A virtual army of impish cartoon pooches is waging war on Russia

“We usually express gratitude to our international partners for the security assistance,” tweeted Ukraine’s ministry of defence on August 28th. “But today we want to give a shout-out to a unique entity—North Atlantic Fellas Organisation #nafo.” Below the message was a picture of a dog, clad in Ukrainian army uniform, and looking serene as rockets from a himars launcher streaked into the sky behind him. “Thanks for your fierce fight against kremlin’s propaganda &trolls.” the tweet went on. “We salute you, fellas!”

The North Atlantic Fella Organisation (spellings vary) is a tongue-in-cheek label adopted by a virtual army that champions Ukraine’s cause and harangues its foes on social media. Its members don the avatar of a cartoon shiba inu dog—a breed borrowed from an older meme of 2013. They post caustic, typically humorous, memes mocking Russia’s military performance and the outlandish claims of its officials and propagandists.

Their campaign has fans among the upper echelons of Ukraine’s government. On August 30th Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defence minister, thanked “each person behind [the] Shiba Inu cartoon”. He then changed his Twitter profile picture to a canine version of himself, created by a member of the public, complete with trademark goatee and a miniature himars launcher. “nafo expansion is non-negotiatiable!” he added (spelt thus), echoing one of the group’s catchphrases, a wry allusion to Russia’s pre-war demand that Ukraine forgo membership of nato, the (unrelated) military alliance.

Despite Mr Reznikov’s endorsement, nafo has no formal organisation or leadership. The acronym and imagery were invented and tweeted by a user named @Kama_Kamilia in late May, two months after the invasion. They quickly went viral. The combination of a catchy name, playful imagery and satirical edge provided a collective identity to like-minded activists—many of them actual soldiers in the war—who could channel their outrage at the Russian invasion with irreverence and irony. But the point was also to muster donations for Ukraine.

nafo’s inventor began drawing personalised shiba inu avatars, or “fellas”, for those who donated to the Georgian Legion, a group of foreign military volunteers in Ukraine. Those efforts caught the eye of Christian Borys, a Kyiv-based Canadian journalist and founder of Saint Javelin, a pro-Ukraine fundraising outfit whose logo is a similarly flippant picture of the Virgin Mary cradling a Javelin anti-tank missile. Mr Borys initially donated money for body armour to procure a fella of his own. He now employs @Kama_Kamilia (the name is a pseudonym) at Saint Javelin, which has raised over $1.5m in humanitarian and military support. A channel on Discord, a social messaging site, hosts a thriving community of more than 1,500 pro-nafo members, who participate enthusiastically in fundraising.

Like many online communities, nafo revels in references and phrases that appear nonsensical to the uninitiated. When Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s senior diplomat in Vienna, accused Ukrainians of shelling civilians in June, he found himself on the receiving end of a nafo barrage. His po-faced response to the torrent of mockery—“You pronounced this nonsense. Not me”—swiftly became a leitmotif of the movement. Saint Javelin’s website now sells shirts and mugs emblazoned with the phrase. Another popular slogan—“What air defence doing?”—pokes fun at the failure of Russian air defences to prevent an attack on Saky air base in Crimea on August 9th.

In many ways, nafo’s flippancy obscures its role as a remarkably successful form of information warfare. “It’s been effective at not allowing Russia to run wild across the info-war landscape the way they used to,” says Peter W. Singer, author of “LikeWar”, a book on the use of social media in war. He draws a contrast with Russia’s success in fomenting uncertainty and confusion in 2014, during its earlier invasion of Ukraine. nafo has also helped elevate Ukraine’s role in popular culture. “There’s a huge portion of people who just want their information in memes and that’s basically the gap that we fill,” says Mr Borys. “People stopped caring as much about Ukraine and we were able to keep them engaged because we were funny.”

Many armed forces might envy that success. In recent years, armies have invested heavily in psychological operations to confuse, disorient and mislead adversaries, usually through cyber means. Many have glimpsed the potential importance of memes in that endeavour. In 2006 Michael Prosser, then a major in the US Marine Corps, proposed that America’s armed forces create a Meme Warfare Centre “​​to advise the commander and provide the most relevant meme combat options”. Yet military organisations tend to lack the chaotic energy that characterises nafo.

Generating “memes by committee” tends to produce underwhelming results, observes Nick Waters of Bellingcat, an investigative group. He points to the example of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, which published an image of a hapless cartoon bear in October 2020 with the aim of lampooning Russian hackers. Documents showed that it took the Pentagon more than three weeks to design the meme. It was initially retweeted fewer than 200 times—an order of magnitude less than Mr Reznikov’s post. Others have been more fleet of foot. Mr Singer notes that Israel’s army, involved in its own meme wars with Hamas in recent years, learnt that it needed to respond quickly and push authority down to officers in their 20s and 30s—something that would cause many generals to flinch.

The lesson may be that virtual communities, coming together spontaneously and without direction, can handily out-meme even the largest and best-resourced armies. “President Putin has comprehensively lost the information war in Ukraine and in the West,” judged Jeremy Fleming, the head of gchq, Britain’s signals-intelligence agency, in an article for The Economist in August. The self-appointed warriors of nafo might claim a little credit for that outcome. ■