Putin’s war rhetoric: spurious justifications for invasion

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Riccardo Nicolosi, Professor of Slavic Literatures at LMU, studies the rhetorical strategies by which Vladimir Putin justifies his war against Ukraine. In our interview, he explains what arguments the Russian president makes, what characterizes his oratorical style, and how his use of language differs from Donald Trump’s.

What role does Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric play in his war against Ukraine?

Riccardo Nicolosi: Rhetoric plays a key role – and is far more than just the packaging of political decisions. Putin’s speeches are programmatic texts, in which he formulates the guiding principles of Russian policy. They set the tone for state propaganda, which other political actors and state television merely repeat, vary, and illustrate.

His speeches reveal, moreover, how he seeks to legitimize the war from historical and geopolitical perspectives and with appeals to international law.

How Putin argues

How does he justify the war?

From the international law angle, Putin frames the invasion as a humanitarian intervention and defensive war. Russia had no choice but to protect the Russian-speaking population in the Donbas from a supposed genocide being perpetrated by Ukrainian forces – so went the principal narrative, which deliberately elided differences between language, ethnicity, and nationality. Anyone who speaks Russian, from Putin’s point of view, is Russian and potentially a citizen of the Russian Federation.

At the same time, he paints the war as defensive in nature: NATO is threatening Russia, the West is creeping ever closer, and so Russia has the right to protect itself. In his speech at the outset of the invasion on 24 February 2022, he invoked Article 51 of the UN Charter, which stipulates the right to self-defense in the event of an armed attack. The international community rejected this argumentation as contrary to international law.

Which historical arguments does Putin make?

Putin denies the historical legitimacy of Ukraine as an independent state. The idea of a Ukrainian nation, he maintains, is merely a product of the nationality policies of the Bolsheviks, which granted Ukraine and other Soviet republics cultural autonomy in the 1920s for reasons of power politics – with their own language, own institutions, and own forms of cultural expression, as well as the right to exit the union. According to Putin, this was a “historical mistake” that needed correcting.

Instead, he emphasizes that Ukraine is part of a larger whole: the “historical Russia” or the so-called “Russian world” (russkii mir). This is an ideological construct that sees Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia as forming a cultural and historical unit – bolstered by imperial Russian narratives from the 19th century, such as the notion that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are a single people. And yet these narratives were created specifically to oppose the national identity of Ukraine that was emerging at that time.

What geopolitical rationale does Putin use to justify the war?

Putin frames the war as resistance against a monopolar world order, in which the West exercises unjust hegemony. Russia, accord to his rhetoric, is not just fighting for itself, but on behalf of the “downtrodden peoples” of the world, especially in the Global South. In this context, Ukraine almost fades into the background – rhetorically, it becomes a sideshow in a global power struggle. Typical catchwords in this rhetoric are phrases like “neocolonial hegemony of the West.”

True motives for the war

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Do Putin’s arguments reflect his true motives for waging war against Ukraine?

No, I don’t think so. In my view, Putin has three distinct motives for this war: First of all, it’s simply about payback for the Maidan Uprising of 2014. He wants to punish Ukraine for not submitting to Russia and to make an example of it that will discourage other former Soviet republics.

Secondly, the war has helped him silence internal opposition and strengthen repression – there is practically no resistance left anymore.

And thirdly, he wants to demonstrate his power to the world at large. Russia may no longer be a major economic power, but Putin has used military aggression as a way of bringing his country back on to the international stage. The arguments he makes are entirely spurious and designed to internally and externally justify an illegitimate, terrible war.

In what oratorical style does Putin package his arguments?

His addresses call to mind a schoolmaster of old as he explains complex relationships in a pedantic tone – often delivering long-winded speeches crammed with facts and figures and technocratic jargon. At the same time, he is wont to break into vivid anecdotes from time to time. Once, for example, he related the story of a G8 summit where he was seemingly greeted in a friendly manner – with pats on the back – while the decisions had already been made in his absence. This image of the supposedly deceived and betrayed Russia runs through may of his speeches.

And then, out of the blue, Putin can launch into extremely aggressive, vulgar language. In a video address, for example, he spoke of traitors within, whom the Russian people would “spit out like insects.” This language shocks – and is meant to. An important rhetorical device is the targeted deployment of certain loaded phrases – including such classics of Soviet war vocabulary as “fascist threat” and “patriotic war.” Moreover, Putin never speaks into a vacuum, but always aims his complex rhetoric at specific groups, both domestically and abroad. He seeks to tap into the expectation structures of a broad audience – and sadly, not without success.

For whom Putin speaks

What are these target groups and how do his messages to them differ?

He deliberately addresses three groups: his own people, the Russian-speaking world, and an international audience. At economic forums with guests from Africa, China, or South America, for example, he emphasizes anti-Western rebellion. The main narrative becomes: “We’re fighting against Western imperialism and neocolonialism.”

But if he’s talking to the Russian people on 9 May – when Russians celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany – he presents Ukraine as a neo-Nazi state controlled by the West. In this way, he appeals to the country’s national self-image as victors over fascism – a motif with powerful domestic resonance.

In his declaration of war, by contrast, he combined arguments relating to international law, history, and geopolitics in order to address all three target groups.

Which sources did you draw on for your analysis of his speeches?

The most important source was the official Kremlin website, where almost all of Putin’s speeches have been fully transcribed – including the extemporaneous passages. Particularly interesting are the recordings of panel discussions, where Putin takes the prompts of moderators as the opportunity for rambling monologs.

These speeches and public appearances are freely available: Putin does not shroud his messages in secrecy. I analyzed them in the Russian original and translated into German the passages I quoted in my book when there was no existing German translation. The journal Osteuropa issued by the German Association for East European Studies has published German translations of some of Putin’s speeches – incidentally, this is an excellent source of information for anybody who’s interested.

When the language became more bellicose

How has Putin’s war rhetoric changed?

You have to go back to the year 2012, which marks a clear break with what went before. After his return to the presidency, Putin reacted to mass protests with a repressive turn – and his language became more bellicose. He explained that the imminent election victory was like a military victory. The election campaign was stylized as a patriotic battle – and with the pro-European Maidan Uprising in 2014, Ukraine was definitively cast as the enemy in chief. Since then, Putin has constantly ratcheted up his war rhetoric – and not just quantitatively, but qualitatively too. The enemy has been increasingly dehumanized, and the vocabulary of war has become ever more dominant.

That being so, why does he still call the war a “special military operation”?

It has rhetorical advantages: “Special operation” is a technocratic, law-and-order-type phrase – as if it wasn’t describing a war, but a targeted measure to restore order. The term also signals that Ukraine is not really a foreign country, but a “problem” within Russia’s sphere of influence. It suggests that it’s a sort of internal Russian police action – comparable with the operations against opposition figures inside the country.

Furthermore, the term refers back to earlier “special operations,” in places like Chechnya, and thus places the current war in a familiar tradition. Putin is possibly also alluding to Western conventions of speech: In 1999, for example, Gerhard Schröder explicitly said the Kosovo deployment was “not a war,” but a “military operation to defend human rights.” There, too, the rhetorical intention was to downplay an armed intervention. Putin likes to bring up NATO’s Kosovo campaign in 1999, which he characterizes as breaking international law. Through this intervention, the West has lost all legitimacy in his eyes to criticize Russia for its attack on Ukraine. In making these claims, he’s deliberately simplifying complex historical contexts. And last but not least, the term “special military operation,” abbreviated to SVO in Russian, fits wonderfully well into the Russian language tradition, which is studded with abbreviations as a legacy of the Soviet Union.

Putin in comparison to other politicians

How would you classify Putin’s oratorical style compared to other – authoritarian or democratic – politicians?

The chief difference to democratic rhetoric is the lack of dialog. In democracies, political speech exists as a back-and-forth – it’s about arguments, rejoinders. Putin’s rhetoric, by contrast, is monologic and brooks no contradiction. It’s no coincidence that Putin has never conducted an election campaign or agreed to debate other candidates. Unlike Donald Trump, for instance, whose rhetoric is still in permanent election mode and who communicates a lot over social media, there are no tweets from Putin, just long traditional speeches. He comes across as old-fashioned, but controlled.

If we compare Putin to other autocrats like Lukashenko in Belarus, we note that the latter has a coarser, folksier, off-the-cuff way of speaking – almost playing the role of Putin’s sidekick. Putin is also quite unlike National Socialist leaders, who sought the “total” mobilization of the masses. In so-called Putinism, the opposite is the case: It wants to depoliticize the people, keep them pacified. So Putin’s rhetoric works very differently – although this does not make it any less dangerous.

Riccardo Nicolosi is Professor of Slavic Literatures at LMU. His main research interests are Russian literature and culture in the 18th and 19th centuries, rhetoric, and the relationship between literature and science. His book “Putins Kriegsrhetorik” [Putin’s War Rhetoric] was recently published by Konstanz University Press.