With Russian forces bearing down on Kyiv, the orders to Maksym Skubenko and the other men in his volunteer militia unit on Tuesday were simple: Prepare. Heeding the commands, the unit spent much of the day digging up soil, then packing it into bags. “So if someone shoots at us, the bullets will hit the bags,” Skubenko explains. He and his fellow overnight soldiers know very well how useful those defenses might be. They’ve already had several armed standoffs. The unit cleaned and checked their weapons and moved on to mixing the liquid for Molotov cocktails, following instructions on a poster handed out by the authorities, filling several hundred glass bottles.
In his downtime, Skubenko checked his work messages. The 30-year-old is CEO of the largest independent outfit tracking disinformation in Ukraine, VoxCheck, which supplies research to companies like Facebook. As Skubenko shifts from combating the Russians online to fighting them face-to-face, VoxCheck has continued to churn out reports chronicling false information disseminated by the Russians: about Ukrainian shelling, mass breakouts from Ukrainian jails and home invasions by the Ukrainian National Guard, among many other (untrue) topics.
“I didn’t expect to be here,” he said Tuesday evening, sitting on a bench outside the building serving as his group’s barracks. “I didn’t expect my country to go to war.”
Since Russia’s assault on Ukraine began less than a week ago, the entire nation has quickly shifted to war mode. More than 600,000 people have fled. The two largest cities—the capital Kyiv and Kharkiv to the east—have come under attack. About 80% of the 190,000 Russian troops amassed on Ukrainian borders have entered the country, meeting spirited resistance that has unexpectedly slowed the better-equipped Russians. Part of the defense involves volunteers like Skubenko. Nearly 40,000 answered the government’s call to arms, echoing one made eight years ago during a conflict with pro-Russian separatists.
“I didn’t expect to be here,” Skubenko said Tuesday evening, sitting on a bench outside the building serving as his group’s barracks. “I didn’t expect my country to go to war.”
Compared to the other recruits, Skubenko has a unique perspective on their adversaries. He has spent years trying to foil Russia’s ongoing digital campaign against Ukraine. VoxCheck was founded in 2014 by Tymofiy Mylovanov, an economist and University of Pittsburgh professor, following another moment of tumult: a civilian-led revolution that forced President Viktor Yanukovych out of office and sparking a reform mindset in Ukraine. Then, as now, Ukraine’s media landscape remains skewed by Russia, with consumers susceptible to Putin’s propaganda pushed through newspapers, television and, of course, the internet, largely through social networks maintained by Russian state-affiliated outlets like Sputnik and RT. (Meta, Twitter, YouTube and others earlier this week either banned or restricted those publications.) There seemed to be a place—and a need—for an independent fact-check outlet to call out misleading information from Russia and, at times, the Ukrainian government, too.
“There was strong demand for an objective credible analysis of what’s happening in Ukraine, especially in terms of economics, because for many years, economics as a science was still very backward in Ukraine,” says Yuriy Gorodnichenko, a Berkeley economics professor who aided VoxCheck’s creation. At the same time, traditional media sources lacked the trust of their audience. “There was a lot of credibility gap in Ukraine,” says Gorodnichenko, currently the head of VoxCheck’s supervisory board. “You have the Soviet past—people always worried that somebody’s an agent, somebody’s being paid to say that.”
Maksym Skubenko stands on duty Wednesday while a fellow volunteer solidier takes his photo.
Courtesy of Maksym SkubenkoWithin a few years, VoxCheck’s profile had risen. It issued reports about a Russian troll factory on Twitter, the health of Ukrainian banks and a quantitative index measuring the truthfulness of the country’s least truthful politicians. The organization has become a key partner to companies like Facebook, which relies on its analysis to judge content posted from Ukraine. It has also completed fact-check work for UA:First, a TV news channel, and for Forbes Ukraine, an independent, licensed edition of Forbes. VoxCheck is also a popular resource for Ukraine’s governing elite. VoxCheck’s founder, Mylovanov, switched from reporting about the latter group to being a member of it in 2019, becoming Ukraine’s Minister of Economics. He turned VoxCheck over to its chief economist, Ilona Sologoub, who passed the CEO role to Skubenko on December 1. The site receives about a million visits each month, a figure small by American standards but sizable for Ukraine.
Skubenko had been with the organization almost since the start, joining in 2015. “He grew up with VoxCheck,” says Gorodnichenko. Raised in a small town 140 miles from Kyiv, Skubenko received an economics degree from the Lviv Banking Institute and for a short time worked as an auditor at the National Bank of Ukraine. A couple of weeks ago, Skubenko was engrossed in the work of tracking Russia across traditional and digital media. He and other VoxCheck researchers had picked up a new story line that baselessly suggested an imagined energy crisis in Iraq would imperil Ukraine. It attempted “to revive a narrative that we would die without Russian gas,” he says. They traced five Telegram channels to suspected ties to Russian special forces and worked to catalog pro-Russian sentiment more casually dispensed by wealthy Ukrainians and politicians.
On Thursday, Skubenko’s world forever shifted. He had tried two days earlier to register for the volunteers but had been turned away and told they’d call him later. He returned to a recruiting post in Kyiv on Thursday, but they had no weapon for him. He went to a second, where he did finally join up. The first night, Skubenko, his hair tightly cropped and a large, spade-shaped beard enveloping his face, and his battalion mates slept on wood pallets padded with flattened cardboard boxes. The next day, some people gave them sleeping bags.
Before the past week, Skubenko had only fired a gun during a few days of training as a teenager. At that second station, he received some ammunition and a semi-automatic rifle, though he doesn’t know the exact make or model. “I think it’s Ukrainian,” he shrugs. He does know the gun uses 7.62-millimeter bullets, the larger of the two standard rounds for an AK-47. Skubenko hopes the bigger size helps “when we’re shooting at cars with Russian forces,” as he puts it.
Skubenko and his squad have already skirmished, he says—fights he suspects involved pro-Russian Ukranians who were in Kyiv before the war started. In one, a dark-colored Jeep sped to a stop outside their post to return to fire on police pursuing them. “They were shooting the police. Then they started shooting us. Then we started shooting them,” Skubenko recalls. He moved several people who had turned up at the station to volunteer to safety and joined his comrades for the firefight. They killed one of their attackers. Three more surrendered to the police, he says.
Some of the dozens of Molotov cocktails that Maksym Skubenko and the other volunteer forces readied this week.
Courtesy of Maksym SkubenkoSkubenko’s unit operates in long shifts, and none of the men has gotten more than three hours of rest in recent days. (He remembers the exception fondly. “There was one day when I got seven hours of sleep,” he says. “That was the best day.”) He has kept up through social media, mainly WhatsApp and Facebook, with his family and friends. His grandfather has holed up in his rural home, and while he may be alone, Skubenko reasons that the old man is not totally defenseless. “He has a machine gun somewhere in the house,” he says. His father has entered the volunteers, too, and Skubenko hopes his father may be in Kyiv soon. His mother is volunteering at a hospital while monitoring her son’s updates on Facebook. In a post to his Facebook page, she addresses him as “my heart” and writes, “As a mother, I'm crying, wailing. As a Ukrainian woman, I support you and accept the choice you've made.” She ends with a now common rallying cry: “Glory to Ukraine!”
When Skubenko could communicate with his VoxCheck team on Tuesday, the conversation revolved partly around the team’s video strategy. He checked in with his contacts at Facebook and the status of several other partnership contracts. Most urgent were the calls to Poland, where he’s trying to set up new bank accounts for VoxCheck. “If something happens to the banking system in Ukraine, our organization cannot stay without money,” he says.
His attention flickers from commercial concerns to something more serious. “Sorry, I need to go,” he says. An early warning against potential intruders has gone out. “I have to go.”
As it turns out: false alarm. He returned to his barracks, and he and the other newbie troops enjoyed a warm meal, a dinner sent over by a pizza restaurant improbably still operating, their rifles ready and the Molotov cocktails secured nearby.
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