Because Putin’s War in Ukraine is Longer than Stalin’s Great Fatherland War, Kremlin Propagandists have Been Forced to Change Their Line, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 13 – Until recently, Kremlin propagandists routinely drew parallels between Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine and the Great Fatherland War as Soviet participation in World War II is called, Abbas Gallyamov says. But now that Putin’s war is longer than Stalin’s, his propagandists have had to “radically change their approach.”

            If until this week, the propagandists liked to draw this parallel to argue that “the current war is being waged against the same enemy ‘our grandfathers fought against,” the former Putin speechwriter and now prominent Putin critic says. Therefore, the term “denazification” they used was no accident (t.me/abbasgallyamovpolitics/9515).

            But now these same propagandists are “loudly proclaiming that ‘it’s foolish to compare’” the current war with that of the 1940s because “this is a completely different war.” And they even suggest comparisons with the Great Northern War or the Hundred Years War of centuries earlier.

            “As they say,” Gallyamov continues, “thank you for that.” After all, “the current events have nothing in common with the great Patriotic War;” and even more to the point, the earlier conflicts the propagandists are pointing to “were fought for crowns and territories, that is, they were imperialist and colonial wars.”

            By acknowledging this, the Kremlin has “at least temporarily been forced to stop abusing the memory of our grandfathers” and admitting perhaps more than it even recognizing about what Putin and his team are about.