The War That Russians Do Not See

A majority of people in Russia get their news from state television, which depicts their country not as the aggressor in Ukraine but as a victim of the West.
A television.
In Russia, state television varies little, aesthetically and narratively, from channel to channel.Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker; Source photographs from Getty

Pushkin Square, in the center of Moscow, is a traditional site of protest. Since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, on February 24th, most of the square has been cordoned off, with police in riot gear and National Guard soldiers in full combat gear stationed around its perimeter most of the day. On the first day of the war, police made hundreds of arrests in Pushkin Square; on most nights since, they have netted only a handful of people, often as soon as the protesters got off the subway. At about seven-thirty on Wednesday evening, three policemen in riot gear were dragging a young woman with a braid onto a police bus; a few paces behind them, three more officers dragged another young woman.

Meanwhile, pedestrian traffic around the square flowed smoothly and speedily. People went in and out of the Metro and a three-story H&M store. They did not stop and stare at the mute scenes of arrest. They did not seem to notice, and the not-noticing did not appear effortful. It seemed, rather, that the Muscovites going about their business and the young women being arrested inhabited different realities. The protesters lived in a world where Russia was waging a brutal, inexplicable war in Ukraine, where it was bombing residential neighborhoods in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. The rest of the people in the square lived in a world where this war did not exist.

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A majority of Russians get their news from broadcast television, which is fully controlled by the state. “This is largely a country of older people and poor people,” Lev Gudkov told me. Gudkov is the director of the Levada Center, which was once Russia’s leading public-opinion-research organization and which the state has now branded a “foreign agent.” There are more Russians over the age of forty-five than there are between the ages of fifteen and forty-four. Even those who get their news online are still unlikely to encounter a narrative that differs from what broadcast television offers. The state continues to ratchet up pressure on the few surviving independent media outlets, blocking access to their Web sites, requiring them to preface their content with a disclaimer that it was created by a “foreign agent,” and, ultimately, forcing them to close. On Thursday, the radio station Echo of Moscow and the Web-based television channel TV Rain, both of which had had their sites blocked earlier in the week, decided to stop operations. What the vast majority of Russians see, Gudkov said, are “lies and hatred on a fantastical scale.”

State television varies little, aesthetically and narratively, from channel to channel. Aside from President Vladimir Putin interrupting regular programming in the early hours of February 24th to announce a “special military operation” in Ukraine, the picture has changed little since before the war. There is no ongoing live coverage, no acknowledgment that what’s happening is extraordinary, even as Russian bombs fall on Ukraine’s residential areas and the Russian economy enters a tailspin. The news lineup, too, changes little day to day. On Thursday, the 7 A.M. newscast on Channel One lasted six minutes and contained six stories: a new round of Russian-Ukrainian peace talks in which Russia was eager to seek “common ground”; the “shelling of the Donetsk People’s Republic by the Ukrainian armed forces,” from which “twenty-five civilians have died.” A segue: “And now let’s look at footage from the Chernigov region, an area that is now controlled by the Russian armed forces. . . . Civilians continue driving around on their regular business.” (There were no civilians in the footage shown, only an endless sequence of armored vehicles.) Then: “Russia has prepared more than ten and a half thousand tons of humanitarian aid for the people of Ukraine”; “The West is pumping Ukraine full of offensive weapons”; “Aeroflot is organizing charter flights to return Russian citizens stranded in Europe.” Then the young male host announced, “The next scheduled program is ‘Good Morning.’ ” There was no mention of Kharkiv or Kyiv, which had been bombed the day before. Most remarkably, there was no mention of Russian military casualties, even though on Wednesday the defense ministry had acknowledged four hundred and ninety-eight deaths. (Ukraine has put Russian military losses at more than ten times that number.)

Gudkov summed up the world view shaped by Russian television: “Russia is a victim, as it has been ever since the Second World War. The West aims to establish world domination. Its ultimate goal is to humiliate Russia and take possession of its natural resources. Russia is forced to defend itself.” Days before the full-scale invasion began, the Levada Center asked Russians who they thought was responsible for the mounting tensions in Ukraine. Three per cent blamed Russia, fourteen per cent blamed Ukraine, and sixty per cent blamed the United States.

The government has banned the use of the words “war,” “aggression,” and “invasion” to describe its “special military operation” in Ukraine. Media outlets that violate these bans face fines and closure. On Friday, the upper chamber of parliament passed a bill making the dissemination of “false information” about the conflict punishable by up to fifteen years in prison. The bill was responsible for TV Rain deciding to stop broadcasting on YouTube: the risks of calling things what they are have become too high—and the cost of trying to walk a fine line, as TV Rain had been doing, was morally unsustainable. Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper edited by Dmitry Muratov, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, took a vote among people it calls its “co-conspirators”—those who support the paper through private donations. Sixty-four hundred and twenty people have voted; about ninety-four per cent of them asked the paper to submit to the censorship requirements and continue publishing.

Most of Russia’s propaganda language is plainly Orwellian. After a few days, newscasts were consistently referring to the war as an “operation to restore peace.” On Tuesday night, when the TV Rain Web site was blocked, the channel was broadcasting a story about how the government, working through ad agencies, was offering to pay bloggers and TikTokers to post talking points about the war. “All posts should be accompanied by #LetsGoPeace and #DontAbandonOurOwn,” the offer began. Among the talking points: “We are calling for peace, and it’s unfortunate that these are the means we must use to achieve it.”

On March 1st, schools around the country held special social-studies classes on the war in Ukraine. The online publication Mediazona, another independent news organization that has been branded a “foreign agent,” obtained a script sent out by the education ministry. Its F.A.Q. section begins, “Question: Are we at war with Ukraine? Could this have been avoided? Answer: We are not at war. We are conducting a special peacekeeping mission, the goal of which is to contain the nationalists who are oppressing the Russian-speaking population.”

In “The Language of the Third Reich,” the German-Jewish writer Victor Klemperer described the effect of propaganda as “blurring” reality. When the Russian narrative of the war in Ukraine is not Orwellian, it is Klempererian. The state’s twenty-four-hour news channel, Rossiya 24, drones on about villages and towns that have been “liberated,” but they name small towns that are unfamiliar to most viewers. The pictures onscreen often contradict the words spoken over them. On Thursday morning, a reporter on Rossiya 24 told of directly observing an unexploded Ukrainian rocket wedged in the floor of “an apartment on Lenin Street.” The accompanying image was that of an empty street in an unidentifiable village. “It’s not just the arguments—it’s the uninterrupted flow” of propaganda, Gudkov said. “Viewers are just caught in this flow.”

Although there is supposed to be no war, there is a sense of constant threat and aggrievement. In 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine, an army of propagandists struggled to find the right framing. Finally, they unleashed the war language that Russians know best: that of the Second World War. They called Ukrainians fascists—“UkroNazis”—and accused them of genocide. In this story, the 2014 revolution in Ukraine was carried out by Nazis who want to exterminate the country’s Russian-speaking population, beginning with the eastern region of the Donbass. A slide presentation for students in grades six through eight, also obtained by Mediazona, ends with a sequence of questions: “How do you interpret the word ‘genocide’? Why is it applicable to the situation in the Donbass? . . . Think about history. Russia has always guaranteed Ukraine’s security and independence. Can this situation be described as a senior partner helping a junior one?”

On an episode of a political talk show that has aired several times since the war began, a group of six pundits discussed plans for the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine after it is “liberated.” Their consensus seemed to be that most Ukrainians were not bad people, just stupid and brainwashed by NATO, fascists, and imperialist forces who want to return Russia to the status of “a colony exploited by the West.” Speaking on Rossiya 24, on Thursday morning, Eduard Basurin, the deputy head of the Donetsk People’s Republic Militia, spoke about Mariupol, a Ukrainian city that was then surrounded by Russian troops. “Mariupol has become a concentration camp,” he said. He claimed that Ukrainian troops had herded civilians into the city’s steelworks, which had been planted with explosives: “If the city’s defenses are breached, they will blow the factory up and then use the video footage to say that the Russian artillery is killing civilians. Can you imagine the cynicism?” The next story: “The Russian Defense Ministry’s convoy delivers critically needed humanitarian cargo to residents of the Kharkiv region.” The one after that lamented the West’s ongoing attack on free speech, citing the United Kingdom’s newly announced ban on the Russian state-run English-language channel RT. (By Friday, Russia had blocked Facebook, the BBC, Radio Liberty, and the Russian-language news organization Meduza.)

The nice thing about a war that’s not a war is that it’s easy to look away—without looking away from the television. The airwaves fill with reassurances: Russian banks don’t need SWIFT; Europe’s sanctions only mean that fuel prices will go up in the West; the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich is selling Chelsea Football Club not because he might soon face sanctions but because the club kept losing money; the foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has promised that “our Western partners will get over themselves.” Peace and prosperity are just around the corner.