Magnificent News: Today's WorldView: With NAFO, Ukraine turns the trolls on Russia

Try four weeks FREE, then $4 every four weeks the next year

Read online

Developments from Ukraine, global analysis and top reads.

By Adam Taylor
with Sammy Westfall

With NAFO, Ukraine turns the trolls on Russia

A launch truck fires the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System produced by Lockheed Martin during combat training in the high desert of the Yakima Training Center in Washington in 2011. (Tony Overman/Olympian/AP)

More than six months in, the war in Ukraine has become a little surreal. This past weekend, Ukraine's Defense Ministry shared a doctored photograph of a Shiba Inu dog wearing a military uniform, apparently gushing over the site of a missile launch.

"Today we want to give a shout-out to a unique entity," the tweet read, before pointing to an unusually named group — the North Atlantic Fellas Organization.

If you are the sort of person who gets your news from, say, a newspaper website, you may have little idea what NAFO is. But if you're the sort of person who has spent the last six months scouring Twitter for news about the war in Ukraine, signing up for obscure Telegram accounts and reading accounts of the latest Ukrainian strikes on Russia on blogs devoted to open-source intelligence (OSINT) … well, it's quite likely you're already a fella yourself.

For the former, let's explain. Over recent months, Ukraine-sympathetic internet users have come together to support Kyiv's war effort. The Shiba Inu is a distinctive dog breed from Japan, which for over a decade, has been a recurrent motif in internet culture. You may recognize it as a "doge," beloved of Elon Musk and millions of other internet users.

Vice's Motherboard dates the use of Shiba Inu as a "fella" fighting the war in Ukraine to May, when an artist named Kama began creating custom images of the "fellas" for those who donated money to the Georgian Legion — a volunteer military unit in Ukraine that took on board many foreigners. "Out of boredom, I started making other Fellas and imprinting them on random images from Ukraine," Kama told Motherboard earlier this summer.

The movement went on to have a landmark moment in June, when Russian diplomat Mikhail Ulyanov got into an argument with a "fella" over threats to civilians. Ulyanov, Russia's ambassador to international organizations in Vienna and a vocal advocate for Russia's position on social media, made the mistake of responding to a NAFO member.

"You pronounced this nonsense. Not Me." would become a rallying cry for NAFO (if you hadn't guessed, a play on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization). It showed that the tables could be turned on Russia, when it came to trolling. The fellas soon found they had more and more supporters in the West — just recently, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) joined the troll army.

On Tuesday, Ukraine's Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov changed his Twitter icon to an image of a dog in a suit in what he said was "a personal salute to #NAFOfellas."

This has been a trollish war. That in itself is hardly a surprise. For years, Russia has used online tactics to spread division and create diversions. Most notorious perhaps were the St. Petersburg "troll farms" used in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

It wasn't always covert. The Twitter account of Russia's Embassy in London became notorious for its meme-filled messages, often repurposed from Reddit, 4chan and other dark corners of the internet, designed to both rally support and ignite outrage. It wasn't always the most thoughtful stuff:

But it did appear to be an officially sanctioned policy. After the Guardian reported in 2017 that the tweets could have been the work of Deputy Ambassador Alexander Kramarenko, the Russian Embassy suggested that they were instead a "collaborative effort."

What's different about this time is that Russia isn't the one in charge of the trolling. Russia has largely been stuck with the turgid ideological propaganda about Ukraine (a 7,000-word essay written by Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer was an early taste of just how horrifyingly sincere Moscow's view of the conflict would be).

Meanwhile, supporters of Ukraine have rallied around groups like NAFO, while pro-Ukrainian memes have flooded the internet. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was quickly meme-ified. An online language developed, from "Rashist" (a derogatory word that combines Russian, racist and fascist) to "Tractor Troops" (the Ukrainian farmers who towed abandoned Russian heavy machinery in the early days of the war).

And the Ukrainian government has embraced it, using official websites to highlight memes and personally thanking those who spread them online. Official accounts have mocked not just Russian leaders and soldiers but its citizens, too. Footage of tourists fleeing Crimea after still-unexplained explosions last month was paired with a song by '80s pop group Bananarama and the message: "Time to head home."

The history goes back some way. Writing in Slate earlier this year, Charles Shaw, an assistant professor of Soviet history at Central European University in Vienna, argued that Ukraine was repurposing an old Soviet tactic against Russia. Kyiv was "consciously deploying laughter to define its position on the correct side of a just war, which is a playbook the Soviets used to great effect versus Nazi Germany," Shaw wrote.

It may all seem frivolous. It's anything but.

NAFO, for example, have served as fundraisers for the Ukrainian military, even raising money so Ukraine would paint their memes on a tank, artfully dubbed "Super Bonker 9000." Indirectly, the largely English-language memes have kept Western attention on Ukraine's war — attention that is vital given the importance of Western arms to Ukrainian forces.

The group has also undercut both Russia's somber justifications for the war, as well as accounts from Russian state allies that had attempted to show the conflict going in a better light than it actually was. It's noteworthy that many of NAFO's supporters come from the OSINT community.

Eliot Higgins, the founder the best-known OSINT website BellingCat, tweeted this week that he would be talking about NAFO in a conference "as an example of online communities organically responding to disinformation from governments and counterfactual communities," adding that it was "good for morale."

But there are risks to the tactic, too. The surreal nature of the memes shouldn't mask the bloody reality on the ground nor become dehumanizing, as Soviet propaganda against Germany did during World War II, according to Shaw. It's notable that the Ukraine Defense Ministry has moved to embrace NAFO the same week that it banned reporters from traveling to parts of the country, sparking speculation that a counterattack is imminent.

Is a counterattack actually happening? Ukraine's response so far has been to not answer, but to do what it knows best: Troll the Russians, once again.

1,000 Words

Taliban fighters and senior leaders gathered for a celebration at Bagram air base, once the largest American military base in Afghanistan, to mark one year since U.S. and NATO forces withdrew from the country.

Images released by Taliban media show fighters marching in Western-style uniforms, followed by columns of armored vehicles bearing the group's black-and-white flag moving down one of the main runways. Helicopters flew above the crowd. (Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post)

Talking Points

• A team of U.N. nuclear experts arrived in the city of Zaporizhzhia ahead of a visit to Ukraine's embattled nuclear power plant, the culmination of six months of painstaking international negotiations aimed at preventing a catastrophe at the facility. They are expected to visit the plant first thing Thursday morning to assess potential damage caused by recent military strikes around the facility.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin has spent his 22 years in power relentlessly hacking down the legacy of the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The two rarely met, and Gorbachev, who died Tuesday in Moscow at age 91, cautiously couched his remarks about the Russian leader, even when they weren't critical, my colleagues Robyn Dixon and Mary Ilyushina write.

• European Union countries have reached a political agreement to suspend a visa facilitation accord with Russia, making it more difficult and expensive for Russian tourists to get visas. But the move falls far short of the blanket ban some leaders are demanding.

• A U.N. report on human rights abuses in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, released late Wednesday after months of unexplained delays, concludes that China's actions "may" constitute international crimes, particularly crimes against humanity. The report by U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet came in the final minutes of her last day on the job. The review had faced criticism from both human rights advocates, who worried it would whitewash state-sponsored abuses, and Chinese officials, who insisted the investigation was politically motivated.

Viewpoints

Mikhail Gorbachev, the fundamentally Soviet man

By Masha Gessen | The New Yorker ● Read more »

The Gorbachev vacuum

By Michael Kimmage | Foreign Affairs ● Read more »

Why Gorbachev failed

By Slavoj Žižek | Compact Magazine ● Read more »

Wrong plane out

The three Afghan siblings do not know when or if they will be allowed to join their brother, a U.S. citizen, in the United States. (Ilir Tsouko for The Washington Post)

SHËNGJIN, Albania — The 21-year-old university student did not realize it at the time, but he got on the wrong plane out of Afghanistan.

How was he — or any of the other 780 Afghans approaching their first anniversary at this Albanian beach resort — to know then what they know now?

What he did know last August was that amid the Taliban's return to power and the chaos of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, an escape was an escape. An evacuation plane was an evacuation plane. A safe place was a safe place.

And it still is. Certainly here, on the gentle, sun-drenched coast of the Adriatic Sea, in a tiny European nation more than 2,600 miles from home where — unlike many larger ones — the government and community, welcomed the Afghans with open arms. But a year after the valiant efforts of so many helped tens of thousands of Afghans escape their country as their government collapsed, many other things have become clear.

For one, an evacuation was not necessarily a path to refuge in the United States, as many expected. And it may never be for thousands of evacuees whom the government estimates boarded chartered flights in their escape and landed in other countries like Albania, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Mexico, Greece and Uzbekistan.

The Biden administration, which faced intense criticism for the way it ended the U.S. war in Afghanistan and failed to evacuate many of its Afghan allies, says it never promised to provide refuge for everyone. That response does not sit well with evacuees and their supporters who note that President Biden said the United States would not leave its Afghan allies behind.

The most important factor in determining which Afghan evacuees found quick paths to the United States was not the strength of their U.S. connections. It was whether they made it onto what government officials call a "gray tail" — a U.S. military aircraft — vs. a "white tail" — a commercial or chartered aircraft; a normal airplane.

More than 76,000 Afghans ultimately landed on U.S. military bases abroad last fall, and were transferred onward to the United States for resettlement, in an effort the administration named "Operation Allies Welcome."

Most of those Afghans who boarded "white tails" did not land on U.S. bases. They landed in other countries. It was the opening act of a year-long bureaucratic mess that is only now moving toward a resolution — for some. – Abigail Hauslohner