Standing alone on stage, under blue and red spots, Russian comedian Danila Poperechny strung phrases together without a word of transition. "I'm not going to change the constitution"; "We treat Ukraine as a sovereign state"; "We have no plan for Crimea"; "Our soldiers are not there and have never been there"; "There will be no war"; "It's not a war, it's a special operation"; "They're bombing themselves"; "We're carrying out precision strikes"; "There will be no mobilization." No need to explain: Everyone in the audience will have recognized the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At the end of this enumeration, filmed in London in November 2022 and broadcast in excerpts in April 2023 on his YouTube channel, "Spoontamer," which has 3.4 million subscribers, the artist, highly critical of authorities in Moscow and now in exile, concluded to applause: "There are so many lies that Russians are starting to believe them. Because they tell themselves: 'Well, it can't all be lies.' But yes, it is all lies. Every fucking word of it is!"

Since the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, there has been no more room for doubt. Putin lies. Shamelessly. On the very day his troops crossed the border into "brotherly" Ukraine, as a column of armored vehicles raced towards Kyiv, the head of the Kremlin said in an address to the nation: "It is not our plan to occupy Ukrainian territory. We have no intention of imposing anything on anyone by force." A few days earlier, Ben Wallace, then British Defense Minister, who had come to Moscow in a last-ditch attempt to sound out Russia's intentions, was told the same thing by his counterpart, Sergei Shoigu. He returned to London convinced his interlocutor was deliberately lying to him and that it was too late.

Saturation

For some time, Western leaders minimized or pretended to ignore this subversion of words typical of Russian power. Yet there was no shortage of signals. In 2013, after the sarin gas attack perpetrated by Syrian forces in Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus, former British prime minister David Cameron experienced it first-hand. "I called President Putin," he recounts in Norma Percy's documentary Face à Poutine (Putin vs the West). "At that point, there was no doubt that it was an attack carried out by the regime. We already had the evidence. He said: 'Ah, it's not in the regime's interest to carry out a chemical weapons attack, it's much more in the opposition's interest.' (...) I knew he had seen the same evidence. For the first time, I thought this guy was lying and ready to say anything. He denied what had happened, even though there wasn't the slightest doubt." This deliberate denial was useful to the head of the Kremlin. Not only did he succeed in preventing a Western response in Syria – the "red line" once brandished and later abandoned by former United States president Barack Obama – but, by intervening militarily in the country two years later, he established himself as the protector of his ally Bashar al-Assad.

You have 83.57% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.