In the first months of the invasion, Russian propaganda was built around the expectation of a rapid victory. When that narrative failed, Z-bloggers began explaining retreats. Later, Russia's military setbacks were reframed as evidence that the country was fighting not Ukraine, but the entire NATO alliance.
As the war continued, the function of propaganda changed again. It increasingly became less about promising victory than about normalising prolonged attrition, and preparing Russian society for the possibility of losing the war.
The initial Russian narrative was based on an assumption of the superiority of the so-called “second army.”
Russian Telegram channels portrayed Ukraine as an artificial state that could be defeated within days.
Ukrainian soldiers were described as demoralised, disorganised, and ready to surrender. Russian troops, meanwhile, were portrayed as liberators who would be welcomed by civilians supposedly eager to return to Russia.
This narrative of an easy victory required the rapid suppression of any information that contradicted it. On 24 February 2022, the anonymous Telegram channel War on Fakes appeared, presenting itself as a fact-checking project. In practice, however, the channel became an important instrument for denying Russian military failures and alleged war crimes.
Russian attacks on the Mariupol maternity hospital and drama theatre, as well as the atrocities committed in Bucha, were presented as so called staged provocations and Ukrainian fabrications.
At this stage, the central task of Russian propaganda was to convince that the “special military operation” was proceeding according to plan
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As we all know Ukrainian forces repelled the Russian advance on Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy in the spring of 2022. The idea of Ukraine as an easy target became increasingly difficult to sustain. When Russian forces withdrew from northern Ukraine and later were kicked out of Snake Island, Russian Telegram channels described these retreats as voluntary “gestures of goodwill”.
The Ukrainian counteroffensives in the autumn of 2022, particularly the liberation of Balakliya, Izyum, and Kupiansk, made the language of voluntary goodwill increasingly implausible. The Russian withdrawal from the right bank of Kherson Oblast required a new explanation. This time, Telegram propagandists spoke of “tactical regroupings”.
The logic was that Russia was supposedly not losing territory
. It was deliberately giving up ground in order to preserve its forces, improve its defensive positions, and prepare for future operations. The important change was that propaganda tried to redefine what a retreat meant.
By late 2022, the original premise of the war had become impossible to maintain. Ukraine could no longer convincingly be presented as a weak and disintegrating opponent. Russian propaganda therefore changed the enemy. Russian Telegram channels claimed that Russia was not really fighting Ukraine at all. It was fighting the United States, NATO, and the entire “collective West”. Ukrainian soldiers were increasingly portrayed as proxies or “cannon fodder”, while Russian channels claimed that Western mercenaries and even regular NATO personnel were fighting directly on the front.
They tried to change the enemy, because there is a considerable difference between losing to Ukraine and failing to defeat a coalition of more than thirty countries. The latter narrative allowed Russian propaganda to preserve the image of Russia as a great power.
Battlefield setbacks could be explained not as evidence of Ukrainian military strength or Russian incompetence, but as the inevitable result of confronting the combined power of the Western world.
The most significant change in Russian propaganda may be the disappearance of the original promise of victory. Russian propaganda increasingly focused on making a long war appear normal
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The Russian offensive in Kharkiv Oblast in May 2024 offers a clear example.
Rather than presenting the operation as an attempt to capture Kharkiv city, Russian Telegram channels framed it as an effort to establish a “buffer zone” (sanitarnaya zona) intended to protect Russian border regions such as Belgorod from Ukrainian attacks. The objective was therefore defined in a way that could be achieved without capturing the city that had once symbolised the broader ambition of conquering Ukraine.
Moreover, the military faced criticism for looses near Vuhledar, delays in ammunition supplies, and bureaucratic chaos. On channels such as Z_Arhiv and publications by Russkiy Opolchenec, it was explicitly stated that the top leadership of the Russian Armed Forces was engaged in deliberate sabotage and treason.
Military correspondents ("voenkors"), including Alexander Kots and Evgeny Poddubny, began regularly documenting instances of disorganization and the undermining of combat readiness driven by the self-serving interests of officials in uniform.
Previously used words such as "regrouping" or "straightening the frontline" completely fell out of use, replaced by terms like "meat assault", "system of pervasive lies" and future defeat. The Telegram community shifted to stating facts about the mass destruction of Russian infantry in attacks against fortified positions without adequate artillery or air support.
Criticism escalated from localized complaints against specific brigade commanders to widespread distrust in the entire Russian military forces
. Posts on channels such as VoenkorKotenok, Vysokiy Govorit, and Grey Zone accused the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces of operating in a parallel reality where reports of "destroyed headquarters and hundreds of enemy tanks" were fabricated to appease top military-political leadership in the Kremlin, while frontline units suffered from severe shortages of ammunition, electronic warfare equipment, and communications gear.
The trajectory of Z-propaganda is the story of a constantly moving finish line. Rebranding humiliating retreats as "goodwill gestures" and mass slaughter as "military routine," the Kremlin stopped promising victory. Instead, it reduced propaganda to conditioning a society to accept endless attrition and failure as its new normal.
