Except at Official Functions, Russian Soldiers Fighting in Ukraine Never Refer to Themselves as ‘Liberators,’ Russian Philologist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 30 – Putin and his propagandists routinely refer to Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine as “liberators,” but Aleksey Tikhonov, a Russian philologist, says that he has found no cases where the soldiers call themselves that except at official propaganda functions where they have to hew the line.

            That is just one examples of the way in which official terms have not caught on, the scholar who now teaches at the University of Zurich says. But the failure of propaganda to be accepted is also highlighted by the way in which those who do use these terms given them radically different meanings (svoboda.org/a/nazvatj-voynu-voynoy-kak-i-pochemu-menyaetsya-yazyk-rossii-i-ukrainy/33865662.html).

            Some Russians and many Ukrainians are now using the word “liberator” in a highly ironic sense, with some even suggesting that before the Russian soldiers can liberate anyone else, they must liberate themselves and their own country, something that hasn’t happened and doesn’t appear likely to.

            In the course of a lengthy interview, Tikhonov describes the way soldiers on both sides of the line have adapted language to make their suffering easier to take; but perhaps most important, he discusses not just how war affects language but how language has an impact on war – and thus why rulers care so much about the language used.

            For governments, especially those which are engaged in aggression and violation of human rights, the philologist says, using bureaucratic language helps them to project the idea that war is in fact “part of ordinary life and nothing particularly different from it. But this acquires new meaning when the leaders start talking about war and fighting a war.

            During the first several years of his war, Putin insisted on calling it a special military operation and punished those who called it a war; but now the Kremlin leader and his propagandists call it a war because they can no longer hide from those taking part and others affected that it is precisely that.

            But when leaders start talking about war, Tikhonov says, they are showing that they are committed to fighting to the death, a position that is superficially attractive as far as they are concerned but one that opens the door to doubts among the population and often in the past the defeat of those who decide to talk about war all the time.

From Times Immemorial, Russian Leaders and Their Populations have Been Bored When They aren’t Fighting a War, New Moscow Comic Book Suggests

Paul Goble

              Staunton, Oct. 1 – While many would suggest that Putin’s presentation of Russian history has many comic-book-like elements, a real comic books has now appeared in Moscow suggesting that Russian leaders and the Russian people have been bored when they aren’t fighting a war.

              The Bombor publishing house has now issued a comic book, The History of Russian in Comics. From the Ancient Slavs to Vladimir Putin, which in frame after frame carries that message (nemoskva.net/2026/10/01/vyshla-istoriya-rossii-v-komiksah-ot-drevnih-slavyan-do-putina/).

              Many times Russian leaders as presented in this comic say they are “bored” when they are sitting at home rather than going to war, although to be fair, a few, including Nicholas II, are less than pleased with what happens after they take up arms against someone. Only when Russian leaders fight and win wars do the Russian people enthusiastically support them.

              The comic book which echoes Putin’s own line isn’t winning from Russian readers. All those who left reviews at the Labyrinth book store were negative, with one typical description of the comic being that it is “a terrible propaganda product” and not worth "more than a kopek."

Pro-War Russian Writers Say Moscow Isn’t Doing Enough to Fight the War in Ukraine or Support Their Own Efforts to Generate Support for It

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 1 – A group of Russian writers who have criticized the Kremlin for not doing enough to win in Ukraine is now complaining that the Kremlin isn’t supporting them in ways that allow them to get their message to Russians in general and school children in particular, the Ostorozhno Novosti agency says.

            At a roundtable of such writers in St. Petersburg, Aleksandr Pelevin said that Moscow has failed to launch “a special cultural operation since the war began” as a result of which “patriotic poetry was “in decline as it is hard to keep writing about the capture of yet another small village” (t.me/ostorozhno_novosti/55435 and ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/10/01/zagnali-v-zagon-z-pisateli-pozhalovalis-chto-ih-ne-podderzhivaet-gosudarstvo-i-ne-chitayut-rossiyane-a207490).

            Another pro-war poet, Aksel Kobokki said Moscow’s failure to launch a cultural effort alongside its military one was threatening patriotic feelings among many Russians who have “little trust in the people aligned with the authorities as a result” and that patriots were finding it harder to defend their allies than ever before.

            And a third speaker at the meeting said that he was aware of “orders to keep patriotic writers out of schools” and that these orders “came from the highest levels of the government.” Still others complained that writers at the front weren’t being given leave to attend literary events.

60 Percent of Infrastructure on Russia’s Arctic Coast Threatened by Melting Permafrost and Warming Sea, EU’s Copernicus Monitoring Service Says

Paul Goble

              Staunton, Sept. 30 – Sixty percent of the infrastructure in coastal regions of the Russian Federation along the Arctic is at risk of collapse as a result of the ever-more-rapidly melting permafrost underlying it and the rapid warming of the Arctic Ocean which leads to more waves and erosion there, the EU’s Copernicus Monitoring Service says.

              In a new report based on an examination of the Arctic and adjoining areas, the European Union science office says that over the past four decades, the ice cover over off the Russian coast is receding faster than elsewhere in that sea (rfi.fr/ru/в-мире/20260930-доклад-copernicus-полярные-льды-быстрее-всего-тают-у-берегов-россии).

              That allows for more shipping; but together with the melting of permafrost in northern Russia, it is undermining infrastructure built near the coast because the warming of the sea means that waves are larger and contribute to more erosion of the ground on which they are built.

              According to Copernicus, the area of Arctic sea ice in the summer has been declining at the rate of more than 10 percent per decade and the Arctic waters have been warming “almost six times faster than the planet on average since 1980,” with last summer being the warmest on record.

              The Arctic Ocean off Russia’s coast is leading in this regard. According to the authoritative European center, the surface temperature of the Kara Sea has been going up by 1.68 degrees centigrade every decade, “about 14 times faster than the average for the world’s oceans as a whole,” with the Laptyev and Bering seas not far behind.

Kremlin Comes Up with Another Way to Hide Its Shortcomings: It will Cut Off Funds to Those Making Films Showing Corrupt Siloviki

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 30 – Russian filmmakers will lose state financing if they produce films showing Russian police or security forces accepting bribes or engaged other corrupt enterprises, Kommersant reports, pointing to yet another way the Kremlin is expanding censorship and seeking to hide problems with the Russian regime.

            Two sources in major film studios said messages to that effect have already been sent to the leaders of their studios as others and that the rule was being introduced in this way and that no one expects it to be enshrined in any formal documentation that would attract unwanted attention (kommersant.ru/doc/8990074).

            The imposition of the rule in this way is possible because “all producers know about this” already, one of the Moscow newspaper’s sources says; and they recognize that they could lose more than money because any negative treatment of the police, the FSB, the Investigations Committee or the Procuracy could be presented as undermining those institutions.

            Introducing new rules in this way often happened in Soviet times, but it is making a comeback in Putin’s, giving the regime an opportunity to deny what it is in fact doing while continuing to do it and thus making it harder but as Kommersant shows not impossible to keep track of increasing repression introduced in this way.

           

A Russian Invasion of Baltic Countries ‘Now a Likely Scenario,’ Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 30 –A year ago, Vladimir Pastukhov said that there were there possible scenarios for Moscow’s moves regarding the Baltic countries and eastern Europe more generally – mobilization, hybrid (subversive) war or invasion – and that the last of these was the most unlikely of all.

            But now, the London-based Russian analyst says, the situation has changed because of how the Kremlin leader views the situation; and he argues that an invasion seems to him to have become “a likely scenario” for what Putin will do next (echofm.online/opinions/vtorzhenie-kazhetsya-mne-dostatochno-veroyatnym-sczenariem).

            Pastukhov says that it many ways the current situation in Moscow parallels the situation in Washington at the time when Ronald Reagan came to power. He formed two groups, Team A, which consisted of government experts, and Team B which was made up of university experts and was headed by Richard Pipes.

            The first team, the Russian analyst says, argued that “the USSR would eventually be more and more like a ‘normal’ European state and its aggressive energy would fade. Because of the likelihood of that, the West’s strategy should be not to take any steps that would interfere with this evolving convergence.

            Team B, led by Pipes, came to “the exact opposite conclusion.” Focusing on communist ideology, they argued that “aggression is an essential feature” of those who accept this ideology and that Washington and the West must therefore adopt a strategy of “’strategic deterrence’” to prevent disaster.

            Reagan was convinced by the arguments of Team B and launched a program designed to contain and weaken the USSR. “Ultimately,” Pastukhov says, “this accelerated the collapse of the USSR although in my opinion, that was not the cause” of what Putin calls “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20^th century.”

            The London-based analyst suggests that a debate has been taking place behind the scenes in Moscow much like the one between Team A and Team B almost half a century ago and says that Putin has accepted as the basis of his actions the view that aggression is not only necessary but useful whatever Russian government experts say.

            Because that is so, the Kremlin leader is likely to launch more aggressive actions against the West in general and the Baltic countries in particular as long as he believes that he is winning in Ukraine. Unless he loses there and loses convincingly, that won’t change as long as Putin is in office in the Kremlin.

Many Russians Untroubled by Abuse of Prisoners Because They Believe ‘Criminals Must Suffer,’ Titayev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 1 – Most Russians don’t think about prisons very much, independent criminologist Kirill Titayev says; but when they do because someone prominent is behind bars, they often are untroubled by reports of the mistreatment and even torture of prisoners because they believe that “criminals must suffer.”

            As a result, the prison system, which censors the letters of prisoners often does not remove reports about such things because guards consider this normal and know that a many outside the walls agree with them (istories.media/opinions/2026/10/01/prestupniki-dolzhni-stradat-muchitelstvo-kak-osnovnoi-printsip-ispolneniya-nakazanii-v-rossii/).

            That is why the flood of reports of abuse of prisoners in Russian jails and camps do not generate the kind of response one might expect to such brutality and why the loss of the European Human Rights Court as a final place of appeal is going to have such tragic consequences for Russian inmates.

            In many countries, some believe that prison should involve harsh conditions; but most national prison systems have now moved beyond that recognizing that allowing such treatment will not only make the rehabilitation of prisoners unlikely but also cast a negative shadow on the entire society.

            Participants in focus groups discussing this issue that Titayev has conducted are horrified by individual stories in prisons but at the same time “are not ready to accept the idea that criminal should not be tormented” by their guards.  Until that changes, there is little chance for positive change in the Russian prison system, he says.