Making sense of nuclear threats and Nixon-era ‘Madman theory’ in Russian war rhetoric
Over the past decade Western governments have spent billions of dollars combatting Russian disinformation: from conferences to academic research to multitudes of fact-checking and myth-busting initiatives designed to expose and explain Kremlin lies. But despite all this effort, what undermines Russian disinformation most regularly and most reliably is, in fact, Russia itself.
The parallel reality that the Kremlin has constructed for itself and millions of Russians is sloppy and full of holes. Take this week’s Victory Day: on Monday, Russian troops lined Red Square in commemoration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. Vladimir Putin praised them for “preemptively repulsing an aggression” from the West and argued that Moscow had no other choice but to launch the war in Ukraine. He falsely asserted that Kyiv was looking to acquire nuclear weapons and drew parallels between the Red Army’s fight against the Nazi troops and the Russian forces currently fighting in Ukraine.
Later that day, a commemoration concert broadcast on Russia’s Channel 1 featured a stage full of men and women wearing World War II era clothing and waving Soviet flags. But confusingly, one of the giant photos projected behind them (meant to capture Soviet couples during the war) featured instead…the infamous American bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde. Why? I suspect someone at state TV was told to get photos of couples and thought Bonnie and Clyde would suffice. The point stands: Russian disinformation is sloppy.
Then on May 11, contradicting the Russian leader, the speaker of the Russian Duma Vyacheslav Volodin announced that Washington’s real plan was to get all the grain out of Ukraine and stage another holodomor, referring to a famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s.