The invasion of Ukraine is not the first social media war, but it is the most viral

YOU HAVE probably seen the videos from Ukraine. There is the one where Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, stands outside Kyiv’s government quarter in dim light, holding his smartphone with the camera pointed selfie-style at himself and several senior officials. “We are all here,” he declares, days after Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, sent his tanks across the border. Or the one a Ukrainian soldier took, showing his mates in a snowy field firing anti-tank missiles, set to a thumping techno soundtrack. Or the one where a Ukrainian woman approaches a group of Russian soldiers and tells them to put sunflower seeds in their pockets so that something useful will grow from their bodies when they die.

Each spread online, generating millions of views and likes, reposts and remixes. They became part of the instant digital annals of the war, alongside pictures of Ukrainian tractors towing abandoned Russian tanks, which is now a global meme, and audio of Ukrainian soldiers at an islet in the Black Sea telling an approaching fleet, “Russian warship: go fuck yourself”, which is now a rallying cry at protests as far away as Tokyo.