Putin Uses “Traditional and Family Values” to Justify the War in Ukraine

Russia wants to impose and present itself as the main global defender of the traditional and religious which was visible from Putin’s recent speech, yet again stressing that the “war was to protect our children from degradation and degeneration”. The narrative related to “endangered values” is usually used to dispute Western positions related to women’s rights, ethnic and religious minorities and LGBTI+ groups. Frequently, pro-Kremlin experts mock the alleged Western “moral decay” or “dissolute viewpoint”, while Russia and Orthodox Christianity have proved to be real defenders of traditional values

 

The Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his speech delivered only two days prior to the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is still subject of analysis of numerous global media. Truthmeter already reported on the main disinfo-narratives in his address before the Russian and global audience. This time we will focus on the Russian propaganda that the war in Ukraine is a war for “defending traditional and family values” that the “West wants to destroy”, i.e., war of civilizations as many Putin supporters want to call it.

Russia wants to impose and present itself as the main global defender of the traditional and religious which was visible from Putin’ recent speech, yet again stressing that the goal of the “war was to protect our children from degradation and degeneration”.

“They never stop lying and distorting historical facts as they attack our culture, the Russian Orthodox Church, and other traditional religious organizations in our country. Look what they are doing to their own people. It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion, and abuse of children, including pedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life. They are forcing the priests to bless same-sex marriages. Bless their hearts, let them do as they please…
…Here is what I would like to tell them: look at the holy scripture and the main books of other world religions. They say it all, including that family is the union of a man and a woman, but these sacred texts are now being questioned. Reportedly, the Anglican Church is planning, just planning to explore the idea of a gender-neutral god. What is there to say? Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Millions of people in the West realize that they are being led to a spiritual disaster. Frankly, the elite appear to have gone crazy and it looks like there is no cure for that. But, like I said, these are their problems, while we must protect our children, which we will do. We will protect our children from degradation and degeneration”, said Putin inter alia.

Value-based disinformation narratives are usually focused on endangered concepts as “tradition”, “decency” and “common sense” – positive terms, but rarely clearly defined.

Unlike the Western concept of values – that is in favour of individual rights to personal integrity, security and freedom of expression – the Russian value system is based on an entirety of collective norms with which every individual is expected to comply with.

It is a myth that the West wants to dismantle “traditional values” i.e., ”Russia is fighting a holy war against godless Satanists in Ukraine to protect Christianity and traditional values”, concludes Euvsdisinfo in its analysis of the Russian war in Ukraine.

Often, pro-Kremlin disinformation pundits, particularly Vladimir Solovyov, deploy this disinformation narrative in conjunction with unfounded accusations against Ukraine for allegedly attempting to destroy the Orthodox Church. This manipulative tactic picked up steam in 2019 when the Orthodox Church of Ukraine was granted the status of an independent church and again in November 2022 when the Ukrainian government announced it would draw up a law banning churches affiliated with Russia, reported Euvsdisinfo.

Demonizing Ukraine and its Western supporters as godless heathens go hand-in-hand with pro-Kremlin disinformation that the West wants to destroy “traditional values”.

Together, they portray Russia as the protector of these values. This disinformation narrative of protecting the threatened values is steeped in homophobia that often verges on outright hate speech, Euvsdisinfo concludes.

Hence, not surprisingly, Russian state media spend time mocking, for example, the rights of sexual minorities as illustrated in these examples.

And the State Department, in its analysis “Russia’s Top Five Persistent Disinformation Narratives” reports that Russia pushes the false claim that “Western civilization is collapsing and has strayed from “traditional values” because it works to ensure the safety and equality of LGBTQI+ people and promotes concepts such as female equality and multiculturalism”.

The demise of Western civilization is one of Russia’s oldest disinformation tropes, with claims of “the decaying West” documented since the 19th century. This values-based disinformation narratives evokes ill-defined concepts including “tradition”, “family values”, and “spirituality”. Russia argues that it is the bastion of so-called “traditional values” and gender roles and serves as a moral counterweight to the “decadence” of the United States and the Western countries. For example, President Putin claimed the West has practically cancelled the concepts of “mother” and “father” and instead has replaced them with “parent 1 and 2”, while Foreign Affairs Minister Lavrov wrote that Western students “learn at school that Jesus Christ was bisexual”, the State Department reports.

The narratives about “endangered values” are usually used to dispute Western opinions on the rights of women, ethnic and religious minorities and the LGBTQI+ groups. Pro-Kremlin pundits frequently mock the alleged Western “moral decay” or “debauchery”. On the other side, Russia and Orthodox Christianity appear to be defending traditional values.

The idea about the decay of the West against Russia as the “guardian” of decency and moral stems from Kremlin top officials. According to the analysis of the European Council on Foreign Relations from 2015, Putin adopted such a position back in 2013, condemning the “Euro-Atlantic” countries for their moral decadence and immorality.

One clever propaganda trick was to enhance the image of the evil West by merging together the social conservative and anti-Western posture. In this way, the West and the Westernisers, gay people, liberals, contemporary artists and their fans, those who did not treat the Russian Orthodox Church with due respect, and those who dared to doubt Russia’s unblemished historical record were all presented as one “indivisible evil”, a threat to Russia, its culture, its values and its very national identity, the European Council on Foreign Relations specifies in its analysis.

In November 2022, Russian President, Putin, approved a decree on the preservation of “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values”, declaring the Russian mission as the bastion of “traditional values” and saviour of mankind.

These values, the decree stated, must be defended as a national-security imperative by Russian Security Services. Among other measures, that means cracking down on “nontraditional sexual relations” and promoting patriotic, religious families with multiple children, under the guidance of the Orthodox Church.

This new role for Russia, – Mr. Putin’s decree added – has been made necessary by the “global crisis of civilization and values that leads to humankind losing traditional, spiritual and ethical waypoints and moral principles”.

By inserting Russia into the ideological cleavages of the US and other Western societies, Mr. Putin seeks to weaken this Western resolve and undermine Western unity. What he wants to do is to stoke culture wars as much as possible, said Fiona Hill, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution, who served as White House Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs in 2017-2019.

When the Russian President was speaking at a ceremony to annex four regions of Ukraine in his September address, he qualified such a step as a move forced upon Russia for the purpose of defending its society from the dangers imposed by Western immorality.

Do we want to have, here, in our country, in Russia, parent number one, number two, number three instead of mum and dad? Do we really want perversions that lead to degradation and extinction to be imposed on children in our schools from primary grades? To be drummed into them that there are various supposed genders besides women and men, and to be offered a sex-change operation?, he thundered.

Only the fight against such Western depravity, Mr. Putin added, could allow Russia to rekindle relations with the “genuine, traditional West” as well as the rest of the world that – he said – already shares these traditional values with Russia, reports the article published on webull.com.

For years Putin has been playing the culture war in France, Hungary and other European countries with close inclination towards the so-called traditional values. By doing so, he encompassed a bigger cleavage than the identity policy of the West that Putin tried to deepen ever since he took over the government, Foreign Policy reports.

In these fights, the Russia President portrayed himself as the defender of authentic European culture occupied by the radical culture of the left. The Russian Law on ”gay propaganda” from 2013 – that bans the “promotion of nontraditional sexual relations of juveniles” – additionally encouraged homophobia in Russia (Putin himself compared “gay propaganda” with pornography). Putin’s actions incited similar draft-laws for criminalization of homosexuality in Hungary, Poland and Romania.

Briefly, Putin’s Russia wants to export its own version of traditional values throughout the region it once dominated, Foreign Policy specifies.

It is not the first time for Putin to portray himself as the great defender of traditional family and religious values, putting them all within the context of his justification of the war in Ukraine.

They sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature. This is not going to happen, Putin said in his fierce address while announcing the war on Ukraine.

In the course of many years, Russia has fabricated a summary of fake narratives that its disinformation and propaganda eco-system is persistently introducing them in the global information environment. These narratives act like a pattern that enables Kremlin to adjust its narratives, with one consistency – full disregard for the truth because it shapes the information environment to support its policy goals.

 

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This article was developed within the framework of the project Promoting Access to Reliable News to Counter Disinformation, implemented by the Metamorphosis Foundation. The article, that was previously published in Truthmeter, was enabled with the support of the American non-profit foundation NED (National Endowment for Democracy). The contents of the article is the responsibility of the author and do not always reflect the positions of Metamorphosis Foundation, NED or their partners.

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