#329: Russia Is Weaponizing Perception: Perception vs. Reality, Part I

There is reality, and then there’s our perception of reality. It’s that clear-cut, is it?

Of course, there is such a thing as an external reality. I’m not denying that. Behind me, what you can’t see is a wall. It’s a boring wall. That’s why I’m not showing it. And what you see instead is a virtual background. I believe that’s obvious. I chose that virtual background because it calms me down. Hope it calms you down, gives you a little bit something to see, and it is a pleasant scene while not necessarily signaling too much ostentatious vacation vibes.

I’m real. How do you know I’m real? Well, I’ve made videos here before the newest AI tools came out, and I don’t have money to have been in possession of any of that in advance. So you can compare how I talk, how I look from before. If you pay attention to the channel, you see sometimes the beard gets longer till I have to rein it in—all of these things. And I’m not doing much to these videos except in some occasions where I feel it needs some visuals.

And I’m doing that deliberately because we need authenticity, and I’m trying to be as authentic as I can. So of course I’m curating a certain perspective of myself here. Trying to be polite. I’m trying to be nice. I’m trying not to say things in a way that makes me look bad. I’m still trying to communicate complex ideas or sometimes even controversial ideas. So the reality of me here is crafted by my anticipation of my perception by you.

But that is rather straightforward. It’s sometimes however not very well understood. So how do we understand that in questions of policy or politics?

Let me take Russia and Ukraine as a first example. There’s the perception that Russian victory is inevitable. Russia is so big. It has so many people. It is a dictatorship. Putin can do whatever. And there’s just no chance that Ukraine can win.

Well, what does Russia’s size really have to do with it? Most of Russia is actually sparsely populated. Most of Russia is a resource extraction scheme. Russia before the war had a population of 144 million. Ukraine before the war, 44 million approximately. And so clearly Russia is three times the size population-wise and many, many others more size of country. But here’s what’s relevant: nobody is trying to conquer Russia, which means Russia’s size is not in play.

If anybody tried to physically conquer Russia, the size would matter. It doesn’t. Now, Ukraine is smaller than Russia. So you could say, well, in Ukraine’s case—Ukraine is the biggest physically biggest country in Europe outside of Russia. It’s bigger than France. It’s kind of bigger than Texas. It is huge. So that kind of matters now, too. Smaller than Russia, but still big.

Population size matters, though, doesn’t it? Russia can certainly draft more soldiers. Yes, and so actually could Ukraine. Ukraine has deliberately not drafted its younger generations, the very youngest, in order to make sure it has a future. Russia has deliberately drafted more from the far-flung regions, thus also destroying Russia’s ethnic diversity because not everybody in Russia has a Russian ethnic identity. There are many other peoples within the Russian Federation.

But even these people within Russia will be missed. See, you can’t just draft the people all over the country who are economically holding it together. You can’t just draft criminals either. And when we think about drafting people, you actually have to train them to become soldiers.

Here’s another misunderstanding. A soldier nowadays is not just a person with a gun. I mean, I did my—I did part of my basic training in the German army, and that was just through conscription. So I did my 10 months, mostly I spent time in the office, didn’t see any action, but I did spend my time there and I learned quite a bit. I learned that whatever you learn in two to three months, it’s cute. It’s well, it’s also annoying and it’s in many ways deeply invasive of your time and sense of space and whatever and personal space. I mean, nothing bad. It’s just, unless you’re really deep into this kind of military experience, it’s not what you would necessarily consider something that’s normal.

But military training is there to drag you out of normality, to prepare you for what’s to come. If you don’t train people, they will not be good soldiers or contemporary word warriors. Yeah, that’s kind of a misconception. I mean, soldiers aren’t warriors. Warriors are people who just run into battle, and a soldier is a highly trained specialist.

And it takes much more than two to three months of training. Many of those people who are actually sent into war by NATO armies, they spend years in training and training continues. Of course, in order to fight, you also need to have a certain decision-making power. It’s not just top-down. There’s a reason NATO armies, they give you a target to achieve, but they don’t micromanage you along the way because they need thinking people on the front.

Russia hasn’t done the same, or the Soviet system hasn’t done the same. It’s a very strict top-down hierarchical thing. And you know, if the general says you send those troops into this direction, whether that makes sense or not, you do. Soldiers on the ground don’t get to have a say. Ukraine has inherited the same idiotic system, but they’ve made some improvements and they’ve been trained by the West for a while now.

When Russia sent its elite troops to conquer Hostomel airport near Kyiv as the beginning of the conquest of Kyiv, they were beaten by the Ukrainians. That should have been a signal to Russia. Uh, something is wrong here.

The Ukrainian army, from what we have seen time and again, may be smaller than the Russian army, but it seems better trained. It also has better weapons. Ukraine was already armed, particularly because Donald Trump in his first term sent them Stingers and other equipment. This continued then after the invasion and even during Trump in the first part of his second term. Now Ukraine is asked to buy equipment from the Europeans and all the Europeans for Ukraine buy from the Americans or so.

But the equipment that the Ukrainians have is not just from the West. See, Ukraine has been a major weapons manufacturer before. They are a very inventive nation. So when you look at the size of the army, it’s not just the size of the army, it’s what they can do. It’s how they are trained. It’s how their command chain works.

And so the perception that people have of Ukraine has such a smaller army, they really have no chance—if the army is good, it can hold even bigger armies at bay. And we have seen this time and again. We don’t want to trust our reality because our perception of Russia being stronger than Ukraine is overriding our actual perception of what is happening.

So before I continue, if you like this kind of analysis, like, subscribe, comment. It helps. Thank you.

So Russian interest right now is to put out that perception of we’re the biggest, we’re the strongest, there’s no chance, just give us anything we want and maybe we’ll leave Ukraine alone. That’s the propaganda. The second part of propaganda is we’re only interested in certain bits of Ukraine. So both are false.

We know that. How do we know that? Because Russia has an established pattern of behavior. Russia under Putin—I’m not talking about all the people in Russia. I’m talking about the Russian government, especially the Putin government. For decades now, Putin’s Russia has intervened in the West in order to destabilize it. Invasion of Georgia, invasion of Moldova, and in both cases you still have Russian troops there. Agitation for Brexit, murders of dissidents on British and German soil.

Then there is suspicion that a variety of cyber attacks all from the Russian side. I mean, rather solid suspicion. And there has been frequent talk about creating one zone from Lisbon to Vladivostok. There has been talk by Russia consistently aimed at denigrating the West, about the West being weak, that democracies are all broken, and talk against LGBTQ rights, against women’s rights, for so-called traditional values, whatever that means.

And this is how even people in the West are being fooled. Russia has allowed domestic violence again under Putin. Is that what you understand as traditional values? I don’t think so.

Russia’s Orthodox so-called church under Putin has become a tool of the state and in Ukraine operated spy networks. That’s why Ukraine had to go against it. See, there’s this narrative in the US that Ukraine is persecuting Christians, which simply is nonsense. Ukraine is persecuting a KGB-led organization that is actively a participant in the war. That’s the so-called Russian Orthodox Church. Now, it doesn’t have to be it forever.

And I’m saying this as someone who grew up Catholic and I have quite a few Orthodox icons in the house. I’m not against Christianity. I’m not against Orthodoxy. I’m against the abuse of religion by the state.

Russia creates the perception that Ukraine is a bunch of Nazis. That’s not true. Yes, during World War II, Ukraine had to choose between the Soviets, which just tried to exterminate Ukraine in the Holodomor, the forced hunger, where Russia employed all kinds of horrible measures to eradicate every last Ukrainian. Did it in other parts of the Russian Empire too, or Soviet Union, whatever. And so out of that experience, the Ukrainians were aiding the Germans that came in, but that didn’t help them either.

What are you going to do? You’re being killed by someone and someone else comes in. “I’m going to help you.” Do you then make a moral test? Maybe you should, but you know, I didn’t live in that situation.

And to make matters more confusing, if Soviets or Russians now complain about Ukrainians aligning with the Germans, well, guess who aligned with the Germans in 1939? Russia or the Soviet Union did in the Hitler-Stalin pact, Molotov-Ribbentrop or whatever, how you want to call that. Russia and Germany started World War II together until the Germans, for some reason I don’t quite understand, attacked the Soviet Union.

So if anybody here is the original collaborator with the Nazis, it’s the Soviets. It’s the Russians. And that history is not negated by what the Nazis did then later in the war. But the perception again, the perception of Russia is the eternal victim, and somehow the Soviets get an out because of, well, socialism is nice. Well, in theory, but we’ve seen how it works in practice. I’ll talk about this another time.

So if we look at the Ukrainian side, of course Ukraine also is interested in shaping perception. They have to though because they’re the victim and they have to work very hard for people to see the reality that Ukraine is not just being overrun by Russia, that Ukraine is actively fighting and fighting corruption.

You only hear about corruption in countries where actually corruption is addressed. Russia is more corrupt than Ukraine. You wouldn’t know it because Russia isn’t fighting against it. So it’s not in the news. So this difference between perception and reality is something that we have to address every day.

Okay, how do we know what’s true? Well, let me briefly just shout out to some channels that will tell you what’s what. One, and I linked them in the description, is Inside Russia, run by Konstantin Samoilov, an economist. I’ve had him on my channel. You can look that interview up. He used to live in Russia till he had to flee. And he talks about the transformations of Russian society under Putin.

He’s very clear in his message. Russia is losing. The economic side of the equation will bring about the end of the war. That’s what’s happening. Listen to him. He is solid. He is genuine. He is honest. He has active connections to Russia. He knows what he’s talking about.

Another colleague of mine, Professor Gerdes, he has a channel. He talks about the news about Russia and Ukraine every single day. Listen to him. He gives you great overviews and he also has other sources.

Ukraine Matters by Georgie—more detailed reports about the war, clear dedication to also help fund parts of the Ukrainian resistance. Great channel, great guy.

Jake Broe, former US military, knows what he’s talking about. Little bit also commenting on US politics. So if you are not in their respective camp, you have to tolerate that. But he is not wrong and sometimes frustrated about US policy, which I am too. But you know, who isn’t these days?

Just these four, there are more but like Dennis Davydov, he is a pilot. And so all of these give you data, have connections on the ground, and know what they’re talking about if you don’t believe me.

Thank you. That’s it for now. I’ll resume the topic of perception reality a little bit later again.

Ceterum censeo Ucrainam esse defendam. Слава Україні!