Right after the invasion of Ukraine, a question arose at 'Ukrainian Witness': how they could use their expertise to support Ukraine? How to get the truth into Russia since Russians were kept completely ignorant of the severity of the devastation of the war?

One thing is for sure, in times of war and crises, people feel the urge to seek information. And since the Russian people hardly have access to trustworthy information, the strategy was to bring it to them.

The approach was to work around the Kremlin's censorship, by hacking an open channel, transforming it into a News' one.

Ukrainian Witness is an NGO that draws attention to the war in Ukraine worldwide. It also aims to help inhabitants of the Russian Federation against misinformation.

Right after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a question arose at Ukrainian Witness: How to get the truth into Russia since Russians were kept completely ignorant of the severity of the devastation of the war?

Objective:

Deliver the truth into Russia and fight against its propaganda.

Challenge:

In Russia, free press and almost all social channels are blocked.

Russian propaganda makes the Russian people disconnected from the truth. Especially at the moment when there is a war going on, we needed to act tactically and immediately.

One of Ukrainian Witness' goals is to fight misinterpretation within the Russian Federation. The challenge however is, that as a Ukrainian fact-based platform, they cannot work freely within the Russian Federation.

In times of crises, people feel the urge to seek trustworthy information. Wikipedia is an open-source platform where its fundaments rely on the truth, guarded by editors from around the world.

If Russians start to realize the truth of the war, then the Propaganda lose its forces, hence its leader.

Since the full-scale invasion, most western news outlets were shut down in the Russian Federation, or left due to new Russian laws that prohibit media from covering the war.

Even western social media either left, got shut down, or are highly censored by the Kremlin.

But the need for Ukrainian Witness to spread the truth into the Russian Federation remained.

Since wars are also fought in the digital domain, Wikipedia became a channel to sneak the truth into Russia, since everyone can change a Wikipedia page.

Russian Wikipedia has monthly 32,78 million unique visitors from the Russian Federation*

(*Source: Similarweb)

That's the way in for Ukrainian Witness. And they started adding the reality of the war on Ukrainian city pages on the Russian Wikipedia.

In Russia, free press and almost all social channels are blocked. However, there is one medium that is still accessible and open to adding or changing information and that is Wikipedia. After all, anyone can act as an editor.

In Russia, Wikipedia is consulted by 10.9 million unique visitors a month. So, the idea of posting photos about the devastation on the Russian Wikipedia pages of Ukrainian cities was born.

Where you'd normally see beautiful pictures of city landmarks, now you can also see pictures of these landmarks after being devastated and destroyed by the war, showing the stark contrast between what Russians are used to think about the war, and what is the pure reality behind it. This way, the truth was delivered to millions of Russian people.

The aim was to confront residents of the Russian Federation with the reality of the destruction of Ukrainian cities.

A good indication of the result achieved can be derived from the visits to the Russian Wikipedia pages of the 10 largest Ukrainian cities.

From WikiMedia Statistics (https://pageviews.wmcloud.org) based on the Wikipedia pages on the ten biggest Ukrainian cities (Kyiv, Odessa, Mariupol, Kherson, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Lviv, Lugansk, Bucha, Dnipro), we learned that:

• the number of Wikipedia editors bringing the truth into Russia doubled: 850 editors in 2022, compared to 485 in 2021.

• the amount of edits they made, more than doubled: 2672 in 2022 compared to 1247 in 2021.

• the total amount of Russian viewers who are confronted with the truth on these pages, went up with a record of 242%. 13.3 million in 2022 compared to 3.9 million in 2021.

War is the biggest disruption in the world.

Ukrainian Witness fights to show the world and the inhabitants of the Russian Federation the reality of the war.

In order to stop the war, they needed to show the war. Precisely, to where it's needed the most: in Russia.