There was something almost surreal about the scene in the federal courtroom on Thursday. The people seated at the defense table were not ordinary defendants. For more than a decade, Nicolás Maduro had presided over Venezuela as its embattled president, a man whose name inspired both fierce loyalty and deep fear across a country riven by crisis. Now, wearing ankle shackles and facing a judge in a foreign land, he looked less like a head of state and more like a hollowed image of the power he once held. Next to him sat his wife, Cilia Flores, a former attorney…

There is a story spreading across social media right now, and it is easy to see why so many people want to believe it. It goes something like this: after Ukrainian strikes on several Russian data centres belonging to Yandex, the country’s biggest tech company, the online propaganda machine that has helped fuel pro-Russian and far-right political movements across Europe suddenly went quiet. Disinformation about the war, the story claims, dropped significantly. Engagement generated by Russian bots and propagandists on platforms like X, TikTok and Facebook supposedly declined in a dramatic, visible way. The narrative has been amplified by Ukrainian…