cat illustration military tank illustration

The Arab Spring uprisings and the Syrian civil war used Facebook and Twitter to organize protests and broadcast D.I.Y. The invasion of Ukraine isn’t the first conflict to play out over social media. The Internet-focussed podcast “The Content Mines” called the Ukraine invasion “The Most Online War of All Time Until the Next One.” Other publications have dubbed it the “first TikTok war.” What stands out about coverage of the war in Ukraine so far is how thoroughly the latter category of content has permeated the collective consciousness, providing some of the earliest and most direct glimpses of the Russian invasion. The video, which as of my last count had more than nine million likes, is user-generated content broadcast online, following the aesthetic norms of TikTok: choppy, decontextualized, with catchy pop music in the background.

Hicks’s picture, of course, is an example of traditional photojournalism-a war photographer capturing action at the front lines of battle in a carefully composed image printed in a newspaper. A line of text reads, “The capital of Ukraine at the moment.” The video is set, with breathtaking incongruity, to “Little Dark Age,” a song by the indie-pop band MGMT, whose lyrics have become something of an audio meme on TikTok: “Just know that if you hide, it doesn’t go away.” Another equally arresting document of the war’s beginnings is a TikTok video, posted on February 24th, showing phone-camera images and video clips of missiles falling over the city of Kyiv like fireworks. Its caption noted that both the soldier and the armored vehicle were Russian and that the photo was taken in Kharkiv, the city in northeastern Ukraine where some of the most intense fighting has been taking place.

The photograph ran on the front page of the Times on February 26th.

One of the most striking images from the first days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a picture, taken by the photojournalist Tyler Hicks, depicting a dead soldier sprawled on the ground in front of a disabled tank, his body covered in a sheet of fresh snow.

Cat illustration military tank illustration