Browsing by Subject "Russo-Ukrainian war"

A few weeks after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia on 24 February 2022, French President Emmanuel Macron warned against ‘the temptation of humiliation’ of Russia in order to negotiate the issue of the Russian-Ukrainian war. This statement sparked a lot of discussions among allied partners, and raises the question of the place of France in the Western support to Ukraine, as well as in the EU and NATO. While France had reclaimed its role as an exemplary ally in the Euro-Atlantic space, Emmanuel Macron’s statements came at an important political and reputational cost. This thesis addresses the origin and relevance of Macron’s humiliation narrative drawing from the literature on the role of emotions and status in international relations, as well as the history of French foreign policy, in particular towards Russia. It analyses the French response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine by examining three dimensions of policy change: modes of action, institutional commitments, discourses. This thesis demonstrates that, while Macron’s cautious stance about Russia can be explained by the domestic political context in France, his discursive practices contradict the French efforts to support Ukraine, and harm the Eastern allies’ perception of France as a reliable provider of security. This has notably led Macron to toughen his position on Russia in 2023.

Throughout the Putin Era, the memory of the Great Patriotic War became a potent resource for legitimizing the Kremlin’s ideology and political actions. As part of this ‘Call to History’, the Kremlin mobilized cinema’s persuasive appeal to spark patriotism based on the war victory over Nazism. The purpose of this empirical study is to shed light on how history-evoking Russian film propaganda justifies present warfare. Specifically, it explores how the Great Patriotic War myth is evoked in Russian film propaganda about the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This thesis is informed by a theoretical framework that illustrates the interplay of memory politics, political myth, and propaganda. It builds on previous research on the myth of the Great Patriotic War in Russian cinematic memory politics and the Kremlin’s Ukraine war rhetoric. This study relies on a qualitative analysis rooted in interpretivism and adapts Jowett and O’Donnell’s propaganda analysis model as an analytical framework. The research material consists of the film Witness, the first government-funded film on the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which serves as a case study of film propaganda. The findings illustrate that Witness is a precise cinematic orchestration of Russian war rhetoric. Its ideological constructions echo the primary casus belli: Ukrainian Nazism, Ukrainian genocide, and Western complicity in veiling the war’s ‘true circumstances’. Witness conveys its primary ideological belief of Ukrainian Nazism by evoking the institutional memory of the Great Patriotic War through a myriad of historical references to Nazi Germany’s war atrocities and ideology. This aims to create the veneer of historical authenticity and lend documentary-like truth value to Witness’ fictional story. As the primary propaganda technique, Witness employs the Holocaust as a cinematic master narrative. Besides, Witness uses characteristic propaganda techniques, such as demonizing the enemy, emotional appeals, and the archetypical triangle of victim, villain, and hero. The findings demonstrate that Witness draws on familiar techniques of the war propaganda arsenal. Therefore, this study indicates that historical research on film propaganda of the World Wars is still relevant for understanding films that form part of contemporary information warfare. Furthermore, the findings illustrate how propaganda employs culturally embedded political myths about past wars to frame current wars. Thus, this study addresses the gap in research on the Kremlin’s history-evoking films as part of wartime propaganda efforts.