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One of the stickiest challenges for Western governments has been how to deal with, or even understand, a Russian leadership that lies insistently and incessantly, even when it doesnt need to.

Amid the current crisis over Ukraine, the Kremlin has made the situation both simpler and more confounding. On the one hand, the Russian leadership is stating its most important security concerns and demands more clearly and publicly than ever before. President Vladimir Putin has demanded formal guarantees that there will be no enlargement of NATO to the states of the former Soviet Union and no threatening military presence in Ukraine or elsewhere in eastern Europe.

On the other hand, the Kremlin continues to mask its intentions in a torrent of falsehoods. Senior Russian officials claim that Russian military forces pose no threat to Ukraine while inventing apparent pretexts for a potential invasionsuch as accusing Ukrainians of genocide and claiming that U.S. military contractors are deploying chemical weapons to the Donbas. The thuggish nature of the Kremlins demands and threats undercuts the hand of any Western officials who might want to engage with Moscow. What is the point of talking with a counterpart who has such blatant disregard for the truth?

The Kremlin, for its part, appears to expect that its messages and motivations are clear enough. It doesnt seem terribly bothered that its reliance on brazen lies leads interlocutors to doubt that anything it says can be trusted. Still, knowing what Moscow is trying to communicate with its various uses and abuses of the truth is important as the West contends with the very real threat of a large-scale Russian military operation in Ukraine. Like it or not, Western policymakers simply do not have the luxury of throwing up their hands and tuning out everything the Kremlin is saying.

The Russian leaderships frequent resorting to transparent lies, known in Russian as vranyo, has been widely analyzed. The Kremlin lies even though it either expects or doesnt care that others see through such deception. It lies to deflect blame for outrages in which its role has been exposed, such as the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in July 2014, the poisoning of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the city of Salisbury in the UK in March 2018, or the assassination attempt on opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Russia in August 2020. Russian officials lie to deflect blame from their allies and proxies too, like when they insisted that evidence of Syrian President Bashar al-Assads use of chemical weapons was utter nonsense and blamed Assads opponents instead.

The Kremlin also uses transparent lies to project brazenness at home and abroad. The lies enhance its powers of intimidation and demonstrate that Moscow sets its own rules. The attempted killing of the Skripals sent unmistakable messages to other would-be Russian intelligence service renegades and members of the elite. Trying to kill Navalny with an advanced nerve agent and then absurdly blaming Germany conveyed disdain both for Germany and for other aspiring opponents of the Russian leadership: not only can the regime kill you, it will mock you when it tries to.

Similarly, transparent lying is a way for the Kremlin to troll Western elites and turn the tables on them for supposed hypocrisy, policy mistakes, and attempts to impose their values on others. On such occasions, the Kremlin appears to be inviting its domestic supporters and foreign sympathizers to join in on the joke. At the height of the recent migrant crisis that Belarus created at its border with Poland, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov trolled European elites, blaming themnot Belarusfor starting the crisis and for supposedly being hypocritical in how they handle migrants and apply European values. Putin later echoed those points, probably envisioning that they would resonate not just at home but among anti-EU and anti-immigrant audiences in the West as well.

The Kremlin also expects foreign governments to be able to see through its lies when they are used in pursuit of underlying strategic goals. On those occasions, half of what the Russian leadership says is a lie, and the other half is the truth in a sensethat is, it indicates the goal that Moscow is seeking. Knowing which is which is not always as easy as the regime thinks.

The Kremlin has used the half-lie, half-truth formulation most prominently in the context of Russias involvement in eastern Ukraine. It uses the same approach on the subject of Russias interference in U.S. elections and Russias testing and deployment of a ground-launched cruise missile in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Each of its falsehoods is connected to a goalthat references to all three were included in its December 2021 proposed draft treaty containing itskey demandsof the United States (see text box 1).

To some degree, the Kremlins falsehoods about eastern Ukraine, electoral interference, and INF Treaty violations are all intended to deflect blamewhether anyone believes them or notand to warn or remind the West that Moscow has leverage if its offer of a bargain is rejected or ignored.

The Kremlin no doubt wanted the United States to remain bound by the INF Treaty in part because of its long-standing concern that the U.S. military could convert missile defense sites in Romania and Poland into offensive positions within range of Russia. After the U.S. withdrawal from the INF Treaty in 2019, the Kremlin offered a moratorium on intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Europe, backed up by mutual inspections, even as it continued to insist that Russia had not cheated on the treaty. In the intervening two years, Russian officials have repeatedly expressed irritation that the United States has ignored or rejected their offer. Yet they are not giving up and have inserted a clause on the moratorium in their draft treaty.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg recently stated that the Russians moratorium offer was not credible in light of Russias deceitfulness over the SSC-8, demonstrating once again that deception typically sets back rather than advances Russias strategic goals with Western counterparts.

The Kremlins recent rhetoric has emphasized that NATO enlargement and membership for Ukraine are red lines. By publicizing its ultimatum-like draft treaty, the Russian leadership is experimenting with a less deceptive approach to achieve its goals. This blunter approach, however, is not entirely new. When Putin and his subordinates want something that they consider strategically important, and which they think they can obtain with minimal subterfuge, they can be consistent and nondeceptive. They also indicate, with less specificity, that they will use countermeasures if their terms are not met.

Moscows response to U.S. missile defense capabilities is one example. For two decades, Putin has criticized the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. At first, he swallowed hard and called the withdrawal simply a mistake. As Russian capabilities improved and relations with the United States worsened, however, he brought up the withdrawal repeatedly as a core grievance. He warned of an arms race and unspecified countermeasures to defeat U.S. missile defense deployments. When he finally unveiled an assortment of new advanced weapons systems designed in part to neutralize U.S. missile defense in 2018, he made a point of reminding the United States of those earlier warnings: . . . [N]o one was listening to us before. Listen up now.

Putin has been similarly clear about his opposition to NATOs enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia. He struck a memorably defiant tone on the subject in his February 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference. Russias short war with Georgia in August 2008 represented Putins way of linking rhetorical gestures with real world consequences. The same pattern recurred following the February 2014 revolution in Ukraine. Notwithstanding all his deceitfulness surrounding the seizure of Crimea in 2014, Putins claim after the fact that he had acted to prevent NATO from potentially taking over Russias naval base in Sevastopol was consistent with what he had said about NATO in Munich and what he had done in Georgia.

The fact that Putin has been so consistent about stopping Ukraine from becoming a Western-allied security threat and the way he went to war in 2014 to stop that from happening makes it harder to read his recent military moves as a mere bluff. Rather, they are further confirmation that he almost certainly will not let the issue go.

Few in the West are eager to take Putin up on his bargains, especially when theyre accompanied by falsehoods so brazen that they come across as blackmail. Even if Western governments could compromise on key positionsclosing NATOs open door for Ukraine, for instance, or refraining from criticizing human rights violations within RussiaPutins duplicitous packaging fosters an assumption that he is merely testing his interlocutors for signs of weakness and has no intention of fulfilling his end of the bargain.

Yet alongside Putin the deceiver there is also Putin the dealmaker. He and his spokespeople believe that the terms theyre offering are clear and that it should be self-evident to the West that they are willing to trade away things they dont needlike violence by so-called separatists or medium-range missiles in Europein return for something they really want, like a non-aligned Ukraine or verifiable limits on missile defense.

Putins recent public statements indicate that he may see space for reaching an understanding short of all-or-nothing outcomes. His repeated references to a hypothetical threat of U.S. hypersonic missiles being deployed on Ukrainian territory, for instance, suggest once again that limiting nearby deployments of offensive missiles, and systems capable of launching them, is a top priority for him.

The problem with any deal probably would not be the seriousness of Putins intent to bargain but rather the divergence between his expectations and reality. Even if Putin somehow managed to put in place the formal arrangements for the federalized, neutral Ukraine he seeks, many Ukrainians would not go along quietly and Russian-backed violence probably would resume. As for the agreement with the United States on mutual noninterference that the Russian leadership says it deeply wants, whenever independent Western actorsincluding the media, NGOs, or lawmakerssubsequently challenged or criticized the Russian regime in the future, its likely that Kremlin-backed influence actors would dial up their own activities against the United States.

The lack of trust would cut both ways. Many in the West would be ready to walk away from an agreement on mutual restraint in cyberspace, for instance, the first time a Russian criminal group attacked a key Western firm with ransomware. And reasonably so, thanks to Moscows routine use of deniable proxies. The 1933 U.S.-Soviet noninterference agreement, in fact, fell apart when the Soviet Union didnt stop meddling in the United States.

With his embrace of falsehoods and deception, Putin has dug himself a hole. Few are willing to bargain with a serial deceiver. But the costs of ignoring his offers and seeking to deter him through punitive measures alone are potentially high too. If he does not get the deal he seeks, or at least a counteroffer that he thinks addresses his interests, he will continue to use or ratchet up his leverage until he either gets what he wants or sees that the West is willing to out-escalate him. As Putin has shown when he is telling the truth, he doesnt threaten countermeasures idly.

The author is a paid employee of the U.S. government and conducted this research under a government-funded fellowship at an external institution. All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government. This does not constitute an official release of U.S. government information. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication of information or endorsement of the authors views.

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Why The Kremlin Lies: Understanding Its Loose Relationship With the Truth - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace