G4 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022
wouldn’t it?
A: I believe 90 percent of people
in Russia who think like victims
just stick to their broad
ideological coordinates. They
don’t change their thinking that’s
been so ingrained just because
life is harder. They don’t connect
the two.Q: Or they blame the West.
A: Yes, this is what Putin is doing
with the “sanctions are an act of
war” comments. He’s connecting
people’s hardship with the larger
narrative of the invasion, which is
itself the larger narrative of
victimhood and the destruction
of the Russian way of life.Q: And that’s why the idea that
harsh economic sanctions will
make ordinary Russians call for
an end to the war may be a fallacy.
A: Absolutely. What a lot of
people may want in tough times is
the opposite: They want a display
of strength against the West.
That’s what Putin and state media
are all ready to serve up to them.Q: So how do they do that? Is
Russian state media — are nightly
programs on Vesti — filled with
bombed-out Ukrainian
apartment buildings?
A: No, there’s not really any of
that. They’re showing the
attacking of military bases; that’s
how they project strength. When
you see Ukrainian civilians, it’s
Russian soldiers helping elderly
people, if they can somehow
manage footage like that. It shows
how they’re helping Ukrainians
against the great threat of the
West.Q: Which is also part of the
“reunification” narrative.
A: It fits very nicely into that.
Reunify the people and save them
from the “Nazi” government that
is an instrument of the West. And
that’s maybe when you’d see some
bombed-out apartment
buildings.Q: Why would Ukrainians be
bombing their own apartment
buildings?
A: It’s NATO.Q: NATO isn’t attacking Ukraine.
A: Does that matter?Like you said, it’s not like the U.S.
or Europe has done much to
really feed this narrative.
A: It’s true, the Russian media has
been totally shadowboxing for
years; no one was fighting back.
But that doesn’t really matter. If
you ingrain this message of
victimhood so completely, what it
does is when there’s any kind of
[President Vladimir] Putin
aggressive action, as there is now,
a lot of people in Russia don’t see
it as aggressive — they just see it
as standing up for their way of
life. That’s why the nuclear threat
computes.Q: Because it’s not viewed as
much as saber-rattling as “look at
what you made me do.”
A: Exactly. “We don’t want to take
the nuclear option. But what
choice do we have? You tried to
destroy our way of life.”Q: How broadly does this apply in
Russian society, in your research?
Many Americans have the feeling,
perhaps naive, that there’s a
generational split here. An older
audience that remembers the
Cold War and is more likely to
watch state TV may think this
way. But a younger generation
that doesn’t remember it and is
also tech-savvy won’t. Technology
and the until-recently open
Internet must have some role to
play here, no?
A: I think that depends on the
level of willful agency people
have. For some younger Russians,
yes. But it’s getting so much
harder to get this information.
You have to take action. There is
[independent online news
service] Meduza, which is based
abroad, and Bellingcat and the
other leaks about the war. But you
have to know where to look; you
can’t go to any old site. You have
to know how to work a VPN,
which a lot of people don’t. Or
they’re afraid to. People used to
just turn on [liberal radio station]
Echo of Moscow or [independent
TV station] TV Rain. And nowQ: You’ve been very vocal in your
work that there’s been a whole
narrative about America playing
out in Russian media that most
Americans aren’t aware of. What
exactly has been happening?
A: I don’t think Americans fully
understand what’s been fed to
Russians about the U.S. and the
West for literally the past decade.
It’s been an information war — a
totally one-sided information war
— and it has been waged so fully
and artfully that it’s made a lot of
what’s happening now
preemptively possible. What this
information war boils down to is
this: “The West is completely
against us and trying to stifle and
destroy our way of life.” It’s a
simple message. But people are
told this over and over, in so many
different ways.
Q: Like how?
A: The Western sanctions back in
2014 over the war in the Donbas?
An attempt to destroy the Russian
way of life. The backlash to the
Russian disinformation campaign
in the 2016 U.S. election? An
attempt to destroy the Russian
way of life. Russian-doping
punishments at the Olympics?
Same thing. You name it, if it has
involved Russia and the West, it
was the West trying to destroy the
Russian way of life. When in
reality, of course, most Americans
don’t typically spend much time
thinking about Russia at all.
Q: And Trump fits neatly into this
—
A: Trump fits neatly into this
because Trump was the one
American leader who wasn’t
trying to destroy the Russian way
of life.
Q: And in their eyes that’s what
caused the U.S. backlash to him.
A: That was the one and only
reason.
Q: What effect does this have?
DISINFORMATION FROM G1
Russian media has been
‘shadowboxing for years’
Volkov. Or other dissidents.
A: YouTube is problematic for
Putin because it works both ways;
[Russian censorship agency]
Roskomnadzor can’t just cut it off.
Because you have the Navalny
channel, but you also have a lot of
very popular Russian
propagandists that the
government would like to hold
onto to reach younger people.
And of course they can’t just
remove one channel; once they
allow it, they have to let it all in. So
for now they’ve decided to do that.Q: So the idea of creating a full
media blackout isn’t so simple.
A: I do agree this information
whack-a-mole is a losing game.
Shutting down one informational
sphere causes it to pop up
somewhere else. But it does make
things harder each time. Russia
will never become North Korea.
But it’s getting closer to it.Q: Does this “fill the news desert
with propaganda” approach
work if people don’t have bread
to eat, or their nephews aren’t
coming home from battle? That
would dwarf anything NATO is
supposedly trying to do,propaganda has been working.
But for those it doesn’t, this
makes independent news that
much harder to get.Q: Where do tech companies fit
into this? So many platforms,
from Facebook to Twitter, have
been cut off. But YouTube, for
example, stays on. Can that help
get independent media through?
Alexei Navalny’s channel, for
instance, now run by Leonidthey’re shut down or
preemptively closed because of
the new censorship law.Q: But isn’t that a sign that the
information war is not working?
If you’re such good propagandists,
you shouldn’t need to shut down
independent outlets — your
propaganda should just counter
it, shouldn’t it?
A: I think it’s just about plugging
all the holes in the boat. TheAGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
A closed on-air studio at Echo of Moscow radio in Moscow on March 3. The broadcaster and other
independent voices have been shut or preemptively closed, says filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin, below.THIRD PARTY FILMSBY JEANNE WHALENUntil a few weeks ago, Jacob
Udodov’s software start-up was a
symbol of Eastern Europe’s prom-
ising tech economy.
From his base in Latvia, he built
a team of developers in Ukraine
and Russia who proved that the
tech industry can work seamlessly
across borders, Udodov said, “not
tied to any location.”
That all changed at 8 a.m. on
Feb. 24, when his wife shook him
awake to say that Russian bombs
were raining down on Ukraine.
Udodov quickly opened his
company’s group chat and urged
his Ukrainian programmers to
head west to the safest location.
“My employees sent me a map
of the aerial bombardment,”
Udodov recalled in a recent inter-
view. It showed strikes all across
the country, from Lviv to Kharkiv.
“They sent me this map and said,
‘There is no safe destination in
Ukraine.’ ”
M ore than a month later, the
Ukrainian employees of his start-
up, Bordio, are taking cover in
bomb shelters, struggling with
power and Internet cuts and say-
ing goodbye to family members as
the civilian population scatters to
escape Russian troops.
Two of Bordio’s Russian pro-
grammers have fled their country
in alarm over Russia’s military ac-
tion and the government’s in-
creasing descent into authoritari-
anism, while the ones remaining
in Russia are struggling to receive
their paychecks amid Western
banking sanctions.
Udodov, an ethnic Russian born
and raised in Latvia, is desperately
attempting to hold it all together.
“Today, we have six employees
stuck in a country where there is
war,” he said. “They can’t work
productively, nor leave the coun-
try. As an employer, I can’t fire
them, because it would be a disas-
ter for them.... There is no other
solution but to wait until the war is
over.”
Bordio’s troubles are just one
example of how Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine is threatening the digi-
tal modernity that had taken root
across much of the former Soviet
Union. In the years since the
U.S.S.R. dissolved in 1991, the In-
ternet had become a glue that
helped bind countries and people
who might otherwise be divided
by political tensions. Even in Rus-
sia, despite a years-long creep
toward authoritarianism, young
people had become accustomed to
connecting with the outside world
via Facebook, Instagram and oth-
er Western apps.
The digital renaissance helped
some of the world’s best program-
mers rise above their countries’
troubled economies and find pro-
ductive work at salaries far above
what they would otherwise earn.
There are more than a million
information technology profes-
sionals in Russia, Ukraine and
Belarus, about a quarter of whom
work for outsourcing firms that
serve clients outside the region,
according to Gartner, a research
and consulting company.
Much of this digital network is
now fracturing as Russia shuts
down access to Western social me-
dia and news sites, and pummels
its neighbor with a relentless
bombing campaign. In interviews
with The Washington Post, Bor-
dio’s employees recounted the tu-
mult and anguish the conflict has
brought to their previously settled
lives.
Vitaliy, a Bordio software de-
signer in Ukraine’s Kherson re-
gion, was attempting to work one
recent Thursday afternoon with
no electricity or Internet. In recent
days, two Russian helicopters had
been shot out of the sky near his
small town on the Black Sea, and a
loud explosion was close enough
to cause his empty bed to jump in
the air, the 29-year-old said in a
telephone interview.
For the first few days of the war,
he and his girlfriend slept in their
clothes in case they needed to flee.
At first, Russian forces mostly
rushed past their town, Skadovsk,
on their way to the nearby city of
Kherson, a major battleground.
But then in mid-March, Russian
soldiers with a “huge amount of
equipment” drove into Skadovsk
and took over several seaside
camps normally used for children
in the summertime, said Vitaliy,
who asked that he be identified
only by his first name out of con-
cern for his safety.
“They were attempting to scare
people by firing in the air yester-
day,” he said. Russian forces also
kidnapped the local mayor and his
deputy; they later released the
mayor but not the deputy, Mayor
Oleksandr Yakovlev said in a Face-
book video.
Vitaliy and his girlfriend don’t
have access to an underground
bomb shelter, so when they hear
explosions, they take cover in an
interior room in their home, away
from the windows. Dairy products
and canned goods are disappear-
ing from local shops, and all the
escape routes out of town areblocked by Russian forces.
Vitaliy said he’s trying to work
offline, quickly uploading his
progress when the Internet sput-
ters back to life. But overall, “I
don’t even know what to do,” he
said. “I am sincerely afraid for
myself and my loved ones. It’s not
normal in the 21st century that
people run around and shoot each
other with machine guns.”
His colleague, 32-year-old An-
astasiia Kvitka, tried to stay in her
home in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine,
during the first days of the war but
grew increasingly alarmed as Rus-
sian tanks and forces advanced.
Then Russian shelling hit a nearby
nuclear power plant, causing it to
catch fire.
“It was absolutely terrifying, so
I went to Dnipro,” a city about 90
minutes north, she said. She and
her husband left a key with a
neighbor and took only their es-
sential belongings and their cat.
They were lucky to find a tem-
porary apartment through friends
and have been able to settle in and
get some work done, but there are
still aerial bombardments in Dni-
pro that force them to run to a
bomb shelter. The Internet often
cuts out, she said.
Kvitka also worries about her
parents, who chose to stay behind
in Zaporizhzhia.
“They don’t know how to leave
their life,” she said. “They have
animals. They are afraid to go.”Udodov is himself a mix of sev-
eral Eastern European cultures.
He is a Latvian citizen born in Riga
to ethnically Russian parents, and
he spent part of his childhood in
Belarus, where his father started a
business selling cakes. He re-
turned to Latvia at age 11 and went
to high school in Riga before start-
ing his first company, a digital
marketing agency. In 2019 he
founded Bordio, which makes
software for team collaboration
and project management.
As he hired developers, he
looked to Russia and Ukraine be-
cause top-notch programmers
there command lower salaries
than their counterparts in the Eu-
ropean Union.
The multiethnic team he built
was cohesive, he said. In the first
days of the war, his Russian em-
ployees in the group chat told the
Ukrainians that “they are so sorry
and ashamed for the actions of
their country.... It was obvious
that in our company no one sup-
ported the Russian invasion,”
Udodov said.
Western sanctions have made it
harder for Bordio to pay its em-
ployees remaining in Russia,
Udodov said. In early March, he
struggled to find a Western bank
that would transfer funds to the
Russians’ bank accounts. He final-
ly found one that was willing after
he provided paperwork showing
that the transfers were allowable,but he’s not sure it will work again
in April, he said.
Two of Bordio’s Russian em-
ployees chose to flee the country
because of the war, Udodov said —
one to Georgia and the other to the
United Kingdom. Only the one in
Georgia agreed to speak with a
reporter as long as his last name
wasn’t published.
Aleksandr, a 27-year-old from
Moscow who asked to be identi-
fied only by his first name out of
fear of reprisal, said it was just
coincidence that he and his wife
were traveling to Georgia on vaca-
tion the day the invasion began.
They quickly decided to remain
there indefinitely, he said in an
interview.
They spent the first few days of
the war in a hotel in the capital,
Tbilisi, and — knowing they
weren’t going home — opened a
local bank account, where he is
receiving his salary. Western sanc-
tions, and the decision by big cred-
it card companies to sever ties
with Russia, have meant his Rus-
sian bank cards no longer work,
and he has lost access to his sav-
ings back home, he said.
Aleksandr said he doesn’t know
how long they will stay in Georgia,
but he said he hopes the war ends
soon with a Ukrainian victory.
The couple found an apartment
to rent, but as more fleeing Rus-
sians arrive, Georgians are grow-
ing wary of the newcomers, hesaid. Some Georgian banks have
started denying Russians ac-
counts, and it’s becoming harder
for many to find a place to live.
“A lot of Georgians suspect a lot
of them [Russians] aren’t running
away from what Putin does, but
that they are running away from
economic sanctions,” Aleksandr
said. Georgians, who suffered
their own invasion by Russian
troops in 2008, think some Rus-
sians “will live here and still sup-
port what is going on,” he said.
“No one likes Russians any-
more. It’s just as simple as that,” he
said. “Ordinary Georgians just
don’t like seeing Russians, and I
feel it.”
In a small town in western
Ukraine, another Bordio pro-
grammer, Aleksandr Pashkov, is
living in a hostel with seven other
people in his room. He and his
family fled there on the first day of
the war, after bombs started drop-
ping on their hometown of
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest
city and one of the first cities be-
sieged by Russian forces.
“Even though I am a man and
should treat this all steadfastly,
well, that morning when I woke up
to explosions in my city and went
up to the second floor and saw
how the missiles were flying... a s
my children slept... I couldn’t
believe in this century that I could
live this way,” he said.
They threw some belongings in
their car and went to the bank and
the supermarket, where panicked
Ukrainians were already standing
in long lines. Then they drove west
for two days, not sure where they
would end up, before finally land-
ing at the hostel.
I n mid-March he said goodbye
to his wife and two small children,
ages 2 and 4, and sent them over
the border into Poland, where they
planned to catch a bus to Portugal
to stay with friends. Aleksandr, 33,
must remain behind because
Ukraine has barred the departure
of men ages 18 to 60 in case the
army needs them.
Things are mostly peaceful in
his part of western Ukraine, save
for the constant arrival of refu-
gees, he said. He spends his days
working at cafes or on his hostel
bed with his laptop on his knees.
He feels he is doing his part by
remaining employed while many
others lose jobs. “I develop sites, I
pay taxes, I support our army... t o
help them buy weapons,” he said.
“I know how to do this well. If they
tell me I must pick up a weapon
and defend my country, I will do
it.”
It’s hard to focus on work, but
he forces himself, he said, “be-
cause it helps clear the extraneous
thoughts from my head.”W ar f ractures Eastern Europe’s b lossoming tech economy
Digital renaissance that helped counter
authoritarianism for decades is now threatenedALEKSANDR NOVAK
Aleksandr Pashkov, a Bordio programmer who fled the Russian attack on Kharkiv, Ukraine, works i n a
hostel room he shares with seven others. He sent his wife and children to Portugal to stay with friends.