Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

How the West is helping Putin’s propagandists

One might not think that J. R. R. Tolkien has much to do with the bitter war in Ukraine, but one would be wrong. A particular epithet, once used by Ukrainians specifically for the Russian soldiers who have shelled, looted and raped their way into their country has begun to be applied also to the Russians who support the war and, increasingly, all Russians.

That epithet is orc, the brutal and brutish foot soldiers of the dark lord Sauron, who spill in their countless numbers from the land of Mordor to kill and to despoil.

Tolkien’s works are very popular in both Russia and Ukraine, and there as elsewhere have been subjected to scholarly deconstruction, naked plagiarism and appropriation into memes. Indeed, even before the Ukrainians were calling Russia Mordor, the term was used by Russians embittered by the failure of the so-called Bolotnaya protests against Vladimir Putin’s return to power in 2011-12. Their message was implicitly not only that Putin could be compared with Sauron but also that the country that they felt had failed to support them was now little more than his barren realm.

After Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and intervention into the Donbas, instead the focus shifted. In 2015, Ukraine’s then-president, Petro Poroshenko called the occupied regions of Donbas and the notional new land of ‘Novorossia’ which Russian nationalists wanted declared, Mordor.

Most Russians in Russia do not know what is really happening in Ukraine

The subversively imaginative information warfare Ukrainians are now deploying against Russia – a far cry from Moscow’s plodding or frothing propagandists – was foreshadowed when, next year, Google’s translation tool was hacked: any attempt to translate ‘Russia’ into Ukrainian yielded ‘Mordor’.

With the February invasion, though, the focus has shifted from the country to the people, and especially the soldiers ravaging the country.

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