by Alexander J. Motyl
09/10/25
The Hill
If you think that a rogue state on the verge of systemic breakdown would have more important things to worry about than its image, you’d be wrong. Once again, the Kremlin is accusing its critics of something called “Russophobia.”
As Tom Kent, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, recently put it, “In Russia’s view, the Western world has a big problem: It doesn’t like Russians. The reason, in the Kremlin’s telling, is not Russia’s devastation of Ukraine or its nuclear threats. Instead, the culprit is ‘the propaganda of Russophobia, unleashed by the West.’”
According to Russian propagandists, Russophobia manifests itself in the form of “hate speech.” Thanks to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we have an extensive list of supposedly Russophobic hate speech from 2024 and 2025.
Here is a typical example, by that notorious Russophobe, former President Joe Biden: “The fact is that Putin is a war criminal. He’s killed thousands and thousands of people. And he has made one thing clear: He wants to re-establish what was part of the Soviet Empire. Not just a piece, he wants all of Ukraine.”
If that’s Russophobia, then all rational people who recognize the existence of facts must be Russophobes.
According to the ministry, the ranks of Russophobic government officials include Americans, Belgians, Bulgarians, Canadians, Croatians, Cypriots, Czechs, Danes, Dutch, Estonians, Finns, French, Germans, Greeks, Icelanders, Italians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Luxembourgers and Poles — plus a slew of representatives of the European Union, the G-7 and NATO.
As with Biden, their “hate speech” consists of criticism of Putin, his regime and his war against Ukraine. Ironically, in so defining hate speech, the Kremlin is implicitly admitting that it doesn’t care about hatred of Russians — which is what “Russophobia” really means — but only about hatred of Russia’s corrupt leaders and their barbaric policies. This stance is perfectly consistent with the Putin regime’s overall indifference to the well-being of the Russian people, as illustrated by its willingness to send over a million young men to their premature deaths or infirmities for the sake of Putin’s vanity, criminality and historical ignorance.
As I argued more than three years ago — just a week after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine — Putin and his crimes are the reason for Russophobia. “Putin is a dangerously unhinged dictator and the Russia he has built is a dangerously unhinged country,” I wrote. “It’s no surprise, therefore, that people with minimally liberal notions about the world view both Putin and his
Russia with alarm, distaste, fear and hatred … it’s no surprise that Putinphobia, both as fear and as hatred, grew over the years. And it’s also no surprise that Putinphobia translated into Russophobia — not into fear or hatred of Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, but fear and hatred of the dangerously authoritarian and imperialist system Putin has built.”
Viewed through a moral lens, hating Putin, his regime and their war crimes in Ukraine is essential, just as hating Adolf Hitler, Nazism and his war was essential. Evil is evil, and Putin is evil. (Which doesn’t mean that global leaders shouldn’t talk to him about existential issues of mutual concern — a point made eloquently by Boston University’s Walter Clemens.)
The problem is that hating a dictator and his regime can easily transfer onto the everyday people who cooperate with, support or fail to resist that evil.
How should we regard Russians? Should we be as uncompromising as our insistence that all Germans who failed to resist Nazism were guilty? Or should we be understanding, as in the case of Soviet citizens who feared being killed by Stalin’s secret police and therefore looked the other way?
Russians, and only Russians, can solve this moral dilemma. Sooner rather than later, they need to develop a backbone, recognize the regime’s crimes for what they are and begin to resist — not necessarily with public protests, but with what political scientist James Scott calls the “weapons of the weak.” These entail “everyday resistance,” which is “quiet, dispersed, disguised or otherwise seemingly invisible to elites, the state or mainstream society.”
Russians may not be able to overthrow Putin — though it would be nice if they tried — but they can save themselves from moral perdition and thereby confine Russophobia to where it belongs: Putin, his regime, his crimes and his war.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”