Over 1,500 days of defence: How Mala Tokmachka became a meme, a ghost village and the centre of the universe
Before 24 February 2022, news about the village of Mala Tokmachka in Zaporizhzhia Oblast would only appear on the website of the local village council. Its name was familiar only to local residents, researchers of Bronze Age and Sarmatian burial mounds, and inmates of Orikhiv Penitentiary No. 88 and their families.
Today, things are very different. A Google search for the village returns more than 200,000 results in Ukrainian and nearly 300,000 in English. Ukrainians have come to refer to the settlement as a "fortress" and "the second Chornobaivka".
Almost every day, social media users have been creating new memes about the defence of the village. The famous phrase by the British banker Nathan Rothschild – "whoever controls information controls the world" – has been humorously reworked with "information" replaced by "Mala Tokmachka".
Behind this unexpected "popularity" lies Russia's repeated failure to establish even a foothold in the outskirts of this small village, located 75 km from the city of Zaporizhzhia. Over the past year, Russian officials and propagandists have repeatedly claimed to have captured Mala Tokmachka, only for Ukrainian forces to refute those claims each time.
Why is it so important for Russia to seize this settlement?