A group of Ukrainians in Taiwan has launched “Ukrainian Voices,” a series of bilingual social media posts aimed at sharing first-hand accounts of life in the country following the invasion of Russia on Feb. 24.
Twenty-seven-year-old Oleksandr Shyn, one of the founders of Ukrainian Voices, said the impetus for launching the project on Facebook (www.facebook.com/ukrainianvoices.tw) and Twitter (www.twitter.com/UkrVoices_Tw) came after he realized that some people in Taiwan believed the Russian narratives on the situation in Ukraine.
Shyn, a Ukrainian postgraduate student in Taiwan, said that many Taiwanese he met believed that Moscow’s ongoing military intervention was somehow justified as Ukraine has a large Russian-speaking minority.
“Even just regular people who asked me, one of the first questions is ‘how do you make peace with your Russian brothers?’” he said, adding that Ukraine and Russia are “not brotherly nations in a temporary war,” as some in Taiwan and other parts of the world believe.
One of the goals of the Ukrainian Voices project is to take “control of our narratives,” Shyn said.
He hopes the pages will become a primary source of information about Ukraine for people in Taiwan, he said.
Advocates in Taiwan also hope to “draw the attention of the Taiwanese people to Ukraine once again,” given its reduced public prominence in the past few weeks, he added.
Cofounder Kateryna Leliukh said that the group had a “very clear vision about our mission and goal of the project.”
“We’re also sure that there was no such project before, in which Ukrainians explain our news in English and Chinese through the lenses of history and culture,” Leliukh said.
Mariana Savchenko, who works on the project and had lived in China for about one-third of her life, said she understood “the importance of skillfully tailored narratives, the efficiency of soft power, the danger of censorship and the force of propaganda.”
“Today, our battlefield against [the] Russian invasion is not only at the front line, but also in the realm of [the] information space in this deceptive hybrid war. I also believe that more than ever the Ukrainian identity deserves to be explained and delivered to the world from our own perspective,” she added.
Savchenko and Leliukh are both scholarship students at Academia Sinica, as part of a program launched by the government in March for Ukrainians who wish to continue their studies in Taiwan.
As of Monday, Taiwan has granted visas to 288 Ukrainians, 85 of whom are students or academics, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
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