Putin’s New Story About the War in Ukraine

Since invading Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has changed the story it tells itself about the war. In the beginning, Russian President Vladimir Putin explained to the Russian public and the world that he considered an invasion of Ukraine justified because there was a need to “denazify” the country. Putin claimed that a Nazi junta had seized power in Kyiv and was terrorizing the people, especially those who spoke Russian. To rescue Ukraine, Putin argued, Russian troops had once again been dispatched to save the world from Nazis.

But today you don’t hear much talk about Nazis. After the Russian military suffered a series of defeats at the outset of the war, the Kremlin quickly adjusted its propaganda. It was no longer helpful to assert that Moscow was fighting Ukrainian Nazis after the Russian military failed to take Kyiv. Being defeated by Ukrainians was too humiliating for Putin’s propagandists. Therefore, Russia changed the enemy it was fighting: the Kremlin began to say that Russia was at war with NATO and even the United States. In this telling, the war in Ukraine was a proxy war, and the Ukrainians were in the hands of “overseas puppet masters.” For Russians, this was a familiar story, reawakening the Cold War mindset of us versus them.

As the message has changed, so has the audience. Putin is no longer speaking only to his people, trying to justify an ill-conceived war. Today, he is competing with the West for allies across the developing world, where his allegations of Western hypocrisy are resonating. And in recent weeks, Putin has found new material to exploit: the United States’ unconditional support for Israel in its war in the Gaza Strip.

DENAZIFICATION

When Putin announced his goal of denazifying Ukraine, it was not the first time he and his propagandists had described Ukrainian nationalists as fascists. In 2014, when a popular uprising forced Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from office, Putin and his supporters on Russian television claimed that there had been an armed coup in Kyiv, launched by radical nationalists. It was a laughable falsehood: if an anti-constitutional junta had seized power, why did the new government in Ukraine hold democratic elections in 2019, and how could the incumbent, President Petro Poroshenko, lose if he was an autocratic leader? And if the government in Kyiv was made up of Nazis, why did it have a president who was Jewish, Volodymyr Zelensky? But Putin doesn’t let facts get in the way of a good story.

In 2022, in the early months of the war, denouncing the Ukrainian “Nazis” was mandatory for Russian officials and news anchors. Vladimir Solovyov, one of the most odious Russian propagandists, established a tradition: every day in his Telegram channel, he would add “Denazification is inevitable!” as the final sentence for the Russian army’s daily report about the casualties on the frontlines.

But it soon became clear that the Russian public wasn’t buying this message. On June 16, 2022, at a pro-war rally organized by the authorities of Dalnegorsk, a small provincial town in the far east, the mayor, Alexandr Terebilov, tried to quote Putin, but stumbled three times on the Russian word for “denazification,” at one point unintentionally calling for the “denazification of Russia.” As the crowd broke into laughter, he corrected himself, but it was too late: the video went viral online. The furious mayor tried to punish the journalist who uploaded the video by sending him to the army, but the journalist left the city before he could be caught.

After this scandal, the Kremlin conducted a special study that revealed that the majority of Russians neither understood the term “denazification” nor believed that it applied to Ukraine. The study revealed that post-Soviet society is very pragmatic, if not cynical. The Russian public does not trust that Putin is going to save anyone, including Ukrainians. Propagandists soon stopped using the word “denazification.” By the fall of 2022, Solovyov was no longer posting his daily slogan.

WHATABOUTISM

Moscow’s early setbacks in the war convinced Russian propagandists that a bigger, more credible enemy was needed to justify the battlefield losses. Rather than fighting only the Ukrainians, Russia recast the conflict as a proxy war with NATO and the United States. Russia also stopped talking about rescuing Ukrainians from fascists. The tone of the propaganda hardened: Ukrainians were now traitors who therefore deserved punishment, not compassion. This message built on a traditional myth from Russian imperial history, in which Ukrainians repeatedly betrayed Russia by conspiring with Russia’s enemies and fighting for independence. In April 2022, Timofey Sergeytsev, a former Russian political adviser in Ukraine, now living in Moscow, published an article calling for “de-Ukrainization.” The very identity Ukrainian, in his opinion, should no longer exist.

The main target of Russian propaganda was no longer Ukraine, however, but the West, a larger opponent for the Russian public to rally against. In July 2022, Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and prime minister, who had once been considered pro-Western and liberal, wrote a piece emblematic of the new narrative. Putin’s goals in Ukraine would be achieved, he contended, but the war had already solved a different problem: Russia was once again being taken seriously—“like the Soviet Union used to be.” He likened the situation to a child facing neighborhood bullies. “If you chickened out and ran away home, you are no one and you will not be invited anywhere else,” Medvedev wrote. “But if you hit first, then the chances of defending your position are significantly higher. That is why it is so important that the country is respected and taken into account.”

It was a revealing story, because Medvedev, who was raised in a professorial family in Leningrad, likely did not fight with anyone in the neighborhood as a child. But Putin, who grew up in much humbler circumstances in the same city, definitely did. The gangster values he learned in childhood—hit first or become the victim—had seeped into official speech and had become popular among Russians. This new explanation of the war in Ukraine also appealed to nostalgia for the Soviet Union, which is widespread among the older generation.

Putin doesn’t let facts get in the way of a good story.

Today, for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian authorities openly say that they are fighting the United States. But there is a fundamental difference between then and now. During the Soviet years, Russian propaganda insisted that the Soviet Union was fighting for world peace and that the Americans were warmongers. Soviet propagandists claimed that their country was just and prosperous, whereas the West was guilty of apartheid, racism, and human rights violations. Today, the propaganda in Russia is completely different: no one pretends that one side is any better than the other.

The core of Russian propaganda is now “whataboutism”—responding to any criticism by pointing to the supposed malice of the other side—and no one does it better than Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of the television channel RT. She likes to tell the story of when she was 16 years old and spent a year as an exchange student at a school in New Hampshire, living with an American family. This experience made her skeptical of the United States and she learned to dislike American values, although she never elaborates on what exactly happened during her year abroad that made her think this way. She can spend hours on television making the case that it is not only in Russia where there is no freedom of speech, fair elections, or a just judicial system. According to her, these democratic values and institutions do not exist anywhere in the world. In her mind, Western politicians know how to deceive their population, but in Russia no one is pretending.

Today, the message being spread by Russian propagandists is that any superpower has the right to violence. For decades, only Americans had the opportunity to start wars and invade other countries. Putin’s allies ask, why shouldn’t that right extend to Russia? If the Americans could invade Iraq in 2003, why can’t Russia invade Ukraine? This, they argue, is the privilege of being a superpower.

Surprisingly, this second strain of propaganda about Ukraine has turned out to be much more convincing than the original one, which explains why it is still the dominant message today. Many Russians prefer to believe that it was not Russia that attacked Ukraine but the United States that provoked the conflict and dragged both sides into it.

ANTICOLONIALISM

Russian whataboutism has gained traction not only at home but also across the world. For many countries outside of the West, the war in Ukraine is not a top priority, and the idea that it is a struggle against American hegemony offers extra permission to stay disengaged. For many in the global South, the fact that Putin destroyed the United States’ monopoly on violence makes him, if not a hero, then at least a situational ally.

During last year’s presidential campaign in Brazil, perhaps the only common point of view between the two main candidates—Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—was their appreciation for Putin. In February 2022, with Russian troops massing on Ukraine’s borders, Bolsonaro traveled to Moscow and said Brazil was in “solidarity” with Russia. And Lula, during his campaign, said about Zelensky: “This guy is as responsible as Putin for the war.” In China, India, Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and even some European countries, people see Putin as a strong leader and a fighter against American influence.

For many years, Putin avoided claiming the mantle of global anti-Americanism, because he was still looking to make deals with the West. But he still maintained warm relations with various notorious anti-Americanists, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi. Today, Putin eagerly plays this role. In an article published in September, Nikolai Patrushev, a top adviser to Putin, called Westerners “parasites.” “The Western-centric colonial world order,” he argued, is “undergoing a final breakdown.” And Russia now sees itself “in a large-scale battle for minds and hearts” with the United States.

The core of Russian propaganda is now “whataboutism.”

Putin himself has seized on this view. On October 6, he spoke for almost four hours at the Valdai Forum, a Moscow-based think tank. Putin’s speech focused not on Ukraine per se but on the broader confrontation with the West. Reaching back into history, he promised that “the era of colonial rule will not return.” In an interview that same month with Chinese state television, Putin returned to the theme. “Colonial countries have always said that they bring enlightenment to their colonies, that they are civilized people and bring the benefits of civilization to other peoples, who are considered second-class people,” he said. “Today’s political elite, say in the United States, speaks of its exclusivity. This is a continuation of this colonial thinking. Our approach is completely different.”

The appeal to anticolonialism is rich, given Russia’s own colonial history. Siberia, for example, was colonized by Russian Cossacks long before western European powers colonized Africa and Asia. Putin prefers to leave out this inconvenient truth, however, arguing that all Russian territories have always joined “Mother Russia” voluntarily.

PUTIN THE HUMANIST

The new crisis in the Middle East has strengthened the Kremlin’s propaganda. Putin turned 71 on October 7, and the outbreak of war in the Middle East was a gift for him in every sense. For one thing, the war in Ukraine will likely disappear from the front pages of international media, and it will look local when compared to Israel’s war in Gaza, which is still at risk of escalating to a regional war. For another, the conflict in the Middle East provides Putin a unique opportunity to demonstrate his leadership in the anti-American camp. He doesn’t even need to support Hamas openly; he just needs to repeat at every opportunity that the Americans are to blame for everything.

In the first days after Hamas’s attack against Israel, the Russian propaganda machine changed its tone. Solovyov, a TV presenter from the state TV channel Russia 1, is Jewish. Several years ago, he said in an interview with Israeli media that if a war broke out in Israel, he would fly to the country to defend his historical homeland. Today, Solovyov can be heard on television condemning Israel’s policies. Meanwhile, Simonyan, who usually reacts on RT with caustic ridicule to information about civilian victims of Russian bombardment in Ukraine, is reacting with horror to similar events in Gaza. On October 17, after an explosion rocked the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, she posted her thoughts to her Telegram channel: “I don’t even know what to write about a world in which it is still acceptable (and accepted) such executions as the one that happened in Gaza. Every day, it becomes more and more unbearable to be a contemporary of this world.”

For a long time, Putin himself held Israel in high esteem and enjoyed a close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two leaders have similar worldviews and similar political methods: neither of them cares much about democracy. That no longer matters. Putin, despite his personal feelings toward Netanyahu, has criticized Israeli airstrikes on civilian targets and has voiced sympathy for the population of Gaza.

“Using heavy equipment in residential areas is a complex matter with serious consequences for all parties,” he said on October 13. “And most importantly, civilian casualties will be absolutely unacceptable. There are almost two million people.”

German chancellor Olaf Scholz has called Putin’s position on Gaza cynical. But it is the Kremlin’s accusations of Western hypocrisy that are having a potent effect around the world.