Finland, 1939
During the autumn of 1939, the Soviet Union conducted large-scale military exercises along the Finnish border. According to the official explanation, hostile imperialist powers posed an increasing threat to the Soviet Union. On 26 November 1939, several explosions were heard from the Soviet village of Mainila near the then border on the Karelian Isthmus. In a diplomatic note to the Finnish Embassy in Moscow, the Soviet government claimed that artillery fire from Finnish territory had struck a Soviet military outpost. On 29 November, the Soviet Union severed diplomatic relations with Finland, and the following morning, 30 November, the Red Army crossed the border—without a declaration of war—and attacked along the entire 1,300-kilometre frontier.
The day after the invasion began, the Finnish communist Otto Wille Kuusinen, who had lived in exile in the Soviet Union for nearly two decades, established the Finnish Democratic Republic in the border town of Terijoki, which had just been occupied by the Red Army. At the same time, Soviet radio broadcast the new government’s official declaration, claiming that the government in Helsinki—or the Helsinki clique—had fled the capital in panic.
The following day, 2 December, the Soviet Union officially recognized Kuusinen’s government as the only lawful government of Finland. On the same day, Kuusinen and Joseph Stalin signed a mutual assistance treaty through which Kuusinen’s government formally requested military assistance from the Red Army to suppress the fascist rebels who were said to have seized power in Helsinki.
The Soviet version of events, however, convinced neither the Finnish people nor the outside world. The Finnish proletariat did not welcome its liberators and did not rally behind Kuusinen’s government. The Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations, even though Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov denied that the Soviet Union was at war and insisted that it was merely assisting Finland’s legitimate government. Instead, through leaflets, loudspeaker broadcasts, and radio transmissions, Finland succeeded in making Soviet soldiers question whether they had really come to liberate the Finnish working class from capitalist oppression.
Brass instruments, sheet music for victory and military marches, as well as parade pennants and banners captured by Finnish troops were never used by the Russian liberators. Instead, the instruments and parade equipment were displayed to the Finnish and international press as tangible evidence of the Soviet leadership’s hubris. Soviet propaganda was therefore gradually forced to adjust its message, portraying Finnish society as thoroughly permeated by fascism and capitalist indoctrination.
Ukraine, 2022
During the winter of 2022, Russia conducted extensive military exercises along the Ukrainian border. The Russian Ministry of Defence justified the exercises by claiming that NATO countries were militarizing Eastern Europe and that the Western powers were preparing to provoke an international conflict along Russia’s border. On 21 February, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) issued a press release accompanied by rather unconvincing video footage, claiming that a Ukrainian artillery shell had destroyed a Russian border outpost. In the early morning of 24 February, Vladimir Putin delivered a pre-recorded television address announcing the start of a special military operation. Immediately after the speech had been broadcast, Russia launched cruise missiles and ballistic missiles against targets across Ukraine, including the capital Kyiv. At the same time, Russian ground forces crossed the border from the north, east, and south.
The day after the special military operation had begun, Russian members of parliament started spreading the claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had fled Kyiv in panic for Lviv in western Ukraine. By allowing parliamentarians rather than the Kremlin itself to circulate the story, the message could spread widely without initially being presented as an official government statement. As Russian forces approached the outskirts of Kyiv the following day, claims that Zelenskyy had left the country and was hiding in Poland spread rapidly through Russian state-controlled media. Through a series of selfie videos, Zelenskyy demonstrated that both he and the Ukrainian government were still in the capital. At the same time, he reportedly told the United States that he needed ammunition rather than transportation out of Kyiv.
According to information from Ukrainian and Western intelligence sources, later reported among others by The Washington Post, the Russian operational plan was to remove Zelenskyy from power as soon as elite Russian forces had seized Kyiv and install Viktor Yanukovych in his place. Yanukovych would then be proclaimed Ukraine’s only legitimate president on the grounds that he had been unlawfully overthrown in 2014. He was expected to sign a capitulation agreement and formally request Russian military assistance to restore order. Because Zelenskyy remained in Kyiv and Russian forces never succeeded in capturing the capital, the plan was never implemented. As a result, the operational narrative intended to legitimize the invasion—both to the Russian public and to the outside world—collapsed as well.
When Ukrainian forces captured Russian military transport vehicles, they published photographs and videos showing the contents of the soldiers’ equipment. The trucks contained, among other things, Russian parade uniforms, polished parade shoes, ceremonial belts, and medal presentation boxes. According to information later confirmed by The Washington Post as well as Ukrainian and Western intelligence sources, officers and units of the Russian National Guard (Rosgvardiya) had been instructed to prepare for policing duties and participation in a victory parade along Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main boulevard, only a few days after the invasion had begun.
Denazification as a Strategic Narrative
At the same time, the strategic narrative lived on. From the very first day, the invasion had been justified as a denazification of Ukraine. Yet this was neither the only nor even the original legitimizing narrative. Initially, the official rhetoric focused largely on restoring the Russian World, rooted in the historical Kyivan Rus’, and correcting the historical injustices that, according to the Kremlin, had arisen after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ever since the Maidan Revolution of 2014, Russian state media had portrayed the Ukrainian government as a fascist junta. However, it was not until his address on 24 February 2022 that Vladimir Putin explicitly made denazification the principal political and military objective of the invasion.
At first, denazification was presented as targeting a limited circle of Ukrainian nationalists and the country’s political leadership. About two months after the invasion, however, as Russian forces were forced to withdraw from the Kyiv region, the narrative underwent a significant reinterpretation. The state news agency RIA Novosti published the widely discussed article What Russia Should Do with Ukraine. It argued that a substantial part of the Ukrainian population must also be regarded as Nazi because it supported its own government. Denazification thus came to mean far more than regime change. The article advocated a far-reaching programme of de-Ukrainianization, ideological re-education, censorship, and, ultimately, the possibility that even the name Ukraine itself should disappear.
The Special Military Operation Becomes a War
During the first two years of the special military operation, it was effectively forbidden in Russia to refer to the operation as a war. Yet from the very first day, parallels were drawn with the Great Patriotic War. Since Putin’s declared objective was the denazification of Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s historical memory culture and the myths surrounding the victory over Nazi Germany were immediately activated. In his Victory Day address on 9 May 2022, Putin pointed out that Russian soldiers in Donbas were fighting on the same ground and for the same cause as their forefathers had in 1945. Russian military manuals and school materials began referring to the conflict as The Great Patriotic War 2.0, conveying the message that the contemporary special military operation was a direct continuation of the struggle against fascism.
During the second half of 2023, these parallels became more structural. Rather than speaking only about Nazis, Putin and the Russian state media began comparing Russia’s wartime economy and mobilization with the sacrifices made on the home front during the Great Patriotic War. They highlighted how women, the elderly, and even children had laboured in Soviet factories during the 1940s in order to instil the idea that the entire Russian society must once again unite and accept economic hardship in support of a prolonged conflict.
In the official Russian historical narrative, the first two years of the Second World War occupy only a marginal place. Little attention is paid to the fact that, in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union annexed eastern Poland, the Baltic states, and part of Finland—territories that had belonged to the Russian Empire before the Russian Revolution. By contrast, the Soviet defensive war against Nazi Germany—the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945—occupies an almost sacred position. Unlike the Red Army’s special operations of 1939–1940, the Great Patriotic War is presented not as a revolutionary war or a campaign of communist liberation, but as a defensive struggle against Nazism and a liberation of the sacred Russian homeland.
During the Great Patriotic War, Stalin restored the Russian Orthodox Church and the Moscow Patriarchate in 1943. Historians generally regard his primary motive as the mobilization of Russian nationalism and public morale. When communist ideology proved insufficient to motivate the population to endure the enormous sacrifices demanded by the war, the narrative of class struggle was replaced by a more traditional Russian nationalist and patriotic narrative.
During the war in Ukraine, the official Russian interpretation of history has increasingly rehabilitated Stalin. Official historical narratives have erased or marginalized Stalin’s purges, the Gulag system, and the Great Terror. Instead, Stalin is presented as the brilliant supreme commander who led the Soviet Union—or, increasingly, the Russian people—to victory over Nazism in the Great Patriotic War. Criticizing Stalin has in practice become punishable, since criticism of Stalin and his legacy may be interpreted as criticism of the current Russian state itself.
The War Against the Satanic West
As early as April 2022, once it had become clear that Russia’s blitzkrieg against Kyiv had failed and the Western world had begun supplying Ukraine with heavy weapons, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appeared on Russian state television and accused NATO of effectively using Ukraine as a proxy in a proxy war against Russia. The proxy-war narrative—according to which the West was sacrificing Ukrainians as cannon fodder—thereafter served for a long time both as an argument that Ukraine was not an independent actor and as an explanation for Russia’s heavy losses and the increasingly protracted nature of the war.
When Ukraine launched successful counteroffensives in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions in the autumn of 2022, the Kremlin realized that the narrative of denazification was no longer sufficient to explain Russia’s setbacks or to justify the need for further mobilization. Russian politicians such as Dmitry Medvedev, along with other state officials, increasingly described the conflict as a Holy War against a corrupt and godless West. At the same time, claims began to circulate that Ukraine was possessed by Satanism and that Russia’s objective had evolved from denazification to the desatanization of Ukraine.
While an ordinary Russian citizen—or an independent journalist—risked up to fifteen years in prison for using the word war (война) in a political or critical context, the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church simultaneously made frequent use of the expression Holy War (Священная война) when referring either to the desatanization of Ukraine or to Russia’s invasion itself. Patriarch Kirill declared that Russian soldiers who die in Ukraine have their sins washed away through the sacrifice of fulfilling their military duty. Written in Cyrillic with an initial capital letter, Holy War (Священная война) also evokes the famous Soviet wartime anthem of the same name, composed in 1941 to mobilize the population against Hitler’s invasion. By deliberately reviving these words, the Kremlin activated the historical emotional memory of the Second World War on the Russian home front.
By shifting from concepts such as denazification to desatanization and Holy War, the Kremlin elevated the conflict from a special military operation to a civilizational and existential struggle. Ukraine was no longer portrayed as the principal enemy, but rather as a powerless instrument of the West, while the West itself was cast as the true adversary—a civilization depicted in Russian political and Orthodox rhetoric as spiritually degenerate, morally decadent, and ultimately satanic. This narrative escalation served a dual purpose. It explained to the domestic audience why the war demanded such enormous sacrifices, while simultaneously transforming what had begun as a special military operation to restore the Russian World into a sacred, existential defensive war to save Russian civilization from the moral collapse of the West.
The Holy War against satanic forces was also waged far beyond the borders of the Russian world. Through troll factories and other influence operations, stories were spread claiming that Ukraine persecuted Christians and carried out satanic rituals inside Orthodox churches. The primary target audience consisted of conservative and deeply religious groups in the West, while the principal objective was to reduce public willingness to continue providing military support to Ukraine.
Hybrid Warfare
The message of Satanism, however, failed to reduce European support for Ukraine. At the same time as the narratives directed at the domestic audience were continuously adapted to the changing course of the war, Russian information operations aimed at foreign audiences evolved into a far broader and more sophisticated form of hybrid warfare.
When Russia launched its offensive, the Kremlin appears to have assumed that the international community would respond with little more than protests and sanctions, much as it had after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. European countries, led by Germany, had reduced their military capabilities and made themselves dependent on Russian energy—particularly natural gas and the storage facilities operated across Europe by Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled gas monopoly. Russia had also ensured that European gas storage facilities were only half full in February 2022. Given Europe’s dependence on Russian energy, the Kremlin calculated that Germany and other European countries would refuse to support severe sanctions, let alone provide military assistance to Ukraine.
From the Russian perspective, military action was portrayed as having been forced upon Russia by the West. According to this narrative, NATO had expanded eastward in violation of alleged promises, thereby threatening Russia’s security interests. This geopolitical explanation—that NATO enlargement was ultimately responsible for the war in Ukraine—also found support among prominent American military experts and political scientists, most notably the neorealist John Mearsheimer. By selectively highlighting Mearsheimer’s analyses through its own and international media channels, Russian information operations were able to lend academic credibility to their geopolitical arguments. His reasoning thus became one of the most useful intellectual tools in Russia’s information campaign aimed at weakening Western unity.
The neorealist argument that NATO expansion caused the war has gained some traction in the United States, but it has found little acceptance in Europe—least of all among Russia’s neighbouring states. Consequently, Russia needed additional narratives to reduce European willingness to support Ukraine, not least by creating uncertainty and fear.
At the beginning of the war, perhaps the most visible narrative directed at European audiences was that the next winter would be cold. This operational narrative was so effective that it was simultaneously presented to the Russian domestic audience. Russian media framed the anticipated energy crisis as a moral punishment for Europe’s support of Ukraine. According to this narrative, the satanic and decadent leaders of the West were sacrificing the warmth and well-being of their own citizens in order to support a Nazi regime in Kyiv.
Reality proved less convincing. Energy prices certainly increased as Russian pipeline gas was replaced by liquefied natural gas (LNG), but Europeans never had to endure widespread freezing. Russian homes have, in fact, been considerably colder.
Creating uncertainty and fear in Europe required more than masterfully produced videos on the Russian state broadcaster RT’s YouTube channel, which had already been blocked by the European Union. A frightening ravine on a map does not always have the intended effect if it does not exist in the terrain itself. This is especially true when the navigator possesses alternative maps that correspond more closely to reality. When the map no longer matches the terrain, there are two options: redraw the map—or reshape the terrain. Russian information warfare has attempted both. Psychological operations may therefore require more tangible measures: disruption of GPS signals, incidents in which ships accidentally leave their anchors on the seabed, or new military infrastructure near Finland’s border.
As Russia’s position has deteriorated both economically and on the battlefield, Russian hybrid operations have increasingly focused on delaying Western arms deliveries. From Moscow’s perspective, the rapid military rearmament now taking place across Europe as a response to Russian threats is not in Russia’s long-term interest. But even if Russia cannot completely intimidate its neighbours into abandoning support for Ukraine, it may still succeed in delaying that support by creating uncertainty and encouraging governments to prioritise the defence of their own territory.
By deliberately maintaining the image of Russia as an immediate military threat, the Kremlin increases the willingness of European governments to retain ammunition and advanced weapons systems for their own national defence. Since production capacity remains limited, every artillery shell kept in national stockpiles is one shell fewer available to the Ukrainian front. Yet despite these efforts, it has become increasingly difficult to sustain the claim that Ukraine is merely a passive proxy in a Western-controlled proxy war. Through determination, innovation, and the extensive use of drone technology, Ukraine has succeeded in transforming Russia’s special military operation into a military and political defeat—at least in the eyes of the Western world.
Towards the Victory Parade
The fact that several of Russia’s most visible narratives have had only limited success does not mean that Russian information warfare has failed. On the contrary, it has long been one of the Kremlin’s greatest strengths, particularly when its military capabilities have failed to meet expectations. On the physical battlefield, Russia has at times had to rely on donkeys and equipment dating back to the Second World War. On the battlefield of narratives, however, it has employed artificial intelligence and cybernetic feedback mechanisms at a remarkably advanced level. When one operational narrative loses credibility, it is quickly replaced by another, while information operations are continuously adapted to new audiences and new platforms.
The Russian army has committed well-documented war crimes that have received extensive coverage in Western media. Yet Russian information operations have nevertheless succeeded, through a flood of contradictory claims and competing narratives, in creating uncertainty—or at least the perception of uncertainty—about what has actually taken place. Already during the first year of what the West came to describe as the full-scale war, Russia was forced to withdraw from large areas of occupied territory. Even so, Russian information operations have helped foster the belief, particularly within parts of the American debate, that Ukraine’s defeat is merely a matter of time and that continued support for Ukraine only wastes resources and prolongs a futile bloodshed. Russian information warfare has never primarily sought to convince the West. Its objective has been to influence Western behaviour. Ultimately, it matters less whether the outside world believes the narratives than whether the Russian population continues to live as if it does.
For the special military operation to be portrayed as having unfolded according to plan, the plan itself has had to be rewritten after the fact. This has forced Putin to alter the narrative. Yet the patriotic war must still end in victory—or at the very least with a victory parade on Red Square in Moscow. A defeat in Ukraine must not be allowed to become a defeat in the information war.
The Great Patriotic Information War is therefore no longer primarily about winning a physical war. It is about avoiding defeat in the narrative of the war. The war must still be made to appear legitimate. Ultimately, however, the objective is that, by the time the next election arrives, the narrative will once again present the brilliant commander-in-chief as precisely that: the brilliant commander-in-chief.