Truth with a Z: disinformation, war in Ukraine, and Russia’s contradictory discourse of imperial identity

ABSTRACT

This article offers a qualitative analysis of how, by adopting identity-related discourses whose meanings resonate within a given culture, Russian state propaganda strives to bolster “the truth status” of its Ukraine war claims. These discourses, we argue, have long historical lineages and thus are expected to be familiar to audiences. We identify three such discourses common in many contexts but with specific resonances in Russia, those of colonialism/decolonization, imperialism, and the imaginary West. The article demonstrates that these same discourses also inform war-related coverage in Russophone oppositional media. Russian state-affiliated and oppositional actors further share “floating signifiers,” particularly “the Russian people,” “historical Russia,” “the Russian world,” “Ukraine,” “fascism/Nazism,” and “genocide,” while according them radically different meanings. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of studying how state propaganda works at the level of discourses, and the acutely dialogical processes by which disinformation and counter-disinformation efforts are produced and consumed.

KEYWORDS:

• Disinformation
• war
• Ukraine
• state propaganda

One month after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Scottie Nell Hughes, a former star presenter for the now defunct RT America, complained on RT International about one-sided Western mainstream media coverage of the Kremlin’s so-called “special operation” (CrossTalk [broadcast], 23 March 2022). Hughes attributed this to a lack of knowledge among Western journalists of “the context, including the history” of the region. For her, RT was silenced precisely because, unlike its Western counterparts, its journalists understood this “context.” In turn, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, claimed that, rather than starting a full-scale invasion, on 24 February, Russia “has prevented” a war (RIA Novosti, 24 February 2022).¹ What exactly did these two statements mean? Should we dismiss them as Kremlin obfuscation, requiring no further reflection? By providing an answer we hope to address the key question we pose in this article: How do the identity-related discourses with which Russian state-affiliated media narratives justify the war function as “reasoning devices” (Brugman, Burgers, and Steen 2017) facilitating specific interpretations of events in Ukraine? We examine how these discourses underpin state-endorsed, war-justifying narratives at a time when, within Russia’s state-controlled mediasphere, we have witnessed factually falsified content on a scale unprecedented even by the standards of the past decade. By both differentiating, and linking, these two phenomena (identity discourses/falsified or seriously distorted news), the article contributes to debates around the workings of authoritarian state propaganda in the digital age.

The most common term used by Western commentators and analysts in relation to Russian state media coverage of Ukraine is disinformation. Reflecting this trend, the main database of problematic Russian media output established by the European Council in 2015 is called EUvsDisinfo.² In general, the term tends to be loosely applied to content that ranges from overt fabrications to hyper-partisan reports that may be factually accurate (Wardle and Derakshan 2017). Disinformation Studies theorists thus rightly complain about the fuzziness and inconsistency of their discipline’s adopted terminology (Hwang 2020; Chico and Simonx 2022).³ In this article we use the more internally coherent term “propaganda” as our umbrella concept, while also clarifying its relationship with disinformation. Propaganda is broadly understood as communication that “filters and frames … issues … in a way that strongly favour particular interests.”⁴ In describing the communication strategies of authoritarian regimes in the globally networked environment, scholars note how actors exploit “the hybrid media system” (Chadwick 2013) while aiming to sow confusion and foster mistrust in all media, rather than persuading citizens to change opinion. The role of networked citizens in co-creating and disseminating state propaganda has been emphasized. The terms “authoritarian propaganda” (e.g. Alyukov 2021, 2022), “rewired propaganda” (Oates 2016, 2021), or “network propaganda” (Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018) have been proposed. Benkler, Faris, and Roberts (2018) highlight occasional collaborations among actors affiliated with authoritarian states, on one hand, and populist hyper-partisan actors in Western democracies, on the other. Significantly, they use the terms “propaganda” and “disinformation” synonymously, defining both as “manipulating and misleading people intentionally to achieve political ends” (Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018, 24). When striving to capture the dynamic linking disinformation, media digitization, and populism via the concept of “rewired propaganda,” Oates likewise uses “disinformation” and “populism” as self-evidently integral to contemporary propaganda activities. With reference to the Russian context, our analysis will disentangle some of the threads responsible for this confusion, which we also attribute to lack of awareness of the complex interplay between disinformation and counter-disinformation.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has generated several studies that analyze (a) Russian state-affiliated output across Russian and global hybrid media systems; and (b) audience perceptions of this output. In adopting a predominant Disinformation Studies approach, Pierri et al. (2022) and Caprolu, Sadighian, and Di Pietro (2022) deliver a computational analysis of Russia-associated Facebook posts and tweets in the first months since the invasion. Typically, Pierri et al. classify all Russia-related output as low credibility/disinformation without studying its content. Alyukov, Kunilovskaya, and Semenov (2022a, 2022b) offer content analysis, based on the frequency of keywords in Russian state-affiliated media news coverage. Their studies additionally demonstrate how different social media platforms are used by state propaganda disseminators to target specific Russian audiences. Brandt, Wirtschafter, and Danaditya (2022) address this issue in relation to Kremlin-endorsed war messaging disseminated to US audiences.

Some scholars attempt to ascertain how citizens of different countries react to Russian state propaganda and why. Ehrlich et al. (2022) correlated people’s ability for “analytical thinking” with their susceptibility to “pro-Kremlin disinformation.” Wagnsson, Blad, and Hoyle (2023) analyzed the types of Swedish media users who acknowledged consuming RT and Sputnik after the invasion. Burtin’s (2022) research, based on interviews in Russia, highlights how expressing support for Russia’s actions can serve psychological needs to deal with fear of an unknown future or shame in admitting that one’s own country is at fault. Alyukov, Kunilovskaya, and Semenov (2022a and Alyukov, Kunilovskaya, and Semenov 2022b) illuminate public perceptions of propaganda by analyzing war-related keywords used in genuine, grassroots, Russian social media accounts. The most detailed qualitative study of Russian citizens’ perceptions of the war and their relationship to media-consumption habits is by Belokrysova et al. (2022) who, noting the unreliability of opinion surveys in a war context, conducted in-depth interviews with 213 subjects.

Belokrysova et al. (2022) and Alyukov, Kunilovskaya, and Semenov (2022a, 2022b) provide empirical evidence of relevance to this article. First, they corroborate other news consumption research by showing that Russian citizens often engage with media to confirm their pre-existing views. Second, they demonstrate that Russia’s domestic political communication strategy amounts to “preaching to the converted,” as the most intensive state-sponsored propaganda campaigns around the war have been conducted on the Odnoklassniki platform used by older citizens among whom support for Putin’s policies is already high. Alyukov, Kunilovskaya, and Semenov (2022a) further suggest that Russian citizens use Kremlin-sponsored narratives as “frameworks for interpreting political events,” often without attempting to construct coherent worldviews.

Alyukov, Kunilovskaya, and Semenov’s Russia-related observation accords with what has long been argued by media consumption scholars. While many people quickly discard the factual details of news reports, they retain the “emotional tags” attached to individual pieces of information, remembering how they felt about what they heard and saw, while forgetting specific details (Baum 2002). This explains why narratives capable of engaging people emotionally tend to solicit strong audience investments. Russian state actors exploit this tendency (Chatterje-Doody and Crilley 2019).

How such narratives are constructed, particularly in the context of state propaganda that includes overt fabrication, requires qualitative research targeting the political contexts in which these narratives are produced and the historical and cultural legacies with which they engage. As Kuo and Marwick (2021) rightly argue, such research tends to be limited, because it is labor-intensive, requiring diverse linguistic skills – hence the prevalence of quantitative, computational analysis in Disinformation Studies.Nguyễn et al. (2022) qualitative study demonstrates that the leveraging of recognizable “historical frameworks” can increase the salience of disinformation messages, documenting the utilization of legacies of Western imperialism by disinformation providers who target US diaspora communities. We will identify similar leveraging of “historical frameworks” in Russian state media output.

This article suggests that studying the narratives Russian state propaganda invokes as frameworks for interpreting war-related events requires qualitative research that transcends content analysis based on keyword frequency. We must ascertain how state propaganda works in terms of the continuous discourses from which the narratives driving the Kremlin’s versions of events are derived, understanding discourses as “the conceptual terrain in which knowledge is formed and produced” (Hook 2001, 2), and narratives as “the everyday stories people tell within the context of institutional discourses” (Souto-Manning 2014, 163).⁵

In investigating this issue, we suggest that state-affiliated Russian media actors covering the war fully appreciate the capacity of narratives embedded in familiar identity discourses to feel “true.” Russophone critics of the war share this appreciation, and in challenging Kremlin messaging, they engage with the same identitarian discourses, filling them with different meanings and thereby highlighting the acutely dialogical process by which disinformation and counter-disinformation rhetoric is produced and consumed.

Conceptual framework, sources, and method

Our qualitative analysis focuses on how, by adopting discourses whose meanings resonate within a given culture, Russian state propaganda strives to bolster “the truth status” of its Ukraine war narratives by ensuring that they match prior audience assumptions (Entman, Matthes, and Pellicano 2009). We do not empirically test the efficacy of these efforts by examining audience responses to them; this would require a separate study. The discourses generate narratives pairing long historical roots with contemporary relevance. Hochschild (2016) termed such narratives “deep stories.” In their account of “deep stories” disseminated by right-wing US media, Polletta and Callahan (2017) refer to their “allusive” qualities, their ability to “occlude the relationship between particular and general,” to filter through a specific lens collective and personal histories and to adopt the form of a cosy, informal conversation with an audience addressed directly in the second person. These qualities were prominently displayed in Russian television talk shows during the first months of the war. They also characterize the social media posts of many Russophone war critics.

We have used three sets of sources chosen for their importance as reflected in studies of Russian media-consumption habits (see below). For comparative purposes we include Russia’s main international broadcaster to highlight audience-specific targeting strategies. First, we analyze statements by Vladimir Putin and his political advisors directing audiences towards the “correct” understanding of the invasion. Of particular importance are Putin’s widely mediated article of 12 July 2021 and his invasion-justifying speech on 21 February 2022 (Putin 2021, 2022a).

Of further significance are pronouncements by three of Putin’s political aides – Vladislav Surkov, Vladimir Medinsky, and Sergei Karaganov – who share a conviction that Ukraine’s separation from Russia is a temporary aberration. A week before Putin’s speech of 21 February, Surkov (2022) provided his own justification of the war. After serving as the Kremlin’s PR mouthpiece in 1999–2011, from 2013 to 2020 Surkov acted as Putin’s aide with responsibility for policies towards Ukraine, while maintaining that Ukraine did not constitute a legitimate entity and that its relationship with Russia should be imposed through “force.”⁶ In the run-up to the invasion, Medinsky, Putin’s advisor on the politics of history and Russia’s negotiator with Ukraine during the invasion, represented Putin as a figure through whom the destiny that “God gave us” was being enacted (Medinsky 2021). Immediately following Putin’s February speech, Karaganov, who heads one of the oldest pro-Kremlin think tanks and was international relations advisor to both Putin and Yeltsin, released a lengthy rationale for the invasion (Karaganov 2022). These figures offered the basic frames for state media’s war-justifying narratives (Alyukov, Kunilovskaya, and Semenov 2022a).

As we will show, the discourses these figures draw on are grounded in Russian national myths that equate “Russia” with its empire and represent Ukraine as integral to Russia. Of tsarist origins, they were modified in the Soviet era and questioned only superficially in the 1990s (Tolz 1998). They thus have a long durability, including during Yeltsin’s era (Tolz 1998). Yet in the 1990s, foreign policy actions were underpinned by political realities, including the signing of the 1997 Inter-state Treaty in which Russia acknowledged Ukraine’s current borders (Tolz 2002). In an indication of the importance of the conscious choices that politicians make when invoking (or not) specific national myths, Putin’s government has actively used historical narratives in direct contradiction to current reality to justify regime-legitimizing policies, including war.

Our second source is the output of three main state-funded television channels, two aimed at domestic and one at foreign audiences. In the first three months since the invasion, most of the output on the two domestic channels (Channel 1 and Rossiya) consisted of war-related talk shows,⁷ with the intermittent broadcasting of news bulletins. We followed the three shows that together accounted for the greatest amount of airtime – Channel 1’s “Bol’shaya igra” (The Great Game), and Rossiya’s “60 minut” (60 Minutes) and “Soloviev Live.”

Television remains Russia’s predominant news source. According to a November 2022 Levada-Center poll, 64% of respondents mentioned regular consumption of television, followed by the Internet at 32%. Importantly, the same poll demonstrated that only 49% trusted television news reporting.⁸ However, Alyukov (2022) and Szostek (2018) documented how, despite distrusting Russian television coverage of Ukraine, when interviewed, viewers nevertheless reproduced its cliches.

To ascertain how the war coverage is discursively framed to appeal to specific publics, we compared domestic television broadcasts with the output of RT’s online news reports and op-eds in English and Russian. RT’s Anglophone output is aimed at global audiences, and, since February 2022, it has increasingly begun targeting it to non-Western regions, including Africa (Sguazzin 2022). RT’s reporting initially differed from that of its domestic counterparts, as well as across its language services. RT International continued to reflect a broader range of opinions than RT Russian and domestic television channels, calling Russia’s actions against Ukraine an “attack” or “invasion,” rather than the Kremlin-endorsed “special operation.” RT International frequently deployed quotation marks to perform adherence to basic journalistic standards. Hyper-partisan positions were reserved for op-eds. In contrast, RT Russian, aimed at Russophone audiences at home and abroad, cleaved more closely to domestic television coverage. Overall, the war was prominent, but not necessarily dominant, on RT International news bulletins, which downplayed it by comparison with RT Russian, Russian domestic broadcasters, and Western media.

Our third set of sources were RIA Novosti op-eds. Belokrysova et al. (2022) demonstrate that, apart from television news bulletins, war supporters most frequently consult RIA and TASS news agencies for information about events in Ukraine. These state-owned outlets are algorithmically prioritized by Russia’s most-used search agent Yandex. A one-week comparison of the outputs of these two agencies suggests a close similarity in the adopted narratives. Of the two, we chose RIA Novosti because of its propensity to publish bold op-eds that clearly spelled out the official line as the war proceeded.

We followed this coverage daily throughout the first three months of the war, shifting to focusing on notable developments over the subsequent three months, and creating a dataset of invasion-justifying media reports. At the time, access to Russian state media output was affected by bans imposed in the UK. Channel 1’s livestream (1tv.live) was accessible on iPhones via the Safari browser. Existing versions of RT International’s News App remained accessible, despite its removal from the Apple App Store. RT Russian, along with Rossiya’s programs, were accessed through VPNs and the Tor browser.

Russian state media coverage interacted with that of Russian-language oppositional media which, in principle, Russian citizens could access and which, therefore, state propaganda actors needed to take into account as part of the dialogic disinformation dynamic whose features we aim to capture in this article. We therefore monitored two oppositional Telegram channels, “Solov’inyi pomet” (Nightingale’s Droppings)⁹ and “Kremlevskii tsirk” (The Kremlin’s Circus). Telegram has the largest component of oppositional output among Russian social media platforms (Alyukov, Kunilovskaya, and Semenov 2022b; Belokrysova et al. 2022). The two channels we selected were specifically established by journalists, including some who resigned from state media after the invasion, to challenge and ridicule state media propaganda. As a supplement, we followed the YouTube channels of Russian journalists critical of Putin, as well as Novaya gazeta Europe, which interviewed prominent Russian anti-war citizens (Belokrysova et al. 2022). Within our dataset, we traced war narratives identified through close reading of the sources to familiar identitarian discourses – historical, cultural, and civilizational.

Within a globally networked world, authoritarian regimes reliant on propaganda for the legitimation of their power appreciate the importance of narratives framed by ideational-identitarian discourses (Kneuer 2017; Guriev and Treisman 2022). In her analysis of these legitimation strategies, Kneuer distinguishes between what she calls the “missions” favored by contemporary authoritarian regimes and their twentieth-century predecessors’ use of systematically developed ideologies. “missions” as discursive and performative constructs are articulated situationally around promises to deliver national security and solve socio-economic problems as they arise. Unlike ideologies, missions “are substantially flexible and modularly constituted,” and constantly adapted to fit changing conditions (Kneuer 2017, 184). Given the growing importance of identity-related issues in a world where many communities are challenged by globalization (Michlin-Shapir 2021), authoritarian actors inevitably engage in intensive ideational-identitarian messaging when discursively constructing their missions. When the delivery of promises of security and prosperity is threatened, and the erosion of democratic rights requires justification, ideational-identitarian messaging intensifies (Kneuer 2017). We witnessed a sharp increase in ideational-identitarian messaging in Russian state media over the last decade (Tolz and Teper 2018). Its ratcheting up in the context of full-scale war was therefore predictable.

We identified three recurring ideational-identitarian discourses common to many contexts but with specific resonances in Russia: those of colonialism/de-colonization; imperialism (associated here with the terms “historical Russia” [istoricheskaya Rossiya] and “the Russian World” [russkii mir]); and the imaginary West (articulated in the form of kollektivnyi Zapad and linked to the term “[neo-]liberal order”). During the first two months since the invasion, several different justificatory narratives emerged in the Russian mediasphere. However, they tend to reference the same set of discourses. The narratives often revolve around notions of “the [Russian] people” and “Ukraine,” which serve as floating signifiers linked relationally to specific meanings, and with reference to two further relationally interpreted concepts—“fascism/Nazism” and “genocide.”¹⁰ In line with how “the people” are defined in populist communications (Aalberg and Esser 2016; Block and Negrine 2017), Russian state media constructions of “the Russian people” deny not only diversity within the Russian Federation, but also between contemporary Russia and Ukraine. The terms are evoked dialogically, including in response to accusations that Russia is itself a genocidal fascist state.

We will now turn to the three overarching discourses adopted by Kremlin-affiliated actors, before discussing the meanings attributed to floating signifiers within the justificatory narratives. We will then explore what happens when these discourses are used to critique Russia’s actions, concluding with observations regarding the implications of our research for the study of state propaganda, and for counter-disinformation practices.

The discourse of colonialism/decolonization

Following the break-up of the USSR, post-colonial reflections on Russia’s imperial policies had little traction in Russian state-aligned discourse (Tolz 2020). At first glance, therefore, it seems surprising that references to colonialism and decolonization have become prominent in the Kremlin’s justification for, and state media coverage of, the war. Yet, the meanings attributed to colonialism and decolonization help explain their presence within dominant war narratives wherein critics of the invasion are portrayed as the West’s “fifth column,” and the idea of invading Ukraine is depicted as a defensive act designed to prevent a Western-inspired attack on Russia.

Prior to the war (and the 2014 Ukraine crisis), Russian official discourse did reference decolonization and imperialism (see next section), but usually using the globally accepted lexicon of international relations (the “Russia as a Great Power” narrative), soft power (the Russian World initiative), or international law (the “sovereignty” and “sovereign democracy” narratives articulated by Surkov as a subtle version of decolonization discourse). The war supplanted these more moderate variants with overtly provocative imperialist and colonialism/decolonization narratives, confirming the complex lineage of Kremlin messaging.

The creation of meaning around the concepts of colonialism and decolonization reflects the interplay between their pre-revolutionary and Soviet understandings, and their re-invention post-1991. A significant pre-revolutionary take on colonialism is traceable to the Slavophile, Aleksei Khomyakov, who complained in 1847 that Peter the Great’s reforms had contaminated Russia’s indigenous “internal life” with western European influences, turning Russia into “a colony” [koloniya] of “European eclectics” [evropeiskie eklektiki]. Paradoxically, the colonizers were for Khomyakov not foreign military forces but Russia’s own elites, who had internalized European ideas at odds with indigenous practices. Like future postcolonial theorists who emphasized the centrality of culture to European colonial projects, Slavophiles saw Europe’s cultural domination of the world as having more profoundly negative effects than military and political intervention. Several late imperial Russian authors, particularly in the émigré Eurasian movement in the 1920s, echoed this interpretation (Tolz 2020). A Soviet Eurasianist revival dating to the 1980s underpinned many post-1991 Russian nationalist claims about Western intellectual colonization.

In the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Karaganov, who has advanced such arguments since the 1990s, argued in a repeatedly promoted RT International op-ed that “[w]e still don’t have the courage to acknowledge that the scientific and ideological worldview we’ve had for the last forty to fifty years is obsolete and/or was intended to serve foreign elites … ” (Karaganov 2022). The claim that de-Nazification of Ukraine should begin with “de-colonization of Russia” including liberation from its pro-Western cultural elites, was then echoed across our selected media outlets (Savelev 2022).

The idea of Russia’s political subjugation and early-twentieth-century claims that Russia is the West’s economic colony (Tolz 2020) were also publicized, following the collapse of the USSR, by authors who explain global developments through the prism of conspiracy theories. A good example is the prolific publicist, Nikolai Starikov, who became an active participant in war-justifying television shows that we monitored. Since the early 2000s, he has complained that “Anglo-Saxons” imposed their colonial regime on Russia (Starikov 2012) and that, whereas under Putin Russia had gained more political sovereignty, it remained the West’s economic colony (Sputnik News [Russian], 8 October 2021). In Channel 1’s “Bol’shaya igra” on 26 April 2022, he depicted the Ukraine war as Russia’s liberation from “Anglo-Saxon colonialism.”

Simultaneously, Russia is claimed to be liberating Ukraine from Western colonialism, a narrative foregrounded in Putin’s pre-war speech when he wondered whether Ukrainians understood that “their country has been … reduced to the level of a [Western] colony with a puppet government” (Putin 2022a). Putin’s words were repeated throughout state media (“Bol’shaya igra,” 24 February 2022; RT News, 21–22 February 2022). In justifying the war, domestic television featured the two narrative variants of colonialism/decolonization discourse with equal regularity. On RT International, by contrast, claims that Russia required decolonization (in relation to Western influences) were rare (one such example is Karaganov 2022). Instead, colonialism/decolonization discourse tended to underpin narratives of Russia as a power capable of liberating Ukraine and the non-Western world from Western colonial hegemony (Kholmogorov 2022; Timofeev 2022). As in the Soviet era, today such discursive framing resonates with RT’s non-Western audiences, and with the Western far left (Kovalik 2022).

State-affiliated media consistently project accusations previously leveled against Russia’s political elites onto Ukraine, portrayed as a colony and anti-Russian Western instrument. Echoing Starikov’s claims that local elites in colonized societies trade the well-being of their own people for the “beads” of colonizers (Starikov 2012), Putin accused “the Ukrainian oligarchic elites” of making “a pro-Western civilizational choice” “to safeguard billions of dollars stolen by the oligarchs from the Ukrainian people and hidden in Western banks” (Putin 2022a). Karaganov branded Ukrainian politicians “anti-national” and “corrupted by the West” (Karaganov 2022).

The discourse of imperialism

Whereas accusations of colonialism were reserved for others, the discourse of imperialism, like that of decolonization, was also applied to the Russian Self. This unexpected utilization of imperial discourse was more prominent on domestic television than on RT, in an apparent recognition that, within international audiences, “imperialism” has a predominantly negative connotation. Domestic state media efforts to imbue the notions of “Russian empire” and “Russian imperialism” with positive meanings correlated with the identitarian preferences of Russian citizens as expressed in opinion polls and following intensive state-sponsored identitarian messaging over the past two decades. The Levada-Center’s polls on the issue of “Russian national identity” demonstrate growing popular acceptance of this imperially inflected identity. A 2018 Levada poll found that 75% of respondents agreed with the proposition that “Russia should retain Great Power status,” compared to 31% in 1999. The same poll revealed that belief in the idea of the Russian people (russkii narod) as “exceptional” and having “a special place in history” grew to 62% in 2018, compared to 13% in 1992. Finally, it confirmed that the imperialism discourse that underpinned war-justifying narratives by evoking historically distant events had strong resonance; the most common response (53%) to a question about what comes first to mind when thinking “about your people” (o vashem narode) was “our past, our history” (a significant rise from 34% in 1994).¹¹

The depiction of Russia’s policy as a continuation of its historical empire-building differentiated domestic media coverage of the full-scale Ukraine invasion from that of the Crimea annexation, when Russia’s neo-imperial ambitions were systematically denied, its actions described as the reunification of an ethnically defined nation (Teper 2016). The imperialist discourse generated conflicting narratives within individual media outlets, as well as across domestic media and RT: one tracing the Russia-Ukraine conflict to Western/US intrusion, and another depicting the “special operation” as a means of recreating a “historical Russia” congruent with the tsarist empire and the USSR. In these contrasting narratives, “imperialism” attracts different meanings, associated respectively with the Cold War period, when it was attributed solely to Western powers, and to the tsarist era when the transnational discourse of empire as a polity claimed benefits for the colonized (Aust, Vulpius, and Miller 2010). From the 1930s (Tillett 1969), official Soviet discourse incorporated the idea of tsarist Russia as the benefactor of its conquered non-Russian territories. Moreover, in justifying Russia’s actions in Ukraine, this discourse exploits the wounded pride experienced by Russian citizens following the USSR’s collapse. This sense has informed state-sponsored ideational-identitarian messaging throughout Putin’s tenure (Kolso and Blakkisrud 2016).

Unsurprisingly, given the war context, accusations of imperialism frequently targeted the United States. Ukraine and other states were portrayed as victims of American imperialism, which also threatens Russia. In these narratives, the concept of imperialism was used interchangeably with colonialism. The Soviet-era cliché “the bestial grin of American imperialism” featured repeatedly in both the domestic media and RT (Kandelaki 2022), as this variant of imperialist discourse resonates equally with Russian and foreign audiences.

Representations of US/NATO imperialism as the principal threat to world security created synergies linking Russian actors to the Western far left, and to anti-imperial sentiment in the Global South. For example, television channels, including RT International, publicized a statement by the Democratic Socialists of America branding NATO’s “imperial expansionism” an important root-cause of Russia’s invasion (RT News, 28 February 2022). RT Russian quoted a Bolivian politician when promoting the claim that Russia’s military conflict with Ukraine was instigated by US imperialists (RT Novosti, 10 March 2022).

In relation to Russia, the discourse of imperialism played out in contradictory fashion. Domestic and international broadcasters replicated coverage of the annexation of Crimea, repeating Putin’s denial of Russian imperial ambition in relation to the invasion of Ukraine. The rebuttals were particularly prominent on RT, but also appeared in domestic media (RT News, 22–23 February 2022; 5 March 2022; Channel 1 “Primoi efir,” 22–23 February 2022; “Bol’shaya igra,” 5 March 2022; “60 minut,” 22–23 February 2022; 5 March 2022). Yet, across Russian (particularly domestic) television, RIA Novosti op-eds, and Putin’s media appearances, we find: (a) representations of Putin as one in a line of Russian imperial rulers; (b) unprecedented displays of Russian imperial symbols, celebrations of Russia’s imperial conquests, and the systematic use of tsarist-era terminology; (c) explicit calls to recreate the empire; and (d) debates around the location of the new borders of the expanding Russian state.

The imperial lexicon was primarily invoked to strengthen the cult of Putin. The main purpose of RIA Novosti’s main article justifying the invasion on 24 February was to situate Putin within the pantheon of Russian imperial and Soviet rulers, a narrative embraced by other state propagandists (Alksnis 2022). Putin’s speeches were filmed against a golden statue of Catherine the Great, as he quoted her statements on the conquest of territories in what is now southern Ukraine (Channel 1 “Primoi efir,” 8 March 2022).

Reflecting the increasing militarization of public discourse (Pynnöniemi 2021), Russia’s imperial legacy was often represented via quotes from imperial army officers, especially one by a certain Captain Nevelski to the effect that “[a]ny territory where the Russian flag has been raised at least once is Russian territory forever” (e.g. “Bol’shaya igra,” 25 March 2022). In their RT op-eds, Karaganov and a Russian nationalist author, Egor Kholmogorov, evoked past Russian military successes in territorial battles with rival empires (Karaganov 2022; Kholmogorov 2022).

Domestic state media agitated for the recreation of the Russian empire, systematically deploying pre-revolutionary terms, especially in the first two months of the war. Of particular significance is the term “historical Russia,” which was equated with the tsarist empire and the Soviet Union. Putin foregrounded this association in the Nezavisimaya gazeta article that launched his Putin (2012) presidential campaign, dating Russia’s foundation to the eighteenth century, i.e. when the name Rossiiskaya imperiya (Russian Empire) was introduced (Putin 2012). Since then, references to istoricheskaya Rossiya as well as bol’shaya Rossiya (great Russia) have appeared periodically in state-funded media. These notions were endorsed by Medinsky during his ministership (Medinsky 2015) and further referenced in Putin’s 12 July 2021 article and 21 February 2022 speech.

Putin probably appropriated the term istoricheskaya Rossiya from his favorite Russian philosopher, Ivan Ilyin, who, like other White émigré authors, regularly used it. While critical of the Bolshevik government, these figures saw the borders of the Soviet Union as “just” (pravye), because of their rough congruence with those of “historical Russia.” Traceable to conservative Russian publicist Mikhail Katkov, who in the 1880s re-imagined imperial Russia in national terms (Oleinikov 2001), istoricheskaya Rossiya was a dominant discursive device in Russian domestic state media war coverage, legitimizing statements such as the assertion that, by invading Ukraine, “Russia has come to claim back its own” (prishla za svoim) (Alksnis 2022).

The extremism characterizing the version of Russian imperialist discourse that played out in domestic media war coverage reflected that version’s portrayal of imperialism as a positive force. This context, with Russia advancing military goals openly associated with its great imperial past, accounts for the shocking concept of de-Ukranization (Medvedev 2022). By openly embracing colonial subjugation, the term acquires potential genocidal meaning. Indeed, certain Russian media personalities linked de-Ukrainization explicitly to the “legitimate” slaughter of masses of people, including Soloviev’s proposal to kill “as many Ukrainians as possible” (“Soloviev Live,” 5 April 2022; see also Sergeitsev 2022). Thus, the de-Ukrainization narrative provided the imperial counterpart to that of pseudo anti-colonial de-Nazification.

In the first three months of the war, vestiges of the staged pluralism that had earlier characterized Channel 1 and Rossiya talk shows and involved the inclusion of token Kremlin-critical participants were largely abandoned. However, as Russia’s military campaign began to suffer setbacks, expressions of dissent – some calling for still greater aggression, others questioning the wisdom of the “special military operation” altogether – began surfacing (e.g. “Soloviev Live,” 9 September 2022). The main debate on domestic channels centered on where Russia’s imperial revanchism should stop. War supporters competed with one another in the outrageousness of their claims. Soloviev suggested in one show that he would have preferred to live in the nineteenth century when “Poland, Finland, and Alaska were ours” (“Soloviev Live,” 28 March 2022). On 25 March, a significant segment of Channel 1’s flagship show, “The Great Game,” whose very title echoes imperialistic attitudes, addressed the issue of borders. Here, Vitaly Tretyakov, a 1990s liberal who in the 2000s had realigned with new Kremlin expectations, suggested that Russia might consider not incorporating within the borders it would “inevitably control” parts of Western Ukraine annexed by the USSR in 1939–1945. His position was rejected as potentially “treacherous” (predatel’skaya) by other participants whose territorial claims were more “patriotic.”

Given its different audience, RT was more cautious in supporting the recreation of a state within Russia’s former imperial borders, avoiding the term “historical Russia” other than in the context of Putin’s pronouncements of July 2021 and February 2022. Karaganov’s RT op-ed warned against “overextending” Russia into East European states formally independent during the Cold War (Karaganov 2022). An RT International op-ed penned by Kholmogorov glorified Russia’s imperial past, but limited its current territorial ambitions solely to Ukraine, particularly its eastern part, deploying the language of national re-unification rather than imperial revanchism (Kholmogorov 2022).

RT International’s continued attempt at staged pluralism was manifested in an op-ed by respected political analyst, Andrey Kortunov, who evoked imperial discourse to depict Russia’s war in Ukraine as the last act in the collapse of the Soviet empire (Kortunov 2022). This interpretation was so at odds with Russian official discourse (as we shall see, it echoed oppositional Russian-language media) that RT users’ comments included predictions that Kortunov would be poisoned with Novichok.

Civilizational discourse of the West

Narratives claiming that, rather than provoking war, Russia was defending itself from external aggression and pursuing the just goal of de-Nazifying Ukraine, are rooted in civilizational discourses widespread in postcolonial, developing countries and positing an imaginary, unified and hegemonic “West.” In Russia, the notion of a collective West (kollektivnyi Zapad) is commonly deployed. Contemporary identitarian narratives resemble their historical antecedents in centering on discursive constructs of “the West” as both Russia’s main “Other” and, occasionally, a component of Russian selfhood. This latter function supports narratives relativizing Russia’s actions. The adjective “collective” emphasizes a “West” that includes all countries that followed the United States in imposing sanctions on Russia.

At the same time, Russian state media habitually differentiate the United States as the main culprit for global problems from “continental Europe,” which is represented more positively and in contrast to the “Anglo-Saxon” or “Atlantic” bloc. This tendency to fragment the West was foregrounded in state media coverage of potential disagreements between EU states around sanctions against Russia.

In the context of the anti-Western extremism characterizing Russian public discourse since Putin’s 2007 Munich speech,¹² representations of a Western proxy war on Russia conducted via Ukraine resonated with Russian audiences perturbed by sanctions and the exclusion of Russian cultural and sports organizations and individuals from international forums (Burtin 2022). Such representations also played into anti-Western sentiments in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America (Wintour 2022), hence their reflection in RT’s output across its different language channels (Kovalik 2022; Lukyanov 2022). Responses to the invasion of Ukraine accorded unprecedented significance to notions of Western “Russophobia” dating to the nineteenth century and popular with Russian media actors since 2012 (Robinson 2019).

The civilizational discourse of the West underpins narratives linking the war to the anticipated collapse of the liberal world order. RIA Novosti predicted “the inevitable dismantling of the Atlantic world order” (Alksnis 2022). Karaganov mused that “the collective West” “cannot force itself to believe” that the dominance of the liberal order was coming to an end (Karaganov 2022). Across Russian state television, viewers were invited to celebrate this realization and to derive pride from Russia’s purported rise as “an agent of cardinal change” (Lukyanov 2022; see also Korovin 2022; RT Russian “Prekrasnaya Rossiya bu-bu-bu,” 24 March 2022). Already ubiquitous coverage of the West’s “moral degradation – its rejection of history, homeland, gender, and beliefs,” as well as its “aggressive LGBT and ultra-feminist movements” (Karaganov 2022)—further increased during the war. Domestic state media and RT treated anti-Russian sanctions, for example, almost exclusively with reference to their impact on Western societies.

Occasionally, however, Russia aligns itself with the West, especially in narratives aimed at Anglophone audiences. “The Russian operation is a mirror image of what the US and its allies have done more than once in recent decades in different parts of the world,” argued prominent political commentator, Fyodor Lukyanov, on RT International, echoing statements by Putin and the Russian Foreign Ministry to the same effect. Now, as in the eighteenth century, Russia learns from its Western teachers (Lukyanov 2022).

The meaning Russian state media attributed to the “liberal order” resembles that assigned to it by the Western (far-)right. A shared belief that traditional Christian values are under threat facilitates synergies in interpretations of Russia’s war on Ukraine. In the first three months of the invasion, Russian media featured prominent US critics of the liberal order, including Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, both of whom attacked the Biden administration’s position on Ukraine (RT News, 18 March 2022; Channel 1 “Primoi efir,” 18 March 2022). Carlson’s faith in official Russian sources was widely aired by international and domestic Russian outlets (Pengelly 2022).

The floating signifiers of war narratives

Narratives shaped by the discourses of colonialism, imperialism, and the civilizational West featured frequent references to the Russian people (russkii narod), Ukraine, fascism/Nazism, and genocide. These terms acted as floating signifiers, capable of acquiring different interpretations in specific contexts. The unusually fluid meanings attached to “Ukraine” were articulated in reaction to a peculiar situation. According to Putin and other Russian policymakers, Ukraine’s very existence is an affront to propriety; the discursive denial of Ukrainian nationhood here collides with reality. The fluctuating definitions of “Ukraine” in Russian state media that have oscillated from positive (as “part of Russia”) to negative (as “anti-Russia”) correlates to fluctuating popular attitudes towards Ukraine recorded in Levada’s polls since 2014.¹³

Objections to Ukraine’s rightful place on the world map were already implicit in Putin’s (2013) Valdai speech (Putin 2013). Against this backdrop, Kremlin discourse has redefined the notion of the Russian people. Official re-legitimation has been accorded to three terms associated with the tsarist period – the triune Russian people (triedinyi russkii narod), the pan-Russian (obshcherusskii) people, and the big (bol’shoi) Russian people, combining the entire Slavic population of the empire (Putin 2021; Alksnis 2022). These terms lacked traction during the Soviet era when a separate Ukrainian nationality was officially recognized. Early in the war, these terms recurred throughout Russian domestic media but owing to their lack of resonance for foreign audiences, they were avoided by RT, other than in its Russian-language output and in the context of Putin’s statements (RT Russian Novosti, 12 July 2021).

The reappearance of “the triune Russian nation” in contemporary Russian public discourse dates to the 1990s, when it was used almost exclusively by extreme radicals (Tolz 1998). In 2010, three years before Putin’s decision to proclaim Russians and Ukrainians as part of a single nation, even the state-funded Russian World Foundation, which, from its establishment in 2007, has tended to equate “Russia” with its empire, described the view soon to be adopted by Putin as “extreme” (Yazykovoe zakonodatel’stvo Ukrainy 2010, 2).

The corollary of the absent Ukrainian nation is an illegitimate Ukrainian state. On the eve of the invasion, Rossiya-24 presented a map depicting “Ukraine” contained within its “legitimate borders” (Zinchenko 2022), marking a territory far smaller than the existing state (Figure 1). The remainder of that state was represented as “gifts” from Russian tsars and Soviet leaders. The multiplicity of meanings attributed to “Ukraine,” depending on immediate political needs, were visualised in numerous other maps featured on pro-Kremlin internet sites where the country appeared within diminished borders or disappeared altogether.¹⁴

Figure 1. The Rossiya-24 map visualizing Putin’s interpretation of Ukraine’s history (23 February 2022).

The deep-rooted notion of Ukraine as integral to Russian selfhood expressed in assertions such as “Ukraine is our historical land” (Putin 2021; Kholmogorov 2022) and “Russia perceives Ukraine as part of itself” (Alksnis 2022) has been a cornerstone of the Kremlin’s narrative for a decade. It is not the singlehanded creation of the Putin regime; the sense of Russia’s historical unity with Ukraine shaped the perceptions of Russian elites and publics throughout the 1990s, with leading figures, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his time a globally celebrated hero of dissident resistance to Soviet oppression, expressing growing frustration with Ukraine’s desire for independent statehood.¹⁵

An important, yet transient, change in representations of Ukraine within Russian public discourse occurred following the signing in May 1997 of the Russian-Ukrainian Inter-state Treaty and its ratification by the upper chamber of the Russian parliament in 1999. In this context, for the first time, popular media outlets began attributing distinct histories and identities to Ukraine and Russia. Of particular significance was the appearance of new historical narratives that located the origins of Russian statehood not in Kyiv, but in centers of medieval Rus now located in the Russian Federation. However, this recognition of new geopolitical realities was short lived, and by 2002, revisionist accounts of Russian-Ukrainian relations were disappearing from popular media (Tolz 2002).

When Ukraine recaptured the attention of Putin’s elites, understandings of the origins of modern Ukrainian nationhood embraced a late tsarist narrative attributing Ukraine’s separate identity to anti-Russian Western intrigues, as well as to Lenin’s nationalities policies, which were interpreted as having been designed at the expense of the former empire’s ethnic Russian core. This interpretation systematically underpinned Russia’s policy towards Ukraine during the past decade, against the backdrop of the republishing of texts by White émigré figures whose view of Ukraine as a historical anomaly is shared by current Russian politicians and media figures (Volkonsky [1920] 2015; Kuzio 2022).

Another variant of the historical anomaly narrative is that of Ukraine as an “Anti-Russia”—both an illicit negation of the idea of Ukraine as integral to Russian selfhood and a reflection of portrayals from a bygone era of Ukraine as the product of an anti-Russian intrigue. The expression “Anti-Russia,” common in official discourse on contemporary Ukraine, became a political meme following its use in Putin’s 12 July 2021 article. It was coined at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century by officers from the Russian and former Soviet security services who authored several books centering on Western conspiracies to destroy Russia in a series titled Project Anti-Russia (Proekt AntiRossiya).¹⁶ The concept exposes the contradictions underwriting much contemporary Russian identity discourse – its struggle to recognize that which is non-Russian and different as anything other than an extension or an inversion of the sameness of the Russian self, with both Ukraine and the West oscillating between these two functions (Hutchings 2022). The oscillations are driven by attempts to appropriate an eclectic legacy, including pre-revolutionary sources, anti-communist White émigré literature, and writings by Soviet and current intelligence officers.

Perceived as constituent members of russkii narod, the Ukrainian people are contrasted to the country’s elites who are also represented in a contradictory manner. In narratives grounded in the discourse of colonialism and decolonization, they appear as corrupt individuals who serve “the collective West” as a colonial power and who have “no national idea to fight for” (Karaganov 2022). In contrast, in kollektivnyi Zapad narratives derived from the civilizational discourse of the West, Ukrainian political leaders are described as “poisoned by the pathogen of ethnic nationalism” (Karaganov 2022).

The latter is then equated with fascism/Nazism and represented, like liberal democracy, as a Western invention alien to Russian traditions. Russia’s goal of “de-Nazifying” Ukraine was presented similarly by RT and domestic media as its simultaneous “de-Westernization” and its return to the Russian fold. The “fascism/Nazism” accusation referencing Nazi Germany’s genocidal practices represents a particularly powerful form of othering in the Russian context, given the legacy of the Second World War that Putin’s government turned into post-Soviet Russia’s key foundation myth two decades ago (Hutchings and Rulyova 2008). The “genocide” accusation was systematically leveled against Ukraine and denied explicitly or implicitly in relation to Russia (RT International News, 15 February 2022, 18 February 2022, 27 February 2022, 13 April 2022, 22 April 2022, 4 May 2022; RT Russian Novosti, 18 February 2022, 15 March 2022, 7 April 2022, 16 April 22). However, powerful identitarian discourses and national myths also inform oppositional critiques of government control over messaging that, even within Russia, cannot be fully silenced.

Countering disinformation through discursive inversions

War critics appreciate the importance of rebutting the underlying discursive framing of official war-justifying narratives. Oppositional Telegram and YouTube channels more often ridiculed and inverted the meanings of state-sponsored pronouncements than fact-checked them. The profile of posts on “Solovinyi pomet” on 4 April 2022, when the Bucha atrocities dominated media coverage, is typical. Only two of the 14 posts addressed Russia’s denials of culpability through fact-checking; 12 posts deconstructed Kremlin narratives and their framing discourses through sarcasm, or by repurposing the civilizational discourse of the West and inverting the meaning of the floating signifier “fascism/Nazism.”

Disinformation and counter-disinformation operate in an acutely relational meaning structure. In our sample, war critics actively repurposed the discourses of imperialism and the West as Russia’s Other. The invasion as a means of revitalizing “historical Russia” was recast as “the last act of Russian imperialism” presaging the potential break-up of the Russian Federation (Albats 2022; Pivovarov 2022; Shevchenko 2022; Yakovenko 2022)—a more acute articulation of Kortunov’s out-of-line RT International argument. The West as Russia’s Other was repurposed in Telegram posts contrasting the economic inferiority of run-down Russian towns with prosperous Western ones, and the military inferiority of its Soviet-era military equipment with those made available to Ukraine by NATO.

Similar discursive inversions shaped visually illustrated posts titled “the Russian World.” This identitarian pro-Kremlin concept dating to the twenty-first century’s first decade is overtly irridentist and promotes a benign view of Russian imperialism, also implying Russia’s uniqueness and superiority over the west (Laruelle 2015). Oppositional Telegram posts offered alternative images of the “Russian World,” depicting either the Russian army’s destruction of Ukrainian settlements and people or the ruinous state of Russian towns. Russian state media’s replacement of “Russian World” narratives with those of “historical Russia” may well have been a response to this satirical critique, further demonstrating the dialogistic process within which both propaganda and its antidotes evolve.¹⁷

The greatest informational battle centered on the floating signifier “fascism/Nazism.” Ukraine also appropriated the World War II legacy, representing the current military conflict as its Great Patriotic War and the Russian forces as Nazi occupiers perpetrating genocide of the Ukrainian people. Ideas of Russia as a “fascist state” have been deployed by domestic Russian critics of the war, too (Yudin 2022). Multiple Telegram and YouTube posts highlighted the Putin regime’s “fascist nature,” accumulating hundreds of thousands of endorsements, including from self-identifying Russian citizens.

State-funded Russian propaganda, including state television coverage of the war, enables Kremlin critics to portray Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a manifestation of “Russian fascism,” for which the term rashizm, combining the words Russia and fascism, was coined. For example, interviewed on RT Russian, a Russian-backed Donbas separatist spoke of Russians and Ukrainians as a single nation whose children deserved equal protection, adding that all children deserved protection if they were “born with white skin.” Quickly removed from RuTube by RT’s management, the clip became available on Telegram and YouTube with RT’s logo prominently displayed.¹⁸

With unprecedented volumes of political content being generated in a fast-changing environment, similar faux pas abound on domestic television. For example, a participant in a Rossiya talk show made bizarre use of the term “genocide.” Repeating the common claim that “Russians” were collectively subjected to a genocide organized by the United States, which encouraged different groups of Russians to kill one another, he offered the following elaboration:

Imagine that you have cockroaches living in your kitchen. And you have managed to create conditions in which they start killing each other. You then keep feeding the losing side to ensure that the killing goes on for as long as possible. (“60 minut,” 22 April 2022).¹⁹

This imagery was not questioned by the show’s moderator presumably because it had been legitimized by Putin, who in his earlier speech branded critics of the war “insects” (Putin 2022b). While being televized live, Putin’s speech was immediately depicted on social media, including in Russia, as signalling the launch of a Fourth Reich.²⁰

For Russian state-affiliated actors some problems with adopting the notion of “fascism/Nazism” arose from the tension between Soviet official WWII narratives and those in Putin’s Russia. One important component of the Soviet version of the war’s legacy was the narrative of peace (Tumarkin 1994). A range of Soviet symbolic paraphernalia was produced around the slogans “No to War” and “Peace to the World.” The view that there should never be another world war was embraced not only by many ordinary Soviet citizens, but also by elites. Born in the post-war period, Putin and his entourage have no personal memories of the war capable of moderating their militaristic ambitions. During Putin’s tenure, the WWII myth has been used to militarize Russian society and to create a national self by othering Russia’s purported opponents (Pynnöniemi 2021). Soviet post-war peace discourse has no place in today’s state-sponsored narratives and commemorative practices.

This allowed domestic war critics to use Soviet anti-war slogans to protest Russia’s actions in Ukraine. A Soviet cartoon still available on YouTube in which children discover a sunken Nazi cruiser sporting an engraved letter Z – the approved symbol of Russia’s “special operation”²¹—offered the opportunity to highlight a surreal presaging of Putin’s own “fascism/Nazism.” This oppositional adoption of identitarian discourses troubles Russian authorities, as repressions against Russian citizens who publicly invoke Soviet anti-war symbols indicate. They are accused of disinformation even when they make no explicit reference to Russian actions in Ukraine. Their persecution results in a paradox whereby, amidst complaints that the West and the Ukrainian elites are “canceling” Russian culture,²² the systematic suppression of Russian anti-war sentiments effectively cancels elements of Soviet culture, current state propaganda references to the USSR as “historical Russia” notwithstanding (Info 2022). Moreover, by May 2022, the state media was referring to “de-Nazification” as Russia’s main goal in Ukraine much less frequently than in the previous two months, in an apparent recognition that some appropriations of the WWII legacy did not resonate with Russian citizens (Alyukov, Kunilovskaya, and Semenov 2022a).

Conclusion

State propaganda works at the level of discourses and narratives as well as that of individual facts. When producing narratives replete with factual distortions, Russian media actors embed them within familiar historical and cultural discourses and populate them with floating signifiers filled with meanings expected to resonate with segments of the public by addressing their current concerns and exploiting identitarian needs shaped by nostalgia for Russia’s former “great power” status. Post-1991, Russian state spokespeople, especially under Putin, have linked this status to Russia’s imperial and Soviet legacies. Within official war justifications, the dominance of narratives grounded in identitarian discourses indicates a keen appreciation by Russian elites of the global importance of identity issues, and of the affective force of populist communication styles that exploit the emotive power of identitarian claims. Appreciating that these claims have geopolitical and cultural specificities, RT reconfigures the narratives it disseminates accordingly. The self-reinforcing logic provided by narratives driven by powerful, historically rooted discourses protects imaginary realities from external challenges, including unsettling factual evidence. This phenomenon applies not just to authoritarian contexts, but also, as Polletta and Callahan (2017) illustrate, globally.

We thus return to Scottie Nell Hughes’s comment on RT quoted at the beginning. What she implies is that knowledge of historical Russian-Ukrainian relations as represented in official Russian pronouncements explains (and apparently justifies) Kremlin actions. If, according to these interpretations, Ukrainians are members of “the triune Russian nation,” and the military conflict was solely instigated by NATO, then Zakharova’s statement – made at a time when the Kremlin still believed in a swift victory – that on 24 February Russia “ended the war” ceased to be a barefaced lie and acquired the status of “truth”; it is the “absurd” idea of Russia “invading itself” which becomes fantastically false, as a separate RIA Novosti op-ed on the day of the invasion maintained (Alksnis 2022). Imperialist propaganda narratives and the deliberate deceit designated by “disinformation” are thus closely allied, but not identical.

For domestic audiences, Russia’s state-affiliated actors portray its mission in Ukraine as a noble struggle to regain former imperial territories, evoking tsarist-era thinking and discarding twentieth-century de-colonization agendas. This history informed Lenin’s understanding of nation- and state-building and subsequent official Soviet discourse. The Kremlin’s current decolonization rhetoric, while marginalizing Soviet interpretations, is traceable to nineteenth-century Slavophile and anti-Soviet émigré thinkers in the form of a paranoid vision of Western imperial designs on Russia. Yet, paradoxically, contradictory Soviet appropriations of parts of Russia’s imperial legacy also help legitimize Russia’s actions in Ukraine as the rebuilding of a historically progressive empire.

Western observers and many Ukrainians stress that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. To properly understand how Russian strategic thinking mutates, however, we must differentiate state media coverage of the annexation, which was justified in terms of a lingua-culturally driven need for Russian national reunification, from official accounts of the 2022 invasion, which openly adopted the rhetoric of imperial expansion (possibly corroborating Western fears that Russia was originally planning to extend its military offensive beyond Ukraine).

The failure critically to interrogate the legacy of imperialism in Russian state-sponsored discourses pre-dates Putin’s regime. It is the very embeddedness of imperial discourse within the wider Russian public sphere, as reflected in the opinion data we cited, that renders it unlikely to attract criticism from regular state propaganda consumers. Conversely, the flowering in the West of decolonization narratives critiquing European imperial arrogance of the very era glorified in Russian propaganda further de-legitimates its “truth status” among Putin’s critics at home and most audiences in the West, where the image of Ukraine as a historical victim of Russian colonial aggression exudes righteous veracity.

At the same time, the emphasis in Russian narratives on the victimization of both Russia and Ukraine by US imperialism/colonialism enhances their credibility among Western left-wing groups and wider non-Western audiences that share anti-American sentiments. These themes are particularly exploited by RT International. In turn, Russian narratives that adopt civilizational discourses in critiques of both the (neo)liberal order and postcolonial wokery gain traction not only domestically, but also among right-wing groupings in the US and elsewhere. Finally, alternative narratives by Russophone war critics prioritize repurposing the same identitarian discourses over mere fact-checking. Thus, any study of authoritarian state propaganda and disinformation should account for their acutely dialogical relationship with identitarian discourses prevalent among their target audiences, as well as narratives promoted by regime critics within the authoritarian states and abroad.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. https://ria.ru/20220224/spetsoperatsiya-1774802420.html.

2. https://euvsdisinfo.eu/still-at-war-russias-disinformation-targeting-ukraine/.

3. Chico and Simonx (2022) define Disinformation Studies as a “developing field … that focuses on studying multimodal forms of communication, which unintentionally (misinformation) or intentionally (disinformation) misinform audiences.”

4. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100349558;jsessionid=7320A4F31795A2672F3692C730AE6A5A.

5. We use the term “framing discourses” rather than the more commonly found “media frames,” because our analysis strives to avoid dealing in the fixed, abstract concepts – or “media frames”—from which actors purportedly make selections when constructing war-related narratives. Our analysis instead allows us to account for historically forged genealogies, as well as for contradictions and complexities in the “reasoning devices” facilitated by those discourses. In our approach we thus respond to Borah’s (2011) critique of the tendency among media frame analysts to isolate frames from the collective, interactive processes that generate them.

6. See Surkov’s interview of 11 June 2021: https://www.gazeta.ru/politics/news/2021/06/11/n_16091756.shtml.

7. On the increased importance of talk shows for Russia’s political communication strategy since 2012, see Tolz and Teper (2018).

8. https://www.levada.ru/en/2022/11/10/the-main-sources-of-information-of-russians/.

9. The title is a play on words mocking the quality of the output of one of the main propagandists, Vladimir Soloviev.

10. We define a “floating signifier” as “a signifier that absorbs rather than emits meaning” (Buchanan 2010).

11. https://www.levada.ru/2019/01/17/natsionalnaya-identichnost-i-gordost/.

12. See, for example, https://www.levada.ru/en/2022/12/16/the-attitude-of-russians-to-countries-november-2022/.

13. See, for example, https://www.levada.ru/2021/12/17/rossijsko-ukrainskie-otnosheniya-10/.

14. Multiple examples can be identified through a search for “maps of Ukraine” (karty Ukrainy) on Russia’s main search engine Yandex.ru, which has complied with government demands to exclude anti-Kremlin sources from its search results.

15. In 2014, the main Russian government newspaper published an exposé of Solzhenitsyn’s evolving views on “the Ukrainian question” (https://rg.ru/2014/04/24/solzhenicyn.html).

16. https://eksmo.ru/series/proekt-antirossiya-ID3938/.

17. Our state media sample from the first three months of the war included strikingly low usage of the term “Russian World.”

18. The clip is accessible on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_LiEn6NPuI.

19. In this metaphor, the cockroaches are Russians and Ukrainians (both referred to in the program as “Russians”), whereas the actor feeding them is the West/NATO.

20. See multiple posts on the two monitored Telegram channels on 16 March 2022.

21. A 1939 German naval rearmament plan was code-named Z and destroyers bearing this insignia were produced. Russian propagandists invoking this symbol in the Ukraine war context appeared unaware of the parallel.

22. RT International included such stories on its news App almost daily. They also featured on domestic television.