Simply as importantly, Ukraine’s advance towards Kursk underscores an inside contradiction in Mr. Putin’s propaganda, which portrays the battle as a proxy conflict in opposition to Western powers making an attempt to disclaim Russia its future, and one by which a peaceable, united, and affluent Russia with will definitely prevail. However that phantasm crumbled after Ukrainian forces managed to invade Russia and pressure tens of 1000’s of Russians to flee their properties.
The primary crucial of Mr. Putin’s propaganda, inherited from the Soviet Union, is to implement the assumption that no matter is occurring, nonetheless severe it could appear and no matter the associated fee, the Kremlin – Vladimir Putin, to be exact – is beneath full management. management. The depth of the catastrophe brought on by Russia’s conflict is revealed by the depth of the efforts – euphemisms, innuendos, scapegoats and apologies – directed at propaganda.
Mr. Putin, a product of the previous KGB, is properly practiced on this darkish artwork. From the second the conflict in opposition to Ukraine started in February 2022, he has been relentless in imposing a ban on even calling it a conflict. The Russians face arrest if they do not name it a “particular army operation”, although Mr Putin himself has from time to time slipped. When Russian restaurateur and warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a suspicious aircraft crash after sending his mercenaries combating in Ukraine to march on Moscow, Mr. Putin saved a straight face as he provided his condolences, noting solely that his newest sufferer has “made severe errors in life.”
So when the Ukrainian military launched its unexpected driving in the Kursk region on August 6the Kremlin’s propaganda mill went to work. After all, there was no invasion, solely “armed provocation”, “state of affairs”, “terrorist assault” or “occasions within the Kursk area”. And naturally, the insidious West was in charge. In a televised assembly at his residence with safety chiefs and regional governors six days after the Kursk invasion, Mr Putin stated that after once more “the West is combating us with the palms of the Ukrainians”. He insisted that Russian forces would reply appropriately and nonetheless meet “all our aims”.
When the appearing governor of Kursk Oblast, talking by video hyperlink, started to offer some precise particulars concerning the invasion, together with the variety of cities and villages affected and the scale of the territory captured by the Ukrainian military, Mr. Putin minimize him off sharply, saying that ought to depart these particulars to the army and give attention to the humanitarian response. The poor governor, who in all probability by no means imagined that his distant province can be invaded by anybody, will need to have assumed that his president wished to know what was actually happening. Maybe he didn’t know that his job is to not alarm the inhabitants with details, however solely to point out that the federal government controls and cares for its individuals.
