“Don’t mention the war”: taking sides on the war in Ukraine without ever talking about it. The art of strategic messaging in Belgium

The Russo-Ukrainian war is one of the most prominent themes of disinformation monitored and analysed by factcheckers and media researchers in Europe. However, the intensity of circulation of a message does not automatically mean that the message becomes visible in public discourse. My ethnographic field research among activists and media educators in Belgium shows how the local culture of deeply ingrained suspicion towards the official truth, combined with regular exposure to Ukraine-related news (and fake news), produces multiple regimes of speech. The militant regime is shared by veteran geopolitical “truthers” with Ukrainian diaspora activists: the former take the Russian side in the conflict in a more or less explicit way and defend their right to the freedom of expression; the latter practice online vigilance to track all such expressions and “cancel” their authors. The other mode of speech is procedural: it focuses on existing norms and regulations, being agnostic as regards the contents of messages. This is the domain of EU- and nation-level bodies implementing the DSA and tracking “inauthentic behaviour”, on one hand, and, on the other hand, of courts and public intellectuals navigating legal provisions around hate speech and defamation. Finally, the third modality is strategic omission: the largest part of “Ukraine sceptics”, on the left and on the right, avoids mentioning Ukraine at all. They signal their position indirectly, via discussions about war and peace, budgets and pensions, humanism and legalism. A recent case of such veiled discourse is the Belgian debate around the frozen Russian assets.

Dr. Denys Gorbach is a political ethnographer whose main interests are everyday politics, class formation, migration, social movements and ideologies constructed from below, trade unions, industrial labour, and survival strategies of the working class. In 2022, he was awarded a PhD degree by Sciences Po Paris. His first book, The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class: Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Soviet City, is a pioneering study of politicisation of the Ukrainian working class. In 2023, he won a research grant from the French Red Cross Foundation to conduct field research on the survival strategies of Ukrainian war migrants in France. As part of the CONSPIRATIONS project, he conducts research on the role of suspicion in the politicisation and the formation of political cleavages in Francophone Belgium.