In 2021 Ilnitsky, adviser to the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation (2015-2024) stated that the purpose of Russia’s “mental wars” is to destroy self-awareness, change the mental, civilizational basis of the enemy’s society (I’m indebted to Tetiana Boryak of Vilnius University and to InformNapalm for drawing my attention to these quotes by Ilnitsky in https://informnapalm.org/ua/format-c/)
“It is possible to destroy the state and destroy the country by changing the self-awareness, worldview, goals, values and priorities of society. The mental war is aimed at changing the worldview. Moreover, if the Armed Forces and infrastructure can be restored, then the evolution of the worldview cannot be changed. ...The information space is [already] completely filled with “necessary” content.”
He allocates “10-15 years to rebooting historical self-awareness [in any community], the system of education and upbringing, and therefore, the basic meanings and goals of society, that is, ideology, including the rewriting (resetting) of history, the destruction of traditions, ways, beliefs (religion) and basic values [in any community Russia is operating on].
The operational goals, which are implemented within 3-5 years with the help of “social technologies of manipulation of society”, are “attack on the existing lifestyle, dismantling, vulgarization and displacement of current norms of behaviour, undermining trust in power, splitting society”... Mental wars are fought without declaring.”
However, Russia keeps declaring this war and explaining to those of us who are paying attention precisely what it is doing. Russia cannot help itself.
From a document obtained by world-leading Ukrainian information warfare collective InformNapalm (see Wikipedia) and signed by Putin himself:
The novel character based on ex-deputy prime minister of Russia Surkov, archetyped as a “Magus,” in Giuliano da Empoli’s “Magus of the Kremlin” explains why Russia must communicate its “undeclared” strategies and aims:
Surkov, the theatre studies graduate who designed Putin’s election campaign and his presidency has declared the “mental war” in multiple texts. In early 2025, for example, Surkov set out how Russia invades the minds in whichever country it’s operating:
“Since the 2000s, Russia began to produce meanings itself and went on to an information counteroffensive to the West by transferring the psychological concepts of the “mental matrix” and “archetypes of national consciousness” into the political and information realms.
Hacking every country’s archetypes of national consciousness yields Russia directed “fig leafs” (as Surkov describes Russia’s operation through surrogates) like “Georgian Dream,” Brexit, MAGA, Ireland for the Irish, Free Palestine and a bunch of flag-waving paleo-conservative, misogynistic, anti-immigrant riot-creating “movements” globally. Disinfolklore engenders division and disgust in all our communities, and is created and perpetuated by such “provocations.”
In every locality there are variations on the theme (temnik) commensurate with difference in the base “base archetypes of national consciousness.”
The Mana / energy, temnik (themes), tactics, techniques, procedures however are similar and yield the same results: chaos and division, an undermining of authority that begins in the individual consciousnesses of a population.
Never thought about Palestine before, yet now you think of nothing else? Never imagined you would camp out in campuses which have no impact on Israel, Hamas or Hezbollah’s decisions, yet there you are suddenly doing it for weeks on end… That’s Russia’s Mental War operating against you and your community. Even after the Russian so-called federation dissolves (perhaps within the next few months) this Mental War will continue - “Moreover, if the Armed Forces and infrastructure can be restored, then the evolution of the worldview cannot be changed.”
We’ll come back to how the Disinfolklore Analytical Method that I invented while working inside Russia’s kinetic and Mental Wars in Russia-occupied Ukraine can help us overcome this terrible moment in human societal development.
So I’ve written four pieces since July 2023 on how this war ends.
The first piece I wrote on the 8th of July 2023: “First Crimean War ended with a treaty, yet the Second Crimean War will end just like the First Gulf War.” This was in the context of all this talk, this troll, this Disinfolklore about how all wars end in negotiations — these Russian talking points at a time when Russia was in as bad a state as it is today.
In the First Crimean War, Russia kept pirating ships in the Black Sea and tried to passportize Christians of all nationalities in Judea, Canaan, the Holy Land. Eventually, even Russia’s allies, including the Austrian Empire, united into a coalition of the willing against Russia — France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire (the Sublime Porte as it was known then), Sardinia, and Prussia and Austria. Because of course there was no Germany then, it was just one state.
If anyone gets onto the subject of new countries — it’s always interesting when you look at the Treaty of Paris that ended the First Crimean War, to see whose signatures are on it. Turkey’s not there because it wasn’t a country then. Neither was Italy, neither was Germany. Austria is there, but mainly as part of the Austrian Empire.
And after Russia was beaten in the 1856 Treaty of Paris — which allowed Russia to continue occupying Crimea, with a continuous genocide of indigenous Crimean Tatars, and provided that Crimea was a demilitarised zone — Russia was also obliged in perpetuity never to use the Black Sea with military vessels. By 1870 (that was 1856), by 1870 it was clear that Russia was remilitarising Crimea and had begun to interfere with Black Sea shipping again.
The end of the Second Crimean War will not be a Treaty of Paris. That ship has sailed. Had Russia retreated from most of Ukraine after losing the battles for Kharkiv or Kherson, it’s possible the great powers might have pressured Ukraine to compromise. It’s possible they would have allowed Ukraine to keep Luhansk and Donetsk, but cede Crimea.
And it’s very interesting in the context of Donald’s latest brainwashing by Putler that Crimea isn’t even in the conversation. While from the Russian perspective they’re hoping they’ll never give up Crimea, obviously from our perspective and from Ukraine’s perspective, as we’re watching the pressure on Crimea, the fact that it’s not part of the conversation is fantastic.
My analysis of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since 2015 has been that the main reason Russia escalated in Luhansk and Donetsk and in Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro and all these other parts of eastern Ukraine — where it tried to spark revolutions which fizzled out immediately, including in Odesa, almost immediately as the people came out onto the streets and got rid of these Russian patsies in Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia and Kryvyi Rih and Odesa and other places — the main reason it escalated was that it was surprised by the sanctions from the White House and wanted more leverage, which is why it then invaded the mainland.
If Russia were, in some dream reality, allowed to keep Crimea, it would be getting exactly what it had wanted in 2015. And we’ve thankfully seen enough world leaders in the last week saying Russia should get nothing — you don’t get anything when you lose wars.
How I thought the war would end in July 2023 was that it would be like the Gulf War. The First Gulf War ended with a very long, I think 21-page letter from Iraq to the Security Council of the UN, full of grievances. And someone then, off the record, an Iraqi diplomat was asked, “Does this amount to your capitulation?” And they agreed. But if you read the letter, you wouldn’t think this was a capitulation. They were confused at first.
That’s how I foresaw, and actually still foresee, Russia’s capitulation. There will never be this moment where everyone shakes hands, nor should there, nor will there need to be. President Zelensky said again this week: we will not forgive and we will not forget.
On 5th of August 2023, I wrote another piece about how it would again be just like the First Iraq War, where every time Iraq breached the terms of the UN Security Council resolution, English, French and American fighter jets would bomb Iraq into submission again. So it’s great to see the signing of the Gripens today — something all of us have dreamed of.
I foresee that this is still on target. When Ukraine manages to really get its drone production up, and the West manages to get it up to the level where we can see thousands of drones go over the Russian border every night, then I think that will precipitate the end of the war.
In May 2024, I wrote “The Conditions to End Russia’s War”: Ukraine has every capability — 10,000 drones a night, ATACMS, Taurus, F-16s — to hit targets inside the Russian Empire whenever it chooses. A 200 km strip inside Russia along the border of Ukraine has turned into a wasteland capable only of supporting all forms of wildlife, excluding humans.
Then on the 18th of March 2025, I wrote “How This War Ends”: Ukraine, Poland, maybe Turkey, Baltic states aided by Finland, Scandinavia, the Nordics will eject Russia from 100% of Ukraine. I don’t see too much sign of this yet. Frankly, I don’t think it’s going to be necessary at this point. But they are doing it by proxy, by arming Ukraine. So that’s all very positive, unless you’re obviously on the front line and fighting this war.
But this week, I came across this amazing document written by a researcher at Vilnius University called Tetiana Boriak. It was published on InformNapalm’s blog site, and I will probably refer to it again over the coming weeks because it’s a really rich and deep document which is completely complementary to my work on Disinfolklore and my findings in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018. She comes to many of the same conclusions. Her analysis is pretty similar. We’re just going for different markets, really.
There are two quotes at the very beginning of the report which I’m going to focus on today. The title of the document is “How Russia Formats Identity and Tries to Conquer the World with the Help of a Mental War.”
I emphasise that I came to this from the ground up. I didn’t start with theory. I was in this situation. I was inside the occupation. And it was just really weird, as I’ve talked about before — the whole language, the othering of Ukrainians, the turning of Ukrainians and myself as a foreign diplomat there into devils, into demons, the demonisation of us, the gradual transition among the people left in Russia-occupied Ukraine. Their identities were stolen from inside their heads.
And now we have MAGA, and anyone we know with MAGA, as a good example — something many of us will at least be aware of: the idea that this can happen. Your identities can be stolen from you using what I call Disinfolklore. And that can alter society, and this is not an accidental thing. This is not an organic process. This is planned and implemented with all the help of modern technology.
While many of us can look at MAGA — and I’m always picking on them, just because it’s perhaps an example that we all in this audience from around the world are aware of — this is happening, as I talked about in my Munich speech, which frames all of my work, possibly for the rest of my life, but certainly for the foreseeable future. I foresaw that the Disinfolklore galaxy that Russia used inside Russia-occupied Ukraine to change identities — and I use that language, as indeed does Tetiana Boriak: “How Russia Formats Identity” — she’s taking language from computer discourse. “Formats identity.” This is what I saw with my own eyes and felt. It’s what we saw with people with Brexit or with MAGA.
But I foresaw that this method, which the Russians then turned on themselves inside Russia, and which MAGA around the same time started using with Donald’s presidency, would then be mainstreamed across the whole of American society and across the globe.
Within days of my talk at the Pirate Security Conference in Munich in February 2025 — a conference none of us will ever forget because of its proximity to Vance’s speech, but also its proximity to that traumatic White House meeting — the world leaders responded and rallied behind President Zelensky, as they have ever since, which is fantastic to see.
But I see in every country in Europe the signs that this war is going on. This is how I framed the discussion: by how this war ends. When the kinetic stage of the war ends, whenever that is — hopefully relatively soon, and with the collapse of Russia — we see these signs this week. We talked about this two weeks ago. We’re already seeing early warning indicators where certain federal units are appealing to Moscow for money, food, heat and resources. And this is precisely the dynamic I identified as the reason why the Soviet Union collapsed — the immediate reason.
The USSR, the Central Soviet under Gorbachev, was trying to strong-arm Belarus into signing a gas deal that Belarus couldn’t afford. Winter was already upon them, they hadn’t signed it, and they weren’t getting any gas. The only means Belarus had of getting gas, along with the Russian SSR and the Ukrainian SSR, was to declare the end of the Soviet Union, to declare themselves as independent sovereign states who could enter into legal relations with each other and solve this problem.
And so the Russian SSR under Yeltsin, the Ukrainian SSR, and Belarus declared independence, became sovereigns who could enter into contracts, and Belarusians did not freeze.
That same dynamic, I think, is what will precipitate the end of the Russian Federation — and it could be imminent. So that’s wonderful. I don’t think I really foresaw the mechanics of it in 2023, because we didn’t see Ukraine’s attacks on Russia in that way. And I don’t think many of us foresaw it, and we mustn’t lose sight of that.
Even with all this Tomahawk talk — which most of us probably aren’t that disappointed about because we never thought it was going to happen; we’ve been to this rodeo before, we’ve seen this trolling going on constantly, and we weren’t going to fall for it — essentially, they’re arguing over which assets in Russia to bomb. We saw that strike today in Bryansk, allegedly using a whole universe of different weaponry, including the Storm Shadow missile system, the Anglo-French one. So this is quite an advance.
I heard Lavrov a couple of weeks ago talk about the Tomahawk: that America shouldn’t give the Tomahawk because they couldn’t be trusted with it. As if there is some legitimate target in Russia which Lavrov would approve them hitting. I don’t lose sight of that. It’s great to see that this is the discussion — which weapon systems Ukraine should have to target Russia. And as far as we can see, no one is pressuring, not even the White House seems able to pressure Ukraine into relenting. And that’s fantastic.
So how does the war end? Unfortunately, when this happens, the dynamics of the mental wars which Russia set off inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, then expanded across the whole of Russia, and now into all of our countries — those dynamics won’t suddenly end. That’s what’s been on my mind as I began to think through it.
Tetiana Boriak quotes two brilliant passages at the beginning of her paper which set out what the mental war is, in the words of senior Russian advisors.
The first is from 2021, from Andrey Ilnitsky, an advisor to the Minister of Defence who was in power from 2015 to 2024. Ilnitsky was born in Lviv, as it goes.
According to Ilnitsky: “Humanity in the 21st century has entered a new stage of wars — mental wars. The purpose of which is to destroy self-awareness, change the mental-civilisational basis of the enemy’s society.” It is possible to destroy the state — and have in mind the image of the White House being demolished by that guy yesterday. “It is possible to change the mental-civilisational basis of the enemy’s society. It is possible to destroy the state and destroy the country by changing the self-awareness, worldview, goals, values, and priorities of society.”
“The mental war is aimed at changing the worldview. Moreover, if the armed forces and infrastructure can be restored, then the evolution of the worldview cannot be changed. The information space is completely filled with necessary content, and mental wars are fought without declaring.”
Here’s what he’s saying. I think most of us believe Russia will be destroyed and turned into six or seven sovereign states, which hopefully can develop along more civilised lines. But what he is talking about — this bit which really got me — was: “If the infrastructure can be restored, then the evolution of the worldview cannot be changed.” This is the de-brainwashing process which Germans and Japanese successfully went through after World War II.
What he is proclaiming is that Russia has set off a mental bomb inside all of our communities, which is independent of the force which put it into development or into being.
I can identify evidence that this might be the case. Look at Georgia. I was listening recently — I don’t very often listen to him — but Denys Davydov, who does a really great daily battle update on what’s going on at the front. He was talking about the fact that Russia is apparently now using a newly built Georgian refinery to refine its oil.
Denys Davydov — who I’ve really enjoyed watching evolve from being really supportive of Trump, to not wanting to get involved in American politics, to really turning on Trump, so it’s wonderful to see in real time a real human being confused and being rolled and roiled — he has a slight blind spot when it comes to Telegram. He really falls for certain trolls who position themselves as countercultural and not being part of the Russian establishment.
But here he’s mystified as to why Georgia would allow Russia to use its refineries when Russia invaded two parts of Georgia. For me, it’s quite simple: Russia is in charge of Georgia. It is occupying Georgia, but it did so through this brilliantly designed troll that integrated all of Russia’s learnings from its failures in Ukraine, and was called Georgian Dream — which is constructed on the pillars of Georgian identity.
The entire structure is built on what Georgians feel about themselves as being different. The anti-European message, how outsiders and foreigners were subverting their Georgianness, was ironically broadcast by the outsiders who were the Russians.
That pattern we see with MAGA and American nationalism and the flag and this whole thing this week, where the GOP leadership is trying to archetype the No Kings demonstrators as being somehow un-American — when it couldn’t be more American to protest and demonstrate opposition to tyranny and autocracy and authoritarianism. But they are trying to subvert the very pillars of identity as Americans and confuse everyone, turn everything upside down.
We see a similar process in Britain and in Ireland, where pillars of national identity — this whole campaign about “Ireland for the Irish,” which is based on a really jaundiced view, a really bogus view of what it means to be Irish, and didn’t exist a few years ago but has suddenly arisen and is now involved in an election campaign going on there. We see it in England with the painting of the St George’s flag on roundabouts, and councils are complaining that they have to spend two million pounds to remove these flag paintings. This is something I encountered a lot in Northern Ireland when I worked there for an anti-sectarian political party.
We see this pattern everywhere.
Vladislav Surkov, the former deputy prime minister of Russia — he lost favour slightly after the mess following Putin’s return as president after Medvedev stepped down, when we had all those demonstrations and protests. Surkov was supposed to have created the Nashi movement, which was basically a Hitler Youth movement who were supposed to crack heads. Nashi didn’t really work because the demonstrators embarrassed them. So he lost favour.
He was then sent to Ukraine and became the so-called “curator of Ukraine.” He was in charge of all the operations in eastern Ukraine, where I was, and of Georgia and Russia’s occupation of Georgia. InformNapalm, the brilliant Ukrainian information warfare collective, managed to get Surkov’s email inbox, which was a brilliant moment, 2015–2016. In it, you read the minutiae of how Surkov, from his office in the Kremlin, was involved in determining whether you could get babushkas at your protest: “The demonstration in front of the American embassy in Kyiv — if you can give us $2,000 more, we’ll get some younger people, we can get this group.”
Surkov was involved in approving even the effigies of President Poroshenko which were going to be burned — all this minutiae of how you create fake demonstrations and fake stories, which are then spun around the world as real. Pure creation of Disinfolklore. And of course, Surkov was a theatre studies graduate.
This is what Surkov wrote in 2025 — and my eyes popped when I read this originally. It’s quite a complicated text, written after my Munich speech. I was reminded when reading Tetiana Boriak’s piece, because she quotes it at the beginning.
Surkov transfers the concept of the “mental matrix — archetypes of our national consciousness.” He says that “work is being done with mental spaces that are influenced by the mythical environment and the relief of collective historical memory. And only then politics is used as a means of achieving goals.”
Surkov then goes on to say he was looking for a fig leaf to disguise Russian imperialism. And so he came up with Russkiy Mir — which was obviously already there, but he is the one who decided this is how he would cover up what he was doing.
This is the equivalent of MAGA, the equivalent of Georgian Dream, the equivalent of “Ireland for the Irish,” the equivalent of “Britain for the British” or Brexit — these fake expressions of patriotism, archetyped patriotism, which cover up something much darker and more malign.
When he uses the term “mental matrix, the archetypes of our national consciousness,” he’s revealing the pattern we can see in many different countries. And it’s of this that the mental war Russia is fighting consists.
While it’s easy for us to explain to someone who isn’t MAGA — I can use the example of MAGA to say, look, this can happen to people, you can be brainwashed, you lose your identity, we’ve seen it with some of the people who champion “Free Palestine” and any other cause — what’s underneath it, what’s immanent in it, is this conscious, purposeful attempt to change the archetypes of our national consciousness.
It’s quite hard for us to see it being done to ourselves, but also for others to see it, because you have to explain so much. “Look, this can be done. You can be brainwashed. Russia has said these things. These people have said these things. They said: we are doing this.”
And then people like me, people like all of us listening, people like Tetiana Boriak, and the amazing work that InformNapalm does — we see the evidence of this on the ground. We see these strange protests which come out of nowhere.
The Palestine thing: I had never in my life seen tents in the university I went to in Dublin, Trinity College. We have this very nice, very old campus with this beautiful square. And when I went back there during the height of the Free Palestine protests, the students were camping out in a way they never camped out for Iraq One or Iraq Two or Ukraine. It was just unusual. We saw that across the American campuses. We have friends and acquaintances who have been radicalised by different memes, whether it’s anti-vax or all sorts of things.
But the one thing most people aren’t getting radicalised over is Ukraine and helping Ukraine. Thankfully, enough powerful people are. But we don’t see that kind of strength of passion to support Ukraine. That’s also a bit of a clue.
When Surkov is talking about “archetypes of national consciousness,” he’s talking about archetypes in the same sense I am, which is different from Carl Jung’s — because Carl Jung believed in universally applicable primordial archetypes. I do believe there are primordial archetypes, and I believe there are certain archetypal structures which work on Indo-European intellects. So that’s slightly different from Surkov. But I am with Surkov in this: that you can change the meanings. This is why he says, “Russia began to produce meanings.” You produce new meanings for the archetypes.
In this sense, since 2009 in Russia, Russkiy Mir was the meaning. “Russia’s borders end nowhere.” “All these wars are justified.” “We can put up with any suffering as long as Russkiy Mir is expanded.” And suddenly, all those quite reasonable Russians who went out to protest and demonstrate in 2009 — they all now march instead, as do many of the MAGA people, and in all of our other countries where the meaning of national identity becomes subverted in a quite conscious way.
What is to be done about this? My work is where I’ve spoken before about the mana in the meme. Looking for the mana in the meme is part of it, because it’s not good enough to say to someone, “Look, if you start reading this MAGA stuff, you’re going to become MAGA and brainwashed, and we’re going to lose you to the cult.”
What we need is a tool that we can use in real time to try to see what’s immanent in the memes — what are the patterns, what are the things that are common to it. This pattern I described with Georgian Dream, “Ireland for the Irish,” MAGA, Americanism — any movement which attempts to subvert or use in a negative way as othering the archetypes of our national consciousness — when we spot that energy in Georgian Dream or in different movements in any country, in any texts or memes, that should be a warning to us.
If we’re scanning for that energy — anything affecting the archetypes of our national consciousness — just look at the demolition of that wing, or whatever you’d call it, old stables or something, in the White House. You could not get a more clear demolition of the archetypes of our national consciousness than that. That image is a perfect example of an actual, literal and metaphorical demolition of an archetype of our national consciousness — the White House, the sacred place, which the British burned. And here this interloper, this usurper, is having it demolished.
What I see in that is this same energy, this mental war which has been set off. The dynamics in all of our societies are such that even when Russia collapses — mainly because most people can’t trace this back, can’t see the Russian energy in a lot of these movements — even when Russia collapses, that won’t undermine these movements in themselves. Our fight will go on, I think, after the war ends, while Ukraine is turning itself, becoming like Poland and the rest of the European Union and trying to heal from this pain and suffering. But we have this mental war which we will still be fighting.
That’s what’s been on my mind this week. I talked a lot, so I’ll leave it at that. Next week I have a few other things to say about magical thinking and contagion.
I can give you a direct answer. This is from a document that InformNapalm obtained. They managed to get the contents of the email inbox of the secretary to the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Putin himself is chair of the board of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It’s a very short document and it has Putin’s signature on it.
Can I share it directly? Do I have that power? Yes? Wow, amazing. What a power. OK.
So this is an excerpt from that document, which I think answers your question in the immediate sense, Wendy. The document itself is entitled “The De-Westernisation of Russia.” There’s loads of waffle, as you can imagine, but it’s only four pages.
“Accordingly, to solve the problem of social entropy in such a system of social relationships, the most obvious solution would be to continue the policy of exporting chaos abroad. That is, diffusing internal tension through external expansion.”
I talk about mana and energy — this is all the energy of absurd Russian policy documents, but signed by Putin himself. We see that you wouldn’t believe this if you didn’t see the evidence in Ukraine, the blowing up of our armaments depots and all sorts of things we’re all aware of, but perhaps normal people aren’t. So it’s hard to convince them that these documents actually set out the policy which we then see evidence of being implemented.
“The most obvious solution would be to continue the policy of exporting chaos abroad. That is, diffusing internal tension through external expansion.” That’s the tight answer to your question, Wendy, from their perspective. Through chaos, they can diffuse internal tensions.
How does that benefit them? Why would they do it? I think all of us are astonished — why do any of this? Because it clearly doesn’t benefit them. And the more it doesn’t benefit them... A normal country might have made the error of invading Ukraine. But a normal country would have left after two weeks and declared victory and just gone home.
We see them still doubling down, their brains just rotten with this stuff. And I’m a great admirer of Marxist dialectics and Adorno and the like of it, and I hope my mind hasn’t been rotted by learning this stuff. But it’s in this sentence, Wendy: “The problem of social entropy — the most obvious solution would be to continue the policy of exporting chaos abroad.” And you think, that is not the most obvious solution. The most obvious solution is to try to do what Poland does, what France, what Ireland, what every other country in the world tries to do — which is create a more secure environment for their own people rather than exporting chaos abroad.
But then it gathers its own dynamic, as we see with this war. This trope at the moment — which I think is probably true — that Putin can’t stop the war because the whole thing would just fall down. I’m happy that people talk about that being true, Putin can’t stop the war, but without then saying Ukraine must surrender, because that was the case for the first year or two and we had to fight that.
These things gather their own momentum, and as we see with MAGA and elsewhere, these movements begin and they’re uncontrollable, uncontrolled. No one can control them. That’s why I identify that when the kinetic war ends and when Russia collapses — when these people are in hiding or in war crimes tribunals or being hunted by The Hague for the rest of their lives — we’re still going to be living with the consequences of this mental war that has been set off by the oligarchic elite, for all of their individual reasons, since 2015 really, in the aftermath of the world financial crisis, as a counterbalance to what they thought would be the rise of the left. And then it just becomes intoxicating.
It doesn’t benefit them. I’ve written before about how if you were to do a cost-benefit analysis of Russia’s propaganda — which they’ve never done; they’re on genocide autopilot — if they worked out the cost: “We’ve brainwashed ourselves into believing this stuff. We’ve created all this chaos everywhere. We’ve lost a million and a half people. We’ve destroyed our country and the future of however many people there are in Russia, 80 or 90 million.” You’d never engage in it. But it doesn’t seem to be rational. They don’t seem to be in control of themselves.
That’s the best answer I can give, but I’ll certainly see if I can come up with a better one. Diffuse internal tensions through external expansion — through Disinfolklore.
