A mainstay genre of Moscow’s war propaganda is the claim of a direct, unbroken moral continuum running from the Great Patriotic War—what Russians call the eastern front in World War II—to 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. “We can do it again” has been a popular rallying cry for decades, functioning less as nostalgia than as moral permission for today’s aggression: If our grandfathers once fought absolute evil and prevailed against impossible odds, then today’s enemies—however defined—must be the same, and their destruction equally justified.

Never mind that it was the Soviet Union, not today’s 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’t even bother to deny these facts—they 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—historically righteous, militarily unstoppable—that grinds enemies to dust and makes resistance not only futile but immoral.

A mainstay genre of Moscow’s war propaganda is the claim of a direct, unbroken moral continuum running from the Great Patriotic War—what Russians call the eastern front in World War II—to 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. “We can do it again”has been a popular rallying cry for decades, functioning less as nostalgia than as moral permission for today’s aggression: If our grandfathers once fought absolute evil and prevailed against impossible odds, then today’s enemies—however defined—must be the same, and their destruction equally justified.

Never mind that it was the Soviet Union, not today’s 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’t even bother to deny these facts—they 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—historically righteous, militarily unstoppable—that grinds enemies to dust and makes resistance not only futile but immoral.

On Jan. 12, “we can do it again” curdled into a bitter joke for Russians. That day, Moscow’s 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—from the moment the Nazis invaded their ally in 1941 to Germany’s 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.

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’s failure is now impossible to deny—or to dismiss as illegal defeatism or foreign propaganda. Ukraine did not perish—not 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’s own justifications for the invasion.

Critical Russian infrastructure faces daily Ukrainian drone strikes, 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 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—but look at how much pain and destruction we’re inflicting along the way.

The symbolic significance of Jan. 12 seems to have been great enough for the Kremlin’s media managers to simply erase it—not by disputing the comparison, but by blacklisting it. This is not an exception but a familiar routine. Previous research on the Russian media, including this author’s own, 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 “we can do it again” rhetoric suddenly found no airtime or column space for the one date that turned their own symbolism against them.

And yet the silence didn’t 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’s reach: Russian exile media, Russian-speaking Ukrainian bloggers, and, inside Russia, the semi-autonomous, mostly Telegram-based pro-war “Z” sphere. Anti-war Russians, such as exiled journalist Kirill Nabutov, treated the milestone as definitive proof that the “small victorious operation” myth had collapsed into a long, degrading war—just 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, pointing out that the continuity with World War II only works until you do the math. At that point, the narrative no longer mobilizes; it becomes humiliating.

Another group of Russians—vehemently pro-war but generally anti-Kremlin ultranationalist dissidents—has also acknowledged the symbolism. It gives them cover to criticize the government for its mishandling of the war. In widely quoted Telegram posts, Maxim Kalashnikov, a longtime associate of imprisoned pro-war Kremlin critic Igor Girkin, wrote that Russia is left with “blood, ruins, and losses” while other countries—such as China and the United States—reap the benefits.

The convergence of these voices—anti-war Russian exiles, Ukrainian observers, and Russian ultranationalist dissidents—as well as the official silence surrounding the 1,418-day milestone mark something rare: a moment when empirical reality overpowers the Kremlin’s narrative control. Russia’s “special military operation” has now objectively failed by every standard set by its architects. The original stated goals—“denazification,” “demilitarization,” and regime change in Kyiv—are not only unmet but also further out of reach than when Russia invaded. Ukraine’s military has not collapsed, the Ukrainian state has not disintegrated, and Western support has not evaporated, despite chronic delays and self-imposed restrictions.

The comparison that Russia’s 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’s Russia has fought over Ukrainian villages at division-scale casualty rates—while still failing to fully occupy the ruins of Pokrovsk and Kupiansk, small towns that Putin falsely claimed as “liberated.”

Even more revealing is the collapse of confidence among the war’s most committed supporters. As journalist Julia Davis has systematically documented for English speakers, Russian state television—the propaganda engine that peddled the unstoppable steamroller narrative for years—now features admissions of “total mayhem” and warnings that the Russian economy could face the fate of Venezuela’s or Iran’s. This month, Vladimir Solovyov, a talk-show host and one of Putin’s most reliable propagandists, told viewers that the war will continue “for a long time” and that Russia must prepare for an economy that is no longer reliant on oil revenue. He simultaneously acknowledged “colossal problems” and “real stagnation.” 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—a far cry from past rhetoric of an inevitable victory.

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 “total mayhem,” ultranationalist bloggers speak of “blood, ruins, and losses,” 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’s 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—destroyed by Ukraine and defeated by the calendar.

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