Speaking to workers at a factory in St. Petersburg, Putin’s speech on Wednesday commemorated the breaking of the Nazi siege of the city, which was named Leningrad at the time, during World War II.
Nazi forces laid siege to Leningrad for nearly 900 days from September 1941, causing mass starvation within the city and a death toll estimated at up to 1.5 million people.
The Russian leader’s address repeated “standard and longstanding Kremlin rhetoric,” falsely claiming Moscow was protecting residents of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region from “neo-Nazis who, the Kremlin claims, seized control of the Ukrainian government in 2014,” the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) wrote in its daily update on Wednesday.
Saying that the Soviet Union defeated Nazi’s Germany’s “genocide of Leningrad,” Putin drew parallels between the blockade of the 1940s and Russia’s battle against what he called “Ukrainian neo-Nazis” in Donbas, the think tank added.
But, crucially, Putin’s speech indicates he “remains uncertain about his ability to significantly shape the Russian information space,” the ISW argued. “Putin likely reiterated standard Kremlin rhetoric because it has resonated well with the Russian ultra-nationalist pro-war community, elements of which have been increasingly critical of his conduct of the war,” it continued.
In crafting a speech that “was symbolically significant for the Russian domestic audience,” the ISW suggested, Putin hopes to gradually shape the Russian propaganda narrative “to regenerate support for the invasion and for maintaining a protracted war.”
These historical narratives, namely discredited ideas of “Ukrainian neo-Nazis” and genocides committed against Russians, are a tactic by Putin to try to regain control of Russian media coverage of the war “after having largely ceded this space to a variety of quasi-independent actors.”
The ISW is referring to Russian military bloggers, some of whom have been outspokenly critical of the Kremlin’s conduct of the war in Ukraine. Former Russian commander Igor Ivanovich Strelkov, also known as Igor Girkin, recently warned of “civil war” in Russia that could result in “millions of casualties” as the country continues to fight in Ukraine.
The Russian Defense Ministry announced a reshuffle of its command structure on January 11, and the ISW previously argued the move was partly designed to reduce the influence of Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.
So Putin’s latest speech likely forms part of a “larger and relatively new informational effort” to wrap the invasion of Ukraine inside the “greater Russian national mythos of the Great Patriotic War,” or World War II, in an attempt to bolster domestic support for “a protracted war and increasing mobilization,” the ISW warned.
But the speech, empty of new announcements, showed Putin to be “unwilling or unable to attempt a dramatic speech that represents a significant inflection in his rhetoric,” according the ISW assessment.
During his address to employees of a factory producing air defense systems, Putin called a Russian triumph in Ukraine “inevitable,” adding that “victory is assured, I have no doubt about it.”
“Everything that we are doing today, including the special military operation, is an attempt to stop this war,” he said at an earlier audience with veterans in Russia’s second-largest city. “This is the gist of our operation: to protect our people who live there, on these territories,” he added, according to a state media readout.
Also speaking on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov doubled down on the neo-Nazi rhetoric during a media conference on Russian diplomacy for the previous year.
“Work is in full swing to establish a Nazi police state [in Ukraine]. In fact, this process is virtually over and it has been done with the West’s blessing,” he told reporters, according to state media outlet Tass.
