Kathrine Frich
It is not the first time the Kremlin has tried to sell this exact narrative to the public.
Political speeches have a funny way of trying to rewrite history in real time.
When a country has spent years making headlines for military aggression, you might expect its leaders to tread carefully around the subject of peace.
In Moscow this week, however, the official script went in the exact opposite direction.
A bold claim
According to the Russian state news agency TASS, President Vladimir Putin stepped up to the microphone on November 4 during an awards ceremony inside the Kremlin. Rather than addressing ongoing international tensions, he used the moment to paint Moscow as a completely peaceful neighbour.
Speaking to foreign honourees gathered in the hall, the Russian leader delivered a line that flatly contradicts decades of documented history.
“Especially now, it is very important that people in many countries, including those beyond the countries you represent, recognize at the political level that, first of all, Russia has never threatened anyone and does not threaten anyone now,” Putin said, as reported by TASS.
He did not stop there. Right after claiming a spotless record of peace, the president insisted his government only wants friendly ties with the rest of the world. “Secondly, we seek cooperation,” Putin added, according to TASS.
What history shows
It is not the first time the Kremlin has tried to sell this exact narrative to the public.
Back in February 2022, just days before Russian troops launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made a nearly identical promise when he claimed that “Russia has never attacked anyone throughout its history,” according to fact-checkers at the Poynter Institute and PolitiFact.
Historians quickly tore that argument apart. When PolitiFact reviewed the Kremlin’s talking point, military experts pointed to more than a dozen unprovoked offensives by Russia and the Soviet Union stretching back centuries, including invasions of Poland in 1939, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979.
Cornell University military historian David Silbey summed up the Kremlin’s peaceful narrative in three words for PolitiFact. “It’s blatantly false,” Silbey said. Even so, as Wednesday’s Kremlin ceremony showed, Putin is still sticking to the story.
