This interview is part of Undertones, Global Voices’ Civic Media Observatory‘s newsletter. Subscribe to Undertones. Welcome back to Undertones, where we analyze media narratives from around the world. Today we would like to share a thoughtful conversation we had with Ukrainian scholar, Dr. Tanya Lokot, about Ukrainian narratives online. Against all expectations, the talk ended with a few belly laughs. Yes, Ukraine’s situation is gloomy, but we have learned that Ukrainians find beautiful (and sometimes, funny) ways to bond with each other and strengthen their identity amidst the Russian state’s attempt at annihilating their country and culture. Since 2021, the Civic Media Observatory has focused on Russia’s narratives for the simple reason that Russian disinformation tactics are pervasive, strong, and mimicked by other governments. We are very conscious that Ukrainian voices were left out of this analysis. So, despite not having a specific investigation open on Ukraine’s media, we thought it was high time to offer, if only a glimpse of, Ukrainian perspectives. Dr. Lokot is an expert on digital media in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. She is a former Eastern Europe editor at Global Voices and has used the Civic Media Observatory’s narrative analysis methodology on Russian digital authoritarianism in our Unfreedom Monitor project. For context, Ukrainians use the internet and social media a lot, especially since the country’s Euromaidan revolutionary protests in 2014, which resulted in the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych. Even more Ukrainians have created social media accounts or reactivated them since Russia’s invasion in 2022, now frequently dubbed the world’s “most online war.” This interview, led by newsletter writer Melissa Vida, was edited for length and clarity. : For Ukrainians, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram are still the top social media outlets. Twitter is incredibly niche for intellectual influencers and TikTok is mostly used by the younger population. [The Russian social media] VKontakte was actually one of the top social media platforms for a while but was banned and blocked in 2017 for national security reasons. TL: Yes, there are a lot of YouTube-only vloggers who do talk shows about the typical stuff, like video games, but also history, politics, or culture. It’s also been really interesting to see that when they started their accounts, they would speak in Russian because it wasn’t such a big issue before 2014 and especially before 2022. Speaking Russian helps them reach a bigger audience. But since 2022, a lot of these YouTubers have started producing content only in Ukrainian. It was a tectonic shift. This change in language is part of the whole debate about the Ukrainian identity as being separate from the Russian one. The Russian narrative asserts that if you speak Russian, you are Russian and, therefore, “theirs to protect.” That is really important to understand. TL: If you recall that Ukraine has been dominated by the Russian empire in its various forms throughout history, you will see that it had an impact on the linguistic map of the population. A significant portion of Ukrainians speaks Russian, especially along the border. Ukrainian and Russian are mutually intelligible, yet distinct. For a long time, the Soviet policy in particular, and the imperial policy before, aimed at suppressing Ukrainian. They did not want to allow Ukrainians to have a separate identity from Russia. During the Soviet Union, if you spoke Ukrainian in public, you were seen as uneducated, “from the village”. It happened to my mother, who spoke the “local dialect”. So when you have decades, if not more, of that suppression, then it’s no surprise that you end up with Russian being the dominant language. I mean, Russia is right there. There is Russian culture, Russian literature, Russian cinema, Russian everything. The Ukrainian identity had to scrape itself from the bottom of the barrel to stand its ground. Ukrainians have been rediscovering Ukraine’s arts, literature and language. Especially in the last ten years. And it has taken a while to switch from Russian to Ukrainian, but today, the default language in Ukrainian media is Ukrainian. TL: What many people outside Ukraine don’t see is that Ukraine is Russia’s testing ground for propaganda and disinformation for other countries. So when Russian disinformation is exposed, Ukrainians are not surprised because they have seen these tactics develop in the last 10 to 15 years. The overarching feeling is that most people spot Russian propaganda pretty easily. But Russian propaganda is also sneaky. The main message in Ukraine aims at undermining trust in Ukrainian media and politicians.