How Truth and Creativity Are Aiding Ukraine

“There was truth and there was untruth. And if you clung to the truth against the whole world, you were not mad.” By all accounts, George Orwell’s iconic novel, 1984, never truly felt like fiction when it was released 73 years ago. It still feels that way. Where Putin sees a ‘Special Military Operation,’ the rest of the world sees genocide and war crimes. Seize the truth and the world is yours. The Kremlin knows this. Every national government and person in power knows this. Ukrainians and every person subjected to war deeply understands it. 

As Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelensky put it: “truth is our weapon.” Take a broad look at the Internet landscape and you’ll see signs of resistance from the media, agencies and outlets at every corner. Ukraine percolates Russia, and its allies, with a universal truth: that war is pain and suffering. Felt on both sides. And when you can appeal to the humanity of someone, you may just be able to influence them. As Orwell wrote: “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” 

Yes, our screens are rife with disinformation where old explosion footage was passed off as new. And where deep fake videos showed Zelensky announcing his country’s surrender. But they live alongside authentic harrowing stories, interviews and images published across social media. When the Internet allows us to live stream almost every event, opportunities arise. Online, we see signs of the truth stemming from the intersection of technology, creativity and art. So how does civilian resistance unfold online and what do some of these battles for the truth look like in this war?

From the top down, the Ukrainian government’s Ministry of Digital Transformation was formed in 2019 to digitise government documents and make them easily accessible for Ukrainians. Since the invasion, the Ministry has deployed projects such as a chatbot for citizens to submit images or videos of Russian troop movements. They have started recruiting a volunteer ‘IT army’ to hack Russian targets and opened Ukraine to receive crypto donations — of which they have already raised more than USD$100 million. Among other things, the Ministry has also secured access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service to fortify the country’s Internet. This kind of ingenuity and agility extends beyond government agencies and into creative ones. Bickerstaff.734 is a Kyiv-based creative agency that formed in 2020. They’re on the ground with a mission to tackle Anti-Russian propaganda in their own way. In March they released their ‘Message to Russian Mums’ campaign: an appeal to Russian and Belarussian mothers to find their soldier sons. Anyone who’s spent a minute working in sales knows that to sell an idea, you must first sell the emotion behind it.

Marina Chernyavskaya is the agency’s Creative Group Head. She says the concept appeared in the early days of the invasion. “Here in Ukraine, we have a web page [with] photos and videos of killed, damaged or surrendered Russian soldiers. [So that] the families [are] able to find them. I’m not sure who was responsible for this web page, but it definitely was somebody from the governmental area…they came to us [asking] to somehow help spread this web page and [relevant] Telegram channel.”  Their goal was to get the attention of Russian mums, especially since the original web page was blocked in Russia. So the video also came with instructions on how to access the page through a VPN. Some of the agency’s 16-strong employees are now dispersed across Europe while 10 remain in Kyiv. They now almost exclusively work on social impact projects with the likes of UNICEF and smaller passion projects raising money for a Ukrainian dog shelter. 

The next campaign in their information ammunition was a concept slated for Orthodox Easter, widely celebrated across Russia. With this one, the agency hoped to appeal to the virtuousness of religious Russians who traditionally send animated GIFs to each other on social media and Viber: one of the country’s most popular messaging apps. The GIFs are holiday greetings spreading messages of light, love and warmth. This year, Bickerstaff created a series of designs identical to the ones in usual rotation. In Bickerstaff’s versions, when the GIF animated it flipped to a certified image of the war with a quote that translated to: “there is no love and light while there is so much death and violence.” 

The GIFs, dubbed “truth bullets”, were created in tandem with digital partners who helped with the technicalities of the work. While measuring results is hard, the agency knows that five of its designs appeared on the first page of search results by keyword. Another 15 were displayed over the next seven pages. And when considering the open data from Easter users, Bickerstaff estimates that 2.9 million Russians used or saw the GIFs. 

Resistance like this has also taken shape across different disciplines from the international community too. Slovakian marketing agency, Jandl, has used Tinder to break the information barrier. Romanian Creative Director, Alex Strimbeanu, spearheaded the idea after learning that some Russian soldiers were contacting local Ukrainian women through dating apps such as Bumble and Tinder. The ‘Special Love Operation’ involved Strimbeanu and his colleagues creating Tinder profiles, configuring their geolocations to Russia, and uploading profile details that showed images of the war. It also came with a message: “Dear Russians, the West does not hate you. We hate the war. We hate the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. The Russian army is killing innocent people while Putin is lying and hiding the truth from you. Your brothers and sisters are dying because of the madness and delusion of a dictator. Spread the truth. Make love, not war.” 

Meanwhile, sitting within an entirely different discipline is an audio project by grammy-award nominated producer, Roger Leao, and his studio 7CS. He teamed up with Ukrainian ad agency, Angry, to collect audio clips from the war and used those samples to create a song dubbed: ‘The True Anthem of Russia’. It’s a chilling, necessary reminder of the realities on the ground, and serves as a platform that links to ways to donate to Ukrainian organisations. Likewise, Creatives for Ukraine is a site encouraging the global creative community to submit digital art and illustrations. It drives the message that Russia has not only waged war on a sovereign nation, but on the truth itself.

While Ukraine has seen billions of dollars worth of donations and support from around the world, there is an overarching ‘David and Goliath’ view to this war. As Marina says, “there is a typical archetype where something big and evil is trying to harm something small and good. But as far as humanity [is concerned], it’s always the stories with the same archetypes…since the beginning of humanity’s existence. I guess that makes us feel and believe that we definitely are right…The good must beat the evil and that’s what we are doing now.”