Russian state television’s aggressive talk shows are a platform on which Viacheslav Kovtun is very comfortable. The TV analyst was for years one of the few Ukrainians to be frequently invited to air his views on live broadcasts in which the atmosphere was often so heated that the programs ended with fistfights.
But Kovtun, who is often featured on-air as a political analyst, now fears the possibility of war. TV talk shows have intensified their bellicose rhetoric amid rising tensions on Russia’s border with Ukraine. Some observers say it is a ploy by the government to convince the public that any conflict that does occur will not be Russia’s fault.
“They always follow the party line,” says Kovtun, of the talk shows’ traditionally pro-Kremlin stance. In recent weeks, state media have been broadcasting a steady stream of accusations against Ukraine as 100,000 Russian troops are deployed along the border, raising international fears that Moscow is planning to invade the neighboring country. The portrait painted by the talk shows is of Kiev as the aggressor, backed by a belligerent West, while the alliance between Ukraine and the West creates a dangerous threat to Russia and unwillingly pushes it into conflict.
Talk shows are especially proactive. As Irina Petrovskaia, host of a television content analysis program on Moscow’s opposition radio station Eco, said in a recent broadcast, the talk show participants, many of whom are figures on the fringes of Russian politics, “are always asking for an attack, talking that we must attack, penetrate, defeat, annex”.
For her, the programs are dominated by a climate of military hysteria.
The news on state TVs tends to be more restrained. But this week TV newspapers claimed that Ukrainian forces had transported chemicals to the east of the country to potentially be used as chemical weapons, identifying cities controlled by Russian-backed separatists in the region where such “provocations” could take place.
In a report published last week, the US State Department described this allegation and others as “disinformation and political propaganda” aimed at “influencing Western countries into believing that Ukraine’s behavior could provoke global conflict”.
The document cited several cases in which the US said it believed Russia was fabricating pretexts to launch military action. Journalist Ivan Davidov, author of a media column on Russian website Znak, recently wrote that “war predictions are becoming routine” on state TV. The effect of this would be to normalize the concept of conflict. “War becomes possible when people stop seeing it as something out of the ordinary,” he observed.
He tells the Financial Times that the current situation differs greatly from 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and supported a separatist uprising in eastern Ukraine. At the time, Russia and state media outlets denied or downplayed the importance of Moscow’s military and political involvement in eastern Ukraine.
Now, however, analysts are portraying an armed conflict as “a possible, though not a very desirable, option to resolve accumulated problems.”
According to Davidov, all state media portray Russia as “the most peaceful country on the planet”. According to the media, Western leaders “don’t want to listen, they launch accusations, provoke, threaten”, and Moscow is forced to react. Denis Volkov, from the independent Russian research center Levada, says the message from the state media seems to have managed to influence the population. According to a survey carried out by Levada in December, only 4% of Russians think their country is to blame for the escalation of tensions. About 50% blame the US and NATO, and 16% blame Ukraine.
“Society is prepared for war, insofar as it has absorbed the perspective from which the Kremlin and Russian state media portray the situation – the idea that ‘it’s not our fault, it’s theirs'”, he says.
But despite the talk of state media, most Russians, according to observers, prefer not to think about conflict. Focus groups suggested that the population is tired of living in a constant state of confrontation with the West and Ukraine, Volkov said, and that the prevailing attitude is that “it’s scary, it’s unpleasant and I don’t want to get involved.” “People in Ukraine feel the war, but in Russia people don’t talk about the war,” says Arshak Makhichian, a 27-year-old Russian climate activist recently detained in Moscow after holding an individual protest against the potential conflict.
In a survey carried out by Levada in December, 53% of respondents said that an armed conflict is not going to happen or is unlikely. “The idea of ​​an armed conflict is being pushed out of the public consciousness. People don’t want to know about it,” says sociologist Sergei Belanovski, founder of the Belanovski Group research institute. According to him, especially outside Moscow’s central region, people are more focused on the country’s internal problems than on foreign policy. Online discussions are dominated by rising prices, local news or anti-vaccination content.
Among participants in a Levada survey conducted in January, 32% said their quality of life had declined in the last year, and only 11% thought it had improved. Furthermore, analysts say, TV’s influence is waning while the internet’s is growing, as in other countries.
Nor is it clear to what extent talk shows can be seen as reliable indicators of Kremlin thinking. “Nobody knows what Putin thinks – you don’t know, I don’t know,” says Kovtun.
“The broadcasters are also guessing.”
