Russian propagandists were never shy about the genocidal intent of Putin's great "de-nazification" of Ukraine. Over a year on, though, and with the threat of war crimes tribunals, they may come to regret their patriotic fervour. As Julia Davis notes, the case for the prosecution is in their own words:
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s elite propagandists wanted to drink champagne in the studio to properly celebrate the moment. Head of state propaganda agency, RT, Margarita Simonyan, expressed “an overwhelming sense of euphoria” and added: “I’ve been waiting eight years for this . . . it finally happened. This is true happiness.”
With the bloody all-out invasion now in its second year, the euphoria has been replaced by a lingering sense of dread, with Putin’s mouthpieces routinely fretting about the possibility of war crimes tribunals. The issue is playing on their minds....
From the lowliest pawns on Putin’s chess board to the queens of propaganda like Simonyan and Skabeeva, the state-controlled media has played a central part in prompting, encouraging, rationalizing, and normalizing the Kremlin’s massacre of its next-door neighbors.
It may be tempting to interpret such lurid language as silliness designed for a domestic audience. But the outpourings of the propaganda machine have often foreshadowed or justified serious acts of state violence against Ukraine, including the mass murder of civilians, the mass kidnapping of Ukrainian citizens, the weaponization of migrant flows, and the evisceration of the Ukrainian polity.
Examples of such talk are easy to find. They proliferate nightly on live TV. Before the full-fledged invasion, Russian state media favored the description of pro-independence Ukrainians as “pigs,” with corresponding cartoons featured on state television, where Ukraine’s language, food, and traditions were routinely mocked. Since February 2022, the descriptions have descended into the realm of open dehumanization. During his show in July, Solovyov said: “When a doctor is deworming a cat — for the doctor, it’s a special operation, for the worms, it’s a war, and for the cat, it’s a cleansing.”
In October, RT’s director of broadcasting, Anton Krasovsky, suggested drowning Ukrainian children, setting Ukrainian homes on fire — with the inhabitants inside — and alleged that Ukrainian grandmothers would gladly pay to be raped by Russian soldiers. He insisted that Ukraine should end in its current form, with its only surviving sliver zoned for pig rearing. Krasovsky felt the need to clarify that when he said “pigs,” he did not mean Ukrainian women.
In October, Pavel Gubarev, a Russian political figure who proclaimed himself the “People’s Governor” of the Donetsk Region in 2014 and later as leader of the Donbas People’s Militia, explained that Ukrainians were, “Russian people, possessed by the devil,” and that Russia’s aim was to “convince them” that they are not Ukrainian. He added: “But if you don’t want us to change your minds, then we will kill you. We will kill as many of you as we have to. We will kill 1 million or 5 million, we can exterminate all of you.”
Months earlier, in May, State Duma deputy Aleksey Zhuravlyov appeared on 60 Minutes to outline his calculations about the number of Ukrainians to be reeducated by “re-installing their brains,” as opposed to the millions who would refuse to abandon their Ukrainian identity and who must therefore be killed “A maximum of 5% are incurable. Simply put, 2 million people . . . These 2 million people should have left Ukraine, or must be denazified, which means to be destroyed.”
There is a widespread consensus in the state-controlled media that this so-called “denazification” means mass murder. In April, again on 60 Minutes, Zhuravlyov and Skabeeva concurred that this process is “accomplished by shooting, or ripping heads off.”...
It is easy enough to understand the link between talking points that routinely compare the Ukrainians to animals, bugs, or worms with atrocities like Bucha, the torture and murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war, attempts to freeze and starve civilians to death by destroying critical infrastructure and forcibly deporting Ukrainians — including children — to Russia.
Russian academics are happy to explain the logic of Kremlin-directed violence and to provide an intellectual gloss. It is explained that attacks to deprive Ukrainians of electricity, running water, and food are part of a bigger plan. So the forced movement of millions to Russia is to compensate for its severe demographic shortcomings, while 8 million more have been pushed westwards to overwhelm Europe and undermine its economy by creating a refugee crisis. In October, speaking on Solovyov’s show, Andrey Sidorov, Deputy Dean of world politics at Moscow State University, acknowledged that Ukraine’s destruction had a secondary benefit: “We should wait for the right moment and cause a migration crisis for Europe with a new influx of Ukrainians,” he said.
And in January, the host of Solovyov Live, Sergey Mardan, rejoiced at the souls forced to leave their homes and enter Putin’s Russia: “Look at how much the Motherland is spending to solve the demographic problem . . . We got these people [Ukrainians] for free, for nothing—approximately five million of them! Five million souls!”
In the world of Russian state TV, everyone has a soul, but not everyone has a right to live out their life. Some things are just more important, as Professor Elena Ponomareva of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations explained on Solovyov’s show in March: “Never let morality prevent you from doing the right thing. I understand the importance of a humanitarian component . . . but morality shouldn’t get in the way.”
It is not hard to imagine those words echoing in a courtroom, as the prosecution lays out its case against Professor Ponomareva and her co-defendants.
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