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A mainstay genre of Moscow\u2019s war propaganda is the claim of a direct, unbroken moral continuum<\/a> running from the Great Patriotic War\u2014what Russians call the eastern front in World War II\u2014to the so-called special military operation, which everyone else calls the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this telling, history is not analogy but destiny. Recruitment posters and billboards produced by the Russian Defense Ministry make the point visually: a Red Army infantryman in a 1940s olive tunic clasps hands with a soldier in modern Russian camouflage, as if the two conflicts were interchangeable chapters of the same war. The comparison is not only a top-down directive but also a deeply internalized belief among Russians. \u201cWe can do it again\u201d has been a popular rallying cry<\/a> for decades, functioning less as nostalgia than as moral permission for today\u2019s aggression: If our grandfathers once fought absolute evil and prevailed against impossible odds, then today\u2019s enemies\u2014however defined\u2014must be the same, and their destruction equally justified.<\/p>\n Never mind that it was the Soviet Union, not today\u2019s smaller and weaker Russia, that won World War II, or that the Red Army was a multinational force. Millions of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, and others fought and died, and Ukraine and Belarus, in particular, suffered catastrophically under German occupation. Russians don\u2019t even bother to deny these facts\u2014they have simply erased them from history. By a master stroke of mythmaking, Russia has recast the Soviet victory as an exclusively Russian achievement, hoarding all the glory, all the victimhood, and all the symbolic capital of anti-fascism. The result is the myth of the Russian steamroller\u2014historically righteous, militarily unstoppable\u2014that grinds enemies to dust and makes resistance not only futile but immoral.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n A mainstay genre of Moscow\u2019s war propaganda is the claim of a direct, unbroken moral continuum<\/a><\/u><\/span> running from the Great Patriotic War\u2014what Russians call the eastern front in World War II\u2014to the so-called special military operation, which everyone else calls the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this telling, history is not analogy but destiny. Recruitment posters and billboards produced by the Russian Defense Ministry make the point visually: a Red Army infantryman in a 1940s olive tunic clasps hands with a soldier in modern Russian camouflage, as if the two conflicts were interchangeable chapters of the same war. The comparison is not only a top-down directive but also a deeply internalized belief among Russians. \u201cWe can do it again\u201d <\/u>has been a popular rallying cry<\/a><\/u><\/span> for decades, functioning less as nostalgia than as moral permission for today\u2019s aggression: If our grandfathers once fought absolute evil and prevailed against impossible odds, then today\u2019s enemies\u2014however defined\u2014must be the same, and their destruction equally justified.<\/p>\n Never mind that it was the Soviet Union, not today\u2019s smaller and weaker Russia, that won World War II, or that the Red Army was a multinational force. Millions of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, and others fought and died, and Ukraine and Belarus, in particular, suffered catastrophically under German occupation. Russians don\u2019t even bother to deny these facts\u2014they have simply erased them from history. By a master stroke of mythmaking, Russia has recast the Soviet victory as an exclusively Russian achievement, hoarding all the glory, all the victimhood, and all the symbolic capital of anti-fascism. The result is the myth of the Russian steamroller\u2014historically righteous, militarily unstoppable\u2014that grinds enemies to dust and makes resistance not only futile but immoral.<\/p>\n On Jan. 12<\/span>, \u201cwe can do it again\u201d curdled into a bitter joke for Russians. That day, Moscow\u2019s war in Ukraine officially surpassed 1,418 days, a number drilled into every Soviet and Russian schoolchild. It marks the time it took to achieve victory in World War II\u2014from the moment the Nazis invaded their ally in 1941 to Germany\u2019s capitulation in the smoldering ruins of Berlin. Russians are now faced with incontrovertible evidence of their failure to live up to their chosen historical standard. The comparison is even more painful when set against the thousands of miles that the Red Army drove Nazi forces across Europe, versus the few yards of frozen farmland that Russian troops have struggled to seize this winter.<\/p>\n The demoralizing effect of crossing this symbolic threshold is difficult to quantify, yet it is visibly unsettling even to the most fervent Russian patriot. The enormity of the invasion\u2019s failure is now impossible to deny\u2014or to dismiss as illegal defeatism or foreign propaganda. Ukraine did not perish\u2014not in the planned three days, not in nearly four years of war. Instead, it now poses a serious threat to Russia itself, in a darkly ironic self-fulfilling prophecy of Moscow\u2019s own justifications for the invasion.<\/p>\n Critical Russian infrastructure faces daily Ukrainian drone strikes<\/a><\/u><\/span>, with air defenses all but helpless to stop them. Claims that Russian forces are still advancing ring hollow against the hard reality of the colossal losses<\/a><\/u><\/span> incurred for marginal, largely symbolic gains. Even among pro-war Russians, it takes a sadist to find solace in this outcome: Yes, they sneer, Kyiv may remain out of reach\u2014but look at how much pain and destruction we\u2019re inflicting along the way.<\/p>\n The symbolic significance of Jan. 12<\/span> seems to have been great enough for the Kremlin\u2019s media managers to simply erase it\u2014not by disputing the comparison, but by blacklisting it. This is not an exception but a familiar routine. Previous research<\/a><\/u><\/span> on the <\/span>Russian media<\/span>, including this author\u2019s own<\/a><\/u><\/span>, has shown that a special department in the Kremlin micromanages the news agenda through regular briefings and informal instructions to senior editors. The result is a system in which some themes are aggressively amplified while others are subjected to coordinated silence. The 1,418-day mark fits this pattern just about perfectly: The same media outlets that spent years covering the Ukraine war with World War II imagery and \u201cwe can do it again\u201d rhetoric suddenly found no airtime<\/a><\/u><\/span> or column space for the one date that turned their own symbolism against them.<\/p>\n And yet the silence didn\u2019t last. Once a symbol exists, it migrates to the only places in the Russian-language information ecosystem where it can be publicly processed outside of the Kremlin\u2019s reach: Russian exile media, Russian-speaking Ukrainian bloggers, and, inside Russia, the semi-autonomous, mostly Telegram-based pro-war \u201cZ\u201d sphere. Anti-war Russians, such as exiled journalist Kirill Nabutov<\/a><\/u><\/span>, treated the milestone as definitive proof that the \u201csmall victorious operation\u201d myth had collapsed into a long, degrading war\u2014just like Afghanistan, Chechnya, and other conflicts in which the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and modern Russia embroiled themselves. Prominent Ukrainian journalist and blogger Denis Kazansky used the symbolic number as a propaganda boomerang on his Russian-language YouTube channel<\/a><\/u><\/span>, pointing out that the continuity with World War II only works until you do the math. At that point, the narrative<\/span> no longer mobilizes; it becomes humiliating.<\/p>\n Another group of Russians\u2014vehemently pro-war but generally anti-Kremlin ultranationalist dissidents\u2014has also acknowledged the symbolism. It gives them cover to criticize the government for its mishandling of the war. In widely quoted Telegram posts<\/a><\/u><\/span>, Maxim Kalashnikov, a longtime associate of imprisoned pro-war Kremlin critic Igor Girkin, wrote that Russia is left with \u201cblood, ruins, and losses\u201d while other countries\u2014such as China and the United States\u2014reap the benefits.<\/p>\n The convergence of these voices\u2014anti-war Russian exiles, Ukrainian observers, and Russian ultranationalist dissidents\u2014as well as the official silence surrounding the 1,418-day milestone mark something rare: a moment when empirical reality overpowers the Kremlin\u2019s narrative control. Russia\u2019s \u201cspecial military operation\u201d has now objectively failed by every standard set by its architects. The original stated goals\u2014\u201cdenazification,\u201d \u201cdemilitarization,\u201d and regime change in Kyiv\u2014are not only unmet but also further out of reach than when Russia invaded. Ukraine\u2019s military has not collapsed, the Ukrainian state has not disintegrated, and Western support has not evaporated, despite chronic delays and self-imposed restrictions.<\/p>\n The comparison that Russia\u2019s propagandists spent years building has now become a precise, calendar-based indictment. In the same amount of time that it took the Soviet Union to advance from the outskirts of Moscow to the Reichstag in Berlin, President Vladimir Putin\u2019s Russia has fought over Ukrainian villages at division-scale casualty rates<\/a><\/u><\/span>\u2014while still failing to fully occupy the ruins of Pokrovsk and Kupiansk, small towns that Putin falsely claimed as \u201cliberated.\u201d<\/p>\n Even more revealing is the collapse of confidence among the war\u2019s most committed supporters. As journalist Julia Davis has systematically documented<\/a><\/u><\/span> for English speakers, Russian state television\u2014the propaganda engine that peddled the<\/span> unstoppable steamroller narrative<\/span> for years\u2014now features admissions of \u201ctotal mayhem<\/a><\/u><\/span>\u201d and warnings that the Russian economy could face the fate of Venezuela\u2019s or Iran\u2019s. This month, Vladimir Solovyov, a talk-show host and one of Putin\u2019s most reliable propagandists, told viewers that the war will continue \u201cfor a long time\u201d and that Russia must prepare for an economy that is no longer reliant on oil revenue. He simultaneously acknowledged \u201ccolossal problems\u201d and \u201creal stagnation.\u201d Pro-war military bloggers like Yuri Kotenok have complained about severe troop shortages and Ukrainian counteroffensives that have pushed Russian forces out of their defended positions\u2014a far cry from past rhetoric of an inevitable victory.<\/p>\n The 1,418-day mark is not just a symbolic embarrassment; it is an empirical threshold beyond which the myths sustaining this war can no longer function. When Kremlin propagandists admit \u201ctotal mayhem,\u201d ultranationalists speak of \u201cblood, ruins, and losses,\u201d and the timeline meant to validate the war instead condemns it, narrative control has collapsed. What remains is not a debate about outcomes but a slow, grinding recognition of disaster, visible in state television\u2019s carefully hedged admissions and the bitter recriminations flooding nationalist Telegram channels. The myth of Russia as an invincible steamroller driven by historical destiny has run its course\u2014destroyed by Ukraine and defeated by the calendar.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n