Why The Kremlin Lies: Understanding Its Loose Relationship With the Truth

Russian leaders have used deception for strategic ends in ways that shed light on their geopolitical goals

One of the stickiest challenges for Western governments has been how to deal with, or even understand, a Russian leadership that lies insistently and incessantly, even when it doesn’t need to.

Amid the current crisis over Ukraine, the Kremlin has made the situation both simpler and more confounding. On the one hand, the Russian leadership is stating its most important security concerns and demands more clearly and publicly than ever before. President Vladimir Putin has demanded formal guarantees that there will be no enlargement of NATO to the states of the former Soviet Union and no threatening military presence in Ukraine or elsewhere in eastern Europe.

On the other hand, the Kremlin continues to mask its intentions in a torrent of falsehoods. Senior Russian officials claim that Russian military forces pose no threat to Ukraine while inventing apparent pretexts for a potential invasion—such as accusing Ukrainians of “genocide” and claiming that U.S. military contractors are deploying chemical weapons to the Donbas. The thuggish nature of the Kremlin’s demands and threats undercuts the hand of any Western officials who might want to engage with Moscow. What is the point of talking with a counterpart who has such blatant disregard for the truth?

The Kremlin, for its part, appears to expect that its messages and motivations are clear enough. It doesn’t seem terribly bothered that its reliance on brazen lies leads interlocutors to doubt that anything it says can be trusted. Still, knowing what Moscow is trying to communicate with its various uses and abuses of the truth is important as the West contends with the very real threat of a large-scale Russian military operation in Ukraine. Like it or not, Western policymakers simply do not have the luxury of throwing up their hands and tuning out everything the Kremlin is saying.

Remembering That The Kremlin Expects Others To See Through Its Lies

The Russian leadership’s frequent resorting to transparent lies, known in Russian as vranyo, has been widely analyzed. The Kremlin lies even though it either expects or doesn’t care that others see through such deception. It lies to deflect blame for outrages in which its role has been exposed, such as the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in July 2014, the poisoning of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the city of Salisbury in the UK in March 2018, or the assassination attempt on opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Russia in August 2020. Russian officials lie to deflect blame from their allies and proxies too, like when they insisted that evidence of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons was utter nonsense and blamed Assad’s opponents instead.

Deciphering the Kremlin’s Half-Lies, Half-Truths

The Kremlin also expects foreign governments to be able to see through its lies when they are used in pursuit of underlying strategic goals. On those occasions, half of what the Russian leadership says is a lie, and the other half is the “truth” in a sense—that is, it indicates the goal that Moscow is seeking. Knowing which is which is not always as easy as the regime thinks.

The Kremlin has used the half-lie, half-truth formulation most prominently in the context of Russia’s involvement in eastern Ukraine. It uses the same approach on the subject of Russia’s interference in U.S. elections and Russia’s testing and deployment of a ground-launched cruise missile in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Each of its falsehoods is connected to a goal that references to all three were included in its December 2021 proposed draft treaty containing its key demands of the United States (see text box 1).