Russian State TV Promotes Narrative of Quick Victory Over Europe, Portrays Western Militaries as “Soft”

In a disturbing escalation of war rhetoric, Russian state television has begun conditioning its audience for a potential confrontation with Europe, using the same dismissive tone it deployed before launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

During a recent broadcast on Russia’s state-run channel Rossiya 1, Margarita Simonyan, chief editor of the Kremlin-backed Rossiya Segodnya news agency and head of Russia Today, downplayed the military strength of Western nations, claiming their armies were ineffective and had not fought a real war since World War II.

“Now they are supposedly planning to send their troops against us. What troops? These armies haven’t fought in decades. In fact, they haven’t really fought since the Great Patriotic War,” Simonyan said, using the Soviet-era term for World War II.

She went further, stating that Western armies are full of “soft” soldiers and mocking European nations for their reliance on migrant recruits.

“They themselves admit that they have more illegal migrants—just the illegal ones, not even counting the legal ones—than the entire size of their armies. And now they plan to send these forces against us? These soft soldiers, who were already soft even back then?”

Simonyan also revived Soviet-era propaganda, dismissing the role of Western Allied forces in defeating Nazi Germany.

“People often say—and I completely disagree with this—that we won World War II because we suffered so many losses. No, not because of that. We won because we crushed far more of Hitler’s divisions, battalions, equipment, and everything else than they did. That’s all. Examples of true mass heroism like ours simply don’t exist elsewhere.”

Her comments ignore the multinational nature of the Soviet army in World War II, which included millions of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, and other nationalities, as well as the critical role played by the United States, Britain, and other Allied forces in the war effort.

Simonyan’s latest remarks bear a striking resemblance to the Kremlin’s pre-invasion rhetoric in 2022 when Russian propagandists boasted that Ukraine would be defeated in two days.

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At the time, Simonyan dismissed Ukraine’s resistance, claiming that Russia could quickly wipe out its defenses:

“We understood that in a hot war, we would defeat Ukraine in two days. What is there to defeat? Oh please, it’s just Ukraine! We suppress their fire points, and that’s it. We even discussed this during a commercial break.”

Earlier, Russia’s state-controlled media and intelligence agencies were instructed by the Kremlin to ramp up propaganda efforts as the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine nears its third-year mark, aiming to undermine public morale, destabilize Ukraine internally, and discredit the country on the international stage.