"The Russian army is conducting a special operation to denazify Ukraine, liberating Kharkiv, Mariupol, and Mykolaiv from Nazi battalions. The operation is proceeding according to plan and would have already been victoriously concluded if the Nazi militants hadn't taken civilians hostage. They are blowing up residential buildings and hospitals with Ukrainian women and children inside to blame everything on Russian forces—because otherwise, the flow of money and weapons from the West to the country would stop. And by the way, Russia did not attack Ukraine; it was forced to launch a preemptive strike because, in just six hours, Ukraine would have attacked first. Moreover, Kyiv was developing an atomic bomb to use against Moscow, and in secret laboratories in Ukraine, the Americans were creating combat strains of coronavirus that affect only Russians and are spread by migratory birds. In general, Ukraine is merely a battlefield between Russia and the USA, where the fate of the future world order is being decided."

How can one believe in such nonsense that completely distorts reality, turning black into white? How can one call the obvious aggressor a peacemaker when there are thousands of documented evidences of aggression?

And yet, this nonsense is the official position of Russia. And yes, many in Russia have believed in it.

The rift has run through millions of families—the older generation accepts a worldview akin to a photographic negative, arguing and quarreling hoarsely with their younger relatives, for whom the deceit and lies are obvious. Putin's propaganda, responsible for the psycho-emotional preparation and justification of the fratricidal and expansionist war against Ukraine, proves incredibly effective once again, even when its lies should, seemingly, be glaringly obvious to anyone.

How to explain this? Not just by the gullibility of the Russian TV viewer, surely? After all, the internet still exists in Russia, where anyone can find the truth about the war in Ukraine, and anyone can look the truth in the eye if they want to, right?

But the truth about the war is being eradicated by all possible means. If you search for news about Ukraine from Russia, you won't see the word "war" at all. The fact is, it, like any information about the front line differing from propagandists' statements, is now a criminal offense. Fifteen years in prison for "spreading information discrediting the actions of the Russian army." Three years for anti-war calls. Even "Novaya Gazeta," just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its honesty and resilience, is forced to erase the word "war" from its headlines. All other critical media and independent social networks have simply been banned and blocked during the war. Russians are increasingly trapped in a hermetically sealed environment where the truth has no access.

But of course, it's not just that. Videos of bombings, photos of the wounded and dead seep through the membrane of censorship. However, facts, images, and witness videos turn out to be unimportant. It turns out they can be ignored, doubted, or given a different explanation—fitting them into a diametrically opposite narrative. It is the narrative that holds primary importance. The imagined world has far greater power over people than reality.

Since the victory in the Great Patriotic War (as we call that part of World War II that affected the Soviet Union) and Yuri Gagarin's flight into space, my country has had no triumphs. People have had no reason to be proud of their homeland.

The victory in the Great Patriotic War came at monstrous sacrifices for the Soviet people: no less than twenty million people died, with victims literally in every family. Paid for with the blood of relatives, the war and Victory became sacred. Putin's ideologists and PR people decided to turn it into a source of their legitimacy, portraying Putin and his entourage as the heirs of the victors.

In private life, the vast majority of Russians are completely powerless and helpless in the face of the state, which instills a loyal, not civic, consciousness. People have a huge demand for basic self-respect, for a sense of dignity—but the Putin regime is based precisely on the suppression of human dignity, on political apathy, and a sense of learned helplessness. Instead, people are fed imperial chauvinism, disguised as patriotism. The authorities are incapable of improving the lives of Russians, which have been deteriorating for many years, becoming poorer and shorter. The people are unhappy and embittered, poor and frightened; and on top of everything else, they are tormented by a sense of aimlessness and hopelessness in life, which gets worse every year. And even if people deep down understand who is responsible for their troubles (it's not Zelensky or Biden, after all, who are messing up their elevators!), they lack the courage to admit it even to themselves.

Propaganda offers a comfortable and inspiring myth that allows them to come to terms with their existence. One only needs to reject the facts, to believe that the Great Patriotic War never ended and continues to this day, that the current generation of Russians is also involved in the great feats of their ancestors, whose memory we must not betray. The feeling of universal involvement in a great historical mission plays an incredibly important psychotherapeutic role—especially in a country where almost no one seriously believes in God. For eight long years, since the annexation of Crimea, all the propaganda efforts of the authorities have been aimed at convincing people that the capture of Ukrainian territories is justified by the war against the Nazis.

A few photographs of Ukrainian nationalists with swastika banners and footage of torchlight processions in Kyiv ten years ago were enough for the Russian TV viewer to believe that Nazis govern all of Ukraine. The election of President Volodymyr Zelensky, a Russian-speaking Jew, by a decisive majority in a direct popular vote turns out to be irrelevant. Facts, in general, turn out to be unimportant. Something else is more important.

People gain a sense of meaning in life. They finally have the opportunity to feel proud of their country. This becomes an important ersatz of self-respect in everyday life. Even if they don't get up from their couches, but already feel the decline in living standards due to Western sanctions, they seem to be waging a war for their truth, and even sacrificing something in this war. Moreover, the consolidated response of the West to the Russian invasion is torn from context by propaganda and presented as aggression by the USA and its allies, who want to weaken and dismantle Russia—as Putin has been telling us all these years.

Yes, this is not reality, this is a heroin haze, but heroin brings both euphoria and oblivion, heroin relieves pain.

Trying to persuade those who have believed in the righteousness of the "special operation" in Ukraine is incredibly difficult: because to admit that it is Russian troops bombing Ukrainian cities, destroying hospitals and schools, that it is Ukrainian women and children dying at their hands, that they are opposed not by a separate nationalist battalion but by the entire Ukrainian people, means admitting oneself as an accomplice. It means losing almost the only support that allows you not to fall completely into existential darkness, not to lose yourself. To recognize reality means to lose the certainty that you are a good person—a cornerstone feeling, absolutely necessary just for life, and to accept the feeling of guilt and responsibility for complicity in an unjust war. And then you would have to call your side—the side of evil, your ruler—a tyrant. And this either requires courage of a completely different level because it either pushes you out of your home into a desperate and most likely doomed struggle or forces you to admit your own cowardice.

Putin's propaganda has lured us into a terrible trap. By hooking us on resentment and imperial nostalgia, giving us a sense of involvement in a great historical mission, it actually makes my people complicit in war crimes. And the more blood is shed, the harder it will be for people to believe in the truth without completely losing themselves.

And yet I am sure that this moment will come. They fear it in the Kremlin too, otherwise, why would they ban all sources of information that simply call the war—a war.

But in the modern world, you cannot block the truth. Thousands of Russian soldiers killed in the Ukrainian war will sooner or later return home in black plastic bags. Tens of thousands will come back from the front and tell their families that they fought not with Nazis, but with a people we once called brotherly. Millions of Ukrainians, who fled their homes and those who lost their loved ones, will one day call their relatives in Russia and tell them how it all was.

A terrible price to simply believe in reality. But I want to believe that we will one day find the strength to look the truth in the eye.