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“Trust, but verify”.

You expect positive propaganda on all sides of every war with some truths exaggerated and others buried to serve a narrative.

The efforts Russia goes to to invent stories though, is a different matter.

Nobody doubts that Ukraine has a Nazi problem, or that Zelenskyy’s predecessor passed a lot of anti Russian laws. Or that Russian supporting political parties have been banned.

But the industrial scale fiction Russia pushes over these matters only serves one purpose, to dehumanise the enemy at home and abroad. And even Russia knows it’s fiction.

We’ve seen Russian election officials stuffing unused ballot sheets into the Yes piles on one Russian TV broadcast, five feet from the reporter, cameraman and boom mike holder.

We’ve seen the exact same group of half a dozen Russian soldiers popping up repeatedly at different Putin visits and alleged despatches from the front... They’re in Russia and always have been.

A small group of stage school kids alleged to be Ukrainian and in Ukraine have been on Russian TV in different skits in different locations and different stories... they were paraded for stories set in Russia one week, in Mariupol the next, back in Russia a few days later, and I think they even appeared in a news story allegedly showing Ukrainian kids happily going through the Russian reeducation and adoption system.

One Russian TV celebrity Vox Pop has been seen posing as a pro Russian mayor in one town, a fireman in another, a soldier in several different front line positions, an irate refugee from Mariupol, and an army medic. He’s been in three different places at once.

Kadyrov bragged from a gas station allegedly in the Donbas which was met with derision because that gas station chain never has opened a presence in Ukraine and it was subsequently proved to be far east of the Russia Ukraine border.

These fakes are intentionally obvious and Russia doesn’t care that they can be debunked very quickly by anyone with the mildest sense of critical thinking, a bit of initiative, and a pause button. The material is produced for consumption by useful idiots, politically blinkered ideologues who don’t care what’s true or not so long as it supports a narrative, anyone else who’s actively looking for confirmation bias, and of course the “dumb proles” who need to be geed up for their daily 2 Minute Hate.

It’s like phishing spam. You don’t have to be bigly smart to know what spam looks and smells like. You know your bank wouldn’t send you an email with spelling and grammar errors all over it. You know that Nigerian princes don’t treat you like a VIP.

So why do the spammers bother making it? Well, because it doesn’t matter that 98% wouldn’t fall for it so long as there’s at least one percent who are suicidally gullible, completely ignorant, or so desperate they are grasping at straws.

Russian propaganda is like that.