Putin’s up-is-down world, in which ‘war is peace’

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/05/2022 (997 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The good news out of Moscow this week was that Vladimir Putin did not use his Victory Day speech to make a very bad situation even worse.

He did not use the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany to formally declare war on Ukraine, mobilize his country’s reserve forces, or issue veiled threats to use nuclear weapons, as some had feared. For that at least, we can be thankful.

The bad news, though, is that Putin appears to be trapped in a reverse reality in which up is down, black is white, and as George Orwell famously put it, “war is peace.” He accused his enemies of doing precisely what he is guilty of, and in so doing he dishonoured the millions of Russians who died in the fight against fascism.

Russia, he claimed, is carrying out its “special military operation” in Ukraine to pre-empt Ukraine from invading its “historical territories” in the Donbas region and Crimea. In fact, it was Russia that invaded and annexed Crimea back in 2014, and effectively occupied the Donbas through proxy militias. And there’s zero evidence that Ukraine was planning any campaign to reverse this when Putin ordered his troops in on Feb. 24.

Ukraine, he went on, was looking into acquiring nuclear weapons. In fact, Ukraine gave up its nukes as part of a deal in 1994 that guaranteed its borders and territorial integrity. There’s no evidence at all that it was trying to reacquire them.

NATO, said Putin, provoked the conflict by stationing troops close to Russian territory and pouring weapons into Ukraine. In fact, it was only after the invasion that western countries started supplying Ukraine with modern heavy weaponry in significant quantities. Once the invasion began, Ukraine was begging for weapons that have now arrived, and used them to great effect.

Russia, according to Putin’s version of events, had to invade Ukraine “so that there is no place in the world for butchers, murderers and Nazis.” This is rich coming from the leader of a country whose army stands accused of war crimes in Ukraine, and has indiscriminately attacked civilian targets from apartment houses to schools and hospitals.

The “Nazi” accusation is a particularly stinging one, given the sacrifices made by millions of Russians and Ukrainians alike during the Second World War. It’s true there are far-right, even neo-Nazi, groups in Ukraine, but there are just as many in Russia itself. Extreme right groups won just over 2 per cent of the vote in Ukraine’s last elections.

To compare Ukraine, a flawed but democratic state, to Nazi Germany is worse than ludicrous. Some 300 Jewish historians and scholars of genocide have condemned that as simple propaganda. “This rhetoric,” they write, “is factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism and those who courageously fought against it, including Russian and Ukrainian soldiers of the Red Army.”

Along the way, Putin invoked the memory of heroic Russian resistance to Polish, French and German forces, from the 17th century to the 20th, to justify the “special military operation.” All those previous episodes, however, involved foreign powers invading Russia, and Russians successfully pushing back. Not, in fact, Russians launching an unprovoked invasion of one of their neighbours.

The sobering conclusion is that Putin is dug in, both militarily and psychologically, for a long struggle. The quick victory he clearly hoped for has eluded him, but there’s no sign he is ready to halt the aggression.

Instead, he is clinging to his upside-down version of reality. The West must show at least as much determination in defending the truth.