Russia is losing both wars – the propaganda war and the one on the ground

The protests keep coming and, just as in Stalinist times, you can’t stop people thinking or talking

Marina Ovsyannikova, a producer on the primetime Russian state TV news show, leapt onto the set with a banner (AFP via Getty Images)

Three weeks into a war that was supposed to last three days and, to adapt the famous euphemism employed by Emperor Hirohito in 1945 after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Russia’s advantage". It certainly seems to be so on the propaganda front.

The latest dissident to make the headlines is actually a bit of a professional in the field. Marina Ovsyannikova, a producer on the primetime Russian state TV news show, leapt onto the set with a banner declaring that viewers shouldn’t believe the propaganda. Her message, “No war, stop the war, don’t believe the propaganda, they are lying to you here”, was backed up with a passionate online video. She hasn’t been seen since, naturally.

It reminded me a little, in tragicomic terms, of the time back in the unenlightened 1980s, when Nicholas Witchell had literally to sit on an LGBT+ rights campaigner who had smuggled themself into BBC Television Centre. Or “Beeb man sits on lesbian” as the deathless Daily Mirror headline summarised it.

In Russia, protests are met with a rather more brutal police response. Even holding a blank placard up makes you liable for arrest. I’ve seen a pro-Putin woman being led away by police as soon as they spotted her talking to western media. I was most moved by a veteran of the 1941 Siege of Leningrad (ie the tactic now used by Russia in Ukraine), Yelena Osipova, something of a celebrity in her homeland, being taken off by Putin’s coppers. Presumably that was just to remind the old lady about why her generation sacrificed so much in the Great Patriotic War.

But the protests keep coming and, just as in Stalinist times, you can’t stop people thinking or talking. Social media was one way that Russian people could find the truth, but Putin has been closing them down, or they have felt, like Facebook, that they had to withdraw from the scene. Nonetheless, Russia is no longer a hermit state, and some communication with the outside world is going on. The conscripts freezing in their tanks on the road to Kyiv are telling the folks back home about the reality of war.

Anonymous, that disparate gang of cyber hackers, sometimes hijack Russian websites and TV stations, just as the Russians attack those in the Baltic states, for example. The west has shut down RT and Sputnik, and the usual Russian skill at disinformation and social media manipulation is less evident than in recent years.

Sadly, there are still plenty of Putin apologists and conspiracy theorists on Twitter and TikTok – "useful idiots" on the left who think Russia is still a socialist state, and the cranky populist right who admire Putin as an "anti-woke" strong man.

By the way, the war highlights how fortunate we in the UK are to have the BBC and BBC World Service, and how unlucky we are to have GB News and Nadine Dorries.

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No doubt, many Russians will still believe everything Putin says, but Russia is not immune from political change when wars go wrong. The revolutions of 1905, 1917 and 1991 were all preceded by economic hardships and humiliating defeats in war – against Japan in the Pacific, against Germany and Austria in the First World War, and the loss of Afghanistan and the Cold War with the west, respectively. They all happened despite a police state and official control of information. It is perfectly possible to envisage a revolt in the coming weeks against Putin’s disastrous wars among his own people and inside his own military and sections of the elite. The Russian Revolution of 2022?

The squeeze on Russia has hardly begun in earnest. The economic war – we’ve moved far beyond tokenistic sanctions – was always going to hurt both sides. The west loses its gas and oil, but Russia loses the funding for its war machine. Personal sanctions on oligarchs have taken time to bite, and so will the shortages and disappearance of western investment. The collapse in the rouble, for example, will take a few weeks to fully work through the economy.

All of that, and setbacks in the propaganda war, would be OK for Putin if the “special military operation” (his current euphemism) was going at a lightning pace – because the war was supposed to be won and over by the time the Russian people were inconvenienced by the loss of their Big Macs, ownership of Chelsea FC and Renault-built Lada cars.

But, of course, the traditional Russian military talent for waste, corruption, inefficiency and poor planning has meant that the war is far from won and may never be, in the sense of a pacified Ukraine sitting contentedly in the new sphere of influence. Volodymyr Zelensky was supposed to have fled to America by now, his army crushed and his people welcoming the “liberators”.

Instead, Putin is begging China for drones and Syria for soldiers. I repeat: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Russia’s advantage.”