Victims or villains? Alexander Nemenov/AFP/ Getty Images

If you were a Russian mother, would you rather believe that your son gave his life heroically fighting Ukrainian Nazis, or that he died butchering innocent civilians? The former, most likely. It is not easy to admit — to oneself or to others — that you live in a country that has murdered tens of thousands of Ukrainians, or that has pointlessly sacrificed the lives of its own people.
Yet it is one thing to turn a blind eye to the truth, and quite another to be “brainwashed”. The West is fixated on the idea that “Putin’s war” is not Russia’s, and that the Russian people only support it because they have been “zombified” by a totalitarian regime. But this is missing the wood for the trees.
Independent polling claims that 75% of Russians approve of the war, a figure that has been relatively stable since March 2022 — despite a slight wavering when mobilisation was introduced in September. Similarly, Putin’s current approval rating remains at 80%, some 15-20% higher than it was before the invasion. Of course, opinion polls conducted in an authoritarian country must be treated with caution: a June 2022 study by political scientists Philipp Chapkovski and Max Schuab estimated that between 10-15% of Russian respondents may have lied to pollsters about supporting the war. But that still leaves a majority in favour.
Ever since Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, ordinary Russians have been helping Putin to weave a narrative about the invasion. In those early days, people could easily access opposition and Russian-language Western media, but most preferred to listen to — and pass on — tall tales of Ukrainian Nazis under the spell of evil Westerners.
Russian TV news channels, which have long been the most trusted form of media, especially among older audiences, latched on to this popular opinion. It would be naïve to think they could get away with anything else, given that they rely on advertising revenue for income. Even today, producers schedule shows because they’re lucrative, not just because they uphold state propaganda (although they do need to stay on the Kremlin’s good side). Such was the demand for war propaganda following Russia’s invasion — from on high and below — that some channels ran pro-war content for up to 10 hours a day. After six months, however, audiences grew tired of the constant barrage and started to switch off, hitting advertising revenues. In response, the channels replaced some of the political propaganda shows with soaps, sports and lifestyle programmes.
Russians aren’t dependent on state television for all their news. Ordinary people can still read and watch almost all alternative sources using a VPN, which one in four Russians use. Even without a VPN, the Internet is mostly free, if manipulated, and the social media app Telegram acts as an uncensored news source for some 40 million Russians. Use of Telegram has tripled since the war began but, of the top 10 political channels, nine are virulently pro-war. Clearly, these are narratives that Russians are seeking out and choosing to believe.
As a specialist in Russian propaganda, I have analysed tens of thousands of pro-war Telegram posts and media articles, identifying three main narrative groups, or themes, all upheld by the belief that Ukrainians are in fact Russians, and that Ukraine is not a real country. The first group is rooted in Second World War mythology, arguing that Russians are not fighting against Ukraine but against Nazism, which has reappeared in Ukraine as evidenced by Kyiv’s alleged “genocide of Russian speakers”. The second casts Russians as “misunderstood angels” who are liberating Ukrainians. In this, Russia appears to be aping Western justifications for their wars in the Middle East: there is the same self-satisfied denialism of claiming to bring people freedom and rights by bombing them.
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