Russian Defense Ministry releases Unity Day propaganda highlighting army’s multiethnic composition

Meduza.io

To celebrate Unity Day, Russia’s Defense Ministry released a video showing several masked soldiers stationed in Ukraine reciting their hometowns and ethnicities before declaring themselves to be “Russians” (using the ethnic, not civic, denominator). According to what the men in the videos say, the military propaganda features soldiers from among Russia’s Chuvash, Tatars, Buryat, Pamiri, Bashkir, Armenian, Chechen, Tajik, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Russian ethnic communities.

In one clip, participants fire a howitzer and ride in a tank to the song “Rasseya” by the band Lyube, rumored to be one of Vladimir Putin’s favorite tunes.