Joseph Goebbels, who knew a thing or two about the subject, is supposed to have said that if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. Whether he actually said it is disputed, which is rather fitting. But the poor man had to work so hard. He needed a ministry, a radio network, a film studio, Leni Riefenstahl and several million cheap wireless sets. Had he lived to see X, he would have wept. Today a man in a flat in St Petersburg can tell a bigger lie before breakfast, to more people, than the Reich managed in twelve years, and the platform will pay him for the engagement.
I live in Kyiv. I have lived here since May 2022, which means I have spent four and a half years watching two wars at once. The first is fought with Shaheds, glide bombs and ballistic missiles, and I hear it most nights when the siren goes. The second is fought with memes, bots, deepfakes and the confident pronouncements of people in Ohio, Essex and Queensland who have never set foot in Ukraine and could not tell you whether Odesa is a city, a cheese or a Marvel villain. It is the second war that worries me more. Russia is losing the first, slowly and at enormous cost. It is winning the second, and the second is how it hopes to win the first.
Let me show you how it works.
In late 2024 a story went viral claiming that Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s First Lady, had bought a $4.8 million Bugatti with American aid money. It came complete with a video of a supposed Bugatti salesman confirming the sale. The salesman did not exist; he appears to have been generated by AI. The story was published on a website posing as an American newspaper, part of a Russia-based network the BBC linked to John Dougan, a former Florida deputy sheriff who fled to Moscow and who once described his work as “a game” and “a little payback”. Bugatti denied the whole thing and threatened legal action. By then it had been seen by at least 12 million people on X.
There was the one about Zelensky buying two superyachts with American money, which a future Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, helped to spread. There was the one about Zelenska blowing $1.1 million in a single afternoon at Cartier in New York. There was the fake BBC video claiming Ukraine had sold Western weapons to Hamas, and another fake video of Azov fighters burning an effigy of Trump. Every one of them was invented. Every one of them was debunked. Every one of them is still believed by millions of people who never saw the correction, because corrections, like the second half of a Leonard Cohen concert, are never quite as well attended.
This is not an accident. It is an industry. Researchers call one of these operations Storm-1516, which sounds like a Tom Clancy novel and has a similar relationship with the truth. Another, called Doppelganger, built pixel-perfect clones of the Guardian, Der Spiegel and Le Monde and filled them with Kremlin lies; the US Justice Department seized 32 of its domains in 2024. Another, known as the Pravda network, published some 3.6 million articles in 2024 across 150 websites in dozens of languages, which almost nobody reads. It does not need human readers. It is written for the machines. In March 2025, NewsGuard tested ten of the leading AI chatbots and found that they repeated the network’s false narratives a third of the time. Six of the ten told users, as fact, that Zelensky had banned Trump’s Truth Social in Ukraine. It was never available there. The Kremlin is no longer just lying to you. It is lying to your computer, so your computer can lie to you on its behalf, politely and in full sentences.
And then there is the American end of the pipe. In September 2024 the Justice Department charged two employees of RT, the Kremlin’s television channel, with secretly funnelling nearly $10 million into a Tennessee company called Tenet Media, which paid well-known right-wing American influencers to make videos. The influencers, prosecutors said, did not know where the money came from. One can only marvel at the ability of grown men to receive vast sums from a mysterious European benefactor named “Eduard” and fail to ask a single question.
Last November, X briefly rolled out a feature showing the country each account was based in. It was a little like turning on the lights at a nightclub at two in the morning. A swathe of fiercely patriotic “America First” accounts turned out to be operating from Eastern Europe, Nigeria, Thailand and Hong Kong. One with more than 400,000 followers and “America First” in its bio was traced to a non-EU country in Eastern Europe. X removed some of the data within hours, saying it was “not 100%” accurate. Quite. There is no evidence that a particular state ran those specific accounts. But it showed, beyond argument, that a great many of the voices telling Americans what to think about their own country, and mine, were nowhere near either.
The man who owns the platform has not exactly helped. In early 2025 Elon Musk repeated Trump’s claim that Zelensky had a 4 per cent approval rating, was corrected by his own site’s Community Notes, and announced that he would “fix” the system, because governments and the media were “gaming” it. He accused Zelensky of wanting a “forever war” and called it “evil”. By one newspaper’s count his posts about Zelensky drew more than 600 million views in a matter of weeks. When the richest man in the world owns the printing press, stands on the roof shouting through a megaphone, and disables the smoke alarms, it is hard to be surprised when the building fills with smoke.
So let us do what the algorithm will not, and take the lies one at a time.
“Ukraine is run by Nazis”? No, it is run by a Jewish president, elected with 73 per cent of the vote, whose grandfather fought Hitler in the Red Army and whose relatives died in the Holocaust. In the 2019 election every far-right party in the country stood together on a single ticket and won 2.15 per cent and one seat in 424. That is fewer fascists than you would find below the line on most British newspaper websites.
“Azov proves it’s a fascist state”. Azov is one brigade among hundreds. In 2014, as a volunteer battalion, it let in too many football hooligans, as one of its own founders told me with refreshing candour when I was news editor of the Kyiv Post. It has since been vetted and absorbed into the National Guard, and it is best known for bravely holding out for weeks in the Azovstal steelworks under unimaginable bombardment. If one controversial regiment made a country Nazi, Britain would have been “denazified” several times over.
“Russia was provoked by NATO”. Russia, which supposedly could not bear the alliance on its border, invaded a country whose western frontier touches four NATO members, and when Finland joined in 2023 and added 1,300 kilometres of NATO frontier at a stroke, Moscow barely looked up from its newspaper. You do not keep a neighbour off your doorstep by moving your doorstep under his feet.
“The war began as a civil war in the Donbas”. Igor Girkin, the former Russian FSB officer who led the armed seizure of Sloviansk in 2014, later boasted that he “pulled the trigger of this war”, and said that without his men crossing from Russia the whole thing would have fizzled out. He is now in a Russian prison, not for starting the war, but for complaining that Putin was running it badly.
“There was a genocide of Russian speakers”. In March 2022 the International Court of Justice said it had seen no evidence of any such thing, and ordered Russia to stop its invasion. Russia did not stop. Zelensky himself grew up speaking Russian, as did much of the army now shooting at Russians, and millions have switched to Ukrainian since 2022 out of what can only be called linguistic disgust.
“The 2014 revolution was a coup”. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, some of whom I’ve interviewed, stood in the frozen squares for months after their Moscow-loving puppet president tore up a deal with the EU at Moscow’s bidding. His police shot protesters dead. He fled to Russia. Parliament, including members of his own party, voted him out. If that was a coup, it was the first in history carried out by the electorate.
“Zelensky is illegitimate because he won’t hold an election”. Ukraine’s constitution forbids elections under martial law. Britain held no general election between 1935 and 1945, and nobody called Churchill a usurper.
“The Pentagon was running bioweapons labs”. In March 2022 Moscow told the UN Security Council that America was preparing to spread pathogens using migratory birds and bats. One pictures squadrons of pigeons in tiny goggles being briefed by a man from Langley. The UN said it knew of no biological weapons programme. The labs were dreary Soviet-era public-health facilities that American money had made safer.
“Ukraine is corrupt”. Yes, there is widespread corruption here, and I have reported on it. The difference is that when Kyiv tried to clip the wings of its anti-corruption bureau in 2025, young Ukrainians filled the squares in the middle of a war and the government backed down within days. The bureau then brought down two ministers and the president’s own chief of staff. In Russia, the man who exposed corruption, Alexei Navalny, was poisoned with Novichok and died in an Arctic penal colony.
Every one of these claims has been taken apart, again and again, with documents, votes, court rulings and the testimony of the very men who started the war. None of it matters to the algorithm, which rewards the lie because the lie gets more clicks. A study by researchers at MIT found that false stories on Twitter were 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. The truth is still putting its boots on while the lie is halfway to Washington.
And it is in Washington that the lie has found its most powerful home.
Russia does not operate alone. Its Shahed drones were designed in Iran and are now mass-produced in Tatarstan. North Korea has sent millions of artillery shells, ballistic missiles that have landed on Kyiv, and more than 10,000 soldiers to fight in Kursk. China, while posing as a neutral peacemaker, has supplied the bulk of the machine tools and microelectronics that keep Russia’s arms factories running, and Beijing’s own online networks dutifully amplify the Kremlin’s lines about NATO “provocation”. It is an axis of the world’s most repressive regimes, and its propaganda arm, at least in the West, now has a surprisingly reliable ally.
You would think the President of the United States, of all people, would be immune to this stuff. You would think a man who this year went to war with Iran would hesitate before cosying up to Iran’s closest military partner, a regime which, according to Ukrainian intelligence backed by Western sources speaking to Reuters, photographed a Saudi air base from space days before an Iranian strike wounded American servicemen there. You would be wrong.
Instead Trump has done what he always does when something goes badly: found somebody else to blame. His war with Iran sent American diesel prices through the roof. Someone had to be responsible, and it could not possibly be him. So it was Ukraine, for the impertinence of bombing the Russian refineries that fuel the tanks invading it. Zelensky, Trump wrote this month, “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did”. He then bought several million tonnes of Russian diesel, suspended sanctions he had imposed three weeks earlier, and suggested Ukraine get “a new leader who can make a deal”. He did not suggest one for Russia. He never does.
None of this is new, and anyone surprised by it has not been paying attention. In 1987 Trump went to Moscow as a guest of the Soviet state travel agency and came home to buy full-page newspaper advertisements attacking America’s allies. In 2008 he sold a Palm Beach mansion to a Russian oligarch for $95 million, more than twice what he had paid four years earlier, the same year his son told a conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets”. During the 2016 campaign his company was still pursuing a Trump Tower in Moscow, while the candidate said, “Russia, if you’re listening,” and his campaign chairman shared internal polling data with a man the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee later identified as a Russian intelligence officer. In Helsinki in 2018, standing beside Putin, he took the Russian president’s word over that of his own intelligence agencies. In 2019 he was impeached for holding back military aid to Ukraine while asking Zelensky to “do us a favor”. In February 2022, as Russian tanks massed on the border, he called Putin’s move “genius” and “savvy”. In February 2025 he called Zelensky “a dictator without elections” and blamed Ukraine for a war it did not start; his administration voted at the UN alongside Russia, Belarus and North Korea against a resolution condemning the invasion; and a few days later he and his Vice President ambushed Zelensky in the Oval Office on live television. In August 2025 American soldiers knelt to smooth the red carpet for Putin in Anchorage. Now his envoys are reported to be negotiating with Moscow over a multibillion-dollar deal for Lukoil’s foreign assets, though nobody has shown that they stand to profit personally.
I do not know what Putin has on Trump, and I suspect the answer is less sinister and more embarrassing than the conspiracy theorists hope: flattery. Trump likes strongmen because he would like to be one, and Putin, a former KGB officer trained in recruiting the vain, has played him like a cheap ukulele for a decade. But the result is the same. The leader of the free world now repeats, almost word for word, talking points that were drafted in Moscow and laundered through X. The Kremlin’s propaganda no longer needs to reach the White House by stealth. It walks in through the front door, takes a seat in the Oval Office and gets its own pen.
Here is why it matters, and why I cannot treat it as a joke, however much I would like to. Propaganda is not a sideshow to this war. It is the war’s oxygen. Every time a congressman delays a vote on air defence because he read that Zelensky bought a yacht, a Patriot battery does not arrive. Every time an American voter decides that Ukraine started it, a politician somewhere feels a little safer cutting the aid. And every time that happens, somebody in Kharkiv or Dnipro or Odesa goes to bed and does not wake up. I have seen what a glide bomb does to a block of flats. I have seen the people under the blankets on the pavement. You do not forget the shoes. There are always shoes.
Putin is a man who has invaded two neighbours, flattened Grozny, Aleppo and Mariupol, poisoned his opponents in English cathedral cities, deported Ukrainian children by the thousands and earned an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. Zelensky is a former comedian who was offered a ride out of Kyiv in 2022 and asked for ammunition instead. That an entire online ecosystem has managed to persuade millions of Westerners that the first is a misunderstood statesman and the second is the devil is the most remarkable feat of propaganda since the Soviet Union convinced half the Western intelligentsia that Stalin was a kindly uncle with a pipe. Goebbels would have been green with envy. He would also, I suspect, have been on X.
The good news is that the antidote is cheap. It is called reading. Read past the headline. Check who posted it, and from where. Ask why a man in Nigeria cares so much about American gas prices, or why a website called the Chicago Chronicle has not printed a newspaper since 1907. Ask, before you share that video of a Ukrainian general’s mansion, who benefits if you believe it. The answer, almost every time, is a man in the Kremlin who would quite like your country to be next.
AI WILL END SIVILISATION BY TAKEING OVER THE NUCLIAR ARM AND LETING FLY AT EVERY COUNTRY....DOOMSDAY