Good morning. In years gone by, a long-winded press conference from Vladimir Putin was as reliable a December phenomenon in Moscow as a Christmas tree in Red Square. But this year, Russia’s president broke with tradition.
“For the foreign audience, he can say everything he deems necessary, he’ll find an occasion,” political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya told Andrew Roth last week – with a visit to Minsk yesterday, where he raised fears that he will push Belarus to join a new ground offensive, a good example. “As to the domestic audience, he doesn’t see the point. Let his subordinates handle it.”
That means Russian state TV. And it’s working: while a growing number of Russians who find independent outlets are uneasy about the war, they remain marginal because of the large majorities in support among those who mostly watch broadcast media.
So who is telling the story on Putin’s behalf, and what are they saying? For today’s newsletter, I spoke to BBC Monitoring’s Francis Scarr, a Russia specialist who calculates he has spent at least 500 hours watching Russian state TV this year, about how that messaging has evolved since the start of the war - and the occasional hints that not everything is going according to plan.
For the first time, First Edition also features a technological innovation guaranteed to blow the mind of any millennial: gifs. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
US politics | The January 6 committee has referred Donald Trump to the justice department for potential criminal charges, accusing the former president of fomenting an insurrection. The justice department, where an investigation into Trump over the insurrection is already underway, is not obliged to follow the committee’s recommendations.
Cop15 | A once-in-a-decade deal to halt the destruction of Earth’s ecosystems won full support at Cop15 in Montreal after the Democratic Republic of the Congo dropped its opposition. The DRC’s environment minister threatened to throw the agreement into doubt after China’s summit president appeared to force through the text.
Strikes | Thousands of patients who have had strokes, heart attacks or broken bones will have to get themselves to A&E on Wednesday when ambulance staff strike over pay, NHS bosses have warned. Only category one patients - those at immediate risk of dying - will be sent an ambulance during the stoppage.
Tesco | A seven-year-old girl was raped at a factory producing clothes for Tesco in Thailand while her mother sewed F&F jeans late in the evening, the Guardian has learned. The girl and her mother are claimants in a landmark lawsuit against Tesco on behalf of 130 Burmese former workers at the factory.
PPE Medpro | The UK government has commenced legal action to recover more than £100m from the company that was awarded two large PPE contracts after the Conservative peer Michelle Mone recommended it to ministers.
In depth: How Russian state TV went from triumphalism to warnings of a long haul
If you’re worried about your screen time, spare a thought for Francis Scarr. Every morning, he settles down in front of his laptop at Broadcasting House and puts on one of Russia-1, Channel One, and NTV, the leading state-controlled TV stations in Russia. He does this for three to four hours every day. “It can get pretty repetitive,” he said. “I’ve got a knack now for knowing when I can skip through the stuff that isn’t as much of interest.”
If you immerse yourself in just a fraction of this content via Scarr’s Twitter account, some persistent themes become obvious: bloviating military commentators, Fox News-style presentation, and obscure western news clips cheerfully magnified out of all proportion. There is little question that it is the Kremlin calling the shots. A New York Times story last week quoted an email from the military to state media, providing a misleading video about the March bombing of Mariupol with the message: “Please use in stories.”
As the war has worn on, the coverage has changed. “They won’t ever criticise Putin, and with very rare exceptions they won’t criticise the broad strategy,” Scarr said. “But when things started to go wrong on the ground, they had to acknowledge at least part of the reality.”
The clips below tell the story of that evolution.
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March: ‘We’re waging a war of the future’
Much of the programming in the early months of the war, like this clip from March, was “dripping with hyperbole and triumphalism”, Scarr said – and a message that the invasion was being conducted as humanely as possible. “It was about liberating Ukrainians, a clean surgical operation to take out the leadership.”
Later, Russia’s approach came to be viewed widely as complacent; but here, pundit Alexei Mukhin praises a “very correct and very well balanced military operation”. “In those first weeks, you wouldn’t have had the impression it would have lasted very long,” Francis said.
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13 September: ‘We’re losing a huge number of people’
This clip, broadcast on Russia-1 after Ukraine’s stunning counteroffensive in the north-east of the country, was a landmark, Scarr said: “As far as I’m aware, nobody had acknowledged Russian losses so directly on state TV before.” Alexander Sladkov, a war correspondent speaking from the Donbas region, told the studio: “We’re losing a huge number of people, we have wounded. We’re having great success, but we’re not …” Then, after tailing off, he started talking about the value of long-range aviation.
“It seemed like maybe he let his guard down for a moment,” Scarr said. Frontline reporters like Sladkov, he added, do sometimes provide a slightly different perspective to the “armchair generals” in the studio: “They do seem a bit less gung ho because of what they’re seeing, even if they don’t provide objective information.”
Even if Sladkov’s remarks were a slip of the tongue, they prefaced a larger change. “They started drip-feeding the bad news in an acceptable way that wasn’t going to create a huge backlash,” Scarr said. Three weeks later, Bloomberg reported that worries that “relentless upbeat propaganda was fueling growing doubts” had led to a high-level decision to “start admitting some of the failings” of the invasion.
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9 November: ‘In our country there have been painful episodes when political leadership meddled in the military’
This clip features one of the most prominent Russia-1 hosts, Vladimir Solovyov, who has a nightly talkshow. As one of the presenters with the closest ties to the Kremlin, his stance is sometimes read as an index of the direction the Russian authorities wish the coverage to take. His monologue here embodies a wider strategy: acknowledge difficulties, but insulate Putin from criticism at all costs.
In an atmosphere Scarr described on Twitter as “positively funereal”, after Russian troops retreated from Kherson, Solovyov called the move a “very difficult decision” taken by the “very courageous” general Sergey Surovkin – and kept Putin at arm’s length: there had been “extremely painful” episodes in the past where Russian leaders had “meddled in control of the military process,” he said.
The newly installed Surovkin, too, was treated as “a leader having to fix the mistakes of his predecessor,” Scarr said. “But it’s about Putin above all, of course. He won’t go near bad news with a bargepole.”
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14 November: ‘I would like to know what those goals and objectives are, for a change. Just once!’
Perhaps the most fascinating of all these clips, and a total outlier: a direct criticism of the wide strategy behind the war and how it is communicated. The pundit Dmitry Abzalov sparks looks of bemusement from other panellists as he says: “The situation whereby nobody is saying anything is creating a vacuum.” After presenter Olga Skabeyeva – another of the stars of the state TV apparatus – says firmly that “The special military operation is going to plan, its aims and objectives will be achieved,” Abzalov replies: “I would like to know what those [goals and objectives] are, for a change. Just once!”
“It was remarkable,” said Scarr. “State media exists to protect this constructed reality, and it felt like he took a step back from it.”
Abzalov is presented as an authoritative voice – but as with many other pundits, his thinktank, the Center for Strategic Communications, appears to have no substantive presence in Russian civil society. “He gets huge amounts of airtime,” Scarr said. “I remember asking myself, does he do any other work? I once saw him on three different shows on the same day.“ Meanwhile, Skabeyeva’s show, 60 Minutes, has outstripped its title, and now appears for a total of five hours daily. Usually, Skabayeva is on air throughout.
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12 December: ‘Children are cultivated in a laboratory and controlled from a smartphone’
Quite hard to get your head round this one, but the gist is: the west is breeding children in labs for control as “cyborgs” by smartphone, and this will ultimately make “Africans” seem cute to Europeans and Americans. The overarching point, taking in Morocco’s run to the World Cup semi-final: Europe’s “classical modern understanding” with “gays and propaganda” is “losing to the traditional world”.
If the layers of racism and homophobia bound up here aren’t much worth unpacking, Scarr notes that conspiracy theories “abound any time Russia is on the back foot. These stories don’t seem designed to be persuasive, particularly – they are there to confuse people and urge them to fall back into the safe shell of Russia.”
“There are just huge amounts of airtime to fill,” he added. “Unless something very big happens, it’s just a constant drumbeat of rhetoric without very much meaning.”
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18 December: ‘Why should we enter talks when it’s a war for survival?’
If the war began with proclamations of Russia’s unmatchable strength and predictions that Kyiv would fall within a few days, the pitch to viewers today is very different: be ready for a long and existential conflict. In this clip, former general Andrey Gurulyov argues that a negotiated settlement is impossible because “it’s a war for survival, for the survival of civilisation, for the survival of our Russia, but not just of Russia – of the countries around us too.”
“The change in tone is clear,” Scarr said. “There’s an attempt to evoke memories of the second world war, when it literally was a fight for the existence of the motherland.” Meanwhile, Ukraine and the west have been vilified more often as satanists and cannibals – reinforcing arguments, like the one Gurulyov makes, for attacks on civilian infrastructure.
There have also been calls to create millions of Ukrainian refugees, and gung-ho invocations of nuclear war. The audience is not the west, Scarr said, but older Russians who will often have TV on in the background throughout the day. “It’s telling the domestic audience, even if things are going wrong, we have jokers we can pull out of the pack. It’s about reassuring people that Russia is still a superpower, no matter what’s happening on the ground.”
What else we’ve been reading
Alexis Petridis’ superb tribute to Terry Hall of the Specials, who has died aged 63, casts him as a “defining member of one of the most beloved and influential bands of their era … who declined to be hemmed in by their vast legacy.” Archie
Janet Carter is a 69-year-old wheelchair user that is suffering from memory loss caused by early dementia, Parkinson’s disease, chemotherapy and a head injury. Carter is also a prisoner in California who has been refused parole despite her deteriorating health. Sam Levin reports on the growing humanitarian crisis in US prisons with ageing populations. Nimo
Rebecca Nicholson is very funny about what makes BBC One’s The Traitors so watchable (beyond the fact that it’s based on legendary party game Mafia, obviously). Get on it with the same irreducible enthusiasm as magician Tom has when guessing who’s trying to kill him. Archie
If, like me, you set yourself an unrealistic goal to read loads of books this year and are now, inevitably, disappointed that you barely made a dent – don’t worry. Nancy Jo Sales explains how she cut down screen time this year and spent hours racing through novels instead. Nimo
Get into the spirit of the season with Zoe Williams’ contribution to the ‘Christmas present I’ll never forget’ series. Features out of date mustard and will definitely make you laugh. Archie
Sport
World Cup | Now that the celebrations have died down – and the estimated one million fans have cleared out of the streets of Buenos Aires – experts are taking stock of one of the most controversial World Cups in history. It was costly, carbon-heavy, bloodstained and corruption-shadowed but this micromanaged power play couldn’t have gone much better for the hosts, Barney Ronay writes from Doha. “The football was excellent,” he goes on, but “there is no meaning to this, no moral to be drawn. The World Cup was good because football is good. This is why Qatar paid $220bn to borrow its light.”
Cricket | England wrapped up a 3-0 whitewash in their test series in Pakistan, becoming the first visiting team to do so in cricket history. Ben Stokes and Ben Duckett needed just 38 minutes on the fourth morning in Karachi, knocking off the remaining 55 runs to complete a thumping eight-wicket victory.
Rugby union | Steve Borthwick has been appointed as England’s new head coach after the dismissal of Eddie Jones, with Kevin Sinfield joining the national setup as his defence coach. Borthwick says his players are “hurting” as a consequence of poor recent results and has vowed to channel that pain into a strong Six Nations campaign.
The front pages
The UK front pages are dominated by upcoming strikes, with the Guardian saying “Ambulance strikes threaten lives of 999 patients, warn NHS boss”. The Sun covers the same message from health officials with: “A&E? Call a taxi.”
The Times reports “Heart attack patients to be denied ambulances”, while the i says “No guarantee of ambulance for strike or heart attack”. The Telegraph leads with “Plea to end strikes as NHS faces meltdown”. The Mail has an interview with the prime minister under the banner, “Rishi: I won’t back down over strikes”. The Express leads on comments from union leaders with “Nurses: Talk to us, Rishi, we don’t want to break the bank”.
The Financial Times reports on “Crisis talks with ambulance leaders as nurses threaten six months of strikes”, and the Mirror has a message from the mum of a sick young girl to the health secretary: “You are working nurses to the bone”.
Today in Focus
The bribery scandal rocking the EU parliament
The Guardian’s Jennifer Rankin in Brussels tells Hannah Moore that the arrests of members of the European parliament has stunned the EU establishment, which is scrambling to respond to one of the biggest scandals in its history.
Cartoon of the day | Martin Rowson
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Tomás Saraceno is an Argentinian artist who has spent much of his career exploring the relationships between human beings and the environment that they share with other living organisms. His latest exhibition in the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), Oceans of Air, draws attendees attention to the air, using dust, spiders and a floating backpack to encourage people to think further about nature and sustainability.
Saraceno’s art urges people to see the world in new ways so that they will hopefully join the effort in trying to save it. It is clear that Saraceno’s work has a real viscerality to it, despite being about something intangible. One of the curators of the exhibition, Emma Pike, said: “Tomas’s work, it’s got all this backbone, intricacy and community around it, and the big vision. But at the end of the day it also hits you in the gut. You can see it and feel it too.”
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
