My hot take: Ukraine’s Maidan was a pretty standard pro-democratic revolution for Central/Eastern Europe.

Similar revolts led to democracy fully prevailing in other countries — and didn’t lead to wars and mass devastation.

Do you know why? One word: Russia.
1/ When pro-democracy movements swept Central/Eastern Europe in the 1980s/1990s, Soviet Union was in decline and then Russia was deep in internal crises.

So these nations could peacefully sort their politics out and transition into western democracies.

Ukraine wasn’t so lucky.
2/

I know some are getting tired of the Russians at War movie scandal at @TIFF_NET

I get it.

I don’t like canceling stuff — especially when there are more practical ways to help Ukraine (like helping its armed forces).

But this is an exception.
This is a teachable moment.
🧵 The backlash against the funding and promotion of Trofimova’s Russians at War movie by Canadian institutions is not caused by hurt feelings or anti-Ru censorship.

It’s caused by western institutions getting easily exploited by Russian propaganda campaigns — which has to stop.
2/

Why is Russia trying to murder Ukraine’s towns?

Seeing the fate of Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Maryinka and other towns makes you wonder: why would anyone kill a city? Isn’t occupation enough for Moscow?

The answer also holds the key to understanding Russia's logic of this war.

🧵1/ Killing a city is a lot of work that leaves you with an absurd result: a blank space on the map. Nothing in place of something.

So much discipline, intention and overtime work just to bleach a limited land area. This begs the question: Why?

Slavenka Drakulić had the answer.
2/

A Maidan memory unlocked.

When the protests were just starting as student movements, we would tie blue-yellow ribbons on our backpacks and coats to be more visible and promote our cause everywhere in Kyiv.

The police figured it out and started targeting us one by one.
1/6 The following week, numerous videos of police harassing people on the streets and even picking them from public transport popped up.

With the unleashed violence, the pro-Yanukovych minority and undercover cops caught up: people got attacked for wearing ribbons.
2/6

The anatomy of shilling for Russia or how to spot the wordings of a Russian asset/useful idiot.

Let’s unpack Simon Jenkins’ @guardian outcry about NATO escalation to see how specific wordings expose a Russian propaganda asset.

These wordings go beyond just Simon.

A thread.
1/9 Simon says Germany sending Taurus is a “risky escalation”.
It’s not.

The UK and France already sent similar long-range systems, even the US sent a bit of their ATACMS.

Taurus would help Ukraine a lot. But it’s not a game changer or a new development.
2/9

For the 2nd anniversary of the Russian invasion, 3 big Russian opposition media held a joint crowdfunding to help Ukrainians affected by the invasion.

The readers, mostly exiled Russian liberals, were not happy.

Here are some of their replies with English translations.

1/6🧵 The original tweet explicitly told these funds were not going for the Ukraine’s Armed Forces, but to the civilian population.

(If you ask me, the most cost-effective anti-regime donation a Russian person can make IS to the UAF, but okay)

That didn’t matter.
2/6

A few words about @mashagessen's piece for @NewYorker talking about the "democracy in darkness in Ukraine" – mainly about the criticism it is getting from many Ukrainians.

Why are we angry and frustrated with this piece?
1/9 For starters, it's so tiresome to see big media outlets employing a Russian citizen – with unavoidable imperial biases and misconceptions about Ukraine – to explain Ukraine to the western world.

In 20-freaking-24.

The power dynamic of this reporting is just wrong.
2/

Russia invests heavily into a specific conspiracy claiming that Ukraine and Russia were on the brink of a peace deal in April 2022, but those efforts were stalled by the West.

I believe Kremlin will export this lie as its central propaganda narrative.

A short thread
1/11 Russia propaganda machine continuously tests various ideas and narratives to find potent lies that perform better at hijacking foreign discussions.

Kremlin’s international propaganda effort is much more consolidated and efficient than most people imagine.
2/

Weirdly, 2022 felt more hopeful for many Ukrainians than early 2024.

Sure, the whole country went from peaceful life to an all-out invasion in 2022.

Sure, we almost lost Kyiv and our country in general.

But 2022 had something 2024 doesn't: hope for a radical change.
1/10 Now, I want to emphasize that 2022 was definitely the worst year in the lives of the absolute majority of Ukrainians.

One day we lived our lives, the next day everything we had and everyone we loved were in grave danger.

Nothing compares to this level of existential dread.
2/

On a more serious note, Ukrainians didn’t just decide not to work with the Russian opposition out of spite.

We see their work, we know their impact — and we can clearly see it brings close to zero impact on Ukraine’s victory, our only cause.

Let me break it down for you.
1/6 If you look at the pro-cooperation arguments provided in that Politico piece, you’ll notice that Russians usually repeat the same points:

- Help us do anti-propaganda in Russia (“Give us funding to do polls and print Navalny posters”)
- Undo the Visa/Mastercard sanctions
2/6

A lesser known page of the Russo-Ukrainian war is the story of how a bunch of Ukrainian digital pros launched a *massive* info campaign in Feb/March 2022 to penetrate Russian propaganda and reach ordinary Russians.

It’s time you should know this story (and learn from it).

1/19 First, some background.

As Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border on Feb 24, Russian official position was to deny everything.

Russian TV said there was no war (hence “special military operation”) or that Ukraine was bombing itself.

An iron curtain was on.
2/

I recently realized I want two things for my country more than anything else:

1. Victory & justice in our resistance against Russia
2. Witnessing Ukraine become a member of the European Union

Not many people understand why the second point is so important.

Let me explain 🧵
1/

https://twitter.com/vonderleyen/status/1722214622957301915

I was born in mid-1990s in Kyiv.

My family always wanted Ukraine to be democratic, free and become a member of the European family. I absorbed this emotion early on.

There was always this feeling that we were violently torn away from the rest of Europe by Russia.
2/

As a Ukrainian person looking at everything that’s been happening in the world lately, here’s what I really, REALLY need people living in liberal democracies to understand as soon as possible.

This isn’t a pleasant conversation.

A thread.
1/ You can’t afford to take democracy for granted.

It may feel like your countries’ democratic institutions have been there forever — but that’s just because you were born after generations of your compatriots had given their lives to defend and develop these institutions.
2/

Last week a small Russian media outlet posted a guide on how to get rid of imperialistic thinking.

It mentioned basic stuff like "avoid addressing all people in Russian" and "respect indigenous people’s culture"

Let me walk you into the heart of darkness aka the replies.
1/9 First, some context.

Komi Daily is from the Komi Republic, a Northern region of Russia with an indigenous population of Komi people who speak one of the Uralic languages.

Russians have colonized the exploited the region extensively since the 19th century.

2/9

Exactly 9 years ago, I rushed to my dad with the news I just saw: passenger flight #MH17 got hit in the Russia-occupied part of eastern Ukraine.

Dad went silent and then said, “At least now the world will stop Putin.”

It didn’t. But let me walk you through some context.

1/15 In July 2014, Ukrainians had just gone through Maidan, had a new democratically elected government, but also had gotten the first taste of Russian invasion: Crimea was occupied in late February and Russia actively fought in Eastern Ukraine.

2/15

Lately, I’ve been very critical of how some western media outlets cover Ukraine‘s counteroffensive.

There’s a pattern of narratives that are just poor, harmful reporting — based on wrong expectations, failing the reader, and needlessly hurting Ukraine. No, the counteroffensive is not failing. It was never supposed to be a victory march — it’s a complex nonlinear process that requires time.

Every military expert with combat experience knows that.

Your expectations were wrong, and you shouldn’t project them onto your reporting

Up until fairly recently, I used to be okay with the term “post-Soviet state.” Not anymore.

Let me try to explain my previous thinking.

Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union for 70 years (50 years for western regions).

The legacy of Soviet institutions is still alive.
1/9 Whenever I visit Eastern European countries that had Soviet or socialist history, I can instantly feel the shared context.

Our streets and buildings look familiar.

Our elderly people seem very alike.

Our economic and social contexts have similar pre-1991 roots.
2/9

So I would like to clarify another extremely important detail that I feel this thread didn’t communicate properly.

Singling out and discriminating ethnic Russians or Russian-speaking people in former colonies is just not a real thing. It never was.

1/10

https://twitter.com/thestanislawski/status/1655963946111877121

In Ukraine, ethnic Russians are so intertwined with ethnic Ukrainians that nobody really knows their ethnicity for sure.

There are signs like Russian surnames or family origins, but people absolutely don’t give a crap about these things — and never did.

2/10

I noticed that a lot of people from Western democracies with imperial past don’t get that ethnic Russians living in Ukraine (especially Crimea), the Baltics, Caucasus are not indigenous ethnic minorities.

They are mostly Russia’s colonial settlers.
1/10 Russians in Crimea and the Baltics often moved into the houses of recently deported indigenous owners.

Russians across ex-colonies have enjoyed all the privileges of a colonizer nation for centuries — they aren’t an oppressed population in any common sense of this term.
2/10

It’s hard to articulate the depth of Russia’s imperial influence in Ukraine, and how important it is for us to finally remove this legacy from our social fabric.

So I have a personal story about one of my childhood’s favorite streets in Kyiv and its ever-changing name.

A thread As a kid growing up in the 2000s in Kyiv, I used to spend a lot of time around one street in central Kyiv..

It was a wide street with 19th-century “sadybas”, a modernist “flying-saucer” building, and a recently built Megamarket store that sold Dr. Pepper in the mid-2000s.

Hey everyone,

I’ve gathered up a thread of threads with some of the highlights of @uaexplainers and my personal threads that I believe deserve a read.

I will keep updating it from time to time. The story of my family transforming from Ukr-speaking farmers to Ru-speaking Kyivites throughout the XX century.

My story is not unique – it reflects the cross-generational russification of millions of Ukrainian families in the last hundred years.

https://twitter.com/TheStanislawski/status/1520421209355296768?s=20