Section: Global Voices (The Netherlands)
Russian Hackers Behind Attack on Ukraine’s Power Grid, Researchers Claim
The hacking attack left thousands of citizens in western Ukraine without power in December. Image by Juanedc on Flickr, CC BY 2.0. The alleged cyber-attack that led to a temporary outage of the Ukrainian power grid was likely perpetuated by Russian hackers, according to US researchers. The cybersecurity research team iSIGHT Partners told...
RuNet Users Get Creative In Response to Ukrainian President’s Fake Magazine Cover
Shortly after New Year, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko tweeted a photo of a cover of The Economist magazine featuring his face among many other international leaders. The magazine cover turned out to be fake and resulted in a perfect storm of parodies and memes on the Russian-speaking Internet. On January 3, Poroshenko posted a photo of the...
The Bridge From Russia to Crimea Doesn’t Exist Yet, But It Already Has an Instagram Account
Most the cat will help occupy your time #WaitingfortheBridge from Russia to annexed Crimea. Image from @cat_the_most on Instagram. If you were ever at a loss as to what your social media strategy should include when you’re slowly building a very expensive bridge to illegally annexed territory, the answer is: cats. The so-called “Crimean...
Massive LiveJournal Troll Network Pushes Pro-Kremlin Narratives
Multiple LiveJournal blogs linked to a Twitter bot network discovered earlier publish pro-Kremlin posts on a regular basis. Images mixed by Tetyana Lokot. Since spring 2014, thousands of fake LiveJournal blogs have been mass-posting content promoting a pro-Kremlin stance on world events, attacking Western leaders and praising Russian president...
Activists Take to the Top of Lviv City Hall to Highlight Human Rights in Ukraine
Volodymyr Beglov, a Ukrainian journalist and civic activist, reading the Declaration of Human Rights in Lviv. Image by Yurko Dyachyshyn. On December 10—International Human Rights Day—Ukrainian civic activists, journalists, and lawyers came together at the very top of Lviv City Hall to read aloud an important document—the Universal Declaration of...
Spot All the New Urban Murals in Kyiv with This Handy Interactive Map
This recent mural by Ukrainian street art collective Interesni Kazki can also be found on the interactive map. Image from ilgorgo.com, CC-BY 3.0. Street art and wall murals are becoming wildly popular in Ukraine: every week brings news of a new wall in one city or another filling up with the results of some artist’s creative labor. One Kyiv...
Herein Lie the Secrets of Geolocation
Image edited by Kevin Rothrock. This article is part of a larger guidebook by RuNet Echo to help people learn how to conduct open-source research on the Russian Internet. Explore the complete guidebook at the special project page. With most photographs and videos, the most reliable way to conduct verification is through satellite images, allowing...
On Volunteer Day, Ukrainians Honor Grassroots Efforts with a Social Media Campaign
Volunteers participating in “The Real Ones” photo exhibition. Photo from Справжні on Facebook December 5 is International Volunteer Day, and this year, Ukrainians came out in force on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere to say a heartfelt “thank you” to their country’s volunteer community for all the work they have done—and are still doing....
Natalia Antonova: Journalist and Playwright Caught Between Russia, Ukraine, and the West
A journalist and playwright with a complex national identity, Natalia Antonova was born in Soviet Ukraine, has roots in modern-day Russia, and was raised in the United States. Today, her time and mind are split between Moscow and other places. In addition to freelancing for newspapers like The Guardian and writing a column for The Moscow Times,...
New Ukrainian Police Banned from Using Russian Social Networks
No more VK or Odnokklassniki for Ukraine’s patrol police, pictured here on their first day of work in Kyiv in July 2015. Photo by Oleksandr Ratushniak for Demotix. Members of Ukraine’s new patrol police force make frequent appearances on social media—in fact, their penchant for posing for selfies and featuring in testimonials on...
