Enter Sochi
Putin’s speech and ‘discussion’ with a carefully selected audience at the Valdai Discussion Club, held in Sochi on 7 November, was one more event to showcase self-confidence, remove focus from the domestic economy, and replace it with a story of Great Russia overshadowing a decaying and malicious Europe.
Russian state TV outlets boasted about Putin’s performance lasting a record of four hours and seven minutes. It seems that long performances and counting hours have become success criteria in themselves, as proof of the intellect and virility of the 72-year-old Putin.
A few noteworthy points and several blank spots
It was mainly the classic repertoire: the West is dishonest and sinister towards Russia but now in decay. The CIA organised a coup in Kyiv in 2014 while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukrainian authorities are fascists/Nazis and illegitimate. Russia doesn’t care about sanctions and is doing more than fine on its own. Ukraine is doomed to lose and Russia is a global power and moral leader of the ‘global majority’ against Western hegemony.
Putin, unlike in many earlier opportunities, did not elaborate on Russia’s economy. Domestic inflation was not even mentioned. One could try to explain this omission by pointing out that Valdai is a forum for security and foreign policy, not economics. And yet, Putin spoke a lot about how bad the European economy supposedly is and which economic course a new US administration should take. So, the real reason for avoiding talking about the Russian economy is simply that it is not doing all that great. The Russian Central Bank raised the key interest rate to 21 per cent and Bank Governor Nabiullina noted consumer inflation rapidly growing by 20 per cent or more. Such events undermine Putin’s main social contract with the people: I give you stability and prosperity while you obey my orders. Patriotic glory is engaged as heavy sugar-coating.
The real message around sanctions
Putin often talks about sanctions. The many passages in Sochi focussed on how bad they are for Europe and the rest of the world but good for the US. In fact, Putin’s real message is: ‘Please, the “West” (the US, the EU, the G7 et al), abolish the sanctions’. In his attempt to sweet-talk global audiences especially in Africa and the Middle East, Putin conveniently forgets that there are no restrictions on food, agriculture, fertilisers, etc. See this sanctions explainer. He also fails to mention Moscow’s export limitations and quotas to protect the domestic Russian market.
Outside the talking shop
In most of Russia, especially outside the centre of Moscow where amusements and distractions from the war against Ukraine are numerous, most developments revolve around the war. They include talk about producing weapons or services or how to avoid the negative consequences of war, like being called up, having one’s business or occupation diverted to the war economy, or being drafted to front line service. Gone are the heyday and economic boom of the first decade in the 2000s. Gone are the ambitions that Russia would be an integral part of a global system where new opportunities, prosperity, and possibilities for the masses would develop infinitely every year. Even stories of butter theft illustrate local problems.
It’s all about the US: please phone me!
A dominant part of Putin’s speech and the questions from the yeah-sayer audience allowed Putin to focus on the US and Trump’s re-election. Behind a façade of a nonchalant attitude of ‘wait and see’ and ‘we don’t beg anybody for anything’, it was clear that Putin really wants a call from Trump.
The many references to and praise of Trump as a real man – his courage, robust political behaviour, US voters’ decisions, Putin’s concern for the world’s nuclear weapons stability, etc. – deliver a singular message: Putin is more than keen to have the US new administration, and Trump personally, contact him. Perhaps he wants Trump to show him respect and elevate him to an equal status, as in the old days of USSR and America superpower relations.
Of course, the real purpose is to coerce a decision to end American arms deliveries and support for Ukraine and hope for a domino effect of defeatism spreading across Europe. All of the paraded Valdai guests from European countries sang the song of praise for Putin and how desirable Ukraine’s realism (read: surrender) would be. To the Russian TV audience, it looked as if mainstream, calm, and considered Europeans have finally seen Moscow’s reason. Now, peace-loving Russia should only wait for the incompetent, puppet-like political leaders in European capitals to come around and see the light. Russian state TV made a mocking example of Poland and Prime Minster Donald Tusk to promote this claim. With more than 2000 case examples in our database, Poland is a favourite scapegoat in Kremlin propaganda.
Preach the Gospel
The regular Putin shows act like beacons in darkness and his words are quoted, reproduced, paraphrased, or woven into the endless pro-Kremlin social media channels, political talk shows, and, to a large degree, ordinary Russian attitudes as researched by the Levada Centre. This is part of the total propaganda efforts which we described in a recent interview on Russian soft power.
RT / Sputnik: the propaganda department of a Ministry of War
The words do not stay inside Russia. The pro-Kremlin channels working in many foreign languages act as multipliers and local-language correspondents feed Putin’s sentences to local audiences. The RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik networks are fitted for this purpose as illustrated by this example from Sputnik in the Armenian language. The claim from Putin goes: Ukrainian troops invaded the Kursk region on orders from Washington and are instructed to stay there at all costs for the sake of the US’s own elections.
Another example is the long, almost word-to-word reproduction, again by Sputnik in Armenian, of Putin’s absurd claim that Russia did not start any aggression but is trying to stop it and did not violate any UN charter or treaty. These examples illustrate why the Sputnik network is not media in the classic sense but is better understood as the propaganda department of a Ministry of War.
Also on our radar this week
Disinfo: EU leaders are Nazi war criminals’
Perhaps as a bizarre warmup to a busy political week in the EU with hearings of newly designated EU commissioners, Russian state and pro-Kremlin outlets turned up the volume of accusations against the EU. The EU is under general and constant verbal attack as our database illustrates, but the language has hardened recently with more frequent Nazi/fascist and militarist formulations.
Key pro-Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov is a mainstay and ever active, especially on TV channel Rossiya 1 and his very popular YouTube channel. Solovyov’s role in the Kremlin ecosystem is to be the outspoken guy, often using profanities or vulgar language talking to the man on the street and to galvanise the Russian public against the EU. He called EU High Representative Josep Borrell and new HRVP-designate Kaja Kallas ‘Nazi war criminals’.
As Kaja Kallas is the former Estonian Prime Minister, the pro-Kremlin networks did not miss an opportunity to mock her country with this wild claim: Estonia is a Russophobic country that will die out by 2100. Theoretical doomsday prophecies can be entertaining, but it is just another way of masking a political attack on a neighbour state, Estonia, which decided and successfully fought to leave the Soviet Union and Moscow’s sphere of control. It is very hard to believe that Estonia, located in the dynamic Nordic and Baltic Sea region with some 30 million inhabitants (plus the Polish and German northern regions) and a combined GDP of close to 2 trillion EUR (ca. the fifth/sixth largest in Europe), should suddenly become unattractive.
Disinfo: The EU erases national identities and is becoming a liberal fascist country
Again, TV station Rossiya 1 and Solovyov lead the pack. We notice the semi-absurd collision of the words ‘liberal’ and ‘fascist’. But Solovyov is turning into a Russian version of Fidel Castro with hour-long verbal safaris into a universe dominated by conspiracy theories about Anglo-Saxon, Zionist, or global elite domination and Putin-Russia’s sacred place in saving human civilisation.
Disinfo: African countries do not receive IMF assistance because it all goes to the Kyiv regime
No, also not correct. But this claim, aired by Sputnik in the Arabic language, is timed to and should be seen in the context of the COP29 climate negotiations in Azerbaijan where Moscow is trying to exploit anti-Western and anti-colonial sentiments to create more animosity.
But do the math: in the IMF, African countries hold more than 38 billion Special Drawing Rights (SDR) in outstanding credit (equal to more than USD 51 billion). This constitutes more than a third of all IMF outstanding credit. Ukraine’s outstanding credit to the IMF is about 10 billion SDR which represents less than a tenth of IMF’s total outstanding credit. Second, the IMF lending capacity stand at about USD 1 trillion, which is more than 6.5 times its current outstanding credit. This renders the claim that ‘assistance to Ukraine is crowding out assistance to Africa’ completely baseless.
Don’t be deceived!
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