Russia’s War, by Jade McGlynn (2023).
McGlynn has articles in unherd.com.
A fragment from Do ordinary Russians support Putin’s war?:
As a specialist in Russian propaganda, I have analysed tens of thousands of pro-war Telegram posts and media articles, identifying three main narrative groups, or themes, all upheld by the belief that Ukrainians are in fact Russians, and that Ukraine is not a real country.
The first group is rooted in Second World War mythology, arguing that Russians are not fighting against Ukraine but against Nazism, which has reappeared in Ukraine as evidenced by Kyiv’s alleged “genocide of Russian speakers”.
The second casts Russians as “misunderstood angels” who are liberating Ukrainians. In this, Russia appears to be aping Western justifications for their wars in the Middle East: there is the same self-satisfied denialism of claiming to bring people freedom and rights by bombing them.
The third category portrays Russia as the underdog, fighting wildly against the odds to defend itself from a Russophobic Western military machine and malign mercenaries from Nato. Combined with the impact of sanctions, this argument has even appealed to some of the more metropolitan and well-educated Russians, who now feel victimised by their government as well as by the West, and resent the latter’s support for Ukraine. For many in poorer regions, especially those bordering Ukraine, Nato’s military aid simply confirms their long-held suspicion that the West is out to destroy Russia, just as it tried to do under Hitler and before that Napoleon.
(all emphasis mine)
Highlights:
According to the television channels, the ‘special military operation’ was not an unprovoked war of aggression or conquest but the culmination of Western-backed Ukrainian Nazis slaughtering Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine as part of a general anti-Russian project.
... my analysis of sixteen of the most popular Telegram channels showed that the most viewed content pertained either to Russia or to Ukraine. Sample popular narratives included the latter’s supposedly cruel treatment of the Donbas and Russia’s patient heroism in finally putting an end to the subjugation of ethnic Russians by Ukrainian Nazis. These narratives were compelling distractions from the reality that in the first three months of the war more civilians died than in the eight years prior – and that the vast majority of those killed hailed from the same Russian-speaking areas that Putin claimed to be defending.2 State supportive media – online and offline – did not place the blame for these deaths on Russia, except in so far as it held back from its heroic mission for too long, although even that culpability is implied rather than articulated. The Kremlin and its supporters admitted very little responsibility for the war or for any of the conditions that led to the war. Despite almost no pro-Kremlin Russian foreign-policy analysts predicting the invasion, many of them became fluent (almost) overnight at explaining why NATO, the USA, UK, EU, Ukraine or Zelensky made this war inevitable.
(all emphasis mine)
Competition in the media for audiences and favors from the Kremlin...
...the core message, of a good Russia reasserting its moral right to great power domination of others, seeps in unimpeded.
I’m often impressed by the total lack of awareness by Russians that Russia was indeed a colonial empire, and that lots of the problems both within Russia and in ex-soviet states are in fact decolonisation problems. The recent ethnic cleansing of the remaining Armenians in Azerbaijan is such an example.
And yet sometimes I hear the accusation of colonialism made by Russians (and allies) at the West with regard to Ukraine. Really weird...
(People in the US are also somewhat oblivious of their colonial past, as if colonialism was something that was done only by European countries, conveniently ignoring not only the Philippines and Hawaii, but also the land they took from Mexico and last but not least, the subjugation and displacement of native peoples of America that lasted well into modern times... still, I suspect much more awareness among Americans than Russians.)
There are core ideas and assumptions underpinning support for and understanding of the war and without which the Russian position makes very little sense. These assumptions include the following:
- the decaying West is hell-bent on destroying Russia
- Russia is fighting nationalist Ukrainians to save Ukraine from banderovtsy and Western machinations
- Russian moral rectitude will succeed against Western hypocrisy and degradation
- Russia has undertaken a defensive, pre-emptive military operation
- eastern and southern Ukraine are essentially Russia [ what about Kyiv is beginning of Russia ? ]
- the ‘special military operation’ is one step towards creating a fairer international order
Natalia Sevagina ... a curator from the Tretyakov Gallery ... a strong proponent of the war ...
[the war] is not political but about worldview, philosophy. Sooner or later any thinking person has to ask why do I live, what is my purpose on the Earth, what is the why of my life. This is the why. Russia doesn’t wage wars of conquest or aggression. Just don’t touch us, don’t touch our church, our people. And if you do, then we will fight you.
This connects the my earlier reading, where was stated that a person’s identity and sense of meaning often are provided by nationalism. Several psychological motives combine to make nationalism a more powerful and easier available method to alleviate all kinds of psychological needs than for example religion or work or art... perhaps even family...
On the other hand, nationalism can be mixed with religion, ethnocentrism, all kinds of us against them feelings....
The West might simply be a convenient “other”. Sufficiently scary to close the ranks and feel good about yourself...
Russia doesn’t wage wars of conquest or aggression
Again, total lack of awareness of their own history.... Maybe she specifically refers to the invasion of Ukraine?
Let me check...
Putin about Ukraine: “This is not a territorial war”
Vlad Vexler:
... and do you real realize and of course you do realize how much discourse especially soft and Russia discourse in our culture is predicated in the idea that this is some kind of a territorial dispute a Russian land grab driven by a perception of certain territory being um appropriately Russian or the idea of plugging some kind of um security motivated gaps.
It's not that and on this you've got to trust Putin he's saying it's not a territorial war and then he went on to say anybody who should be with us who is sort of kind of Russian or should belong to the Russian World this this is my words but this the the the sense is roughly um sensitive to what Putin said anybody who is in that kind of position kind of is with us the implications doesn't really matter whether they're in Kazakhstan or in Estonia that's the distinction there is no territorial distinction here so we're talking about the borderlessness of Empire Russia does not know ... Russia does not know what it means to feel one's own borders.
Many foreign-policy elites and government officials have chosen to rationalise Russia’s invasion as a preventative strike against a Ukraine that was growing stronger militarily and politically thanks to systematic support from the West. There have been bold and unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine was going to invade Crimea or develop a nuclear bomb. Given the shock in Russia when Ukraine did strike the Kerch Bridge in October 2022, it doesn’t seem likely that anyone seriously believed in those plans. (all emphasis mine)
Biolabs?
How do rationalisations work? We tell ourselves stories all the time that are dubious, but necessary to function. How does that work?
Vadym Prystaiko, former Foreign Minister of Ukraine and now Ambassador to the UK expressed with some exasperation in his interview with me: ‘Nobody needs Crimea, yes it’s okay to have a couple of beaches but that’s not Crimea, Crimean beaches aren’t that good, there is only a bit that hasn’t been bought up by oligarchs – the rest of it is nothing, there is nothing, no water, just steppe. And anyway we have the Black Sea.’5
So who is Russia fighting then? The West or Ukraine? Yes, them, both of them. And lots of other people besides: satanists; drug addicts; liberal fascist cancel culture; pagans; Russians’ own unerring sense of nobility; LGBTQ+ parades; migratory birds carrying genetic bioweapons; NATO; militant Baltic gays.
War aims, similarly incoherent...
The [Russian] viewer feels overwhelmed and stops relying on facts for contours, reaching instead for familiar concepts, things they definitely know, like national identity, historical parallels, general emotions, their own memories, perceptions of which are often reinforced by popular culture and the media.
Interview with Modest Kolerov via Telegram, 10 June 2022:
Demilitarisation is the only way to end this. War is terrifying, awful, the purest evil. The idea of the special military operation is to stop the bombardment of Donbas, to demilitarise Ukraine so that it stops being a threat to Russia.
.... neutrality ... but also the total removal of Ukraine’s army so it could never be a threat to Russia again
How does this Kolerov think that Ukraine was a threat to Russia, before Russia started occupying parts of Ukraine and in the end trying to destroy Ukraine? Before 2014 Ukraine had no army to speak of. Russia provoked it to build an army. After 2022 Ukraine can obviously never trust Russia not to invade again, so the disarming makes no sense. How does Kolerov’s brain not explode from the contradictions?
Most serious commentators I have read or heard so far all suggest that regime stability was the real reason for the invasion (war makes Putin popular and helps him getting more power by moving the state in a more totalitarian direction?). Add to that some weird mystical beliefs that some Russians, including Putin, seem to hold about the restoration of the old Russian empire... Would Kolerov dismiss that out of hand?
McGlynn:
Denazification of Ukraine is the most obscene objective and proof in itself that negotiated settlement with Putin is inconceivable: how can a democratic state with a Jewish president need denazifying? It reflects the bamboozling internal reality the Kremlin has constructed and tries to impose on others. In such instances, the constant political and media analogising with the Second World War adds a sense of gravitas to absurd demands.
Fedor Lukyanov:
22 June syndrome9 has left its mark on strategic thinking in Russia – this trying to never end up in the same position. We can’t let it happen that they attack us, if war is inevitable then we have to attack first. Putin’s worldview endowed the Ukrainian question with existential importance for him – it couldn’t be left for later, for his heir. He saw it as his mission to solve it.
McGlynn:
As objectives, both demilitarisation and denazification are completely intangible and incomprehensible. This is why they both failed to resonate with audiences and were soon replaced with an ostensible existential battle for truth and justice and just a general feeling of what is right. These narratives built on years of casting Ukrainians as Nazis, Westerners as Russophobes, and Russia as under attack. (my emphasis)
It is sometimes assumed that if people living under conditions of censorship go online, they will search out the truth, or different interpretations of the present at least. Yet, the most popular political and news channels on Telegram are pro-war and pro-Kremlin. This is reflective not of a bloodthirsty population so much as of the years of informational autocracy that preceded the ‘sudden’ moral bankruptcy of 2022. ‘Informational autocracy’ is a useful term for understanding the nature of the Russian regime until at least the pandemic if not 2022 and denotes the way in which those in power generally used their dominance over information channels to manipulate rather than coerce audiences.
• 13. Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, ‘A Theory of Informational Autocracy’, SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 3 April 2019), https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3426238.
During this time, Russian authorities curated a media environment that had a proven ability to devise persuasive and engaging content. So appealing were the emotive narratives on offer, that viewers were not forced to watch the propaganda, they chose to – and continue to choose to – even in the free space of the internet.
To lure viewers and subscribers, Russian media actors present lies in a way that feels emotionally right. It is an appealing lie, a lie that for whatever reason you want or are inclined to believe, or at least don’t want to question, as it plays on painful memories or offers respite from them.
The polarisation surrounding 2014 makes the historical roots of the war particularly worth studying as one’s interpretation of EuroMaidan will at the very least colour one’s understanding of the root causes of Russia’s full-scale invasion and the questions you pose about the contributing factors.
- Was EuroMaidan a Revolution of Dignity or a putsch by the mob?
- How central was the far right to the success of the protests?
- Was the ensuing war in the east purely a Russian concoction or a civil war?
- What were the Minsk agreements: vessels for Russian control of Ukraine or the only option for peace?
Your answers to the above will often have considerable bearing on your position on today’s war, or at least its causes and potential resolution.
The standard Russian answers to the questions above are starkly different from most Ukrainians’ answers. For example, I discussed with Dmitri Trenin why so many Russians support the war. Dr Trenin saw this support as being shaped by three main factors
- The eight-year war in Donbass (2014–2022),16 during which the Russian language regions of Donetsk and Lugansk Oblasts were constantly subjected to artillery strikes from Ukraine, and by the inability of Moscow to put an end to these strikes through diplomatic means (Minsk 2, the Normandy format, ‘Putin’s ultimatum’ in December 2021);
- A general refusal by the majority of the Russian population – excluding its relatively small liberal part – to accept the policies and practices of the Ukrainian government. The issue here is Kyiv’s official adoption of Banderite (ultra-nationalist) ideology as the ideological foundation of the Ukrainian nation, attacks on Russian language (the cessation of higher education, and then schooling, in Russian, the removal of any official status from the Russian language, the downgrading of it to the position of a foreign and undesirable language), the open hostility towards all things Russian and towards Russia as a state and so on;17
- The West’s extremely severe blanket reaction to the Russian armed forces operation in the Ukraine heralded a shift from a hostile standoff between Russia and the West to active confrontation in the form of an unlimited hybrid war. The West has been actively and effectively interfering in the internal politics of Ukraine since 1991, but since 2004 (the Orange Revolution), this interference has become large-scale. The ‘Revolution of Dignity’ in 2014 was seen by many in Russia as a state coup organised by the USA with the aim of finally cutting Ukraine off from Russia. Since February 2022, the USA and Western countries’ involvement in the Ukrainian situation has reached the level of proxy war between a united West and Russia. In such conditions, the larger part of Russian society has united around its leaders and its army, while a smaller part was required to shift from being in opposition to the Russian political regime to being in opposition to the state, basically to their own country. In conditions of war many oppositionists preferred to go abroad; some came out on the side of Ukraine and the West. And so the war in the Ukraine is seen by many in Russia as a war with the West, which has flagrantly interfered in its own interests in a domestic row between Russia and Ukraine and those parts of the historical Russian state that are still in play.18
(I made explicit lists; emphasis mine)
Dmitri Trenin’s reference to a ‘domestic row’ and his final three words – ‘still in play’ – emphasise that ultimately these debates are not just about history but also about duelling questions of legitimacy. On the one hand, there is a conspiratorial and brutal realism, in which smaller countries are but pawns of major powers, devoid of agency except to choose between puppet-masters. On the other hand, an idealistic but highly selectively applied notion that Ukraine is a test case for the principle that every nation can decide its own fate and seek security and economic guarantors.
- I use the Ukrainian spellings of all Ukrainian locations; however, I translate the speaker’s choice since this also reflects a political, or at least sociolinguistic, reality.
- Given the salience of this issue, it is worth adding here that the Ukrainian constitution also guarantees ‘Free development, use, and protection of Russian and other languages of national minorities of Ukraine’ in Article 10, https://unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/hlm/prgm/cph/experts/ukraine/ukr.constitution.e.pdf.
- Interview with Dmitri Trenin conducted via email, on 7 June and 8 June 2022.
Descriptively the war is in the Russian media the same as in the West, only with the heroes and the villains reversed.
Added to that are “Putin’s wild accusations with seemingly inchoate stories about Pentagon bioweapon networks in Ukraine, Nazis torturing children, economic collapse in the West, efforts to cancel Russia, and transgenderism”.
... while the uninitiated may find the Kremlin’s falsehoods completely farcical, they are less so when seen as embedded within longstanding media framings of the war, which developed out of 2014...
- Roman Horbyk, ‘Little Patriotic War: Nationalist Narratives in the Russian Media Coverage of the Ukraine-Russia Crisis’, Asian Politics and Policy 7, no. 3 (2015): 505–11, https://doi.org/10.1111/aspp.12193.
In [the Russian] propaganda world, Nazis have ruled Ukraine for years, crucifying Russian children, burning people alive, and pursuing a genocide in Donbas.
The notion of Ukrainians as Nazis is really a support act to a description of the war in Ukraine as a Little Patriotic War, or rerun of the Great Patriotic War (Soviet war against Nazi Germany 1941–1945).
The Little Patriotic War analogy created the context through which many Russians understand events today. In this warped version of reality, Russia’s ‘denazification’ campaign is about restoring Russian historical mores and battling Nazis and banderovtsy.
... Second World War analogies are a constant among a vast range of claims about what is really going on in Ukraine. For every biolab accusation, there are comparisons between modern Russophobia and Nazi antisemitism, for every allegation of Western-sponsored terrorism in Crimea, there are articles on Ukrainian shrines to Adolf Hitler. Such seemingly incoherent narratives are better understood as paving slabs on well-trodden narrative paths that are rendered even more familiar by the invocation of popular historical myth. In this alternate reality, Russia is under attack from the West, as so often in its history, and must either fight back, like in the Second World War, or be destroyed like the USSR.
The Little Patriotic War myth intersects with, and feeds, the notion that Russians are the good guys. One of the difficulties when discussing the war with Russians is a frequently encountered belief that ‘Russians are by nature good.’ Or, as another put it: ‘I know our boys, I know they wouldn’t do what your [Western] politicians accuse them of. So why would I believe anything else they say?’30
This must be incredibly rage-inducing for Ukrainians; as if it wasn’t enough that the Russians are bombing your homes, they also insist on being ever so smug about how considerately they are ravaging your lands. Given Russia’s (often fair) criticism of the West’s military interventions in the Middle East, it is ironic it is mimicking its self-satisfied claims of bringing people freedom and rights by bombing them.
- Interview with Yuliya from Voronezh, pseudonymised.
Amazingly, Bucha has been made into a neologism to indicate fake Western news.
MH17 was also thoroughly distorted
Apparently, there is a method that involves first sowing doubt, subsequently “offering alternative explanations expressed as mere suggestions or hypotheses, since the truth is ostensibly unknowable”. That includes introducing made up facts, fantastical theories (like “the plane had been pre-loaded with corpses” or “the Ukrainians shot it down in an attempt to assassinate Putin”. Finally, a narrative is created that fits the greater story of “historical and external forces are always aligned against an innocent Russia”.
The consequences of normalising such a distorted view of events are devastating. They are designed to, and can only give rise to, further hysteria among the Russian elites and public. Russia uses its own crimes as further evidence that it is the victim and as a justification for committing ever more atrocities.
This cycle, and its two stages of dispersing truth and reaffirming core narratives, is central to the Kremlin’s spectrum of allies approach. While some doubt may linger, preventing full, and undesired mobilisation of support, many Russian viewers will be convinced of the injustice of the West pinning others’ crimes on their country, leading them to become ritual, if not especially enthusiastic, supporters, or at least loyal neutrals. The less credulous will at least feel unable to discern the truth and sink into apathy. This is an essential feature of Kremlin propaganda and population management. : it uses techniques that simultaneously demobilise active opposition among those who are overwhelmed by trying to argue back against different interpretations and solidifies ritual support and loyalty among those who believe that Russia is the victim of external attacks, especially since the confusion is eventually deftly folded back into a more coherent alternative worldview. This is what gives the impression that Russians live in an alternate reality and explains the connection between the idea that nobody and nothing can be believed and the firm foundations of a broader Putinist worldview. (All emphasis mine)
The Kremlin’s control over the airwaves permeated every aspect of Russian federal television schedules for months after the invasion. There were no longer soaps or series during waking hours, just relentless propaganda. The popular and execrable ‘news’ discussion show ‘60 Minutes’ lasted two to three hours. It was as if you replaced Eastenders and Coronation Street with 200 minutes of hate.
Again, amazingly, Vladimir Solovev seems not a fringe figure:
So successful and persuasive is Mr Solovev that Russia’s main television channel gave prime-time slots to his shows, scrapping the soaps they normally showed on Mondays to Thursdays.
Propaganda made into a science... I wonder If they go so far in China as well...
Despite the intense nature of the subject matters under discussion, these propaganda shows are packaged in a glitzy format and comprise a form of ‘infotainment’, also called ‘agitainment’, in a reference to its entertaining format and propagandistic content
- Vera Tolz and Yuri Teper, ‘Broadcasting Agitainment: A New Media Strategy of Putin’s Third Presidency’, Post-Soviet Affairs 34, no. 4 (4 July 2018): 213–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2018.1459023.
I wasn’t surprised when Hennadiy Maksak, head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs-linked Prisma think tank in Kyiv told me the story of his schoolfriend.
Like many Ukrainians before the Revolution of Dignity, Hennadiy’s friend, let’s call him Anton, was working in Moscow illegally, primarily on building sites. He had been there around six months when the Maidan protests began in November 2013. Anton watched the news in horror, as far-right activists attacked the Berkut riot police and he heard how innocent civilians were at the mercy of wild-eyed Nazis marauding around Kyiv, attacking anyone and everyone. Anton ‘darted off to Ukraine, to Kyiv, with a firm mind to liberate Ukraine from Nazis. He, a Ukrainian brought up in the USSR, arrived, was there for two days, and realised that what he heard had no connection with reality. He had to adapt, all his friends were confused, asking “Nazis? What Nazis are you talking about?” And in the end he realised and he joined the Maidan. But think about it, six months, that is all it took.
- Interview with Hennadiy Maksak via Zoom, 6 June 2022.
... Kremlin propaganda is washing people’s brains with things they do want to believe, helping them to stay within certain comfortable cognitive frameworks where they are the good guys and they’ve always been the good guys
One of the Kremlin’s preferred directions is political apathy...
This is what Vlad Vexler thinks as well...
... when people believe nothing can be trusted, they will still look for, and need, some support and criteria through which they can understand the world and evaluate events. Often they will turn to something they feel they instinctually understand, such as national identity, or a self-inscribed narrative of their own life as better or worse after X event
Divergent interpretations rarely occur because one side has the facts wrong. They mostly occur because both sides have interpreted the facts differently due to conflicting perceptions, interpretations and values. ‘It’s never about truth, it’s about identity.’13
- Bruce Patton et al., Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, re-issue edn (New York: Penguin, 2011).
...[one] purpose of propaganda is to protect the audience from reality by creating a fake construct of order, stability and security and also, in Russia’s case, a space where supposedly immutable values, culture and history are depicted as even more important, even more real, than reality. In this light, propaganda can be considered the ultimate protection – and, equally importantly, defence mechanism – against reality.
At this point I still don’t have the feeling that I really understand mothers in Russia who don’t believe their daughters living in Ukraine that phone: “we are being bombed!”.
[ to be continued as I read on ]