Memory, Myth, and Militarisation: Russia’s War Propaganda and the Construction of Legitimised Violence in Ukraine

Andreas Heinemann-Grüder

Senior Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies, and Professor of Political Science at the University of Bonn (Germany)

1 December 2024

 

[This article is part of our research initiative “Russia’s Project ‘Anti-Ukraine’”]

 

 

Introduction

 

Any war needs justification in order to instil a sense of purpose among the combatants, to convince the public of a just cause, to sell a story to the outside world, and to de-legitimise resistance among the objects of violence, in this case Ukraine’s populace. The Russian military and its auxiliary armed groups kill, destroy, and annihilate in Ukraine, and part of the discriminate and indiscriminate violence is to convert a war of annihilation into an act of personal and collective salvation, and to convey the “lessons to be taught” to the audiences at home and abroad. This chapter reconstructs the main topics and discursive strategies of the Russian military’s narrative, discloses contradictions, and identifies shortcomings. What are the sales pitches of Russia’s war propaganda and is there any indication for its success? Do the narratives stick?

 

War is a form of communication: Either you give up or you will be killed. On the one hand, the Russian audience needs to be kept de-politicised, to be calmed down – a “special operation” is conducted on a faraway territory, do not worry, go shopping, walk your dog, buy national products, watch TV, and enjoy your life – this is the message of marginalisation. On the other hand, the war against Ukraine is presented as an existential either-or choice: either we will win Ukraine, or Russia will fall apart. Instinctively, the Russian propaganda machine correctly presents the war as a fight for survival of the ruling regime. The war narratives of the Russian siloviki, i.e. representatives of power ministries and agencies, thus serve the purpose of preserving their central position in Russia’s political regime.

 

Almost no organised violence is imaginable without a justifying narrative, a transformation of killing and destruction into a “service” for a higher purpose. The master narratives are rarely invented by military personnel or military propagandists by themselves. The military merely simplifies and popularises worldviews and ideologies developed elsewhere as “force multipliers”. The specific purpose is to dehumanise the object of violence, i.e. Ukraine as a nation-state and its citizens, and to provide moral underpinnings for aggression or for making it invisible. Legitimising strategies thus turn violence into an epiphenomenon of normative behaviour.¹

 

As such, violence itself seemingly disappears behind a smokescreen of narratives. One elementary function of legitimising violence consists therefore in shifting the discourse from violence to normative statements. One’s own violence must be minimised, marginalised, or reduced to defensive purposes. Some authors treat the normative assessment of violence, i.e. the speech acts and performative acts for justification of violence, as an indivisible emanation of violence itself.² “Normative violence” and physical violence would thus co-constitute each other. Russia’s war narratives are violent speech acts, announcements of intentions and their enactment, i.e. intentions in action.

 

To avoid any misunderstandings, strategies for legitimisation of violence are not merely of a normative or discursive nature. Any questioning of, or discontent with, the official war narrative is prosecuted in Russia by law enforcement as a disrespect for the army.³ Objections to the Russian war narrative are punished with harsh sentences, comparable to heresy in medieval times. Russia’s war narrators are not approaching their “hearts and minds” operations as an open market of ideas, but violently impose their narrative like a fundamentalist dogma. No expression of deviant views is permitted. The militarisation of the mind, starting with children in kindergartens and pupils at school and implemented through curricula, memory and media politics, is part of a domestic war against any form of dissent. Information and disinformation are seen by the Russian regime as elements of an overall war effort. Politics are not seen as an alternative to war, but as one form of conducting war: politics is war and war is politics. The logic of war pertains to the war narratives too.

 

Recorded human history has developed a standard repertoire of legitimisations of war. Accordingly, one’s own cause has always a divine origin (“God is with us”). One’s own state is holy while the enemy is cruel, barbaric, and morally inferior. The threat against one’s own group is universal, the enemies conspire, they are at the gates, encirclement is looming. The purity of one’s own group (defined in terms of nation, religion, blood, culture, etc.) must be defended against poisonous infringements. One’s own leader is allegedly chosen by destiny, a saviour and messiah. Finally, holy sacrifices of the past command to not become a victim again. The past obliges to never let aggression happen again. A perpetrator has to project the image of actually being the victim. Justifications of going to war almost always vary elements of these archetypical “holy” causes. The “operating system” of Russia’s narratives to go to war are on the one hand universalist, on the other hand very peculiar, because they create the image of an arch enemy that is flesh of one’s own flesh – a balancing act between antagonistic, mutually exclusive messages.

 

The Narratives

 

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the website of the Russian Ministry of Defence spreads daily news about the number of destroyed Ukrainian armaments and defeated Ukrainian forces – an endless stream of victories without ever mentioning their own casualties. Military actions by Ukrainian forces are usually labelled as terrorism. Amazingly, the purpose and goals of the “special operation” in general and concrete military strategies and tactics are rarely mentioned by the outlets of the Russian military. According to the news briefings, Russia’s arms industry is constantly providing the army with the necessary and most up-to-date weaponry while benefits packages are handed out to war volunteers, veterans, wounded, and relatives.⁴ The message is twofold: we (the Russians) are winning, and we care for our “heroes”.

 

A month after the beginning of the escalation of the Russian-Ukrainian war in February 2022, military publicist Ivan Egorov published 13 answers to questions on the “special military operation” in Ukraine, which were posted on the website of the official Russian governmental newspaper Rossiyskaya gazeta (Russian newspaper) and were partly based, as the author claimed, on his conversations with siloviki.⁵ These 13 answers represent the predominant speech acts of Russia’s warmongers. According to this military master-narrative by Egorov, Russia tried to prevent the war with an agreement with the West in December 2021. The West refused Russia’s offer while Russia would not repeat the mistake of the prehistory of the “Great Patriotic war” by trying to pacify the aggressor – the West is thus implicitly linked to Hitler’s unreliability. Ukraine and the West in general are equalled with the preparations of a war against the Soviet Union by the Third Reich. The West had not merely disrespected Russian interests, but posed an existential threat to the survival of Russia as a state, the claim holds. Russia’s war against Ukraine is thus portrayed as the prevention of a war of annihilation by the collective West.

 

Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of the State Duma (Russian parliament), confirmed this view in an interview:

 

Had the Russian special operation not begun, the NATO operation would have begun the following day. We have outrun them, which means we have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. And today we must do everything to ensure that Ukraine becomes a peaceful country – independent, self-reliant, democratic, so that it does not participate in any blocs.⁶

 

Tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers had for eight years allegedly exterminated the people living in the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, Volodin proceeded. “And now refugees come, we begin to talk to them, the kids ask questions: what is a theatre, what is a circus? All these eight years they were in the basements virtually around the clock. But at the same time, the world community is deaf and dumb”, the chairman of the State Duma said.⁷ In Volodin’s weird logic, the war is thus conducted in order to pacify Ukraine; it is attacked in order to ensure that Ukraine becomes an independent state. Volodin’s rhetoric projects an image of the Russian military as a liberator of deprived, oppressed and repressed Ukrainians in the face of an ignorant world community.

 

The threat from the West was maximised to the extreme in Egorov’s war saga as he pictured Russia as a country attempting to prevent a repetition of the allegedly most monstrous trauma of its history. On Russia’s “historical” territories, the sermon proceeds, an “anti-Russia” was established which is under total foreign control by NATO. The narrative makes therefore three claims – first, neighbouring Ukraine is historically part of Russia, i.e. illegitimate as a sovereign state; second, an ominous “anti-Russia” was built up there, i.e. de-Russification is looming. Finally, NATO, not Ukraine, is the arch enemy that controls Ukraine (by implication waiting to be liberated from foreign oppression).

 

The US and NATO were not interested in a negotiated settlement, the story goes on, Russia had to therefore prevent a war planned by these arch enemies. With the “special operation”, Russia avoided the outbreak of the Third World War, Egorov claimed. Rhetorically, the perpetrator is thus converted into a victim and ultimate saviour. Invoking the image of the “Great Patriotic war”, the “special operation” is by analogy portrayed as the undisputable “never again” lesson from history. Once the equalisation of an imminent threat with the Nazi crime of aggression is firmly established, questioning the meaning of the “special operation” becomes tantamount to betraying a “holy grail”. The rhetorical performance establishes a chain logic: once you are against fascism you must support Russia’s “special operation” as a form of anti-fascism.

 

Since the direct analogy to the beginning of Nazi Germany’s war against the Soviet Union might sound too sweeping, a second line of argument had to be built up, according to which the US had prepared to launch a war against Russia with 60,000 troops, 200 tanks and 150 jetfighters. The danger was seemingly imminent and could only be avoided through preventive action. This line of argument serves the purpose of countering criticism that Russia had started the war. The story line resembles the false news about a Polish attack on the radio station in Görlitz in late August 1939, which Nazi propaganda used as pretext for starting a war against Poland: our patience is gone, we are shooting back, the Nazi propaganda held.

 

For eight years, Russia allegedly tried to solve the Donbas problem by diplomatic means, but Europe failed to force Kyiv to implement the Minsk II agreements, the next talking point holds. Recognising the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic” thus remained Russia’s only option. A justification for the later annexation of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions is, however, missing from that narrative.

 

But why did Russia begin the “special operation” while denying any respective intention to even shortly beforehand? Allegedly, Russia had received information about an imminent Ukrainian attack against the Donbas and Crimea, and Ukraine’s planned use of nuclear weapons against Russia’s heartland. Since Ukraine does not have nuclear weapons, this military reasoning seems misplaced or only intended for badly informed people. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had, however, allegedly declared at the Munich security conference two days before the start of the “special operation” that Ukraine might leave the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 (which had guaranteed Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons).⁸

 

In fact, Zelensky had said that since 2014, Ukraine

 

tried three times to convene consultations with the guarantor states of the Budapest Memorandum. Three times without success. Today Ukraine will do it for the fourth time. I, as President, will do this for the first time. But both Ukraine and I are doing this for the last time. I am initiating consultations in the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. The Minister of Foreign Affairs was commissioned to convene them.⁹

 

According to Zelensky, if these consultations would not happen again or their results would not guarantee Ukraine’s security, the country would “have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum [was] not working and all the package decisions of 1994 [were] in doubt”.¹⁰

 

Zelensky’s speech was rudely misrepresented. But who was going to check what Zelensky had actually said? Russia’s unwillingness to uphold the Budapest Memorandum was presented as if Ukraine was preparing for the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

 

The Russian military narrative becomes quite fuzzy at this point. On the one hand, a preventive war was arguably necessary; on the other hand, the war was legitimised by the prevention of any future acquisition of nuclear weapons by Ukraine. Ukraine’s “tactical” Tochka-U missiles had already been launched against Russian territory, the story proceeded. On 14 March 2022, the Russian government accused Ukrainian forces of launching an OTR-21 Tochka missile on Donetsk – Ukrainian territory declared to be Russian territory.¹¹ This allegation was used to justify the start of the “special operation” on 24 February 2022 – a later event must thus serve the purpose of explaining the start of the war. Obviously, coherence or plausibility was not a concern for the Russian military narrative.

 

Apart from the nuclear threat, Ukraine had worked on biological weapons too, according to early Russian claims for going to war. These could have caused pestilence, anthrax, tularaemia, and cholera. Russia thus wanted to only conduct a limited operation against purely military objects and nationalists. References to biological or chemical weapons are old stock of anti-Semitic prejudices since Medieval times – the enemy is poisoning the innocent, the weapon is invisible, but is threatening everyone. No proof has ever been presented by Russian authorities since then.¹²

 

Russia’s “peace-making operation” was intended to force Kyiv to make peace, the next claim holds. However, Ukraine’s forces did not heed Putin’s call. Russia began the special operation in order to prevent a Ukrainian attack on Donetsk and Luhansk, which was supposed to start on 8 March 2022 – no evidence was provided for this statement either, but the claim served the purpose of instilling the image of a preventive action by Russia.

 

After the Maidan in 2014, neo-Nazis had supposedly dominated the Ukrainian parliament, receiving posts in the government and in the presidential administration. These neo-Nazis had conducted a war against their own populace, it was said. For the last 30 years since Ukraine’s independence, the country had turned into a concentration camp against Russian-speakers – Russia’s often-repeated accusation of a genocide. The Ukrainian government’s war against its own people would resemble the occupation policy of the Nazis during the Second World War, it was held. Civilians were used by Ukraine in cities like Mariupol as human shields, similar to the tactics of the terrorist Islamic State in Syria. As the analogy to the Nazis did not seem sufficient, a comparison to the Islamic State was made too. No analogy was thus spared in order to project the image of devilish Ukrainian actors.

 

Furthermore, the Russians in Ukraine would fear most that Russian forces might leave Ukraine one day after the successful destruction of Ukraine’s military infrastructure. Russians in Ukraine would then have to live with the Nazis and “banderovtsy” (Banderites)¹³ without protection by Russia. But Russia, the Russians were assured, would not leave Ukraine before all Nazis were killed or brought to court. In the end, the Russian Army and police forces would stay in Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping mission in the framework of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, the Russian-dominated military alliance of several post-Soviet states. The narrative thus provided a glance into the future of Ukraine – it would be a Russian protectorate with assistance or approval from other post-Soviet states. De facto regimes like in Abkhazia or South Ossetia or Transnistria could be the role models for future Ukraine.

 

One could, however, ask why Russia did not start the “special operation” already in 2014 – the answer was that it needed eight years to prepare Russia’s economy to counter Western sanctions. This argument contradicts the earlier version of an imminent Ukrainian attack. By implication, Russia had thus prepared for the war independently of a looming attack. The narrative is contradictory, full of auxiliary constructions, constantly switching between levels of argument. Coherence is not strived for.

 

A question nonetheless hangs in the air, namely, why Ukrainians should greet Russian overlords? No conclusive answer is offered, but the “change of mind” by the prominent former pilot, prisoner of war and later Ukrainian deputy Nadiya Savchenko¹⁴ is presented as a clue – even hard-nosed Ukrainians could be turned around, it is implied.

 

The future of Ukraine is vaguely described as a state that will emancipate itself from all collaborators of its current criminal regime. Ukrainians could elect their government, but only among those without “blood spots”. The rhetoric reminds the audience of the former Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, who were formally independent, but whose leaders needed Moscow’s approval. A final, concluding rhetorical strategy consists of “whataboutism” – a list of war crimes committed by the US, as if a reference to the US minimises Russia’s “guilt” or sanctions Russia to commit similar crimes – or that Russia was preventing the US from committing similar crimes on Russian soil.

 

Russia’s Military as Guardian of History

 

The Russian state launched a whole programme, including filmmaking, theatre, TV productions, literature, popularised science, Internet productions, in order to “save” its historical memory and “spiritual-moral values”.¹⁵ What is called “historical memory” is in fact memory politics, i.e., a deliberate attempt to construct an official, dogmatic pattern of what has to be memorialised: reality has to fit the preconceived form.

 

In July 2018, president Putin re-established the Main Military-Political Directorate of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (its predecessor organisation had been abolished after the failed Soviet coup d’état attempt in 1991, Russian abbreviation GVPU). This Directorate is meant to propagate military values and to foster the prestige of the army in society and the “moral-ideological pillar” inside the army. The GVPU is charged with propaganda in the Armed Forces, publicising the activities, increasing the prestige of military service, and preservation of patriotic traditions.

 

Critical commentators in the Russian press compared the resurrection of the Directorate to the infamous “politruks”, or political commissars, from the Soviet times who were then in charge of communist and patriotic indoctrination.¹⁶ The reactivation of Soviet role models of indoctrination was explicitly justified on grounds of a renewed enmity with the West and information warfare. The first head of the Military-Political Directorate, Colonel General Andrey Kartapolov, declared that its goal was to form state warriors, instilled by statism, spirituality, and patriotism.¹⁷

 

The Voenno-istoricheskiy zhurnal (Military-Historical Journal, founded in 1939) is the principal outlay of the Ministry of Defence to instil pride into Russia’s past. Telling stories of heroism should instil love to Russia as a country. First of all, Russia is portrayed as the sole moral inheritor of the sufferings and the victory of the people of the Soviet Union, while “Europe” as a whole and Ukraine, Poland or France in particular would deny their collaboration with the Third Reich or falsify history.¹⁸

 

One of the viral disputes between Russia’s official view and Ukrainian positions pertains to the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939. On November 30, 2020, the permanent representative of Ukraine to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, denounced the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Ukraine and Poland had been among the first victims of this pact and Soviet troops had killed Ukrainians. Questioning Russia’s exclusive moral high ground sounds to Russia’s military historians like blasphemy. Russian military historians denounce any complicity of the Soviet Union in starting the Second World War as a “falsification”, which should be punishable by judicial means. An expert of the Voenno-istorichesky zhurnal expressed his concern about Ukrainians who would not reject the falsification of history by their leaders.¹⁹

 

Vladimir Kiknadze, deputy chief editor of the Voenno-istorichesky zhurnal, resorted to an ominous “historical truth” as justification of the “special operation” against Ukraine.²⁰ The military narrative of legitimising the war is thus historicised and the history of Russia told as one of heroic defences. Russian law amendments adopted in July 2021 already made any falsification of history punishable, and only an officially “verified” version was thus permissible.²¹ Any comparisons of the actions of the USSR with those of the Third Reich are declared as criminal offenses.²² The argumentative strategy involves prevention of alleged falsification as well as respective measures. Russia’s loss of influence in Eastern Europe since the Soviet Union’s dissolution is viewed as a reversal of the post-war order. This order had established Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe and clearly delineated spheres of influence between the Soviet bloc and Western powers, such as NATO and the European Community (later the European Union). A rhetorical tactic is to equal any revision of the Soviet control with Nazi collaboration.

 

Russia’s strength is claimed by Kiknadze to rest in historical truth.²³ Referring to a revealed truth, Russia no longer needs to concretely legitimise its war against Ukraine. The defence of “historical truth” is a sufficient justification in itself. The war against Ukraine appears as a defence of the “Great Victory” in the Second World War, and thus rather as a holy war to defend the collective image of self than a war to achieve defined goals. The narrative is fundamentalised and essentialised, elevated to the status of a religious obligation.

 

The references to history as justification for the war fulfil several functions. They turn the war into a fight for the further existence of Russia, as if the very essence of Russianness is at stake. History evolves into a fundamentalist religion. The defence of the narrative turns into a religious war and, by implication, any resistance turns into heresy. A holy war justifies all means and sacrifices, and the goals are absolute, not relative. The war is not a prolongation of politics by other means in terms of Carl von Clausewitz,²⁴ but a statement of self, an all-or-nothing conflict, a zero-sum game without space for compromise.

 

The Clash of Civilisations

 

On 13 April 2022, the official Facebook page of the Command of the Air Assault Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine published a report on the destruction of the mobile command post of the 4th battalion tactical group of the 201st army base of the Central Military District of the Russian army.²⁵ The report mentioned official records and propaganda materials found at the destroyed command post. At least one of those propaganda materials was a Russian language document called “The Whole Truth about Ukraine’s Crimes in the Donbas”. The 48-page document was originally published by the Russian Telegram channel “The Kremlin Laundress” on 26 February 2022,²⁶ and the analysis of the text of the document and its metadata suggests that it was finalised on 24-25 February 2022.²⁷

 

While the author of the document is currently unknown, the place of its original publication may provide indirect information about its source. The Telegram channel “The Kremlin Laundress” was managed by Mikhail Polyakov, a retired colonel of the Russian Federal Security Service (also known as FSB), who, before 2022, had apparently led one of the services of the FSB’s Office for the Protection of the Constitutional Order in Moscow.²⁸ According to one report, already as a presumably former FSB officer, Polyakov supervised a number of pro-Kremlin Telegram channels in coordination with the first deputy head of Russia’s Presidential Administration, Sergey Kirienko.²⁹

 

As soon as the document “The Whole Truth” was published, dozens of Telegram channels directly and indirectly linked to the Russian state amplified the publication, and by mid-March 2022 the corresponding post of Telegram was viewed 1.1 million times.³⁰ One of the Telegram channels that amplified the post of “The Kremlin Laundress” was the channel of one of Russia’s top propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov, who was then followed by over a million subscribers.³¹ There is little doubt that the creation of the document, as well as what looked like a coordinated amplification effort, was an operation coordinated by the Russian state actors.

 

As it was evidently distributed among the Russian military personnel, the document was meant to provide meaning to their war against Ukraine and to outline the benefit packages for participants of the war. The document frames the conflict, as in Soviet times, as a clash of the evil, imperialist, colonial West against Russia that defended itself against inroads of the West.³² The history of imperial competition, balancing of power, power-sharing, and coexistence is reframed as a “Russia against the West” conflict, thus implicitly soliciting support from the “Global South” against its former colonial headmasters.

 

Russia’s own imperial expansion, suppression of non-dominant or indigenous people, and its “civilisational” mission is totally denied in this narrative, as if Russia only defended its way of life against inroads from an unfriendly West. Denial, projection, and externalisation characterise this approach. The West has to deal with its past, not Russia, the self-ascribed moral high ground holds. After the end of colonialism, the West could only survive by exploiting the resources of the socialist camp and of resource-rich countries such as Iraq. The West would be interested in stripping Russia of its resources and planting the seeds of chaos in their place, the memo proceeds, while Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria would serve as blueprints. The goals of the “special operations” are listed as “defence of the people in the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics”, “defence against a genocide”, “demilitarisation” and “denazification” of Ukraine, and “prosecution of Ukraine’s war criminals”. Russia’s very existence would be at stake, and it would win because “justice” and “truth” would be on Russia’s side.

 

The explanation is quite crude and sweeping. It recycles Soviet anti-imperialist and anti-Western propaganda, reduces Ukraine to a bridgehead of Western expansionism, and reactivates the absolute truth claim of communist propaganda – the Communist Party was always right, and nowadays Russia owns the one and only “truth”. The absolutist truth claim does not need to participate in any legitimising endeavour, it is rather totalitarian in its reach.

 

Ukraine is declared to be part of the Russian soil, with the exception of former Galicia. Novorossiya, i.e. all territories formally annexed by Russia since February 2022, are declared to be Russian territory. The document states – without providing any evidence – that roughly half of Ukraine’s population was pro-Russian, but even then, the question remains what Russian soldiers should do with those preferring a Ukrainian identity. The intended status for “the rest” of Ukraine is omitted in the document. Obviously, it is not clear what soldiers are ultimately fighting for – the liquidation of Ukraine as a sovereign state, its pro-Ukrainian populace, or just its government? The document is finally scared of defeatism and retreats, and therefore tries to instil a belief in victory like over Nazi Germany – a triumph of the will is invoked. The “belief” is underscored with reminders of Stalinist draconian punishment in case of defection or cowardice. In the end, it is the reign of shock, awe, and fear that should keep soldiers at the frontline.

 

Conclusion

 

Russia’s justifications of its war against Ukraine reactivate the cliché-like narratives about Russia’s spiritual legacy, its holy historical mission and ethno-cultural supremacy, as well as the imperialist denial of Ukraine’s national autonomy. Russia’s propaganda cognitively re-enacts, like in a movie taken for reality, an anti-fascist war, and it projects the image of an all-out encirclement by an adversarial collective West. Part of this war against Ukraine are conspiracy theories, disinformation, “active measures”, lies, and the systematic repression of protest and discontent in domestic politics. The Russian military is a war narrator in its own right.

 

Russian war propaganda portrays an image of Russia in a permanent defensive war against the West. The permanent war necessitates permanent vigilance against internal enemies and a narrative of permanent victory. The Russian military pretends to be a defender of historical truth, especially the guardian of an undisputable, dogmatised reading of the Second World War. The canonised Russian reading of the Second World War is blown up to an issue of national and international security. History is spiritualised, securitised, and turned into issue of penal law.

 

The military narrative claims a continuity of Russian statehood and Russian people on a territory that includes Ukraine. Instead of talking about living people and their preferences, history turns into an imagined sovereign, an ultimate judge and decision-making power. History is the justifying authority rather than living people with tangible preferences or legitimate institutions. Legitimacy is derived from a canonical narrative. The official reading of history turns into a legitimising authority, which is thus beyond the control of the sovereignty of people. People are not actors of history, but the imagined history turns them from principals into wheels of history – history is the principal. The war against Ukraine is thus no longer a means to a defined end, but a bloody statement about a collective identity.

 

Russian war propaganda serves the purpose of portraying a larger than life historical mission, to project an eternal clash of civilisations with an imperialist and colonialist West, to exploit the trauma of the Second World War, to reduce the war to a decision about “war against Ukraine or dissolution of Russia”, to suppress any empathy for victims of Russia’s aggression by dehumanising Ukrainians, and to provide a “one size fits all” framework that suppresses any cognitive dissonance between fact and fiction. Fiction trumps facts. The war narratives represent applied social constructivism: War is no longer war, but what Russia’s propaganda makes of it. The meaning is more important than the act.

 

Ultimately, the military legitimisations of the war against Ukraine cannot provide tangible goals to be achieved by the war effort, except to avoid Russia’s defeat. Russia’s war narrative is thus in limbo. Russian soldiers are not greeted as liberators, but perceived as war criminals by Ukrainians – this experience has to be covered up by hollow truth and claims of victory.

 

The propaganda seems to have worked to the point that the overwhelming majority of the Russian populace approvingly accepts the interpretations provided, even if only on opportunistic grounds. The elder generation (55 and older) is most attracted by the official propaganda, but only between eight to eleven percent of the Russian populace disagreed with the “actions” of the Russian military in 2022, according to opinion polls by the Levada-Center.³³ The narratives stick because public deliberations are suppressed, and because a mix of the paternalistic Homo Sovieticus, the imperial Homo Russicus, cynicism, opportunism, and a profound lack of empathy characterise the hegemonic Russian mentality. Fears of de-Russification, of losing control over the external and internal empire, lingering Stalinist prejudices, and deep-seated inferiority complexes intermingle. Turning history into a fundamentalist religion and converting war into a religious service remind one of the clerico-fascist movements in the inter-war period.

 

Russian war propaganda has to bridge the glaring mismatch between a preferred collective self-image and actual performance. The only reason for hope rests in the opportunism of most Russians. They will jump ship once they no longer perceive the war as a winning ticket. World views may change while opportunism remains, as a famous Soviet anecdote once held. As long as most Russians enjoy their everyday life undisturbed and look at the war as a distant series of events, Putin’s warmongers and cynical entourage will not back down, but rehash their stew of triumph of the will and politics of fear. Only a looming defeat will let Russians raise the white flag – and that scares the warmongers most: “Sometimes they’ll give a war and nobody will come”.³⁴

 

Endnotes

 

1. 1. Trutz von Trotha, “Soziologie der Gewalt”, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, No. 37 (1997), pp. 10-56.
   2. Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp, 1999), https://criticaltheoryconsortium.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Walter-Benjamin-Zur-Kritik-der-Gewalt-1.pdf.
   3. “Russian Lawmakers Approve Punishments for Criticism, ‘Fake’ Info on Mercenaries”, The Moscow Times, 14 March (2023), https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/03/14/russian-lawmakers-approve-punishments-for-criticism-fake-info-on-mercenaries-a80478.
   4. See the daily postings on the war related website of Russia’s Ministry of Defence, https://z.mil.ru/, as well as http://government.ru/department/94/events/.
   5. The rhetorical strategies are found in the following document: Ivan Egorov, “Otvetov na voprosy o prichinakh spetsoperatsii na Ukraine”, Rossiyskaya gazeta, 23 March 2022, https://rg.ru/2022/03/23/13-otvetov-na-voprosy-o-prichinah-specoperacii-na-ukraine.html.
   6. “Vyacheslav Volodin: Esli by ne nachalas’ rossiyskaya spetsoperatsiya, na sleduyushiy den’ nachalas’ by operatsiya NATO”, Gosudarstvennaya duma, 3 March (2022), http://duma.gov.ru/news/53593/.
   7. Ibid.
   8. “Memorandum on Security Assurances in Connection with Ukraine’s Accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Budapest, 5 December 1994”, Treaties and International Agreements Registered or Filed and Recorded with the Secretariat of the United Nations, Vol. 3007, Nos. 52234-52254 (2014), https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/v3007.pdf, pp. 167-182.
   9. “Ukraine Initiates Consultations in the Framework of the Budapest Memorandum – Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Munich Security Conference”, President of Ukraine, 19 February (2022), https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/ukrayina-iniciyuye-provedennya-konsultacij-u-mezhah-budapesh-73001.
   10. Ibid.
   11. Lorenzo Tondo, “Russia Accuses Kyiv of Deadly Missile Attack on Donetsk”, The Guardian, 15 March (2022), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/14/russia-accuses-kyiv-of-deadly-missile-attack-on-donetsk.
   12. Olga Robinson, Shayan Sardarizadeh, Jake Horton, “Ukraine War: Fact-Checking Russia’s Biological Weapons Claims”, BBC, 15 March (2022), https://www.bbc.com/news/60711705.
   13. See the discussion of the term “banderovtsy” in Alexey Levinson, “Through the Russian Gaze: Perceptions of Ukraine and Ukrainians”, Centre for Democratic Integrity, 4 December (2023), https://democratic-integrity.eu/through-the-russian-gaze/.
   14. “‘War Hero’ Savchenko Accused of Terror Plot, Levels Own Accusations in Ukraine”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 15 March (2018), https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-savchenko-terror-plot-accusations/29101770.html.
   15. Ivan Popp, Ilya Shakhnovich, “Gosudarstvennaya politika po sokhraneniyu istoricheskoy pamyati grazhdan Rossiiskoy Federatsii: normativno-pravovoy aspect”, Pedagogicheskoe obrazovanie v Rossii, No. 12 (2018), https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/gosudarstvennaya-politika-po-sohraneniyu-istoricheskoy-pamyati-grazhdan-rossiyskoy-federatsii-normativno-pravovoy-aspekt/viewer, pp. 42-48; Darya Snegova, Anastasiya Mayer, “Putin podpisal ukaz o sozdanii Natsionalnogo tsentra istoricheskoy pamyati”, Vedomosti, 2 November (2023), https://www.vedomosti.ru/society/articles/2023/11/02/1003948-putin-podpisal-ukaz-o-sozdanii-natsionalnogo-tsentra.
   16. “Ekspert nazval zadachu voenno-politicheskogo upravleniya Vooruzhennykh sil”, RIA Novosti, 30 July (2018), https://ria.ru/20180730/1525612506.html.
   17. “Zamministr oborony nazval osnovnye zadachi novykh voenno-politicheskikh organov VS RF”, TASS, 1 September (2018), https://tass.ru/armiya-i-opk/5514456.
   18. See the interview with Russian general Anatoliy Kulikov in “Nikto tak ne zhelaet mira, kak voennye”, Izdatel’stvo Derzhava, https://derzhava-press.ru/nikto-tak-ne-zelaet-mira-kak-voennie.
   19. Lyubov Stepushova, “Ukraina raschelovechivaet russkikh s tribuny OON”, Voenno-istoricheskiy zhurnal, 4 December (2020), http://history.milportal.ru/ukraina-raschelovechivaet-russkix-s-tribuny-oon/.
   20. Vladimir Kiknadze, Spetsoperatsiya. Ukrainskiy front voyny protiv Rossii (Moscow: Prometey, 2023).
   21. “Putin unterzeichnet umstrittenes Gesetz gegen Geschichtsfälschung”, NZZ, 1 July (2021), https://www.nzz.ch/international/putin-unterzeichnet-umstrittenes-gesetz-gegen-geschichtsfaelschung-ld.1633371.
   22. “RF zapretila sravnivat’ deystviya SSSR i natsistskoy Germanii”, DW, 1 July (2021), https://www.dw.com/ru/putin-zapretil-sravnivat-rol-sssr-i-nacistskoj-germanii-v-razvjazyvanii-vojny/a-58121740.
   23. Vladimir Kiknadze, Rossiyskaya politika zashchity istoricheskoy pravdy i protivodeystviya propagande fashizma, ekstremizma i separatizma (Moscow: Prometey, 2021).
   24. See Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
   25. “Ukrayins’ki desantnyky spil’no z pobratymamy…”, Facebook, 13 April (2022), https://www.facebook.com/uaairborne/posts/pfbid0mUjr7UKQfBvEPMBLQm9FkRcYw7GwodKT2fGpsAwGWg7Ys5xfD2Npd31k797MqYyBl.
   26. “Vsya pravda o prestupleniyakh Ukrainy na Donbasse”, Kremlyovskaya prachka, 26 February (2022), https://t.me/kremlinprachka/17367.
   27. Read more on the technical aspects of the document here: Sopo Gelava, “Telegram Channels Amplified Document Falsely Justifying Russian Invasion”, Digital Forensic Research Lab, 16 March (2022), https://medium.com/dfrlab/telegram-channels-amplified-document-falsely-justifying-russian-invasion-2101d7befec0; Elise Thomas, “Explainer: The Anti-Ukraine ‘Report’ Spreading on Telegram”, Centre for Information Resilience, 28 April (2022), https://www.info-res.org/post/explainer-the-anti-ukraine-report-spreading-on-telegram.
   28. “Istochnik ‘Vazhnykh istoriy’: arestovanny polkovnik FSB Polyakov rabotal v Upravlenii po zashchite konstitutsionnogo stroya UFSB po Moskve i oblasti”, Vazhnye istorii, 15 July (2023), https://storage.googleapis.com/istories/news/2023/07/15/istochnik-vazhnikh-istorii-arestovannii-segodnya-polkovnik-fsb-mikhail-polyakov-ranshe-rabotal-v-upravlenii-po-zashchite-konstitutsionnogo-stroya-ufsb-po-moskve-i-oblasti/index.html.
   29. Ibid.
   30. Thomas, “Explainer: The Anti-Ukraine ‘Report’ Spreading on Telegram”.
   31. See https://t.me/SolovievLive/89386.
   32. “Pamyatka voennosluzhashego vooruzhennykh sil Rossiiskoi Federatsii, uchastvuyushego v spetsialnoy voennoy operatsii na territorii Ukrainy, Luganskoy i Donetskoy narodnykh respublik”, https://www.mopolustrovo.ru/adresnie_programmi/2023-god/Памятка_ЗВО_в_печать.pdf.
   33. “Conflict with Ukraine: November 2022”, Levada-Center, 12 December (2022), https://www.levada.ru/en/2022/12/12/conflict-with-ukraine-november-2022/. See also Levinson, “Through the Russian Gaze”.
   34. See Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1936).