Russia Divided: How history and money drive the war machine.

I talk about how the Kremlin combines historical narrative with enormous financial incentives to mobilise the poorer strata of provincial Russia for war. This is a conversation about propaganda that needs no coherence because its goal is to sow chaos, and about what Russian historical signals really mean for Poland.

My starting point is Putin's essay from July 2021: an ideological denial of Ukraine's subjectivity that the Kremlin turned into a casus belli. But history is not the only tool of mobilisation. I put forward a provocative argument: for the poorer layers of Russia's provinces and Siberia, the war has become "good business." Simply signing a contract earns a soldier around one million rubles, and the state is prepared to cancel their credit debts up to the equivalent of half a million Polish zlotys. In this way, the Russian state has replaced the traditional mechanisms of escaping poverty with war. Russia today is a country of two speeds: Moscow as an "economic green island" with self-censoring elites, and the impoverished provinces where the front is the only path to financial stability.

I also show why Russian propaganda is more dangerous than it appears. It is not a primitive lie machine. It deliberately abandons ideological coherence in favour of narrative fragmentation: its purpose is to feed contradictory versions of events into Western societies in order to generate polarisation from within. I point to Vladimir Medinsky, under whose auspices a book titled "A Short History of Polish Russophobia" was produced, as an example of growing information aggression directed specifically at Poland. I also highlight the deepening adoption of the Chinese model, including the rollout of an application designed for total surveillance of society.

Finally, I draw a conclusion I consider essential for Polish policy: any attempt by Russian authorities to deploy historical argumentation regarding a given territory, such as the Chelm region, is not an invitation to discussion but a warning signal of planned aggression. I also warn against the trap of partitioning Ukraine: drawing Poland into such a scenario would turn us into a "hyena," echoing the Zaolzie annexation of 1938, and would destroy our position in NATO and the EU for generations.