KYIV, Ukraine—Since he took office in 2019, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has frequently been accused of being a puppet for his country’s deep-seated oligarchic interests—a comical populist unwilling or unable to confront the Russian influence tearing his country apart. So his recent crackdown on pro-Russian media came as a surprise to observers and critics alike. On Feb. 2, with just a few strokes of a pen, Zelensky signed sanctions that immediately blocked three pro-Russian television stations from operating in Ukraine. The move—proposed by the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council—was celebrated by pro-reform activists who gleefully shared GIFs of garbled color bars as the bans took effect. Zelensky followed up his media purge with a tweet affirming that “information today is as powerful [a] weapon as tanks or missiles.”
That’s an equivalence Ukrainians are experiencing firsthand as their country’s conflict with Russia enters its eighth year. In eastern Ukraine—where government troops are at war with Russian-backed rebels—armed confrontation has nearly ground to a halt since July 2020. Cease-fire violations are far and few between. But the Russo-Ukrainian conflict has hardly subsided; rather, it has shifted to a hybrid war of the sort Moscow and its proxies have long waged against Ukrainian sovereignty.
