Wars need weapons, but before a single tank rolls across a border, there has to be a story that makes the tank feel necessary. That is the quiet, unglamorous work that happens years before the explosions, in television studios and newspaper columns and social media feeds, where a people are slowly taught to see another people as a threat. Over the past two decades, the Kremlin has done exactly that with Ukrainians, turning them from “brothers” into an enemy that must be crushed. That is not a small shift. It is a complete reversal of identity, and it took a whole industry to pull off—an industry with a payroll, a supply chain, and export markets stretching from Lagos to La Paz. Ilya Yablokov, a Russian-British academic who has spent his career tracing the mechanics of disinformation, has written a forthcoming book tentatively titled Words That Kill. In it, he tells the story of how Russian state media spent twenty years preparing its audience to accept war against a people they had recently called family. If you trace the rhetoric year by year, starting from 2001, he says, the pattern is unmistakable. There is an escalation of language that, by the time the war actually starts, can be called nothing but genocidal. This is the deeper point: war is not just a military project, it is a narrative project, and the narratives are built long before the bombs.
The hinge point in that story is the Maidan protests in late 2013 and early 2014. When Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych abandoned a planned agreement with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Moscow, hundreds of thousands of people took to Kyiv’s central Maidan Square. They stayed for months, in what became known as the Revolution of Dignity, until Yanukovych fled the country after a deadly crackdown. In Russian media before that, the dominant language had been fraternal. Ukrainians were “brothers,” “one nation,” people who should stay close to Russia. After Maidan, something shifted. The Ukrainian leadership vanished from Russian propaganda as family members and reappeared as “the junta,” as “puppets in the hands of Americans.” As Ukraine tilted toward the West, its leaders stopped being relatives and became a threat. There was no single broadcast that marked the turn, no one dramatic moment when the switch was flipped. Instead, Vladimir Putin’s own views hardened alongside the coverage, freed after 2014 from whatever restraints had held him back before. Yablokov describes eight years of slow drip, drawing on older imperial habits, stripping Ukrainians of agency and culture in the retelling, until hostility hardened into policy. That is what makes it so chilling: the dehumanization was not an accident or a side effect. It was the fuel. And it was produced deliberately, carefully, and at scale, so that by the time the invasion came, a large part of the Russian public had been primed to accept it as necessary.
To picture how this actually happens, forget the idea of a single sinister mastermind in a dark room writing daily talking points. Yablokov offers a more mundane, and somehow more troubling, image: think about a factory floor, a production line. Someone produces a story. Someone else comes up with a narrative twist. Someone turns it into a social media post. Someone amplifies it with computational propaganda tools. Someone else picks it up on television, cuts it into a segment for YouTube, and then a new wave of social media posts amplifies that segment all over again. Hundreds of editors, producers, camera operators keep that line running, not necessarily because they believe in the message, but because they see an opportunity for a career or a stable job. They have shifts. They go to the factory, they finish their work, they go home. That is a crucial part of the story, because it explains why the machine keeps running even when public trust starts to wobble. Back in 2003, Russian authorities effectively took over the country’s most professional polling operation, and its exiled staff went on to found the Levada Centre, which is still one of the more credible sources on Russian public opinion. The Kremlin understood early that managing a narrative also means measuring it. You need to know whether your story is working, and you need to adjust it if it is not. This is not mysterious, exotic evil. It is just industry. And like any industry, it is made up of people who show up, do their jobs, and try not to think too hard about the final product.
The same production line is exported around the world, and there is a willing market for it. Russia’s war depends on apathy beyond its own borders, on the feeling that this is someone else’s messy regional conflict, not something that matters to the rest of humanity. That is why understanding disinformation matters well past Eastern Europe. Polling shows just how receptive the world has been. A Gallup survey put median approval of Russian leadership across Africa at 42 percent in 2023. The African Youth Survey found that 83 percent of African respondents aged 18 to 24 see Russia as a positive influence in their country, which is up 25 points in just two years. A Democracy Perception Index study found Russia viewed favourably by 75 percent of respondents in South Asia and 68 percent in Francophone Africa. It would be easy to assume that this is the result of unusually clever Russian messaging, but Yablokov reads it differently. RT, the Kremlin-funded state broadcaster that operates in dozens of languages, thrives in Latin America and parts of Africa because it very much matches the anti-colonial, anti-American, anti-Western sentiment that is already there. Disinformation does not plant new grievances; it amplifies grievances that are already sitting there waiting. And that raises an uncomfortable question for Western governments. Right now, Washington and European capitals are cutting aid budgets, throwing away the kind of benevolent soft power that could counter those grievances. That seems like folly. More Western engagement with the Global South would matter not only for the thousands of people who could benefit from aid, but for the chances of liberal democracies being seen again as role models and friends rather than hypocrites.
The same Russian narratives have found a receptive audience closer to home, including in Austria, a country that has long treated political neutrality as a shield but, in practice, has often functioned more like an open door. Disinformation researcher Dietmar Pichler has spent years studying this. Austria’s Cold War-era law actually permitted espionage on its soil as long as it was not directed against Austria itself, and that law is only now, belatedly, being revised. The old logic was simple: if you let spies from every side operate here, nobody needs to target Austria. As Pichler puts it, you don’t shit where you work. But that logic has failed. Austria has weathered terrorism in the 1970s and 80s, the case of Bellingcat investigator Christo Grozev, whose Vienna apartment was broken into before he was forced to flee after being surveilled by a Bulgarian cell working for the fugitive ex-Wirecard executive Jan Marsalek, and the discovery of Russian antenna arrays around the city. Add it all up, and what emerges looks less like safety than a collection of blind spots. What worries Pichler even more is what does not make headlines: so-called throwaway agents, ordinary people 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 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. But where does that logic end? Pichler asks, only half ironically: maybe the troll farm is also freedom of speech? If it is, we are in serious trouble.
Neither man treats this situation as hopeless. They just think we need to stop relying on the wrong tools. Yablokov’s policy argument is blunt: social media platforms respond to fines, not to 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 penalties, platforms will actually do something. Fact-checking obligations and enforceable penalties are among the few levers that reliably change platform behaviour. Pichler’s fix starts smaller and more local: 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 that someone is merely naive. Vienna has recently been enduring embarrassing spy trials and what one might call a forest of dodgy Russian antennas. It is now taking action, belatedly, tightening espionage laws and taking down the old antennas. But the industry Yablokov describes does not need a rooftop in Donaustadt to function. It does not need a single rooftop at all. What it needs is an audience willing to buy what it is selling, whether in Vienna, in Lagos, or in Rio. That, both men suggest, is the harder thing to legislate against, and the more urgent thing to understand. Because the lesson of the last twenty years is that stories are not just stories. They are preparation. And once a society has been prepared to see another group of humans as less than human, the consequences are not theoretical. They are written in mass graves, in ruined cities, in millions of refugees, and in the awful, hollow silence of those who looked away. The only question left is whether we can learn to recognize the story for what it is before the weapons are already on the move.