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From Ukraine to Africa: Unpacking the propaganda battle in a post-truth era

26 Mar 2025

After Russia’s aggression it has felt like a double whammy that one of the two major parties in my adopted country, the US, has slowly succumbed to a cult of personality and is apparently exchanging lessons on various post-truth tricks with the Russians.

I am writing this in Durban on Day 178 of my year-long, 40-country tour that has already taken me to the South Pacific, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Australia. Ahead of me are about 20 African countries, with multiple overland borders to cross, from here all the way to Ethiopia.

After 30 months of a gruelling schedule of daily live TV and YouTube broadcasts to Ukrainian and international audiences, accompanied by nearly daily air raids and frequent booms of ballistic missiles and drones, I was ready for a sabbatical. A sabbatical that would take me to those countries with which Ukrainians have had little experience, and vice versa.

A sabbatical that most Ukrainian men aged 18 to 61 cannot take as they are not allowed to leave the country during a state of war. I was lucky, since I have a US passport, and could come and go at will.

While waging a hot war of aggression against its smaller neighbour, Russia has in parallel been engaged in a vicious information war for the hearts and minds of the denizens of the so-called “Global South” (for lack of a better term).

Well-heeled propaganda efforts

It has engaged in well-heeled propaganda efforts to portray itself as the victim of a Western plot to dismember it and control its natural resources, rather than the aggressor waging a neocolonial war of conquest.

Vladimir Putin has tried to portray himself and his country as the leader of an anti-Yankee, anti-Anglo-Saxon resistance against “paedophilia”, “multiplicity of genders”, “secular blasphemy against organised religion” and other ills of liberal democracies.

Yet during my travels so far — from the remote islands of Vanuatu to the highlands of Papua New Guinea to the hills of Phuthaditjhaba, South Africa — I have been struck how the majority of regular people, notwithstanding their government’s political alliances, have seen through this ruse. From taxi drivers to market vendors, people overwhelmingly support Ukraine’s David in its struggle against Russia’s bullying Goliath.

The part of Ukraine that I grew up in — the eastern region of the Donbas — was predominantly Russian speaking and culturally and politically more closely aligned with Moscow than Kyiv.

So when in 2014 Putin annexed Crimea and then instigated a war in eastern Ukraine, it was done under the pretext of “protecting the Russian-speaking population” of these areas against Kyiv’s “cultural and linguistic genocide”.

As a native of the region, it was incumbent on me to dispel this blatant lie, which I did, breathlessly, on any and all international TV channels that would have me.

When Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over my native Donbas on a hot July day in 2014, and it was immediately evident to most observers that the Kremlin was behind this monstrous crime. I naïvely hoped this would be the straw that broke the camel’s back and Putin would come out with an admission of responsibility and a desire to wrap up the war.

Barrage of theories

What we witnessed instead was Russia’s propaganda machinery going into overdrive to produce a barrage of theories — from plausible-sounding to completely cockamamie — blaming Ukraine and its Western backers.

To me, that moment marks a new era spearheaded by Russia and aptly called “post-truth” by Yale’s preeminent historian Timothy Snyder. It was bad enough for me as a Ukrainian from the Donbas seeing how my compatriots in the now Russia-occupied Donetsk were being gaslit and brainwashed in this brave new post-truth world, and told that what they thought was white was, instead, black.

Yet it has felt like a double whammy that one of the two major parties in my adopted country, the United States, has slowly succumbed to a cult of personality and is apparently exchanging lessons on various post-truth tricks with the Russians.

Having endured three years of the “biggest land-based war in Europe since WW2”, as pundits like to refer to it, and having been reassured by its Western allies — US first among them — that they would stick with Ukraine for “as long as it takes”, we have now woken up to a world turned upside down.

In this topsy-turvy world, the US is voting with Russia, North Korea, and China against Ukraine’s resolution at the UN General Assembly; Ukraine started the war; Volodymyr Zelensky is a dictator with 4% popularity and the country should turn over all of its natural wealth to the United States as a way to thank it for its support.

As I travel though these remote, “exotic”, tropical countries, talking to taxi drivers, journalists, businesspeople and politicians, I seek a reassuring hold on the familiar guardrails.

Hoping — possibly naïvely — that there is still a truth out there, shared by the majority, where the victim cannot be at the same time the perpetrator and where might does not necessarily make right.

Where the truth exists objectively, and not just at the whim of a Dear Leader, whichever side of the Atlantic he may be. DM

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Well-heeled propaganda efforts

Barrage of theories