If you read the Russian newspapers this morning, you would be forgiven for thinking today was a day like any other. You would have almost no clue that 24 February marks the one year anniversary of Putin’s bloody, stalling invasion of Ukraine, in which nearly 200,000 of the country’s men have so far been killed or injured.
Not a single Russian newspaper carried any articles commemorating the anniversary this morning. The closest they got to directly acknowledging it was to report the news that Putin wouldn’t be giving a speech today to mark the occasion.
While surprising, Putin’s decision not to commemorate the start of his invasion is, admittedly, not totally unexpected. The war is not going well for Russia: the army has sustained huge losses, with few significant territorial gains to boast of. Criticism of the Kremlin has become commonplace in corners of the military blogging community.
The time for reflection, and even then, only in Kremlin-sanctioned forms, has not yet come for Russia
Putin dedicated a portion of his address to the Federal Assembly to the conflict three days ago. To address it again so soon would require him to confront an undesirable choice: whether or not to finally acknowledge how badly the war is going.
Just one pro-Kremlin news outlet, Ria Novosti, carried a headline mentioning the anniversary explicitly. Even then it was only to regurgitate a report in the Daily Mail about a planned protest in Germany to demand that German leader Olaf Scholz stop sending arms to Ukraine. ‘Germany prepared an unpleasant surprise for Ukraine on the anniversary of the special military operation’ gloated the headline.
However, although the anniversary of the war has gone unacknowledged in the Russian state media, coverage of the ‘special military operation’ has continued. The broadsheet Izvestiya carries a report claiming that a new wave of mobilisation is taking place in Ukraine. It alleges mass press ganging in the country and says that 17-year-olds are being prevented from crossing the border (in reality, Ukrainian martial law prevents men only over 18 leaving Ukraine). The report’s claims are unverified and most likely disinformation designed to reinforce the Kremlin’s propaganda of Ukraine as the morally corrupt aggressor.
Meanwhile, the business broadsheet Kommersant splashed its homepage this morning with the news of China’s twelve point plan to end the conflict in Ukraine, published overnight. The first point in China’s proposed peace plan calls for ‘the sovereignty of all countries to be respected’. Unsurprisingly, this point didn’t make the top line of Kommersant’s report, which led with: ‘Beijing believes that it is necessary to start peace negotiations, end unilateral sanctions, as well as guarantee the export of Ukrainian grain and reduce strategic risks’.
True to form, the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda carries a jingoistic report from one of their correspondents who spent yesterday, celebrated as ‘Defender of the Fatherland Day’ in Russia since the early days of the Soviet Union, ‘with real heroes on the front line’. The paper also published a round-up of ‘the most modern’ Russian military weapons being used in Ukraine. Its headline wouldn’t look out of place in a Soviet-era kids comic book: ‘A flying tank, hypersonic missiles and “Solntsepek” for the Nazis: Terrible Russian weapons that inspire fear in the enemy’.
The pro-Kremlin press’s reluctance to acknowledge today’s anniversary may in part be down to the key message of Putin’s speech this week: war in Ukraine is here to stay and it’s time for Russians to keep their heads down and crack on with the war effort. In other words, the time for reflection, and even then, of course, only in forms that would be sanctioned by the Kremlin, has not yet come.
While Russia’s mainstream media has more or less stayed silent on the anniversary of the war, the same cannot be said for its military blogging community. On his Telegram channel, former Putin advisor turned milblogger Sergei Markov posted in the early hours of this morning to mark the exact moment the Russian offensive began last year. ‘This was the beginning of a new era for Russia and for Europe and for the whole world. Vladimir Putin is the creator of this new era,’ he said. In a revealing and repulsive show of idolatry, he went on to call Putin the ‘demiurge of the new world’.
The milblogger under the username Romanov Lait, whose content focuses on the logistical detail of the Russian army’s advances, listed the gains the Russian army had made in the past year annexing the territories of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia. Nevertheless, his message struck a more reflective, if cold, tone than Markov’s: ‘The question of how much this has cost us remains open. and this cost will grow. At the same time, in the long term, the area of our motherland has increased significantly. We have gained fertile and resource-rich lands. Do I seem cynical? That’s just how it is.’
The most loquacious acknowledgement of today’s anniversary was by the milblogger and leader of the ‘A Just Russia’ political party, Sergei Mironov. He declared that 24 February would always be a day to ‘commemorate the fallen and glorify the living heroes’. Demonstrating the pervasiveness of Kremlin propaganda and the effort to which it has gone to create an alternative reality in Russia, Mironov said the date would be remembered as ‘the day of the renewal of Russia, the birth of a new world order based on the principles of truth and justice’.
It goes without saying that much has changed for Russia in the past year as a result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. A glance at how differently the Russian press covered the beginning of the invasion last year, which I wrote about at the time, alone is testament to that. Amongst other things, the notion of a free press or freedom of expression no longer exists in the country.
As the second year of this war begins, Russia’s milbloggers may well be correct in their soliloquising of today’s anniversary in all but one crucial aspect. 24 February 2022 was indeed the beginning of a new era for Russia, Ukraine and the rest of the world; it will be remembered for years to come – just not in the jingoistically glorified, heroic way Putin wants it to be.
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