Three US Generals on Propaganda and Russia's War

 

Three retired American generals have been speaking out about the US leadership’s lack of knowledge of Russia and Ukraine since before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. 

When General Wesley Clark, a former NATO four star general, talks about Russian geopolitics, he reveals truths like bursts of fresh air. In an interview with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he recalls a 1999 scene in Ukraine when Putin said, “Ukraine and Russia, we’re more than brothers, we’re in each other’s souls.” Using his hands to express himself, Clark adds, “We’ve never handled Putin the right way. In 2014, we told the Ukrainians to give up Crimea,” as though the US leadership was a fish that swallowed the lure whole.

Far from being in Russia’s soul, Ukraine has spent more than two centuries trying to wrest freedom from different incarnations of its empire.  That was after Kyiv's rule of the small territory of Muscovy in the Kyivan Rus State from the 9th to the 13th centuries. 

Russia invaded sovereign Ukraine in the early morning of February 24, 2022, raining missiles down on many cities ever since.

“If naked aggression like this is allowed to succeed, we will see more of it around the world,” says General David Petraeus, a retired four-star American general and former director of the CIA, in an interview with The Cipher Brief. 

General Ben Hodges, who served as the Commanding General for United States Europe, echoes his two fellow retired generals. “The US leadership’s focus on Russia now is all about limiting escalation. It betrays how little we understand Russia,” he explains in an interview with Futucast. There is no hesitation in the General’s criticism of American lack of strategic leadership. “It’s due to lack of education on Russia that we’re susceptible to Russian disinformation,” he stresses. Like General Wesley Clark and General David Petraeus, General Ben Hodges has decades-long expertise and no career agenda.

When an empire rules all its neighbours for approximately 200 years, the rest of the world doesn’t learn accurate information about it. Before the Russian Empire acquired Ukraine in the late 18th century, the people in Ukrainian lands had lived their own history. Yale University Professor of History Timothy Snyder explains the outside world’s perception that Ukraine was not a real place. In a conversation with Bill Kristol, he says: “…Among both Republicans and Democrats, the expectation was Ukraine is going to fold in a few days. … And why did we have that expectation? I think that comes from a kind of very deep Russian subjective victory, which is Americans and most people in the West until 2022, somewhere deep-down thought Russia’s a real place and Ukraine is not a real place.” 

General Clark explains that the US has feared a confrontation with Russia for a long time. With visible disbelief, in an April 2024 interview he paraphrases attitudes of the US military in 2022 as "Oh my God, no. No. We don’t want a confrontation with Russia. We mouthed the words of the rules-based order, but we didn’t act on them." 

General Petraeus continues pouring ultimatums on the public like cold water to thaw people’s ignorance. If this is allowed to continue, more of it will happen around the world. If Russia succeeds, Putin will invade more countries. Like freezing, cold water running down our backs. “If we don’t help Ukraine in its hour of need, no-one is going to believe that we’ll help others around the world in their hours of need,” General Petraeus asserts. In 2024 he states that if Russia’s unprovoked invasion of sovereign Ukraine succeeds, it won’t stop there, and Putin will go on to invade Moldova or one of the Baltic countries. 

On February 21, 2022, Putin addressed his nation to announce his Special Military Operation. In his speech he said that Russia recognized the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic (located inside Ukraine) as independent from Ukraine. The next day, Russia said it was sending troops into the territories as "peacekeepers".

The Russian leader’s address was tailored to a domestic Russian audience, poised to convince them that starting a war right next door was justified. Although his numerous facial expressions and raised eyebrows conveyed his message dramatically, Putin sighed and blinked repeatedly like someone telling an uncomfortable story. In his speech on kremlin.ru he complained that "Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood. … From the very first steps they began to build their statehood on the denial of everything that unites us. They tried to distort the consciousness, the historical memory of millions of people, entire generations living in Ukraine.” 

Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel tie history to the war in Ukraine in detail, in “Russian and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States,” published in 2024. After the Mongols invaded much of Kyivan Rus in the mid 13th century, the area of Ukrainian lands and Kyiv went under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. During this time the Grand Duchy of Muscovy oversaw Vladimir-Suzdal, a northeastern principality of Kyivan Rus. Following the Mongol invasion, Muscovy was ruled by Mongols until the late 15th century and came under the influence of Mongol culture.

The two separate histories continued in parallel, explain Popova and Shevel. Ukrainian lands were ruled by Poland as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, created at the Union of Lublin in 1569, and was exposed to Western influences that Muscovy-controlled territory never experienced. From 1649 to 1785, Ukrainian lands were defended by the Cossack Hetmanate, a self-governing Ukrainian state. Only after the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century did Russia rule present-day Ukraine, until Ukraine became fully sovereign in 1991. 

Russian propaganda that amplifies its own power has played a role in the US leadership not delivering enough aid to Ukraine in 2024 so it can defeat Russia. After a long delay, the US House passed a bill in April to support Ukraine with $61 billion, after President Joe Biden provided ongoing information on why aid was important. 

In February 2024, USnews.com reported that the EU has committed about 94 billion in aid to Ukraine and the US has committed about 75 billion. And while Estonia has committed 3.5% of its GDP to aid Ukraine, the US has committed 0.32% of its GDP to aid Ukraine. 

The three retired generals have been calling for a hard line with Putin for over a decade, since before the invasion of Crimea. Although successive US governments have taken the approach of appeasing Putin, the generals warn that the war in Ukraine has resulted in a coalition between China, Iran, North Korea and Russia who share tyrannical values. The part they’ve left out are the tyrannical views held by a segment of the US MAGA movement right at home.

Anne Applebaum says democracy is losing the propaganda war. She describes MAGA Republicans as having common cause with autocrats in Russia and China. In The Atlantic, she describes the goals of the online American alt-right and foreign propagandists as almost indistinguishable from each other, convincing Americans that nothing they see is true. They discredit freedom and liberalism everywhere, influencing Americans to “believe their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying.”

General Ben Hodges emphasizes his disappointment in his government’s failure to clearly identify the objective about why the war in Ukraine matters.  “Because the Administration …has failed to make the case on why it’s important, it left the door open to Trump and his supporters to stop aid for Ukraine.”

 

Sources

The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2024/05/june-2024-cover-anne-applebaum-new-propaganda-war/678302/

Centre for Strategic & International Studies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk8_UBmKu0U

Cipher: https://youtu.be/4Rp43iHJxqc?feature=shared

CNN: https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2024/01/08/petraeus-amanpour-intw.cnn

Conversations with Bill Kristol: https://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/timothy-snyder-on-ukraine-russia-america-and-whats-at-stake/

Futucast; https://youtu.be/NGlXzIzZDj8?feature=shared    

Hrushevsky, Mykhailo, The traditional scheme of "Russian" history and the problem of a rational organization of the history of the East Slavs, Winnipeg : Published for Ukrainian Canadian University Students' Union by the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences; 1966, c1965

Popova, Maria, Russia and Ukraine : Entangled Histories, Diverging States, Cambridge, UK ; Hoboken, NJ : Polity Press; 2024

Putin, Vladimir, Address by the President of Russia, June 21, 2022 http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828

Statista: https://www.statista.com/topics/9087/russia-ukraine-war-2022/

Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/04/27/us-aid-ukraine-russia-what-comes-next/