Decoding Putin’s Speeches: The Three Ideological Lines of Russia’s Military Intervention in Ukraine
Russia’s strategic concerns regarding the post-Cold War European security architecture, as expressed in the two treaty drafts published by Moscow in December 2021, may be seen as legitimate, or at least deserving to be heard and taken seriously. The new lines of argument expressed in Vladimir Putin’s Feb. 21 and Feb. 24 speeches, however, have irrevocably strayed from those initial concerns.
For a long time, the Kremlin was able to strike a balance between Russia’s pragmatic strategic interests and its more ideologically-loaded constructs inspired by different brands of conservative and/or nationalist thinking. This balance now seems to have been lost, a sign of the ascent of an increasingly rigid ideology in the Kremlin. This week’s speeches have confirmed this dramatic turn, with the construction of a narrative legitimizing the military intervention in Ukraine along three key ideological lines: a historical one, an ethnic one and a political one.
The Historical Line: Ukraine as a Bolshevik Creation
The Russian president started his Feb. 21 speech with long statements on the historical unjustness behind the creation of the current Ukrainian state. Ukraine is presented as part of Russia’s longue durée imperial history, with no history of its own as a fully independent state. Putin argued that the Bolsheviks created the Ukrainian state at the expense of the Russian heartland. Not only did the Ukrainians have the Bolsheviks—and then Stalin and Khrushchev—to thank for having established their artificial statehood, Putin argues, but they also have post-Soviet Russia itself to thank for not claiming the territories that became Ukraine by Soviet decision. “And today the ‘grateful progeny’ has overturned monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. They call it decommunization. … We are ready to show what real decommunizations would mean for Ukraine,” concluded Putin, laying out the trope that recognition of the Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk People's Republic (LNR) is an act aimed at fixing Soviet mistakes.
This narrative derives from conservative monarchist circles, represented by people such as media mogul Konstantin Malofeev and his Tsargrad TV. Its modus operandi is the idea that the Bolsheviks were anti-Russians at heart who created Ukraine in order to break up the Russian nation and gave power to the empire’s other ethnic minorities in order to weaken the Russian state. Such fundamentalist discourse not only interprets Soviet land management as Russophobia, but claims that all such actions were illegitimate because the Soviet regime was itself legally illegitimate.
This narrative has circulated for years among certain segments of the Russian Orthodox Church and the propagandists of rehabilitating the White movement and the tsarist monarchy. For a long time Putin and his government tried to keep both “red” (pro-Soviet) and “white” (anti-Soviet) narratives equal, following a classic balancing act that the regime had been building between different vested interest groups. But the anti-Bolshevik narrative has been elevated quite suddenly over the last two to three years, resulting in a rapid decommunization of the historical narrative at the higher level of the state apparatus.
This discrepancy in discourse is noticeable when comparing Putin’s July 2021 text on the unity of Russia and Ukraine and his Feb. 21, 2022, address. The 2021 text is already negative on the Bolsheviks: “One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed, indeed.” But the general tone was less critical of the Soviet Union and more respectful toward Ukraine, even if it was a clearly Russia-centric reading of Ukraine’s history. These nuances have totally disappeared in the 2022 storyline, which presents Ukraine as a stateless territory, governed by the illegitimate U.S. puppet administration. The anti-Bolshevik “white” narrative seems therefore in the process of winning out amid the upper echelons of the state.
The Ethnic Line: “The Genocide of Russians”
Then Putin moved to a second line of argument: the genocide of Russians in Ukraine. The argument is not a new one. It was already well developed in the 1990s, advanced by the ethno-nationalist opposition, such as Dmitri Rogozin’s movement, the Congress of Russian Communities, directly inspired by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s discourse of a demographically dying Russia. “Genocide: Russia and the New World Order,” was even the title of the 1999 book by Sergey Glazyev, who was at that time in the national-patriotic opposition before occupying a series of government positions.
The genocide narrative was revived in 2014 in order to justify Crimea’s annexation and support for the Donbass secessionist movements, with the deaths of 42 pro-Russian protestors in the Odessa Trade Unions House fire as its centerpiece. The concept has since been regularly mentioned (in 2015 and in 2018) by Putin himself or by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and has been revitalized in light of the current crisis. Putin stated that “what is happening in the Donbass today is genocide,” a discourse echoed by State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin and complemented by two measures: the opening of a criminal case by the Russian Investigative Committee over the discovery of supposed mass graves of civilians killed in the shelling of Donbass, and the release of documents to the U.N. Security Council accusing Ukraine of “exterminating the civilian population of the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk,” thereby also referring to the idea of a genocide.
The use of the genocide argument allows Russia to play several cards at once: it echoes the demographic fears of Russians’ ethnic disappearance, presents itself as the mirror of the Ukrainian narrative on the Holodomor and seeks to guilt-trip Germany for its Nazi past. For instance, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was mocked by Russian officials for not recognizing the supposed genocide. It also allows Russia to participate in the “search [for] lost genocide” (to borrow a phrase from political scientist and Holocaust scholar Evgeny Finkel) that is happening all over Central and Eastern Europe, using victimhood as a tool for political legitimacy.
The Political Line: “Denazification”
The third argument is a more political one: the “denazification” argument, put forward mostly in Putin’s Feb. 24 speech justifying his military intervention in Ukraine. Here too, it is far from a recent trend, as it has a long Soviet history and was revived in 2014. Obviously, Russia’s memory of the Great Patriotic War has become a central part of the nation building process and the symbolic politics built by the Putin regime in the last 20 years. But the obsession with presenting Russia as the antifascism power par excellence has now transformed from a nation building tool to a literal weapon.
Since the mid-2000s, memory wars with Central and Eastern European countries have been a permanent mutual otherization, with Russia accusing its western neighbors of becoming “fascist again.” Meanwhile, Central and Eastern European countries—mainly Poland, the Baltic states and Ukraine—along with some Western experts, politicians and media accuse Russia of being a fascist regime or a fascist country.
Since 2014, Russia has emphasized that Ukraine is supposedly run by a fascist regime and allows radical far-right movements to proliferate. This line constitutes the other side of the “genocide” coin, as it projects neo-Nazi Ukrainians committing genocide against Russians. Justifying Russia’s military intervention as a “denazification” strategy supposes some kind of punitive operations—already mentioned in the Feb. 21 speech—against targeted people, but also and mostly, tries to present Putin as a “Nazi hunter,” thereby confirming that the metaphor has now become literal.
The Russian Public’s Response
What is striking is that Russian audiences do not seem to respond the same way to the different ideological lines advanced by Putin. According to Google Trends and Yandex Stats, after Putin’s Feb. 21 address, searches for “Ukrainian history” increased sharply, while searches related to “genocide” did not register a spike. After his Feb. 24 speech, one of the key searches on the Russian net was “what is denazification,” a sign that people are trying to make sense of the official reasoning. However, tellingly, after both speeches, the top search was the ruble-dollar exchange rate, confirming that the Russian population is mostly interested in the impact of the current crisis on their everyday future.
Conclusion
The 2014 Crimean crisis saw the blossoming of a romanticized war narrative around the idea of Novorossiya. Now, gone are the romantic exaltations of a reunified Russian nation and of young men wanting to try their hand at war as a kind of self-fulfilling coming of age à la Byron. Today’s language is a darker, vernacularized mixture of negative messaging in which the strategic line of argument—that Russia feels insecure in the current European security architecture and needs to be given a say—is lost in profit of purely ideological arguments inspired by imperialist and nationalist thinking.
The decommunization of Russia’s official historiography as revealed by Putin’s speeches and the literal weaponization of the anti-fascism positioning are more than concerning. It seems suddenly that the key issue for Putin is not so much NATO and European security architecture as the simple existence of Ukraine. In Russian, the word “Ukraine” means a frontier. In his two speeches, Putin seems to have “decapitalized” Ukraine from its statehood and nationhood in order to transform it into a lowercase frontier territory in the American sense. Such an ideological shift can do nothing but cripple Moscow’s desire to have its strategic concerns heard on the international scene.
Shortly before launching a full-scale war on Ukraine,Vladimir Putin outlined his reasons for the attack. Russia, he said, must "defend itself" and "denazify" Ukraine.Much of this is false.
Vladimir Putin has tried to justify the war on Ukraine with false claims
Does Ukraine need to be 'denazified'?
Claim: To stop the alleged mistreatment and "genocide," Russia must "strive to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine."
DW fact check: False.
Putin's statement is a propaganda narrative that lacks any basis. Putin uses the term denazification, which refers to the Allies' policy for Nazi Germany after World War II. They wanted to rid the country of Nazi influences and remove incriminated individuals from their posts.
Reactions from the Jewish community have been swift. The Auschwitz Museum and the US Holocaust Museum condemned Putin's "megalomania” and his exploitation of history for his false narrative.
While there are far-right groups in Ukraine, Umland said, they are relatively weak compared to those in many European countries. "We had a united front of all radical right-wing parties in the last parliamentary elections in 2019 where they won 2.15% of the vote."
Ulrich Schmid, professor for Russian culture and society at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, describes Putin's claim as "a perfidious insinuation." It is true that there were individual far-right groups during the Euromaidan protests in 2013 and 2014. Today, however, they play a subordinate role, said Schmid, who researches nationalism in Eastern Europe. "They exist, but in Russia itself there are at least as many far-right groups as in Ukraine."
Right-wing Ukrainian combat units fighting separatists in eastern Ukraine, such as the Azov Regiment, have been criticized in the past. The Azov regiment was founded by a far-right group, but was incorporated into the Interior Ministry's troops, the National Guard, in 2014, Umland said.
After that there was a separation of the movement and the regiment, which still uses right-wing symbols, but can no longer be classified as a right-wing extremist body. Right-wing extremist soldiers were noticed from time to time during training courses for military personnel, but those revelations came to light and caused a scandal, Umland argued.
Were NATO troops advancing on Russia's border?
Claim: Putin referred to the "expansion of the NATO bloc to the east, including moving military infrastructure to Russia's border." NATO, he said. "The war machine is on the move and, I repeat, it is approaching our borders."
DW fact check: Misleading.
What is correct is that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, 14 Eastern European states have joined NATO. Four of them border Russia. Ukraine was given a NATO membership perspective in 2008, but the country's accession has been on hold since then. And as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, among others, emphasized during his visit to Moscow in mid-February, this is not on the agenda for the foreseeable future.
It is also true that NATO has made logistical preparations in its Eastern European member states, setting up airfields for the rapid reinforcement of troops. However, it did all this after 2014 in response to Russia's annexation of Crimea, which was illegal under international law.
NATO continues to respect the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, which prohibits the additional permanent deployment of substantial combat forces in NATO accession countries. In response to deteriorating East-West relations, NATO began rotating four battalion combat groups in the Baltic states and Poland in 2016. However, these battle groups, totaling 5,000 troops, are far too small to pose a realistic threat to Russia, which has an estimated 850,000 active duty troops.
Outside the alliance, individual NATO member countries cooperate bilaterally. Moscow views the deployment of the Aegis Ashore missile defense systems with great suspicion. The system has already been deployed in Romania with Poland set to follow later this year. They can shoot down cruise missiles that could reach Russia in a short time, as former German army officer, Wolfgang Richter, told DW.
However, this would not be an insoluble problem, according to Richter, who now works for the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), a Berlin-based think tank.
"This could be solved through concrete verification," he said. In other words, Russia could be given the opportunity to verify that there are no cruise missiles waiting to be launched in the Aegis Ashore silos. But Russia refused the offer to discuss arms control, Richter said: "Moscow chose war instead of a possible negotiated solution."
Claim: "We have simply been left with no other option to defend Russia and our people than the one we must resort to today," Putin said. "The Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics have asked Russia for help. In this context, in accordance with Chapter 7, Article 51 of the United Nations Charter (...) I made the decision to conduct a special military operation."
DW fact check: False.
It is neither true that Russia must "defend itself" against Ukraine, nor is the United Nations Charter applicable here. This is part of Putin's narrative accusing Ukraine of conducting military operations and even preparing for war against Russia.
Shortly after Russia recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, they asked for help and Putin sent — in his words — "peacekeepers" to the separatist areas. De facto, however, this is a continuation of a creeping occupation that began in 2014. Russia has so far failed to provide any evidence that Ukraine attacked Russia, nor is there any independent information to that effect. In addition, there have been false flag actions — that is, faked attacks — which online investigators have exposed as staged in the separatist areas in eastern Ukraine. (Warning: disturbing images in blog post).
"The right to self-defense, pre-supposes an attack by the other side. That is not apparent at all in the case of Ukraine," said Pia Fuhrhop, a researcher at SWP. "On the contrary, Ukraine has done everything in recent weeks to offer Russia precisely no pretext to claim a right to self-defense," she said.
Article 51 of the UN Charter guarantees UN member states the right to "individual or collective self defense" in the event of an armed attack. But this case does not exist with regard to Russia, said Marcelo Kohen, professor of international law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
"Putin's argumentation is baseless for several reasons," Kohen told DW. Firstly, he said, the two breakaway territories are not states under international law. Secondly, Ukraine had "not been acting violently" against the two territories prior to the invasion. "And thirdly, the massive use of force against military installations throughout Ukraine is unnecessary and disproportionate."
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has also condemned the Russian attack as a fundamental breach of the UN Charter.
Was there a 'genocide' in Ukraine?
Claim: The goal of Putin's so-called special military operation is "to protect people who have been subjected to mistreatment and genocide for eight years."
DW fact check: false.
The term "genocide" is defined by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention as a "crime of deliberate extermination of a national, ethnic, religious group or members of a race."
There have been no reports of such targeted mass killings of civilians in Ukraine. All civilian casualties in the conflict, attributed to the fighting or the aftermath, have been meticulously documented by international observers since 2014. The OSCE Observer Mission, which has been traveling on both sides of the "line of contact" in eastern Ukraine since 2014, with Russia's approval, has found no evidence of any systematic killing of civilians. According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights' 2021 data, a total of approximately 3,000 civilians have died in the war zone in Eastern Ukraine.
Most of those deaths occurred early on in the fighting but casualty numbers have been dropping since 2016. The latest available summary report from the OSCE's 2020 Monitoring Mission recorded 161 civilian deaths from January 1, 2017, to mid-September 2020 with similar numbers of casualties on both sides. The overwhelming cause of death was artillery fire, followed by landmine and munitions explosions.
The SWP's Pia Fuhrhop said Putin's genocide accusation was "completely baseless."
"In the authoritarian system that Russia is today, there is no chance for critical media to somehow verify this. In this respect, justifying war without any factual background is enough for him," she said.
This piece was originally written in German.
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The Russian president, who ordered an invasion of Ukraine, has often spoke of tied identities.
By Niko Vorobyov
Published On 25 Feb 2022
St Petersburg, Russia – On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his armed forces to deploy on what he called a peacekeeping mission to Donbas, eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed rebels have been fighting the central government in Kyiv for the past eight years.
In a televised speech, Putin reiterated his concerns about a possible NATO expansion into Ukraine, describing it as a “direct threat” to Russia’s national security, and made provocative interpretations of Ukrainian history.
Among other things, the Russian president asserted that “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood,” and that the nation now known as Ukraine was carved out of Russia by Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin.
In 2021, Putin wrote an essay titled, On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, explaining his belief that Russians and Ukrainians are one people divided artificially by borders and outsiders.
In it, he accused modern Ukraine of an “anti-Russian project” in which longstanding ties with Russia are cast aside, Nazi collaborators are glorified and the Russian language, spoken by around a third of Ukraine’s population, is shunned from public life.
To find out how accurate these statements are, as well as the roots of the current crisis, a closer look at the two countries’ shared history is needed.
Russia and Ukraine, as well as Belarus, share a common ancestry in Kievan Rus’, a loose federation of medieval city-states with its capital in Kyiv.
But in the 13th century, the area which became Russia was conquered by the Mongol Golden Horde, while western portions later fell to the Polish-Lithuanian Empire.
From there, three separate languages, and national identities, evolved.
It was not until the 17th century that Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, rebelled, throwing off Polish rule and willingly reuniting with Russia.
But by the 19th century, the tsars had quite enough of the Ukrainian national spirit, which they saw as undermining their rule, and banned the Ukrainian language from many walks of public life.
The westernmost parts of Ukraine, meanwhile, were never ruled by imperial Russia and came under Polish or Austrian dominion instead, where the Ukrainian language was still allowed and as a result, nationalist sentiments are still strongest in western Ukrainian cities such as Lviv.
This identity split lies behind many of the troubles today.
“People living in these lands developed different geopolitical orientations, have different interpretations of their historical memory, different pantheons of heroes,” Russian political scientist Gulnaz Sharafutdinova told Al Jazeera.
“Additionally, there are the issue of Russian chauvinism relating to Ukraine and Belarus – as ‘younger brothers’ in the elite’s rhetoric, revealing their desire to control Ukraine’s choices.”
As the empire plunged into civil war after the Russian Revolution of 1917, Ukraine was one of several nations, along with Finland, Poland and the Baltics, which attempted to break free of Russian rule.
When the Bolsheviks emerged victorious, they indeed created a new Ukrainian state among the fifteen Soviet republics which made up the USSR. But that does not mean a distinct Ukrainian identity did not already exist.
“That [part of Putin’s speech] had me the most confused,” said Emily Channell-Justice, an anthropologist at Harvard University.
“There’s not any kind of historical grounding for that claim.”
“The eastern part of Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union in 1922,” she told Al Jazeera. “That’s only part of the territory of contemporary Ukraine, and the rest of Ukraine spent up until 1945 fighting the Soviet Union. So, that’s far beyond Lenin.”
Stepan Bandera controversy
During the second world war, the Red Army took over Lviv, bringing it under Moscow’s rule for the first time. Unlike southern and eastern Ukraine, and to a degree Kyiv, Lviv and western Ukraine remained distinctly un-Russified.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army led by Stepan Bandera collaborated with the Nazis in their bid for Ukrainian independence.
The hero status sometimes bestowed on him in modern Ukraine hits a nerve with the country’s Russian-speaking minority, as well as in Poland, for committing atrocities against Poles and Jews.
“The view of Ukrainian and Russian people being one nation is not supported by the continuous struggle on the part of Ukrainian nationalists, even during the Soviet period,” Sharafutdinova explained. “Although Ukrainians and Russians are related through their Slavic roots and linguistic proximity, these are different nations, undoubtedly.
Russian national identity is today the more insecure and vulnerable one – because Russia’s national evolution always had an imperial character, and imagining the Russian nation in non-imperial terms is not easy; indeed, it appears to be quite painful.”
As the Cold War reached its final moments in 1990, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, himself of Ukrainian descent, was assured by his Western counterparts that NATO, an alliance established explicitly to contain the Soviet Union, would expand “not one inch” to the east.
A year later, the USSR collapsed and Ukraine, as one of its constituent republics, declared independence.
But the divisions within Ukraine itself were far from settled.
In the 2004 Orange Revolution, mass protests were held against what was seen as a rigged election in favour of Viktor Yanukovych of Donbas, who leaned towards Russia.
His opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, became president, and later bestowed the honour of “Hero of Ukraine” upon Bandera, sparking protests in east Ukraine which burned effigies of the leader.
“Yushchenko started the policies of nation-building that marginalised the national identity of the pro-Russian south and east, and privileged the nationalist interpretations, memories and heroes of western Ukraine,” Sharafutdinova said.
“In Russia, the Orange Revolution was viewed as a political change guided and even organised from the United States. It sparked fear and paranoia in the Kremlin.”
Nevertheless, as historian Robert David English points out, a mere five years later, Ukrainians elected Yanukovych again, suggesting that matters of identity were not as important as ordinary people’s desire to live a decent life.
“And when he failed to improve the economy as well, there was another explosion,” English told Al Jazeera.
In 2014, after Yanukovych signed a trade deal with Russia, rather than with the EU as most Ukrainians had hoped, he was toppled in the Euromaidan revolution and fled to Russia.
Far-right fighters played an active role in the street battles with riot police in Kyiv, which was seen in Russia and parts of Ukraine as an ultranationalist coup evoking memories of Bandera.
Shortly after the overthrow of Yanukovych, Bandera’s portrait was seen hanging in Kyiv’s city hall.
“I am personally very sceptical of the glorification of him as a hero,” said Channell-Justice, “but I do think that Bandera and the neo-Nazi threat has been blown out of proportion by the Russian media.
“Yes, there is a far-right presence in Ukraine. There’s a far-right presence in Russia. There’s a far-right presence in the US. There’s one almost everywhere.
“They do not have significant representation in Kyiv’s government so by that measure, the far-right isn’t very strong in terms of deciding Ukraine’s policy.
“But there is a very vocal far-right within the civic sector.”
Indeed, far-right parties performed dismally in the 2019 elections, winning only 2.9 percent of the vote, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Russian-speaking Jew, was elected president.
Zelenskyy’s platform, among other things, promised to end the conflict with Russia, but at the same time, supported joining the alliance. His unwillingness to give up that support may arguably lie at the heart of the crisis.
“Preventing NATO expansion into Ukraine is Putin’s overwhelming motivation. Ukraine is positioned at Russia’s strategic heartland, and it is so big – so the potential for NATO bases and weapons all over the country is huge,” English, the historian, explained.
“Remember, while in the West people often think of NATO as a defensive force, in Russia, they were long indoctrinated against it, and then it bombed Serbia and Libya with no UN mandate and in violation of international law.”
Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and the Baltics have all joined NATO.
Although Russia, as the successor to the Soviet Union, was not offered any written guarantees the alliance would not expand “one inch”, the Kremlin nevertheless views a potentially hostile alliance creeping towards its doorstep as a threat, not unlike the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Although English considers Ukraine’s special identity to Russia a minor factor in the continuing standoff, Sharafutdinova disagreed.
“As Ukraine has slipped out of Russia’s control and found a greater engagement from the West and the United States – for the Russian political elites, it created a threat of NATO troops in places that are dear to the Russian heart and soul,” she said.
“Given Russia’s attitude towards Ukraine as a little brother, the Kremlin has a hard time imagining such potential scenarios that Ukraine might be able, one day, to join the Western alliance … even a faraway possibility for such a scenario causes them to see red.
“So identity issues and Russia’s view of how Russia and Ukraine are related – connected through blood, so to say – hinder Russia’s ability to recognise Ukraine as a sovereign nation, as a grown-up country that can make its own choices.”
