Before the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a national speech in which he laid out his justification for the attack. He was saving the Ukrainians from neo-Nazi thugs running the country. Curiously, this narrative closely parallels arguments Democrats used against President Donald Trump and his supporters.
Putin’s Narrative
Vladimir Putin (Photo by Kay Nietfeld/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Putin knew many Russians have Ukrainian relatives or friends, and a raw imperialistic annexation of Ukraine would not be popular among his people. Therefore, he had to frame the invasion as a special operation to rescue the Ukrainian people from grave danger. He said neo-Nazi thugs had taken over the country and accused the government of Western collusion, labeling it a puppet regime preparing for NATO to install short-range nuclear missiles at the Russian border that could reach Moscow within minutes.
Putin furthermore argued that the bigoted neo-Nazis were harassing Russian-speaking Ukrainians and appealed to what we could call a Russian Lives Matter sentiment. Finally, he rewrote Ukraine’s history and claimed it was an artificial entity founded by the communists during the Russian Revolution. Ukraine had always been a part of Russia and should continue to be so. We might call this historical revision Putin’s 1917 Project.
The truth is the neo-Nazis in Ukraine got less than 2% of the votes, and President Volodymyr Zelensky, a centrist politician, is of Jewish heritage. Although Zelensky’s approval was at a record low before the invasion due to corruption and mismanagement, Ukrainians united around their leader in opposition to the hostile Russian takeover. Kyiv was officially founded in A.D. 482 and was the capital of the proto-Russian empire from A.D. 882, three hundred years before Moscow existed.
The Democratic Narrative
When Trump took office in 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign paid former British agent Christopher Steele to concoct a document that became the centerpiece of the so-called Russian-collusion scam that led to Trump’s first impeachment. Democrats and a near-unified media accused Trump of being “literally Hitler” and frequently called both him and his supporters “white supremacists.”
After the death of George Floyd, the media united around Black Lives Matter and promoted the idea that a systemically racist America targeted blacks. Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times started the so-called 1619 Project, revising American history to paint it as founded on slavery and white supremacy. It is reportedly taught to children in public schools all over America.
The Democratic narrative is approximately as true as Putin’s: a web of lies sprinkled with occasional isolated facts.
Why Similar?
Putin’s narrative is so like that of the Democrats it raises the possibility it was inspired by the effective media war waged against Trump. However, a more pertinent question might be why actors in a free democracy think and behave so similarly to the autocrat of a corrupt kleptocracy. A simple solution might be that similar people with similar worldviews think alike.
~ Read more from Caroline Adana.
