How the Kremlin’s Narratives Are Still Influencing Some Western Political Leaders
Don’t Think that Russian Influence Has Disappeared
Malyn city (Ukraine, Zhytomyr Oblast) after 8 March Russian airstrike during Russian invasion. Emergency servicemen carry a dead body found under rubble. March 9, 2022. Source Emergency service of Ukraine
The Russian regime’s criminal war on Ukraine is far from having eliminated the Kremlin’s propaganda narratives. But as has happened in the past, the softer forms of this propaganda are the most to be feared. It is true that today there are fewer people in the West who still dare to defend Moscow openly and legitimize the war crimes committed in Mariupol, Bucha and Irpin, among other places, or even openly deny these crimes. But the idea, as suggested by a much too un-nuanced article, that the so-called soft power of Putin’s regime has been destroyed and relegated to the dustbin of history, is adventurous to say the least, as Julie Haviland and Françoise Lacroix have rightly pointed out.
Whoever wants to understand the roots of such a narrative must first ask a simple question: what is the objective that the Kremlin pursues through its propaganda? Or, more precisely, what are the goals it reasonably intends to achieve in the current context? If one considers that its goal is to buy unconditional support for its actions, it knows that this is a lost cause, except in circles of the far right or the so-called “tankies” from the extreme left. The Kremlin will certainly try to favor these groups, which are effective vectors for amplifying its narratives, and it also contributes to reinforcing conspiracy-type discourse on other subjects, such as vaccines and the restrictive measures taken on the occasion of the Covid-19 crisis, or whataboutism—all techniques that we have already discussed.
As the Belgian historian Marie Peltier has also recently pointed out, Western leaders have not paid enough attention to a discourse of desensitization and relativization that has become widely shared in public opinion. It is because of this background that the Kremlin’s propaganda has been able to flourish. It is also not at all accidental that the Putin’s propagandists, failing to fully endorse its most immoral narratives on the massacres committed in particular in Bucha by the Russian army, use the weapon of doubt, often employed in Syria or after the downing by a Russian missile of flight MH 17 in 2014.
However, the problem becomes even more worrying when, often involuntarily, but also to cover up their past mistakes or their lack of courage, some leaders take on board the speeches that most closely match Moscow’s concrete intentions. Indeed, this regime does not expect Western governments to support its undertakings, but essentially not to take decisive action against it. The Russian leaders are playing on a form of weariness or fatigue on the Western side and the temptation, already visible at times, of a return to normalcy with the Russian regime. They are playing for the long term while counting on the fact that the West will not undertake anything decisive in the coming months to achieve what would be the absolute duty of democratic leaders: to stop the criminal acts of the Russian army. It is already clear that, without action, these crimes will continue under our eyes in the Donbass and elsewhere. This would require arming Ukraine with significantly more defensive capabilities—including a system comparable to Israel’s iron dome and long-range missiles capable of retaliating against Russian attacks from Russian territory or the Sea of Azov—and offensive capabilities. Indeed, Ukrainian and allied forces must be allowed to push the Russian army back beyond the legitimate borders of Ukraine. The victory against the Russian regime must be decisive and total.
It is true that the Kremlin, as has often been said, thought it could continue to divide the Western front in the long term and did not expect the severe sanctions that have been imposed. But these are still far from being sufficient. Indeed, gas purchases in particular continue to finance the war and the war crimes of the Russian army. In addition, thousands of accomplices of the system are not on the lists of sanctioned persons. The blocking of the SWIFT interbank payment system is far from complete. After years of guilty appeasement with Moscow, Germany in particular, as Stefan Meister points out, remains a major obstacle to much stronger sanctions. Moscow is still counting on a form of oblivion both of the war crimes themselves and of the de facto occupation of part of the Ukrainian territory. In spite of the Russian army's severe setbacks and massive losses, it is not yet certain that Kyiv alone will be able to reclaim the entire occupied regions.
The permanence of the old narratives
The new Russian offensive against Ukraine, with its brutality and the massive and deliberate killing of civilians that it has entailed, certainly could not leave the Kremlin’s propaganda unchanged in terms of the main narrative. Certainly, it is working on it for the Russian public, with all the more ease since Putin’s regime has further accentuated its repression against the free media and increased the lockdown of the Internet to limit the arrival of accurate information from abroad and from dissidents. It is known that it has even outlawed the use of the word “war”, having replaced it with the expression “special operation” and its television channels repeat the stupid and vile stories about the “Nazis of Kyiv”, the “abuses of Ukrainian forces”, the "will of NATO, and in particular of the United States, to destroy Russia”. Expressed in these terms, such propaganda has little chance of working in the West beyond precisely those circles that are already propagandistic.
On the other hand, some hard propaganda-like stories continue to be spread by Putin’s “sympathizers” or various agents in the West. In the more than eighty television and radio broadcasts I have participated in since February 24, 2022, I have heard them several times from people I have had to confront. Others continue to circulate on websites and social networks.
For example, according to this propaganda, all those who call for more resolute action by NATO and the European Union should be designated as war-mongers. There is also the discourse that those who would react would be the “real culprits” of a Third World War—which allows, in the Kremlin’s view, to reverse the responsibility of the fault. The main goal is clear: to dissuade any serious offensive by the West against a criminal regime which, for this reason, has won all these wars for 22 years. It is worth repeating: the Kremlin’s propaganda has concrete effects—it works.
Other propagandists continue to say that a significant part of Ukrainians, especially Russian-speaking ones, would be in favor of joining Russia and that some Ukrainian regions would be ready, in case of a referendum, to vote for it. Of course, we know that this is not true and that Russian-speaking Ukrainians are Ukrainians first and foremost and have no desire, even less now, to submit to Putin’s yoke. A sincere referendum in the regions of Donbass or those around Odessa would obviously give a result overwhelmingly in favor of remaining in Ukraine. But this discourse is in line with the classic idea of Russian propaganda of an Ukraine oppressed by Kyiv or, at the very least, the distribution of faults.
A third discourse borrows this same theme: we would have treated Putin badly, would not have understood him, would not have discussed enough with him and finally the war in Ukraine would be the fault of the West. This reversal of the main fault or this minimization of the Kremlin’s guilt is a great classic. This story is obviously false: all Western leaders have discussed with Putin—in our opinion even too much and unwisely—have let him go ahead and commit his crimes with far too little reaction. Moreover, even if this had been the case (an absurd hypothesis), we do not see how this could provide the beginning of a justification for his war crimes.
Fourthly, we find in this propaganda of a part of the Kremlin’s Western propagandists the all-too well known “both sides”. It takes the form of the allegation, also false, that Ukraine is responsible for the situation because it never accepted real concessions in the Normandy format discussions on the implementation of the Minsk 2 agreements. I have had occasion to remind how these agreements should be understood. It is clear that such a discourse actually means that Kyiv should, according to those who hold them, have agreed to give up sovereignty over the Donbass or part of it, to accept that this region remains in the de facto hands of the Russian forces, that it was necessary to keep quiet about the massive human rights violations committed in these regions, that the absence of basic conditions for elections, due to the oppression on the spot of any group not allied with Moscow, should be endorsed by the West.
Finally, there is the repetition by the same propagandists of the classic whataboutism according to which Putin should not be blamed for his violations of international law and war crimes, because the Americans, Europeans and their allies would have done the same. The reality is that, for these same, now more discreet but real, Putin’s thurifers, human rights do not matter at all.
This re-adaptation of classic propaganda narratives is not only done by extremist leaders, but also by more moderate-looking people, including former senior civilian and military officials and political figures, who are easily given a voice by television and radio stations. It is accompanied by four other stories. It plays on what I have repeatedly called our “cognitive dissonance”.
The first claims that Vladimir Putin has changed—a rather indecent way of concealing his past mistakes, but often also an old complacency. We know only too well that Putin’s war crimes are old: his misdeeds against Ukraine are nothing new to those who followed the previous episodes in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria on an even larger scale, and already Ukraine from 2014. Some people act as if this “brutalization,” to use George Mosse’s term, was new and had not already been observed for 22 years as well, not to mention the older period marked, notably, in Ukraine already, by the slaughters of the NKVD in 1941, the Soviet secret police. This way of washing away one’s own blindness is also an indirect way of blaming war crimes in Ukraine on a kind of accident and of trying to obscure the very basis of understanding, namely the nature of the regime.
The second new narrative always returns to the oft-repeated lazy mantra of a diplomatic solution. Some will say that we in the West should not be more “extreme” than President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and accept negotiations with the Russian regime. But those who do so do everything but recall the firm positions of the Ukrainian president, including even stronger security guarantees than those provided for in Article 5 of the NATO treaty, and the full territorial integrity of Ukraine. In reality, they are ready to push Ukraine to make concessions that are unacceptable both for Kyiv and in terms of the principles of international law. Some actually already did for eight years.
The third argument of the propagandists is draped in the garments of humanity. The aim is to save the population—which is true. But for the Kremlin’s backers, this does not mean a Western intervention in Ukraine, but on the contrary an acceptance of Russian domination over at least part of its territory. This is the trace of Moscow’s diplomatic activism abroad: selling the idea that peace is possible with some concessions. Apart from the fact that this would be a way for Putin’s regime to achieve its objectives—the total neutralization of Ukraine and its definitive occupation—it would also allow it to reactivate a discourse that would allow it to clear itself of its crimes. He will soon be able to make his little music heard: “If you have accepted concessions, it is because our arguments were not unfounded. We fought a war for nothing, because it was enough to negotiate before. In the end, you are responsible for this war.” Such a nauseating reversal is not so new.
Finally, the fourth argument is part of another usual Kremlin tactic: distraction. By bringing certain Western leaders into the humanitarian field—one thinks in particular of the evacuation of the inhabitants of Mariupol—the Kremlin kills two birds with one stone. On the one hand, because it is talking to these leaders, it is in fact forbidding them to make a clear statement about the fact that Putin is a war criminal; on the other hand, it is leading them to focus on this specific subject and not on the Kremlin’s war as a whole. Let us add that, if the negotiations fail, Moscow will be able to blame its interlocutors for their alleged intransigence. However, we remember that in Syria, too, the blackmail of humanitarianism—a paradox of a regime that creates a humanitarian crisis through its war crimes—this ruse worked: the ‘humanitarian crisis”—a way of naming without attribution a situation created from scratch by Russia—had two effects. Firstly, this crisis had been anything but resolved; secondly, it had led Western leaders to look away, and even more so to turn away from the crimes committed. This is obviously a trap in which it is difficult not to fall: every Western leader must try, as much as he can, to save lives. But in reality, they save few or none, they restrict themselves in their actions and vocabulary and, in the end, both the humanitarian crisis and the war continue. It is important to remember that there is no humanitarian solution to war; war implies a military solution.
To better understand how propaganda works, we must first understand the ends it pursues.
A basic rule: propaganda is primarily about the future
Propaganda aims to obscure the present, but also to prepare the future. Thus, the Kremlin’s narratives from now on are also, if not primarily, intended to make the aggression and the massive war crimes sink into the traps of oblivion. The Kremlin considers that it is already necessary to prepare a form of “return” of Russia to the international arena and aims to obtain a lifting or mitigation of sanctions without obviously changing its behavior. Thus, we see Putin’s forces at work in the West to accustom people to the trivialization of crimes. Here again, the Kremlin’s rhetoric is far from new—it has even worked quite well in the past with governments that did not want to understand anything—but it is adapted to the new situation created by the new attack on Ukraine.
The first narrative, heard more and more frequently, is that it would be appropriate for Western countries to place themselves in a peace perspective. This should guide their behavior and narratives. Of course, according to this narrative, there is no question of the Russian forces stopping their massacres and leaving the territories of Ukraine and Belarus that they occupy. This discourse is aimed at a form of compromise, which is certainly unacceptable for the defenders of freedom and fundamental rights, but the Kremlin always finds devotees to suggest that by seeking to oppose Moscow’s criminal activities, the West would be responsible for every new death.
The pseudo-argument of so-called realism, which I have analyzed several times, is a convenient rescue for the same propagandists. Russia would be “too big to fall”. This would lead to a chain reaction that would be dramatic for the world, they claim, and if the argument does not seem sufficient, the same propagandists will evoke the risk, presented as increased, of a strengthening of People’s China. Indirectly, this fallacious argument aims at giving a blank check, because Russia would be the largest country in the world, to such a regime to commit crimes and aggressions without consequences. Here again, this argument has worked in the past: it was necessary to wait for the new attack on Ukraine to show a minimum of consideration for Ukraine, which many people implicitly considered as a small country to the point of not deigning to go there and to show, often without too much dissimulation, that they saw Russia as a country more worthy of attention.
Then comes a third argument, no less biased, and again often repeated: there could be worse than Putin that at least we would know. No doubt, after 22 years of uninterrupted crimes on his part, one can imagine even worse, but it is also possible to imagine better. In any case, we can see the scope of this argument by the absurd: to try to relativize the crimes of the regime and to try to place them in a scale at an average level, as if they could be acceptable.
The fourth argument borrows from the same type of so-called realism. According to its advocates, a “political solution” should be sought through negotiations. The proponents of this Kremlin thesis will certainly not point out that all negotiations with Putin so far have been nauseating shams and have in fact unilaterally strengthened the Kremlin’s positions. Moscow still hopes that the West will fall into the trap: while it seems to be working less well than before, the West, especially in Europe, continues to suffer from weak links and powerful lobbies that could push for accommodations.
Fifthly, by all possible means, Moscow is pushing the narratives that aim to mitigate the scope of Putin’s and his army’s war crimes. It is true, and fortunately, that this time they have been named by several leaders, which was not the case in Syria. But the Kremlin is pushing two narratives, one practical, the other ideological. The first is that to make peace, there should be two of them, and that Western leaders will one day have to sit down at the same table as Putin. Moscow is taking advantage of the inconsistency of the Western leaders: they seem to be as irresolute as ever in providing decisive military assistance to Ukraine, not to mention their commitment to Kyiv. The Kremlin’s propagandists are thus playing on the fact that the West will not help Ukraine to definitively defeat the war and push the Russian troops out of Ukrainian soil. It is because of this gross misconduct of democratic nations that Moscow can thus consider such a new accommodation of the West with a war criminal. The second dimension of this whitewash, despite the investigations carried out, aims to reinforce the ideological positions of the Kremlin and to show, once again, to the world the inconsistencies of free countries regarding crimes without forgiveness possible.
Finally, a sixth argument of propagandists relies on the longevity in power of Vladimir Putin. It is based on the idea that there will be no revolution in Russia, that the people will not rise up and that opponents are marginalized, and above all imprisoned or forced into exile. By refuting in advance any change of regime, they want to make the leaders, considered weak in the West, understand that Putin will not only survive them, but that they will have to count with him and that isolation is not a solution. This is another example of the subversion of the principle of realism: while realism, properly understood, based on a correct apprehension of the threat, assumes, as Joe Biden suggested, that its fall is indispensable for the security of Europe, Moscow’s propagandists claim that realism is on the side of its maintenance in power. Even if this is true, it is surely foolish to consider that, at the very least, his non-involvement in international discussions is the only solution for preparing an alternative in Russia.
One must certainly consider that these stories will not produce immediate effects. The shock of the images of the massacres is too unbearable for that. However, the cracks continue to exist within Europe and the West in general is not responding adequately to these crimes and the brutal attack on Ukraine. Once again, Moscow’s propaganda is playing with time. It is precisely this time that we should not give it.
The three requirements of the fight against propaganda
These Kremlin propaganda-inspired narratives continue to do well in the West. While few still dare to openly defend the Kremlin, some who have hastily and opportunistically converted to criticism of the Russian regime accompany these seemingly less conciliatory positions with a case for some form of re-engagement. They practice their former religion in a concealed way, but this does not mean that they have abjured their former faith. Some, including former diplomats or military personnel in the West, may be doing so out of ideology or simple idiocy. Others may have more self-interested motives.
Faced with this persistence of a discreet but all the more perverse and perhaps effective propaganda, three types of action are necessarily required.
First, Western governments must leave no possible doubt today about their future intentions, if only to cut short any suspicion. They must solemnly declare that there will be no re-engagement with Putin’s regime, that the toughest sanctions will remain until Ukraine is fully liberated, that investigations for war crimes will be pursued to the end and that there will be no return to normalcy. Even if they keep an open channel of communication with Moscow, they must make it clearer that this does not mean that they consider Putin a partner for possible negotiation. The very term negotiation, like dialogue, must be banned. The choice of words matters more than ever. Any impropriety of language feeds the enemy’s propaganda. The foundations of our diplomatic communication must be rethought from top to bottom.
Then, as we proposed a long time ago, soft propaganda speeches must be better analyzed and tracked by the competent services, especially the intelligence. Whether the origin of these speeches, which are often catch-all, is ideological or linked to corruption, they must be dissected and responded to. We are at war and this implies taking the necessary measures in front of what is also a war of communication and information. This cannot be limited to a counter-offensive against the harshest and most infamous Russian propaganda.
Finally, we in Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States must launch much more thorough investigations into the organizations and individuals who spread this kind of propaganda. That some do so out of ideology is certainly a matter of freedom of opinion. But when others do it out of self-interest, it cannot remain without consequences: it is indeed intelligence with the enemy, nothing more and nothing less. Our laws and practices must be urgently upgraded in this sense.
We know it now only too well: if Ukraine does not win the war waged by Russia, it is us first, we Europeans, we Americans, we free nations, who will lose it. This will be a capitulation. We must give ourselves all the means to win the war.