Russia as saviour of the world? Kremlin copies US propaganda techniques to sell Syrian intervention to its citizens

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his circle have spent years criticising what they said was Washington’s calamitous 2003 military intervention in Iraq and its pernicious habit of meddling in the Middle East.

But faced with marketing their own foray into the region for the first time since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – in Syria – the Kremlin is borrowing US government and broadcast tactics to replicate the media campaign that George W. Bush used to win American hearts and minds.

Be it in Chechnya, Georgia or Ukraine, the Russian military has traditionally been cagey about its campaigns. But in Syria, the Russian defence ministry has turned itself into a 24-hour news station, pumping out slick TV footage of cruise missile and air strikes complete with animated graphics.

With post-9/11 Afghanistan, Bush declared a war on terror. In Russia, Moscow’s Syria intervention is being similarly sold. Only this time the enemy is Islamic State (IS) militants who the Kremlin says could come to Russia once done with Syria.

Weathering a worsening economic downturn and weary of hearing about the travails of Kremlin-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine, many Russians appear to be enjoying the show and buying into the Kremlin’s message that its intervention is evidence of the country’s military and diplomatic renaissance.

The propaganda push, which has even extended to a TV weather presenter describing the climatic conditions for air strikes, seems, from a Kremlin viewpoint, to be working so far.