Putin State TV Ally Once Said Anyone Invading Ukraine Would Be a Criminal

A video has gone viral of Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov saying that a war with Ukraine "would be the worst crime you could think of."

The anchor of Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, which is shown on the Russia-1 channel, appears to have had a more positive attitude about Ukrainian-Russian relations in 2008 than he has now following Vladimir Putin's decision to go to war with Ukraine. Solovyov reportedly has close ties with the Russian president.

Over the past few months, Solovyov has been a cheerleader for the war, warning that it would spread while blithely referring to Moscow's potential use of nuclear weapons, including strikes against Western countries supporting Ukraine's military resistance.

But the video from nearly a decade and a half ago shows him telling an audience that "there will never be any war between Russia and Ukraine because any person who attempts in full seriousness to undertake such an act is a criminal."

"What's more, I can't even imagine how big a criminal," he added in the clip, which was tweeted by Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring, who said the address took place at the Moscow Art Theatre.

"In Ukraine, there live people who are absolutely fraternal in spirit, blood and common history, a war with whom would be the worst crime you could think of," Solovyov said.

"We don't need to shout 'Sevastopol is ours.' We don't need to shout 'Crimea is ours,'" he added, six years before Russia illegally annexed the Ukrainian peninsula. Sevastopol is a major Crimean port city on the Black Sea.

"We just need to make life in our country so attractive that Ukrainians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Armenians, Georgians—all of them want to live in peace with us and come to us," Solovyov said.

As of Wednesday morning, Solovyov's message of peace and harmony had been viewed more than 341,000 times.

Newsweek has contacted Russia-1 for comment.

The video reveals a marked change in tone from views Solovyov has expressed on his talk show this year. Among his comments justifying the war and railing against the West, he warned in June that if NATO kept helping Ukraine militarily, there would be a "massive nuclear strike" in which only "mutants" would survive.

In July, Solovyov seemed to dehumanize Ukrainians when he compared Russia's actions in Ukraine to "deworming a cat." For an animal doctor, "it's a special operation, for the worms, it's a war, and for the cat, it's a cleansing," he said.

Following an explosion that destroyed part of Crimea's Kerch Bridge last week, Solovyov urged retaliatory strikes across Ukraine that would target bridges, dams, railways, thermal power plants "and other infrastructure facilities."

However, Diane Nemec Ignashev, Russian professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota and an observer of Russian media and propaganda, said there was "almost nothing in this video contradictory to what he is saying now."

"The only thing that is slightly contradictory is his statement [that] people shouldn't be saying 'Sevastopol is ours' or 'Crimea is ours.'

"But this is before 2014, when Russians began to chant that," she told Newsweek. "In 2008, this statement could be read as castigating Ukrainians for claiming Crimea as theirs, and Tatars for claiming Sevastopol as theirs."

Regarding Solovyov's comment that "only a criminal" could cause a war, she said, "the standard Kremlin line is that NATO and the Nazi Ukrainian regime are to blame—they are the criminals who caused the war."

"Then as now, he affirms that Russians and Ukrainians share the same history, the same blood, the same fate. Ukrainians regard Russian historians, for example, as having usurped Ukrainian history."

When Solovyov described how in the viral video that those from the former Soviet Union "should live in peace" and then "everyone would come to us," Ignashev said, "that is another way of saying that these countries—and their people—should return to Russia."

Update 10/13/22, 3:14 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with comment from Diane Nemec Ignashev.