As a young analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, where I prepared for our country’s leaders assessments on the national security implications of international events, I developed an appreciation for the fact that the game of geopolitics, frequently equated to chess, usually has at play some pieces that are not fully visible on the board. Identifying these unconventional tokens and realizing how they move facilitate our efforts to understand why a given situation unfolds the way it does and to develop a more informed appreciation for possible outcomes.
In the Ukraine crisis, one way we can better position ourselves to see the big picture by paying attention to nonstate actors. Now, we have all seen the reports of daily rising numbers of ideologically motivated foreign fighters — including U.S. passport holders and reminiscent of mujahideen recruiting against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s — but I’m referring to other approaches to private support that are emerging in prominent ways in the cyber, open-source analysis, media and economic theaters, which all bear watching.
Private citizen players, fueled by moral outrage, are making pro-Ukraine contributions inside and outside the conflict zone, possibly on a scale unseen in previous intrastate conflicts.
Take, for example, the infamous hacker collective Anonymous, which has reportedly dented Moscow’s efforts to censor coverage of the invasion inside Russia by tapping government-controlled television news feeds and broadcasting footage of the carnage, and has engaged in online harassment operations against organs of government by manipulating the content of their official public websites.
Then there’s Bellingcat, a private research group that is churning out advanced forensic analysis of video and other war data rivaling that produced by national intelligence agencies and now being cited by mainstream media. (The organization was, until this conflict, largely unknown outside of international security nerd cliques.)
The information-war front is seeing its share of private, civilian players, too. As independent Facebook groups give direct, real-time access to live, firsthand postings from fighters in the trenches, Twitter reportedly has tapped Dark Web channels to ensure that Russian news consumers have untainted lines to outside information.
Reports abound regarding private citizens’ use of assorted social media platforms, including the dating site Tinder, to inform Russian citizens about realities on the ground in Ukraine and beg for their protest. Meanwhile, Lithuanian civilians reportedly are facilitating phone calls into Russian homes, one by one, by native-level speakers who provide to the residents information about the events in Ukraine that is unavailable from internal Russian sources.
We have also seen captains of private industry join nation-state financial initiatives, the “economic war,” as President Putin calls it. Setting aside a focus on profits and shareholders, CEOs and boards in all sectors are denying goods and services to Russia and providing support to their own employees in Ukraine. Several nongovernmental organizations, like the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), have joined the socio-political pressure campaign against the Kremlin by shunning Russian participation, and several former Western government leaders, acting in their roles as private citizens, have stepped down from board positions with Russian companies.
Finally, we are witnessing privately organized crowdfunding of everything from ammunition for fighters to medical supplies for evacuees, while we see others donating money and time and their skills to humanitarian relief efforts in Ukraine-border countries, which are now harboring the largest groups of refugees inside Europe since WWII.
“What do we make of all of this?,” you ask. Well … nonstate actors and initiatives, particularly foreign fighters, have been documented and studied in previous conflicts, but the enthusiasm and creativity and breadth of the private efforts we see in Ukraine seem to have a different character; they may be telegraphing the rise in prominence of a new regular variable in the calculus of future conflicts.
The full impact of these efforts on the outcome of the current war will only become fully clear in hindsight, if ever, but they meanwhile offer us all — even here in the remote Pacific — inspiration (and opportunities) to contribute to the cause, if only by donating to the humanitarian initiatives caring for the displaced.
So, keep your eye on the nonstate actors and, while you’re at it, throw a shaka their way.
J.P. Atwell is a former senior CIA operations officer. His two-decade career began as an intelligence analyst and took him to every continent, save Antarctica. He now calls Hawaii Island home. He welcomes your comments at island.intelligencer@gmail.com.