By Jabir Deralla

Russia is not waging a conventional war against Ukraine. It is waging a campaign of terror. Apartment buildings are struck at night. Schools and hospitals are hit without military necessity. Power stations, heating plants, and electricity grids are systematically targeted to freeze cities into submission. This is not collateral damage. It is strategy. It is punishment. It is the deliberate use of civilian suffering as a weapon.

There is no legal ambiguity here. There is no moral gray zone. Russia’s actions amount to a war of aggression prohibited by the UN Charter and are accompanied by systematic and deliberate violations of international humanitarian law that constitute war crimes. And yet, while Russia bombs Ukrainian homes and plunges families into darkness, the Kremlin is fighting another war – to weaken the moral architecture that still protects Ukraine internationally. That is where Venezuela and Greenland enter the story.

The Kremlin does not need to prove that its war is legal. It knows it cannot. It does not even seek excuses. Its objective is more corrosive – to convince enough people that legality itself is a Western convenience, selectively applied and therefore meaningless. If international law is treated as a tool of power rather than a constraint on it, Russia’s actions remain brutal, but no longer exceptional. If rules are broken whenever they become inconvenient, outrage collapses into hypocrisy and condemnation becomes theater.

That is the space Russia is trying to carve out for itself.

Venezuela: narrative ammunition for a war of terror

Venezuela has long been more than a distant geopolitical theater for Moscow. It is a strategic partner, an energy supplier, and a political ally that has helped Russia mitigate sanctions pressure and sustain its war economy. Even actions that appear to harm the Kremlin’s immediate interests do not sever that relationship. On the contrary, Venezuela remains useful to Russia in a different, and in some respects more important, domain: narrative warfare.

The U.S. strikes in Venezuela on January 3 matter not because they resemble Russia’s actions — they do not — but because the legal framing and execution of the operation provided raw material for Russian propaganda. When force is used under contested legal justification, described in ambiguous terms, and presented as exceptional necessity rather than clearly grounded authority, it feeds precisely the story Moscow is desperate to tell: that power, not law, ultimately governs international conduct.

The operation was publicly framed as a form of “law enforcement,” including claims regarding the detention of Nicolás Maduro, even as the underlying authoritarian system remained intact. Whatever its tactical objectives, the strategic result was paradoxical. The regime survived. Democratic institutions were not restored. The rule of law was not strengthened. What was demonstrated, vividly and globally, was the spectacle of overwhelming force applied swiftly and decisively — without a clear path to democratic transition or legal accountability.

Russia does not cite Venezuela to defend itself in courtrooms. It uses it to poison conversations. To blur distinctions. To repeat, relentlessly, that there are no real rules — only double standards. The message is not that Moscow is innocent, but that no one is clean.

Once that idea takes root, Russia does not need to justify missile strikes on apartment buildings or the deliberate targeting of energy infrastructure. It only needs to make outrage feel selective, performative, or exhausted. In that environment, terror against civilians no longer appears exceptional. It becomes another episode in a world where legality is treated as convenience and condemnation as theater.

Greenland: manufacturing symmetry where none exists

The Greenland narrative is the same propaganda operation, applied in a different strategic context. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, Mark Carney described the current state of global affairs as “a rupture, not a transition” — marked by fading confidence in the rules-based international order and intensifying great-power rivalry. Russian propaganda does not need to invent this sense of rupture. The Kremlin exploits it by reframing legitimate debate about systemic change as a story of Western fracture, NATO instability, and the irrelevance of shared rules.

As Donald Trump invokes Russian and Chinese activity to justify his preposterous and illegal claims over Greenland, most NATO allies — particularly in Europe and the Commonwealth — acknowledge strategic interest in the Arctic while firmly rejecting it as any credible basis for annexation. During his address at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2026, Trump stated that he would not use military force to take Greenland. Yet this disclaimer did not amount to a retraction. It was accompanied by a confrontational tirade that insulted European allies, disclosed private correspondence with statesmen, and accused Europe of ingratitude for U.S. actions in the Second World War — all while leaving the underlying claim politically asserted and legally unresolved. In legal and strategic terms, the rejection of force altered the tone but not the substance of the challenge. For the Kremlin, it was a gift: public confirmation of Western discord, norm erosion, and alliance fracture — delivered without a single Russian provocation.

Indeed, Moscow exploits this divergence. Indeed, Moscow exploits this divergence with particular effectiveness. Russian media ridicule Western security concerns, continue to frame NATO as an aggressor, and portray Arctic defense as a fabricated pretext for militarization. Internal differences among allies are amplified and weaponized. Unity is recast as discord. Defense as provocation.

The objective is not to deny reality. It is to muddy it.

Greenland becomes another exhibit in Russia’s broader case: that Western security concerns are exaggerated, self-serving, and morally equivalent to Russian actions elsewhere… That NATO expansion, not Russian aggression, is the destabilizing force… That Moscow is reacting, not attacking… 

This false symmetry is the lifeblood of Kremlin propaganda.

Why this matters for Ukraine — now

Ukraine is not asking the world to sympathize with the suffering of its people. It is asking the world to recognize a crime — and to act upon it. Its cities are being bombed. Its energy grid is being dismantled to freeze civilians into submission. Its population is being terrorized to break political will. This is not a tragic byproduct of war. It is the logic of collective punishment — a practice outlawed precisely because of Europe’s own history.

Ukraine’s most urgent need is to shield its civilians from Russian aerial terror and the deliberate weaponization of winter. Air defense saves lives. But equally urgent is another form of protection: the clarity of the moral and legal case against Russia.

These two forms of defense are inseparable. The sharper that clarity, the harder it is for Moscow to operate diplomatically, economically, and politically — to evade sanctions, fracture coalitions, and exhaust international resolve. One shield enables the other.

That is why Venezuela and Greenland, however distant geographically, become part of the same battlefield. They are not theaters of the kinetic war itself, but of the narrative war that sustains it — the struggle over legality, legitimacy, and responsibility that shapes how far and how long Russia can continue its campaign of terror.

Every time that clarity is blurred by Western inconsistency, legal vagueness, or poorly explained uses of force elsewhere, Russia gains room to maneuver. Not on the battlefield, but in the minds of governments, publics, and institutions already suffering from strategic fatigue. That space is not abstract. It translates into delayed decisions, diluted commitments, and constrained action — precisely the outcomes the Kremlin seeks.

Russia’s fertile narrative ground

Russia has long exploited a particular strain of elite “rationality” in democratic systems — the calculation that judgment is riskier than delay, and that confrontation is more costly than accommodation. Moscow’s narratives were never designed to win broad agreement. They are designed to find institutional, political, and cultural environments where ambiguity is rewarded, accountability is costly, and judgment is deferred. Their effectiveness lies not in conversion, but in compatibility — with existing power structures, unresolved grievances, and habits of rule that already treat universal norms as conditional.

That resonance is not confined to one region. It appears wherever authoritarian governance, managed pluralism, or elite-driven politics benefit from skepticism toward universal norms — wherever accountability is inconvenient, and international law is treated as negotiable rather than binding.

In such environments, Russian narratives rarely produce open alignment. They produce something more useful: abstentions instead of opposition, silence instead of condemnation, calls for “balance” instead of judgment, procedural neutrality in the face of mass violence.

And neutrality, in this war, favors the aggressor. Whether political, academic, or within media and civil society, neutrality — or more precisely, false balance — clears the path for missiles to kill civilians and for deliberate attacks on energy infrastructure to freeze populations into submission.

Ukraine does not lose support only through dramatic ruptures. It loses it incrementally, through quiet votes, diluted statements, delayed decisions, and strategic equivocation. These are not accidents. They are outcomes Russia actively engineers.

Whataboutism is poison — and Russia distributes it deliberately and effectively

Whataboutism is not a legal argument. It is a political solvent. It dissolves responsibility without defending innocence.

Russia does not say, “We are right.” It says, “No one is clean.”

That move is deliberate — and it is old. From the earliest years of the Cold War, Soviet propaganda relied on moral equalization: every Western crime, real or alleged, was invoked not to excuse Soviet behavior, but to erase the distinction between aggressor and victim altogether. The purpose was never persuasion in the strict sense. It was corrosion — the slow erosion of moral clarity until judgment itself seemed naïve.

That strategy did not disappear with the Soviet Union. It was refined. Under Vladimir Putin, whataboutism became systematic doctrine. Decades of state-controlled media, strategic disinformation, and hybrid operations transformed it from a reactive talking point into an offensive tool. Every accusation is met not with denial, but with counter-accusation. Every documented crime is answered with a reminder that “others have done worse.” Every demand for accountability is reframed as hypocrisy.

Once that logic takes hold, bombing civilian homes becomes just another data point in a cynical world. The deliberate targeting of energy infrastructure becomes a matter of “context.” Terror becomes normalized. Aggression becomes one narrative among many. This is not confusion by accident. It is confusion by design.

Whataboutism does not need to convince audiences that Russia is innocent. It only needs to convince them that innocence itself is an illusion — that law is selective, norms are performative, and outrage is always politically motivated.

That is how crimes fade into noise. That is how responsibility is buried under false symmetry. And that is how a war of aggression is stripped of its name.

Narrative erosion is a threat to the survival of democracy

Europe’s security is built on law because Europe knows what happens when force is left unchecked. Russia does not need legal order to function. Europe does.

Ukraine is fighting on Europe’s eastern edge so that terror does not become an acceptable instrument of state policy again. If the legal and moral distinction between aggressor and defender erodes, Europe’s entire postwar security architecture erodes with it. This is not an argument against the use of force by democracies. It is an argument against carelessness.

When democracies act, they must explain why, how, and under what limits — not for perfection, but for credibility. Because credibility is what stands between a rules-based order and a world where terror against civilians becomes just another tactic.

Russia’s war against Ukraine is not misunderstood. It is understood perfectly — and deliberately obscured. Venezuela and Greenland are not explanations for that war. They are used as instruments of distraction — to shift attention from destroyed homes, frozen cities, and dead civilians toward debates about Western inconsistency instead of Russia’s responsibility for crimes committed against civilians on a massive scale.

The danger is not that the world will believe Russia is right. The danger is that the world will stop insisting that Russia is wrong. And when terror loses its name, it gains space to continue.

AI-assisted editorial tools were used for language refinement and structural editing. The illustration was generated using AI tools based on the author’s concept. All responsibility for the content rests with the author.

Jabir Deralla (pen name of Xhabir M. Deralla) is a journalist, political and hybrid-warfare analyst, and civil society leader based in North Macedonia.

© 2026 Jabir Deralla. Published by CIVIL. All rights reserved. The views expressed are solely those of the author.