Wars are fought with weapons, but they are also manufactured in language. Over twenty years, the Kremlin has spun a story that turned Ukrainians from “brothers” into an enemy that must be crushed. That is the conclusion of Ilya Yablokov, a Russian-British academic who has spent his career tracing how disinformation is built, financed and exported. In his forthcoming book, tentatively titled Words That Kill and currently under academic review, Yablokov argues that Russian state media spent two decades preparing Russians to accept a war against a people they had recently called family. Speaking at a recent event in Vienna organized by the media forum FJUM, he said the pattern is unmistakable: year by year, from 2001 onward, Russian official institutions, media and public intellectuals escalated their language about Ukraine until, by the time the full-scale invasion began, “I cannot call it anything but genocidal.” The hinge point, he argues, was the Maidan protests that began in November 2013, after President Viktor Yanukovych abandoned a planned association agreement with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Moscow. Demonstrators occupied Kyiv’s central square for months in what became known as the Revolution of Dignity. After Yanukovych fled in February 2014 following a deadly crackdown, Russian propaganda changed its vocabulary. Before Maidan, the dominant tone was fraternal: “We are one nation, they are our brothers, we should be together.” Afterwards, Yablokov said, “you don’t see that much of Ukrainians or Ukrainian leaders in Russian propaganda. They called them ‘the junta.’ They called them ‘puppets’ in the hands of Americans.” As Ukraine tilted West, its leaders stopped being seen as family and became a threat. The shift required nothing less than a whole propaganda industry, with a payroll, a supply chain and export markets stretching from Lagos to La Paz.
There was no single broadcast that marked the turn, and Yablokov is careful not to reduce everything to Vladimir Putin. Putin’s isolation during the COVID pandemic, surrounded by alternative history books, may have made him more bellicose, but the machinery of persuasion was already in place. Yablokov describes eight years of slow drip after Maidan, drawing on older imperial habits, stripping Ukrainians of agency and culture in the retelling, until hostility hardened into policy. He rejects the image of a lone mastermind issuing daily talking points. Instead, he offers a different image: “Think about the factory floor and the line of production. You have someone producing the story, someone coming up with a narrative, someone turning it into a social media post, someone amplifying it with computational propaganda tools, someone amplifying it on TV, someone cutting it into a segment for YouTube, someone amplifying that segment again on social media.” Hundreds of editors, producers and camera operators keep that line running, he says, not necessarily out of conviction but because “everyone sees an opportunity for a career, or a stable job. They’re coping with this… they have shifts, they go to the factory floor, they finish the shift, they go home.” That helps explain why the machine keeps running even as public trust wobbles. In 2003, Russian authorities effectively absorbed the country’s most professional polling operation; its exiled staff went on to found the Levada Centre, still one of the more credible sources on Russian public opinion. The Kremlin, Yablokov suggests, understood early that managing a narrative means measuring it too, a habit that continues even as trust numbers slide.
Russia’s war depends not only on domestic support but on indifference beyond its borders, which is why Yablokov argues that understanding disinformation matters well past Eastern Europe. Polling suggests fertile ground. A Gallup survey put median approval of Russian leadership across Africa at 42 percent in 2023, while the African Youth Survey found 83 percent of Africans aged 18 to 24 see Russia as a positive influence in their country, up 25 points in just two years. A separate Democracy Perception Index study found Russia viewed favourably by 75 percent of respondents in South Asia and 68 percent in Francophone Africa. One might assume this reflects unusually clever Russian messaging, but Yablokov’s reading points elsewhere. RT, the Kremlin-funded state broadcaster that operates in dozens of languages worldwide, thrives in Latin America and parts of Africa, he says, “because it very much matches the anti-colonial, anti-American, anti-Western sentiment” that is already present. Disinformation, in this view, amplifies grievances that are already sitting there waiting; it does not need to plant new ones. Currently, Washington and many European capitals are cutting aid budgets, throwing away a form of benevolent soft power that could counter those grievances. That, Yablokov suggests, is folly. More Western engagement with the Global South would matter not only for the thousands who could benefit from aid, but also for the chances of liberal democracies being seen as role models and friends.
Russian narratives have also found a receptive audience closer to home, including in Austria. Disinformation researcher Dietmar Pichler argues that Austrians have long treated political neutrality as a shield, but his research suggests it has functioned more like an opening. Austria’s Cold War-era law permitted espionage on its soil as long as it was not directed against Austria itself, a law only now, belatedly, being revised. The old logic, as Pichler puts it, was that hosting spies from every side would keep Austria safe: “You don’t shit where you work.” That logic, in his account, has failed. He points to terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, to the case of Bellingcat investigator Christo Grozev, whose Vienna apartment was broken into before he was forced to flee the city after being surveilled by a Bulgarian cell working for the fugitive ex-Wirecard executive Jan Marsalek, and to the more recent discovery of Russian antenna arrays around the city. Add it all up, he says, and what emerges looks less like safety than a set of blind spots.
What worries Pichler even more, though, is what does not make headlines: “throwaway agents” recruited online for small, deniable jobs, and “agents of influence,” a Cold War-era term for semi-prominent figures from academia, diplomacy or media who lobby and shape opinion on behalf of an authoritarian state without ever being asked to spy in the traditional sense. Germany has run public awareness campaigns warning citizens about this kind of recruitment; Austria has not. The ties between the political right and Russia often make headlines, but Pichler says individuals across most of Austria’s major parties carry what he calls a “rucksack” of unresolved entanglements from decades of treating Moscow as a partner rather than a risk. Security officials, he says, often wave away concerns about influence operations as protected speech. Pichler is worried about where that logic ends: “Maybe the troll farm is also freedom of speech? If it is, we are in trouble.”
Neither man treats the situation as hopeless. Yablokov’s policy argument is blunt: platforms respond to fines, not appeals to conscience, because virality and disinformation are often the same content wearing different labels. “As soon as there is even the prospect of financial fines to the social media platforms, they will actually do something,” he says. Fact-checking obligations and enforceable penalties, in his view, are among the few levers that reliably change platform behaviour. Pichler’s fix starts smaller: name the mechanism. Treat “agent of influence” as a recognized category worth scrutiny, the way troll farms already are, rather than waving it off as paranoia. Ask where the money and the motive come from before deciding someone is merely naive. Vienna has recently been enduring embarrassing spy trials and what Pichler calls “a forest” of dodgy Russian antennas. It is now taking action, albeit belatedly, tightening espionage laws and taking down old antennas. But the disinformation industry Yablokov describes does not need a rooftop in Donaustadt to function. What it needs is an audience willing to buy what it is selling, whether in Vienna, Lagos or Rio. That, both men suggest, is the harder thing to legislate against, and the more urgent one to understand.
