How the Russians are seeing — or not seeing — the war in Ukraine

It happens as a great segment of the Russian people, observers say, have become willful participants in their own indoctrination, choosing to inform themselves through state media despite access in recent years to independent and critical journalism.

Why? Anton Shirikov, a misinformation researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, argues in The Washington Post that it’s partly because Russian propagandists are so good — understanding their audience and knowing how to make their tales appeal through “dramatic and entertaining” detail. Not unlike Trump supporters in the United States, Putin sympathizers are a particularly easy sell — eager to consume information, or misinformation, that reinforces their world view. The Russians have also received substantial help from right-wing America. Russian television has repeatedly played translated clips from Fox News host Tucker Carlson saying Ukraine “is not a democracy” and calling it a “client state of the Biden administration.”

“There are big cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, with lots of students, intellectuals and people connected with the outside world. But even there, so many people are accepting the government’s narrative. Even young people will say, ‘We don’t like the war, but it’s something we have to do,’ ” Lukas Andriukaitis, an expert on Russian propaganda and misinformation at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told me.