As the conflict in Ukraine continues unabated, Russia finds itself increasingly cut off from the rest of the world. Western companies and organizations have pulled their services from Russia, leaving citizens scrambling to find alternatives. Movies and TV shows are no longer available as Hollywood studios cancel releases and streaming services go out of business. As a result, Russians have turned to illegal piracy to obtain content. And it provided an unexpected way for a group of enterprising Ukrainian journalists to bypass Russia’s state filters and reach the country’s citizens.
The story of Volodymyr
Having lived and worked in Russia between 2010 and 2013, I was very familiar with the formidable Soviet propaganda machine and how it deceives the Russian people – telling them half-truths, sometimes outright lies and ignoring facts. Therefore, I made a 10 minute video myself about Torrents of Truth. It was extremely moving, recounting the horrible things I had seen. “But all this can be stopped if you tell the truth, if you don’t keep quiet,” I said at last. “If you send this video and other war-related videos to other people.” Read more here Torrents of Truth is a campaign that uses torrent files that promise the likes of The Batman or Better Call Saul to infiltrate Russian homes. “To circumvent the extreme censorship raging as we speak in Russian media, we have allowed journalists to upload reports about Ukraine disguised as pirated torrents of popular movies, series, software, music and books in Russia,” the campaign’s website explains. The content interrupting messages are broadcast in Russian and the voices are ones that Russians can relate to. To view this video, please enable JavaScript and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video The thinking behind this, from Guillaume Roukhomovsky, the campaign’s founder, is that most Russians simply don’t know what’s going on because state control of the media is all-consuming. Roukhomovsky, a French director at the creative agency 72andSunny, has Ukrainian roots. He sees Russia’s appetite for pirated content as the perfect delivery system for the rebels’ information campaign. Journalists such as Volodymyr Biriukov – a Ukrainian radio host – are then recruited to film and deliver the messages disguised as popular torrents and uploaded online. The very thing that makes it hard to shut down torrent sites also makes it hard for a government entity to shut them down. The peer-to-peer broadcast network simply broadcasts a new source or proxy the second an existing one is closed. While it’s hard to measure the scale of the campaign’s impact – other than the number of seders each fake torrent gets – there’s no doubting the intelligence of those behind it. MORE: Russia abandons ISS program in 2024 to build own space station MORE: Russia slams Ukraine’s Odessa port hours after grain export deal signed
