Fifteen days into Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, the foreign ministers of the two warring countries met in the Turkish resort town of Antalya, where they would discuss potential resolutions to what was already the largest European conflict since 1945. It seems safe to say that no diplomatic summit has ever proved so spectacularly unsuccessful. For an hour and 40 minutes, Ukraine’s Dmytro Kuleba and Russia’s Sergei Lavrov debated the causes and consequences of the war, but no meeting of the minds would follow. Kuleba called for an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory. Lavrov refused. Kuleba requested that a demilitarized corridor be established so that civilian residents of Mariupol might escape their besieged city. Russia’s Sergei Lavrov refused. Kuleba pleaded with the Russians to mitigate the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Ukraine’s North, South, and East. Again Lavrov refused. Lavrov demanded the unconditional surrender of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Kuleba naturally refused. Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlüt Cavusoglu, serving as mediator, could only look on with dismay as the negotiations, if they could even be called that, inevitably petered out. Nothing was going to be achieved by extending the talks further, and so the top diplomats promptly went their separate ways. 

Sergei Lavrov, mendacious as ever, proceeded to debase himself even further. At a press conference following the summit, he predictably prattled some nonsense about the looming menace of Ukrainian “Nazis,” dismissed international concerns about civilian casualties as “pathetic shrieks,” and flippantly declared that the previous day’s airstrike against Mariupol’s Maternity Hospital No. 3, which injured 17 and killed five (including one stillbirth), had been conducted against a legitimate military target, even as Russian Ministry of Defense mouthpiece Igor Konashenkov was busy insisting that “absolutely no tasks to hit targets on the ground were accomplished by Russian military aircraft in the area of Mariupol” and that the “alleged airstrike” had been a “completely staged provocation in order to maintain the anti-Russian public outcry in the Western audience.” (When your country has devolved into a global pariah, and nobody with an ounce of sense believes your claptrap, there’s really no need to get your story straight.) Most perplexing of all was Lavrov’s assertion that, contrary to all appearances, “we do not plan to attack other countries; we did not attack Ukraine either. However, we just explained to Ukraine repeatedly that a situation posed direct security threats to the Russian Federation.”

This was no slip of the tongue. Russia’s foreign minister was not experiencing some kind of mental episode. Earlier that week Lavrov had even made a similar claim, that “the goal of Russia’s special military operation is to stop any war that could take place on Ukrainian territory or that could start from there.” Bear in mind that by this time Vladimir Putin’s regime had sent hundreds of thousands of troops into Ukraine, including the infamous 40-mile-long convoy bound for Kyiv. It had surrounded major cities like Kharkiv, Sumy, and Chernihiv. It had conducted some 775 missile strikes against Ukrainian targets. Volnovakha and other cities in the Donbas had effectively been wiped off the map by indiscriminate artillery and aerial bombardments; in Mariupol alone tens of thousands of civilians would perish, and hundreds of thousands would find themselves deported or otherwise rendered homeless. And here was the supremely odious figure of Sergei  Viktorovich Lavrov repeatedly contending that Russia had not even attacked Ukraine. If anything, it was exhibiting a selfless concern for international peace and stability by preventing a war from arising there in the first place. No wonder Ukraine’s exasperated United Nations envoy Sergiy Kyslytsya urged Russian diplomats to avail themselves of a 24-7 mental health hotline.

Tempting as it is simply to attribute the aberrant statements of Lavrov and other Putin lackeys to some kind of schizoaffective delusional disorder, we are unfortunately obliged to delve deeper into this geopolitical and psychopathological morass. Ukraine’s war goals are clear-cut: national survival and the restoration of its pre-war, internationally-recognized borders. Russia’s war goals are much harder to delineate, even for the Russians themselves. It is only natural, when asked to justify the unjustifiable and explain the inexplicable, that Russian diplomats fall prey to cognitive dissonance and are reduced to uttering a series of disconnected inanities, all in a desperate bid to account for their nation’s actions in a way that might satisfy international opinion. Presented with a war in search of a casus belli, officials like Lavrov must get creative. They complain of potential NATO expansion (studiously ignoring Finland’s accession), they make unfounded allegations of an ongoing genocide of Russian-speakers in the Donbas region (while massacring and displacing Russian speakers by the tens of thousands); they darkly warn of perilous Ukrainian “biolabs” churning out flocks of weaponized birds infected with viruses that target “Slavic DNA.” That anyone in the West would be gullible enough to believe any of these claims is difficult to fathom, but we live in a world in which Republican Sen. Mike Lee approvingly cites the lunatic leftwing fringe website the Grayzone during arguments with pro-Ukrainian X (formerly Twitter) accounts, suggesting that anything is possible here on the other side of the looking glass.

Western commentators, analysts, and policymakers in the media, academia, and the halls of power, rightly suspicious of Russia’s spurious rationales for its illegal war, have been gamely attempting to psychoanalyze Putin and his criminal regime ever since the war began on that terrible day of Feb. 24, 2022. The Russian Federation’s revanchism, we are told, stems from various historical grievances and humiliations, combined with a neo-Eurasianist multipolar foreign policy. Russia watchers pore over the pseudo-historical, pseudo-philosophical ravings of openly fascist ideologues like Alexander Dugin, who revels in the war against Ukraine as a “clash with our ontological enemy,” namely, the “absolute Evil embodied in Western civilization,” while urging on a “genocide of the cretins,” i.e., Ukrainians, who he describes as a “race of bastards that emerged from the sewer manhole.” The time spent coming to grips with the twisted psyche of Putin and his lickspittles is not entirely wasted. Wars have an ideological component, of course, and we could not understand Nazi Germany’s genocidal expansionism without investigating its totalitarian ethno-nationalistic ethos and underlying cult of violence. At the same time, purely practical considerations must not be ignored. Hitler’s goal of a Greater Germanic Reich was predicated on the need for Lebensraum at the expense of Untermenschen. As the Russian politician and journalist-turned-dissident Alexander Nevzorov has put it, we cannot lose sight of the “purely zoological explanation” for Russian criminality. (READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: The Great Lesson: Statue of Stalin Consecrated in Russia)

Most of the Kremlin’s absurd rationales were manufactured for external consumption — frothy, bloody chum gobbled up by those either on the lunatic extremities of the political horse-shoe, or by those with certain ulterior motives. But what about the propaganda meant for domestic consumption? The French philosopher Jacques Ellul, in his 1962 treatise Propagandes, divided his subject into two categories: integration propaganda and agitation propaganda. There is plenty of integration propaganda in Putin’s Russia, designed to provoke warm and cozy feelings about its disastrous policies and its increasingly isolated place in the world. Usually Russian billboards merely offer some form of thanks to the “defenders” of the homeland:

Наши защитники!
Спасибо, родные!

Our protectors!
Thanks you, dearies!

Other signs convey traditionalist messages, more aspirational than truly reflective of Russia’s pervasive social dysfunction. One such billboard, erected in the temporarily occupied Kherson region, depicts a woman in a headscarf, her hands gently clasped as she sweetly gazes heavenward, altogether unconcerned by, say, the decriminalization of domestic violence in the Russian Federation, or the widespread campaign of sexual violence carried out by Russian occupiers, along with the caption:

Дети, Кyхня, Церковь!
Смысл и величие русской женщины

Children, Kitchen, Church!
The meaning and greatness of the Russian woman.

This may be a direct reference to the Wilhelmine and Nazi German slogan “die Küche, die Kirche, die Kinder,” but, ultimately, it’s not the sort of thing that makes someone want to pick up a 5.45 mm AK-12 and run off to the Zaporizhzhian front. For that, you need agitation propaganda. (Or you can just conscript military-aged males, subject them to dedovshchina military abuse, use them as cannon fodder, and send their families 5 kilograms of frozen fish by way of compensation.) (READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: Volodya & Vika)

When waging a war of annihilation, it is only natural to employ expressly genocidal rhetoric — Russian talking heads love to conjure up images of drowned Ukrainian babies, raped Ukrainian grandmothers, millions of Ukrainians dying from rocket attacks or exposure, Ukraine turned into a “giant furnace,” an all-purifying nuclear holocaust, and so on and so forth. (Cue the Mitchell and Webb “Are we the baddies?” sketch.) This sort of agitprop is quite insane and likely to motivate only the most bloodthirsty sociopaths. It is also at odds with the Kremlin’s stated position that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people,” despite an abundance of linguistic, historical, cultural, and political differences. No normal person is persuaded to support the war against Ukraine by unhinged talk of Jewish Banderite Soros-influenced Khazar Nazis, or whatever propagandistic diarrhea is currently pouring out from the cloaca of the Russian state-run media. Normal people do, however, respond to incentives, so the deal sometimes has to be sweetened. Consider two recent recruitment advertisements produced by the Russian Armed Forces. In the first, a pair of Russian soldiers in a trench find themselves under enemy fire and begin to converse:

Soldier One: Do you happen to know where Perchesk is in Kyiv?

Soldier Two: It’s in the center. My aunt lives there. Why?

Soldier One: My dream is to buy an apartment in Kyiv. After the fighting is done, when we take Kyiv, I’ll move there with my family. 

Bullets scream through the air and slam into the dirt around them; they take aim and return fire.

Soldier Two: I’ll go to Odesa. I love the sea.

Fade to black.

The commercial does not end, strangely enough, with a HIMARS munition exploding in the trench, sending 182,000 tungsten balls tearing through the soldiers’ flesh, bone, and sinew. Nor does it end with a Ukrainian drone dropping a bomblet on their heads while filming their death throes, later to be uploaded onto Telegram. Instead, the advert ends with the caption “Выбери гoрод своей мечты” — “Choose the city of your dreams.”

The next advertisement in the series is more curious still. Its production values are relatively low, but it contains a few artistic flourishes, featuring, for some reason, shots of a seagull flying over the rocky Black Sea coastline, interspersed with images of a pensive dark-haired woman, apparently one of the natives, sensuously stroking a volume of Pushkin’s poetry entitled I Remember a Wonderful Moment, as old-timey brass band music warbles in the background. We are then introduced to another pair of dead-eyed soldiers, this time on leave behind the frontlines:

Soldier One: Soon elections will be here too. 

Soldier Two: I will stay here after the war. My relatives are from these lands, from Odesa. I will be returning home, you could say.

Soldier One: You want to buy land?

Soldier Two: No, they’ll give it to us. Like in the Far East, for free. And participants in the Special Military Operation will get first dibs.

Cut to a shot of some pigeons, and then waves lapping against the shore.

The slogan “Воюem за cвою землю” — “We are fighting for our land,” which is actually Ukrainian land — appears on screen, and the soldiers resume their conversation as they feed crackers to the now ubiquitous pigeons.

Soldier One: But you’re mobilized. You’ll be sent home soon.

Soldier Two: No! Who will watch over our guys? I’m here until victory. Until Berlin, as my grandfather used to say.

The aforementioned woman runs her delicate finger across a particularly romantic line in her Pushkin anthology and smiles endearingly at Soldier Two.

Fade to black.

Alexander Nevzorov predicted in the run-up to the Russo-Ukrainian war that Russian soldiers, unlike their Ukrainian counterparts, would have very little notion of why they were fighting and dying in the greasy Donbas mud, in the dense forests of Izium, or in the endless stretches of Ukraine’s southern steppes. “Not a single soldier or officer,” he said, “will have even the slightest idea of why the hell they are here and for whose yachts and palaces they are fighting.” Russian propagandists have evidently realized this, and they are now promising yachts and palaces, or at the very least apartments in Kyiv or Odesa, to those who stick it out and survive. No need to concern oneself with who used to live in that apartment, or who used to live upon the land being given away for free, if they are alive or dead or exiled or imprisoned. (READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: A Requiem for Russia)

On the eve of his abortive coup, Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin recorded a video in which he laid bare what he perceived to be the rationale for the war in Ukraine. “The ministry of defense now is trying to deceive society, the president, and tell a story there was insane aggression from Ukraine and that they intended to attack us with the whole NATO bloc,” began Prigozhin, disingenuously making sure to absolve Putin from any personal responsibility. According to the Wagner chief, “[T]he Special Military Operation that began on Feb. 24 was started for completely different reasons.” The “de-militarization” and “de-Nazification” of Ukraine were just “pretty stories,” whereas in reality the war was “a racket” that “was needed by oligarchs … that clan that today practically rule Russia.” Prigozhin shrewdly noted:

From 2014 to 2022, the Donbas was plundered. It was plundered by various people, some from the president’s administration, part from the FSB, part by oligarchs such as Kurchenko. These people were stealing money from people in Donbas located in the unrecognized republics of LPR and DPR … The Donbas was a perfect place to steal money … The top oligarchs only think of one thing: how to preserve their body as long as possible, for the body to remain in the best state. This is their brain disease. They don’t think about the country, the people, the war, only about themselves.

The ultimate goal of the so-called special military operation, according to Prigozhin, was the appointment of the immensely corrupt pro-Kremlin Ukrainian lawyer, politician, and influence-peddler Viktor Medvedchuk — Putin’s personal friend — as the new president of Ukraine. The oligarchs “were stealing loads in Donbas, but they wanted more,” he continued. “They decided to appoint Medvedchuk, but he was arrested, and exchanged for the whole of Azov [battalion leadership captured in Mariupol].” With nothing more to be gained from the portions of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts seized in 2014, it was time to take a bigger bite, so as to obtain “the material assets” of the rest of Ukraine, “to be divided after taking them under control.” 

We have become so accustomed to fratricidal civil wars, and coups d’état, and regime changes, and humanitarian interventions that we seem to forget that wars throughout history have not infrequently been waged as straightforward matters of territorial conquest, undertaken with an eye toward resource extraction and reallocation. If we get too far into the ideological weeds of Russo-fascism — Alexander Dugin’s esoteric Eurasianism, Roman Silantyev’s incomprehensible doctrine of “Destructology,” etc. — we risk losing sight of Russia’s squalid profit motives. The oligarchs, having sucked the Donbas dry, want more material assets. The mobiks can be motivated by the distant prospect of an apartment in Kyiv’s Pecherskyi District, or some beachfront property in Odeshchyna, or at the very least by the opportunity to murder, rape, and plunder along the way.

Information wars are waged along two fronts: the international and the domestic. Propaganda crafted for international consumption should be studied and combated, but far more interesting is the domestic propaganda that enables a regime to mobilize support for a war of aggression. In the Russian case, the propaganda appearing in print, online, on television broadcasts, and on billboards is a nauseating admixture of brazenly genocidal rhetoric and cynical financial incentives. Take up arms and defeat the Ukrainians, the Russian populace is told, and you will be doing your part to defend the Motherland by eliminating a despised “race of bastards.” Or, if you prefer, you can settle down there in your free apartment with your winsome state-provided, Pushkin-reading Ukrainian wife.

The eliminationist rhetoric on display in Putin’s Russia should be enough to ensure its global pariah status. Its unabashed desire to annex and ransack vast swathes of Ukraine should likewise be profoundly disturbing to the international community. As the researcher Kamil Galeev has pointed out, the first order effect of any successful Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory would be to encourage wars of conquest, which alone would be bad enough, but the second order effect will assuredly be that “states will have to adapt to the now unsafe world. Even if their neighbors do not seem to plan a war of conquest right now, they may be considering it in the future. One must prepare for this scenario. You can say goodbye to non-proliferation.” Ukraine surrendered its nuclear weapons in 1994, opting to rely on guarantees provided by the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. Having acted in consummate good faith, Ukraine would begin paying a terrible price two decades later. Other countries facing external threats can be forgiven for heeding that lesson and taking affirmative steps to avoid a comparable fate. (READ MORE: Russians Weaponize Feigned Stupidity to Undermine Putin’s Regime)

It was Tolstoy — the novelist Leo, not his present-day descendant, the belligerent anti-Semite and State Duma Vice-Speaker Pyotr — who wrote in What I Believe (1884) that error can constitute a “force that welds men together.” Only “deeds of truth, by introducing light into the conscience of each individual, can dissolve the cohesion of error, and detach men one by one from the mass united together by the cohesion of error.” It will take a long time for the light of truth to penetrate the Russian collective conscience in such a fashion. One can only hope that the rest of the world will look upon the enormities being committed by Russian forces in Ukraine on a daily basis, and the deranged propaganda churned out by Russian state organs, and then separate error from truth, just as one separates the flies from the cutlet, and act accordingly. Russia’s barbaric conduct does not, after all, make such distinctions terribly difficult.