From Russia With Lies

Jared Harris, playing the historical character of Valery Legasov in 2019’s Chernobyl, gives a brutal soliloquy in the closing episode: “Our secrets and our lies. They are practically what define us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”

It’s an explanation of “how an RBMK reactor explodes,” causing the Chernobyl disaster: “lies.” It’s also how, nearly 40 years later, the Ukrainian military turned a nearly static frontline into a major incursion into Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod oblasts.

On August 8th, Bloomberg ran an article detailing how military higher-ups in Russia ignored intelligence of Ukrainian troop build-ups along the border in Ukraine’s Sumy oblast. Russian officers located there had reported Ukraine’s troop build-up to the chain of command. What came back down was to “ignore misinformation.”

The same day the Bloomberg article was published, Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov briefed Putin, Sergei Shoigu and a handful of others. The Russian military had “stopped the advance of the enemy deep into the territory in the Kursk direction,” Gerasimov told them.

The next day, Ukrainians wiped out a column of Russians coming to reinforce Kursk. Days after that, the Russian tricolour was pulled from captured administrative buildings, replaced with the blue-and-yellow of Ukraine.

Apti Alaudinov, a Chechen-Russian military officer who gained favour integrating Wagner mercenaries into Russia’s military after the group’s abortive rebellion, summarized the situation thus: “Some leaders of the Defence Ministry, as I understand it, they were lying and lying and lying, and it turned out that they deceived themselves.”

Coming from Alaudinov, those words are particularly damning. This April he took up the post of Deputy Chief of the Main Political-Military Directorate, a revival of the Soviet political officers responsible for instilling ideological loyalty to the Russian state in military units.

There’s a term for those kinds of lies in Russian culture: vranyo. They are lies of the “you-know-that-I-know-that-you-know” type. When a person describes the insolent glee Russians seem to derive from telling lies, they’re describing a practice so culturally ingrained it warranted its own word to separate it from regular lies or “lozh,” straightforward falsehoods.

Lozh is a dry word with no emotional gravity, goal-oriented and as rational as lies can be, the kind of thing you use to hide embarrassing moments or extramarital affairs. Vranyo is expressive, emotive, the kind of thing most people would be embarrassed to say in how blatant and absurd it is. Vranyo is the child with his hand in the cookie jar, staring you in the eye, insisting he isn’t taking a cookie.

Vranyo could be likened to the English “bullshit,” but even that’s a crude approximation. The English idiom is an outraged call-out of the liar; the Russian term is a game played between the speaker and the listener.

That game of lying is perhaps why Russians had to come up with the equally playful rhyming reminder “doveryay, no proveryay.” Its translation was popularized by Ronald Reagan and became a beloved saying of journalists and those dealing with the Soviets and Russians: “trust but verify.”

Vranyo can be benign, like two people during the siege of Stalingrad insisting they had plenty to eat – the British “stiff upper lip,” if those lips were uttering nonsense. Its purpose is to project strength and hopefully cope long enough for the situation to improve, then pretend as if it were so all along.

As a domestic and foreign policy, vranyo is still meant to project strength and to cope with failure, but its character is both more thuggish and audacious: “you know I’m lying, but challenge my lie at your peril.”

It is the antithesis of Roosevelt’s quip to “speak softly and carry a big stick.” It’s shouting repeatedly at deafening volume that you have the largest stick of them all, such as when Moscow trots out Medvedev for his scheduled rant about using Russia’s nuclear stockpile.

It’s also a kind of klepto-mythology where Russians steal the triumphs of others and unburden themselves of their failures on those same people. It’s the claim that 27 million Russians died fighting the Nazis; the disproportionate brunt of Soviet service was borne by Ukrainians and Belarusians, as were Soviet service deaths – and that after Stalin and Molotov jockeyed to get into the Axis until 1941, had the NKVD turn Poles over the Gestapo after their mutual invasion and had the Jewish Antifascist Committee arrested or killed for – absurdly – “collaborating with Nazis.” Vranyo.

The deception becomes a kind of sympathetic magic for political policy: so long as the lie is believed, even as a game, the justifications drawn from it are real. Once anything challenges the lie, the magic crumbles and the truth is laid bare.

It’s part of what makes Russia and its predecessors, the USSR and the Tsarist empire, so good at deception. Entire political, military and intelligence doctrines were built around deception. Grigory Potemkin’s namesake villages, dezinformatsiya, maskirovka, active measures; the roots of these grew from the seeds of vranyo.

The fingerprints of vranyo are everywhere in Russia’s handling of its most recent war. When Okhmatdyt children’s hospital was hit in Kyiv last month, the distinctive profile of a Russian Kh-101 missile, with its signature underbody jet engine and rear-swept wings, was recorded on two videos at the moment of impact. Russia and its sympathizers claimed it was both an AIM-120 air-to-air missile and an MIM-140 Patriot missile, neither of which look anything like the Kh-101 captured on video. Vranyo.

Days before February 24, 2022, when Russia was still denying its troop build-up was in preparation for an open invasion to back its puppet proxies, English-speaking Russian propagandist Patrick Lancaster published a video of a “car bombing” in Donetsk; one of the three bodies in the car had clear autopsy marks on its skull and ribcage. Vranyo.

In 2013, Ukrainian President Yanukovych killed a Ukrainian-EU association agreement at the urging of Putin. The deal was supported by the majority of Ukraine’s people and members of parliament, including Yanukovych’s own party and a majority of Donbas. Russia passed off the resulting Maidan mass protests as a CIA rent-a-mob and American coup d’état, despite then-president Obama’s statement that Ukraine was not a core American interest. Vranyo.

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion – the same one that helped usher Alaudinov to favour – was foreshadowed by an infamous rant where he decried the lies of “de-Nazification”. When the business jet Prigozhin and other Wagner leaders were flying in exploded in Russian airspace exactly 60 days later, the Kremlin threw up its hands in confusion as to who could have possibly been responsible. Vranyo.

And now, as Russian troops had eyes on the troops piling up at the borders of Kursk and Belgorod, their superiors chose the best direction for that information to go was back down in an order to ignore it. Vranyo.

One pitfall of blatant lies, and its doctrinal implementation as state policy, is it works until it doesn’t, and there is no fail-safe. It floods vital communications channels with meaningless, contradictory information. And it raises the fear among those responsible for reporting ground truth to their higher-ups that the messenger might very well be shot.

The Ukrainian presence in Kursk and Belgorod lays that vulnerability out for the world to see, but it’s not the first time it has been put on display. It was made obvious after the Islamic State attack on Moscow in March. Putin had previously told the FSB in a recorded address that America’s intelligence warning of the Islamic State’s plans amounted to “blackmail” meant to destabilize the country. Iran, Russia’s diplomatic ally, had also sounded the alarm.

The killing spree left 145 Russians dead and 550 more injured. Russia, whose Wagner-affiliated Rusich group provoked fury in Syria and beyond by castrating Muslims and leaving their bodies next to signed doodles of Adolf Hitler, immediately blamed Ukraine and the CIA. Vranyo.

The other, more pressing pitfall of the cultural attitude of pathological lying is shown in the online chatter surrounding the incursion. Russian Telegram channels and accounts on X, né Twitter, are flying off the rails in response to Ukraine’s thrust into Russia.

Russian messaging has never been coherent; now it’s outright febrile. Five days after the incursion, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs only managed to post a bizarrely circular quote: “Maria Zakharova on the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ latest terrorist attacks on Russian regions: It is apparent that Ukraine’s missile and UAV attacks on Russian regions are clearly of terrorist nature.” Russian Foreign Affairs statements have always had a particular Slavic tilt to their syntax; now they’re the reasoning of a child.

Some accounts have fallen silent, paralyzed by an inability to play at vranyo. Others posted every day that the incursion had been stopped – Russia’s official talking point – before more video and photos surfaced hours or even minutes later showing that it was very much ongoing.

More troublesome for the Kremlin are those demanding Putin and Medvedev respond or be ousted, saying they look “weak” in protecting Russia’s borders and putting lie to the notion that Russia’s human waves that move the front in Donbas by inches are elite, battle-hardened troops and not bullet sponges from Russia’s ethnic minorities meant to drain Ukraine’s resources.

“We will not be indignant at the Kremlin geniuses of military strategy, because the authorities are always right and keep everything under control: idiots cannot have so many awards, right?” reads one sarcastic Telegram message.

Both Putin and Medvedev have stated that Moscow’s decade-long war against its neighbour was patient and restrained. Now that Ukraine has taken the fight to them, Russia’s sympathizers expect that “patience” and “restraint” to be set aside. And it can’t be, at least not without Russia breaking the nuclear taboo or having those human waves gunned down on Russian soil.

It’s here that vranyo becomes dangerous to its speaker. The game requires two parties to play. The moment one player walks away from the table, telling the other – telling the world – they don’t believe that big stick exists at all is the moment the magic fades and the aura of power used to sustain the lies collapses.

Once the aura dims, there is a struggle to re-establish it. Others who shared in that aura become deprived of its power as well, and they begin to turn on each other, like snakes jockeying for the warmth of a rock once the heat lamp has been turned off.