Not Even Pro-War Russians Find This Ukraine War Comedy Funny |
President Vladimir Putin and his propagandists have tried to portray the aggression in Ukraine as a people’s war since the beginning. It didn’t work. The country has grown tired, even as so-called heroes — people who killed, raped and maimed with impunity — returned from the front.
It seems Kremlin ideologues decided it was time to inject the population with an antidote: “The Other Side of the Coin,” a comedy series following Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
A comedy about war, backed by an organization that receives billions of rubles from the Kremlin, is a new genre for Russian propaganda. No comedies about the war in Chechnya were made with state funding (or private funding, for that matter). The devastation of the two Chechen wars looks very similar to what we see in Ukraine today: residential neighborhoods leveled by artillery, mass killings of civilians in “cleansing operations,” looting, and filtration camps that are sites of torture, rape and extortion.
But there is a fundamental difference between the Chechen wars and today’s war in Ukraine. In 1994-1996, atrocities committed by Russian troops and the realities of the war could be reported with relative freedom, at least for a time. Fewer members of the public knew people who were fighting or were affected by sanctions than today. Beyond journalists and human rights defenders, what happened in Chechnya mostly concerned the military and their families. For most Russians, it was a local story on the empire’s periphery.
There was no mobilization then. Coffins came back from........