[this is an op-ed piece about op-ed pieces. It’s a long version of a newspaper piece for the Danish press]

Even as we move well into the third year of war in Ukraine, the media sphere, dependent as it is on the economy of attention seeking, is still pretty narrowly focused. I can read millions of works a week penned about military technology, grand strategy, geopolitics or even tactics, and much of it is good, informative and interesting. Yet, at least in English, I can read relatively little on the actual details of things like military mobilization in Ukraine and Russia. Or, for that matter, analytical summary of how the war affects the structure of employment, the relationship between war production and the rest of the economy, and logistics within the two countries. The fact that I know by name and even by sight the few people writing consistently well on these topics should itself be a cause for concern.

Now, that’s not to say that such analysis doesn’t exist or even that it’s truly in short supply. However, there are only a handful of organizations and individuals really putting resources into granular coverage of the political economy of the war and how it interacts with wider society. Usually we talking about lone researchers within organizations of a much larger staff, many of whom seem to be busy with little more than the diminishing returns of punditry on what Putin said or didn’t say in 2007, or what Zelensky ‘really means’ today. There is often great journalistic follow up on human-interest or human rights stories, but even these suffer from 1. Belatedness; 2. Distortion because of the way journalistic truth is produced in close contact with official sources, and 3. The Mutual-Distrust-distance between journalism and expert research.

One piece that got me thinking along these lines was an article with the click-bait title: ‘Ukraine is heading for defeat’. Of course, the author is not really arguing that. Now, I want to say right up that I think this is a decent enough article for Politico! (LOL to the folk who decided Axel-Springer Politico ‘leans left’). I think the journalist tries to cover lots of bases – breadth and depth that are often missing. Furthermore, it’s an opinion piece and pretty short. Let’s cut the guy some slack.

What exercised me though, and not only me, but more than one Ukrainian researcher, was the impression that only now can the media start ‘discovering’ stories for their readership like widespread draft avoidance in Ukraine and the gross human rights violations by the Ukrainian state in press-ganging. Once again, its unfair to pick on this one point in an article. The fact is, however, so much coverage is really not interested in the rights and opinions of Ukrainians, the social dynamic in the country. Which is a pity because attending to it might tell us more about the prospects for Ukraine withstanding Russian aggression than paying attention to prime ministers doing photoshoots with Zelensky sitting in the cockpit of a F-16 (this is Danish political snark).

The story of ‘draft-dodging’ is presented with a curious addition – that would-be recruits now spend their ‘afternoons’ in nightclubs instead of volunteering. Then there’s a few alarming quotes of key political figures in the war leadership. This, and other framings make it seem like the journalist is uncritically repeating the – frankly – political spin of the presidential coterie (Yes! Why not call it that!) in Ukraine. Spin: that there is a feckless youth that need to steeled by fire. Spin: that it’s not Zelensky who wants to mobilize more young people, but that his hand is forced. The fact is that those kids in nightclubs (in the afternoon!?) are there because they already paid off the commissariat or paid bribes for ‘medical’ exemptions. Conscript wars are class wars, after all. Even in a short article, a left-leaning journalist should be able to do better.

Whether we read something about Ukraine or Russia, the journalistic or think-tank product has been filtered through contact with various gatekeepers of knowledge. In this case it’s (too much) contact with people peddling the Ukraine president’s line. Once again, it would be better reader service to say that Ukraine is a complex political society and there are lots of competing centres of authority, interest and even ideology operating, regardless of war. I dunno, you could do a vox pop on what people think of press-ganging! (answer: it would cause cognitive dissonance among Americans, so we won’t do that). It would also be good to say that it’s normal in wartime for even most men to not want to die, even if their country is a victim. Someone commented on the forgotten history of draft avoidance during WWI. Journalism has to operate in tolerable frames of propriety – the idealised morality of the society it speaks to. Zelensky is the good tsar who cares about Ukrainians. The Russian General Staff are monsters shoving meat in a grinder. Both might be ‘true’, but does it aid understanding to rely so much on personalities and pretend we can have moral clarity by proxy?

The third point is my self-interested criticism as a person whose job it is to produce country-based knowledge (in Russian and Ukrainian). Journalists need an answer ‘now’, for sure, but don’t always make much of an effort to reach out to the genuine country experts for help. Here in Denmark, we have the luxury of a professionalized journalism. Most journalists actively seek out expert knowledge, accommodate the views, and even promote them, of scientists. Indeed here, the foremost Russian foreign policy expert won a public communication prize last year for his work with the press to bridge the divide between research and public.

However, we can always do better from both sides: open to the challenge of different kinds of knowledge. Journalists often have the multi-level connections that academic researchers can only dream of. After all, journalists can get up-close to powerholder much more easily. At the same time, academics often have the advantage of being able to devote time and energy in chipping away at issues in a holistic and systematic way – like social attitudes and responses to things like military mobilization in both countries. Furthermore, there’s a deficit of critical (in the sense of social scientific) Ukrainian voices in the press in the ‘West’. The fact that I’m writing this post stems from interacting with Ukrainians who just don’t feel comfortable with the future consequences of voicing these kinds of criticisms.

Finally, academics are more to blame than journalists. We still live in a world where academics are afraid of journalists (that they will distort things); are in a kind of dysfunctional envy-snobbery disposition towards them. We’d all love to see thousands read our work, to be able to make bigger knowledge claims with often less evidence, to get to travel to places more easily and report on them, to get to talk to powerful people and even just legitimately be present in ‘hot spots’.

A few final points about the vicious cycle of Ukraine coverage. This is itself a product of the interaction between simplistic media narratives and western elites who avoid confronting hard choices and instead flip-flopping on real commitment. Being Politico (Atlanticist, not left-leaning!), the piece can’t say out loud that US patronage is a zero-sum game. You want to sponsor Israel against Iran, sure: have some more Patriots. Ukraine comes to the window: ‘sorry, we’re out today, come back tomorrow.’ Now that the US military aid bill has passed, so many people are acting like we can breathe a sigh of relief and ‘move on’, yet, an attentive reading of even the Guardian reveals that only a fraction of the money ($8 out of $61bn) will go to Ukraine soon, and mainly to keep the state functioning. A lot of the rest will go primarily into the coffers of US corporations. And only much later materialize as materiel on the battlefield.