From Kyiv to Brussels: The Great Patriotic War as Putin’s propaganda tool
Since the Maidan uprising and Russia’s illegal annexation of
Crimea in 2014, Kremlin propaganda has consistently portrayed Ukrainian leaders
as Nazis or fascists. Russian officials and state media began claiming that the
new Ukrainian leadership consists of “neo-Nazis” who allegedly threaten the
Russian-speaking population of Ukraine. Russia also accused the Ukrainian
authorities of “genocide” of the population of Donbas.
On 24 February 2022, while announcing the full-scale
invasion, the “denazification” of Ukraine was presented as the primary goal of
the war. On the ground, there is no evidence to support Moscow’s accusations:
nobody has ever documented a “genocide” against ethnic Russians or Russian
speakers, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere. As for the Ukrainian far-right, its
political influence remains minimal: in the 2019 parliamentary elections, the main ultra-nationalist
parties, running together on a joint list, received just over 2% of the vote,
well below the threshold required to enter Parliament. In short, the image of a
“Nazi regime” in Kyiv is based on a glaring mismatch between rhetoric and reality.
However, the goal of this analysis is not to demonstrate
that Russian propaganda is, in fact, propaganda. Rather, it is to understand
why the Russian authorities repeatedly invoke references to the Second World
War—or, in Russian parlance, the “Great Patriotic War”—when speaking about
Ukraine. Understanding this memory dynamic is essential to grasp the power of a
rhetoric which, despite lacking any factual basis, continues to shape the
Russian worldview.
Erasing Soviet complicity in World War II
The Soviet and Russian insistence on using the term “Great
Patriotic War” to refer exclusively to the period from 1941 to 1945 serves a
specific purpose: to erase the twenty-one months that preceded Nazi Germany’s
invasion of the USSR. Between the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939,
and Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, Moscow and Berlin were de
facto allies: they engaged in extensive economic cooperation,
diplomatic coordination, jointly invaded and partitioned Poland in September
1939, and the Soviet Union proceeded to annex the Baltic countries and wage war
against Finland. By reducing the war to the period 1941–1945, the USSR and
Russia were able to deny any responsibility for the outbreak of the Second
World War and present themselves solely as the victim of Nazi aggression and
the primary liberator of Europe.
The Great Patriotic War—and especially the victory in
1945—became the founding event of Soviet history and the cornerstone of
collective memory. Yet this memory, often portrayed as monolithic and
universally shared, is anything but uniform. A Ukrainian from the west, who
endured two successive occupations between 1939 and 1944, remembers a war very
different from that of an eastern Ukrainian, whose experience was shaped
primarily by Nazi destruction. The memory of a Russian bears little resemblance
to that of a Crimean Tatar, who was deported along with his entire
community and denied the right of return for decades. As for Soviet Jews, whose
families and communities were annihilated in the Holocaust, they were long
forced to remain silent—official narratives left no room for the specificity
of their suffering.
While in Western Europe and North America the Holocaust has
come to be understood as the ultimate measure of wartime horror, the Soviet
myth of war erases this tragedy by subsuming it within the vast death toll of
the Soviet people as a whole. Minority memories—of anti-Jewish massacres,
ethnic deportations, or the varied experience of occupation—had to be absorbed,
silenced, and effaced.
The collective experience of the war and the official
discourse surrounding it deeply reshaped the Soviet population’s understanding
of “fascism” and “anti-fascism.” Rather than referring to a specific political
doctrine of the inter-war period, the term “fascism” had become a catch-all
label for the ultimate enemy. Trotsky or the British Conservatives could just
as easily be branded as “fascists”, as well as domestic and international
opponents after 1945—including even the Chinese Communists. The word “Nazi”
itself was rarely used. In everyday life, calling someone a “fascist” served
more as the gravest possible insult rather than as a statement of ideological
substance.
In the 1960s and 1970s, as faith in communism as a project
for the future began to wane, the cult of the 1945 victory gradually became the
main pillar of the Soviet regime’s legitimacy. Commemorations became ritualised
and came to involve all generations and social groups: children, neatly lined
up, marched in front of the Eternal Flame or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier;
brides, veils flowing and bouquets in hand, visited war memorials to lay
flowers and pose. In every city—and eventually in every town and village—the
state-built memorial complexes whose solemn architecture was intended to
inscribe the memory of the Great Patriotic War into the everyday life of its
citizens.
The Putin Era: memory as a weapon
Under Vladimir Putin, the cult of the Great Patriotic War
has been revived. Following the pro-democracy
protests of 2011 and Putin’s bid for a third presidential term in
2012, the regime instituted a deliberate policy of historical narrative
construction, aimed at grounding its legitimacy in a vision of the nation as
under siege. Faced with widespread protests against growing authoritarianism,
the authorities chose to portray Russia as surrounded by enemies—and Putin as
the only bulwark capable of defending the homeland. There was no need to invent
a new ideology: the already well-established myth of the Great Patriotic War naturally
emerged as the regime’s strategic narrative, functioning on every level.
The glorification of the 1945 victory allowed the regime to
purge the collective memory of its specifically socialist elements: by
retaining only the narrative of national triumph, the Soviet period could be
seamlessly integrated into a continuous national history without any
revolutionary rupture. At the same time, the rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin as
a legitimate victor served to validate autocracy. The mass repressions and
genocidal policies that claimed millions of lives were reframed as a tragic but
necessary step: they had made the USSR a global superpower, capable of
defending civilisation against the “brown plague.”
The Kremlin has multiplied its legal instruments to enforce
this narrative. Since 2020, the Russian Constitution mandates “respect for the memory of the defenders of
the Fatherland” and prohibits “diminishing the importance of the heroism” of
the Soviet people. In April 2021, Putin signed a law increasing penalties for “insults”
or “false claims” about the Second World War and its veterans. In December 2019, Putin himself gathered some leaders of
post-Soviet states around a pile of archival documents that he said proved
historical truths long ignored in the West—selectively quoting them to justify,
in retrospect, the USSR’s annexation of Poland and the Baltic states. In this
way, Putin has weaponised history, which has become inseparable from
national interest. To challenge his interpretation is tantamount to treason.
The national imagination built around the cult of the Great
Patriotic War now allows all of Russia’s actions on the international stage to
be framed as part of an eternal war against fascism. Within Russian media
discourse, it would have been unthinkable to describe the Ukrainian government
as a “fascist junta” or a “Nazi clique” outside the narrative framework imposed
by the state over the past decade. The 2022 full-scale invasion is thus
portrayed merely as a continuation of the Great Patriotic War: a conflict
embedded in a cyclical conception of time in which Russia, eternally under
threat from a Western enemy, fights for its very survival—on Ukrainian soil.
9, Russians march in the Immortal Regiment carrying portraits of relatives who
fought between 1941 and 1945. Increasingly, the faces of those who fought—or
died—in the war against Ukraine are added to these ranks, as though both wars were
part of a single, endless struggle. Past and present warfare are merged, and
the victory of 1945 becomes the lens through which all events—past, present, and future—are interpreted in a
continuous historical timeline.
This symbolic fusion also explains the surreal images of
Russian occupation forces who, in recent weeks, have placed propaganda banners
in destroyed Ukrainian cities. An uninhabitable Bakhmut was transformed into a
stage for celebrating the 80th anniversary of Russia’s victory
in the “Great Patriotic War.” The cult of victory is not only a central element
of the Putinist imaginary—it functions as an operating system for domestic
governance and external aggression.
Expanding the war narrative: from Ukraine to Europe
This mythological framework also shapes Moscow’s foreign
policy. It fuels the belief in a moral right to “punish” people accused of
collaborating with the enemy; the war narrative becomes a disciplinary tool
used against “rebellious” neighbouring countries. A telling example of this is
the installation of a giant screen on the Estonian border, broadcasting
Victory Day celebrations in a loop—an attempt to remind Estonians, as well as
Latvians and Lithuanians, that the Soviet victory represents an unassailable
moral superiority. Identifying with the discourse of the Great Patriotic War
thus becomes a mark of loyalty and virtue; to reject or question it is to prove
one’s treachery, to expose oneself as corrupted by the enemy, and therefore to
be branded a fascist. Through this mechanism, the Russian regime does more than
control collective memory—it controls the political and social sphere.
In the Russian collective imagination, the word “fascism”
has lost all connection with a specific political ideology and now refers only
to an abstract, absolute threat: the desire to destroy Russia. It has become
synonymous with “enemy” or “Russophobe,” always denoting the Other, never a
historically defined movement. This separation between word and meaning allows
the regime to simultaneously glorify the antifascist victory and openly promote
xenophobic, homophobic, or ultraconservative rhetoric, without any perceived
contradiction.
The word “denazification,” used by Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, to
justify the invasion, initially puzzled many Russians, most of whom were
unfamiliar with the term in this context. Shortly afterwards, the state news
agency RIA Novosti published an article by Timofey Sergeytsev – What
Russia Should Do with Ukraine – aimed at clarifying its meaning:
“denazification” was described as a “total cleansing,” targeting not only
alleged Nazi leaders but also “the popular masses who are passive Nazis,”
deemed guilty of having supported the “Nazi government.” According to Sergeytsev,
modern Ukraine hides its Nazism behind aspirations for “independence” and
“European development.” To destroy this Nazism, he argues, is to
“de-Europeanise” Ukraine. In this logic, denazification becomes synonymous with
eliminating all Western influence from Ukraine and dismantling the country’s
existence as a nation-state and a distinct society. Incubated on official state
platforms, this narrative reveals the true scope of “denazification”: a
large-scale project aimed at erasing any trace of Ukrainian singularity, a
blueprint for the genocide.
The article recently published on the official website of the
Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), entitled “Eurofascism, Today as
80 Years Ago, Is a Common Enemy of Moscow and Washington,” strikingly
illustrates the expansion of the “denazification” discourse far beyond Ukraine.
The accompanying image depicts a grotesque hybrid monster: its body is shaped
like a black swastika with the EU’s circle of stars in the centre, while its
head is a caricature of Ursula von der Leyen. The creature, with its
blood-stained claws outstretched, is caught between two bayonets—one American,
the other Russian/Soviet. This grotesque image is not merely a provocation: it
reflects a narrative deeply entrenched in Russian state propaganda, where
“Eurofascism” becomes an operational concept encompassing all European
societies.
Such a message, endorsed by the highest levels of the state,
might have seemed absurd or even comical just a few years ago—much like the
rhetoric around “Ukronazis,” which even Russian opposition figures failed to
take seriously, dismissing it as a cynical smokescreen. But the 2022 tipping
point revealed these discourses for what they truly are: the ideological
foundation of a large-scale invasion, long prepared within the informational
sphere. Today, part of European society—especially elements of the pacifist
left—is falling into the same trap: underestimating or ignoring the ongoing
propaganda dynamic. But the machine is already in motion. The language of
fascism is being broadened daily to include new designated enemies, and the
ideological war is shifting: it is no longer stopping at Ukraine—it is now
targeting all of Europe. In the face of this brutal reconfiguration of the
official Russian narrative, complacency or passivity have themselves become
forms of strategic blindness.
