The Russian invasion of Ukraine and a parallel invasion that many people overlook

@ElentirENG ES 8·17·2024 · 6:56 0

I have been participating in social networks for 16 years and during this time I have seen many times a specific and very repetitive behavior.

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The old technique of "lie, something will stick"

This behavior is displayed by people who start a debate by resorting to a lie, you dismantle it and instead of admitting that they were defending a falsehood, they try another one and so on, to see if any of the lies work and thus they get away with it. It is a way of acting as sneaky as it is easy, since it is easier to invent things than to prove that they are lies. For the latter you need to know the facts or do research on them, while to tell a lie you only need a little inventiveness and a total lack of scruples and shame.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a good example of this approach, but on a very large scale. In this case, it is not a Twitter user who is trying to deceive you by telling lies: it is a state that is trying to deceive millions of people, backed by a network of propagandists who follow the behavior I have just described, filling social networks with hoaxes that follow that old principle of propaganda (already discussed by the Greek historian Plutarch) that has come to us summarized in the phrase "lie, something will stick".

The slogans that sought to deny that there would be an invasion

Before Russian troops attempted to take kyiv, the slogan was to ridicule those of us who warned that there were reasons to think the invasion would take place. The disseminators of the Russian narrative accused us of being bought or rented and even of being "instrumentalized by intelligence services" and of practicing "disinformation", "propaganda" and "media manipulation".

The slogans they spread to justify the invasion

When Russia launched the invasion, the slogan changed: Ukraine now had no chance of winning the war, and those of us who supported it were villains who sent Ukrainians to die at the front, as if Ukrainians had no desire to defend their country from the invader. And now it is Russia that is unable to defend its own territory, after Ukrainian forces, exercising their right to self-defense, decided to take the war to the invader's country.

Russian propagandists also claimed that many Ukrainians would welcome the Russians as liberators, in an attempt to whitewash a criminal invasion that has been marked from day one by war crimes against civilians by the invaders, crimes constantly denied or questioned by pro-Russian propagandists. The reality is that this invasion has served to consolidate Ukraine’s national identity to an unprecedented level, even among Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

Another of the famous lies used to justify this invasion was the hoax about biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine, spread over and over again by conspiracy theorists without at any time offering even the slightest evidence to support it.

Lies to cover up Russia's responsibility

The Kremlin's sloganeering machine also accused the West of "Russophobia", which was one of the most repeated words by Putin's fans in the first months of the invasion. In this way, the rejection of a brutal attack by one country on another was demonized as an irrational hatred of the poor invader, presented as if he were a victim.

Adding to this whole barrage of lies, Russian propagandists have been claiming for two and a half years that Russia is not guilty of this war, but the West, the US, NATO and Ukraine itself, which is the invaded country. In other words, they want us to believe that everyone is guilty of this war except Putin, the scoundrel who ordered the invasion, and Russia, the country that carried it out. It is one of the crudest lies and is based on making everyone look like an idiot.

Lies to cover up Russian crimes

Likewise, many Russian propagandists have been systematically denying for two years all Russian attacks against the Ukrainian civilian population, despite the abundance of evidence proving this, constantly resorting to lies with which the Kremlin came to tell us that the murdered civilians were in fact Ukrainian soldiers or Western mercenaries. They were indifferent to the evidence of civilians tied up, kneeling and cold-bloodedly shot in the back of the head in Bucha.

Pro-Russian propagandists have also been indifferent to evidence of Ukrainian prisoners being tortured and killed in the most brutal ways, including severed heads and amputated hands and a Russian video showing a Ukrainian prisoner being decapitated and impaled, a video that was intended to intimidate defenders of Ukraine, but it only served to demonstrate the kind of psychopaths there are among Putin's troops.

A parallel invasion in which the target is us

The spread of lies by the Kremlin and its minions continues to this day. We could compile them into an encyclopedia of vileness and shamelessness , which is demonstrated by both the authors of these lies and those who are dedicated to spreading them, refusing to verify them with any facts.

Ultimately, this Moscow-sponsored propaganda terrorism demonstrates something that some have overlooked: that in the present times, war is not limited to the use of military means on the field of operations: Russia is carrying out a parallel invasion whose target is our conscience and has been attacking it with lies for two and a half years; lies whose purpose is to justify the military invasion of Ukraine, to deny Russian war crimes and to try to make Moscow’s aggression against the Ukrainian people a success. A success that would be a great failure for the West and would endanger other allied countries.

Just as the invaders have a network of accomplices throughout the West, those of us who support the legitimate defence of Ukraine have a way to contribute to it: our word. Lies cannot be defeated with censorship: they are defeated with the truth. That is why, to a large extent, Russia is losing this war for our consciences: the truth is a much stronger wall than Putin imagines, and there are many more of us who are willing to defend it than those who are willing to swallow without complaint all the Kremlin's lies.

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Photo: TASS.