Vladimir Putin recycled a number of Russian propaganda narratives to justify the invasion of Ukraine and portray Russia as a victim of Western aggression. The false narratives were also doubled by blatant lies, such as the one that Russia did not threaten to use its nuclear weapons, or the promotion of revisionist theses, according to which Romania, Poland, Hungary (and Russia) have the right to take back territories from Ukraine.
Ukrainians were invented by the Poles and Austrians, but they are actually Russians. Ukraine is an artificial state, created by Lenin
Vladimir Putin devoted a large part of his speech to history, deliberately resorting to a confusion between the ancient Russians, the Slavs from whom modern Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are descended, and modern Russians, from the state of Russia. The Russian language, by the way, operates this distinction: Russsky refers to the old Russians (and the respective term is also used for the phrase Russky mir, the Russian world), while Rossiisky is used for the contemporary ones. The different historical and linguistic developments of those Slavs led to the emergence of different peoples, recorded throughout history. However, Putin and Russian historiography deny, for example, the Ukrainian presence in the Black Sea region after the establishment of the Zaporozhian Sich , made up of Old Ukrainian-speaking Cossacks who defended the southern borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for two centuries. Cossack churches, houses and cemeteries, with inscriptions in an ancient Ukrainian language, were flooded and destroyed as a result of the Soviet Union's building reservoirs and hydroelectric plants. The Ukrainian Cossack presence there is much older than the Russian one.
The Russian leader also referred to the Ukrainian state, described as a fruit of the Soviet era, more precisely a creation of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who allegedly took territories from Russia to create Soviet Ukraine. "All those territories became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, including the regions bordering the Black Sea and which became ours during the reign of Catherine II without any connection with Ukraine," Putin said.
In reality, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin was forced to create the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to defuse the tension following the Russo-Ukrainian War of 1917-1920. In the context of the Bolshevik revolution, the Ukrainian People's Republic was proclaimed in Kyiv in 1918, which had diplomatic relations with several states, including Romania . There was a Ukrainian diplomatic mission in Bucharest and a temporary Romanian diplomatic mission in Kyivv. The new Ukrainian state was conquered by the Bolsheviks in 1920. The Ukrainian SSR was created by the Bolsheviks to satisfy the demands of the Ukrainians to have their own national state and avoid a new civil war in the former Russian Empire. A series of sad pages in the history of the Ukrainian people followed, including the Holodomor of 1932-1933, organized by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin with the aim of destroying the Ukrainian national elite.
Hungary and Romania have the right to recover their territories occupied by the USSR
The same Stalin annexed territories of the states bordering the USSR - especially Poland and Romania - initially following the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, then as a result of the victory in the Second World War. Those territories were either transformed into republics (Moldova) or included in existing Soviet republics (Ukraine). After independence, the respective countries inherited the respective territories. Russia uses these historical realities to promote the thesis regarding the artificial nature of the Ukrainian state. Vladimir Putin told Tucker Carlson that the USSR took territories from Hungary and Romania , so these states would have had the right to get them back. In other words, Russia and all of Ukraine's neighbors have a right to Ukrainian territories. Historical arguments are used to exonerate Russia or to question the need to respect international law.
In reality, according to the norms of international law, a state’s border cannot be changed by military actions. Moreover, the past ownership of territories does not mean that a state has the right to recover it by force. In 1997, Romania and Ukraine signed a Treaty on good neigborly relations and cooperation , in which both states undertook to respect the existing borders. According to the Final Act of the Conference for security and cooperation in Europe, drawn up in Helsinki on August 1, 1975, the use of force, the threat of force or the change of internationally recognized borders is prohibited. The document is part of the domestic legislation of all states neighboring Ukraine.
Russia has not threatened Ukraine or the West with nuclear weapons
"They were using us to scare the world, saying that tomorrow Russia will use tactical nuclear weapons, or that tomorrow another type of weapons will be used, if not, then the day after tomorrow," Vladimir Putin said, calling Moscow's nuclear blackmail an invention of the Western leaders.
In reality, the nuclear threat has already become a tradition of political communication in Russia in recent years. For example, in September 2022 Putin stated: “Our country has weapons of mass destruction, some even more modern than NATO’s And if there is a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to the protection of our citizens, we will use all means at our disposal. And it's not a bluff."
Most of the time, Russia's nuclear blackmail has been verbalized by the vice-president of the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev. Last fall, the former Russian president stated that in case of a success of the Ukrainian army on the front, Russia would have to use the nuclear weapon. He also warned, in May 2023, that the West was grossly underestimating the risk of nuclear war over Ukraine, warning that Russia could launch a pre-emptive strike if Ukraine acquired nuclear weapons. It should be noted that Ukraine is not a nuclear state, nor does it have nuclear military programs.
In mid-January, Medvedev said that Russia may attack Ukraine or other states with nuclear weapons if Kyiv does not stop using long-range missiles to strike targets on Russian soil.
Russia never attacks first
Vladimir Putin also spoke about Russia’s peaceful nature, terming information in the Western media about Moscow's bellicose moves against NATO as attempts to sow panic. "We will attack only if Russia is attacked by Poland. Why? Because we have no interests in either Poland or Latvia. How would that help us? We have no interests there, but we only hear threats," the Russian leader said.
In reality, the same kind of speech was delivered by Putin around the full-scale war in Ukraine. It is an older metanarrative that Russia never attacks first, and that sometimes only preemptive military action is accepted. Only during the period since Putin has been in power, Russia has waged a brutal war in Chechnya, invaded Georgia in 2008, attacked Ukraine and seized Crimea in 2014, and then invaded Ukraine on a full scale in 2022.
On February 15, 2022, Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that the information appearing in the Western media about Russia’s preparations to invade Ukraine was "war propaganda". Her comments came shortly after the Russian Defense Ministry had announced the partial withdrawal of Russian troops deployed on the border with Ukraine. Nine days after, Vladimir Putin started the biggest war on the territory of Europe after the end of the Second World War.
Ukrainian elites are Nazi
Vladimir Putin once again accused the Ukrainian leadership of promoting Nazism. Putin says that Ukrainians have the right to consider themselves a separate people from Russians, but not based on Nazi ideology. "If someone considers themselves a people, they have every right to do so, but not on the basis of Nazism or Nazi ideology," Putin said, adding that the goal of "denazifying" Ukraine had not yet been achieved. The West was again accused of not noticing Nazism in Ukraine and supporting it to destroy Russia in the war.
In reality, to Russia, anything that contradicts its own vision of the correct political organization of its neighbors is Nazi. Nationalism and Nazism are often synonymous in the Russian Federation’s narratives. Regarding Nazism, as early as 2015 Ukraine banned Nazi and communist ideology by law. Moreover, since the proclamation of the independence of the Ukrainian state, no Nazi party or candidate has run in elections. Nationalist parties either did not pass the electoral threshold or, when they did, got only 6-8% of the number of mandates. The Russian press traditionally categorizes nationalist/identity-related manifestations in the ex-Soviet space as forms of Nazism.
A year after the launch of the full-scale invasion, the Russian press was claiming that the "special military operation" had saved Russia from NATO invasion and Ukrainian Nazism. The false narrative about Moscow showing restraint when bombing Ukraine , knowing that Ukrainians do not support the Nazi leaders in Kyiv, has often been promoted.
