2 May 2019

Ukraine’s Failed Attempt to Stop Russian Interference Is Trampling Digital Rights

Samuel Woodhams 

Ukraine’s hybrid conflict with Russia over the past five years has not just unfolded in annexed Crimea and the regions of eastern Ukraine where Russia continues to back separatist groups. It has also been felt in Kiev and across the rest of the county, as Russian interference continues to destabilize Ukrainian politics. 

In an effort to defend against Russian disinformation and propaganda, Ukraine’s government has responded with measures that have led to a substantial erosion of digital freedoms for journalists, activists and the wider Ukrainian public. A country once heralded as one of the most progressive in Eastern Europe for digital rights, Ukraine is now actively restricting them.

Much of this is the legacy of President Petro Poroshenko. Will the landslide victory of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine’s presidential election Sunday lead to a reversal? 

Zelensky gave little away about his official positions on a wide range of issues during the campaign, often providing vague commitments to national unity rather than concrete policies. At one stage, though, he did suggest that he plans to launch a “powerful information war in order to end the war in the Donbas,” referring to eastern Ukraine. It remains unclear, however, what that will mean for digital rights. 

The issue of Russian interference is unlikely to go away anytime soon, especially after President Vladimir Putin announced this week that Russia would offer passports to people living in parts of eastern Ukraine. The European Union condemned that move as a sign of “Russia’s intention to further destabilize Ukraine and to exacerbate the conflict.”

Zelensky will probably have to confront these issues head-on in the coming months, one way or another. As analyst Nina Jankowicz wrote ahead of the election in The Atlantic, “whoever wins the presidency will inherit a dangerous amount of power over the country’s information space.” Ukraine, she added, “has been accused—by allies as well as critics—of pushing the boundaries of acceptable democratic behavior.”

In 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a nonbinding resolution on digital rights. It declared that “the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression.” Russia, unsurprisingly, did not sign the agreement, but Ukraine did. Yet amid Russia’s ongoing interference, there have been several violations of this basic principle in Ukraine. 

The first significant restrictions began in 2017, following a presidential decree that banned the two most popular social media platforms in Ukraine, Vkontakte, or VK, and Odnoklassniki, as well as the one of the most popular email services, mail.ru, and one of the country’s most used search engines, Yandex. Each of these websites is Russian-owned, and the social media platforms have substantially more users in Ukraine than their prominent American alternatives, such as Facebook and Twitter. 

Volodymyr Ariev, a Ukrainian lawmaker, had suggested that these platforms were a national security risk as they could be used to harvest sensitive information about Ukrainians due to their Russian links. European officials thought otherwise. The head of the Council of Europe, Thorbjorn Jagland, said the digital bans contradicted Europe’s “common understanding of freedom of expression.” 

This was just the beginning of Ukraine’s wave of censorship in the name of fighting a hybrid war with Russia. A year later, a second presidential decree led to almost 200 websites being blocked. The majority of these websites were pro-Russian, and included the administrative websites of the two Russian-backed, separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. 

Ukraine recently proposed new draft laws that aim to counter Russian-backed propaganda and disinformation. But they have dubious legal legitimacy.These policies didn’t simply contradict the basic principle of freedom of expression online, however. They also appear to have been largely unsuccessful in limiting Russian interference. 

More than two years since the initial ban was introduced, the social media platform VK is still widely accessed in Ukraine. In fact, according to Alexa, Amazon’s tool for tracking internet traffic, VK remains the third most popular website in Ukraine, despite the ban. 

The prevalence of virtual private networks, or VPNs, provides an easily accessible way around such blacklisted sites, both in Ukraine and Russia. So even if Ariev was correct about Russia accessing sensitive data about Ukrainians, the 2017 ban doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect. What’s more, blocking those sites hasn’t prevented Russian attempts at spreading disinformation via other means. 

“It’s unclear what deterrent effect the blocking has had on Russian attempts to disseminate malicious propaganda,” Dominic Bellone, the senior program officer at Counterpart International, an international development organization, told me. Counterpart works with and helps fund several local organizations in Ukraine who monitor digital freedoms and help promote sustainable development across the globe. 

As Michael Schwirtz and Sheera Frenkel reported last month in The New York Times, Ukrainian authorities unearthed new evidence of Russian interference in the runup to the recent election. But it wasn’t on the social media platforms ostensibly banned in Ukraine; it happened on Facebook. 

The new tactics involved Russian agents finding people in Ukraine who were willing to sell their accounts or rent them out to Russian propogandists who would use them to spread disinformation about the candidates. This, once again, proves that even by blocking the Russian-owned websites, the disinformation campaigns were not defeated.

Russia has proved increasingly versatile in its ability to destabilize elections and other democratic processes around the world, utilizing a whole host of complex techniques, few of which can be derailed by merely blocking access to a specific website. Knowing that, the Ukrainian government has attempted to fight back in other ways that raise their own troubling implications about freedom of speech and information. 

It recently proposed several new draft laws that aim to counter the proliferation of Russian-backed propaganda and disinformation, including in the media. But they have dubious legal legitimacy and, if anything, resemble laws against supposed “fake news” in Russia, which are designed to tightly control information. 

One of the current draft laws in Ukraine effectively seeks to criminalize anyone held responsible for spreading false information in print or online, regardless of whether they did so intentionally or not. Such measures, without a doubt, have significant ramifications for freedom of speech, press freedoms and digital rights. 

Will Zelensky shift course and drop these clumsy approaches to defending against Russian disinformation, whose main impact so far has been to limit the rights of Ukrainians? By promising to launch an information war against Russia, there are legitimate concerns that there could be an increase in digital restrictions that leads to further disinformation and Russian retaliation in the coming months. 

And as the draft laws that seek to limit online content appear unlikely to slow in Ukraine’s parliament, there is reason to believe that this may, in fact, only be the beginning in a much longer battle in which digital liberties will continue to be disregarded.

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