Pro-War Propaganda in Sakha Quite Different from Moscow’s Version, ‘NeMoskva’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 26 – As the war in Ukraine has ground on, the propaganda media outlets in Sakha use to promote service in that conflict has begun to take on a different tonality than that Moscow issues to the Russian Federation as a whole, with Sakha’s playing up the ways in which fighting in the war is like battling with the elements in rural parts of the republic.

            Service in the war, the NeMoskva portal says, is presented as a simple extension of the Sakha way of life rather than as an act of special heroism, and Sakha outlets stress that going to fight is thus an important way of remaining part of the Sakha nation (nemoskva.net/syusyukane-umilenie-i-derevenskaya-obshhnost-kak-yakutskaya-propaganda-prodaet-lyudyam-vojnu/).

            Such divergence in propaganda in the regions from Moscow’s messages represents not an attempt to challenge by the former to challenge the latter but rather to add to the success of the center. But this linguistic pattern, which the portal documents, further highlights the enormous differences among various parts of the Russian Federation.

            And those differences, if things go wrong at the front, may thus play a key role in what some suggest will be the second transformation of an international war into a civil war on the territory of Russia as a whole.