It looked like a normal tweet by Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, posted days before NATO’s summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. But instead of referring to the military alliance’s acronym, she congratulated the “fellas” on their “first-ever NAFO summit.”
At the end of her short video greeting, a cartoon-like dog, wearing the blue and yellow colors of Ukraine’s flag, pops up behind the Estonian leader.
Kallas was not joking. “NAFO” stands for the North Atlantic Fellas Organization and is a decentralized online volunteer organization that is waging its own social media war against Russia and its invasion of Ukraine. Over the weekend, the group held its own summit in Lithuania’s capital, which was opened by the country’s foreign minister.
NAFO’s volunteer “troops” use tongue-in-cheek memes to mock, troll and discredit Russia’s war. Their battlegrounds are primarily Twitter and Telegram, where they have garnered a sizable fan-base among Ukraine supporters and captured the attention of global leaders.
These volunteers, also known as “fellas,” can be identified by their online avatars or profile pictures, typically a cartoon Shiba Inu (a Japanese hunting dog that became a popular internet meme in 2013) dressed in Ukrainian military gear.
