State’s Legitimisation of Violence through Strategic Narration: How the Kremlin Justified the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

ABSTRACT

The use of violence by state actors in political conflicts is often legitimised through the development of strategic narratives. The social construction of such narratives arguably relies on polarised storytelling centred on notions such as national heroism on one side and ‘perpetration against the nation’ on the other. The Kremlin’s official justification of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since February 2022 provides an illuminating example of this process of strategic narration. Relying on widely accepted cultural templates, Russia’s state institutions and officials put forward a narrative focused on Russia’s alleged heroic mission in Ukraine and the delegitimisation of the Ukrainian government and its external supporters as ‘ultimate perpetrators’. This highlights the proactive framing role that state actors may have in developing a discourse legitimising violence.

KEYWORDS:

• strategic narration
• violence
• narrative analysis
• Kremlin
• Russian invasion of Ukraine

The growing body of interdisciplinary research on politics and culture shows that the political legitimisation (and delegitimisation) of violence during political conflicts is executed through implementing strategic narratives (Smith 2005; Apter 2016; Reyes 2011; Zavershinskaia 2023a; 2023b). For instance, the delegitimisation of violence is expressed by attributing a negative connotation to violent acts. Alternatively, violence can also be represented positively, for instance, as a heroic self-defence of the nation against ‘ultimate perpetrators’ (Alexander 2006; Smith 2005; Ventsel et al. 2021; Szostek 2017; see also Zavershinskaia 2023a; 2023b).

Such discursive drivers of collective actions often remain overlooked in scholarly debates. Scholars have often considered the phenomenon of violence from a subject-object and actor-centric point of view, believing that its destructive potential depends on the dysfunctions of socio-political institutionalisation and the activity of political actors. Such conceptualisations play an important role in the critical description of acts of violence, its classification and typology (for example, Kalyvas 2003); in establishing a nexus between the scale of violence and the institutional structure of the state; and in the analysis of the legitimisation practices of power relations (for example, Weber 2013 [1921]; Tilly 2003; della Porta 1995; North et al. 2009), of trajectories and practices of victimisation (for example, Metelits 2010), and the process of de-escalating conflicts (Matanock 2017; Humphreys and Weinstein 2007). Nevertheless, by relying on such functional interpretations of social processes, many substantive mechanisms of reproducing violence are overlooked, reducing the problem of its (positive and negative) significance to rationalistic explanations. To fill this conceptual gap, this article focuses on the role of (polarised) strategic narration in legitimising violence during political conflicts. This is illustrated by deconstructing the Russian state’s (Kremlin’s) strategic narration to justify its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The underlying question is: how did the Kremlin use strategic narration to legitimise violence during the Russian invasion of Ukraine?

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 was the culmination of a process that started with its war in Eastern Ukraine in the aftermath of the Euromaidan unrest¹ and governmental changes in Kyiv from 2014 onwards. Since 2022 much has been written about the Russian state’s attempt to justify the invasion to domestic and international audiences.² This study makes two contributions to the burgeoning literature on this issue. First, it investigates how the Kremlin has legitimised Russian violence in Ukraine through a particular strategic narration. Second, the growing volume of narrative research on this topic has thus far focused either on investigating the Russian media landscape (for example, Brusylovska and Maksymenko 2022; Chaban et al. 2023; Garner 2022; Kaltseis 2023; Tolz and Hutchings 2023) or selected speeches of Russian politicians (for example, Claessen 2023; Knott 2022; Schneckener 2022). Instead, this study offers an in-depth analysis of the Kremlin’s general discourse regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Specifically, it examines its strategic narration found on the websites of four of the most relevant Russian state institutions: the executive (the President of Russia and the Russian Government) and the legislative (the Federal Assembly, comprised of the Federation Council and the State Duma) branches of the Russian state. This official state narration was disseminated and regulated in Russian society by Russian communicative and regulative institutions such as the media, the education sector and the judicial system (Zavershinskaia 2023b; see also Fedchenko 2016; Gabdulhakov 2020; Koposov 2018; 2022; Kaltseis 2023; Szostek 2018).

This article argues that the Kremlin framed the Russian invasion through implementing a particularly polarised binary narration. Specifically, the Russian aggression of Ukraine was represented as a heroic action of President Vladimir Putin, the Russian army and ‘Russian patriots’ to protect the nation. Conversely, the Ukrainian government and their supporters were framed as ‘ultimate perpetrators’ who supposedly oppressed the local population and had to be stopped by the ‘heroic’ Russian army. To make this case, first, the article turns to the studies regarding strategic narration in politics and discusses how they address political legitimisation. Next, from the cultural-sociological perspective, it details the Kremlin’s strategic legitimisation of violence during the invasion through the polarised narration of heroism and perpetration. Finally, the study’s outcomes and prospects for future research are summarised in the conclusion. Moreover, in the conclusion, the article also suggests whether and how such polarised narration may influence the collective acceptance and increase of violence in society.

Strategic narration in politics

Narratives are discursive practices of substantiating social events which organise society’s ideas about them. Narratives represent society in its current form and project its future trajectories by normalising and legitimising the meanings of certain concepts and isolating others (Gill 2011). As a narrative unfolds, both protagonists, antagonists and the environment are transformed. More precisely, this plot development gives narratives their retrospective-prospective quality and enables them to be accounts of both past and future predictions: not only describing but also shaping human actions through anticipating outcomes (Olick 2016; Erll 2009).

Among the different ways of narrating in society (see Smith 2005; Alexander 2006; Koschorke 2012; Erll 2009; Groth 2019), strategic narration can be considered as one of the most effective for political elites to mobilise collective actions (Miskimmon et al. 2017). Scholars (for example, Ibid; see also Wingender 2003) argue that, in an attempt to shape the discursive framework of society, political actors articulate their interests, manage collective expectations and extend their influence through strategic narration.³ This process of creating and implementing strategic narratives entails competition between various domestic and international political actors who attempt to protect and promote their preferred self-identities and delegitimise their opponents (see Szostek 2017, 752; 2018).

Political legitimisation and strategic narration

Scholars (for example, Alexander 2006; Habermas 1973; van Leeuwen 2007; Jacobs and Sobieraj 2007; Reyes 2011) have widely discussed how political legitimacy is fostered through collective discourses. For example, Jurgen Habermas (1973, 664) argues that “the rise of modern science established a demand for discursive justification”. In a similar vein, Antonio Reyes (2011, 783) suggests that “legitimization deserves special attention in political discourse because it is from this speech event that political leaders justify their political agenda to maintain or alter the direction of a whole nation”.

Consequentially, strategic narration can be considered a means of political legitimisation (for example, Jacobs and Sobieraj 2007, 5; see also Alexander and Smith 2003; Zavershinskaia 2023a). Importantly, while strategic narration implies a high degree of historical selectivity and operationalisation of certain concepts by political actors (Stryker 1996; Schmitt 2018; Leser and Pates 2022) when introducing a particular narrative, political elites also must consider and take into account the popular culture and mnemonic trajectory of society (Foucault 1975; Olick 2016; Hinck et al. 2015; Szostek 2018). In reality, political actors do not always stick to their preferred narratives but instead favour “a narrative that they perceive will be more palatable to the public” in order to receive society’s support (Kirkpatrick and Stoutenborough 2018, 994). Thus, strategic narration historically resonates with the with specific milieus within the public opinion (Chaban et al. 2023). By utilising specific cultural templates that are widely accepted in society, political actors produce compelling narratives to legitimise their authorities, protect their autonomy and achieve their goals (van Leeuwen 2007; Jacobs and Sobieraj 2007). These narratives reinforce the morality of their actions and provoke society’s outrage against chosen antagonists (see for example, Reyes 2011; Szostek 2017; Ventsel et al. 2021).

Binary narratives of heroism and perpetration to legitimise violence

When analysing the political legitimisation of collectively significant events through narration, scholars (for example, Alexander 2006; Eisenstadt and Giesen 1995; Karolewski 2009; Pates 2021; Zavershinskaia 2023a; 2023b) identified a binary categorisation described as ‘us and them’. This article does not focus on the binary division in general; instead, it draws on the polarised narratives of heroism and perpetration based on the ‘us versus them’ dichotomy, which is utilised by political actors to strategically legitimise political conflicts, as originally theorised by Bernhard Giesen (2004) and further developed by other cultural sociologists (for example, Smith 2005; Alexander 2006). Accordingly, in such strategic narratives, heroism is attributed to glorifying the nation and its representatives while perpetration serves to antagonise rival individuals and groups. Giesen (2004, 23-8) had argued that the ‘hero’ is the central figure in collective narratives, suggesting that contemporary collective narratives describe heroes as national representatives who can sacrifice themselves for national prosperity and oppose the oppression of victims. Opposite to the category of heroes is that of ‘perpetrators’, which are supposedly violators of the basic norms of society: instead of protecting society, they are oppressive and destabilise the society’s prosperity (53).

Combining Giesen’s (Ibid) theorisation with other cultural-sociological studies (for example, Alexander 2006; Smith 2005; Zavershinskaia 2023a; 2023b; forthcoming), it is possible to expand this theoretical framework to suggest that the extreme polarisation of binary narratives during political conflicts is used to legitimise violence. As David Apter (2016, 11) proposes, through such polarised discursive techniques, “violence not only builds on itself but becomes both self-validating and self-sustaining”. In a similar vein, analysing cultural justifications of political conflicts, Philip Smith (2005) argues that the narrative polarisation expressed in the uncompromising antagonism of ‘heroes versus perpetrators’ facilitates the legitimisation of violence against chosen perpetrators during political conflicts. This process reverses the negative connotation of political conflict, legitimising violence for the alleged ‘greater good’ of the nation in the uncompromising fight against the ‘ultimate evil adversary’. Hence, Andreas Ventsel et al. (2021, 21) argue that “the main aims of discursive activities of the adversaries are demonisation of a concrete enemy and mobilisation of people for fighting”. Consequently, strategic narratives during conflicts are triggered by political actors not only to provoke fear inside and outside of a given society (Ibid) but also to legitimise their authority and violence against the ‘other side’ by justifying the conflict as the heroic mission of the nation (Roselle et al. 2014; Alexander 2006, Smith 2005).

Therefore, this article argues, based on the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that the theoretical description of binary narratives of heroism and perpetration can be applied to analysing the legitimisation of violence during conflicts through a particular polarised strategic narration. On the one hand, the justification of the conflict can be expressed in the storytelling regarding the alleged heroic national actions (Szostek 2017). On the other hand, the narratives of perpetration legitimise the alleged necessity of violence against chosen perpetrators (Smith 2005; Claessen 2023; Ventsel et al. 2021).

Narrative analysis as a methodology

In order to explore the connection between the strategic narration and legitimisation of violence during political conflicts, this article deconstructs the Kremlin's narratives aimed at justifying the Russian invasion of Ukraine. To this end, the article draws on the aforementioned cultural-sociological framework according to which the social construction of collective narratives during political conflicts relies on the polarised binary storytelling centred on ‘national heroism’ and ‘perpetration against the nation’.

Data collection: the Kremlin’s websites during the Russian invasion

First, data (in this study, ‘texts’) was collected from the Russian versions⁴ of the official websites of the Russian executive and legislative branches. For each website, 50 texts were selected from the rubric ‘news’ between 21 February 2022 and 24 November 2023. All of the selected texts contained the stem ‘украин’ (‘Ukraine’) and were automatically filtered by selecting the filter option “according to their relevance” (по релевантности; relevance filtering)⁵ suggested on the website. This resulted in a dataset of 200 texts (Table 1; the full dataset can be accessed in the Online Appendix).

Table 1. The data about the Kremlin’s narrative.

	actor	URL	branch of power	number of texts
1	Prezident Rossii / President of Russia	http://kremlin.ru	executive	50
2	Pravitelstvo Rossii / The Russian Government	http://government.ru	executive	50
3	Sovet Federacii / The Federation Council	http://council.gov.ru	legislative	50
4	Gosudarstvennaya Duma / The State Duma	http://duma.gov.ru	legislative	50

Note: this table summarises the data collected between 21 February 2022–24 November 2023 as presented in the Online Appendix.

The President of Russia. The collected texts from the kremlin.ru website contained speeches, interviews and statements from official Russian representatives, such as transcriptions of conversations with Putin and Russian ministers (for example, the defence minister Sergei Shoigu), media figures (such as Margarita Simonyan, the Editor-in-chief of the Russian official media outlet Russia Today), church representatives (for example, the Russian Russian Orthodox bishop Patriarch Kirill of Moscow) and different public figures (such as historian Mikhail Piotrovsky, the Director of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg). Furthermore, these texts often featured international meetings. Specifically, 21 of 50 texts were devoted to covering the Kremlin’s narration during international events, such as the second Russia-Africa Summit (27-28 July 2023), the BRICS summit (22-24 August 2023), the Valdai Discussion Club (2-5 October 2023) and G20 Summit (9-10 September 2023). The texts, therefore, featured not only the speeches of the Kremlin’s representatives but also commentaries of several international officials (such as the Belorussian and Eritrean Presidents, Aleksandr Lukashenko and Isaias Afwerki) who expressed support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the context of international meetings.

The Russian Government. The government.ru website featured speeches and meetings with the Russian prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, deputy prime ministers, chairpersons of the State Duma and members of political fractions. Furthermore, the announcements of decisions made by the government (for example, on making amendments to the governmental regulations or on allocating federal budget funds for the occupied territories of Eastern Ukraine; on accepting governmental projects [for example, for the infrastructure]) were frequently published on the website. In comparison to kremlin.ru, the strategic narration on the government.ru did not focus on the general narration of Russian heroism and Western perpetration but more intensively on actions that the government had supposedly implemented to resist Western sanctions and, more generally, to support the Russian population and Ukrainian refugees. Like kremlin.ru, the government.ru website featured domestic governmental meetings and meetings with international actors (for example, the prime ministers of allies such as Belarus, Roman Golovchenko, and Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez).

The Federation Council. The council.gov.ru website frequently featured individual statements of the Federation Council senators. During the invasion, the texts covered different ways the Federation Council and its senators supported the invasion, specifically, the decisions of “our Supreme Commander” Putin (Sovet Federacii 2022b; author’s translation). For instance, the texts described the senator’s visits to the Russian-Ukrainian frontline, refugee centres and educational facilities to “counter the pseudohistory” among young Russians (Sovet Federacii 2023; author’s translation). As in the previous cases, the council.gov.ru also published information regarding several international events in which its senators took part (for example, in the spring session of the Interparliamentary Assembly of States Parties of the Commonwealth of Independent States in April 2023). Also interestingly, 13 out of 50 texts from council.gov.ru featured statements regarding the United States (US) supposedly developing biological weapons against Russia on Ukrainian territory, which suggested the relevancy of this narration for the Kremlin’s justification of the Russian invasion.

The State Duma. Like the council.gov.ru website, the duma.gov.ru featured individual and collective statements of the Duma’s deputies. Additionally, the published texts reported on parliamentary hearings and implementation of new laws (such as the laws to legitimise the Russian actions in Ukraine) and ongoing investigations (such as the investigation regarding the aforementioned biological warfare). Accordingly, as in the previous case, there was a higher number of texts concerning US biological warfare in Ukraine (22 out of 50 analysed texts), which suggested the centrality of this topic in the Kremlin’s narration justifying the invasion. Finally, despite the limited number of texts regarding international meetings, some featured international representatives (such as Amado Cerrud Acevedo, the president of the Central American Parliament) who expressed support for the Russian invasion and, therefore, facilitated its legitimisation.

The focus on both the domestic and the international landscapes, together with the publication of the content in Russian and English on the four official Russian state’s websites, suggests how essential these two dimensions are in the Kremlin’s strategic narration (for example, Szostek 2017, 752; 2018) that justified the invasion not only for Russian society but also for some parts of the post-Soviet space and Russia’s potential political supporters (for example, BRICS states, Venezuela and Nicaragua). As the four websites focus on similar narrative topics and include the same political and public figures, this article does not analyse the Kremlin’s narration on each website separately, but rather introduces the Kremlin’s common strategic narration aimed to justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine and legitimise violence in Ukraine.

Narrative analysis: the Kremlin’s strategic narration of heroism and perpetration

The analysis below focuses on the Kremlin’s legitimisation of violence, as expressed in its praising of Russia’s positive qualities and its delegitimisation of its adversaries.⁶ By analysing the Kremlin’s narrative framings of violence, this article draws on the theoretical conceptualisation of binary strategic narratives, which emphasises the alleged ‘heroism versus perpetration’ dichotomy during political conflicts (Table 2). These narratives were described by analysing the collected data, existing studies regarding the Russian war in (eastern) Ukraine (for example, Fedchenko 2016; Fedor 2017; Hinck et al. 2018; Laruelle 2016; 2020; McGlynn 2018; Riabchuk 2016; Szostek 2017) and the recent political science literature regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine (such as Brusylovska and Maksymenko 2022; Chaban et al. 2023; Claessen 2023; Goretti 2022; Kaltseis 2023; Knott 2022; McGlynn 2023a; 2023b; Oksamytna 2023; Sablina 2023; Schneckener 2022; Shevtsova 2022; Tolz and Hutchings 2023; Götz and Staun 2022; Zavershinskaia 2023b).

Table 2. Narrative polarisation to legitimise violence.

Legitimisation		Delegitimisation
Symbolic figures
H	Hero	P	Perpetrator
Permissible actions toward victims (Heroism [H] / Perpetration [P])
H1	restore honour/remember	P1	ignore suffering/silence
H2	save/protect	P2	abuse/misuse
H3	prevent/predict suffering	P3	hide the truth/demonise
H4	suffer for the common well-being	P4	oppress for self-interest
H5	fail to prevent suffering	P5	fail and cause more suffering

Note: this table is an adaptation of Table 1 in Zavershinskaia (2023a).

The Kremlin’s legitimisation of violence during the invasion

The morning of 24 February 2022 marked the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which can be considered a violent culmination of the war waged against Ukraine by the Kremlin since 2014. On the same day, Putin (President of Russia 2022b) publicly announced the alleged ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, which followed Russia’s official recognition of so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics – Ukrainian territories occupied by pro-Russian separatists since 2014 – as independent states on 21 February 2022. Putin declared the invasion of Ukraine as a supposedly ‘forced’ and ‘preventive’ measure to protect the population in Eastern Ukraine and Russia from the ‘evil’ Ukrainian government and its Western allies. Against this background, to assert Russia’s power status (Clunan 2019) and legitimise violence in Ukraine (Szostek 2017; Claessen 2023; Ventsel et al. 2021), the Kremlin attempted to justify Russia’s invasion as a form of collective heroism to defend and protect the prosperity of the Russian nation and humanity in general.

The heroism of the Russian nation

One of the most frequent narrations of heroism was expressed in Russia’s alleged need to stop violence in Ukraine. Here, the Kremlin claimed that Russia and Russian speakers were under threat from Western and Ukrainian governments, framing its invasion as an act of Russian heroism aimed at protecting its people, lands and interests. Furthermore, the Kremlin emphasised that this ‘military operation’ was not only focused on Russia’s protection of its lands or political interests, but that Russia heroically and altruistically protects civilians and even the whole world (Sovet Federacii 2022c). The invasion was often legitimised by attributing a moral dimension to Russian violence. For instance, the Chairwoman of the Federation Council of the Russian Federation, Valentina Matviyenko (President of Russia 2022b), claimed: “It seems to me that this has already become simply a moral duty for us in Russia. […] Poor women, elders that are weeping and children who are sitting in basements and taking their classes, and the entire international community is looking at all this through a blindfold”. This heroic ‘moral duty’ to protect victims (see also Table 2, H2) was attributed to the Russian military since the global community allegedly ignored its people’s sufferings (The State Duma 2022a; see also Table 2, P1).

The legitimisation of the invasion through the alleged protection of Russia’s territories and interests was often supported by the Russkij Mir (Russian World) metaphor. Since the early years of Russia’s formation in the 1990s-2000s and its radical conservative turn in 2007 (Gill 2011; Laruelle 2020), the Kremlin adopted this imperialist metaphor to promote its expansionist nostalgic vision of Russia as a re-emerging civilisation (Laruelle 2015). Specifically, this imperialist metaphor suggested that some of Russia’s neighbouring post-Soviet states were artificially separated from their ‘heartland’ (Knott 2022; Laruelle 2016; 2020) after the collapse of the Soviet Union, considered by the Kremlin as “a major geopolitical disaster of the century” (President of Russia 2005). Since the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine and especially during the Russian invasion, this metaphor was operationalised by the Kremlin to justify its interventions, as Ukraine was one of these allegedly artificially separated territories (Schneckener 2022; see also Laruelle 2016; 2020). The Kremlin claimed that Ukraine (predominantly its eastern part) was an integral part of Russia (see Brusylovska and Maksymenko 2022). For instance, the Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Nikolai Patrushev (President of Russia 2022c), argued that “Our goal is to protect our country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty”, implying an external danger to Russia’s territorial integrity (including Eastern Ukraine) and the possibility of it being invaded by the Ukrainian army and its Western allies had Russia not intervened (see also Table 2, H3).

A similar narrative was focused on the purported resistance of the ‘brotherly’ population in Eastern Ukraine. Accordingly, the Russian-speaking population in Eastern Ukraine was not only an object of oppression but also actively resisted the ‘illegitimate’ Ukrainian government, striving to unite with their motherland, Russia. For instance, Putin (President of Russia 2022c) claimed that “People declared that they were establishing two independent republics, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic. This was the point when the confrontation started between the Kiev officials and the people living on that territory”. Furthermore, besides claiming the support for the invasion by the ‘brotherly’ population, the Kremlin officials also frequently emphasised the loyalty of the Russian population by referring to unspecified Russian sociological surveys (Sovet Federacii 2022b).

The Kremlin’s emphasis on the necessity of the Russian invasion was also expressed in narratives regarding Russia’s attempt to find a peaceful consensus prior to the ‘special military operation’. Such efforts purportedly failed because of the Ukrainian government and Western democracies. This also corresponded to Giesen’s (2004) description of the heroic actions aimed at preventing victim’s suffering (see Table 2, H3 and H5). For instance, Putin (President of Russia 2023b) suggested:

Nine years [referring to Russia’s war against Ukraine]! We genuinely tried to agree – difficult as it was – on somehow keeping Ukraine’s southeast as part of the country, we were sincerely working for this. Now we know that our so called partners simply cheated us – they swindled us, as people say. They never planned to fulfil any of the agreements, as it turned out, and so it all came to the current situation.

Russia also legitimised its violence in Ukraine by claiming its aim was to bring justice to an oppressed people and restore their honour (see Table 2, H1). Specifically, the Kremlin promised to punish those responsible for the oppression of the population in Ukraine. For instance, in his address on 24 February 2024, Putin (President of Russia 2022b) claimed: “We will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation”. In this speech, he also added: “No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history”. This passage also includes one of the central aims of the strategic narration: to intimidate the opponent by provoking fear (Reyes 2011; Ventsel et al. 2021).

Provoking both a sense of fear and national pride was also expressed through the Kremlin’s narration of Russia’s alleged strength (see also Table 2, H1) for the benefit of both domestic and international audiences (Clunan 2019). For instance, Kremlin officials (Sovet Federacii 2022a; author’s translation) claimed that the Russians represent the “generation of winners”, implying Russia’s victories in the past such as the Soviet army’s contribution to defeating Nazi Germany during World War II. Affirming Russia’s strength also mitigated the effects of the economic and diplomatic sanctions against Russia implemented by Western governments. For instance, Mishustin (The Russian Government 2022b), discussing the impact of the sanctions, claimed that Russia had exceptional strength to resist them: “It is unlikely that any other state could have coped with this. We have survived. We countered the attempts to destroy our country and harm our citizens with the systematic work we have been doing almost around the clock to minimise the damage”. Moreover, Russia’s superpower status was also emphasised in the speeches of other countries’ leaders who supported the Russian invasion and, therefore, were featured on the Kremlin’s websites. For instance, Russia’s closest ally, Belorussian President Lukashenko (President of Russia 2023c), echoed the Kremlin’s narrative, suggesting that Russian actions should become a role model for other countries: “Russia must be very active. Its prestige is great despite all the anti-Russia yelling in the Western media. Russia has taken a risk in challenging the unipolar world. Russia is in the vanguard of this process and we are nearby”. Interestingly, the Kremlin’s willingness to find a peaceful compromise was also connected to Russia’s self-projection of strength. This narrative emphasised that Russia was allegedly still willing to achieve some kind of peace in Ukraine (on terms which would be unacceptable for Kyiv) despite its (supposed) preponderant military might (President of Russia 2023a).

Perpetration by the Collective West

The justification for the Russian invasion was also expressed in the Kremlin’s severe hostility towards the Ukrainian government and its supporters, especially Western democracies and the US, which was predominantly executed through the ‘collective West’ metaphor. The ‘collective West’ has its roots in the Kremlin’s official storytelling during the Cold War period, centred on the geopolitical confrontation between the Soviet Union and the US (see Gill 2011; McFaul 2018; McGlynn 2023a; 2023b; Laruelle 2015; Götz and Staun 2022). After the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Kremlin gradually adopted this metaphor in their political communication (Gill 2011; Laruelle 2020; Zavershinskaia 2023b). According to this narrative, Russia was supposedly the main enemy of the US, which attempted to expand its influence and contest Russia’s sphere of influence. To the Kremlin, the US was attempting to maintain its superpower status and influence around the globe, especially in its ‘satellite states’ – essentially the EU’s and Commonwealth member states. This alleged ‘unipolarity’ of the US was contrasted to Russia’s supposedly ‘multipolar’ agenda which, according to the Kremlin’s narrative, promoted the establishment of equal cooperation between the independent ‘states-civilisations’ such as Russia or the People’s Republic of China (PRC).⁷

In the framework of the Russian invasion, the strategic narration of the ‘collective West’ against Russia played a major role in the Kremlin’s legitimisation of violence. Therefore, it is important to begin by characterising the general antagonism towards Western democracies because, as this article showed, the Kremlin’s narration framed these actors as the main provocateurs of the war in Ukraine and yet another occurrence of Western expansion.⁸

Specifically, the Kremlin suggested that the Western democracies – as essentially pawns of the US – would continue to execute their expansionist ambitions and use Ukraine to attack an independent Russia. This interpretation of the ‘collective West’ and their alleged selfish aims also corresponded to the categorisation of perpetration expressed as oppressing chosen antagonists for self-interest (see Table 2, P4). For instance, Putin (President of Russia 2023c) claimed that “Whenever Russia raised its head and emerged as a real geopolitical competitor […] Russia instantly came up against someone’s containment policies”. Interestingly, the Kremlin not only stated that the ‘collective West’ opposed Russia in military terms. Officials also frequently referred to the so-called “economic war” (The Russian Government 2022c) regarding the sanctions against Russia and to the “biological invasion” (The State Duma 2022c), making claims about the existence of US laboratories in Ukraine which were supposedly developing the biological weapons to be used against Russians.

Additionally, the Kremlin also speculated that the apparently decaying Western countries (see also Table 2, P5), with their concept of the US ‘unipolarity’, did not accept a plurality of contemporary actors in the global arena and, therefore, used Ukrainian territory to wage war against Russia, which challenged their ‘one-sided’ world order (President of Russia 2023d). This narrative was closely linked to another which suggested that the Western democracies accepted only their values and destroyed everything which did not correspond to their worldview. For instance, Patriarch Kirill (President of Russia 2023e) demonised Western values, highlighting the allegedly harmful influence of liberalism:

Moral relativism, the cult of consumption, freedom misinterpreted as permissiveness, and the eradication of the traditional family are only some of the problems of the system of values, which certain forces are promoting in the West, or rather anti-values because their adoption will inevitably bring humanity to deep cultural and spiritual degradation.

Another interconnected narrative suggested the continuation of colonial politics of the ‘collective West’ and their aspiration to gain new territories and resources. For instance, during the 2023 Valdai International Discussion Club forum, Putin (President of Russia 2023d) stated: “The history of the West is essentially the chronicle of endless expansion”. Often such claims were supported by the Kremlin accusing Western countries of abusing the Black Sea Grain Initiative (in June-July 2023) that aimed to deliver grain and other food supplies predominantly to the developing countries (see Table 2, P2).⁹ These claims were especially frequent during the Russia-Africa summit when the Kremlin not only accused Western democracies of abusing the deal and stealing grain but also labelled their actions as the politics of neocolonialism (President of Russia 2023h) and even blamed them for a new Holodomor (The State Duma 2022b).¹⁰ Unsurprisingly, on 17 July 2023, Russia ended the Black Sea Grain Initiative. Interestingly, in the same text, it was also argued that the West did not want to admit their evil plans and, therefore, blamed Russia for the war in Ukraine. On the one hand, this narrative highlighted that Russia allegedly suffered for the common good by intervening in Ukraine (see Table 2, H4); on the other hand, by framing Russia for the war in Ukraine, the ‘collective West’ supposedly misrepresented the events (see Table 2, P3).

Consequently, the Kremlin did not frame Ukraine en masse as the ultimate perpetrator and even claimed to provide support for Ukrainian refugees (The Russian Government 2022a). Specifically, the Ukrainian population (especially the Russian-speaking population in Eastern Ukraine) was characterised either as a ‘brotherly’ people or even as Russian natives, divided from Russia due to unforeseen tragic historical decisions (President of Russia 2022b). According to this narrative, one of these tragic decisions was Euromaidan, framed by the Kremlin as a coup d’etat initiated by the ‘collective West’. Therefore, the Ukrainian government elected in 2014 and the Ukrainian military were framed as perpetrators, new Western ‘pawns’ who denied Ukraine’s common historical links with Russia (The Russian Government 2022b; see also Table 2, P3). Putin claimed that by making Ukraine a “tool” for its imperialist fight against Russia, a sort of “anti-Russia”, the US allegedly also increasingly supplied Ukrainian territory with weapons (President of Russia 2022b) and its military with drugs (also presented as a US “biological weapon”) which purportedly made them especially cruel (The State Duma 2022c).

Apart from implying the ‘subservience’ of the Ukrainian government to the US, the Kremlin attempted to legitimise the invasion through historical references to World War II (the Great Patriotic War [GPW] narration; see also McGlynn 2018; 2023a; Tolz and Hutchings 2023). The GPW narration was considered one of the most powerful and socially accepted strategic narratives implemented by the Russian state which was also rooted in the Soviet past (Adamsḳy 2019; Ventsel et al. 2021). It was constructed in the Soviet period to condemn the invasion of Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945 and emphasised the bravery of Soviet soldiers (Gill 2011). Today, this strategic narration is implemented by the Kremlin to normalise violence in Ukraine as a necessary action to protect Russian against the supposed revival of Nazism in the form of the Ukrainian government and military, and supported by the ‘collective West’. For Putin (President of Russia 2022a), the West has encouraged neo-Nazis in contemporary Ukraine and the Russian army continued the ‘heroic legacy’ of their ancestors by fighting this revived Nazism to which the ‘collective West’ has allegedly enabled access to power:

Meanwhile, the so-called civilised world, which our Western colleagues proclaimed themselves the only representatives of, prefers not to see this, as if this horror and genocide, which almost 4 million people are facing, do not exist. But they do exist and only because these people did not agree with the West-supported coup in Ukraine in 2014 and opposed the transition towards the Neanderthal and aggressive nationalism¹¹ and neo-Nazism.

Furthermore, especially in the Kremlin’s statements which employed the GPW storytelling, although the Ukrainian government and military were represented as Western ‘tools’, they were not passive nor obediently executing the will of the ‘collective West’. The Kremlin often represented the Ukrainian government and military as ‘vicious villains’ (see also Table 2, P4), which were created and supplied by the ‘collective West’ to fight Russia. Moreover, the Kremlin also argued that the Ukrainian government and army overperformed their alleged creators in their cruelty (President of Russia 2022b).

As mentioned above, narrative studies demonstrate how polarised storytelling is implemented during conflicts to cultivate fear of the enemy and national pride (Smith 2005; Ventsel et al. 2021; Szostek 2017; 2018). Therefore, the Russian violence in Ukraine was represented as an existential battle against Western invaders and their Ukrainian pawns. Interestingly, the Kremlin also attempted to frame its violence in Ukraine as exclusively directed against Ukrainian military infrastructure (President of Russia 2023g), omitting references to the killing and deliberate terrorising of civilians by the Russian army, such as the mass murder of the local population in Bucha (Knott 2022; Garner 2022; Shaw 2023).

Conclusion

Overall, this article aimed to illustrate the political legitimisation of violence during conflicts through a polarised strategic narration such as the one articulated by the Kremlin in the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. First, by relying on the studies regarding strategic narration in politics, the importance of articulating interests and goals of political actors was highlighted. Furthermore, following cultural sociologists, this article argued that when political actors apply strategic narration, they have to consider the cultural framework of society and, therefore, implement certain accepted narratives. Second, by detailing the binary narratives of heroism and perpetration, their extreme polarisation during political conflicts was considered. Specifically, relying on cultural-sociological studies, it was suggested that the narrative polarisation of ‘heroes versus ultimate perpetrators’ during conflicts facilitates the legitimisation of violence.

In order to empirically illustrate such political legitimisation of violence through a strategy of polarised narration, this article concentrated on the state’s production of polarised narratives. To this end, it investigated the Russian state’s overarching narration during the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has remained underexplored in academia until now. To analyse the cultural dynamics in Russian politics, this article dissected the polarised binary narratives of ‘heroism’ and ‘perpetration’ through which the Kremlin framed the invasion. The empirical analysis showed that the Kremlin legitimised violence against Ukraine by implementing a strategy of polarised narration. Specifically, it strategically framed its invasion as the heroic act of the Russian nation fighting against the ‘ultimate perpetrators’ in order to protect its people and national interests. Accordingly, the violence was portrayed as a necessary and heroic action of the Russian army and authorities to protect its population (also beyond Russia’s borders) and interests against the ‘ultimate perpetrators’ represented by the Ukrainian government and its supporters.

Nevertheless, this study provides a somewhat circumscribed empirical case study of how narration is used to legitimise violence. Indeed, as mentioned in the theoretical section of this article, scholars (Olick 2016; Erll 2009) argue that narratives can shape collective actions by suggesting certain outcomes. Specifically, polarising narration aims to expand the limits of what actions are considered acceptable in society (Stack and Alexander 2019, 4) by suggesting that inaction and the absence of radical solutions can lead to negative outcomes and the destruction of society (Smith 2005; see also Girard 2016 [1987]). Consequently, several studies (Alexander et al. 2019; see also Briggs 2007; Zavershinskaia 2023a; forthcoming) point out that such a narration increases the likelihood of collective tolerance for violence against chosen antagonists and of a more general escalation of violence in the societies involved. The case of the Russian narration of the invasion of Ukraine is arguably illustrative of this mechanism, leading to societal mobilisation against chosen antagonists and collective acceptance of violence (see for instance, Garner 2022).

In this article, however, the correlation between the Kremlin’s polarised narration and outbreaks of violence remains outside the scope of the analysis. Additional studies regarding the strategic legitimisation of violence in preparation for and during political conflicts are needed to understand and identify how misrepresentation of violence as a heroic action by state actors may stimulate outbreaks of violence. Moreover, further empirical case studies exploring the link between political legitimisation and strategic narration during political conflicts may strengthen the argument in this study concerning the political legitimisation of violence through strategic narration. All in all, such studies may significantly contribute not only to the detection of harmful narration but also to the timely prevention of the violence that it can stimulate (for example, by calculating and identifying increases in such narration over time).

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the insightful comments and suggestions of Francesco Spera and her colleagues, who preferred to stay anonymous. Additionally, the author would like to thank the journal’s editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and criticism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Polina Zavershinskaia

Polina Zavershinskaia is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Political Science, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany, a fellow of the Far-Right Analysis Network (FRAN) and a member of the COST Action “CA22165 - Redressing Radical Polarisation: Strengthening European Civil Spheres facing Illiberal Digital Media (DepolarisingEU)”.

Notes

1 Starting on 21 November 2013, Euromaidan was a months-long civil unrest in Ukraine in response to the suspension by the Ukrainian government, led by the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, of preparations for the signing of an association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union (EU). As a result the Yanukovych government collapsed and a new Ukrainian government was elected, supported, inter alia, by the EU and the United States (US). Framed as illegitimate by Russia, Euromaidan was followed by the Russian occupation of the Crimean peninsula and Russia’s eight-year-long war against Ukraine in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which eventually resulted in the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (Götz and Staun 2022; Tolz and Hutchings 2023).

2 On the justification of the invasion in, for instance, Germany, see Sablina (2023), Schneckener (2022) and Zavershinskaia (2023b).

3 Strategic narratives are channelled through different communicative and regulative institutions; see Miskimmon et al. (2017); Roselle et al. (2014). For instance, they are disseminated via political press conferences and media channels, reverberated by the education sector and fixed in laws; see, for example, Koposov (2022); Spera (2022).

4 This was due to the fact that the English versions of the analysed websites present a relatively limited pool of materials compared to the Russian, except for the kremlin.ru website, of which both the Russian and English versions are complete. Wherever possible, for the sake of accuracy, the article provides the official English translations (otherwise the translations from Russian are the author’s, as indicated in the text).

5 Unfortunately, in line with the Kremlin’s general lack of transparency, the analysed websites did not provide any information as to how they curate the results of the relevance filtering option. In order to assess whether this filtering option offers relevant data for this study, the article explored whether changing some parameters (for instance, geographical location, personal computer, different VPN locations [accessing the websites from, for example, Russia, Germany, Belarus, Poland, and the US]) influenced the list of results. The article also examined whether the Russian and English version of the kremlin.ru website provide diverging lists of texts under this relevance option. Despite all these manipulations, the websites suggested the same list of texts when applying relevance filtering. Consequently, since the listed results remained the same across different geographical locations and IP addresses, the websites seemingly do not employ a personalised filter bubble for relevance filtering (Pariser 2011; see also Bryant 2020). Only after the second check of the websites on 28 February 2024 (a few months after the end of the data collection on 24 November 2023), it was observed that the list of texts slightly changed. While the first nine to ten texts (depending on the website) remained the same, the other texts were replaced with more recent ones. Nevertheless, regardless of whether the outcome of this filtering is a handpicked list, a product of an algorithm (see, for instance, Google 2024) or a mixture of both, it is a reflection of what these organisations themselves deem relevant to show on their own websites. Therefore, these first 50 selected texts are of high relevance for the Kremlin to narrate the Russian invasion and, therefore, are taken in this article as important instances of the Kremlin’s legitimisation of violence in Ukraine.

6 The texts were coded manually with the help of the MAXQDA software for mixed methods.

7 On the philosophical idea of the ‘multipolar word’ developed by Aleksandr Dugin (2012) and other ‘Neo-eurasianist’ and adopted by the Kremlin, see Laruelle (2015; 2020), Götz and Merlen (2019), Schirm (2023).

8 In the Kremlin’s texts also the ‘eastward expansion of NATO’; Erll (2009), Hausteiner (2016), Wertsch (2021), Götz and Staun (2022).

9 Specifically, the Kremlin argued that, instead of delivering grain to developing countries, the ships with grain sailed to the EU’s ports.

10 The genocidal killing of the Ukrainian population through starvation perpetrated by the USSR in 1933; see European Parliament (2022).

11 Here, particular attention should be paid to the Kremlin’s utilisation of the word ‘nationalism’. In the Soviet narration, this term had a negative connotation, being equated to ‘anti-Sovietism’ (see, for instance, speeches of Andropov [1973], Chernenko [1984]), which denied Soviet republics their national characteristics and independence from Moscow. Unsurprisingly, scholars (for example, Krastev and Holmes [2018], Verovšek [2021]) argue that precisely the rediscovery of national independence (‘nationalism’) in some countries of the Soviet Block (for example, Poland and the Baltic States) facilitated their struggle against Soviet hegemony even before the collapse of the Soviet Union and drove them towards European Integration in the early 2000s. Consequently, the Soviet regime attempted to delegitimise such political dynamics. The negative connotations of nationalism did not disappear until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Kremlin found a new way to strategically utilise this word, for example, by juxtaposing it with the positive connotation of Russian patriotism (as observed in the listed clauses regarding the GPW), followed by the contemporary misuse of this word as a synonym of Nazism.