Why We Have Fewer Images from the War in Ukraine than from the First World War

For nine months now, we have been following the Russian-Ukrainian war daily, which has the characteristics of a global conflict. Have you even noticed that there are almost no war correspondents in this war like those we became accustomed to from the Croatian War of Independence in 1991 to the more recent wars in Afghanistan or Iraq? There is no new Christiane Amanpour in Ukraine who will, as during the war in Bosnia, greet and report on every Russian missile fired at Kyiv and then follow its victims for days, and then jump to Kherson to mingle among Ukrainian soldiers to ask them about their morale and motivation…

The most famous war reporter reporting from war-torn Ukraine to Western media is actually the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Occasionally, former British Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen have stepped in as special correspondents. The Russian media sphere, in which the Kremlin is traditionally the main and only war correspondent, has been closed off to us (except for a privileged ‘audience’) since the beginning of the war, just as we have been to it.

Precedent in Croatia

If we follow the developmental trajectory of media war reporting from the war in Croatia as the first war on European soil after the Second World War to today’s war in Ukraine, it seems like a closed circle – from complete freedom to complete control. Media reporting on the war in Croatia in the summer and autumn of 1991 had two completely different sides: Croatian and Serbian.

Reporting from the Serbian side of the front was completely controlled by the JNA’s counterintelligence service (colloquially KOS), access to the front was only possible exceptionally, as part of special organized ‘excursions’ for correspondents. The then Croatian government set a precedent in war reporting by allowing (also) foreign war correspondents practically freedom of movement in all war zones, partly out of ignorance and inexperience, and partly due to the desire to see the nature of the war and to break the media blockade that was benefiting the JNA and Serbia with their reporting.

The correspondent elite went to Belgrade. Because it was more comfortable to sit in ‘briefings’ at the General Staff than to seek stories in the Slavonian or Lika battlefields. They also closely followed the policies of their countries (UK, France, USA), which at that time still unequivocally supported the JNA and Yugoslavia, i.e., Serbia. Correspondents eager for affirmation, without war experience, mostly came to Croatia. Eight foreign (and fifteen Croatian) war reporters were killed by the JNA and Serbian army, including two correspondents from Russian television, Viktor Nogin and Genadiy Kurinoy. However, with their images and words, they managed to break the media blockade and show Croatia as a victim of an aggressive war.

A few months later, during the war in Bosnia, being a war correspondent, especially a war cameraman, became a career, and financially, a very lucrative profession. With their harrowing photographs and stories about the victims of Serbian ethnic cleansing in 1992 in Bosnia, war correspondents contributed the most to the international public choosing their side in the war (Muslims/Bosniaks), perceiving Serbs as ‘bad guys’ and Croats as hidden ‘bad guys’. It mostly went unnoticed who was the behind-the-scenes ‘producer’ of most of those harrowing images and stories: they were mostly British, and somewhat less French and Canadian peacekeepers, who led and guided them through Bosnia, providing them with transport and ‘briefings’. In accordance with their state policies.

Broken Illusion of Independence

During the war in Afghanistan, and especially in Iraq, the ‘producers’ of war reporting became public. Defense ministries stuffed their media stars into war transports as embedded journalists, as an openly extended arm of information warfare, breaking any illusion of independent war reporting, beyond and above state policies.

The war in Ukraine is just a continuation of the trend of strictly controlled war information. Indeed, it is unusual for a head of state to also become the main war correspondent, but Zelensky is, evidently, the best and safest correspondent. There is also an explanation for why. With today’s technology, opening up the media space would necessarily result in an incursion by the opposing side and information chaos. On the other hand, centralized and strictly controlled information from the Russian side of the front is a tradition, not a novelty. And so we encounter a paradox: at a time of the most sophisticated communication and video technologies, we have fewer images of the war from Ukraine than from the First World War. And no one complains. And no one misses them.