How can Ukraine’s culture of resistance serve the country’s security? Olesya Khromeychuk spoke to Peter Pomerantsev about the subtleties of waging information warfare, the challenges of cultivating a world of truth and justice today, and creating the kind of space where democracy can be practised.
‘Do you need video, or can I take you for a stroll by the ocean?’
Peter Pomerantsev replies to emails with the kind of brisk efficiency I keep meaning but failing to adopt myself: no excessive pleasantries, just straight to the point. Of course, it’s he who’ll be strolling by the ocean. I will remain in my London living room. I agree, and we lock in the interview.
The last time we crossed paths, the roles were reversed. Peter was the one asking the questions, moderating a Hay Festival panel, bluntly — though appropriately — titled ‘What’s Going on in Ukraine?’ It was May 2024, and by then, most people had lost track of the war. There had been no decisive counteroffensives, no headline-making Ukrainian victories. Civilians were still being killed in an ever-escalating Russian terror campaign, but we’d grown so used to seeing images of dead bodies in different warzones on our screens that, unless the death toll was in the dozens, it scarcely broke the news cycle. We needed to jolt even a well-read festival audience into remembering what was going on in a faraway country between people of whom they knew something, but not nearly enough.
The discussion quickly turned to literature — it was a literary festival, after all — and to culture more broadly, both as a target in Russia’s genocidal war and as a tool of resistance for Ukrainians. We spoke about the destruction of culture in its material form (just days before our panel, the largest printing press in Ukraine was destroyed in a missile attack on Kharkiv), as well as the targeting of those who produce it. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia has killed at least 234 Ukrainian creatives. By the time we met in Hay, it was nearly a year since the death of Victoria Amelina, a writer, poet, and war crimes investigator who was killed in a targeted missile strike on a restaurant in Kramatorsk. My fellow panellists and I had known and admired her deeply. Victoria’s story summed up what was going on in Ukraine: while Ukrainians, including those working in culture, were being killed by Russia, the international community was mostly discovering their legacy and adding their names to the newly created ‘Ukraine shelf’ in Western bookshops posthumously. What a price to pay for the world’s attention.
As we discussed the state of culture in Ukraine, and how to make it better understood abroad, Peter asked me what my ideal Ukraine shelf would look like — a question that, at least in part, inspired the subsequent creation of a podcast by the same name. Thinking back on it now, I realise that what I’d really hope for is a Ukraine shelf that isn’t squeezed out by the ever-imposing Russia shelf — a neighbour that all too often looms large, not just in the physical layout of bookshops and libraries, but also on readers’ literary maps. The space we afford to culture — our own and that of others — reflects the seriousness with which we treat a state, a nation, a people. Culture is, inevitably, a matter of security.
Though Peter was in the interviewer’s chair at Hay, when it comes to explaining what’s going on in Ukraine, he’s just as well placed to offer answers. He splits his time between the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where he’s a Senior Fellow, and Kyiv, where he serves as Executive Editor at The Reckoning Project, a journalistic and legal initiative with the goal of fighting for ‘truth and justice, and against disinformation and impunity, both in the court of public opinion and the courts of law’.
Kyiv holds personal significance for Peter. He was born there but left as a young child after his father, the poet and journalist Ihor Pomerantsev, was arrested for distributing anti-Soviet literature. The fight for truth is, for Peter, both a family legacy and a professional calling. After a decade working in television in Russia, he turned his efforts to exposing the inner workings of the Kremlin’s disinformation machine. His first two books, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (2014) and This Is Not Propaganda (2019), lift the lid on disinformation and spin in Russia.
His latest book, How to Win an Information War (2024), is also about propaganda, but with a focus on a different part of the world. It tells the story of Sefton Delmer, Britain’s World War II master of information warfare. Ostensibly about the past, the book reads like a manual for our times. As I turned its pages, I found myself thinking less of Hitler’s Germany, and more of Putin’s Russia, and, to some degree, Trump’s America. In the course of the interview, I hope to find out if Peter had these parallels in mind as he was writing the book.
Peter switches on his iPhone camera just long enough to give me a glimpse of the ocean. I feel a twinge of envy as I peer out at the grey drizzle beyond my window. I hit ‘record’, and we begin.
‘If you had five minutes in the room with key democratic leaders, Peter, what would be your elevator pitch on how to deal with enemy propaganda today?’
Peter doesn’t take the bait and gives a characteristically unexpected answer.
‘I don’t care about democratic leaders, if I’m going to be honest. I’m not interested in immediate elections. If we’re talking about America, it is in a political civil war right now. Information is used as a weapon. In that sense it is possible to use Delmer as an example.
‘But we have to understand what it is we’re fighting for. What does it mean to save democracy? It doesn’t mean just talking to ourselves. It means subverting what the other side is doing and creating the kind of space where democracy can be practised. If we’re going to use the war metaphor, we have to both defeat the enemy and liberate the occupied territory.
‘We’re in a race to understand audiences, understand their traumas, angers, desires, and to work with them. But that means sometimes working with their most negative feelings, as Delmer did. That means understanding what facts matter to them and why, and provoking them to think for themselves.’
I put my pre-written questions to one side. This clearly isn’t going to be the sort of interview you can script in advance. Much of what Peter says resonates with me on a professional level: the way an academic historian works is deeply rooted in trying to understand the other side. All sides. It’s not about justifying actions, but about grasping what led to them. I’m also open to the idea that different facts hold different weight for different people. And I’ve always believed in encouraging people to think for themselves. So, given that none of this is exactly new ground, why does what Peter says leave me feeling uneasy? As I sit with that discomfort, Peter continues: ‘So, you really have to understand the pleasures and the seduction of authoritarian propaganda.’
It dawns on me that my discomfort surfaces when this idea of understanding traumas, angers, and desires is applied to Russians. What kind of grievances could possibly explain — let alone legitimise — a genocidal assault on a neighbouring state? Surely the only people who ought to hear those ‘traumas, angers, and desires’ are judges, in a court of law. Being surrounded by propaganda doesn’t have to turn one into a criminal or someone who unthinkingly supports criminal acts.
Both Peter and I were born in the USSR, and I remind him that even in that extremely repressive society, people didn’t lose their capacity for critical thought. So why should we assume they have in contemporary Russia? Ignorance, very often, is a choice. The question, for me, is why people make that choice. It seems the answer lies in a desire to avoid feeling complicit, to escape responsibility.
Peter agrees that Russian propaganda frequently works precisely by deflecting responsibility.
‘And responsibility encourages action. And action is dangerous’, I add.
‘Yes, all those things are deeply connected’, Peter continues. ‘It’s amazing, when one talks to many Russians, including those in exile, they’re like, “I can’t do anything about it. It’s got nothing to do with me”. Or if you talk to people who are more supportive [of the war, they would say], “We were forced into this, the West made us do it.”’
Peter admits that a frightening number of people do take some pleasure in the murder of their purported enemies, but many want an excuse to disassociate themselves from their country’s actions. He adds: ‘I think that taking responsibility for what your country is doing is the first step to taking control of it. If you don’t take responsibility, you’re not going to get involved, you’re not going to be an active citizen.’
Practising active citizenship is something Ukrainians excel at. It’s a skill honed over decades of statelessness, and later through years of safeguarding their statehood by holding elected officials to account. One of my favourite placards from recent protests in Kyiv against the curtailing of the independence of anti-corruption bodies quoted the Ukrainian constitution: ‘The only source of power in Ukraine is the people. Article 5.’ That such mass protests took place in the midst of a full-scale war speaks volumes about the depth of civic responsibility Ukrainians feel when it comes to defending their freedoms.
It is the opposite in Russia, and Peter explains why: ‘All this is tied to a bigger thing, which is the identification with the leadership, the sense that the leader can do things for you.’ He sees this trend in Trump’s America as well: ‘It’s the total opposite of the democratic instinct, which is “let’s do things as a citizenry”. But that goes to an emotional place too, where you sublimate, or the leader legitimises within you, a bunch of feelings including anger: he normalises that and lets you express that as well.’
‘When you talk about the effects of propaganda’, Peter explains, ‘it’s not about a set of attitudes, which are debatable, it’s really about the emotional release that propaganda gives. [Sefton] Delmer talks a lot about being at Nazi rallies and how these normally stolid, emotionally repressed Pomeranians start screaming, and of that moment of angry ecstasy. [It’s] about the hatred and the anger that propaganda allows you to feel, but without any guilt.’
One of the key lessons I took from Peter’s book is that propaganda isn’t just about distorting reality. It works, above all, by offering its audience a sense of belonging. It appeals less to reason than to the subconscious. A world in which facts matter so little is deeply unsettling. So I ask Peter, given his close involvement in The Reckoning Project, what chance do truth-seeking storytellers have in a climate where ‘everything is possible and nothing is true’?
‘Look, we have to defeat the enemy and liberate the space — both at the same time’, he replies. ‘When we’re talking about preserving and cultivating a world of truth and justice, that’s about liberation. Part of that world still exists, so we can make it more effective. It’s not completely impotent, but let’s be honest, it’s shrinking. We’ve only had international law since 1945, and the overall sense is that it’s kind of crumbling at the moment. There are more and more wars with total impunity. But that doesn’t mean we stop trying.’
In terms of communicating with Russians, Peter is skeptical about the power of sheer facts. From the first days of the full-scale invasion, ‘Ukrainians were phoning their relatives, people they knew, and saying, “Look, we’re being bombed. Atrocities are happening in Ukraine.” And the relatives were saying, “It’s not happening, or if it’s happening, you deserve it.” So, there is completely zero interest inside of Russia for most Russians about atrocities in Ukraine.’
Peter suggests a more sophisticated counter-propaganda approach: ‘So if you’re going to talk to mainstream Russians, the ones who acquiesce to the war, about the war, you’ve got to choose the facts that matter. Our job is to get people to start gaining responsibility and start being resentful towards the war and leadership. If you show Russians stories about rising crime rates because convicts are being released into society, that puts them off the war. I’m hypothesising here, but I think most of the people who support the war love the strong hand. Their mindsets are very authoritarian. Putin’s whole thing is that he brought order after the chaos of the 1990s. When crime rates shoot up, when convicts are let back into the system, the whole emotional image of Putin is undermined, and the data we have shows they are less likely to send relatives to the war. So the aim of this sort of campaign would be to help slow recruitment and raise the Kremlin’s costs for funding the Russian army. Other campaigns should focus on strengthening sanctions and undermining confidence in the ruble. There’s no serious chances for democratic change in Russia. But information can play a role in undermining the war machine and the war economy.’[1]
There is no doubt in Peter’s mind about the need for a repository of all Russian crimes: ‘Russia as a society, if it wants to progress one day, will have to go through the period of taking responsibility for what was done in its name, like most atrocity-wielding societies have to do. I’m not saying we don’t collect the truth about these terrible things, it matters for creating a world of justice and truth. But right now, in the middle of a war, I have no delusion about The Reckoning [Project] having a role inside of Russia for mainstream Russian audiences.’
Steering our conversation towards audiences in the West, I ask Peter to zoom out and reflect on the role of culture. In its war against Ukraine, Russia has wielded culture as a weapon — openly and effectively — far from the frontlines: in theatres, concert halls, and galleries in London, Berlin, New York, and beyond. And yet, so many in the West still prefer to believe that Putin and Pushkin have nothing in common. To me, it’s a striking example of how culture is inseparable from questions of security. Russian culture has served as a kind of Trojan horse — welcomed into our homes and hearts for centuries — that leaves us vulnerable to Russian agendas today. So I ask Peter how one can counter such a weapon when so many still refuse to recognise it for what it is.
‘Interesting question, Olesya. Culture is part of imperial projects far and wide. Were we [the British empire] using Shakespeare to control Indian elites? Saying, ‘You’re going to be part of this huge culture and this imperial system’, while doing all the things that historians like William Dalrymple write about. I think this is probably quite a common imperial tactic. It’s just that Russian atrocities are ongoing, full of genocidal intent, and so, we see it much closer.’
‘I think that the deification of culture — and I’m talking as somebody who comes from a family of poets — is the problem’, Peter suggests. ‘You should be able to read poetry and disassociate a kind of political worship from admiring the brilliance of the poetry. Why shouldn’t you be able to say, “Pushkin is great in his use of rhyme, what a brilliant stylist he is” and at the same time, “Oh my God, he’s writing about the Caucasus as a colonial subject that you need to crush”? […] I think your analysis is quite right about how Russia uses culture in its imperialist projects, but we’d better start thinking about us a little bit and how we experience culture.’
I don’t fundamentally disagree with Peter. Of course, the problem lies less with the cultural products themselves and more with the role we ascribe to them. The myth of ‘great Russian culture’ has worked incredibly well, especially in academia, where it’s often studied in ways that are surprisingly uncritical. And it has worked on the general public too, which remains enchanted with the idea of the so-called mysterious Russian soul. This myth squeezes out other interpretations, pushing other cultures to the margins or denying their existence altogether. Ukraine is one of those cultures.
Whenever I speak publicly about Russia’s war, there’s almost always a question about saving Russia. I’ll be sitting there as a Ukrainian writer, a Ukraine specialist, someone directly affected by this war, and yet the question I hear is: ‘How do we save Russia?’ There’s a very clear connection between cultural familiarity and emotional investment. When people feel connected to a culture, they care what happens to it.
And that’s at the heart of my concern: Ukrainian culture, for all its richness, is still unfamiliar to so many. And I worry that we in Ukraine — especially at the level of the state — don’t fully recognise that culture should be part of our security strategy. Because the reality is simple: if people don’t know about you, they’re far less likely to care about what happens to you.
I pause my rant, so Peter has a moment to respond.
‘The funny thing is the Brits, and definitely the Americans, have got very self-critical about the abuses of their own cultures, but they don’t apply it to Russia. It’s kind of a form of patronising towards Russia. Can we see Russia as a grownup? Hands covered in blood… These writers are wading through fields of blood…’ Peter also draws attention to Western consumers and amplifiers of Russian culture, whether in academia, publishing, or elsewhere. Their failure to engage critically with that culture, he argues, makes them complicit in Russia’s imperial project.
‘There’s also another thing we have to bear in mind’, Peter says. ‘A lot of the Russian literary tradition, the cultural tradition, especially in the Soviet period, was also repressed in many ways. And just because they were repressed doesn’t mean that they weren’t horrible in other ways. Like Bulgakov — he had a horrible fate as a writer, and at the same time he was a pro-Russian chauvinist. We have to embrace all those complexities if we’re going to make sense of this culture.’
Peter’s walk by the ocean is coming to an end, and I begin to worry that we’ve reached a point where we’re agreeing too much — possibly the worst thing we could inflict on our readers. So, I decide to end on a slightly more provocative note.
‘Peter, in your book, you draw a few parallels between your own life and that of Sefton Delmer. Are you planning to set up a clandestine radio station — or its modern-day equivalent, say, a YouTube or TikTok channel — to broadcast to Russians?’
‘At the end of the day, you write something as huge as a book because there has to be something that you find worthwhile for yourself’, Peter admits. ‘I think Delmer’s understanding of propaganda is very similar to mine. It’s about identity formation, not really about the battle against disinformation. This may have led us astray a little bit — disinformation is the symptom rather than the cause.’
I think back to something Peter said at the start of the interview about how mainstream media in the West have failed to protect common democratic spaces for people to act as responsible citizens: ‘It’s a battle. It means reaching them. What to do is not that hard, frankly. But it’s completely unclear whose job it is to do it.’
Peter Pomerantsev may not be launching his own clandestine propaganda channel yet, but he points out that Ukraine’s culture has produced a unique mode of information warfare. ‘One of the great things that the war in Ukraine has told us is that horizontal ties — in business, civil society — play a huge role in the war, whether that’s in drone production, which is a private–civic–state enterprise in Ukraine, down to information campaigns’, he observes. ‘People from marketing leave advertising behind and do campaigns to demoralise Russian soldiers, obviously talking with the Ukrainian [security] services, but really operating on their own. We are in this age where you can start doing stuff from the civic sector, and it actually might be a lot braver and a lot more experimental than what states are doing.’
Endnotes
[1] For a more comprehensive analysis of how Russia’s propaganda machine works, see Peter Pomerantsev, ‘Putin’s Hidden Vulnerability’, Foreign Affairs, 11 October 2024 <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/putins-hidden-vulnerability> [accessed 15 September 2025].
Olesya Khromeychuk is a historian and writer. She is the author of The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister (2022) and Undetermined Ukrainians (2013). Khromeychuk has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Prospect, and The New Statesman, and has delivered a TED talk on ‘What the World Can Learn From Ukraine’s Fight for Democracy’. She has taught the history of East-Central Europe at several British universities and is currently Director of the Ukrainian Institute London.
Image: Sevilâ Nariman-qızı, tatlı mesülietsizlik (the sweetness of irresponsibility) from the series menim – seniñ (mine – yours), 2025
