In the three months since its tanks rolled into Ukraine, Russia has caused massive death and destruction and triggered a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportions. It has razed urban infrastructure and housing, laid waste to industrial facilities, impaired agricultural production and exports, and seriously damaged Ukraine’s transport and energy infrastructure.

Recent estimates put the cost of reconstruction at US$600 billion. Depending how long the war lasts, the final figure could easily exceed US$1 trillion. Ukraine’s economy has been devastated. The World Bank estimates that this year it will shrink by 45%. Even as the war continues, it’s clear that the task of reconstruction will be enormous.

Who will pay? The European Union recently disbursed €600 million (US$632 million) in soft loans to meet the most urgent needs and plans to provide a further similar amount by the summer, and the International Monetary Fund has approved US$1.4 billion in emergency financing.

At a conference held in Warsaw in early May, international donors led by the EU laid the foundations for a Marshall Plan–like trust fund, pledging US$6.3 billion to support Ukraine’s humanitarian and reconstruction needs. The World Bank, the IMF and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development are also expected to provide financing and technical support.

Even these funds together, however, are dwarfed by Ukraine’s reconstruction needs. The long-term costs of rebuilding the country will be colossal, and the process will take years, or decades.

The war was instigated by Russia and was unprovoked. There is therefore a general expectation in the West that Russia should foot the bill. Putting in place the mechanisms to tap Russian assets, however, is fraught with political and legal challenges.

Several ideas have been floated, but without much detail. Western nations and others will need to reach broad political agreement on their approach and work out the thorny details. They may also need to enact supporting legislation.

The most commonly proffered proposal is to liquidate the assets of Russia’s oligarchs and put the proceeds in a reconstruction fund. This idea is attractive mainly because of the visibility of the assets but is legally hard to implement. The assets lie in many jurisdictions and would need to be confiscated and sold through due process, with adequate proof of their illegal origin. Property rights would need to be protected. Simply being Russian and rich should not be grounds to have your wealth confiscated.

Few countries have legislation that allows for the quick seizure and sale of oligarchs’ wealth. The exception is Italy, whose tough anti-mafia laws might serve as a model. Four US senators have already initiated an ‘assets seizure for Ukraine reconstruction bill’ that would enable the US government to take control of oligarchs’ assets. However, the funds obtained would at best cover a fraction of Ukraine’s reconstruction needs.

Tapping Russia’s frozen foreign reserves is attractive but legally problematic. European and US authorities have frozen about US$300 billion of Russian reserves held in euros and dollars. That would help significantly to bridge the funding gap.

There are several recent precedents for freezing a country’s reserves, as a temporary measure. These include Iran, Venezuela and Afghanistan. However, foreign reserves are the property of the concerned central bank and enjoy strong protection under international law. Russia’s frozen reserves remain the property of its central bank, and confiscating them to fund Ukraine’s reconstruction would be legally and politically controversial. And as long as the reserves remain frozen, they can be used as a bargaining chip with Moscow.

The EU high representative for foreign policy, Josep Borrell, has indicated that he supports using Russia’s reserves. He refers to the precedent set by the US taking partial control of Afghanistan’s reserves. Of the EU countries, Poland has been the most vocal in supporting the notion that Russia should pay. EU officials are looking into the matter but have not proposed specific action.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has indicated that she does not take the matter lightly, that such a move would need to be coordinated with America’s allies, and that new legislation might be required. When Russia’s reserves were originally frozen, China was strongly opposed. It is clearly concerned that the precedent set by the move could leave its own enormous reserves at risk.

Prior to the war, Ukraine was no economic paragon. It was endemically corrupt, with weak rule of law and lax regulation of state entities. Ukraine inherited many of the problems of the Soviet system, including poor-quality and ageing infrastructure. In due course, the reconstruction effort will provide an opportunity not only to rehabilitate physical and social assets but to reform Ukraine’s economic policies and institutions.

As the conflict drags on, it is turning into a war of attrition. It may eventually become a frozen conflict. Any sustainable reconstruction effort would require a high degree of stability, which is not yet on the horizon. Before that, however, the details for financing the reconstruction need to be hammered out. The task is complex and should be tackled without delay.

The impact of the Russia–Ukraine war on global food supplies is being magnified by nations imposing bans on food and fertiliser exports to preserve stocks for their domestic needs.

Since the invasion, 15 nations have imposed restrictions on food and fertiliser exports, including new bans imposed last week by India on wheat exports and Indonesia on sales of palm oil.

As the Financial Times trade columnist Alan Beattie comments: ‘It’s a global prisoners’ dilemma: it’s in everyone’s interest to keep exports flowing, but no one wants to run short by being the only country that does.’

As a major food exporter, Australia could be doing more to alleviate the crisis through food aid. However, there’s currently no mechanism for this given that exports are managed by private trading businesses.

The emerging crisis repeats the experience of 2008, when a panic about food supplies in the wake of the global financial crisis led nations to raise export barriers and create the shortages that had been feared. That led to food riots in many countries, particularly in the Middle East, where they set the conditions for the Arab spring uprisings in 2010–11.

The first social disruption from the Ukraine crisis has emerged in Iran. The government has slashed grain subsidies in the face of soaring budgetary costs, resulting in bread prices tripling, and leading to protests in several cities over the past week.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization highlights the vulnerability of wheat-importing nations including Egypt and Turkey as well as sub-Saharan countries of Congo, Eritrea, Madagascar, Namibia, Somalia and Tanzania. It predicts that the number of people going hungry will rise by 13 million as a result of the conflict.

Russia and Ukraine provide about a third of the world’s wheat and barley, almost two-thirds of traded sunflower oil and a fifth of its maize. In addition, Russia is the largest source of fertilisers.

Although Russia’s food and fertiliser sales have been exempted from sanctions, it’s difficult for buyers to arrange finance and insurance, both of which are sanctioned, as well as shipping. Ukraine’s exports have been largely halted by the war.

The disruptions to Ukrainian and Russian sales come on top of a series of other pressures. Commodity prices globally have been rising over the past year in response to the strong economic recovery from the pandemic and the general inflationary impulse from stimulatory monetary policy. Rising energy prices also contribute to rising farm product prices.

In addition, climatic conditions have resulted in reduced supplies from many countries. The US Department of Agriculture last week forecast the smallest US wheat exports since 1973 because crops have been affected by drought. Global wheat production is expected to fall by 0.6%, mainly due to a 35% fall in Ukraine’s production. India justified its wheat export ban with the damage to crops from extreme heat.

So far this year, the FAO’s measure of prices shows a 20% rise for cereals; 28% for vegetable oils; and 8% to 10% for meat, dairy and sugar. Price increases from general inflationary pressure have resulted in a 30% increase in total traded food costs since April 2021, led by a 46% lift in vegetable oils and a 34% increase in cereal costs.

The squeeze on vegetable oil trade may prove the most damaging, because 40% of global consumption is provided by imports. There are high levels of import dependence—60% or more—across most of South Asia and much of Africa.

An analysis by the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute suggests that Lebanon may be one of the worst affected, because it is already in the midst of a severe financial crisis and it depends on Russia and Ukraine for more than a quarter of the average Lebanese family’s calorie intake. Much of its silo storage was destroyed in the Beirut port explosion of 2020.

The spread of export restrictions follows the pattern evident during the 2008 financial crisis and, to a lesser extent, following the outbreak of Covid-19. IFPRI counts 20 countries imposing export bans, up from five before the invasion. The bans cover a total of 31 products, while a further seven nations have export-licensing requirements on 9 products.

The FAO has proposed establishing a food import finance facility to assist the poorest nations meeting their needs in the face of rising prices and global shortages. The organisation’s Chinese director general, Qu Dongyu, told a meeting of G20 finance ministers last month that eligible countries would be required to increase investments in agricultural resilience and said the FAO believed a fund could be established without further inflaming market prices.

The suggestion is that the fund would be established with an initial US$6 billion which could cover a quarter of the current import costs of eligible countries. Another model would be for the fund to support imports in excess of a base per capita amount.

While the proposal will be considered further at the G20 summit in Bali in November, it is unlikely to be established in time to provide relief over the next year or two.

Australia stands to gain from the global shortage with its agricultural exports expected to rise by a third to $64 billion this financial year. Average rural commodity prices are at record levels, standing 40% higher than at the beginning of last year, according to the federal Department of Agriculture.

There would be scope for the federal government to develop its own food aid program to directly assist poor nations in the region, particularly neighbours in the Pacific. Australia’s aid programs frequently include measures to assist agricultural productivity. Australia also donates relatively small amounts to the UN World Food Programme ($40 million budgeted in 2022–23).

The US has operated a food-aid program since 1954 that both provides technical assistance to help countries improve their own agricultural productivity and delivers direct food donations.

At a time when national income is being boosted by $15 billion from the record prices resulting from the global food shortage, Australia could do more.

The national grain lobby group, Grain Producers Australia, has launched a fundraising appeal, Grain4Ukraine, calling on farmers to donate a share of their proceeds to assist their erstwhile competitors in Ukraine, so there is good will for international assistance in Australian farm communities.

It has become commonplace for commentators on Russia’s war in Ukraine to assert that Ukraine is winning the information war.

Indeed, Russia’s information operations seemed clumsy, and in some cases completely absent, in the early days of the invasion. In contrast, Ukraine, with much fewer resources, has seemed to dominate in all domains—broadcast, print and social.

After the horrific Russian atrocities against unarmed Ukrainian civilians revealed in Bucha, Irpin and elsewhere this week, it’s difficult to believe that Russia could win the information war anywhere.

However, Carl Miller, research director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at UK think tank Demos, cautions that while this might be true for Western and English-language information spaces, it’s probably not true outside the West.

Miller says that the wall-to-wall pro-Ukraine sympathy that Western audiences are seeing on social media shouldn’t engender complacency.

‘In fact, it might be blinding us to where the information war is really happening. It could mean that the West is not the battleground over which the information war is currently being fought.’

This view is supported by a report this week from Meta detailing a surge in disinformation across its platforms in which Russia and its allies are playing major roles.

Miller and his team have been pulling apart a Twitter influence operation that began on 2 March, focused on two pro-invasion hashtags, #IStandWithPutin and #IStandWithRussia.

Researchers looking at the activity on these hashtags saw obvious and suspicious patterns, says Miller, indicating a probable information operation.

The key features included accounts that did nothing but fire off retweets, accounts from different linguistic and national arenas that suddenly started posting the hashtags on the same day, and sharp spikes in the creation of these accounts on the day of the invasion as well as on the day of the UN General Assembly vote to condemn Russia’s actions.

But, says Miller, in the world of open-source intelligence it’s very difficult to find hard evidence to link campaigns back to state actors, in this case Russia.

Miller’s team wanted to find out more about this campaign by building a picture of the linguistic profile of accounts used.

The first thing they found was that very few of these accounts claimed to be from the West. Most used Hindi, Farsi, Urdu, Sindhi and other languages and identified themselves as coming from India, South Africa, Malaysia and Indonesia.

And their messages did not address the West at all. The narratives they amplified were all about Western hypocrisy and NATO expansionism.

‘They were talking about anti-colonial solidarity, they were talking about BRICS solidarity, they were talking about Putin’s role in national liberation movements in Africa in the 1980s,’ explains Miller.

A lot of these narratives were amplified by a small number of memes receiving huge numbers of retweets and ‘likes’ from the suspect accounts.

Miller says that these memes can be divided into two categories.

‘You’ve got memes which are explicitly addressing India and BRICS countries, especially South Africa. Lots of Indian and Russian flags crossed, and ones invoking Russia’s diplomatic support for India over the years, as well as what Ukraine has done to undermine Indian aims over the years.

‘But tied in with that there are pure internet memetics. Putin riding a bear and India as Jon Snow in Game of Thrones, standing up to a charging horde of Western diplomatic pressure.’

He notes, however, that it’s important to recognise that a lot of this messaging doesn’t really belong in the category of disinformation.

‘There isn’t a tremendous number of truth claims really being contained in these memes. There is no actual truth or lie in Putin riding around on a bear.

‘So this is often actually not really about fact or falsehood at all. It’s acting in the world of feeling and slick TikTok rock music videos, and making Russia look cool and powerful. It is much more to do with identity and belonging and sense of place in the world, I think, than overt fake news or propagating a lie.’

While it’s difficult pin these campaigns on states without sustained investigative journalism, Miller says many of them use paid-to-engage services, which offer to create amplification accounts that up retweets, followers and replies. The aim is to create an illusion of high engagement that might then tip over into authentic engagement.

‘You’re one Google away from these services. For instance, in the three Indian tweet clusters which we found, pretty much every single account is currently talking about Kashmir Files, a very divisive Indian-language film that’s been released. So, my guess is that they’re commercial.’

The fact that businesses have sprung up expressly to service both commercial and state-based information operations is an often overlooked aspect of information warfare.

‘It probably has much more to do with the grubby, benign day-to-day world of spam than it does grand geopolitics and the great game,’ says Miller.

But the geopolitical effects can be very real. Miller notes that the #IStandWithPutin campaign is attempting to ‘couch what I see as an essentially an imperial invasion in anti-colonial terms’.

If the Indian government sees an upswing in pro-invasion Twitter sentiment, that might influence it to take action to help Russia circumvent sanctions and damage India–US relations—both desirable objectives for Moscow.

According to Miller, the information space across BRICS and Southeast Asia is much more contested than Western decision-makers might be aware of.

‘I’ve had lots of journalists reach out to me from Malaysia, India and Singapore and Indonesia. They are seeing much more joined conflict on Ukraine in their information spaces than what we are seeing in the West.’

So how best can Ukraine-supportive governments counter these campaigns? First, they shouldn’t just copy these tactics, argues Miller, because all that would do is help strip information of authenticity or true meaning, ‘hastening the militarisation of things that shouldn’t be militarised’.

‘The responses have to be asymmetric. We have to look beyond the platforms. Facebook and Twitter removing accounts isn’t enough. We have to put more direct pressure on the servers that are being used to attack these platforms,’ says Miller.

‘And ultimately, I think we’ve got to clean up the world of spam. Because it’s not okay that there are these companies out there selling retweets to anyone, because who’s going to pay for them are information warfare officers. It’s not okay that this stuff is legal and it’s not okay that it’s functioning freely in the open market.’

Cybersecurity and the fight against disinformation share one key feature that, if better understood, could point the way to a more durable defence for democracies.

Malware on the internet and the meaning of content online are reversible in ways that challenge the orderly processing of information needed for stable democracies.

In the cyber domain, order is the ability for businesses, governments and economies to function without data breaches, disruptions and the theft of valuable data.

Order, in the case of online content, means the public’s ability to understand and trust the information they receive.

The weapons of malware on the internet are themselves information that, with re-engineering, can be repurposed to be used against their creators.

The Shadow Brokers hacking group exposed tools used by US intelligence agencies. Once the tools were hacked and released in 2016, they were incorporated into ransomware used against US and Western targets.

Researchers Karlis Podins and Kenneth Geers write:

Malware is a weapon unlike old-fashioned tanks and planes … [F]ully-functioning cyber weapons can be found every day, by a careful observer, within network traffic and even on most email servers. And just as with Aladdin’s magic lamp, these tools can be quickly repurposed for new operations, entirely distinct from what the malware was originally intended to do.

Even discerning the motives of hacking is deeply dependent on perspective.

I once heard a cybersecurity professional explain that a poorly written antivirus tool was hard to distinguish from a piece of advanced malware.

The ambiguity about code found on networks extends to online content in the form of words, videos and images. Even if the facts are agreed (a bomb exploded, a politician made a statement), meaning inevitably diverges. Online, though, meaning is easily, wilfully inverted to the opposite of its original intention.

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the White House’s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci urged people not to use face masks. Months into the outbreak, Fauci changed his advice about the utility of masks to prevent Covid’s spread. Today, millions of people read the change in advice as evidence of a government cover-up.

The further the intended audience is from the action, the easier it is to present facts to them with the meaning reversed: think of the successful effort by Russia and Syrian proxies to convince the world that the White Helmets rescue crews were terrorists and crisis actors.

The easy reversibility of meaning is a challenge for the democratic system that relies on a baseline of public understanding of events among differing communities.

Reversed meaning is distinct from opinions differing over the same sets of facts. If it were just about opinions, the Associated Press would not now produce a story called ‘NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn’t happen this week’ including items like ‘Photos of London Olympics don’t show prior knowledge of pandemic’.

Instead, it’s a matter of misunderstandings that unspool easily, or that are encouraged to unspool, across information found online.

What is routinely called ‘disinformation’ flourishes in this environment.

The problem for democracy is that the understanding of broad notions that bind a society shouldn’t be so easily reversible: questions like who is the legitimate authority and who is the recognised winner of an election.

Differing views are the lifeblood of democracy.

Before the internet, information was just as contested as it is today. However, the economics of communication didn’t allow for the inversion of meaning at the scale the internet now permits.

‘Poe’s law’ holds that it’s impossible to create a parody on the internet without attracting someone who takes the joke as being real.

The same logic applies to non-parody.

On 6 January last year, an organised riot and coup attempt took place at the US Capitol. A year later, pro–Donald Trump demonstrators argued the riot was akin to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 in China.

A ‘solidarity’ movement has emerged in Australia and Canada (replete with the signage inspired by the 1980s Polish trade movement). If members see ‘communism’ everywhere, they can co-opt images of the 1980s anti-communist movement to galvanise people over networks, irrespective of historical fact.

Shouting verified facts onto social media only creates more fuel for misunderstanding and confusion. What’s required for democracy to thrive is to make some core ideas and information less easily reversible. But how?

The answer is to develop strategies around information that make certain democratic meanings more ‘sticky’. The evolution in ransomware defence offers a clue. Cyber defenders have learned they can no longer simply out-engineer would-be ransom-seekers; they must take action to change the behaviour of the humans operating on the other side of the network.

So we see publicised arrests, warnings made through diplomatic channels, legal reforms to speed the flow of information needed to recover stolen funds, even efforts that instil doubt in the ransomware gang themselves—all of these are human-to-human operations over the internet.

In the realm of communication, perhaps core meanings central to democracy (‘insurrection is not a legitimate option’, for example) can be made stickier in the minds of the public if the locus of communication relies less on the internet itself and more on the human-to-human cross-promotion of the narrative.

Overpowering the reversibility of information online requires information that orients or makes sense of the same information offline.

When Russia annexed Crimea, when Russian-backed militants shot down MH17 and when Russia intervened in Syria, the Kremlin and its proxies were able to spread information that could be easily, wilfully misconstrued online. Russian soldiers were ‘little green men’, and White Helmets were ‘terrorists’.

Differences in fact were recast as mere differences of opinion.

In the current crisis over Ukraine, Russia’s efforts to paint the West as the aggressor have been stymied in part by the US State Department and the British foreign office releasing information that, once ingested into the news cycle, makes it more difficult to claim that the US is fomenting war with Russia, or that the US–UK–Australia position on Ukraine in 2022 has parallels to the same governments’ views of Iraq in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion.

Another broader example: US President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy in December was an online event of sufficient complexity and breadth that no single fact that could be wilfully misconstrued to invert its overall meaning. Democracies with shared interests stand together in the world.

Could this strategy be replicated on smaller issues like those that are debated in domestic politics?

The goal in making the ideas that are core to democracy less reversible is not to make those ideas irreversible, which evinces the rigid thinking of illiberal regimes.

Nonetheless, we have to recognise that truths once seen as self-evident are no longer self-evident online.

With the emergence of the metaverse, virtual reality, non-fungible tokens and cryptocurrencies, what’s not real will continue to compete for our attention with what is real—like democracies and their citizens.

If we recognise that the world of digital information is, at heart, like the world of digital code where everything can be re-engineered and reversed easily, then we can build new strategies around information. One of those strategies should be to ensure the meaning of core issues is anchored in a way that supports democratic outcomes.

Can Russia accept living peacefully next to a sovereign, independent and undivided Ukraine? Or is open war inevitable? This has long been the paramount question for Eastern Europe, and it has abruptly returned to the fore with the massive buildup of Russian military forces in Crimea and along Ukraine’s eastern border.

Ukrainian independence was the issue that definitively broke up the Soviet Union 30 years ago. While the departure of other Soviet republics would not necessarily have been an existential threat, Ukraine’s declaration of independence absolutely was. It sealed the Soviet Union’s fate, a collapse remembered by Russian President Vladimir Putin as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe’ of the 20th century.

For two decades after the Soviet Union’s breakup, Russia focused primarily on building its own state and forging its own identity. That changed when Putin decided to return to the presidency for a third term in 2012 (having served a single term as prime minister while his crony, Dmitri Medvedev, held the presidency until Putin was constitutionally eligible to run again). He then embarked on a revisionist course to create a so-called Eurasian Union.

Ukraine, meanwhile, had developed a strong preference for alignment with its Central European neighbours. And though those countries had joined the European Union, there was no reason why closer ties with them should weaken Ukraine’s historical and cultural links with Russia.

In this context, the EU’s Eastern Partnership, which resulted in its Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area with Ukraine, was part of a broader attempt to meet Ukraine halfway. None of the EU–Ukraine trade agreements were incompatible with the trade agreement that Ukraine had with Russia. But the Kremlin saw things differently. Unable to accept these agreements, it started pressuring Ukraine’s weak and vacillating president, Viktor Yanukovych, to turn away from the EU. That prompted a popular uprising that ousted Yanukovych (who fled to Moscow) and set the stage for the war that began in 2014.

The Kremlin saw Ukraine as a weak and fractured state that would fold under sustained pressure. To justify Russian revanchism, officials subjected the outside world to lectures about how Ukraine was really just a collection of the pieces left over from defunct empires. While true to some extent, the same could be said about Russia and every other modern nation-state, depending on how far back one goes.

Committed to the idea that Ukraine isn’t a real country, the Kremlin seems to have convinced itself that snatching Crimea in early 2014 would precipitate Ukraine’s collapse. The hope was that Russia could then carve out a so-called New Russia (Novorossiya) in Ukraine’s east and south, while leaving a rump ‘Western Galicia’ that remained outside its control.

With these grand ambitions in mind, Russia started deploying insurgents, ‘volunteers’ and weapons, accompanied by a massive disinformation operation to turn Ukrainians against one another. But this effort failed. Invading other countries is rarely a good way to make friends and this time was no exception. Instead of dividing Ukraine, the Kremlin managed to unite the Ukrainian population like never before. By 2014, Russia had to deploy regular army battalions to rescue what was left of its separatist redoubt in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Since then, efforts to achieve a political settlement (through the two Minsk agreements) have failed. The ongoing low-level conflict has taken 14,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. While the Ukrainian public has had difficulties accepting some of the compromises that any settlement would entail, the real barrier to progress has been the Kremlin’s refusal to give up its enclaves in Ukraine. The nationalist segment of Russian public opinion, the bedrock of Putin’s support, will have a hard time swallowing ‘defeat’ in Ukraine.

Now, according to Russia’s defence minister, Russia has amassed two full armies and three airborne units to Ukraine’s east and south, supposedly for the purpose of holding military exercises. But exercise for what? The mobilisation is clearly directed at Ukraine. Putin’s own spokesman has explicitly said as much, claiming that Russia intends to intervene if necessary to prevent attacks on Russian speakers in Ukraine.

Regardless of whether this brinkmanship leads to open conflict in the coming weeks or months (of this even Kremlin decision-makers probably aren’t sure), the situation will remain dangerous until Russia gives up its revanchist ambitions. The question ultimately is about war or peace. Until Russia can accept living alongside a sovereign, democratic Ukraine, there can be no stable middle ground.

The outcome has implications far beyond Russia and Ukraine. A successful Russian revisionist agenda would not stop with the reconquest of Kyiv, but would seek to unravel Europe’s entire post–Cold War security order. That would be profoundly dangerous for everyone, not least Russia itself. As long as the Kremlin remains locked in confrontation with the rest of Europe, it will not be focused on building the democratic and prosperous future the Russian people deserve.

One way or the other, the broader region’s fate is now tied to that of Ukraine.