.
As the BBC reported:
According to a report by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency, Kyiv officials put out a statement asking people to stay in shelters and to stay away from windows if they were at home.
But Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov told Ukrainian news site Lb.ua that the army was "in control" of the situation.
"We are stopping the horde using all means available. The army servicemen and citizens are in control of Kyiv," said Mr. Danilov.
According to BBC correspondent Paul Adams, "The Ukrainian army said it had repelled an attack along one of the main roads in the west, early [Saturday] morning. And it says it's managed to prevent a Russian attempt to land airborne troops at an airport south of Kyiv—even saying a large plane carrying troops had been shot down."
In a video recorded Saturday morning from the empty streets of Kyiv's government district and shared on Twitter, Zelenskyy countered rumors that he had directed the army to surrender to Russian troops.
"I'm here. We will not lay down any weapons. We will defend our state," he said.
According to the New York Times, "Reports on Friday from the Ukrainian military and the United States and its allies indicated that Ukrainian troops were fighting fiercely, slowing the Russian advance."
"Civilians were also volunteering to defend the country," added the newspaper, which interviewed several residents who have taken up arms.
In an address to Ukrainians on Saturday morning, Zelenskyy said that "we are defending the country, the land of our future children."
"Kyiv and key cities around the capital are controlled precisely by our army," the president added. "The invaders wanted to block the center of our state and put their puppets here like in Donetsk. We broke their plan."
Meanwhile, fighting continues throughout Ukraine, where Russia is being condemned for alleged war crimes.
Western governments have vowed to increase weapons shipments to Ukraine and impose harsher sanctions on Russia—including directly targeting the assets of Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov—but Zelenskyy continues to urge all European Union members, including current holdouts Germany and Hungary, to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT international banking system.
For the first time in history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on Friday activated parts of its Response Force.
Viktor Liashko, Ukraine's health minister, said Saturday that 198 Ukrainians, including three children, have been killed so far, and more than 1,100 people, including 33 children, have been wounded.
United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees, Kelly Clements, told CNN on Saturday morning that more than 120,000 people had fled Ukraine "to all of the neighboring countries."
"The reception that they are receiving from local communities, from local authorities, is tremendous," said Clements. "But it's a dynamic situation, we're really quite devastated obviously with what's to come, and we would say that up to four million people could actually cross borders, if things continue to deteriorate, which they have until now."
Amid the alarming images of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over the past few days, millions of people have also seen misleading, manipulated or false information about the conflict on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Telegram.
Old footage, rebadged on TikTok as the latest from Ukraine.
TikTok
One example is this video of military jets posted to TikTok, which is historical footage but captioned as live video of the situation in Ukraine.
Visuals, because of their persuasive potential and attention-grabbing nature, are an especially potent choice for those seeking to mislead. Where creating, editing or sharing inauthentic visual content isn’t satire or art, it is usually politically or economically motivated.
Disinformation campaigns aim to distract, confuse, manipulate and sow division, discord, and uncertainty in the community. This is a common strategy for highly polarised nations where socioeconomic inequalities, disenfranchisement and propaganda are prevalent.
How is this fake content created and spread, what’s being done to debunk it, and how can you ensure you don’t fall for it yourself?
Using an existing photo or video and claiming it came from a different time or place is one of the most common forms of misinformation in this context. This requires no special software or technical skills – just a willingness to upload an old video of a missile attack or other arresting image, and describe it as new footage.
Another low-tech option is to stage or pose actions or events and present them as reality. This was the case with destroyed vehicles that Russia claimed were bombed by Ukraine.
Using a particular lens or vantage point can also change how the scene looks and can be used to deceive. A tight shot of people, for example, can make it hard to gauge how many were in a crowd, compared with an aerial shot.
Taking things further still, Photoshop or equivalent software can be used to add or remove people or objects from a scene, or to crop elements out from a photograph. An example of object addition is the below photograph, which purports to show construction machinery outside a kindergarten in eastern Ukraine. The satirical text accompanying the image jokes about the “calibre of the construction machinery” - the author suggesting that reports of damage to buildings from military ordinance are exaggerated or untrue.
Close inspection reveals this image was digitally altered to include the machinery. This tweet could be seen as an attempt to downplay the extent of damage resulting from a Russian-backed missile attack, and in a wider context to create confusion and doubt as to veracity of other images emerging from the conflict zone.
European organisations such as Bellingcat have begun compiling lists of dubious social media claims about the Russia-Ukraine conflict and debunking them where necessary.
Journalists and fact-checkers are also working to verify content and raise awareness of known fakes. Large, well-resourced news outlets such as the BBC are also calling out misinformation.
Social media platforms have added new labels to identify state-run media organisations or provide more background information about sources or people in your networks who have also shared a particular story.
They have also tweaked their algorithms to change what content is amplified and have hired staff to spot and flag misleading content. Platforms are also doing some work behind the scenes to detect and publicly share information on state-linked information operations.
You can attempt to fact-check images for yourself rather than taking them at face value. An article we wrote late last year for the Australian Associated Press explains the fact-checking process at each stage: image creation, editing and distribution.
Here are five simple steps you can take:
1. Examine the metadata
This Telegram post claims Polish-speaking saboteurs attacked a sewage facility in an attempt to place a tank of chlorine for a “false flag” attack.
But the video’s metadata – the details about how and when the video was created – show it was filmed days before the alleged date of the incident.
To check metadata for yourself, you can download the file and use software such as Adobe Photoshop or Bridge to examine it. Online metadata viewers also exist that allow you to check by using the image’s web link.
One hurdle to this approach is that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter often strip the metadata from photos and videos when they are uploaded to their sites. In these cases, you can try requesting the original file or consulting fact-checking websites to see whether they have already verified or debunked the footage in question.
2. Consult a fact-checking resource
Organisations such as the Australian Associated Press, RMIT/ABC, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Bellingcat maintain lists of fact-checks their teams have performed.
The AFP has already debunked a video claiming to show an explosion from the current conflict in Ukraine as being from the 2020 port disaster in Beirut.
3. Search more broadly
If old content has been recycled and repurposed, you may be able to find the same footage used elsewhere. You can use Google Images or TinEye to “reverse image search” a picture and see where else it appears online.
But be aware that simple edits such as reversing the left-right orientation of an image can fool search engines and make them think the flipped image is new.
4. Look for inconsistencies
Does the purported time of day match the direction of light you would expect at that time, for example? Do watches or clocks visible in the image correspond to the alleged timeline claimed?
You can also compare other data points, such as politicians’ schedules or verified sightings, Google Earth vision or Google Maps imagery, to try and triangulate claims and see whether the details are consistent.
5. Ask yourself some simple questions
Do you know where, when and why the photo or video was made? Do you know who made it, and whether what you’re looking at is the original version?
Using online tools such as InVID or Forensically can potentially help answer some of these questions. Or you might like to refer to this list of 20 questions you can use to “interrogate” social media footage with the right level of healthy scepticism.
Ultimately, if you’re in doubt, don’t share or repeat claims that haven’t been published by a reputable source such as an international news organisation. And consider using some of these principles when deciding which sources to trust.
By doing this, you can help limit the influence of misinformation, and help clarify the true situation in Ukraine.
T.J. Thomson, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication & Media, Queensland University of Technology; Daniel Angus, Professor of Digital Communication, Queensland University of Technology, and Paula Dootson, Senior Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
As the author of a recently published book on anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine and a historian of the Holocaust, I know why the accusations of Nazism and genocide have resonance in Ukraine. But I also understand that despite episodic violence, Ukrainian history offers a model of tolerance and democratic government.
First, it is worth pointing out that Ukraine today is a vibrant, pluralistic democracy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky won a five-year term in the 2019 presidential election with a landslide majority, defeating 39 candidates. His Servant of the People party then swept the parliamentary elections in July 2019, winning 254 seats in the 450-seat chamber, becoming the first majority government in the history of the modern Ukrainian state. Zelensky was well-known as a comedian and star of the popular sitcom “Servant of the People,” from which his party’s name was derived.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaking at a news conference.
The fact that Zelensky is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and was raised in what he told The Times of Israel was “an ordinary Soviet Jewish family” was barely noted during the election. “Nobody cares. Nobody asks about it,” he remarked in the same interview. Nor did Ukrainians seem to mind that the prime minister at the time of Zelensky’s election, Volodymyr Groysman, also had a Jewish background.
For a brief period of time, Ukraine was the only state outside of Israel to have both a Jewish head of state and a Jewish head of government. “How could I be a Nazi?” Zelensky asked in a public address after the Russian invasion began. “Explain it to my grandfather.”
Sporadic episodes of violence against Jews, or pogroms, began well before the Holocaust. In 1881, for instance, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, ordinary churchgoers, laborers, railway workers and soldiers attacked Jewish-owned shops, mills and canteens, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Jews in what was then considered the south of Russia, but is now Ukraine. During another wave of violence following the Revolution of 1905, workers, peasants and soldiers, egged on by Russian right-wing paramilitary groups, murdered 5,000 Jews in the region.
During the unrest that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, about 100,000 Jews died as a result of attacks perpetrated against them by soldiers fighting to restore a united Russia, as well as by the armies of the newly established Ukrainian and Polish states.
Finally, during the Second World War, German soldiers murdered 1.5 million Jews in the areas that are now Ukraine, often with the collaboration of Ukrainian militias established in the diaspora and with the help of local auxiliary police. The role of ethnic Ukrainians in the Holocaust remains contentious in Ukraine today, where nationalist heroes who collaborated with the Nazis continue to be honored.
Small stones placed on the photos of victims of the 1941 massacre where the Nazi killed tens of thousands of Jews during WWII, in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Yet at the same time, millions of non-Jewish Ukrainians lost their lives under the Nazis or were exploited as slave laborers. The occupiers treated Ukrainian lands as little more than Lebensraum, living space for ethnic Germans.
Forgotten in this history is the period between 1917 and 1919 when an independent Ukrainian state offered a different model of multiculturalism and pluralism. The Ukrainian state that declared its independence from Russia in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolutions, envisioned a Ukraine for all ethnicities and religious groups living within its territory.
One of its first acts was passing the Law on National Autonomy in January 1918, which allowed each of the major ethnic minority groups – Russians, Jews, and Poles – broad autonomous rights, including the right to use their own language.
The cabinet included a Secretariat of National Affairs, with vice-secretariats for Russians, Jews and Poles, and, briefly in 1919, even a Ministry of Jewish Affairs. The legislative body, as well, included proportional representation from each of the national minorities. The state issued declarations and currency printed in four languages: Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish.
However, this state, hailed by Jews around the world as a model for the new nation states then emerging in eastern and central Europe, never managed to hold the capital for more than a few months at a time. By April of 1919, the government was being run from a moving train and could barely claim more land than the tracks beneath it.
From its inauguration in January 1918, Ukraine found itself enmeshed in a bloody war on multiple fronts. The Soviet Red Army attacked it from the east, while Moscow sought to ignite Bolshevik revolutions throughout Ukraine. A Russian White Army led by officers from the old tsarist army attacked from the south, hoping to reestablish a version of the Russian Empire. From the west, the army of the newly established Polish Republic attacked with the goal of restoring historic Poland’s borders.
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At the same time, a range of insurgent fighters and anarchists formed militias to seize land for themselves. In the midst of this chaos, the dream of a pluralistic state devolved into inter-ethnic violence.
In March 1921, the war ended with the Treaty of Riga, incorporating much of the territory claimed by the independent Ukrainian state into the Soviet Union.
Putin’s selective telling of the past exaggerates the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine while ignoring the state’s historic struggle for pluralism and democracy. There is a good reason for this: he fears democracy more than he fears Nazism.
Jeffrey Veidlinger, Professor of History and Judaic Studies, University of Michigan
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
