When Russian troops first massed on the borders of Ukraine, no man of good will would call what was about to unfold a “civil war.” That term belonged exclusively to the vocabulary of Kremlin propaganda, bent on denying Ukraine’s statehood and portraying the nation as a victim of Western manipulation which had been induced to rebel against its big brother, Russia. Once the Kremlin had cast the conflict in these terms, obviously those who supported Ukraine in its resistance to the invasion had to counter Russian propaganda by pointing to Ukraine’s national sovereignty and its European aspirations which the Kremlin had moved to excoriate by the force of arms.
As Russia’s war on Ukrainian soil acquired more and more the character of genocide, however, the Kremlin propagandists’ emphasis began to shift. The stubborn enemy needed to be dehumanized. Ukraine was no longer a younger brother, but now a stronghold of Nazis and Satanists, suppressing Christian churches, dealing in arms and drugs, promoting poisonous LGBTQ+ ideology, and in every way flaunting the corruption with which the unscrupulous West had contaminated its body politic. To exterminate the vipers that had made their nest on the territory of its obstreperous neighbor, Russia was compelled to start what the propagandists would increasingly describe as a holy war.
Now, nearly three years into the war, a supporter of Ukraine who accurately sees it as the victim of neo-Soviet imperialism may ask himself dispassionately — without worrying that he might be echoing Kremlin propaganda in its earliest phase — whether this war is really not a civil war, and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is not fratricide.
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