The War-Weary West: How Governments Can Keep Their Citizens …

In early February, U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, introduced a resolution to halt all U.S. military and financial aid to Ukraine. Later that month, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee decided to mark the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine by launching an investigation into Washington’s aid for Kyiv, arguing that “it’s time for the White House to turn over the receipts to ensure U.S. taxpayer dollars aren’t being lost to waste, fraud, or abuse.” Gaetz dubbed his legislative action the “Ukraine Fatigue” resolution, and Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are merrily encouraging the notion that such fatigue is widespread among Americans. But it isn’t U.S. taxpayers who stand to gain from these Republican efforts to rein in support for Ukraine. Since the beginning of its 2022 invasion, Russia has counted on the West to tire of aiding the Ukrainians in their fight. Whether they recognize it or not, members of the Republican Party’s anti-Ukraine faction are helping Russia realize its goals.

Not long after the invasion of Ukraine, some figures in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle admitted to The Washington Post that the Russian leader was simply biding his time, “digging in for a long war of attrition” against Ukraine and, by proxy, the West. Russian officials have also laid the propaganda on thick: the Western sanctions on the Russian economy—not Putin’s decision to invade a sovereign country—will cause a global food and energy crisis, and Western populations will tire of their governments’ support for Kyiv, demanding a resolution of the conflict that spares them any further material suffering. That these narratives appeared so quickly was no accident. The Kremlin has a history of trying to generate and exploit real divisions within societies—in this case, fostering so-called compassion fatigue toward Ukraine—to achieve favorable policy outcomes.

Thanks to Kyiv’s savvy communications and the West’s natural affinity for Ukraine, Russia has not been all that successful in this effort. Western publics by and large have managed to stave off compassion fatigue and remain committed to helping Ukraine repulse the Russian invasion. But that commitment will not last forever and, indeed, may already be beginning to waver in several countries. Western governments cannot afford to be complacent lest their publics start to chafe against the war effort. Leaders must acknowledge the real costs the war has imposed on their populations but nevertheless remind their citizens of all that is at stake on the battlefields of Ukraine.

THE CHORE OF SYMPATHY

Understandably, people can struggle to sustain the compassion they feel for the plight of others. Populations tire of digesting heart-wrenching photos. They get weary of being overloaded with grim information. They begin to break under the weight of accepting refugees, and they fear that they can no longer afford to help suffering strangers or accommodate the increased costs that come with crises. Governments and institutional donors, for their part, start to bristle at the obligation of adding zeros to the bottom lines of grant agreements. Moscow recognizes this tendency. Just as it has with previous influence operations elsewhere, the Kremlin has sought to fan compassion fatigue in many Western societies in a bid to influence public opinion and policy.

Although support for Ukraine remains resolute in Europe and North America, there are small signs that it might soon begin to waver. Polling conducted in early 2023 by the Centre for Information Resilience, a British-based nonprofit, showed that public support for providing financial backing to Ukraine has ebbed somewhat in central and eastern Europe, even in places close to Ukraine that have long experience with withstanding Russian disinformation. In Bulgaria and Slovakia, for example, 43 percent and 39 percent of respondents, respectively, believe their governments are doing “too much” for Ukraine. Although it is difficult to determine whether these sentiments are a direct result of Russian messaging, key Russian narratives—including the notions that Ukrainians are neo-Nazis and that NATO is responsible for the war—have gained traction in these societies.

Similar trends are appearing in the United States. According to a Pew Research Center poll published in February, a quarter of Americans believe that the United States is giving too much support to Kyiv. After the chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio, in February, some conservatives wondered why U.S. President Joe Biden was visiting Kyiv instead of the affected community at home. Moreover, since the beginning of the year, prominent American conservative influencers have sought to discredit images of Ukrainian suffering on social media as fake while insisting that an alleged dearth of footage of combat in the war in Ukraine suggests the conflict is a concocted conspiracy. (This theory is particularly absurd, given the tens of thousands of verified videos and photos posted online by civilians and combatants alike.) The corollary to such claims is the accusation that the Biden administration is sensationalizing the conflict to justify the extraordinary largesse it is extending to Ukraine.

LIES TAKE ROOT

Russia has long hoped for such divisions in public opinion in other countries and has on several occasions worked to widen them, seeking to amplify compassion fatigue. In 2016, for instance, during the height of the refugee crisis in Europe, the state-controlled TV network Channel One and other Russian propaganda organizations seeded an invented story about the rape of an ethnic Russian teenager in Germany by an Arab migrant. Although the German police eventually confirmed that no such rape had taken place, the fabrication took on a life of its own thanks to the coordinated work of Russian information networks. Russia’s state broadcaster covered the story, as did the Kremlin’s foreign news networks, including RT, Sputnik, and RT Deutsch. Their coverage was then disseminated online by right-wing groups, some of which participated in real-life demonstrations organized on Facebook. Even senior Russian officials such as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov referred to the story. The concocted rape dominated headlines in Germany for two weeks, sapping the public’s compassion for refugees and deepening a major policy challenge for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government.

After the bungled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Russian propaganda outlets employed a similar tactic. In a tweet that was later deleted, RT shared a photo of what appeared to be an Afghan family with weapons in their backpacks. The caption and image text read, “Are some terrorists getting a free ride out of Afghanistan? Up to 100 Afghan evacuees on intelligence watchlists.” Other RT tweets characterized Afghan refugees as “wolves in sheep’s clothing” and spread narratives citing U.S. mismanagement of the withdrawal and its overall war effort in the country.

Russia is attempting to repeat this tactic when it comes to Ukraine. The narratives that Moscow and its proxies disseminate range from claims about NATO “provoking” Russia into invading a sovereign country to the idea—now floated by some congressional Republicans in the United States—that the money going to Ukraine is being used for illicit or illegal ends. At times, the Kremlin repackages its domestic propaganda for foreign audiences through overt content-sharing agreements with outlets abroad; in some countries in the global South, for instance, where media outlets are unlikely to have their own correspondents based in Ukraine, misleading Russian coverage of the war dominates. On other occasions, foreign outlets pick up Russian narratives, obscuring their origins. The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, for example, was a prominent amplifier of fringe Russian theories, including the accusation that Ukrainians have habitually misused U.S. aid and a conspiracy about U.S. bioweapons labs in Ukraine being the reason for U.S. support for Kyiv. Moscow also pushes extremely negative content through its propaganda channels and affiliated social media handles about Ukrainian refugees in European countries, claiming they are ungrateful or criminal “social tourists” seeking the benefits of living in Western societies.

The Kremlin’s narratives lack any credibility, particularly juxtaposed with Russia’s indiscriminate killing of at least 8,000 civilians in Ukraine. Until recently, these fictions had won very little traction among Western audiences, especially in comparison with prior Russian attempts to undermine compassion in the West. A few factors have helped maintain robust public support for Ukraine. First, an uncomfortable and incontrovertible truth: Europeans and Americans have felt greater affinity and proximity—both cultural and geographic—to Ukraine, Ukrainians, and their struggle for freedom than to other countries and people in crisis. Ukrainian refugees have undoubtedly received a more welcome reception in Europe than those fleeing conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. This is in part because Ukraine is a mostly white, Christian country, and it gains more sympathy among mostly white, Christian publics than do countries embroiled in conflicts in the global South. Put more simply: Ukrainians do not have to contend with the racism that other refugees routinely face. Many Europeans also think of Ukraine as the bulwark against further Russian incursion into Europe.

Second, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s communications have been incredibly effective throughout the war, regularly reminding the West of the horrors perpetrated by Putin’s army. As the communications scholar Susan Moeller wrote in her 1999 book Compassion Fatigue (the first in-depth examination of the subject in politics and media), “What really makes a difference in the foreign policy equation is how long [photos of a conflict] continue to have prominence in the news and how effective those pictures are in illustrating a political stance: save the starving Somalis, rescue the imprisoned Bosnians.” A single striking image—such as the BBC journalist Matthew Price’s shocking 1992 photograph of Fikret Alic, an emaciated Muslim man standing behind the barbed wire of a Serbian concentration camp, or the 2015 image taken by the Turkish photographer Nilufer Demir of the body of Alan Kurdi, a two-year-old Syrian refugee who died as his family tried to cross the Mediterranean to Greece—can galvanize compassion in the West. No single such image encapsulates the Ukrainian war. Yet Western publics have been fed a steady stream of content displaying Russian cruelty and Ukrainian suffering, thanks in part to Zelensky and the Ukrainian government’s insistent and urgent communications. That daily cascade of imagery generated a surprisingly deep well of compassion for Ukraine in the year following the invasion.  

THE COMMUNICATIONS BATTLEFIELD

Of course, audiences can grow overwhelmed, tired, or inured to these photos and videos—and, indeed, that increasingly seems to be happening as the war drags on. Russia’s messaging campaigns have further stoked anxieties about the strains of supporting Ukraine’s war effort. Enter Gaetz and Republican Representative James Comer of Kentucky, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, who seek to address these concerns through performative resolutions and investigations that effectively turn Ukraine’s plight into a political football. The Kremlin, whatever its mistakes early in the war, has noted these congressional actions and is amplifying them to both Russian and global audiences. RT’s fawning article on Gaetz’s resolution reads like a press release. Still, the United States and its allies should not brush aside their citizens’ concerns. They should meet them head-on, providing transparent accountings of aid to Ukraine, updating citizens regularly about support for the war effort, and insisting that restoring a sovereign Ukraine is the best defense of freedom from authoritarian governments around the world.

Rather than let Gaetz’s disinformation stand, the Biden administration and members of Congress who support Kyiv must continue to emphasize what Americans and Ukrainians have in common—bravery, ingenuity, resilience, and a fierce love of country—while still acknowledging that weekly grocery runs and trips to the gas station are dipping deeper and deeper into people’s bank accounts. Americans must recognize that although Ukraine fatigue is understandable, the Kremlin and some reactionary Republicans and other homegrown purveyors of disinformation seek to exacerbate it for their own gain. Ukraine’s supporters must draw the connection between the effects of the war on inflation and the actions of one man—Putin. To endure rising food or gas prices is to express solidarity with the Ukrainian people and condemn a war criminal.

Without a concerted effort to push back against Russia’s online offensive, the West will allow the Kremlin to gain ground in an information war that supporters of Ukraine were initially winning. Russia knows the communications battlefield is as important as the kinetic one; the West would do well to remember that, too.