A Surge of Unifying Moral Outrage Over Russia’s War
Ukrainians take to social media, and taboos are tumbling as countries abandon neutrality and people abandon indifference to support their cause.
PARIS — The man the Kremlin holds in dismissive contempt, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, has emerged as an online hero. His Twitter account has leapt by hundreds of thousands of followers a day (he now has 4.3 million). Often dressed in olive-green fleece and cargo pants, he has accused Russia of war crimes, signed a formal application to join the European Union, and morphed into a symbol of hope and grace under pressure.
As Russia pursues its ruthless invasion, Mr. Zelensky has used social media adroitly to outmaneuver his nemesis, President Vladimir V. Putin. So, too, have many of the 44 million citizens of Ukraine. TikTok, the video-sharing app with more than a billion active users, has shaped views of the conflict and contributed to an intense wave of global sympathy for Ukraine. Call it Resistance 4.0, the influencers’ war against an unprovoked Russian invasion.
Mr. Putin’s assault against a phantom “genocide” in Ukraine meets the nimbleness, even the humor, of a people unified and galvanized by the Russian leader’s obsessive talk of their nonexistence as a nation. The Russian leader also claims the war is nonexistent and is in fact “a special military operation.”
Technology, blamed of late for every ill from the death of truth to the spread of loneliness, restores feeling and revives human connection as the war unfolds. Brave civilians brandishing newly acquired rifles against armored divisions cannot leave the onlooker cold.
“I don’t really have any choice because this is my home,” Hlib Bondarenko, a computer programmer who has lined up for his weapon in Kyiv, tells The New York Times in a video. This is not the remote, clinical war of drones and satellites. It poses perhaps the most acute moral question of war, especially one pitting the weak and righteous against Goliath: What would I do?
The answer appears to be: something, at least. Protest marches have unfurled under blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags across Europe and the United States, from Chicago to Warsaw, from Berlin to New York. Ukrainians living abroad have lined up to return home and fight. As with the Spanish Civil War, when volunteers flocked to support the left-leaning government against a military rebellion, the conscience of Europe has stirred. Taboos have tumbled.
Swedish and Finnish and Swiss neutrality has evaporated. Postwar Germany’s refusal to prioritize military spending and send arms to conflict zones has ended. A united 27-nation European Union has decided, for the first time, to provide Ukraine with more than half-a-billion dollars in aid for lethal weapons. The outright collapse of the Russian economy is declared an objective by the French economy minister.