“Ukraine is winning the information war,” both the Washington Post and CNBC proclaimed this week, with identical wording. Fortunately, the articles were more nuanced than the premature conclusions of these headlines, but it pointed to an information war about an information war. The more complex story is that the Ukrainians and the Russians are fighting different information wars, not going head-to-head on this front.
For the Ukrainians what matters is getting international sympathy and support, and on this front they are winning. Their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been out on the streets building morale and gathering sympathy. A short while back he was a comedian catapulted into political office, now he is being described as “Churchillian”. His cellphone street video was a stark contrast to the depiction of a slightly demented Vladimir Putin either sitting at a comically sized table or against a white background far from the battlefront...
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