Why Vladimir Putin is losing the Ukraine propaganda war

The final text messages from a Russian soldier killed in Ukraine expose the stark difference between the reality on the ground and how the conflict was sold to troops in Moscow, the besieged nation’s UN ambassador has claimed.

The unnamed soldier told his mother that Russian troops were “shooting everyone, including civilians”, and that he wanted to “hang” himself, according to ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya. At a special UN session yesterday on Moscow’s unprovoked invasion, Kyslytsya read out the messages in which the mother asked her son “why have you [not] responded for so long, are you sure you’re on training?”

“Mum, I’m in Ukraine,” the soldier replied. “There’s a real war going on here.” In a message reportedly sent just moments before his death, he wrote: “They told us Ukrainians would greet us peacefully, but they are throwing themselves under our machinery, not letting us pass. They call us fascists, Mum.”

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Prisoners of war

Other Russian families have told of their “shock” at learning about “the involvement of their loved ones in the invasion of Ukraine” through videos and photographs posted online, The Guardian reported.

Ukraine’s Interior Ministry has set up a channel on messaging app Telegram featuring footage and images that allegedly show captured Russian soldiers. The “Find Your Own” channel has reportedly “led to an outcry” from Russian families, who are being urged by Ukrainian officials to “voice their opposition” to the invasion.

The sister of a captured injured soldier from a Russian sniper unit told the paper: “I was completely shocked. I had no idea that he was fighting there.

“No one needs this, not Ukraine and not Russia. I believe we can come to an agreement through peaceful means so that our sons, brothers and husbands don’t die.”

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence has also founded a hotline named “Come back alive from Ukraine” that has “received hundreds of calls from relatives of the Russian military looking for their loved ones”, The Kyiv Independent media outlet tweeted.

According to latest figures from the ministry, 5,700 Russian troops had already been killed as the conflict today entered its sixth day. By contrast, the US lost 4,431 troops and military staff during its almost nine-year war in Iraq, according to the US Department of Defence.

Casualty numbers in Ukraine “are unverified” and have been described by the Kremlin as “inaccurate”, Vox reported. But “they’re still a sharp contrast to initial Russian expectations” of a “swift, relatively painless invasion”.

“In recent years, much has been made of Russia’s developing hybrid warfare,” the news site continued. But “on the information front, Russia seems to be losing the war. The sheer volume of video and information coming from Ukraine in real time, plus a young, social media-savvy president and broad, transparent intelligence sharing, have proved to be a powerful antidote to the Kremlin’s disinformation spin.”

Propaganda machine

Putin has “launched the predictable two-prong propaganda campaign”, said Professor Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security affairs and senior associate fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute.

In an article for The Spectator, Galeotti wrote that the Kremlin has deployed “a barrage of nonsensical rationalisations of Russia’s invasion and legal and technological measures to try and keep honest reporting at bay”. But the Russian president’s “media control machine is also having to scramble to spin this unprovoked war”.

On Sunday, a hastily removed article on the Russian state-owned Tass news wire claimed that “reliable sources from the Russian Federation Ministry of Defence” had said that Putin was “personally extremely disappointed with the progress of the military operation”.

“Was this clumsy editing?” asked Galeotti. “A Ukrainian hack that added the damning butcher’s bill to an anodyne report? A deliberate act of sabotage by a journalist at Tass?”

The answer remains unclear, but it appears that “Putin’s propaganda machine is breaking down”, Galeotti argued.

According to latest data from OVD-Info, a Moscow-based group that tracks politically motivated arrests, the Russian authorities had detained a total of more than 6,400 people as of Tuesday for participating in anti-war protests since the invasion began on 24 February.

Britain and Ukrainian defence sources told The Times that “Putin believed that he could capture Kyiv and as many as four other cities within 48 hours of launching his invasion”.

The insiders reportedly said that in Putin’s vision, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would “surrender and sign over his country to Russia at the historic Pechersk Lavra monastery”, which the Russian leader visited in 2004.

But his war “has not gone to plan”, said the paper’s defence editor Larisa Brown. Instead, the invasion has floundered, “with Russian troops coming up against fierce Ukrainian resistance and analysts pointing to failures in basic military tactics and a lack of morale”.