Letter From the Editors

In renowned journalist David Frost’s definition, diplomacy “is the art of letting somebody else have your way.” The current standoff in the Iran war demonstrates that neither the US nor Iran has mastered this skill, and the situation in the Strait of Hormuz is doing nothing to help. As Nurlan Gasymov explains in Vedomosti, the IRGC closed the strait on April 18 in response to the US’s failure to lift its blockade of Iranian ports. Both sides have labeled the other’s actions a “violation of the ceasefire,” and Iran has now pulled out of a second round of talks scheduled to be held in Islamabad on April 21.

According to expert Yury Lyamin, “both sides are likely to use the blockade as a way to strengthen their negotiating positions.” However, in an interview with Vedomosti, Iran’s Ambassador to Russia Kazem Jalali expresses little hope that talks can be successful: “Trump says that during negotiations we must accept everything he is dictating to us. That is not what ‘negotiations’ are about. Negotiations mean that people should reach a fair compromise based on the ‘win-win’ principle. What Trump has failed to achieve during the war he will be unable to achieve during negotiations.”

But even if both sides were open to negotiations, would that do anything to break the standoff? Izvestia’s Aleksei Vagin would probably say it wouldn’t. As he explains, diplomacy, which used to be conducted “behind closed doors and in classified correspondence,” is “now unfolding on social media for all the world to see.” Calling the story of the Strait of Hormuz a “stark example” of this, Vagin details how the timing of a series of posts from both Iranian and US officials influenced bets on oil prices, likely resulting in a windfall for people with insider information. As Vagin concludes, “it’s not just the price of a barrel that’s fluctuating. It’s the very confidence that global decisions are buttressed by institutions and not media improvisations serving the interests of a narrow group of people.”

Meanwhile, the Russian government – notorious for its own “media improvisations” – has long attempted to control Russians’ online behavior by blocking certain Web sites and throttling access to others. Now, Russia’s digital situation has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The popular Telegram messenger app is the latest target: In a more nuanced approach, Roskomnadzor is not blocking the app itself, but the “VPN and proxy protocols” used to access the app, causing Russians to switch to wired connections and to purchase devices capable of bypassing the restrictions.

But things can also backfire when that narrow group of people Vagin refers to attempts to exploit social media for its own purposes. As Klim Bakulin (not his real name) writes in Republic, there are limits to tightening online censorship. According to him, research has shown that the blocking of online resources does not actually deprive people of freedom of speech or access to truthful information. On the contrary, he says, in Russia, Internet censorship “has only increased the underlying irritation with the government and made officials even more disconnected from the lives of ordinary Russians.” Finally, reflecting on the 40th anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, one wonders what role social media would have played in spreading news about the accident had that technology existed at the time. As it was, first responders arrived at the scene with only vague knowledge about an explosion gleaned from swirling rumors. In an article for Republic, Roman Perl outlines how the story of Chernobyl has morphed since then from a cover-up to open discussion to a villain-free epic of “heroic liquidators.” And this story is now shifting again in the context of the Ukraine war: Russia seized the exclusion zone in the early days of the war, ostensibly to protect against “false-flag” Ukrainian operations involving radioactive materials. Since this opening salvo, though, Russia has been unsuccessful at convincing Ukraine to let it have Moscow’s way.