Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, warned Russians that they must prepare for a “forever war”. “Things will get much harder,” Peskov told a gathering of the country’s political elite. “This will take a very, very long time.” It’s a far cry from Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation”. This was supposed to sweep into Kyiv in a matter of days, weeks at the most. Once there, Russia would be able to free Ukrainians from the “gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis” who were preventing Ukraine from assuming its natural role as a part of the motherland. A war which was going to take days or weeks could now take many years. And far from rescuing Ukraine from fascists, the conflict is now a bitter struggle for Russia’s continued existence. As Putin told workers at an aviation factory recently: “For us, this is not a geopolitical task, but a task of the survival of Russian statehood, creating conditions for the future development of the country and our children.”
But then Kremlin narratives have been notably flexible and self-serving over the years. This was brilliantly highlighted in the recent BBC documentary Putin versus the West, which took a close look at shifts in Russian political rhetoric over the past decade. This is the period we might accurately refer to as “Putin II”. In 2012, Putin resumed the presidency after getting around the constitutional ban on serving three consecutive terms by making his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, president for one and then resuming the top job. Since then he has ramped up the historical nationalism somewhat. But even as far back as 2008, in a meeting with then US president, George W. Bush, Putin was questioning Ukrainian sovereignty: “You have to understand, George. Ukraine is not even a country.” Shortly after his troops entered Crimea, leading to its annexation in March 2014, he doubled down on this theme, insisting that it was the Bolsheviks (“may god judge them”) who gave much of south-east Russia to Kyiv. In the same speech he said Nikita Khrushchev, a former leader of the USSR, may have added Crimea to Ukraine to atone for the famine of the 1930s – but that this was something “for historians to figure out”.
This message of Ukraine as a historical aberration has been a common and fairly unwavering element of Putin’s discourse since 2012.
In 2016, the Rand Corporation, a US thinktank, developed a model for Russian propaganda it called the “firehose of falsehood”. The Kremlin uses all the machinery of state (including a tame media) to embellish and perpetuate its lies with the purpose of confusing the widest possible audience. There have been several constant mantras emerging from the Kremlin over the war and in its build-up. One is that Ukraine’s pro-Russian former president Viktor Yanukovych had been ousted in a coup, meaning that all subsequent Ukrainians governments have been illegitimate.
The Kremlin logic trail then continues that, as a result, Ukraine is not a democracy. Of course, the fact that after the invasion began, the Zelensky government cracked down on pro-Russian agents and banned pro-Russia political parties is taken as further proof of Kyiv’s lack of commitment to democracy.