Since the beginning of the war with Ukraine, Russia has been trying to keep its face even when the reports from the battlefields in Ukraine have been less than favourable. However, in September Russia’s propaganda changed dramatically. Even the main rupors of the Kremlin’s line on the war in Ukraine have started to deviate from the existing “everything is fine” script – for example, Soloviev (Evening with Vladimir Solovyov on Russia-1), and Margarita Simonyan (Russia Today and Rossiya Segodnya), both separately started talking about how it is time to say the truth to the people and accept the defeats that Russian troops are facing in Russia. These changes came about after a successful counteroffensive by Ukraine, which pushed the Russian forces in the east and moved the frontline by miles.
The changing script of Russian propagandists is now focused on accepting the military defeats on the battlefield but emphasising that these are the lessons to be learned. Undeniably, for an ordinary observer, such change looks rather radical and rather insincere. One possible reason for such a change in the discourse is that it is not possible to hide or deny Russia’s military losses in Ukraine. The pushback that Russia is seeing in Ukraine, combined with the partial mobilisation of Russian citizens (which might end up not being partial at all), is becoming impossible to hide.
Thus, the Russian propagandists retreated to the rhetoric of “we made a mistake, let’s learn from it and do better”, which might have placated the pro-Kremlin audience on its own, but it is not as attractive anymore in the tandem with partial mobilisation. There would be few people in Russia who don’t know somewhere who is getting mobilised, which changes the game completely. It is one thing to believe what the regime says on television when you have no skin in it, and it is a different situation when the “special operation” is demanding relatives, friends, and colleagues to be shipped to the frontline.
The West is impatiently waiting for more Russian military losses in Ukraine as the tensions of a nuclear war are rising. Francis Fukuyama twitted his anticipation of a bigger Russia’s defeat in the coming days. In Russia, people are setting mobilisation hubs on fire in their protests against the Kremlin. Would it be enough to turn the tide? We shall see in October.