Lockdown in the Ukrainian port city Mykolaiv

This is another development in the Ukrainian war effort. In the port city of Mykolaiv, the Ukrainian government did a lockdown for 54 hours to investigate collaborators with the Russians: Michael Schwirtz, In War-Torn Mykolaiv, Ukrainians Search for Informers New York Times 08/08/2022.

Map Source: Wikipedia

ich sealed the city, preventing residents from entering or leaving — a success. Five people were arrested, he said, and a number of weapons and communications devices confiscated, though he provided no details.

“I’m sorry for the discomfort over the weekend, but it was worth it,” Mr. Kim said in a video message Monday morning.

He added, “No Russian-speaking person was shot.”

As just someone reading the news, I wonder what kind of hairs the governor might be splitting by saying, “No Russian-speaking person was shot.” It might just be a way of saying that no one was killed in the search for collaborators in the city during the lockdown.

Having heard endless police accounts in the US of people being killed by police which turn out to be, well, not entirely fact-based, a sentence like that sounds a little dodgy. Like: "No, the police did not kill a five-foot-ten-inches-tall, 51-year-old man with ten fillings in his teeth and wearing a blue shirt, on the corner of 3rd and Main at 10:02 on Friday morning." That leaves quite a bit of wiggle-room for what the police might actually have done.

Wolfgang Richter of the German Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) talked about the lockdown in this German-language report from Deutsche Welle: Selenskyjs Strategien gegen Russland-Kollaborateure 08/12/2022:

Richter doesn't claim to have any particular insight about the raid. He explains that the justification is not implausible on its face. But we also don't know all that it implies. He talks about the fact that Russia does obviously have collaborators and supporters, even though there's no reason to uncritically accept Russian claims about how widespread such support is.

He notes that as the war continues, there could be a kind of emerging civil war within the larger war.

This part of the New York Times report illustrates why reporting on an incident like the Mykolaiv lockdown is tricky:

Amid the devastation, some residents said the checks for collaborators brought some comfort, despite the inconvenience.

“It calmed us down a bit,” said Valentina Hontarenko, 74, who was at a kiosk selling kvas, a popular drink made from fermented bread. “They asked about our connections to Russia. We don’t have any.”

During the lockdown, officers went door to door and stopped people in the street, checking their documents and scrolling through their phones looking for evidence that they might be coordinating with Russian forces. Video of the operation released by local authorities shows officers checking computers and text messages on phones.

At least that third paragraph describes the context. But in that context, pretending to conduct random interviews of locals is even more fluff than the hackneyed reports of journalists going to a diner in some small city to interview white people about what they think about politics and presenting it as some kind of special insight in the thinking of Regular Folks.

So, you're a local in a Ukrainian city in a war zone. The government has locked the city down for over two days and is apparently stopping people randomly to examine their electronic devices to see if people might be collaborating with the Russian army to kill Ukrainians. A foreign reporter interviews you at a public kiosk, and asks you what you think about the event.

How many people in that situation are going to tell the foreign reporter something like, "This lockdown is ridiculous! It's nothing but an excuse by our corrupt, incompetent government in Kyiv to intimidate people. It's a total disgrace that they're doing this!"

Nobody's going to say that. On the other hand, would an actual Russian spy or collaborator who actually talked to a foreign reporter in a government-controlled city under lockdown say anything much different from what this supposedly random 74-year-old at a kiosk said?

This kind of man-on-the-street interview is especially silly in this context.

Schwirz also quotes this guy:

Dmitry Boychenko, the driver of a truck that daily delivers water to Mykolaiv from nearby Odesa, said the lockdown allowed him to reconnect with neighbors. Residents were allowed out of their homes, but were urged to stay in their courtyards, prompting impromptu gatherings outdoors.

“There are people here who are giving out the locations of our guys,” Mr. Boychenko said. “It may be sad, but we have traitors to our motherland living here.”

It's important to recognize that such quotes are pure fluff in an article like this. It's a stylistic way to illustrate the obvious: of course Russia would find or insert collaborators and spies into a contested city.

I do wish that the Times had provided a bit more information, since only some fraction of one percent of the readers have any idea whether it's normal or sensible in a situation like this to declare a citywide lockdown for more than two days to search for collaborators. And they arrested only five people in the whole process?

I picked out this article to highlight because it's a good reminder that to pretty much everyone who is not former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul that actual wars are a lot more complicated and messy than Twitter trolling and hooray-for-our-side memes.