It is not clear whether Russian troops committing mass murder and mass rape in occupied Ukrainian villages, towns, and cities actually read Medvedev’s and other propagandists’ diatribes. But by making it clear that a “significant part of the masses” are allegedly Nazis and thereby the worst enemy Russia could possibly have, the propagandists incite those who do absorb the rhetoric to extreme violence—and absolve them from any need to feel guilty for these crimes.

Judging by what survivors of Russia’s atrocities are now telling journalists, it’s safe to assume Russian forces have been exposed to some version of this rhetoric. Survivors report how Russian soldiers were hunting for nonexistent “Nazis” among the terrified locals they claimed to be liberating. Egged on by the language of annihilation and extermination, Russian soldiers, Rosgvardia troops, and mercenaries have become willing executioners of ordinary Ukrainians.

The increasingly vicious propaganda version of Russia’s war appears to be terrifyingly effective. In numerous reports, many Russian-Ukrainian families are fractured, with Russian relatives simply refusing to believe their сhildren and siblings on the other side of the border. In videos distributed by the Ukrainians, Russian prisoners of war call home; their mothers, instead of comforting them, unload grotesque monologues about Ukrainian biolabs allegedly concocting deadly viruses to exterminate Russians. When denying war crimes committed by its army, Russia now repeats the talking points employed by other regimes fighting a genocidal war; during World War II, the real Nazis dismissed foreign reports about the mass killing of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war as “atrocity propaganda.”