{"id":22977,"date":"2023-02-23T18:05:44","date_gmt":"2023-02-23T18:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ounews.co\/?p=22977"},"modified":"2023-02-23T18:05:44","modified_gmt":"2023-02-23T18:05:44","slug":"ukraine-war-how-have-vladimir-putins-narratives-survived-a-year-of-reality-checks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/arts-social-sciences\/ukraine-war-how-have-vladimir-putins-narratives-survived-a-year-of-reality-checks\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine war: how have Vladimir Putin\u2019s narratives survived a year of reality checks?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr Precious Chatterje-Doody<\/a> is <\/span>Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at The Open University. Her research interests centre on questions of communication, perception and security, with a particular focus on Russia.\u00a0 Here she discusses Vladimir Putin’s narratives around the war in Ukraine:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The Russian state has a long history of\u00a0using its information operations<\/a>\u00a0to try and shore up its military plans overseas. Of course all states try to win over the hearts and minds of the population either at home or where they are fighting. But Russia\u2019s approach is a bit different.<\/p>\n

What we see in Russia is a strange sort of intermeshing between official statements, interventions from people who are clearly on the Russian state\u2019s payroll and the pronouncements of supposedly neutral but Kremlin-aligned commentators. It\u2019s not for nothing that Margarita Simonyan \u2013 a close associate of Vladimir Putin and the editor-in-chief of Russia\u2019s international broadcaster, RT \u2013 once infamously said that Russia needed RT for \u201cthe same reason the country needs a defence ministry<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Russian state and its representatives frequently use lies to create cover for their military operations. And some are believed, at least, temporarily or in part. Back in 2014, Putin personally denied the involvement of Russian special forces in the annexation of Crimea, claiming that the military equipment sported by the \u201clittle green men\u201d on the peninsula could be\u00a0bought from any local shop<\/a>. Following the 2018\u00a0poisoning<\/a>\u00a0of two Russian nationals in Salisbury, England, three Russian suspects were charged. Putin stated that the suspects were private citizens, even though later\u00a0open-source investigations proved <\/a>\u00a0them to be senior members of Russian military intelligence.<\/p>\n

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Since then, western nations have learned the value of pre-empting Russia\u2019s disinformation attempts. If we look back to a year ago, Russian officials kept insisting that <\/span>no invasion of Ukraine was planned<\/a>, even as Russian tanks continued to mass on Ukraine\u2019s borders. Indeed, RT\u2019s commentators were dismissing all such concerns as \u201cRussophobia\u201d right up to the day of the invasion. Incidentally, RT\u2019s broadcast rights in the UK were\u00a0<\/span>revoked by regulator Ofcom<\/a>\u00a0shortly after the invasion just as they were banned\u00a0<\/span>across the EU<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shifting narratives<\/h2>\n

The key difference between the invasion of Ukraine and earlier Russian provocations is not only that the intelligence reports had been clear about the Kremlin\u2019s intent all along, but that western governments had taken the unusual step of publicising them. This meant Russia\u2019s political elite was unable to pass the invasion off as a response to some unanticipated provocation when it had so clearly been pre-planned.<\/p>\n

The Kremlin\u2019s narratives have shifted throughout the conflict. The initial pretext for Russian involvement in Donbas was supposedly to protect Russian-speakers from \u201cgenocide\u201d. The Kremlin has consistently tried to portray Ukraine as \u201cinstitutionally Nazi\u201d \u2013 ignoring that Ukraine\u2019s president Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and that Russia\u2019s Wagner group of military mercenaries itself has clear ultra-nationalist links.\u00a0Russia habitually uses such mirroring techniques<\/a>\u00a0to project its worst attributes onto others.<\/p>\n

A few months into the conflict, Russia extended its stated goals from \u201cde-Nazification\u201d, to \u201cde-Ukrainisation<\/a>\u201d. It ramped up unambiguous propaganda about\u00a0Ukrainians being Russians by another name<\/a>, and suggested that Ukrainian nationhood is made up. In this narrative, the Ukrainian state is in itself neo-Nazi and, for that reason it must be liquidated, as were the Nazis themselves by the Red Army in 1945.<\/p>\n

Civilian mass graves<\/h2>\n

Whenever\u00a0evidence of Russian war crimes<\/a>\u00a0has emerged, the familiar playbook of Russian information operations has kicked in. For instance, when\u00a0civilian mass graves<\/a>\u00a0were left behind by Russian forces in Bucha and Irpin, Russian politicians dismissed the evidence as fake and state-controlled domestic television aired hours\u2019 worth of conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Kremlin even tried<\/a>\u00a0to get the UN to discuss what had happened in Bucha as a Ukrainian deception operation. The UK \u2013 which had previously alleged that Russia uses the UN security council to\u00a0spread false information<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 was at that point the security council\u2019s chair. It refused to convene the council, so this time the Kremlin\u2019s well-rehearsed mirroring technique came to nothing.<\/p>\n

Public service broadcasters including the BBC and Deutsche Welle have\u00a0comprehensively debunked<\/a>\u00a0many Kremlin falsehoods. But \u2013 as with all disinformation \u2013 their power comes not from their factual accuracy but from how believable audiences\u00a0feel them to be<\/a>. This helps explain why Kremlin narratives about the west using Ukraine to undermine Russia ring true for many beyond the Euro-Atlantic bubble. It is a plausible line in many countries still grappling with the legacies of colonialism.<\/p>\n

Russian media coverage<\/h2>\n

What is more, though Russian media operations have been disrupted in the US and Europe, they\u2019ve been less affected elsewhere in the world. Over the past year, for example, RT has given a high profile to its Indian telegram channel on its international Twitter feed. Its website remains accessible via a mirror site in the UK and it has expanded with the new RT Balkans web service.<\/p>\n

Western unity in the face of Russian aggression is an important factor in Ukraine\u2019s fight for its sovereignty. Improved understanding of how Russian disinformation works \u2013 and how to preempt and resist it \u2013 has been important in cultivating this unity. But that unity doesn\u2019t necessarily extend to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

Russia is actively courting public and political opinion in the wider world \u2013 and it\u2019s efforts have met with some success. It\u2019s no surprise that states such as Iran and North Korea have has no problem supplying arms to Russia, or that allies such as Belarus and Syria have refused to condemn it at the UN. But even democratic India declined to condemn the Russian invasion, instead abstaining from the UN vote<\/a>. This speaks to the wider resonance of Russia\u2019s \u201ccounter-hegemonic\u201d propaganda push and \u2013 in a protracted conflict \u2013 we ignore this wider context at our peril.<\/p>\n

Main picture: Naga 11 for Shutterstock<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr Precious Chatterje-Doody is Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at The Open University. Her research interests centre on questions of communication, perception and security, with a particular focus on Russia.\u00a0 Here she discusses Vladimir Putin’s narratives around the war in Ukraine:\u00a0 The Russian state has a long history of\u00a0using its information operations\u00a0to try and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":23407,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,19],"tags":[869,2200,2300,2386],"class_list":["post-22977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-social-sciences","category-ou-speaks-out","tag-fass","tag-the-conversation","tag-ukraine","tag-war-in-ukraine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}