ENGFighting Russia, one meme at a time: Saint Javelin creator Christian Borys on his meme empire

"It’s a strange business that we’ve created, but I think it’s an important business," the Saint Javelin creator Christian Borys says. In the last six months his idea evolved from a viral Virgin Mary with a Javelin anti-tank missile system image to the empire of memes and a full-fledged merchandise shop with $2 million donations to Ukrainian causes. We've spoken to Borys in July about the Saint Javelin phenomenon, establishing production in Ukraine and a scandal with SJ mural in Kyiv.

You can also read this piece in Ukrainian.

– I do understand you must be tired of constantly retelling the origin story of Saint Javelin. So there was the original picture of SJ, then you made it big with social media campaign and now you basically have this empire of memes. But what would you say is the biggest appeal of Saint Javelin? Why do you think did it strike a chord?

– I’ve thought about it a lot. I think that, first of all, we [Saint Javelin] existed before the war started. The reason why is because I’ve spent a lot of time in Ukraine. I wasn’t just an expat living in Kyiv, I’ve reported from here and I believe I have a deep understanding of this war. The friends and colleagues that I trusted kept telling me that this is what’s going to happen. That’s why I started this campaign, and it started with no expectation or anything…

– A $500 campaign, as you’ve said.

– Yeah, exactly. So basically we existed before all the major organisations got their shit together. They weren’t expecting [the full-scale Russian invasion] to happen, so they weren’t prepared for it.

But also – and I don’t know if that’s something that’s happened in other wars or if that’s a unique phenomenon – it was such a clear decision between right and wrong, between evil and good [in the war Russia waged on Ukraine]. And so people didn’t want to just donate to Red Cross or something, they wanted to show that they supported Ukraine. So they looked at us and thought: Hey, if I wear this [Saint Javelin t-shirt] and walk around outside people will know which side I’m on, they’ll know I support Ukraine.

And in February and March it was the biggest story in the world. There were so many people, who had no interest in Ukraine otherwise, who [showed support in this way]. From our perspective, there’s a core group of people who continue to support Ukraine in this war, and I think that [Saint Javelin’s] a symbol of that for them. And it’s not just one symbol, we have a lot of designs now, but Saint Javelin started everything.

It shows western support for Ukraine: the Javelin is a thing that Ukraine said it needs if Russia attacks in order to stop the tanks going in. And it’s a funny design, because it’s Virgin Mary holding a fucking rocket launcher; you haven’t seen this type of thing before. And that’s how the internet works, people latch onto it really quickly.

It’s also very interesting, I’ve just shared an article with the whole team about the super long history of these religious icons being used in wars. Even in Kyiv there’s archangel Michael who holds a spear. And so [Saint Javelin] is just a modern version of something that’s been happening for centuries or even longer. People look for religious symbols in wartime, and it’s just another symbol for them.

– I have a couple of questions about this symbolic value of Saint Javelin, but can we get back for a moment to the impact of the project? What would you say was a high point for your team in this crazy success story? Was it Zelensky and Reznikov getting your t-shirts? Or maybe the first million dollars in donations?

– Honestly, I remember when we first hit like $10,000 – I was just shocked. I couldn’t believe that it happened, and it happened really quickly…

– We’re talking matter of days?

– Right. But the only moment I was like: “Holy shit!” was when Reznikov sent me a video of him giving our t-shirt to Zelensky. I was in Kyiv that day, I was actually about to leave Kyiv. [Reznikov] actually sent me a message: Just to let you know, the president has your T-Shirt. And I honestly didn’t know what he meant, cause when I gave him a T-Shirt I just expected him to throw it away or give it to his assistants or something like that.

And then he messaged me, and then, like ten minutes later, somebody from our team sent me a video that Zelensky’s team put up. And my phone started going crazy! And that’s when I thought: Wow, this is insane!

– My favorite moment in the video is when Zelensky gets the t-shirt, looks at it for a moment and then says: “Yeah, I get it!”

– Yeah, we’ve actually made a version of a t-shirt with this quote. He’s like: I understand, it’s cool. [he laughs]

And then like two hours later they bombed Kyiv. They fucking hit the [residential] building and they killed a journalist [Vira Hyrych] from Radio Free Liberty. So that whole day was so surreal. First I go to meet Reznikov, I have like a bag of stickers and t-shirts, there are these SBU/Alpha guys guarding him, and there’s this moron with [Saint Javelin] stickers trying to get to him. [he laughs] And then the president gets our t-shirt. And then they fucking strike Kyiv, for like a first time in weeks.

I remember [this feeling in the city]: the spring was just starting, people started going outside more, not paying attention to air raid sirens that much, they were trying to be normal again. And then there was this horrible reminder of where we are, what’s actually happening. So that’s one day that’s always stuck in my mind as the most surreal day.

– That’s quite a bittersweet feeling for you, I can imagine. Is the contact with the Ministry of Defence and Reznikov’s team ongoing?

– Yeah, we’re actually giving him a bunch of shirts with our latest project, Saint HIMARS. I don’t know if you’ve seen this Fellas phenomenon, but we’re also giving him the NAFO [collection]. I don’t know if he understands what the Fellas are, but we’ll introduce him to them. [he laughs]

– The HIMARS project has gone up so quickly, what was the timescale on it?

– As soon as the US announced HIMARS [being sent to Ukraine] we started working on it. We understood how important HIMARS would be. We knew that Ukraine was asking for HIMARS and all these military experts were saying how valuable of a system it can be to Ukraine. So we started working on it. And when these videos started coming out with the impact HIMARS was having we already had the project ready to launch, quote-unquote. [he laughs] And then one night, like four days ago we launched the HIMARS shirt, and it went like crazy.

People have been asking us for HIMARS for a while, and now we’ve just released the HIMARS patches, they’re cool. It’s a really cool design, our designer Eugene Shalashov is actually based in Lviv…

The good part about it is that it proves that it’s not only about Saint Javelin and the original design. It proves that we can make new things and create attention for war, to remind people of the reality. It’s a strange business that we’ve created, but I think it’s an important business. And it’s beyond the financial impact, it’s also about the attention we create, to remind people about this war that’s going on in Ukraine.

– It’s a great example of the memes having an impact. But memes have a short lifespan, don't they? And does that mean that you must be really quick to generate ideas and put them into production, like in the case of Saint HIMARS?

– I think a lot of people expected that Saint Javelin meme would just fade away. And we continue to make sales of a lot of Saint Javelin stuff. I just think that memes convey messages so much quicker than an article or something like that. Basically it’s just a way that people are communicating on the internet.

We can see from our analytics that when we put out a meme it can be shared like 5,000 times or even more. Like a million people might see it. As opposed to the article, a lot of people would just read a headline. You might not convey such a huge, complicated message in one illustration or meme. But everybody’s so busy now, so we can give them just a snapshot of information very quickly. They can still pay attention to what’s happening rather than asking them to read a long [text] or watch a long video.

There’s still a huge audience for regular journalism, but I feel that this memes stuff is a way to convey a message quicker to a part of an audience that doesn’t want to invest so much time in reading or watching, right?

– Here in Ukraine we pride ourselves on being good at memes. But would you say that Saint Javelin proves that Ukrainian memes can come through globally?

– I always thought that Ukrainians are amazing at memes. I’ve lived in a bunch of different countries, I’ve reported from Europe, South America, you name it. And I’ve always noticed that Ukrainian memes are extremely good, because Ukrainians have this specific, darker sense of humour, I think it comes across very well in memes.

But the thing that, I think, we have tried to do is almost like explain Ukrainian memes for the western audience. Just the other day there was this meme with a guy holding a dog, but it’s HIMARS instead of a dog. And then there’s Bayraktar, like a cat that stands next to them and being jealous. We took that off a Telegram channel and translated into English – and it took off immediately. It’s such a simple thing, people get it right away.

Yeah, I always thought Ukrainians have a special talent for memes. I remember it was 2015 and there was Chewbacca running for mayor in one of Ukrainian cities, all the memes coming from that were so, so funny to me. [he laughs]

– Do you think it’s possible to control memes and its impact? Or does it kind of get out of your hand at some point?

– Yeah, I think it just gets out of your hand. And it’s hard to know which one is going to take off and which ones won’t. So recently we’ve started to do these HIMARS memes, there’s a lot of them. And the ones that make me laugh the most – they just fall flat, completely. And some of the other ones, that I don’t think will make it, get like thousands of retweets.

– There were these great ones with HIMARS o’clock!

– Yeah, everybody starts doing it now.

Establishing production in Ukraine

Saint Javelin is a team of 14 people at this point, the brand has established production lines in Ukraine and Canada, it also has a worldwide following. Christian Borys name-checks Patagonia and Supreme brands as inspiration for the project. Why is that?

– I’m not expecting specific numbers, but can you talk me through the ranking of your projects in terms of impact? Saint Javelin must be number one, what about the others?

– Saint Javelin is number one by far, Saint NLAW is number two. Saint Javelin is probably like 70% of all sales. In the last week Saint HIMARS’s been number one though.

– What about the Taras Shevchenko and Olha of Kyiv lines?

– These ones did not do too well actually, probably because we don’t have a huge audience in Ukraine. So much of our audience is American and Canadian, right? And we kinda became a news source [about Ukraine at war] for westerners. Because we do everything in English, and Ukrainians already have these news sources like Telegram channels and media. And so the foreign audiences are not that familiar with Taras Shevchenko. The Olha line did pretty well, because of her crazy backstory…

– And you guys did this great Twitter thread about her.

– Yeah! NLAW was doing really good, cause Brits caught onto it.

– Swedes not so much?

– For Sweden we did Saint Gustaf! The Swedes and the Finns, we have a lot of orders from. It’s no surprise, because people there understand the true nature of Russia, better than anybody from Germany, Portugal of Spain. These countries in Western Europe don’t understand Ukrainians the way the Baltic States and other countries sharing the border with Russia do. So we saw support coming in from their way, way more, than from other countries.

– You’ve mentioned that Saint Javelin means western support for Ukraine. What percentage of your support comes from Ukrainians?

– I think it’s less than 5%. And it’s not surprising, because [Ukraine’s] economy has been brutally taken down. But also we haven’t really marketed yet to the Ukrainian audience. And there’s so many shops and stores, where you can buy similar type of shirts. When I was in Ukraine everyone was wearing shirts, like I’m wearing a Fellas shirt right now.

Right now we’re starting to make some shirts here in Ukraine. We’re making t-shirts in Dnipro, we actually had a factory in Kremenchuk, it was really close to the mall that got hit [by Russian missiles].

– I understand you have some production in Kharkiv also.

– Yeah, we’re making hats in Kharkiv right now. The woman who’s making our stickers in Kyiv is from the village Peremoha near the city, she was under occupation for like 21 days, living in a basement.

Even though Ukrainian market is a small percentage of our sales, we’re trying to shift the maximum economic value back to Ukraine. Half of our team is in Ukraine, the other half is either Ukrainian diaspora or displaced Ukrainians [in other countries]. We just hired the guy, who created NAFO, he’s our first non-Ukrainian [member], but he’s Polish and he hates Russia just as much as anybody else.

So we’re making shirts, hats, socks, pins and flags here in Ukraine. Patches also. We also want to make a tracksuit. We’ve had a plan to work something out with a tracksuit, but unfortunately it did not work out…

– You mean the “Gentlemen” movie style, right?

– Yeah, there’s an unfortunate story with that. So we were thinking about a bigger project in that case. You know like there’s this Vsi Svoyi store in Kyiv with all the Ukrainian brands. We almost think that we can do what Vsi Svoyi does, but bring it to the western audience.

– You mean this marketplace type of thing?

– More like limited edition drops, like Supreme. Supreme does collaborations and they do limited edition drops, so that’s what we wanted to do with this tracksuit. Like a lot of people asked us for Saint Javelin vyshyvankas, scarves, bandanas and whatnot, someone was suggesting bulletproof vests in Saint Javelin style. There are so many different things that we want to do, we’re just simultaneously trying to do a lot of things. At the same time we’re trying to establish these mechanics and logistics to make all these things in Ukraine. While doing it at our scale and effectively.

It’s quite difficult, especially because shipping from Ukraine is not easy right now. There are these trucks staying for a days at the border, going in and out, right? So it makes it more difficult, but I think we can accomplish it, for sure. There are so many brands making stuff in Ukraine, like Hugo Boss has a factory in Lviv, it’s not something new. It’s just that our audience is so big, we can do it too.

– So the plan is to make all the stuff both in Ukraine and abroad?

– My dream would be – everything’s made in Ukraine. But I’m starting to understand how difficult that would be. The problem is because of Amazon people are expecting for everything to be shipped next day. In order to do that – it costs a shitload of money to store, inventorize and make sure someone’s dispatching it the next day.

I would rather we would plan to make 2,000 shirts, bring it to Canada and then ship them next week. So we’re still trying to think about simple stuff like that, but the reality is that we’ll probably make things both in Canada and Ukraine. And then the things that we make in Ukraine will be sold to the European audience and the things made in Canada will probably be for the North American audience.

– Is this a full-time job for you and your team?

– Yeah, we have 14 people at this point. We have registered Saint Javelin in Ukraine as a corporation, we have a law firm in Kyiv that works for us. We’re trying to maximise the economic benefit for Ukraine as much as possible. It’s difficult to be honest, because we have people in five different time zones now. But I think it’s the right thing to do.

– Do you see Saint Javelin becoming a [commercial] project, not a social one at some point?

– The goal is to be like Patagonia. Patagonia is a social enterprise, they’re B Corp certified. Patagonia’s mission statement is: We’re in business to rebuild the environment. And our statement is: We’re in business to rebuild Ukraine.

Basically we can build a business, we can put a maximum amount of economic benefit back into Ukraine, like making stuff in Ukrainian warehouses and factories, employing Ukrainian people and then donating profits back to organisations in Ukraine. And also just being an advocate. For instance, I’m working on a documentary, like a timeline of the war. We’re also working with United24 fund on the drone crowdfunding campaign.

I think of it as not just a business, but almost like a cultural project. We’re not just trying to sell t-shirts, we try to maximise resources that we have to deliver as much support back to Ukraine as we can.

Making pins out of Russian tanks and donating to Ukrainian causes

– Saint Javelin redirects money to the Ukrainian Red Cross chapter, 24.02 fund and the Canadian charity organisation Help Us Help…

– The first big donation was $500,000 to Help Us Help, which is a registered Canadian charity. The whole operation was started back in 1991 in order to support Ukrainian orphans. They had a summer camp that would run every year since 1993 or 1994, they brought orphans from all over Ukraine to teach them life skills. They did it in summer and winter. And when the war started in 2014 they continued working with the Ukrainian families that lost fathers or mothers at war.

I spent some time with them and felt inspired by all the work that they do, it was a way for me to give half a million dollars to an organisation that I trust. And they basically spent all of it already, they were also able to buy some first aid kits. So I know that it was helpful.

And then I started giving money to organisations in Ukraine, I also asked other journalists like Roman and Katya [Stepanovych and Sergatskova, Zaborona media co-founders] and Zhenya Maloletka, who’d actually been my landlord back in Kyiv. When he came back from Mariupol I asked him, who’s doing good work, and he told me, that the Ukrainian Red Cross guys in Mariupol were really risking their lives… So we gave them a bunch of money.

– Can I ask you about Red Cross specifically? Because there are a lot of questions about the effectiveness of their work here in Ukraine, like all the organisations that, in your words, took time to get their shit together after the full-scale war started. Was there any discussion in your team about Red Cross and whether that’s the best way to support Ukrainian cause?

– It was a discussion that I had with people in Ukraine. I didn’t want to ask people [abroad], so I asked a bunch of journalists. We didn’t give them like a $100,000, and we made sure to donate to Ukrainian chapter of Red Cross, not the ICRC.

The problem is – we give money and we hope and trust, that people getting the money will do the right thing. In certain circumstances I’ve paid directly for things, like trucks, night vision goggles. And I know that it’s going to where it should go.

– I imagine you guys get a lot of requests.

– Yeah, we do. But now we also work with Ukrainian World Congress, which is basically the voice of the Ukrainian diaspora, they’ve been around since [1967] or something.

– And it has a strong presence in Canada of all places.

– So they take our money and buy bulletproof vests and stuff like that, they’ve already put $25 million in Ukraine since February. I spent time with them in March helping to organise logistics, trying to figure out how we can buy things and put them into Ukraine. Because it was very difficult at that point. Then it got easier and now I hear it gets difficult again. But I can trust an organisation like that to do the work.

Quite frankly, we get so many requests, that it’s like a full-time job to manage them. How do you do that? And also there’s tax implications. So if we donate money to Ukrainian organisation directly the Canadian government makes us pay taxes on the revenue that we’ve earned, so we can get a tax receipt for it. Whereas we’ve basically been able to organise ourselves in a way, so we can use a maximum amount of money that we make in order to give it back to Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers.

– There’s also an issue when you’re trying to support Ukrainian charity funds like Come Back Alive, because it’s the direct military help we’re talking about here. But is there any way for Saint Javelin to support funds like that?

– First day of the war I’ve personally sent $13,000 in crypto to Come Back Alive.

We’ve actually talked to CBA yesterday, we’ve opened discussions with them because we have in mind one of our biggest projects. Our audience’s asked whether we can get pieces of Russian military equipment, like tanks, and get it to them. It’s almost like a war trophy, right? And it can have like a plaque that says when and where this tank was destroyed. A lot of Americans and Europeans would like to buy it, and for us, it would be a great tool for raising funds, because theoretically it should be very cheap to acquire these pieces and then resell them.

When we’re making a shirt there’s a cost to every item of clothing. But when you’re selling a tank you just can cut it into small pieces and then sell it off.

– So you can make pins of the Russian tanks?

– There’s a guy who’s raised over a million of dollars for drones selling keychains from the pieces of Russian aircraft. I find this super impressive, because we’ve been trying to do it our way and basically we just don’t know – who owns this equipment, who’s in charge of it legally. Ministry of defence doesn’t know, SBU doesn’t know, who’s in charge. So we can’t export it, we don’t even know who to ask.

It’s become a complicated thing, but I wanted to do it with Come Back Alive, because they have a lot of that equipment and we have a huge audience in a lot of the western world. So we could basically sell it and give the money to CBA or whoever. It’s so much more complicated than I ever expected it to be.

– So there’s no legal infrastructure and no precedent for it.

– We’ve prepared a whole presentation and a proposal to build the legal infrastructure. One of our guys is a former lawyer at the National Bank, he created the whole structure of how this could work legally, but when we presented it every ministry had its own idea, no one new who should be responsible for it, who’s to make a decision. The bureaucracy of this whole thing – it’s just something I never expected. It’s seems so easy: go cut some Russian tank, makes some pins and sell them in the US. But when you start trying to do it, it’s really hard legally.

We also have some pieces [the trophy equipment] we need to send to Toronto, and so the question is now – how do you ship it? Will FedEx accept it? I don’t know. [he laughs] It’s just some of the problems I never expected I’d need to deal with.

The Saint Javelin mural scandal and mayor Klychko interaction

May marked the launch of the first Saint Javelin physical project in Kyiv – the mural on one of the city's residential buildings. The local city council had a different idea though: the Saint Javelin halo on the mural was painted over after the complaint from Ukraine's religious organisations. Christian Borys pleads there was absolutely no intention to make the symbol sacrilegious, he also tells a story about meeting Kyiv the mayor Vitaliy Klychko days after the incident.

– I was also meant to ask you about the strange case with the Saint Javelin mural in Kyiv. Now that some time has passed – how do you guys feel about the whole experience?

– Oh, I thought it was hilarious! I never, never expected such a crazy response. And the Church’s reaction… The Barbara Streisand effect of it all – when you complain about something that nobody knows about, you garner so much attention so then everybody knows about it.

– A self-fulfilling prophecy basically.

– Exactly! The church complained about it, they painted over the halo, and it became a national scandal. For me, watching it, it was more than I ever expected from that project. And it was honestly quite shocking that the church would actually get someone to go and paint over the halo. Especially because the halo had the tryzub! The halo was the least offensive part, if anything you should paint over the Javelin!

– You’re on the record saying that there was absolutely no intention to make fun of the religious symbol…

– There was no intention to offend, my intention was not to offend anyone, not at all. The intention is to use this thing, that clearly has a lot of power, and just keep it going.

As someone who lived in Kyiv for a long time, I understood just how important those murals are. I thought, that if we could have a mural, it was almost like a way to forever keep Saint Javelin alive. I never expected an AP journalist to go and take pictures of it, I think it was in The Washington Post, and then it was all over the news. I was getting requests from Catholic media, the Italians was very upset, calling it sacrilegious.

– I also found it ironic, because it was the Kyiv city council that painted over the halo, but prior to that there were some heavily publicised photos of Kyiv’s mayor Vitaly Klychko with the Saint Javelin pins.

– Yeah, that was ironic. The way it was explained to me: somebody probably approached Klychko and said that church is angry about it. And I imagine he was like: Come on, I have better things to deal with.

– But it became a political issue.

– I guess so. When I was in Davos – cause I got invited to go to [World Economic Forum in Davos] because of this thing – I tried to approach [Klychko], who was also there. Just to say hello, I guess. And one of his guards asked me what I was trying to do. So I just showed him the stickers. And he was like: Oh, fuck no! [he laughs] It was like two days after the whole thing with mural began, they were probably tired of it. From his perspective – he has so many other things to deal with. To think about this mural, it was probably like: Guys, just take it away from me.

So it was all just very strange for me. But I hope that one day we can get the halo back. I have no idea if we’ll be able to do it, we’ll probably have to start a petition and ask the city council if they will let us do it. But there’s so much more important stuff now.

– But the idea is to get it back up?

– I’d love to, but it’s clearly not a priority right now. Some people suggested taking them to court, initiating legal proceedings. But I was like: Guys, we’re not doing it, it’s not the time for stuff like that.

I understand, why some people get offended by it, but, to go back to the very first thing we’ve talked about, there’s a very long history of these symbols being used in wars. Because it provides moral support for people. What you’re seeing with her holding Javelin is shocking, because we’re used to a saint holding a spear or a sword, but now that’s she’s holding a rocket launcher it looks a lot different. There’s a whole Wikipedia of war saints, Saint Javelin isn’t something brand new, it’s basically the latest in this long line of things. I would say it’s probably the most shocking because of the type of weapon she’s holding, it’s so visible…

– Can you elaborate on that? Because there’s a lot of symbolic value not only in the religious iconography, but in Javelin itself. To be honest initially I had a hard time branding it as a symbol of hope and resistance, both because it’s the American military industrial complex creation and because it seemed as some sort of compromise prior to the February 24, with the western countries supplying Ukraine with anti-tank weaponry, not artillery or heavy weaponry?

– I guess the rationalisation was if Russia’s gonna do it they’re gonna do it with a lot of tanks, right? Even though Ukraine has Stugna and other anti-tank missile systems, the Javelin is the best anti-tank missile system in the world. I always knew that’s what the military wanted.

But I think that most people probably look at this thing and don’t really know that it’s a Javelin. I think they just see an icon with a modern weapon.

– It’s mostly about the symbol of resistance?

– Primarily, right. It’s like a symbol: We’re fighting! And if you peel an onion, it’s also a symbol of the rest of the world supporting Ukraine. But I think primarily it’s a symbol of Ukraine fighting back: We’re not gonna lay down our weapons, we’re gonna fight for this! And I believe every war has a similar symbol, for instance during the Egypt revolution they had a Nefertiti in a gas mask, that was their symbol that inspired a lot of people.

If you watch some videos with Ukrainian soldiers from Mariupol and even from Azovstal, the Azov guys had patches of Saint Javelin, the old version. So they’ve already adopted it as their own symbol of resistance, long before the war [reignited]. We basically popularised something that already existed.

– You’ve eluded to your time in Kyiv as a foreign correspondent, I would like to ask about that experience. There are quite a lot of foreign journalists in Ukraine, probably more than in the whole history of the country. Do you have any advice for the international media in Ukraine? 

– I think if you’re a journalist coming to Ukraine you should start traveling all over the country as much as possible. If you sit in Kyiv, you’ll see one perspective, but it’s very much one perspective.

When I was living in Ukraine, I was traveling all the time, I was basically like a homeless person, I was constantly on train or in cars. I remember the only region I’ve not managed to visit was Kherson.

I believe it’s even more important now to have a broader context and understanding, to go to all these different cities. Kharkiv is a completely different reality to Lviv’s. If someone goes to Lviv and just sits there, they’re not gonna get the right context about the whole country. I’ve been to Lviv for a couple of times since the war started, if you spend one Saturday in Lviv you’d have almost no idea there’s a war going on.

– No offence Anderson Cooper, but yeah.

– If I was speaking to someone coming to Ukraine to report, I’d tell them to get on a train and see as much of a country as they can. Try to understand the mindset and the culture. The problem with journalism is that most of the big stories come from the guys, who fly in from the U.S. or the London bureau, they stay for a few days and then return.

– Moscow bureau, for instance.

– Exactly, and all the Moscow bureau people – they basically can’t go back to Moscow now. They can’t really tell the honest truth about what’s going on in Ukraine if they plan to work in Russia again. They know that, so they have to show the Russian side of the story, which is fucking crazy to me.

When I was a journalist, that always used to piss me off, because, for instance, when I wrote for The Guardian “Russian forces in Donbas”, they would change it to “separatists allegedly backed by Russia”. And it’s quite a meaningful change, right?

I think now people understand there’s really no value in acknowledging what the Russians say, because they just lie all the time. If you’re gonna reprint what Lavrov says you’re just reprinting bullshit. Like, if you’re a journalist, you’re supposed to present facts. Their guide is living in a completely different reality. But it’s hard for freelancers, because they need to write stories and start to do it immediately. It’s just better to have some context and understand the people when you start writing about a foreign country.

– You must’ve had an itch to go back to journalism after the war reignited.

– Well, yeah, to be honest. It’s just that my fiancee has been pregnant the whole time. So when I went back it was with the promise that I wouldn’t go to Donbas or Kharkiv. When it first started, I thought that maybe going back to writing was the best use of me during this war. But in reality the best use is what we’re doing now. I believe we’re making much more impact with Saint Javelin than if I was writing stories.

Anyway I definitely wanted to go back to journalism right away, but it’s just not my thing anymore. And there’s a lot of people doing great job, I think.