1418 days of the Great War: the double meaning of January 11

The 1418th day of large-scale armed aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine has begun. This is the same number of days that Germany’s war against the Soviet Union lasted in 1941-1945, which Soviet and Russian propaganda calls the “Great Patriotic War,” and the entire ideological construct of the Moscow regime is based on this narrative.

Many politicians and diplomats around the world, either out of ignorance or intentionally, date the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war to February 24, 2022. However, Russia’s armed attack on Ukraine using regular ground forces and irregular armed formations began eight years earlier, in the second half of February 2014.

The Ukrainian Parliament officially designated February 20, 2014, as the day of the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war and the first violation by Russian armed forces of the officially agreed rules of movement in Crimea.

Russia’s illegal occupation of the Ukrainian Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol did not lead to large-scale hostilities at the time, but it was this covert military action by Moscow, and not the so-called “special military operation” that began 8 years later, that marked the beginning of the largest war in Europe since 1945.

Currently, the Russian offensive on Ukrainian territories is proceeding slowly, while the losses of the Russian army are much greater than their “successes.” Moreover, the pace of the Russians is estimated to be the lowest in the history of wars of the last century. The Russian offensive is also compared to the Battle of the Somme in 1916, when the Allied troops pushed the Germans back 10 km.

According to the data provided in the documentation of the Russian army, it is stated that the invaders are advancing at a speed of 1.5-3 km per day, which is a breakthrough of the fortifications. However, the Russians actually manage to achieve such figures only in a month, not in a day. According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), the invaders are advancing at a speed of 1.5-4.5 km per month.

During the full-scale invasion of 2022-2026, according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the occupation forces lost more than 1.2 million people.

How the Putin regime uses the myth of the “Great Patriotic War”

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany, with the support of the Allies, attacked another “yesterday’s” ally, the USSR. This began the German-Soviet War, one of the bloodiest and largest military campaigns of World War II, which brought numerous tragedies to Ukrainian soil.

Soviet, and later Russian propaganda, used the term “Great Patriotic War” to refer to the period of the German-Soviet war of 1941-1945. This propaganda cliché, ironically, originated in the Russian Empire. It is a paraphrase of the name of the Franco-Russian campaign of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe – the Patriotic War of 1812.

For decades, Soviet and Russian propaganda created the grand narrative of the “Great Patriotic War,” on which the entire ideological construct of the Moscow regime rested.

By playing on the issue of family memory, Putin and Kremlin ideologues, in particular Vladislav Surkov, created a perfectly tuned political technology that simultaneously consolidated and manipulated the masses in Russia, replacing family memory of those who died during World War II with an ideological narrative about the “peculiarity of Russians who saved the world from the plague of Nazism.”

At the same time, the facts of the Red Army’s use of the “scorched earth” tactic were deliberately kept quiet, when all cultural, educational, or other economic facilities that the Soviet military could not evacuate during the retreat were destroyed. The Russians are resorting to the same tactic in Ukraine now, when, losing in civilized methods of warfare and in order to achieve the goals set by the political regime, they are razing entire cities and villages with all civilian infrastructure to the ground.

In real political practice, Putin and his henchmen act using the methods of their “historical enemies” – the Nazis from the Third Reich. The parallel between the Nazis attacking the USSR at 4 am and the first Russian tank column invading Ukraine from the Luhansk region at 3:40 am on February 24, 2022, has already become well-known. Putin announced the announcement of the so-called “special operation” almost simultaneously with the first missile attacks at around 5 am.

The territories occupied by Russian troops became places of war crimes. In terms of their pace and brutality, at least in the case of the Kyiv region, the Russian military, one might say, “surpassed” the Nazis. The Nazi occupation of Ukraine lasted for several years. It brought with it numerous tragedies, in particular, the Holocaust of Jews and Roma, whose villages were burned as a result of punitive actions.

The Russian occupation of parts of northern Ukraine lasted about a month. Even during that time, the Russians left behind huge mass graves, and civilians were horribly tortured before being killed. We have yet to learn the full truth about the consequences of the occupation of the south and east of the country.

Based on materials from UINP and data from open sources.

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