The Russian Federation is going through a period of revanchism, while Vladimir Putin uses propaganda to instill the idea that Russia has the right to reclaim its old territories, stated the political pundit Igor Boțan during an IPN debate on Friday. According to the expert, the Moldovan media and civil society must explain to the citizens the true stakes of the war in Ukraine so that nostalgia for the supposed flourishing period of the Soviet Union disappears.
According to Igor Boțan, Russian propaganda in Moldova must be combated with concrete examples showing that Russia is an undemocratic state that started an unprovoked military aggression against Ukraine.
“The mass media, civil society in Moldova, especially the community of historians, must talk about what is happening in Ukraine and about Russia’s claims. It must be proved that Russia is passing through a period of revanchism. The unfounded accusations against Ukraine about Nazism are ridiculous, because Ukraine is a democratic society. After the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, after the war in Donbas, there were two perfectly democratic election cycles, President Zelensky was elected in an absolutely democratic manner, including in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine. We cannot say the same about the Russian Federation, where elections are routinely falsified and mystified. Putin’s accusations that there was a coup d'état in Ukraine are frivolous. Putin himself is the successor of Yeltsin who in October 1993 carried out a coup d'état in the Russian Federation, firing cannon at the State Duma, and Putin for 22 years remains unchanged at the helm of this country. All these things must be explained to the citizens”, said Igor Boțan.
Igor Botan says that Vladimir Putin’s imperialistic pretensions have been evident for many years, and now the Russian president is using the rhetoric of post-World War I Germany to justify starting the war in Ukraine.
“When we are talking about Russia’s revanchist stage, we can recall a series of documents signed either by President Putin or by the people in his entourage. Two years ago Vladimir Putin published an article in the American ‘National Interest’ magazine, in which he justified German revanchism after the First World War, and the people in his entourage subsequently tried to instill the idea that Russia was humiliated during of the Cold War and he has the right to reclaim the losses he considers unacceptable”, Igor Boțan added.
The political commentator also says that the similarities between the speeches of Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler are obvious, and the role of civil society in Moldova is to explain to the people the terror unleashed by dictatorial regimes.
“If we compare Putin’s speech of February 24, 2021 with Hitler’s speech of June 22, 1941, we see that they are similar. We see similarities between the Gleiwitz incident that the Nazis fabricated so as to have a pretext to attack Poland and the so-called explosion in Donetsk that took place right before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There are some clichés of revanchist policies that they are destined to repeat, and this must be explained to the citizens so that they understand that what is happening in Ukraine is unacceptable”, said the permanent expert of the IPN project.
The debate titled “Who started World War II and why? Propaganda myths as a source of nostalgia for the USSR” was the sixth installment of the series of debates “100 years of USSR and 31 years without USSR: Nostalgia for Chimeras”. The project is implemented by IPN News Agency with support from the Hanns Seidel Foundation.
