Rhetoric as a weapon – about Putin’s speeches as a political tool
Vladimir Putin rhetorically prepared and escalated the war against Ukraine while also substantiating it with complex arguments. The web of justification strategies may seem disconcerting and disturbing, but it deliberately ties in with the expectations of a broad national and international audience and guarantees a diffuse understanding of the Kreml’s positions. The Russian president is not a charismatic and eloquent politician. Especially in comparison to his opponent Selenskyj, his oratory skills are clearly inferior. But Putin’s wordings are the origin of all political communication strategies in present day Russia. They define the framework of what can be said politically.
Riccardo Nicolosi dissects Putin’s war communication: From the parody of Western justifications for war to a paranoid causal logic in which Russia is drawn up as the eternal victim of Western hegemonic aspirations; from the affect rhetoric of resentment to the mystification of the Second World War as a never-ending event; from the modelling of the conflict in Ukraine as an anti-colonial, tectonic shift in the geopolitical world order to the elevation of war as the only true form of existence in present and future Russia. The power of words thus legitimises the martial use of force just as much as it accomplishes to let war appear as the solution to all problems.
Riccardo Nicolosi, now a Professor of Slavic Literature at the LMU Munich, was a fellow at the Alfried Krupp Kolleg Greifswald.
