Propaganda and Conflict: Putin’s War in Ukraine
Ben Donnelly, Investigative Journalist
April 7, 2022
Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been almost universally condemned by the international community. 141 of 193 UN states have condemned the war, while 5 voted not to condemn it and 35 states abstained from voting, including China and India. The UN vote recognized that “the military operations of the Russian Federation inside the sovereign territory of Ukraine are on a scale that the international community has not seen in Europe in decades and that urgent action is needed to save this generation from the scourge of war.” The conflict has claimed the lives of thousands of civilians, displaced over 3.1 million people, and is escalating into one of the largest humanitarian crises in Europe since the Second World War. Anthony Blinken said: “We’ve seen numerous credible reports of indiscriminate attacks and attacks deliberately targeting civilians, as well as other atrocities. Russia’s forces have destroyed apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, critical infrastructure, civilian vehicles, shopping centers, and ambulances, leaving thousands of innocent civilians killed or wounded.”
Despite widespread international condemnation, polls indicate that 58% of Russians support the conflict. Arguably, part of this support is due to Kremlin propaganda. Putin has total control over the media in Russia and has tried to shape news production by aggressively policing content that defies the official state narrative. Journalists who defy Putin are subject to up to 15 years in prison. Putin’s manipulation of the information available to the public has allowed him to carefully curate and shape what information reaches ordinary Russians. What has resulted is an abundance of misinformation. For example, Russian state media reported that “Ukrainian nationalists shot down a column of civilians leaving Mariupol through the humanitarian corridor.” Their story is that Ukrainian national troops are the ones currently besieging the city and preventing civilians from leaving.
The New York Times found that many Russians do not see the invasion as a war. Many members of the public firmly believe that the Russian military had gone into Ukraine in order to free ethnic Russians from a ‘Nazi’ regime. One woman who lived in Ukraine spoke to the Times about messages that she had exchanged with her sister, who was living in Russia: “No one is bombing Kyiv, and you should actually be afraid of the Nazis, whom your father fought against. Your children will be alive and healthy. We love the Ukrainian people, but you need to think hard about who you elected as president.”
The Kremlin has carefully constructed a narrative that the Russian military has mobilized to stop the genocide in the Donbas region and remove an evil president from power. The West’s expansions of NATO toward Russian borders and its plans to bring Ukraine out of Russia’s sphere of influence, Putin claims, have forced Russia into a position where the invasion was the only answer. Putin has also given a revisionist history of ties between Ukraine and Russia, overstating linkages between the two countries. Putin wrote: “I would like to emphasize that the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space.”
The careful construction of Russo-Ukrainian kinship through the media, alongside manufactured accounts of the purposes and nature of the invasion, has allowed Putin to sway public support in favour of what is indisputably a war of conquest. Through television, social media, newspapers, and other means, Putin has meticulously fabricated a web of disinformation, blocking out actual accounts. It is important to understand the role information plays in justifying these types of conflicts. Russia’s ability to warp information in order to justify itself as anything other than a fundamentally imperialist aggressor to its population should raise alarm in the West.