You know about Russia’s devastating losses in the Ukraine war. You’ve heard stories about Russian
soldiers refusing to fight. You’re more than familiar with Russia’s war crimes and crumby
tactics. But you often don’t hear Putin’s POV and what he’s telling his folks at home.
Well, count your blessings. Because we’re about to make you privy to the proclamations and
accusations of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. As you probably know, when all this kicked
off in February 2022, when the conflict that staretd in 2014 turned into full scale war,
Russia used different terminology from the rest of the world in regard to what was happening. As
the Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya explained,
“Don’t call this a war. This is called a special military operation.”
On February 24, 2022, Putin appeared on TV where he told his people
that this was a special operation, not a war. We guess Putin and his colleagues were hoping
that Russians had never heard of the expression, “If it looks like a duck,
swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”
Before we get to what Putin’s saying now, even though he just said he wasn’t in the mood to
face any more “boring questions,” we should look at what he told Russians at the start
regarding the so called “special operation.” One thing that this show today is going to
focus on is narratives. As a military analyst rightly said recently, “The Ukraine conflict
is about control of the narrative as much as armed conflict.” Putin wants control,
and his enemies want control. Control is essential to victory, which is why
everything Putin says is a kind of weapon. We’ll explain what we mean by this throughout the video.
When the war got going, Putin talked about the “tragic events in the Donbas” and that his
invasion was for the security of Russia. He blamed “irresponsible Western politicians” for the war,
who he blamed for overthrowing the elected pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.
This was very important regarding Putin’s narrative. He has always said this is a proxy
conflict with the West and certainly the USA, which he says is the chief string-puller. This
is why he felt happily vindicated when a leaked telephone call between US Assistant Secretary of
State Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, appeared on YouTube.
In it, she indirectly talks about who should be the next leader of Ukraine,
as if she was handpicking the person. It doesn’t mean she actually, practically picked him,
although she obviously had her favorites. For instance, she said, “I don't think Klitsch should
go into the government. I don't think it's necessary; I don't think it's a good idea.”
She was referring to the former heavyweight behemoth turned politician, Vitaly Klitschko.
She added, “I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience,
the governing experience. He's the... what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok
on the outside.” By Yats, she was referring to Arseniy Yatseniuk, who did become the PM.
Nuland got what she wanted, but as we said, that doesn’t mean she had the power to put
who she wanted into power. That colorful conversation, in which she famously said,
“BLEEP the EU,” certainly made it look like the US was pulling the strings. After all,
for many decades, the US has pulled strings worldwide and installed various leaders, sometimes
taking down democratically voted-in politicians to replace them with tyrants. For Putin, Nuland
had laid a golden egg right into his lap and inserted a feather into his cap. He used this as
an example of US interference in foreign affairs, backed by what he called a history of meddling.
She was embarrassed and later said she wouldn’t comment on what she called “private diplomatic
conversations.” Still today, people debate what power the US had and currently has in Ukraine,
with folks such as the economist and public policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs
and political scientist John Mearsheimer, saying this is definitely a proxy war.
This is a matter we’re not going to comment on. It’s a very complicated story, but we
will say that Putin jumped on that phone call. A call that might have been leaked by Russia.
A Russian newspaper gloated, “Madame Nuland doesn't only swear. She also gives detailed
instructions on how the three puppets from Kyiv's Maidan should act.” The White House didn’t deny
the phone call was real, just saying it was “a new low in Russian tradecraft.”
It was indeed crafty if it was the Russians. As we said, we don’t know how much power the US
exerts over Ukrainian politics, but it has to be said that this call provided Putin with a lot of
ammunition. He told Russian citizens repeatedly how the US was trying to destroy their country.
The people believed him for the most part. Imagine if the boot was on the other foot, and a top
Russian politician had been caught talking about trying to install a new anti-American President.
And then he got elected. The US press would have had a field day, and many people would have been,
at the very least, suspicious. It’s hard to blame the Russian people for not being
suspicious of the US’s intentions. Putin talked consistently about the
expansion of NATO, an organization he said he’d been “patiently trying” to come to an
agreement with for many years. He complained of “cynical deception and lies” coming out of NATO
and what he called “pressure and blackmail.” This is what he said then, and it’s what he
says now. Nothing has changed in this regard. He has talked about the US and its Allies and
their arrogance in interfering with other countries’ domemstic and foreign affairs. He
said the US feels “absolute superiority” among all nations, and Russia, he said,
after the fall of the Soviet Union, was exploited when it was the most vulnerable.
He said the “arrogance” of the US knows no limits and international law does not matter
one bit to this country and its closest Allies, especially when it comes to the Middle East,
where, Putin said, the US conducted an “illegal use of military power” creating what he called
“international terrorism” and a humanitarian disaster in such places as Libya. This backs
up his present narrative, which, you know already, he needs people to believe in.
Please don’t shoot the messenger. We’re just telling you what he said. It doesn’t mean he’s
right or wrong. We’re just repeating his words. He was saying it as justification for the invasion,
explaining that NATO’s push eastwards was another example of this exceptionalism. He said Russia was
deceived and betrayed by NATO. For this to make a bit more sense we should mention that, for Putin,
NATO is just a front for US foreign policy. He even went as far as to call the US and its
Allies a bunch of “con artists,” which, you have to admit, would be quite funny if circumstances
weren’t the opposite of funny. He called the US itself an “empire of lies,” although he
admitted that it was still a “great country.” Still, he said that if countries don’t go along
with what the US wants, they are gonna feel the pain, or “the squeeze,” as he
likes to say. He said Russia was willing to talk it over with the US and its Allies,
but now the squeeze has been put on Russia, adding that the US wants to “finish us off and utterly
destroy us.” Ironically, he talked about how the US wants to spread its values, values he called
degenerate and counter to human nature, which, to anyone who knows the history of the Soviet
Union, is some pretty hardcore hypocrisy. But this is what the Russian people heard,
and many of them might have agreed with him, further proved by Putin going up in the
popularity ratings. He was doing what any leader would do by inventing a Good vs. Evil scenario,
picking out bits of truth and embellishing them with exaggerations and subjective
theories. He was fine-tuning his narrative. His main point is that Russia is innocent of all
wrongdoing and is being bullied by the world’s superpower. He issued a stark warning in this
regard, stating “that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences.”
He was referring to nuclear weapons. After this he clarified his statement by saying they would
only be used if used against Russia, and he said NATO was not ever going to get away with expanding
toward the East. Totally unacceptable, he said. Not on his watch. “For our country,
it is a matter of life and death,” he said. “This is not an exaggeration,” he added, “It is a fact.”
So, can you imagine what many Russians, huddled as a family in front of their TVs,
were thinking at that point? He then told them that Russia’s special military operation was for
the people of the Donbas, who had “pinned their hopes” on Russia helping them after many had
died at the hands of Ukrainian forces in what he called a genocide. He invoked the term Neo-Nazis,
whom he said had a stronghold in Ukraine. He even told his viewers that his right-wing
enemies in Ukraine had gone as far as to “aspire to acquire nuclear weapons,” adding,
“We will not let them do that!” Of course, you know differently.
You’ve heard a different story. You don’t believe Ukraine is highly contaminated with Neo-Nazis,
although you do know the country has had some issues with the far-right wing in the past.
You don’t believe in Russia’s innocence, as Putin describes it, but the fact is, this is
what the Russian people have heard many times. It didn’t help matters of transparency when in
March, Russia adopted what Reporters Without Borders said was a “draconian” press law,
in which Putin said any news journalist found writing content that was “false”
or “mendacious” in relation to the Ukraine situation could be sent to prison for 15 years.
With that in mind, how can people in that country read stories that disagree Putin
and his rather handy explanation of things? After that law was introduced,
the BBC, Bloomberg News, CNN, ABC, and CBS News stopped reporting in Russia or collecting news
there. It was too dangerous for the journalists. Putin wanted to make his narrative unchangeable.
As one critic said, “We are looking on helplessly as Russia’s independent media
are being silenced to death… Vladimir Putin has delivered the final blow and completed
the destruction of Russia’s independent media.” The Russian government then went about blocking
and banning all kinds of websites in Russia where people might get to read a more expansive tale of
the tape regards to Ukraine. Russia even clamped down on a woman on Instagram that
disagreed with Putin’s narrative. She said she might now be looking at six years in prison.
She wasn’t being paranoid. A guy named Ilya Yashin was recently sentenced to 8
years for criticizing Putin on a YouTube live stream.
This guy spoke the truth when he said after being sentenced, “With that hysterical sentence,
the authorities want to scare us all, but it effectively shows their weakness.”
Whatever you think about the western media, at least folks like Sachs and Mearsheimer haven’t
been blocked or banned, even if they have been criticized a lot. Admittedly, Sachs did get
pulled off the air when he started talking about the Nord Stream explosion being a US operation.
Still, it was easy enough to find that out. Anyone can hear what he has to say. In Russia, the people
aren’t so fortunate. Regular news sites rarely criticize their leader, but some journalists have.
Two of them said in May, “Putin and his circle are doomed to face a tribunal after the end of
the war. Putin and his associates won’t be able to justify themselves or flee after losing this war.”
They also released the statement, “Putin is a paranoid dictator. Putin must go.
He started a senseless war and is leading Russia into a ditch.” As far as we know,
they haven’t yet been fitted with a pair of cement shoes or had their organs vaporized after having
a harmless-looking cup of tea, but when they wrote their critical articles, they added at the bottom.
“Disclaimer: This material is not approved by the state; therefore,
the Presidential administration will delete it… In other words: TAKE A SCREENSHOT
URGENTLY before it’s deleted.” They were brave, considering the possible consequences.
But there is another factor that has made Putin paranoid and thus more likely to lie to his people
Putin has been saying there are spies in his midst, writing lies at the bequest of the
West. In September, that’s what he said about a Russian journalist who was jailed for 22 years.
After hearing that there would be trouble if they said anything that contradicted Russia’s Defense
Ministry on Ukraine, other journalists had to flee the country. Putin wants his narrative
encased in iron. If his foundation collapses, so does his leadership. At the end of the day,
the power is always with the people. The Russian Defense Ministry, at one point,
was saying there were no civilian casualties in Ukraine because Russian strikes had been so
accurate. If photographs or video showed differently, it said that was because
the Ukrainians had been bombing themselves. It sounded ridiculous, but with no independent media,
that’s the story everyone in Russia heard. The message is pretty clear. If you’re not
with him, you’re against him and against the fatherland. There’s no middle ground or nuance to
the narrative, as there is elsewhere. In December, Putin said about the people criticizing him:
"The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum
and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths.
I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen
our country, our solidarity, cohesion, and readiness to respond to any challenges.”
We are not sure a man who’s been talking endlessly about the threat of Nazis chose wise words there.
We all know which group in the 1930s and 40s liked to talk about purifying society to strengthen it…
Putin’s assumption was wrong as both St Petersburg and Moscow saw widespread protests
against his “special operation,” leading to the arrest of many peaceful protestors.
It’s these folks, he later said, that need purifying. This included mothers
of sons who’ve gone to Ukraine and not returned dressed in anything but a body bag. Putin has
embraced the totalitarian spirit, but that’s not how he explains it. He says his critics
are diseased. They’ve contracted a virus from the West. They’re infected with fake news. This
is what tyrants learn in their college class, Totalitarianism 101…We’re kidding, of course…
Tyrants learn their skills through experience. There have been more protests as the war has
gone on. At the start, Putin talked in a way that made people think his special operation would be
like a German blitzkrieg. It’s been anything but, and now Putin is saying the war “might
be a long process.” Anyone would think he’s on the payroll of the world’s arms industry
because this war is already expensive, and it will have even more massive reverberations to
economies and the people living in them. This doesn’t pain Putin. It doesn’t vex Vladimir.
Still, he said in December that he wouldn’t be calling up more troops to serve. He told
the Kremlin’s human rights council, “In these conditions, the talk about some additional
mobilization efforts makes no sense. There is no need for this for the state and for
the Defense Ministry.” This came right after some Ukrainian drone strikes that hit Russian
turf. Putin had already ordered another 300,000 conscripts at that point. If the Ukraine war had
been distant until then, it was now coming home. Putin hasn’t changed at all, though, regarding the
fundamental matters he talked about at the start of the war. As we said, he wouldn’t speak at one
point, reportedly saying he was sick of being asked to reply to the same old boring questions.
He’s said what he has to say in this regard. He won’t give up or change tack regarding what
he sees as a US-led proxy war against his country. He even recently compared the West to the Nazis,
although this kind of fury didn’t mirror his foreign minister's words,
who recently said that he had “a certain hope that a compromise can be reached.”
It seems obvious that Putin hopes that both countries can reach a compromise,
but it also seems obvious that if he doesn’t get what he wants, this war will be a very a long
and bloody one. Recently, he again talked about existential threats and how Russia
is fighting for its life. He said, “The struggle we are waging is a struggle for our sovereignty,
for the future of our country and our children.” It’s almost exactly what he was saying in February
when he took to the airwaves, but the Russian people watching him then were
perhaps feeling a bit less pessimistic about the whole affair than they do now.
Late in 2022, Putin said that his military’s tactics “fully justified themselves.” He tried
not to sound bothered about the failures in what’s turned into a protracted war. But
analysts are now saying he would feel better if he had an attractive off-ramp very soon.
Things really haven’t happened as he’d hoped. As one Pro-Kremlin commentator recently said:
“The military operation is, no question, tougher going than had been expected. It
was expected that 30 to 50 percent of the Ukrainian Armed Forces would switch over to
Russia’s side. No one is switching over.” Putin also said recently that the West’s
sanctions are really hurting his country, calling them an “economic blitzkrieg.” He
admitted that there have been “deep, structural changes [to] our economy” and it is hurting the
masses. Still, what he thinks about the West hasn’t changed. In that same speech,
he claimed yet again regarding the US, “There is only one goal. The destruction of Russia.”
He also said that the West’s power over global communications is a weapon just as
useful as an explosive. The West, he said, will mount a propaganda campaign so cunning
that his own people will turn against him. As far as an information war is concerned,
the US holds most of the cards since it controls most of the tech. Putin knows that there’s not
much he can do about this weakness. He explained not long ago, “An unprecedented information
campaign has been unleashed, which involves global social networks and all Western media,
the objectivity and independence of which turned out to be just a myth.”
Still, Putin also likely knows that independent journalists, some of whom have won Pulitzers
and have done some impressive investigative work in the past, are being called Putin-apologists
for having another take on the grand narrative of this war. Putin must be able to recognize
that their voices are not banned or sequestered. They have channels on YouTube, pages on Substack,
and accounts on the newly transparent (maybe) Twitter. There will be transparency,
which is more than you can say for Putin’s Russia. He’s being a total hypocrite, too, considering
he’s acting like the information czar of Russia; a real-life Big Brother. He reminds us of George
Orwell’s book 1984, which explains, “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory
beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them.” He condemns misinformation and then
spreads it, but arguably every country has done that in the past. After all,
if you control the past, you control the future; if you control the present, you control
the past. That’s not us. It’s Orwell again. The people of the West are at least free to read
and watch what they want, and they can make up their own minds about what’s going on in Ukraine,
who’s behind it, and if Mr. Putin is a tyrant or if he’s just fighting back against dastardly
imperial America. Maybe the story is not so simple, and like most important historical
tales, it’s full of grey areas worthy of lengthy, polite, intelligent discussion.
With that in mind, calling anyone who disagrees with him scum and a traitor is very harsh and
plainly not true. He should know that in this day and age, suppressing information often works
against you because, at some point, it comes out, and then no one trusts you. If Putin’s
theory that the US-led West is trying to kill off Russia is real, then surely people will
see that for themselves if they have access to enough data. If Russia is under threat and is
being hard done to, they will see that, too. Putin said lately that he has no regrets about
the invasion and still believes Russia is acting “correctly and in a timely manner.”
Not too many analysts think he will actually use nuclear weapons and bring about mutually assured
destruction. At a December meeting, he said, “We have not gone mad; we are aware of what nuclear
weapons are. We aren't about to run around the world brandishing this weapon like a razor.”
He reminded everyone present that Russia doesn’t have nuclear weapons in other
countries’ backyards. He said that’s the policy of the US. He also reminded the attendees that
the US had mulled over preemptive military strikes and that the US was not “shy to openly talk about
it during the past years.” White House analysts called this mere “saber-rattling.” Let’s hope so.
Some analysts say he’ll concentrate more on cyber warfare from now on. Controlling narratives and
hacking infrastructure can be just as helpful in war these days as conventional weapons. But
let us hope for constructive dialogue with a happy ending and transparency among nations
since the truth, we’ve heard, sets you free. The suppression of it, as Orwell said, might look
like “a boot stamping on a human face…forever.” Now you need to watch “Insane Ways Vladimir Putin
Survived Assassination Attempts.” Or, have a look at “Why Putin's Invasion of Ukraine is a Failure.”