Putin's dangerous game with history. How does Russia lie?
I talk with Karol Paciorek about something that still sounds too radical for many analysts: Russia is in a state of permanent war with the West, and historical policy is its integral front.
I show how Putin fabricates a vision of the past to give meaning to ongoing war crimes, what lies behind the concepts of "banality of evil" and the "horseshoe tactic" in Russian disinformation, and why when the Kremlin begins intensively invoking the history of a given state, we should treat it as a warning signal.
Among other things, I discuss the fact that Putin does not so much lie as fabricate a vision of the past. This is a subtle but fundamental distinction. The Russian state offers soldiers "absolution" by embedding their actions in Ukraine within the mythological continuation of the fight against Nazism. Hannah Arendt described this mechanism as the "banality of evil": ordinary people become perpetrators because the state narrative removes from their sight the fact that what they are doing is a crime. The trauma of 1991 is a source of physical pain for Russian elites: the borders that fell outside their control after the USSR's collapse are seen as artificial and in need of revision.
I also raise the fact that Russian disinformation goes far beyond classical propaganda. The horseshoe tactic involves simultaneously promoting contradictory narratives to generate cognitive chaos: the same drones over Poland are simultaneously "Ukrainian" and "proof of the weakness of the Polish army." The goal, described by Peter Pomerantsev as "nothing is true, everything is possible," is not to convince people of one lie, but to destroy the very concept of objective truth. With AI support, this information war is becoming increasingly difficult to resist.
Poland should take a clear-eyed look at its place in Russian strategy. Quantitative analysis of Kremlin documents shows that Poland appears only in the third dozen of mentions, behind many other countries. The Kremlin treats us instrumentally, as an element of a broader clash with NATO. Suggestions of partitioning Ukraine directed at Warsaw have one goal: to destroy our credibility in the EU and NATO. My conclusion is pragmatic: the goal of Polish eastern policy should not be the utopian vision of a democratic Russia, but the pursuit of a less aggressive one. And a sober awareness that when Russian propaganda begins intensively exploiting historical themes about a given state, it is time to arm ourselves.