STRATEGY ONE: How Russia Comments on Its War Crimes
By Oleh Melnychenko
During the three months of the war against Ukraine, the Russian army has committed numerous war crimes: shellings of peaceful residence blocks and civil infrastructure, the use of forbidden weaponry, capturing or forced deportation of civilians, and most importantly — mass killings, or, as Ukrainian Human Rights Activists and lawyers try to prove, a genocide of Ukrainians. Yet, in Russian social media, people continue to write pro-Kremlin posts with hashtags and titles “I am not ashamed”, “Not ashamed to be Russian”, etc. How do they manage to remain proud of the war their country leads in the face of universal condemnation? The answer lies in the way Russians communicate this news. Let us look closer at the main strategies Russian propaganda (in a broad sense, including both the official TV propagandists and pro-Kremlin users of social media) uses to reconcile its audience with the facts of war crimes their army commits in Ukraine.
In short, numerous strategies reappear in different combinations, but at the end of the day they can be counted as follows:
1) Russians reject the very possibility that something like that can take place;
2) When the proofs appear, they try either to prove they are false or 3) put the blame on the Ukrainian side;
4) If all the previous strategies failed, or if the proof is undeniable, Russian propaganda shrugs and says that this is what all the world powers and especially superpowers do.
Let us look closer at each of these strategies.
Each of them will be published separately, so keep an eye on it!
Strategy 1. Denial
1.1. Nobility as proof
From the first days of the acute phase of the war, Russian officials have refused to acknowledge that their army fires at the houses of civilians, residential areas, schools, orphanages, and religious buildings. Russian military experts and TV propagandists claim that all the missile shells were “of high precision” and directed exclusively against military objects. Often, they appeal to the high morality of Russian people or to the noble traditions of the Russian army as the main argument against all the possible accusations. Thus, the Assistant to the Russian President Vladimir Medinsky said that his knowledge of history makes him certain that a Russian soldier is “organically, genetically incapable to do the things ascribed to him”. This idea was accepted by a wide public, so that one can often hear it on the street polls or in comments of Russian influencers. Russian officials turn to this tenet time and again: for instance, the press-secretary of Putin Dmitry Peskov assured journalists that Russian soldiers have never been raping women nor killing the civilians but were helping them all instead; a few weeks afterwards, Russian general Mikhail Mizintsev called the forced deportation of the citizens of the besieged Mariupol “a rescue” from Ukrainian Nazis.
“From the first days of the acute phase of the war, Russian officials have refused to acknowledge that their army fires at the houses of civilians, residential areas, schools, orphanages, and religious buildings”
1.2. Failure as proof
Even the lack of military successes, according to Russian propaganda, is caused by an excessive caution of Russian soldiers and the way the Ukrainian army uses Russian devotion to the letter of the rules of war. Thus, in the middle of April, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that it is the “living shield” of civilians that prevents the Russian army from defeating the defenders of “Azovstal” (at that moment the siege lasted for about a month). Somehow in the same report, the Russian side managed to call the information about many civilians besieged in the plant “one more piece of fake news”. A chain of later attempts to organize humanitarian corridors from Azovstal proved this news to be true.
Another example: Russian media broadcasted a footage cut from the report of Al Jazeera. Cut in a very specific way, the footage suggested that the Ukrainian soldiers use ambulance vehicles as transport — proof so needed to justify Russian firings at the ambulances. Belgian fact-checkers demonstrated that the original unedited report depicted how these soldiers a) far earlier b) in another city c) were actually helping civilians to evacuate.
1.3. Foreign media as proof
Often, Russian speakers make references to the foreign media, whose neutrality is expected to compensate for the lack of credibility of Kremlin propaganda. Thus, in the first days of April, Russia Today published a record of the conversation between the alleged foreign reporters. There, the unknown speaker assures his colleagues that Russians have nothing to do with the destruction and murders in Borodianka. Yet, there was neither the source, nor even the name of the media. On the contrary, practically all the leading Western media, like BBC, DW News, NBC News, RMC, and France 24 confirmed the information about Russian atrocities in Borodianka and other Ukrainian cities.
“These ‘proofs’ of Russian innocence do their job: instead of letting the facts of the crimes change their faith in the righteousness of their invasion, the Russian audience lets their faith overshadow the facts. ”
Sometimes, instead of faking the words of Western speakers completely, Russian propaganda intentionally misinterprets the actual ones. Thus, they pretended to quote the UNICEF Director of the Office of Emergency Programmes Manuel Fontaine as though he said his organization has “no proof as such” of the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. Compare it to the actual statement of Fontaine: “[UNICEF] does not currently have access to areas of Ukraine or Russia that would allow them to investigate reports of child abductions.”
As my acquaintance with the inner-Russian war discourse shows, these “proofs” of Russian innocence do their job: instead of letting the facts of the crimes change their faith in the righteousness of their invasion, the Russian audience lets their faith overshadow the facts.
Most of the fakes and debunkings mentioned in the article were collected and analyzed by Ukrainian fact-checkers from StopFake and Detector Media (with its two projects #DisinfoChronicle and Russian Fake Go F*** Yourself), to which I am grateful. Both for materials and for their struggle.