FLASH
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In the film "Wag the Dog", a political satire starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, the American president invents a fake war in Albania to divert the attention of the media and public opinion from his personal problems.
Vladimir Putin, embroiled in difficulties affecting him and Russia itself, does the opposite. Since he cannot invent a war – which exists, continues, and is becoming increasingly deadly for Russian soldiers – he invents a place to tell another lie.
In an interview with state television Vesti, the Russian president stated that around 5,000 Ukrainian soldiers were close to being surrounded by Russian forces on the Stary Oskol River.
"They are trapped on the left bank," Putin said, adding that the 144th Division had begun the final phase of the siege of Rubtsy, a village of about 350 residents in the Donetsk region.
However, according to the author, there is a big problem with this version: the Stary Oskol River does not exist.
On the map of Ukraine, the name Stary Oskol does not refer to a river, but to a village in the Russian Belgorod region. There is a river called Oskol, but it flows through the Kharkiv region, which makes Putin's statement even more ambiguous.
Furthermore, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has stated that there is no indication that Russian forces are close to encircling Ukrainian units in the Kharkiv area, much less near the Oskol River.
According to the author, this indicates a new phase in Putin's rhetoric: no longer traditional propaganda, but what historian Ian Garner calls "slopaganda," a stream of contradictory, inaccurate, or false narratives that, over time, assume the status of truth.
The author also recalls the Russian writer Joseph Brodsky, who wrote that in the mid-19th century "Russian literature, pursuing reality, ended up reaching it." More than a century and a half later, the analysis argues, Putin's is not literature, but a narrative that replaces reality and, because of the war, produces deadly consequences.
In fact, the author concludes, the first person who might believe this narrative is Vladimir Putin himself, isolated in the Kremlin "bubble" and convinced that victory is just one step away. Adapted from "Corriere della Sera"
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