REMARKS TO THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB
AMBASSASADOR VASYL MYROSHNYCHENKO
11 FEBRUARY 2026
“Russia’s War On Ukraine: An Alternative Narrative”
President and members of the National Press Club; members of the Press Gallery; Senators and Members of the Australian Parliament; fellow members of the Diplomatic Corps; distinguished Guests; supporters of Ukraine watching here in Australia and around the world; ladies and gentlemen:
Thank you for the honour of making a nationally and internationally broadcast address today, as we approach the fourth anniversary of the illegal and unprovoked full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine - an invasion marked by the deliberate and cruel targeting of civilian homes and energy networks intended to weaponise winter as a means to kill innocent civilians.
Before I begin, I wish to acknowledge the murders of our respective citizens during the Bondi anti-Semitic terrorist attack of 14 December 2025.
All those murdered deserve a place in our hearts, and I especially recognise those with a Ukrainian connection, including:
Both Australia and Ukraine have a shared destiny in defending ourselves against the international forces of ideology and violence which seek to destroy our ways of life, and our values.
It is very tragically not the first time that our two counties share a bond of trauma, and it will not be the first time that our two countries stand side by side for recovery, healing and triumph of good over evil. MH-17 was an outrage for which Russia must be held accountable.
Today, I will focus on an alternative narrative about Russia. I will challenge some of the notions that surround Russia’s disgraceful invasion of Ukraine - a war of illegal territorial annexation - and I will advocate for an alternative approach.
First, I will start with an exchange that is thousands of years old:
Adam and Eve ask God: “Why did you make Ukraine so perfect?”
God replies: “Wait until you meet the neighbours.”
When I first proposed to mark this fourth anniversary of Russia’s outrage, I met some strong resistance.
“Let it go, give it a rest, time to move on, there are other priorities for public debate, this is Europe’s problem, the Australian audience isn’t interested”.
Really? Could the proposition be true that people think this way?
No, it is not - not according to the professional research of Australian attitudes. Australians are far more attached to the ideal of a resolution to this invasion on Ukraine’s terms. And they want to hear more, not less.
I have no doubt that some institutions want to wish away the war, and there is analytical or strategic weariness about how and when the war will end. But that is precisely the fertile ground for the Russian false narrative about the war.
We must collectively resist the temptation to reduce our efforts against predatory major powers.
There is no easy life in this world. If we do not resist brutalist predatory major powers, then we volunteer ourselves to be bullied.
Australia, as a significant middle power, has a global role to play.
Before I discuss the Russian false narratives, I want to spend a minute discussing the term “narrative”, and its power.
A narrative – a clear narrative – tells in simple story form the justification or the strategy being undertaken, and then a series of policies or actions are taken which seem to support the story.
In a post-truth world, where simply asserting something makes it true, the contest is not in the Board Room, or the stock exchange, or the ballot box, or the battlefield. The contest is in the public perception of the reality of the narrative.
If you can make the narrative stick, the facts don’t matter. And that is why propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, foreign influence and the aggressive placement of “alternative facts” are so powerful today.
If you listen to President Putin’s narrative, Russia is a benevolent superpower engaged in the “liberation” of Ukraine, and defending itself against NATO aggression … and Russia is on the verge of complete victory.
Russia’s story is that any peace settlement with Ukraine must reflect that version of reality, including the surrendering of Ukrainian territory, because Russia is going to win anyway. You can hear that narrative reflected in phrases like “NATO must recognise reality” and “Ukraine must make concessions”.
But let us test that Russian narrative with a simple comparison.
On 22 June 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union, pushing Soviet forces back to Moscow and to two major cities then called Leningrad and Stalingrad.
On 12 July 1943 the Soviet counter-offensive began. It covered around 2,000 kilometers and took about 660 days, ending with the Soviet capture of Berlin and the surrounding area in May 1945.
Four years ago, with 21st Century weapons systems, and with surprise on his side, President Putin announced a 10 Day Special Military Operation intent on capturing Kyiv.
1,448 days later, and after occupying only 12% more of Ukraine’s territory than it held before the invasion, and not a single provincial capital, Putin’s 10 Day Special Military Operation is looking more like the strategic failure it actually is, than the “near total victory” his current narrative claims.
During 2025, Russia “succeeded” in occupying an additional area of Ukraine that is equivalent to twice the size of ACT – at the cost of hundreds of thousands of its own casualties.
At the same time, constantly evolving Ukrainian drone warfare capability has seen some 35% of Russia’s domestic oil processing decimated.
In truth, Putin is not really winning, and the EU, other middle powers like Australia, and other security partners, need to make that clear … diplomatically and in public. They need to look at the historical context too: Russia has won no wars in the 20th or 21st centuries other than the one – the Second World War – bankrolled by the West.
While we are examining the Soviet legacy, it is worth noting that the experience of former member states of the USSR is recalled with horror.
Neither Ukraine, nor Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, or others, have any wish to be ruled by Moscow again.
We have already suffered under Moscow – never again. We have our independence, our sovereignty, and our territorial borders, and there is no legitimate reason why we should surrender any of them to Moscow or to Putin.
Another of Russia’s narratives is that President Putin is a man of peace, of reason, and has legitimate humanitarian grievances against Ukraine. The narrative goes on to say he now seeks a peace outcome and that somehow Ukraine and NATO are provocateurs who brought this invasion on themselves.
Again, the contest is in the narrative, and some involved in diplomacy and diplomatic outcomes incline towards the Russian narrative, casting Ukraine’s resistance to a complete capitulation as a sign that Ukraine acts in bad faith.
But the narrative that Putin is a man of peace is easily countered.
There is an old saying: “show me the youth and I will show you the old politician”. Putin is a product of his formative years.
He was a thug from the slums of Leningrad, easily recruited into the KGB, rose to be the head of the successor agency to the KGB, and was deeply traumatised by the collapse of the Soviet Union. He wants that power back.
His world view is based on state power, control over the media and any who oppose him, and an aggressive and violent foreign policy based on regime change and territorial acquisition. There should be no sense that he enters into peace negotiations in good faith, nor that his undertakings can be relied upon.
During the course of the war, Putin has rejected more than 20 unilateral offers of immediate ceasefire by Ukraine, many of which had the backing of the United States and other players.
It is all part of the old KGB playbook being enacted: opposition figures die while on walks in the snow or from drinking radioactive tea; journalists are murdered; planes mysteriously explode; lethal Novichok nerve agent is found on door handles; those who fall out of favour also fall from balconies; grey zone warfare is clearly underway; and international disinformation and foreign interference operations are conducted on industrial scales.
Is there any wonder that Ukraine does not want this to be its future? So the natural question follows: why would middle powers enable or tolerate such an outcome, if only because they allow the Russian narrative to go unchallenged in public.
Remember: narratives are a contest of story-telling; facts are drowned out by stories, and the stories become the new facts.
False narratives need to be countered … loudly and in public. There is no joy to be found in being on the wrong side of history.
Much has been said about the Russian invasion of Ukraine being a test or a crisis of the international rules-based order. Perhaps that phrasing needs to be set aside, at least for the time being.
It is certain that the international rules-based order needs wholesale repair and reconstitution, but it seems not to be fit for purpose any longer … at least in our current times.
The foundation of the international rules-based order was always taken to be the UN.
But the UN seems to be powerless when Russia, a Permanent Member of the Security Council … and a nuclear weapons state … embarks on a war of territorial annexation – directly contrary to the UN Charter – and threatens Ukraine, a non-nuclear weapons state, with atomic attack if it continues resistance, or if it retaliates in kind along the same lines of the outrages committed by Russia.
If these, the broadest planks of the UN platform, go consequence-free and un-enforced by the UN, if not outright rewarded with a forced Ukrainian capitulation to Russia, then lesser elements of the international rules-based order are also fatally corrupted.
Perhaps the Golden Rivet of international security is found in nuclear weapons and arms control treaties. These are the agreements which gave middle powers confidence that whatever else may happen, nuclear war will not be our destiny.
With the imminent expiry of the last of the nuclear arms control treaties, and no sense of an extension or replacement agreement, the rational rules-based world order we have known since the 1950s and 1970s is fast fading. Russia will be free to threaten nuclear war to get what it wants.
I note here that Ukraine gave up its post-Soviet nuclear weapons in exchange for territorial and security guarantees – which Russia signed - but that seems an idealistic move in retrospect.
It poses the question: should small or middle powers now embark on their own nuclear weapons programs in the face of predatory major powers?
Keen to be seen as a superpower, and enjoy the geo-strategic benefits of such, Russia also has an economic and energy narrative that needs to be challenged.
Even with a total transformation onto military footing, Russia’s GDP growth is approaching zero and inflation is around 6%. Its budget revenues have been halved with the collapse of its “gas station” economy. Interest rates stand at around 16% making investment outside the Mafia system near impossible.
At the same time, 2026 has seen Russia suffer significant set-backs: the disruption of its client regime in Venezuela and the unrest that sees its allies in Iran – the main supplier of drones that fall on Ukrainian cities – on the brink.
This suggests an observation recently shared with me. The topic was the Titanic disaster, and where the tragedy lay. The observation was that the tragedy lay, not in too few lifeboats, but that not one of the lifeboats that pulled away from the sinking ship was actually full.
In other words: not everyone who could have been saved was saved.
It strikes me that there is a parallel with Ukraine’s situation.
No one expects the middle powers, including Australia, to defeat Russia alone, or to restore the competence of the international rules-based order alone. But is everything that could be done, being done?
Is there an active and determined contest of narratives underway in public, by diplomats, the media, and by governments - inside Parliaments and outside them?
Are middle powers doing everything within their grasp or influence to ensure that not one drop of tainted petrochemicals, sourced from Russian oil and gas, laundered through third country refineries or storage, enters the supply chain?
Is every sanction - every single sanction - that could be conceivably applied being applied?
Are security and other arrangements, such as the QUAD, and the Five Power Defence Arrangements, being leveraged in new and novel ways to exert the influence and determination of middle powers?
Australia is not without global influence and impact. Australia invented Wi-Fi and gave it to the world as a free-good. Imagine the world without Wi-Fi! And more recently, the plain-packaging of tobacco products, and now the ban on underage access to social media, made global headlines … and they serve as a model for other nations.
Ukraine remains deeply grateful for the military, humanitarian, and energy assistance so far contributed to Ukraine by Australia, and by many other countries. These contributions have allowed Ukraine to hold our ground.
Now we need global middle powers, including - and even led by - Australia, to exert their combined influence and impact to generate the diplomatic and reconstruction momentum to ensure a just, sovereign outcome - on Ukraine’s terms - to the illegal and unprovoked Russian invasion … via a durable, resilient, and irreversible peace.
For those who ask: “why doesn’t Ukraine just surrender land to
Russia?” I say this. In 2014 Russia illegally seized Crimea, and that
wasn’t enough for them. Russia used fake separatists to seize
eastern Donbas, and that wasn’t enough for them. What makes you
think that western Donbas will be enough, when we know he wants
Kyiv as well, along with our entire Black Sea coastline?
But there is more to this than clinical squares on a chess board. It's not just sovereign territory that can be traded away like a real estate deal. When Russia occupies Ukrainian territory, Russian troops and secret police torture and murder Ukrainian civilians for resisting Russian occupation. Russian soldiers use rape as a weapon of war. Children are abducted and taken to Russia for assimilation and re-education ... Soviet-style. Ukrainians are forced to renounce their Ukrainian religious traditions and to adopt Russian Orthodox practices. Many protestant pastors get kidnapped and killed. Ukrainian culture and language are extinguished and replaced with Russian-ization including through the Russian school curriculum. Russian passports and citizenship changes are forced on our citizens. And an influx of Russian transmigration drowns out Ukrainian sovereignty.
What rational, just, and liberal democracy would ever willingly subject its citizens to such brutality and so many gross human rights violations? What right-thinking nation would consign new urban areas and new rural communities to such appalling and sickening abuses? When people say "Ukraine should swap land for peace" they have no compassion or empathy for the Ukrainian people they are consigning to a horrible fate and a future of anguish and despair.
The other day, my nine-year-old son asked me a question that no child should have to ask: “Dad, why did Russia invade Ukraine?”
I told him this: sometimes a bigger neighbour decides that rules don’t matter, that borders don’t matter, and that another country doesn’t have the right to choose its own future. Ukraine is fighting because it believes that right does matter — not just for Ukrainians, but for everyone.
I explained that we fight for fairness. It is about whether might makes right, or whether laws and values protect smaller nations. And I told him that Ukraine is standing up so that children — in Ukraine, in Australia, and elsewhere — don’t grow up in a world where force replaces rules.
And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is why Ukraine fights so hard. Yes, we fight for our sovereign territory. But we really fight for the Ukrainians who live on that territory. Wouldn't you? And if you agree with that motivation, how can middle powers allow the Russian narrative of justification and entitlement go unanswered, unchallenged, and uncontested? Ukraine needs middle powers to diplomatically and politically band together, to stand up, and to speak up. Russia has done enough damage already. Enough is enough.
President, ladies and gentlemen - narratives matter. And countering false narratives matters even more. Australia has a diplomatic and clear public advocacy role in the name of a just peace. Now is the hour for Australia to join other Middle Powers to speak up and loudly challenge Russia’s false narrative.
ENDS