G4 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 6 , 2022
“Gen Z doesn’t consume media
the way that people that came
before did. They live in Roblox,” he
said, referring to a popular gam-
ing platform, “and they’re going
to pay more attention and even
evaluate something more as the
truth if it’s part of worlds like
that.”
What’s more, doing it this way
can evade Russian censors. The
country’s officials have blocked a
lot of content about the invasion
on traditional media and required
that the war be called a “special
military operation”; it e ven
banned some social media out-
right.
But the Reface app and its anti-
war messaging remained avail-
able last week on both Google Play
and the Apple App Store, and the
push notifications had been sent
to Russian users 2 million times
(out of 9 million globally).
Bad reviews have already be-
gun trickling into the app stores
from Russian users. It is a pitfall of
sorts in a new metaverse world in
which immersive content may not
be as easily refuted, but the entire
product itself can be denigrated.
Shvets, though, said such troll-
ing efforts may not catch on the
way its practitioners hope.
“There are people who are go-
ing to use these tools to fight the
truth,” Shvets said. “But others
will see this and it will motivate
them even more to go out in the
streets and protest.
“When you reach people where
they’ve living,” he added, “they are
going to react.”Immersive technology is also
being used as the war unfolds to
convey more explicit pro-Ukraine
political messages.
Reface, a popular Kyiv-based
app that uses AI to enable the
playful prospect of putting users’
faces on the video bodies of fa-
mous people, has set about re-
making its cutting-edge app as a
kind of Ukrainian-war messaging
tool.
The company has water-
marked every image of users’ face-
swapping with “Stand With
Ukraine” messaging; showed
Kyiv war images on its start
screen; and even sent push notifi-
cations to users decrying Russian
aggression.
The company’s founder, Dima
Shvets, says such reality-distort-
ing apps as Reface are a way for
users to absorb messages they
might otherwise tune out. People
have their guards up with politi-
cal news on those platforms, he
said. But they lower them for an
immersive experience like face-
swapping.
“To be frank, if you give people
the truth on Facebook or in tradi-
tional media, they don’t always
see it,” he said by phone from Kyiv,
where he had begun working
from home after closing the com-
pany’s newly completed offices.
“But when you’re having fun play-
ing around in this world, it reach-
es you in a different way.”
Shvets said he believed meth-
ods like this will be increasingly
necessary for a new generation of
digital citizens.people to understand what it’s
like to be a victim of the Russian
political system. A lot of people
don’t really know what that’s like,”
Furman said.
Furman and his wife were in
their apartment in Kyiv in late
February when a car was leaving
for the western city of Ivano-
Frankivsk, farther from the war’s
likely front. He secured spots for
them and set about figuring out
what to take, because there was
only room for each to bring one
backpack. He had to leave his
camera behind.
They arrived in Ivano-
Frankivsk after a 28-hour drive.
(It normally takes seven.) Furman
and his wife h oled up in an apart-
ment with a half-dozen friends.
During a talk with a reporter at 11
p.m. Monday, an air-raid siren
went off, and he had to hang up so
he could pack in with everyone
else inside a windowless bath-
room.
“This would be very meaning-
ful to people if they could experi-
ence it in VR,” he said when he got
back on the phone a short time
later after the all-clear siren had
sounded.
Furman said metaverse con-
tent can convey war’s difficult
choices in a way social media and
other traditional content could
not. His mother, for instance,
stayed behind in Kyiv, unwilling
to leave the land she’d lived on for
so many decades.
Imagine, he said, looking at her
and watching her stay. Or being
her and watching your son go.that is very suited to war because
VR and AR can convey war’s di-
lemmas like nothing else,” said
Alexey Furman, a Kyiv resident.
“What do you feel when the sirens
go off? What does it feel like when
you have to flee?”
Furman would know — he’s
spent years building a kind of
Ukrainian crisis metaverse. A de-
signer and producer who studied
at the University of Missouri, Fur-
man four years ago helped create
“Aftermath VR: Euromaidan,” a
spare, haunting VR experience of
Ukraine’s 2014 revolution over-
throwing pro-Russian President
Viktor Yanukovych that went on
to win awards at VR festivals
around the world. He recently
completed a demo of a “simula-
tor” of the country’s war in the
eastern Donbas region.
And in 2020, he and several
partners produced “Prisoners-
Voice,” which re-created the jour-
ney in augmented reality of Oleg
Sentsov, Oleksandr Kolchenko
and Volodymyr Balukh — three
activists jailed by Russia for five
years after the annexation of
Crimea in 2014.
Furman drew on the interviews
he conducted with the three, com-
bining their voices with images of
the Russian security apparatus
for a phone-based experience that
is far more three-dimensional and
lifelike than a traditional video.
The experience is available as an
app on major app stores — includ-
ing, at least as of last week, in
Russia.
“I think it’s an effective way forend, its title page on gamer plat-
form Steam became an impromp-
tu group therapy session and an-
ger outlet.
“This is for Ukrainians. Putin
go to the hell,” a user named
Noobly wrote.
“I just heard on the news that
Russia has started a war. This is
what came to my mind,” said user
Littlesoda. “Of course, it cannot be
compared with reality, but this
game allows us to experience the
horrors of war, even a little.”
It also became a venue for Rus-
sian backlash.
While there were overwhelm-
ingly strong reviews on many lan-
guage pages, thumbs-down takes
filled the Russian-language re-
views from the past week, with
references to “Ukrainian fascists”
and other anti-Kyiv epithets.
Miechowski believes it is less a
coordinated attempt than a peek
into a world shielded from accu-
rate news.
The social web of Twitter and
Facebook is well established as a
place of community, information
and, of course, outrage. But new
immersive technologies hint at
how we might come to connect
with war in the decade ahead. If
for much of the 20th century
radio and television piped war’s
horrors into our living rooms, and
this century has seen social media
posts and video clips bring them
to our pockets, these new technol-
ogies will wire them directly into
our minds.
“There’s something about vir-
tual reality and augmented realitya younger generation is increas-
ingly turning to explain the war.
“I think if it makes people un-
derstand what’s happening on the
other side of the border, that’s all
we’re trying to do,” Pawel
Miechowski, head of communica-
tions for 11 Bit, said from his office
in Warsaw.
“This War of Mine” is rare:
Unlike “Call of Duty” and other
battle games, it takes the perspec-
tive not of combatants but of civil-
ians left to absorb the collateral
damage. (“In war, not everyone is
a soldier,” reads the tagline.)
The immersive efforts are at
present still a scrappy and frag-
mented undertaking. But taken as
a whole, they hint at a new and
possibly more effective way to
influence public opinion; such
sites could even eventually be-
come another front in the infor-
mation wars.
Miechowski said 11 Bit has seen
sales of the game soar 2,500 per-
cent since the invasion began in
February. The company planned
to donate all profits from sales
through at least last Thursday to
the Red Cross’s Ukrainian relief
efforts. In just the first four days,
that profit figure totaled $715,000
— a massive sum for a game that
generates just a few dollars of
profit per unit and came out some
eight years ago.
Maybe more important, “This
War of Mine” has become a kind of
communal force. As Russian
bombings intensified last week-
METAVERSE FROM G1
In 21st century, getting perspective on war in a video game
guaranteeing his predecessor’s
wealth and safety. That after all is
very much how Putin succeeded
Yeltsin in 1999 after the eco-
nomic and military disasters of
the 1990s.
Replacing Putin raises a huge
question, which did not exist in- Members of the elite aim-
ing to remove Putin would need
to be confident that if they did
this and agreed to withdraw from
Ukraine, most Western sanctions
would be lifted. Otherwise they
would inherit a continuing eco-
nomic disaster that would crip-
ple their rule as it had his.
Given the attitudes of the Rus-
sian elites, army and indeed pub-
lic, such a promise of withdrawal
is extremely unlikely to include
Crimea and the separatist repub-
lics of the Donbas. Their loss
would be a political blow that
would also cripple any new Rus-
sian regime. Failing a compro-
mise over these territories, there-
fore, it will be vastly more diffi-
cult both for Ukraine and Russia
to escape this war, and for Russia
to escape rule by some version of
the present regime.
Anatol Lieven is a senior fellow at the
Quincy Institute for Responsible
Statecraft and author of “Ukraine
and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry.”intellectuals. They have no col-
lective identity and no collective
institutions. It would be very
difficult for them to generate
such pressure on the inner circle,
unless public unrest had become
very great.
The most likely scenario, it
seems to me, is a sort of semi-
coup, most of which will never
become apparent in public, by
which Putin and his immediate
associates will step down “volun-
tarily” in return for guarantees of
their personal immunity from
arrest and their family’s wealth.
Who would succeed as president
in these circumstances is a total-
ly open question.
This is pure speculation, but I
have begun to wonder whether
just possibly the invasion of
Ukraine might be tied in with
Putin’s own intention to resign in
(or before) 2024, when his pre-
sent presidential term expires.
If the invasion of Ukraine had
been a success, Putin could de-
part in a blaze of glory as a
Russian national hero, bequeath-
ing some of that glory to a chosen
successor. If it failed, he could
save his regime by resigning in
favor of a successor from outside
the inner circle who could shuffle
off blame for the failure onto his
predecessor — while of courserate and disunited bunch of busi-
ness executives, state officials,
local political bosses opportunis-
tically grouped in the United
Russia Party and even to some
extent loyal media figures andnotably those responsible for fi-
nance and the economy.
That means that intense pres-
sure would have to be brought to
bear by the Russian elites in
general. These are a very dispa-today that has the power or
authority to take such a collective
step. Even the prime minister,
Mikhail Mishustin, is not part of
Putin’s inner core, nor are most
of the ministers, including mosttaking key areas of Ukraine
quickly and with minimal civil-
ian casualties. Even more impor-
tantly, Western economic retalia-
tion has been much stronger and
more united than Putin and his
staff seem to have expected.
Credible estimates suggest he
Russian economy could decline
by 7 percent in the coming year;
if the war goes on, Russian casu-
alties could mount into the tens
of thousands. Even if, as widely
expected, the government de-
clares a state of emergency,
there’s bound to be greatly in-
creased public discontent, lead-
ing to greatly intensified state
repression.
Crowds are unlikely to storm
the Kremlin, but sufficient public
unrest and mounting bloodshed
could lead senior officials to
“persuade” Putin that it’s time to
go.
The West is hoping to under-
mine the regime through specific
measures aimed at Russian “oli-
garchs” with wealth and proper-
ty abroad. Deep anxiety among
Russian business elites is already
apparent, despite their being
called in by Putin to be lectured
— and implicitly threatened — on
the need for loyalty to the state in
wartime.
Lukoil, headed by Vagit Alek-
perov, has already called for
peace. However, to use the term
“oligarch” for such people dem-
onstrates a misunderstanding of
the Russian elites under Putin
and of the degree to which pres-
sure on business can directly
influence the regime.
This is no longer the 1990s,
when wealthy business owners
dominated the Yeltsin regime.
Under Putin, those former “oli-
garchs” who have pledged loyalty
to him have been allowed to keep
their wealth (until now), but they
have no political power. That is
exercised by a narrow circle of
top officials and former officials
appointed by Putin to control key
parts of the energy sector. These
men are drawn mainly from the
former KGB. They have great
wealth, but their primary loyalty
is to Putin and the state.
This circle has gotten narrow-
er and narrower over the years
and more completely dependent
on access to Putin, until the men
with any degree of real power
may now number barely half a
dozen. This tendency has been
increased by Putin’s isolation as a
result of the pandemic, so vividly
illustrated by the bizarre pictures
of him sitting at a huge table
literally dozens of feet away from
his ministers.
These men — like Defense
Minister Sergei Shoigu, domestic
internal security chief Nikolai
Patrushev and Igor Sechin, a
former KGB officer and deputy
prime minister who now heads
the Rosneft oil company — are so
close to Putin, and in most cases
so deeply implicated in the inva-
sion of Ukraine, that it is difficult
to see how they could revolt
against the president.
And unlike the Soviet Politbu-
ro that removed Nikita Khrush-
chev as Soviet leader in 1964,
there is no institution in Russia
OLIGARCHS FROM G1
Russian oligarchs lack the power, inclination to stop Putin
THEO GIACOMETTI/BLOOMBERG NEWS
ABOVE: The superyacht Amore Vero, owned by a firm whose top shareholder is Rosneft oil chief Igor Sechin, is impounded Friday in La Ciotat, France, under E.U. sanctions
on Russia. BELOW: Outgoing Russian President Boris Yeltsin, right, greets Vladimir Putin, then prime minister and acting president, in 1999. Rich business owners domi -
nated the Yeltsin regime in the ’90s. Under Putin, those former “oligarchs” who pledged loyalty to him have been allowed to keep their wealth but have no political power.TASS/GETTY IMAGES