Putin’s right-hand man and Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu, has publicly described propaganda and disinformation as weapons of equal standing in the arsenal of the Russian Federation (RF). In terms of RF’s current invasion of Ukraine, it is therefore worth considering how those weapons work.

First of all, what is the Kremlin’s propaganda goal? Stanislaw Zaryn, an official with the Polish Prime Minister’s agencies, recently put it this way to a leading RF propaganda monitoring organisation, StopFake.