Authors

Discussion

The escalation of the Russia-Ukraine War in 2022 has affected even such unexpected areas as online piracy – a practice of the cultural content dissemination without copyright holders’ permission, which is still highly popular in the region. On the one hand, Russia and Belarus de facto legalised piracy to demonstrate to the West and the local populace their disregard for international law but also provide their population with the content of Western studios that had sanctioned the aggressors. Ukraine in its turn started to emphasise security risks – individual and military – related to downloading unauthorised content. 

This presentation however focuses on the perspective of pirate communities, in particular on their potential to contribute to the grassroots resistance of Ukrainians. It is based on online observations of several Ukrainian online pirate spaces (the biggest torrent tracker, illegal streaming services, underground dubbing studios) combined with in-depth interviews with their users conducted during 2020-2024. Building on the concepts of media practices (Couldry 2004; 2012) and subactivism (Bakardjeva 2009), it showcases to what extent groups that reside on the edge of legality can self-mobilise to resist an invasion in a broader postcolonial context. 

In the wake of the full-scale Russian invasion, Ukrainian online pirate communities drastically changed their attitudes toward the state and its institutions: from subversive and sceptical to supportive and collaborative. They integrate their pirate practices into supporting the Ukrainian war effort directly, for example, via collecting donations for the military or broadcasting military recruitment advertisement on pirate spaces but also indirectly via dubbing otherwise legally unavailable popular movies and TV series into Ukrainian and thus redirecting Ukrainian users from the Russian pirate spaces. Similarly to disseminating unauthorised content, not bound by rules and laws, such communities could apply a wider arsenal of practices than state institutions or NGOs and engage in hacktivism. The phenomena under investigation open a new perspective in digital participatory war: one where experiences, energies and skills of the communities in the grey zone or even outright hostile to the state may be mobilised as data warriors either in its defence or, potentially, turned against it.