Originally published 2022-03-17.
Photo: Arnold Schwarzenegger; © PA Archive
On 17 March 2022, three weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Arnold Schwarzenegger posted a video addressed directly to the people of Russia. Speaking calmly to the camera for roughly nine to ten minutes, the actor and former governor of California told Russians that their government was hiding the truth about the war, that Ukraine had not started it, and that their own soldiers were dying for a cause the Kremlin would not honestly explain.
The message stood out because of who delivered it and how. Schwarzenegger did not lecture or insult. He opened with affection for Russia, told stories from his own family history, and asked viewers to look for information beyond state television. He shared it on Twitter and, according to several reports at the time, on Telegram, a messaging app that remained widely used inside Russia after other platforms were cut off.
What Schwarzenegger told Russians
The core of the video was a simple argument: you are not being told what is happening. He said the official explanation, that Russia needed to "denazify" Ukraine, was false, and he pointed out that Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish and comes from a family that lost relatives to the Nazis. He placed the responsibility for the war on the leadership in the Kremlin rather than on ordinary Russians, and he stressed that this was not their war.
He then described what the outside world was seeing: residential blocks destroyed by shelling, strikes on hospitals, millions of Ukrainians fleeing their homes, and heavy Russian military losses. Toward the end, he spoke to Vladimir Putin personally. "You started this war. You are leading this war. You can stop this war," he said, according to widely shared transcripts of the video.
I love the Russian people. That is why I have to tell you the truth. Please watch and share. pic.twitter.com/6gyVRhgpFV
— Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) March 17, 2022
(This post is no longer available on X.)
He also spoke to Russian soldiers, reportedly telling those who had been sent to Ukraine that they were being used by their leaders and that the world admired the many Russians who had protested despite the risk of arrest.
Why he told the story of his father and Yury Vlasov
Much of the video's power came from personal history. Schwarzenegger's father, Gustav, was an Austrian who joined the Nazi Party after the 1938 Anschluss and served with the German army in the invasion of the Soviet Union. According to his biography, Gustav was wounded at Leningrad in the summer of 1942. Arnold described growing up with a father who came home physically and emotionally broken, filled with guilt, and he said he did not want young Russians to return the same way.
He paired that dark memory with a warm one. At 14, he said, he met the Soviet weightlifting champion Yury Vlasov at the 1961 World Championships in Vienna. Vlasov, who won Olympic gold in Rome in 1960 and became the first man to clean and jerk more than 200 kg, was Schwarzenegger's teenage idol. Years later, while filming Red Heat in Moscow in 1988, he insisted on meeting Vlasov again. Vlasov died in Moscow in February 2021, aged 85.
By telling both stories, Schwarzenegger was making a careful point: his criticism was aimed at a government and a war, not at Russia or Russians, a people he said he had loved since childhood.
The information blackout he was trying to reach through
In March 2022 independent news inside Russia was being shut down quickly. On 4 March, Russia adopted laws that made spreading "unreliable information" about the armed forces punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Officials insisted the invasion be called a "special military operation", and independent outlets that described it as a war were blocked or closed. In the same period, Russian authorities blocked Facebook and restricted access to Twitter, and Instagram was blocked soon after.
That is why the choice of platform mattered. A video on Twitter would mostly reach Russians who already used workarounds such as VPNs. Telegram was still freely available, so posting there gave the message a better chance of reaching ordinary people. How many actually watched it inside Russia is impossible to measure; the video was viewed millions of times worldwide, but most of those views were almost certainly outside the country.
Checking the main claims in the video
Most of what Schwarzenegger described was well documented by mid-March 2022:
- Ukraine did not start the war. Russia launched the invasion on 24 February 2022. The United Nations General Assembly voted on 2 March 2022 to demand that Russia withdraw.
- Hospitals were hit. On 9 March 2022, a Russian airstrike hit a maternity and children's hospital complex in Mariupol. Images of injured pregnant women being carried out were published around the world.
- Russian losses were heavy. Russia's defence ministry acknowledged 498 deaths on 2 March 2022 and then went largely quiet. Western and Ukrainian estimates were far higher, and independent counts later confirmed that losses had been seriously understated.
- The "Nazi" justification. Ukraine, like many countries, has far-right groups, but they performed poorly in elections, and the country elected a Jewish president with 73% of the vote in 2019. The claim that the state needed to be "denazified" was widely rejected by historians and governments.
The video was, of course, an appeal rather than a news report. It used emotion as well as facts, and it simplified a complicated history. But its central factual claims held up.
How the appeal was received
Outside Russia, the video was widely praised as one of the most effective celebrity interventions of the war, largely because of its tone. Instead of shaming viewers, it gave them a way to disagree with their government without feeling that they were betraying their country. Commentators noted that Schwarzenegger was unusually well placed to speak: he had been popular in Russia since the 1980s, had filmed there, and had public ties to Russian sport.
Inside Russia, the reaction was harder to judge. Pro-Kremlin voices reportedly dismissed it as Western propaganda, while some Russians who saw it passed it on privately. Whether it changed any minds cannot be known, which is true of almost every appeal of this kind.
Not his first video about extremism
Schwarzenegger has used direct-to-camera videos several times to speak about hatred and political violence. In August 2017, after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he released a video saying there is no such thing as a good Nazi and describing the defeated, guilt-ridden men he grew up around in post-war Austria. In January 2021, days after the attack on the US Capitol, he compared the riot to Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi pogrom against Jews, and again spoke about the shame carried by his father's generation.
The March 2022 video followed the same pattern: a personal story first, then a moral argument. For anyone trying to understand why it travelled so far, that structure is the key. People are more willing to listen when a speaker starts by showing respect and admits his own family's part in history.
Sources: Arnold Schwarzenegger on X, 17 March 2022; Wikipedia: Arnold Schwarzenegger; Wikipedia: Yury Vlasov; Wikipedia: Russian 2022 war censorship laws; originally reported by MSN.
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