War in Ukraine: the Dangers of Believing Your Own Propaganda
Alexander Maxwell - 4th April 2022
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a catastrophe for Ukraine. Casualty figures at time of writing are in the tens of thousands, nearly four million people have fled to other countries, and over six million more have been internally displaced. It’s an outrageous act of military aggression that demands a sharp response. The Russian nuclear arsenal makes a direct military confrontation between NATO allies and Russia unwise, but the countries of the NATO alliance are right to impose the harshest sanctions against Russia, and to generously supply Ukraine with arms and munitions.
The 2022 invasion, however, is also turning out to be a catastrophe for Russia, and for Vladimir Putin’s government in particular. Putin apparently anticipated economic sanctions, even if their speed and extent seems to have surprised him somewhat. But Putin seems to have expected weak Ukrainian resistance and rapid military success. Instead, Russian armed forces have lost not only prestige, but hundreds of tanks and aircraft, thousands of vehicles, tens of thousands of casualties, a warship, and as many as seven generals. Even if Ukrainian suffering most deserves our sympathy, Putin’s predicament strikes me as more intriguing. Putin could easily have avoided these problems: this war, after all, was his idea in the first place.
So how did Putin miscalculate so spectacularly? Any hypothesis requires a theory of Putin’s motives, of course, and Putin’s true motives are ultimately known only to Putin himself. We can nevertheless gain some insight by reading Putin’s public speeches, and in particular the essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” published on the Kremlin webpage in July 2021, and thought to be the work of Putin himself.
Putin’s essay depicts Ukraine as historically part of Russia. It describes several epochs of Russian history, emphasising in each age anew the essential unity of orthodox Slavs in the face of foreign threats. He espouses what is sometimes the “triune” theory of Russian nationalism, which holds that Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine all belong to a greater whole, a greater Russian nation with three branches. Indeed, triune Russian nationalists often prefer to describe Ukrainians not as Ukraintsy, but as Malorussy “Little Russians,” to emphasise their essential similarity with other Russians.
Putin fundamentally attributes the emergence of Ukrainian particularist nationalism to two main factors. The first factor is foreign interference. Historically, he blames Polish and Austrian intrigues, and implies that American or EU support for Ukraine continues a long tradition of anti-Russian machinations. The second factor is Communist nationalities policy. Lenin and the early Bolsheviks, motivated primarily by the desire to establish a socialist order, partitioned the territory of the Russian empire on national lines and found various non-Russian administrative units. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) consisted of several constituent “Soviet Socialist Republics” (SSRs), one of which is the Ukrainian SSR. The early Bolsheviks also forcibly imposed Ukrainian culture on ethnic Russians living in the Ukrainian SSR. Putin succinctly summarised the impact of Bolshevik nationalities policy from a Russian nationalist perspective: “Russia was robbed.”
In the first weeks of the war, several western commentators have dismissed Putin’s history with insults and epithets. There is, however, actually some partial truth in Putin’s historical claims. Intellectuals from those parts of the Russian empire that now form the Ukrainian republic indeed once described themselves as “little Russians,” and the early Bolsheviks indeed forced Ukrainian on Russian speakers. The earliest pioneers of Ukrainian nationalism faced hostility and indifference from an illiterate peasantry. There is no space here to present all the evidence, but readers interested in the early modern era can consult Serhii Plokhy’s Origins of the Slavic Nations. Both Kate Brown’s Biography of No Place and Terry Martin’s Affirmative Action Empire evocatively depict the lack of Ukrainian nationalism in the early Soviet Ukraine.
Putin’s historical musings, however, are not very relevant to the politics of 2022. While the illiterate peasants of Kyiv and Odesa may have been nationally indifferent in the eighteenth or even early twentieth centuries, their descendants in twenty-first century Ukraine still espouse a distinct Ukrainian nationalism. They mostly write in literary Ukrainian, not literary Russian. It doesn’t matter if Ukrainian nationalism is relatively recent, the ferocity of resistance to the Russian invasion provides irrefutable proof of its vigour. The clock cannot be turned back.
It’s understandable that a Russian nationalist, like Putin, would lament the disappearance of the triune Russian nation, or curse Lenin for contributing so powerfully to its destruction. Nevertheless, a twenty-first century Russian politician ought to understand the political situation in Russia’s immediate neighbours. Ukrainian nationalism is a vibrant force. Putin ought to understand that. So, the question remains: how did Putin so badly miscalculate? Was he merely indulging his historical fantasies?
I suspect that Putin’s media strategy provides a better explanation for the invasion. Ever since the 2011 Maidan revolution brought pro-European parties to power in Kyiv, Russian media have depicted them as corrupt criminals neo-Nazis, and so forth. Slander as a media strategy can be effective, insofar as a large section of the Russian populace apparently accepts the narrative presented to it. (Some far right circles in western countries also buy it: Russian propaganda has influenced various extremist news outlets.) The ability to persuade is a powerful political tool, and Putin’s media machine has some ability. Persuading people something is true, however, does not actually make that thing true.
Most importantly, effective propaganda delivery requires the appearance of conviction, and the appearance of conviction is most easily achieved when one is actually convinced. Putin, perhaps, has come to actually believe his own propaganda. If Putin had his generals plan Russian military action on the incorrect assumption that Ukrainians cherished a triune national concept, then he and his generals may have assumed Russian soldiers would be welcomed as liberators. Good politics requires good intelligence, but good intelligence requires the ability to recognize and accept unpalatable political realities. The lesson applies not only to Putin, and not only to Russia, but to politics generally.