Research Exposes Long-Term Failure of Russian Propaganda in Ukraine's Donbas Region
“The Kremlin’s decision to favor outgroup animosity over in-group identity building, and its vast overestimation of the extent to which its lies about non-existent Ukrainian ‘fascists’ promoted pro-Russian sentiment, are key reasons why the invasion has been a strategic and logistical disaster.”
“If the nonsense of Novorossiya or other half-baked ideological narratives start to spread in the West, it could end up being used to pressure Ukraine into relinquishing large swathes of its territory, as a drawn-out war in the Donbas causes the global community’s nerves to fray,” he said.
For his PhD research, Roozenbeek used ‘natural language processing’ to algorithmically comb through over 85,000 print and online articles from 30 local and regional media outlets across Luhansk and Donetsk between 2014 and 2017, charting the patterns of content through use of key words and phrases in the wake of the first Russian invasion of Ukraine.
While half the coverage in print media remained “business as usual” – sport, entertainment, etc. – some 36% was dedicated to the “shaping of identity” via propaganda. Much of this was done through parallels to World War II: the Donbas war as an attack by Ukrainian “neo-Nazis”.
Only one newspaper paid any attention to Putin’s adopted concept of “Novorossiya”. Obvious opportunities to leverage history for identity-building propaganda were missed, such the fact that part of Donbas declared itself a Soviet republic in 1918, or indeed any mention of the Soviet Union.
“Description of an in-group identity that situated Donbas as part of the ‘Russian World’ were almost entirely absent from the region’s print media,” said Roozenbeek.
This pattern was largely replicated in online news media, which were arguably more ferocious in attempts to demonize the “outgroup” Kyiv government – including using English language to try and spread propaganda internationally – while ignoring a pro-Russian “this is us” identity.
Roozenbeek found a handful of stories covering “patriotic” cultural events organized by the Kremlin-owned leadership in Luhansk, but even here the in-group identity was “lazily assumed”, he says, rather than established.
All this despite the fact that a “blueprint” strategy for propaganda in Donbas explicitly called for the image of a benevolent Russia to be cultivated by emphasizing the “Russian World” philosophy.
This strategy, leaked to German newspapers in 2016, is widely believed to be the work of Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s former propagandist-in-chief, often dubbed Putin’s puppet master. It describes the need to construct and promote an ideology of “cultural sovereignty” in Russian-occupied Donbas, one that can act as a stepping stone to statehood.
“Despite the importance given to constructing identity and ideology after the Russian-backed takeover in Luhansk and Donetsk, including as directed by the Kremlin, very little in-group identity was promoted,” said Roozenbeek.
“What identity-building propaganda I could find in Donbas after 2014 was vague, poorly conceived, and quickly forgotten. Political attempts to invoke Novorossiya were cast aside by the summer of 2015, but such weak propaganda suggests they didn’t stand much chance anyway.”
“Putin has severely underestimated the strength of Ukrainian national identity, even in Donbas, and overestimated the power of his propaganda machine on the occupied areas of Ukraine.”
Roozenbeek’s research was conducted for his PhD between 2016 and 2020, and will feature in his forthcoming book Influence, Information and War in Ukraine, due out next year as part of the Society for the Psychology Study of Social Issues book series Contemporary Social Issues, published by Cambridge University Press.
