His Victims His Lies

From the first fake news reports that Zelensky had fled to Putin’s latest speech Tuesday that blamed the war on the West, Russia’s attempts to manipulate opinion have wound up leaving Moscow itself as the prime victim of its own lies.

By Anna Akage

-Analysis-

One year of war can also be counted in 365 days of lies, disinformation and fake news.

With its invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s Russia turned up the volume and rhythm on a propaganda machine that has been deployed the past decade across a range of channels to manipulate public opinion, at home and abroad.

It has continued to the present, with Putin delivering a major speech Tuesday in which he repeated many of the falsehoods that have justified a war that has not gone as planned — all the while vowing to continue to fight.

Yet, this would-be secret weapon of disinformation has repeatedly backfired, ultimately contributing in a crucial way to the Kremlin’s overall failures in the war. And as we now mark the one-year anniversary of the invasion, the story of the broken propaganda machine is coming full circle.

Let’s go back to the beginning, to the first Big Lie that Moscow told after the Feb. 24 invasion was launched. By the following morning, multiple Russian Internet publications close to the Kremlin were reporting that Ukrainian

President Volodymyr Zelensky had disappeared, most likely escaped to London, where he allegedly held real estate property.

According to the reports, much of the top echelon of Ukrainian leadership had likewise fled Kyiv, leaving the poor, abandoned Ukrainians to scatter into basements to hide from the advancing and inevitable takeover of the invincible Russian army.

That evening of Feb. 25, Zelensky recorded a video in front of the main government building of Kyiv, surrounded by members of his government, naming each and saying that each was “here.”

It arguably remains the single defining moment of the war, not only for its display of Ukrainian resolve and the launch of Zelensky as a remarkable wartime leader — but also because it so quickly and calmly discredited the false narrative of Russia’s invasion.

Three audiences

Russian propaganda, directed personally by Vladimir Putin, continued to focus on Zelensky in those early days, presenting him not only as a fugitive, but also a neo-Nazi, a U.S. minion and any other number of lies.

Still, both for Ukraine and the international community, Zelensky became an unlikely and bonafide war hero. He managed to unite Ukraine and the world to gain support and arms that had seemed impossible at the beginning of the war.

From the start, the Russian disinformation machine has been working on three main fronts at once: trying to frighten and demoralize the Ukrainian audience, convince the international audience of Russia’s military and energy strengths, and solidifying