Russia and Ukraine: War And Media
This latest post is the text of an article I contributed to a special issue of Baltic Rim Economies on Ukraine and Crimea. You can access the whole issue here. It was written in the first days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and first published on 28 April 2022.
THE ILL-ADVISED BOAST from the then Russian Defence Minister, Pavel Grachev, in late 1994 that a single regiment of paratroopers could capture Grozny in two hours came back to haunt him. In fact, the army took heavy casualties as it sought to subdue the rebellious city at Russia’s southern edge.
Thereafter, the Russian military started to learn lessons: both in the need to adapt its Soviet-era forces to the changing demands of modern warfare, and in improving the efficacy of its engagement with the news media. In our 2021 paper, ‘Russia’s rising military and communication power, from Chechnya to Crimea’ my co-author Dr Alexander Lanoszka and I argued that since that first war in Chechnya in the mid-1990s, ‘Russia has developed its military and media policies in a coordinated manner: learning from its mistakes and failures as it went along, and becoming more efficient each time.’
In particular, we considered the war against Georgia in the summer of 2008—over the separatist territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia—and the 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. We wrote that the campaign in Georgia ended in a strategic victory for Russia, even if that victory was delivered, ‘ultimately by dint of enjoying significant numerical superiority over an adversary in a conventional war.’
Unless you are inside President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle—or perhaps even inside his head—it is impossible to know whether the opening stages of the invasion of Ukraine went according to plan. It is reasonable to speculate, though, that it has not gone according to schedule. Surely this was supposed to be over in a matter of days: the Ukrainian government capitulating, and Russian troops greeted as liberators by a significant section of the population. Neither happened, of course.
On February 28th, the respected scholar of Russia and the Caucasus, Thomas de Waal, shared on Twitter a remarkable news story prepared by the RIA Novosti news agency, and apparently published in error, with a date of 0800 on February 26th (around 48 hours, in other words, after the start of the invasion). The author of the extraordinary article hailed, ‘A new world being born before our eyes,’ and went on to praise the achievements of the ‘military operation.’
Things did not turn out that way. Two days after the Russian army launched the invasion, the world was instead waking up to the reality of Ukrainian resistance in the face of much larger and more powerful enemy. Questions about the Russian army’s capabilities had already started to creep in, though. Opening my copy of the British newspaper The Times in the early days of the war, I saw a photograph that recalled the decade of sometimes violent chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Two very young-looking Russian soldiers—presumably hapless conscripts who had not expected their compulsory military service to involve invading a neighbouring country—stared into the photographer’s lens. They had been captured by the Ukrainian army—their part in the war over almost as soon as it had begun.
The picture took me back to the most terrifying day of my 20 years in journalism: a cold day in the Chechen capital Grozny, in January 1995. That day, Chechen fighters brought out young conscripts they had captured to show the news media. Shortly afterwards, Russian warplanes attacked the square where we stood. We were lucky to escape. Others close by were killed in the strike. I reflected that the young men I saw in the paper in February this year would not even have been born that day—yet perhaps, in respect of the use of conscripts in major combat operations, not everything had changed in the intervening 27 years.
That first Chechen campaign was the low point of Russia’s post-Soviet military history. The second Chechen war, beginning in the fall of 1999, changed Russia in many ways. Firstly, it provided Putin—then prime minister—with the opportunity to take a tough line with the restive region—and that in turn helped him to victory in the presidential election in March 2000. It also marked the start of the rebuilding of the Russian military—slowly at first—accompanied by a determined attempt to control the narratives that would shape public perceptions of future campaigns in Georgia in 2008, in Crimea in 2014, and in Syria from 2015.
Looking back, all these campaigns may be seen as preparation for the invasion of Ukraine. In the same way, the chaotically free news media of Russia in the 1990s have been brought under control, or even—in the case of Radio Ekho Moskvy or TV Rain, Russia’s last two proudly independent broadcast voices—simply closed down. All combatants since the dawn of time have tried to tell the stories of war the way they want them told. In our media-saturated age, it seems to have become even more of a priority.
The Kremlin has launched the kind of war that Europe hoped it had left back in history. It was not supposed to happen in the 21st century. The Kremlin is also trying to defy conventional wisdom about our age by controlling information in the era of the smartphone.