Captive Audience

ON LAND RUSSIA HAS HELD FOR MOST OF A DECADE, THE FINAL BATTLE WILL BE FOR HEARTS AND MINDS

- SIMON SHUSTER

One day last fall, Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, came across a clip from Russian TV that had gone viral on social media. It showed one of Russia's most prominent talk-show hosts calling for Ukrainian children to be killed "thrown in a river with a strong current" for speaking out against the Russian occupation of their homeland. Even by the ugly standards of Russian warmongering, the statement seemed to cross a line, and the host soon lost his job over it. But it continued to trouble Zelensky.

"Their society accepts this, consumes it," he told me with evident disgust a few weeks later. "They live in this paradigm." The Russian invasion of Ukraine was in its ninth month at that point, long enough to harden Zelensky to many of its horrors-the bombardment of Ukrainian cities, the kidnapping of Ukrainian children, the torture and killing of civilians all of which the President addressed in our interviews with a defiant kind of stoicism. But the Kremlin's propaganda, and the hold it seems to have over many of its viewers, still got under the President's skin. "It shocks me," he said, "the force of this information, the information sickness."

Not only in Russia, but also across the occupied regions of eastern and southern Ukraine, millions of people absorb the Kremlin line about Ukraine through Russian television. Its central message, like a genocidal fever dream mixed in among gardening shows and soap operas, depicts Ukraine's existence as a historical mistake, its government a cabal of satanists and neo-Nazis intent on Russia's destruction. Zelensky, as the main villain in these narratives, does not believe their lack of subtlety makes them any less effective, and he has made it his mission not only to free Ukrainian land from Russian occupation but also to liberate Ukrainians from what he calls the "Russian information space."