Trump says Putin wants peace. Russia’s Orwellian history textbook tells a different story

As Washington debates Trump’s peace proposals, on 27 January, the Kremlin unveiled its new “Military History of Russia” textbook with little fanfare but enormous implications.

The three-volume manifesto was co-authored by Vladimir Medinsky, head of the Interdepartmental Commission on Historical Education and mastermind behind the Kremlin’s propaganda, who led the Russian delegation during the failed 2022 “capitulation” talks with Ukraine.

Its presentation, endorsed by high-profile officials like Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov and Russian Institute of World History Director Alexander Chubaryan, proves it’s not fringe rhetoric but a state-sanctioned blueprint for Russia’s future clash with the West.

This textbook is the latest weapon in Medinsky’s decade-long campaign to embed Russia’s expansionist ideology in the minds of youth, militarizing generations across Russia and occupied Ukraine. Since the 2022 invasion, the Kremlin has accelerated efforts to militarize society, with the Education Ministry launching programs teaching “patriotism” and nuclear safety to children as young as six.

These efforts work hand-in-hand with paramilitary youth groups like the Youth Army, which was founded in 2016 under the auspices of Russia’s defence ministry to address conscription shortages. As of late 2024, it claims over 1.3 million members aged 8 to 18, creating a pipeline of minors steeped in the ideology embedded i these textbooks.

The new Cold War classroom

The textbooks themselves play a crucial role in reinforcing this narrative. They reframe Russia’s post-Soviet expansion not as aggression but as a necessary reclamation of its rightful place in the world.

“Russia returned to the global stage and clearly asserted its national interests,” it claims, painting the US and its allies as the villains, allegedly denying Russia its rightful place in the world order.

This revisionist view sharpens as the book tackles recent decades: “In the early 21st century, the world entered a new era. The US, believing it had won the Cold War against the USSR, did everything in its power to secure its sole dominance on the planet.”

It then takes a provocative turn, accusing the US and NATO of fostering “neo-Nazi ideas” in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics — a talking point straight from the Kremlin’s invasion playbook.

As a result, any sovereign effort at self-defense by these states is twisted into an act of aggression against Russia — its self-proclaimed rightful master. Meanwhile, Russia’s own attacks are redefined as preventive defense, framed as a necessary step to restore Russian “peace” and dominance over others.

America looms large in this narrative as a “predatory hegemon,” bent on global domination. NATO’s post-Cold War expansion — driven by Russia’s neighbors seeking protection from Moscow — is flipped on its head, cast instead as Western aggression. The textbook paints the alliance as an existential threat, its military infrastructure creeping “right up to” Russia’s borders, feeding a siege mentality among young Russians.

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“War is peace”: Moscow’s “peacekeeping” paradox

One chapter of the textbook, “Protecting the Peace in the Entire World,” rebrands Russia’s military interventions over the past three decades as noble missions to preserve “peace.” It casts the Russian military as the cornerstone of national sovereignty, with the Kremlin’s recent invasions framed as undeniable proof of its vital importance.

“Victory over terrorism in the North Caucasus, resolving post-Soviet conflicts, and the special operation in Donbas and Novorossia have shown that a strong, combat-ready army is the backbone of a sovereign, united Russia,” the textbook claims.

This narrative deliberately overlooks key facts: Russia launched two brutal military campaigns in Chechnya, a small, mountainous republic that declared independence after the USSR’s collapse, invoking its constitutional right. From 1994 to 2000, these wars killed roughly 100,000 people — mainly civilians — and leveled the capital, Grozny.

Instead, the Kremlin’s curriculum justifies the invasion by framing it as a fight against “terrorism,” despite the fact that Chechnya, brutally conquered by Russia only in 1859 and long seeking independence from Russian colonial control, had no real link to global terrorist networks at the time.

Even more glaring is the portrayal of Russia’s Syria campaign, where the devastation caused by airstrikes is spun as a mission to prevent the country from becoming a terrorist haven, all while ignoring the atrocities unleashed by Russia’s own intervention.

In 2015, Russia entered Syria’s civil war, backing Bashar al-Assad against rebels and global Islamist groups, including ISIS and Al-Qaeda. However, the textbook selectively focuses only on these groups as the primary enemies of Assad, ignoring the larger opposition forces that had controlled much of the country since 2011 and ultimately toppled Assad’s regime in December 2024.

The textbook also turns a blind eye to Russia’s brutal role in Syria. Since 2015, Russian forces have been linked to nearly 7,000 civilian deaths — half of them women and children — as well as over 1,200 attacks on civilian sites and almost 400 cases of using banned weapons like cluster munitions. Meanwhile, Russia’s veto power has blocked 17 UN resolutions concerning Syria, effectively shielding the Assad’s regime – and the Kremlin itself – from accountability.

Starting war to prevent atrocities: Orwellian pretext for Ukraine invasion

The textbook places Russia’s actions in eastern Ukraine at the heart of its narrative, reworking the invasion into a narrative of national pride.

“The most important task was to explain to the younger generation, to schoolchildren, the forced nature of the ‘Special Military Operation’ carried out by the Russian Federation,” said Russia’s military historian Ivan Basik during a press conference held by the TASS news agency.

A recent Russian textbook presents a skewed version of events, claiming Ukraine’s government launched a “punitive operation” in Donbas, the region Russia invaded and partially occupied in 2014. The textbook even goes so far as to blame Kyiv for the deaths of over 8,000 civilians between 2014 and 2022.

However, the verified data tells a different story. Between 2014 and 2021, Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) recorded 2,704 civilian casualties in Ukraine, with 88% of them caused by explosive weapons in populated areas. Meanwhile, Russia’s occupation of Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea forced 1.6 million residents to flee their homes.

The Minsk agreements, signed in 2014 and 2015 to de-escalate hostilities between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed proxies in Donbas, also fell victim to manipulation. The textbook parrots Kremlin propaganda, calling the agreements a “facade” used by Ukraine and NATO to secretly supply weapons and train Ukrainian forces.

Instead, the textbook takes this distortion even further, claiming that by early 2022, Ukrainian forces and NATO-backed “nationalist battalions” were preparing to “cleanse” Donbas, conveniently ignoring that the Kremlin itself was responsible for 93,902 ceasefire breaches from 2014 until its full-scale invasion in 2022, according to OSCE.

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In this warped narrative, Putin is depicted as launching a “special military operation” — the Kremlin’s euphemism for a full-scale invasion — to “save thousands of civilians” and shield Russian-occupied Donbas from a fabricated “genocide” by Ukraine.

However, by May 2022, Russian troops had killed 20,000 civilians in Mariupol alone, the largest Donbas city still under Ukrainian control after 2014, as per local authorities. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program estimates the death toll from the Mariupol siege could soar to 88,000, but these numbers remain unverifiable as Russia blocks international observers.

The narrative also accuses Ukrainian forces of using “terrorist tactics,” highlighting the explosion of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Station in June 2023. The textbook blames the “Kyiv neo-Nazi regime” for the deaths of “dozens of civilians” who drowned in the floodwaters, despite evidence suggesting the explosion at the Russia-controlled dam was likely an inside job.

Interestingly, it goes as far as comparing Russia’s warfare in Ukrainian cities like Sievierodonetsk and Mariupol with WWII street fighting, especially in Stalingrad. Yet, it intentionally ignores a key fact: the Soviets in Stalingrad were on defense, while Russia’s actions in Ukraine are offensive.

This manipulation of history taps into the Kremlin’s victimhood narrative, twisting the siege of Stalingrad into a weapon to frame Ukrainians as the new Nazis, despite Ukraine losing over 20% of its population during WWII.

The book’s release on International Holocaust Remembrance Day is no accident. While the West upholds the Holocaust memory as a pillar of the rules-based order, Moscow, under both the USSR and Putin, counters this with a competing WWII myth — the exaggerated claim of “60 million Russian deaths” — a narrative recently echoed by Trump.

The textbook lays bare Russia’s core belief: the West should be decapitated, while half of Europe with post-Soviet states like Ukraine and the Bastics must stay under Moscow’s control, with their sovereignty granted only at Russia’s whim.

As millions of Russian children — today’s youth and tomorrow’s conscripts — are raised to believe that war is peace and independence is Nazism, the real question for the world is: Can it resist the so-called peace that Russia’s textbooks are determined to impose on the planet?