Ukrainian historian Tetiana Zemliakova and French historian Guillaume Lancereau are Max Weber fellows at the European University Institute in Florence. Teachers and coordinators for theInvisible University for UkraineTheir work includes analysing the speeches of the President of the Russian Federation, which they analyse in detail for the IHEDN.
WHAT ARE THE MAIN FEATURES OF PUTIN'S RHETORIC?
There is nothing fascinating about Vladimir Putin's rhetoric. It articulates a series of Third World clichés from the Cold War era and a cast of imaginary characters - "the collective West", "the world majority", Russia - all shrouded in a thick fog of international law.
This rhetoric is not entirely devoid of meaning: what Vladimir Putin has been saying for decades shows that his reasoning is based on the concrete state of the political, intellectual and legal world. When he defends the vision of a "multipolar" world, opposed to the machinations of the "collective West", its "hegemony" and its "neo-colonial" practices, he shows that he has understood something about the reception of contemporary post-colonial discourse: from the Sahel to US campuses, via the last communist parties in Western Europe. The same is true, moreover, when he proclaims that his war in Ukraine is a "war of national liberation", against a backdrop of geopolitical strife over what policy to adopt towards Hamas.
When he claims that Russia must exclude or condemn anyone with an openly "non-traditional" sexual orientation, in the name of the specific values that have always been anchored in every Russian, he is turning international calls for respect for sovereignty, which insist on the right of every State to preserve its cultural and spiritual specificities, on their head.
"HIS SPEECHES ENDLESSLY REHASH THE SAME OLD MOTIFS".
Finally, he shows that he is no stranger to the legal formalism that permeates international relations when he argues that the regions of Donets'k, Lugans'k, Zaporižja and Kherson would have had an "inalienable right" to become part of the Russian Federation, guaranteed by Article 1 of the United Nations Charter.
Putin's discourse borrows blithely from the language of international bureaucrats and ministerial officials, while exploiting the most hackneyed clichés of news journalism. His discourse, which could therefore formally echo some of the watchwords of today's international institutions, thrives on a breeding ground of anti-Americanism, distrust of NATO and the incessant struggle for the self-determination of peoples - whose logic he distorts to the point of legitimising the preposterous idea of a "people of Donbass" whose mission it would be for Russia to liberate.
At the start of a third year of war, however, it is clear that the stakes go far beyond his speeches, which endlessly rehash the same hackneyed motifs while weaving them together with dubious logical links. The real collective danger for Vladimir Putin's opponents is the all-too-common habit of placing too much faith or importance on formal coincidences between his own themes, lexicon and obsessions and those of the common political language. So every time Vladimir Putin uses familiar clichés, the informed listener turns a deaf ear, without noticing that the ideological merchandise is being misled.
"IT HAS NO OTHER OBJECTIVE THAN TO MAINTAIN ITSELF IN A PERPETUAL PRESENT".
However, we should be wary of seeing Putin's rhetoric as a coherent corpus, either in terms of its content or its ideological roots. Vladimir Putin only says what suits him. He benefits from presenting himself as a fearless leader of men, determined to usher in the future with his demiurgic hand, while the rest of the world clings to the comforts of the present or the ruins of a bygone past.
The Russian President repeats that his priority is the "historic future" of the Russians as a people, and not any return to the past. On 30 September 2023, when he announced the annexation of the four Ukrainian regions mentioned earlier, he exclaimed: "There is no longer a Soviet Union and we will not revive the past. That's not what Russia needs today, that's not what we want.
Yet Vladimir Putin is in no way ushering in the future. He has no other objective than to maintain himself in a perpetual present, just as it was for him on the eve of his war: that of absolute power and multiplied wealth. He has only one objective when he equates his destiny with that of the entire Russian population: to maintain his usurpation.
A NUMBER OF HIS STATEMENTS APPEAR FALLACIOUS FROM OUR SIDE OF EUROPE. DOES HE BACK UP THESE STATEMENTS WITH FACTS? CAN WE TELL WHETHER HE SINCERELY BELIEVES THEM, OR WHETHER THEY ARE PART OF A STRATEGY?
Not everything that comes out of Vladimir Putin's mouth is a lie. In particular, the international conduct of the United States and Europe provides him with an excellent opportunity to criticise the abuses committed by "the West" around the world. For example, he is right when he says that NATO's bombing of Belgrade as part of Operation Allied Force in 1999 contravened international conventions, or that George W. Bush's United States was the first to withdraw from the ABM Treaty signed in 1972 with the USSR to prevent the proliferation of anti-ballistic missiles.
Where the Russian President's rantings are more blatant is when it comes to Ukraine. He has gone so far as to claim that "biological weapons" aimed ethnically at the Russian population are being prepared in laboratories in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odessa, an allegation that is as absurd politically as it is chemically - although he makes up for the enormity of this assertion by evoking the United States' lie about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which he periodically refers to.
Another of his indignant fantasies concerns the 'denazification' of Ukraine. Asked in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson to demonstrate this political trend at work in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin had nothing to point to but the elevation to the status of national heroes of two Ukrainian nationalists, Stepan Bandera and Roman Šukhevyč, who had once collaborated with Nazi Germany. Memorials and names on flags would justify the deaths of at least 200,000 people on both sides of the front line.
"WE NEED A POLITICAL RESPONSE, NOT A HISTORICAL, FACTUAL OR DISCURSIVE ONE".
It is equally foolish to reduce Ukraine to an "anti-Russia", deprived of all political autonomy by the "collective West", which is said to have manipulated it into committing "genocide" against the "people of Donbass". Finally, this nonsense reaches a climax when Vladimir Putin describes the Maïdan revolution in 2014 as "a fascist coup d'état" and the current Ukrainian government, which came to power after democratic elections, as a pure puppet.
In reality, the most important thing is not to know to what extent Vladimir Putin is lying, whether he believes his own lies, or whether he is sincere in certain parts of his speech. The fact that he is right about NATO expansion and wrong about the Nazification of Ukraine does not change the nature of his war or the action that must be taken against it. The factual rectifications that Western commentators are so fond of, believing themselves to have acted when they have pointed out an error or an approximation, have never deflected a single Iskander or S-300 missile.
Vladimir Putin thinks and acts politically. We need a political response to this - not a historical, factual or discursive one. In this sense, General Bruno Maigret, former commander of France's strategic air forces, perhaps did not realise how right he was when he said in 2022: "We need to rethink a model based on political assumptions.
HAVE YOU NOTICED ANY CHANGES IN HIS DISCOURSE SINCE THE START OF THE WAR IN 2022?
There has been no fundamental change. On the nature of the Ukrainian nation, Vladimir Putin is still only repeating what he proclaimed in his 2021 essay on The historic unity of Russians and Ukrainians. When it comes to the recent history of the West, Russia and the USSR, his latest speeches are no different from those of 24 February 2022. Vladimir Putin's world is not populated by real things, but by abstract entities or invented characters. In this sense, his rhetoric cannot change unless the vision of the world that underpins it changes.
If Vladimir Putin is not renewing his discourse in any way, it is because he is not trying to convince anyone. It doesn't matter to him whether his lies are exposed or cleverly contradicted. Nor does it matter to him how many new supporters he has won among the inhabitants of the "Global South" after yet another speech to the Federal Assembly, or how clearly he needs to set out the political aims of his war. And why should he, since his military aims are now limited to new fortified bases on the edge of the Donets'k region? In this sense, Putin is not looking for supporters; he is looking for nothing more than discord among his opponents.
"ENCOURAGING OPPONENTS TO GET BOGGED DOWN IN DISCUSSIONS OF DETAIL".
One of the favourite refrains of Russian propaganda - "things are not that simple" - perfectly sums up the pragmatism of Putin's speeches. All he has to do is sow doubt and encourage his opponents to get bogged down in discussions of detail. He demonstrates his true potential for adaptation by his ability to distort the entire "news chain" to his advantage. Whether it's major events (from Israel's war against Hamas to speculation about the Ukrainian grain) or perfectly trivial episodes (a broken shop window or the presence of 'mixed toilets' in a European capital), everything is a pretext for him to prophesy that a black sun is gradually spreading over a 'collective West' in decline.
It may come as a surprise to see the Russian President forever hammering out the same arguments, the same facts, the same references, in a world that is constantly changing - if only on the scale of his own war, since we have gone from "taking Kiev in three days" to the current war of positions.
In reality, if Putin's words have not changed one syntagm, it is because, from his own point of view, they should not change: the fact that they remain identical is consistent with his ends. A usurper has no need to adapt to a changing world, since his sole objective is to keep the world as it is.
