Take a picture of this. You are in Russia and want to watch The Batman or Better Call Saul. You go to a pirating site and download a torrent. So far, it's been great. You open the credits roll after playing the file. The young man in the white hoodie appeared on the screen.
He says that it is what you need to see, even though it is not what you expected. This is the truth about the war in Ukraine.
The man is a journalist from the Ukranian city of Kyiv who is one of the volunteers working on a campaign to inform Russians about the war in Ukraine. He taught journalism to university students in the Ukrainian capital and hosted hit TV and radio shows. The invasion turned my world upside down, according to the man. I am good at journalism. I informed the world's media from my bathroom. For many Ukrainians, bathroom windows are windowless and insulated by multiple walls, which provides relative safety from Russia's brutal and indiscriminate shelling.
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The French creative director of 72andSunny saw an opportunity in Russia's refusal to pay for the use of intellectual property from the west and started the project. The latter was announced by the Kremlin at the start of March, supposedly to counter sanctions Russia was hit with. The idea was brought to life by Roukhomovsky and Kokoshko. Nebo lost all of its clients when the war began. The family were forced to leave. Nebo is connected to the international market by her. She found 72andSunny and the other agency together to create a form of cyber guerrilla warfare.
It was a conscious decision to keep the journalists in the Ukrainian space. Russians can help spread the truth about Putin's war.
Ukrainians are witnesses and we wanted to work with them. She tells us that probably Russian journalists would be the opinion leaders.
Roukhomovsky wanted to make sure that the voices of people Russians can relate to were not lost in translation and that they were people Russians could empathise with.
He says that it is important for Russians to hear the truth in Russian.
Credit: Torrents of Truth
In order to create a sense of trust and connection, Torrents of Truth is not being run under the radar. The creators stand next to it with pride. Anyone can see the video reports the campaign has produced and the team is also transparent about the torrents they hijack.
The more people seed the torrents, the more popular they'll be. We decided to make this initiative public because we wanted people from all over the world to download the torrents.
"We saw an opportunity to bypass censorship in a way that couldn't be banned or blocked."
He got the idea after talking to a Ukrainian lawyer. The Russian government passed a misinformation law on March 4. What is the punishment? It could be up to 15 years in prison. The law requires all to address the war as a "special military operation" and forbids the wearing of anti-war insignia by protesters. The war is a criminal offense in Russia, but piracy is not. The loophole was created by the fact that 48 percent of Russia downloads movies on a daily basis. There was an opportunity to circumvent censorship in a way that wouldn't be banned or blocked.
Credit: Torrents of Truth
If done right, piracy is almost impossible totrace. It's difficult to regulate torrenting sites in the West, because even if one server gets blocked, multiple others sprout in its place, and it takes as little as a proxy to get to a restricted site. Both downloaders and uploads can be anonymous.
Two of the Torrents of Truth's server are in Poland and the other in the Netherlands. The source of the torrents can't be blocked because the group has multiple addresses.
Two days after the launch of the campaign, we spoke to Roukhomovsky, who told us about the 21 torrents that had been uploaded by the site. The human impact of this project can't be calculated. There is a way to measure the success of the torrent by the number of seeds it gets.
Finding Ukrainian journalists willing to join the cause was a challenge even with this set-up. She says that it took them a long time because they had some journalists that got in trouble. We had other journalists who agreed to take part, but we didn't see the film. They didn't have faith anymore.
Russia's Ministry of Defense denied responsibility for the massacre of hundreds of civilians in the town of Bucha after Russian troops left the area. It changed the minds of many Ukrainians who were willing to talk to Russians. The truth to power was the purpose of the team.
The train station in Bucha, Ukraine, undamaged by the war. Credit: Getty
Bucha's shopping mall Epicentre destroyed by bombardment, seen in June, 2022 Credit: Getty
We assumed that a lot of people in Russia don't know the truth when we decided to start this project. We are not trying to change the minds of those who support the war. She knows that appealing to those completely soaked in propaganda is Sisyphean, but she's also aware that in an oppressing society there is always a silent opposition.
To find the best way to reach those people, Kokoshko and her team interviewed Russian citizens opposing the war and asked them how to speak to them. It took the Torrents of Truth team a long time to find a balance between exposing the truth and not disturbing a viewer to the point that they would switch off.
Credit: Torrents of Truth
It would be difficult for the viewers and the team to watch the footage from Russia's invasion. The most difficult part of becoming a military reporter was reading the news again and again. It was difficult to sum up the most brutal atrocities of the war. I had to figure out how to explain it to the viewer so that they wouldn't just turn off the video and remove the torrent.
"Summarising the most brutal atrocities of the war was hard to accept. I also had to figure out how to explain it briefly, and keep the viewer's attention..."
Tasya S., who is based in Moscow, joined the cause as part of her resistance efforts from within Russia. She believes that Russians can still help Ukrainians even if they're not in the country.
She says she tries to spread this information, talk to different people, and write "no war" in the city. There were open mic concerts in the park. People applauded when I sang a Ukrainian folk song and then an anti-war Russian song.
Credit: Torrents of Truth
There is no way to measure the impact of this campaign, which is one of the differences between the work of Roukhomovsky and Kokoshko.
Russia is not going to change from one side to the other in a single moment. Even though 90 percent of the people who are going to see that truth might not believe it, there might be 10 percent or one Russian citizen that changes their minds. That is a good result for us.
"Though 90 percent of the people who are going to see that truth might not believe it, there might be 10 percent, or even one person, one Russian citizen, that might change their mind. That's already a good enough result for us."
Russia's approach to propaganda is old. With little creativity or understanding of the modern world, it's not naive to think that an innovative online campaign like Torrents of Truth can go far. Navalny's ability to use the internet to talk to Russians has made him Putin's biggest opponent today. With the help of his team, Navalny addresses people on social media even now that he's in prison.
A woman watches an investigation film by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on her laptop. Credit: Getty
Russia's propaganda isn't the only method that has remained the same. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a symptom of a bigger problem. Helping others understand the truth is what he wants to do.
Russia has done the same thing in other countries, in different wars, in different years. He says that if you read the history of 1939 to 1945, you'll learn a lot about Russia. It means that we're not afraid. People who have fallen in love with Putin's propaganda are helped by us. The belief that what Russia is doing is right is destroyed by each of our stories.
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