The Brief – The beauty of annexing Kaliningrad
By Alexandra Brzozowski this article was originally published in EURACTIV on October 5, 2022.
Over the past few days, Twitter trolls have taken the meme war dealing with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to another level.
Czech social media users have been sharing tweets, tweaked maps, and mocking memes showing that the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad (Královec) is, in fact, historically Czech, and that a referendum should be held to decide the fate of the problematic stretch of land squeezed between Poland and Lithuania.
On Monday (3 October), Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský shared a map of Kaliningrad split down the middle into two zones, occupied by Poland and the Czech Republic, ironically celebrating the Czechs’ newfound Baltic port.
“It’s time to divide Kaliningrad so that our Czech brothers finally have access to the sea,” the Polish account author stated.
On Tuesday, the newly created Twitter account @KralovecCzechia announced the success of the initiative:
“After a successful referendum, 97,9% of Kaliningrad residents decided to merge with the Czech Republic and rename Kaliningrad to Královec,” it stated in comments that echoed – and mocked – Russia’s recent referendums in occupied parts of Ukraine.
By then, the Czech-language Wikipedia page of Kaliningrad was already updated to show the exclave as belonging to the Czech Republic.
‘Make Kaliningrad Czech again’?
Admittedly, it’s easy to spot the joke here though a mock petition calling for the annexation of the Russian port city to the Czech Republic has received nearly 12,000 electronic signatures since it was posted on the website petice.cz last Tuesday.
It shows how this war, which has seen online disinformation and Twitter-trolling on an unprecedented scale, has become one fought (and maybe won) on alternative information warfare.
At the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the West had done little to counter Moscow’s fake news with an information offensive of its own.
But weaponising meme culture has quickly become a success story for Ukraine, in many ways.
Another very successful campaign – the North Atlantic Fellas Organization (NAFO) – has meanwhile developed into a global internet army that aims to challenge Russian disinformation online.
The grassroots movement, not paid for or in the service of any government, has grown into a spontaneous coalition that can be supported by anyone and uses a badly-drawn image of Shiba Inu, a Japanese dog breed that became an internet sensation a decade ago, as their main weapon.
Whenever a NAFO fella spots a Russian official or sympathiser posting a pro-Kremlin take on social media, they can use the hashtag #Article5, a veiled reference to NATO’s mutual defence clause, to spam these accounts with support for Ukraine.
One month after NAFO was founded, Russia’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mikhail Ulyanov, personally felt the wrath of being drawn into a debate with a pack of ‘fellas’, as the information warriors call themselves.
It significantly raised their profile across the internet: The recipe for success turned out to be in not debunking fake news but openly mocking it.
By now, its fans include former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves and Ukraine’s Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov, and revenues from the avatar acquisition are used for humanitarian or military support to Ukraine.
Can spontaneous online troll armies help Ukraine win the war? Hard to say.
But maybe, just maybe, they can fill the gap that governments and international organisations have failed to fill when it comes to effectively fighting disinformation.
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Views are the author’s
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Benjamin Fox]