Moscow's Propaganda Machine Is Malfunctioning

Moscow's propaganda operations are famous for their reach and effectiveness. Russian media operatives have not only weaponized social media, meddling in American and European elections, they've continued to be major players in inflaming the U.S. ongoing culture wars and political divides.

At home, Vladimir Putin has for years consolidated and tightened his grip on state media to control public opinion and crush any rumblings of dissent. It's been widely reported that every week, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov holds meetings with editors from the main newspapers to ensure cohesion across the press. "Secret instructions" are also issued on current talking points to encourage editors to think of particular lines and stories.

The failures and confusion of Russia's war on Ukraine, however, have shown growing cracks in Putin's propaganda machine. Official media have had trouble explaining the war to the Russian public. As the conflict has continued with no end in sight, Putin's mouthpieces have increasingly contradicted themselves and in a few cases even dared to speak truths about the war that have sent some Putin critics to prison.

The media chaos reached a peak following the Wagner Group mutiny in June. Wagner and its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, hailed as Russian heroes particularly for their role taking the town of Bakhmut, were now traitors. But some Russian politicians and media downplayed the revolt and Putin's spokesman Peskov had to reverse his earlier denials that the president had met with Prigozhin and his men after the mutiny.

As Russian propaganda has collided more directly and publicly with reality, Putin has remained firmly in control. Some observers as well as recent polls, however, suggest he may have a growing credibility gap at home which could be a potential long-term threat to his rule.

"When your system is not stable, you will see holes and problems emerge in different places," says Tikhon Dzyadko, Editor-in-Chief of Russia's independent and now banned TV Rain. "[The war] has been going on for 16 months, and no one sees the end. People in the Kremlin and in Russian propaganda see that Russia is not winning, that Russia is losing territories which it captured at the beginning of the war."

Other Russia watchers like Mark Galeotti, a London-based political scientist and author of the 2022 book Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine, (Osprey Publishing) are skeptical, saying that fake diversity of opinion and controlled dissent are just part of the Kremlin playbook. "Putin's etiquette dictates that it's fine for his boys to fight amongst themselves, so long as they make it clear that they are all loyal to the tsar," Galeotti says.

The Russian Foreign Ministry, the Kremlin press office and the Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to Newsweek's requests for comment.

Framing the Mutiny

In the months leading up to the mutiny, Prigozhin, a longtime Putin crony, became the loudest critic of the Kremlin's conduct of the war. Ultimately, he said via Telegram, a messaging app that doubles as a publishing platform, that the war had been begun under false pretenses; that the Kremlin's top brass were corrupt and incompetent; that civilians were being murdered on both sides and that "the clueless grandpa"—an apparent reference to Putin—didn't know what was going on.

Prigozhin marched on Moscow with his fighters on June 24. In its short-lived uprising, the Wagner Group said it took control of two military hubs in southern Russia and advanced within 120 miles of the capital before pulling back after a deal was brokered by Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko.

That confusing series of events led to a confused response from Putin's media. "Inside a falsehood-laden bureaucratic narrative, how do you take Prigozhin and Wagner, who are the heroes of the state and are doing good work for it, and then this weird episode happens, where they're suddenly traitors, marching on the capital?" Christopher Paul, a RAND Corporation social scientist who has studied Russia's propaganda apparatus, asks. "You can't put that in a bullet point or a memo. That is a tough and inconsistent story to tell."

Coverage of the rebellion and the subsequent fallout reflected a lack of internal cohesion or direction inside Putin's disinformation machine. Some outlets reversed their earlier praise for Prigozhin. questioning Bakhmut's importance and asking why it took Wagner more than 200 days to claim victory. In May, propaganda channels had said the capture of the city by Prigozhin was "an event of historic proportions" that evokes "probably, the same emotions as the grandfathers in Berlin had," a reference to the end of World War II.

But on June 30, state TV's Channel One said Bakhmut is "not the most important city for the front," calling the effectiveness of Wagner fighters a "myth." Russian conventional forces had captured the strategic Ukrainian city of Mariupol in the Donetsk region in far less time in 2022, the segment added.

At the same time, however, other outlets appeared to side with the Wagner chief. There was consistent messaging across state press and TV that the mutiny was largely "bloodless," including from the head of the defense committee of the Russian State Duma, Andrey Kartapolov. He was quoted as saying on June 26 that the paramilitary outfit "didn't offend anyone, they didn't break anything" and that "they have not done anything wrong." Kartapolov, a retired Russian colonel-general and a key figure in Putin's ruling United Russia party, also described Wagner as Russia's most combat-ready unit: "This is recognized by everyone, including representatives of Russia's Armed Forces."

That stood in stark contrast to talking points voiced by pro-Russian bloggers on Telegram and some TV guests. A few asked what more than a dozen Russian pilots had died for at the hands of mutineers and demanded to know who was going to be punished. Andrey Gurulev, a member of the State Duma Defense Committee, told RTVI that Wagner will "100 percent bear [responsibility]" given that "our military personnel died." Yevgeny Popov, host of the program 60 Minutes on the Rossiya-1 channel, called Prigozhin a "traitor" as he broadcast footage on July 5 purportedly taken during a raid by security services on the Wagner chief's St. Petersburg mansion.

Finally, Putin appeared on two different "live" TV segments in different places at the same time. No explanation was given by the networks, adding fodder to "Putin's body double" conspiracy theories.

Selective Punishment of 'War Fakes'

The defects in the Kremlin propaganda machine the mutiny made apparent first began to emerge not long into Putin's now 16-month-old war and grew as the invasion bogged down.

Early in the conflict, in March 2022, Moscow sought to tighten its control of the story with legislation imposing jail terms of up to 15 years for intentionally spreading "fake news" about Russia's army. The Kremlin has since used the "war fakes law" to crack down on those who veer from Putin's narrative. That includes prohibiting the media from calling the invasion a "war." State-run outlets typically use Putin's term "special military operation."

About six months later, however, Russian state TV for the first time described the conflict as a "war" when propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, nicknamed "Putin's voice" for his stridently pro-Kremlin views, used the word on his show Evening with Vladimir Solovyov. Multiple TV presenters and guests, as well as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and even Putin himself, have since publicly used the same language.

"Some of that has to do with this willingness to be inconsistent as a virtue, but sometimes it's an institutional flaw," RAND's Paul says. "There's probably different mechanisms of control for the print press versus the television media, and maybe different guidance has filtered through or has been interpreted differently by intermediate managers or leaders or bureaucrats in that hierarchy."

One outlet that fell victim to the Kremlin's media crackdown shortly after the war began is independent television channel TV Rain (Dozhd, in Russian). The broadcaster was blocked by Russia's telecommunications regulator over its coverage of Ukraine and was targeted under the same "war fakes" law that Kremlin-friendly journalists seemed impervious to. TV Rain delivered its final show in early March 2022 with staff walking out of the studio live on-air, saying "no to war" during a broadcast of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, which was aired on Soviet state TV during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"It was pretty obvious to me that the beginning of the war was the beginning of the end of TV Rain in Russia," says Editor-in-Chief Tikhon Dzyadko. TV Rain is now based in the Netherlands.

Dzyadko says the misfires of Kremlin messaging stem from a fundamental "confusion" about the nature and purpose of the war itself. "There has been this shift since the beginning, and it's obvious why—because no one understands why Russia started the [war]," Dzyadko says. "Even the government doesn't understand it, and Russian propaganda is trying to to understand how to react to different events and trying to shift when the situation is changing."

"For example, the so-called 'demilitarization' of Ukraine—now [Putin says] Ukraine is more militarized than it has ever been, which means that this 'operation' is not succeeding," Dzyadko says.

This June, Duma member Konstantin Zatulin made much the same point when he was quoted by Russian media saying Moscow has failed to achieve these goals in Ukraine. In December 2022, Kremlin propagandist Olga Skabeyeva had gone so far as to tell state TV that the war in Ukraine "depletes" Russia in "every way" and that many Russians want an end to hostilities. Neither Zatulin nor Skabeyeva has been charged or prosecuted.

Varied Opinion—Within a Narrow Band

Those deviations don't by themselves signal a shift toward liberalization or even a loosening of the screws on the media, Russia experts are quick to caution.

According to Galeotti, there is typically room for "varied opinion" within Russian state media "but all within a relatively narrow band. There's no one who can actually say this was a stupid war, and we should be pulling out immediately."

Similarly, RAND's Paul says it can "take time for different pieces of the apparatus to figure out what they want to say." He adds: "When we see these kinds of inconsistencies, sometimes it's just different sections of the propaganda apparatus, taking a cut at what they want to share or what they think the current interpretation is."

This March, for instance, Russia's top state-run news agency, RIA Novosti, published a story featuring interviews with frustrated soldiers who were injured in battle and hadn't received compensation promised by Putin. According to Paul, "someone somewhere in the apparatus didn't get the message and probably got chastised for it. Maybe worse."

Shortly after Prigozhin's mutiny, Putin spokesman Peskov, a shrewd diplomat who has had no trouble changing stories as circumstances demand, claimed initially that the Kremlin "has no knowledge of or interest in Prigozhin's whereabouts." A few days later, after Western media had gotten hold of the story, however, he admitted that Putin had met with the Wagner boss and his troops shortly after the coup. That flip-flop was jarring even by Russian official standards.

Similarly, Russian news agency Interfax reported that Peskov told reporters Putin's June 26 evening address to the nation would be "truly fateful." Peskov then denied making the comment after all the major outlets promptly hyped up the speech. As it happened, the public deemed the brief speech underwhelming. Kremlin-aligned media and Putin himself were panned by Russian social media users on VK and OK (formerly known as Odnoklassniki), platforms the Kremlin was thought to have a tight grip on.

Part of the reason the Kremlin's propaganda effort has been weak, RAND's Paul says, is "failure to update." Russia's propaganda approach worked "really well" in 2014 when Putin illegally annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, Paul says, adding: "I think there was an expectation that they could achieve similar results and successes with similar approaches."

But while annexing Crimea was relatively bloodless and politically popular at home, the subsequent invasion and all of its hardships have been much harder to sell to the Russian public. Anton Shirikov, postdoctoral scholar at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, says the Kremlin's propaganda was unsuccessful in persuading the public in September 2022 that Putin's "partial" mobilization order would affect only a small proportion of Russians with military experience. That announcement prompted a mass exodus of men to neighboring countries to avoid conscription.

Shirikov also says the Russian public never really bought into Putin's annexations of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in the fall of 2022. "The government has been talking about these annexed, occupied territories as Russian regions," Shirikov says. "I don't think that most Russians have fully accepted that, I'm not sure that they think of these regions as Russian regions. I think in that sense, propaganda didn't have much success convincing them that this is now an expanded Russia."

This could turn out to be a long-term problem for Putin. A recent survey, conducted via telephone by Russian Field, a nonpartisan Moscow-based research company, found that 45 percent of respondents were in favor of continuing the "special military operation," down 9 percentage points from a survey the company conducted in April 2022.

Meanwhile, 44 percent said Russia should engage in peace talks, 9 percentage points more than in April 2022. And that number rose to 54 percent when respondents were faced with an added condition: that extending the conflict would entail a second wave of mobilization.

Ultimately, propagandists are being left to improvise given the lack of coherent Kremlin strategy, TV Rain's Dzyadko says.

"Since the Russian government is not successful now, then the Russian propaganda is not successful as well," he says. "If you have shows running a couple of hours a day, of course someone would say the truth." He adds: "Most of them perfectly understand what is going on. And even for them, sometimes it becomes too much to say all these stupid things about how Russia is strong and the West is weak, and that Ukraine is weakened."

As RAND's Paul points out, even the best propaganda "is not magical."

"A nation cannot achieve all of its foreign policy goals, simply through saying the right things and supporting it with the right messaging or communication campaigns," he says. "There has to be some connection between what is announced and the empirical reality."

Correction 07/26/2023, 7:00 a.m. ET: This article was updated to correct the job title of Tikhon Dzyadko, who is Editor-in-Chief of TV Rain.