Chaos has consumed online communities created to help foreigners organise to travel and volunteer in Ukraine, including some hoping to fight against the Russians, as the spaces deal with a flood of interested users, trolls and infighting.
After making an appeal to internationals, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted a video today saying that 16,000 foreign volunteers have registered their interest in joining the country’s forces fighting in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Hearing the call for assistance, people from around the world have hoped to find out information about how to volunteer. The number of people searching various keywords relating to volunteering to fight or help in Ukraine spiked as Russian troops rolled over the border into Ukraine (Australia had the 10th-most interest out of any country, with Ireland, the UK and Finland at the top).
In lieu of online resources from Ukraine, unofficial online subreddits, Discord servers and group chats have been set up by users to crowdsource good-quality information, document their travels and bring together people to volunteer in groups. Unfortunately, the decentralised and open nature of many of these communities has made this near impossible.
The sheer amount of interest from around the world has made it very difficult for those trying to organise these spaces to find potential volunteers who have the most relevant experience and training to assist. Reddit user u/tallalittlebit explained on the subreddit r/VolunteersForUkraine — an online space that’s grown to 32,000 members in just over a week — that people who had submitted their details to website www.volunteerforukraine.org hadn’t heard back because other volunteer organisers had been inundated with messages.
“I had 3 volunteers with heavy combat experience with multiple tours AND language skills and I didn’t find their messages for 3 days because 7,000 of you each day were spamming me with questions, most of it from people who DEFINITELY should not be going,” they wrote.
The nature of the platforms that allow quick growing, accessible spaces has also created difficulties for sharing information. The r/VolunteersForUkraine subreddit has posts giving information from people claiming to have worked for Doctors Without Borders wedged between pictures of a Russian soldier surrendering and calls to boycott Russian goods. A barebones guide answering some of the basic questions has been set up by the subreddit’s moderators. Still, new members ask the same questions over and over.
“This subreddit is quickly going to shit,” one user wrote. “It feels as if every other post is either a shit-post or people asking whether they’re qualified to go/how to sign up.”
Similarly, there’s a handful of Discord chat servers about volunteering that have suffered from an influx of users. Disjointed exchanges happen as people join to say they’re interested only to not hear anything. Without official leadership, some step up to advise or critique others. Others promise that they have military or medical experience, but there’s no proof of these claims. Online disagreements spill over as people clash over their prospective plans and the legitimacy of some people’s advice. One Discord moderator tried to soothe tensions after a particularly heated interaction: “now that some of the drama is finished — let’s get back to helping the refugees and victims of war”.
Even in smaller group chats over platforms like Signal that have popped up for organising small troops, misinformation and confusion reigns. Participants share news articles translated using Google Translate and social media posts as the basis for making their plans. Others try to crowdsource information that they can’t find information to either (“Are we allowed to take knives on the plane?” one user asks).
David, an Australian who told Crikey he’s planning on going to fight against Russia in Ukraine, says he’s noticed an increasingly hostile attitude to critical feedback towards naive posters who profess to want to go and serve without any basic knowledge or training in conflict.
“There’s an abundance of posturing [in these spaces]. People are looking for information but there’s a very distinct lack of anyone with information,” he said.
“I’ve seen an alarming trend of people with expertise being shut down as Russian trolls or with a pseudo-masculine attitude, being like ‘this is war and you’re thinking about border permits?’”
Paranoia has started to infect some of these spaces as they become targets for trolling. The r/VolunteersForUkraine has become overrun with fake posts from users claiming to have arrived in Ukraine. In response, users claim that the subreddit has become a target for Russian operatives and is now “compromised”. (Crikey was able to find several threads on 4Chan that encouraged users to go and troll the subreddit).
Fed up with the low-quality information and fighting, one user decried how distracted users were from the goal of the online community.
“We’ve forgotten the title of this subreddit […] It is r/VolunteersForUkraine,” they said.
Where is Beau Geste when you need him?
It’s interesting to consider how much simpler it was for George Orwell in the 1930s, who (from memory) was able to show up with a letter of introduction from his British political party and thereby gain the trust of the POUM and their militia. I expect that most will end up by simply travelling to the Polish border and showing their credentials in person.
If things drag on we can expect to see a more sophisticated system build up, most likely through the work of interested US veterans, of which there are many. (The NYT has an article on it if you’re interested.)
What’s wrong with the old fashioned way, answering an ad. in Soldier of Fortune?
Or the Classified ads. in The Times’, as per a John Buchan character.
As with the Children’s Crusade – what could possibly go wrong?
Very Dad’s Army Cam. In reality though I’m sure Ukraine and the financial support it gets will assist in paying for “private military contractors” or mercenaries looking for paid work all over the globe. After all, that’s what the US and others do.
There are a lot of mercenaries at a loose end with the US out of Afghanistan and the ME.
Most of them with US passports so no probs. travelling to Poland.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/14/russia-ukraine-war-international-legion-foreign-fighters
I’m shocked that Crikey is acting as a forum for making things even more combative (and destructive) for the peoples of that trouble. Does Crikey like to foster war?
Cam’s remit is to explore the new, wired dimension of the modern world, without which the news lacks dimension. It’s a job he does very well.
As far as I can tell, he hasn’t actually set up a web page for volunteers in these pages, so your comment is mystifying. Perhaps you read it too fast?