Russian President Vladimir Putin has tried to justify Russia's attack on Ukraine, an illegal invasion that contravenes the United Nations Charter, with the construction of a speech that shows that the military operation was inescapable.
According to his narrative, based on false and crooked reasoning, Moscow intends to protect Ukrainian citizens, linked to Russians by "blood ties," from the policies of the Ukrainian government, which Kremlin propaganda calls a "neo-Nazi regime." ”.
In addition, according to his version, he tries to defend his own country from the threat of Ukraine, an "artificial" state that has the support of NATO and the West and that has come to infiltrate, says Moscow, sabotage commands in Russian territory.
These are some of the false arguments with which the Kremlin has fabricated its
casus belli
to attack the former Soviet republic:
1. Ukraine is a threat to Russia
In the days before the beginning of the invasion, both the leaders of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk and the Russian authorities denounced aggressions carried out by the Ukrainian forces.
However, many of these attacks appear to be false flag attacks, that is, a simulated offensive to fabricate an excuse against the adversary, according to EUvsDinsinfo, a European Union team specialized in combating Russian lies about Europe.
One of them is the one that occurred on February 21, when Russian security services reported an alleged bombing by Ukrainian forces against a Russian border checkpoint in the Rostov region, according to the Russian news agency TASS.
In the video that accompanied the information, of 37 seconds, a destroyed cabin appeared in a remote place,
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That same day, in Russian Telegram accounts, another video was broadcast that supposedly evidenced the entry of Ukrainian saboteurs into Russian territory and showed the destruction of two armored vehicles.
An analysis of both recordings, that of the destruction of the tanks and that of the border post, carried out by the Center for Information Resilience, shows that they were made in the same place, specifically, on the border between the Donetsk area under the command of pro-Russian separatists and Russia, not in an area controlled by Ukrainian forces.
Geolocation of explosion at Russian border post in Rostov Oblast [47.273672, 38.332292] h/t @zvalgasrytuose https://t.co/gDIEl4UnJR pic.twitter.com/Qud9VHklSf
— Benjamin (@hengenahm) February 21, 2022
With narratives so "absurd" and so easily detachable, there is the possibility that Putin intends, according to Eric Pardo, professor of International Relations at the University of Deusto and an expert on Russia and Ukraine, "to laugh at Westerners to caricature our 'lies ', like Western hypocrisy in the conflicts in Kosovo or Iraq”.
His goal, he continues, may be to show off his power and "show that he too can say and do whatever he wants."
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2. Ukraine is committing genocide in Donbas
The denunciation that Putin made during his speech on February 22, in which he announced the invasion of Ukraine, about the alleged genocide that Kiev is carrying out in the Ukrainian separatist territories of Donetsk and Lugansk, is not new.
However, this narrative, which resorts to the deadliest of crimes against humanity to portray Kiev as the worst of villains, intensified in the days leading up to the attack.
According to an analysis by EUvsDisinfo, the accusations of genocide that the pro-Kremlin media have launched against Ukraine in the days before the invasion have multiplied by five compared to the last six months.
However, there is no unbiased information about the alleged genocide.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch denounced in a 2016 report called
You Don't Exist
(You do not exist) that both the Ukrainian authorities and separatist forces had unlawfully and arbitrarily detained civilians during the 2014 conflict and subjected them to torture and ill-treatment.
However, although these crimes represent a violation of human rights, they do not constitute genocide, that is, the systematic extermination of a population.
There is no allusion to genocide either in the reports on Ukraine of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights or in those of the Special Mission of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) in the Ukrainian separatist region. of the Donbas.
3. Ukraine is a neo-Nazi regime
This false narrative, one of the favorites of the Kremlin, has its origin in the participation of violent groups of the extreme right in the Ukrainian mobilizations of the Maidan and in the early days of the Donbas war.
He avoids mentioning, for example, that the Ukrainian president, Volodímir Zelenski, is Russian-speaking and the son of Jews, like other government leaders, and that his party defends policies contrary to the far right, such as free abortion.
It is true that the Ukrainian government has had links with the extreme right.
"To give an example, the G7 came to address Ukraine during the 2019 presidential elections denouncing the closeness of the then interior minister, Arsén Avakov, with the far-right Azov Battalion," explains Eric Pardo.
Despite this, and although Ukraine's democratic quality is not among the best in the world -
The Economist
index classifies the country as a hybrid regime with a score of 5.57 out of 10, where 10 would mean a perfect democracy - the former Soviet republic is far from being a Nazi regime.
However, the narrative that draws on the memory of Nazism is very useful "to win over Russian citizenship," continues the expert.
“It is very easy to see Russia as a bully, but, from their perception, the defense against a Nazi regime appeals to the suffering of the citizens of the former USSR against Nazi Germany, which caused the death of between 22 and 29 million people. " In the Second World War.
4. Ukrainians are our relatives
Putin has stressed on different occasions the historical ties between Ukraine and Russia, although in his speech last Tuesday he was especially explicit: “Ukraine is not just a neighboring country, it is an inalienable part of our history, culture and spiritual space.
They are our comrades, friends and people who once served together, but also family members, people united by blood ties.”
And he went on to add: "Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by the Bolsheviks, Communist Russia."
That is, from Putin's perspective, not intervening in Ukraine would be like abandoning your own family.
As Pardo explains, on the one hand, Putin tries to "defend the Russians in Ukraine" and on the other, he stresses that it is "a sister nation, and could tolerate it being a state as long as it does not orient itself too much towards the West, that is, the European Union or worse still, NATO”.
But the allusion to Ukraine's artificiality is, in the opinion of this expert on Eastern Europe, "a sterile debate interested in the very subjective nature of the concept of nation."
And he adds: “One could enter into historical disquisitions about the solidity of the historical arguments that each nationalist story elaborates, but a nation is real as soon as a certain story is shared.
This is clearly the case in Ukraine.”
And, although it is a recently created State, it is a sovereign country and recognized by the international community.
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