There was much pomp and pageantry on display recently in former Russian imperial capital Saint Petersburg as Vladimir Putin presided over the country’s annual Navy Day festivities. In truth, however, Putin and his assembled admirals had very little to celebrate. Over the past year, Russia’s once-vaunted Black Sea Fleet has been decimated by Ukrainian drones and missiles in what must rank as the most remarkable series of naval defeats in modern military history.
Despite barely having a navy of its own, Ukraine has managed to sink or severely damage approximately one-third of Putin’s fleet, forcing the bulk of his remaining warships to retreat from occupied Crimea. The war at sea has gone so badly for Russia that by spring 2024, Britain’s Ministry of Defense was already declaring the Black Sea Fleet “functionally inactive.”
The details of this year’s Russian Navy Day program provided some hints of the inglorious reality behind Moscow’s efforts to project naval strength. Tellingly, the traditional parade of Russian warships along the Neva River to the Kronstadt naval base, which usually serves as the centerpiece of the entire holiday, was canceled due to security concerns. In its place, a reduced flotilla took part in a significantly scaled down event that featured around half as many vessels as in previous years.
Despite being by far the smallest Russian Navy Day since the holiday was reinstated in 2017, this year’s event nevertheless represented an excellent opportunity for Putin to honor Russia’s fallen sailors and vow retribution for the country’s unprecedented losses in the Black Sea. In fact, he did nothing of the sort. Throughout his official address, Putin barely mentioned the casualties suffered or the sacrifices made by the Russian Navy during the invasion of Ukraine. Instead, the Kremlin dictator preferred to flush Russia’s Black Sea defeats down the memory hole. He was aided by the loyal Russian media, which carefully avoided any awkward references to the disaster that has befallen the country’s Black Sea Fleet.
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All this brings to mind an old Soviet joke that begins with Napoleon, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great looking down from heaven at a Red Army parade on Red Square. Caesar indicates the endless rows of Soviet troops and says, “with so many men, I could have held Germania.” Alexander points to the tanks and missiles and declares, “with such weapons of war, I could have conquered all India.” Napoleon, meanwhile, completely ignores the parade and is instead engrossed in a copy of Pravda. “If I had such a newspaper,” he proclaims, “nobody would have heard of Waterloo.”
Many Soviet jokes have not aged well, but this particular punchline remains as relevant as ever in modern Russia, where Putin has succeeded in creating a propaganda machine every bit as potent as its Soviet predecessor. Today’s Kremlin-controlled multimedia ecosystem is far more sophisticated than its Communist forerunner, but it serves the same basic function of bending reality to suit the whims of Russia’s ruling elite.
For the past decade, Putin has used this unrivaled information weapon to fuel the biggest European invasion since World War II. Kremlin propagandists have managed to convince millions of ordinary Russians that democratic Ukraine is actually a “Nazi state” whose very existence poses an intolerable threat to Russia. Ukrainians have been demonized and dehumanized to such an extent that genocidal anti-Ukrainian rhetoric is now a routine feature on prime time Russian TV.
The success of these efforts is all too apparent, with a wide range of opinion polls, research, and anecdotal evidence pointing to consistently high levels of Russian public support for the invasion. Meanwhile, there is no meaningful anti-war movement in the country, despite widespread knowledge of the horrors taking place in neighboring Ukraine. This is not surprising. After all, as Voltaire once warned, those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
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Putin’s ability to distort Russian reality is genuinely terrifying, but the sheer scale of his propaganda operation could also inadvertently offer hope for the future. Many commentators have argued that failure in Ukraine would lead to the fall of the Putin regime and quite possibly the breakup of Russia itself, but these concerns may be exaggerated. While a third Russian collapse in a little over a century cannot be ruled out, the experience of the past two-and-a-half years gives good cause to believe that Moscow’s disinformation industry is more than capable of rebranding any future retreat from Ukraine in a favorable light, or of burying it completely. In other words, if the Russian media can manufacture a major war, it can also fabricate a suitably plausible peace.
Anyone who still doubts the Kremlin’s capacity to whitewash military defeat in Ukraine hasn’t been paying attention. We have recently witnessed Putin hosting the biggest naval event of the year while studiously ignoring the historic humbling of his southern fleet. It was the same story in 2022, when he ceremoniously announced that Kherson had joined Russia “forever,” only to order his beaten troops to abandon the city just weeks later. Likewise, when Russia lost the Battle of Kyiv during the initial phase of the invasion, the Kremlin refused to acknowledge defeat and absurdly insisted that the retreat from northern Ukraine was a mere “goodwill gesture.” If Putin is eventually forced to end his invasion, it seems safe to assume he will downplay this humiliation in similar fashion.
Since February 2022, Western leaders have found numerous reasons to limit their support for Ukraine. Some are restricted by modest defense budgets and competing domestic priorities. Most are afraid of possible escalation and have allowed themselves to be intimidated by Putin’s talk of Russian red lines. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says many of his country’s Western partners are also reluctant to arm Ukraine because they fear the unpredictable geopolitical consequences of a Russian defeat. This Western alarm over a possible Russian collapse is exaggerated and fails to account for the power of Putin’s propaganda.
If Russia suffers a decisive defeat in Ukraine, past experience indicates that the Kremlin will almost certainly seek to move the goalposts, change the narrative, or devise some other way of rewriting history and claiming victory. Any embarrassing evidence of failure would simply be flushed down the memory hole, along with all the sunken Russian warships of the Black Sea Fleet.
Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.
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The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.
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Image: Russia's President Vladimir Putin attends the annual Navy Day parade in Saint Petersburg, Russia July 28, 2024. (Sputnik/Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Pool via REUTERS)