Dissection of Putin's speech: lies and half-truths to justify the mobilization of reservists

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, unfolded all his propaganda rhetoric on Wednesday to try to convince his population that the unpopular decree that opens the door to the general mobilization of the population -at the moment it affects 300,000 reservists- is inevitable to face the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

In a speech riddled with lies, alluding to the alleged "neo-Nazi regime" ruling Ukraine and a West that hates Russia, Putin displayed the usual disinformation narratives that the Kremlin repeats to justify a war it has not yet called war.

Russophobia

Since Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, he has intensified his discourse on Russophobia or the West's supposed hatred of Russia to build the image of a country surrounded by enemies whose goal is to wipe it off the map.

"The purpose of this West is to weaken, divide, and ultimately destroy our country," said Putin, who has accused the West of boasting of having achieved the disintegration of the Soviet Union, whose collapse was actually due to a multiplicity of factors.

"And now the time has come [according to the wishes of Europe and the United States] for Russia to disintegrate in many regions," the president warned.

Putin, during his televised speech on Wednesday.

MAXIM SHIPENKOV (EFE)

To support such accusations, Putin resorts to the technique of half-truths.

A clear example is his claim that the West has encouraged "international terrorist gangs in the Caucasus and promoted NATO's offensive infrastructure near our borders."

Although it is true that the Atlantic Alliance has multiplied its resources in the countries bordering Russia, this increase has occurred mainly since 2014, when Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea after a referendum that violated international law.

In addition, Moscow accuses the West without evidence of having encouraged terrorism in the Caucasus, a region where complex ethnic, religious and cultural rivalries converge.

A neo-Nazi regime rules Ukraine

One of the characteristics of pro-Russian disinformation is precisely its repetitiveness.

"Despite all the outlandish claims they spout, the pro-Kremlin media often sounds like a broken record that is limited to giving a couple of basic messages to the national and international public," say experts from EUvsDisinfo, a team of the European Union specialized in combating Russian lies about Europe.

This is just what has happened with the constant references to Ukraine as a country ruled by neo-Nazis, a word that Putin repeated up to 11 times in his speech on Wednesday.

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Last minute of the war

The narrative of Nazism is, precisely, one of the favorites of the Kremlin, because it serves to exalt the Great Patriotic War — the name that Russia gives to World War II — and the resistance of the Soviet Union against Adolf Hitler's Germany.

On this occasion, it has also earned Putin to attribute to the Ukrainians the mass executions and torture perpetrated by the Russian invaders in the lands that kyiv has liberated.

"[Russian troops] have seen and are seeing the atrocities that the neo-Nazis are committing in the occupied areas of the Kharkov region," the Russian president has come to say, referring to the buried bodies and signs of torture found in places like Izium, recently recovered by the Ukrainian troops.

Ukraine remains a threat to Russia

The threat that Ukraine posed to the Russians was one of the arguments used in the run-up to the invasion to justify what Putin insists on calling a “special military operation”.

On Wednesday he used it again: "The current kyiv regime reported its intentions to get nuclear weapons."

But the phrase is again a half truth, because Ukraine has not openly said that it intends to acquire atomic weapons.

With it, Putin refers to the intervention of the Ukrainian president, Volodímir Zelensky, at the Munich summit on February 19, when he threatened to break the Budapest Memorandum, signed in 1994. In accordance with that treaty, Ukraine agreed to renounce all its nuclear arsenal from the Soviet era, while Russia,

The United States and the United Kingdom pledged to guarantee its security and integrity.

What Zelensky literally said was the following: “Since 2014 [when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula], Ukraine has tried three times to convene consultations with the guarantor states of the Budapest Memorandum.

Three times without success.

Today, Ukraine will do it for the fourth time.

This is my first time as president.

But both Ukraine and I are going to do it for the last time."

Ukraine attacks the Russians from its own territory

Putin has accused Ukraine of attacking the Russian-speaking population of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, "some five million people", who, according to the Russian president, live "under constant artillery fire".

According to the head of the Kremlin, Ukrainian troops attack civilian targets such as "hospitals and schools", attacks for which there is no evidence.

However, after the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which has recovered some 8,000 square kilometers – an area equivalent to that of the Community of Madrid – Moscow has responded with attacks on areas where civilians live and on basic infrastructure, such as power stations or dams. .

This attempt by the Kremlin to victimize all Russians also serves to deepen its idea of ​​ethnic nationalism that claims Russia as a world superpower.

In fact, as in his address on February 24, just before ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Putin on Wednesday made an "appeal" to "great historical Russia", "to all citizens" of the country, "to people of different generations, ages and nationalities”.

It is the

or Russian world, which includes Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia, and all Russians wherever they live.

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