«How to subvert the perception of Russia as inevitable?» Peter Pomerantsev on Russian propaganda and lack of response on the part of democracies

Now in its twelfth year, the war has seen the tools of information warfare evolve repeatedly, adapting to the vulnerabilities of different audience segments. Russian missile strikes and the tragic loss of life in Ukraine are unfolding against the backdrop of ideological influence operations designed to exploit a wide range of emotional responses on a global scale.

According to Peter Pomerantsev, the Russian authorities conduct highly sophisticated and precise sociological research on the population and have come up with effective methods for putting the results of that research into practice. He traces Russia’s imperial ideological approach toward Ukraine back to the era of Tsarism and argues that today democracies suffer from a lack of resistance and an impoverished “arsenal of mass influence.”

In a conversation with Peter Pomerantsev, Graty explored why Russia’s propaganda machine appears so invincible—and whether it truly is—how it is structured, and what forecasts can be made about the near-term political future of Ukraine’s neighbors and partners. The researcher explained that while fact-checking and debunking disinformation are important, they are not sufficient on their own. The conversation also touched on the future of propaganda, as well as the role of cultural policy and the emotional sphere in confronting Russia.

Peter Pomerantsev is a Kyiv-born British journalist, writer, television producer, and researcher of information warfare, author of several books on Russian propaganda and disinformation. His most recent book focuses on Sefton Delmer, a British propagandist of the Second World War whose innovations led to successful projects that undermined the information strategy of Nazi Germany.

Graty spoke with Peter Pomerantsev ahead of the human rights documentary film festival Docudays UA, which is currently taking place in Kyiv, and before the researcher’s lecture as part of the Rights Now! human rights program. We are publishing his monologue below.

A one-sided game

The sophisticated monster machine [of Russian propaganda] only seems a sophisticated monster machine because it has very little opposition. There’s nobody competing with it, so it gets to do whatever it wants. Democracies haven’t built up a [proper] strategic response, so it’s like a «гра в одні ворота» (Ukr., a one-sided game) where they seem amazing because there’s really no one opposing them. In the Cold War and the Second World War democracies built up their own mass influence arsenals and they could compete and eventually they won. But we just folded them at the end of the Cold War, and so we’re really far behind. It’s not that sophisticated what they do, and it’s really just statecraft. Democracies can and will compete eventually, I guess. Or else they might not be democracies soon.

Well-known techniques and the next big leap in propaganda

British writer Peter Pomerantsev during his lecture in Kyiv on June 9, 2026. Photo: Serhiy Handusenko, DocudaysUA

I wouldn’t overestimate what Russia does. A lot of it is based on well-known techniques that were popularized by the Nazis, but also by the Soviets, and which have been refined over time in terms of creating sort of supremacist and paranoid collective identities, such as sewing division among your enemies, finding people’s vulnerabilities and exploiting them, using the full suite of distraction and subversion, based on audience analysis.

I mean, propaganda is as good as your audience, or the way you understand your audience. That began in the Second World War. The Nazis had their own theory of the mass and the unconscious. The Allies eventually developed much more sophisticated ones. Since then we’ve seen more and more refinement, but really thinking about the same things: what drives people, what the role of the unconscious is, the things one can’t say when motivating people. How to create group identities and how to change the image of the of the enemy in order to dehumanize them and so forth.

It starts in the First World War, but it’s quite naïve then. During the Second World war it becomes more sophisticated and we’ve seen it only increase since then.

Now obviously we’re on the edge of an AI revolution that will probably be the next big leap in propaganda. We’re just at the start of it. AI is being used to create synthetic audiences, there’s some experimentation sending AI into conduct campaigns but these are still recognizable campaigns. It’ll be a revolution when the AI will make the shifts itself in the middle of a campaign and change it. Same as with the use of weapons. The idea of adapting and learning, changing tactics depending on the context so the humans are not actually in charge anymore. It’s very similar in the battlefield and in propaganda, [when you give the it a general command], and the AI swarms plan, organize and execute [the order], changing it during [the operation] and we’re just sitting back. We haven’t got to that place yet.

[Now] we’re in the middle of a kinetic The physical dimension of war, which involves the use of lethal weapons, firepower, and military equipment to defeat enemy forces war. And the cognitive [means of combat] is another layer. There’s the DIME National security model in the U.S. which took center stage in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the subsequent U.S. military operations in the Middle East. framework [of strategic planning and governance] the Americans use: diplomatic, information, military, economics [are the instruments of national power, meaning] the use of all those levers [is intended.] Usually one of those levers gets forgotten. I mean, look at the Americans in Iran. They remembered the military lever, but clearly forgot the diplomatic lever. They’ve been using the economic one for a while, and the information one completely failed, to the extent that Iran has beaten America in its own backyard with their funny lego videos In the backdrop of the conflict with the U.S., Iranian propaganda mocked the U.S. and Israel through videos that drew on the recognizable style of LEGO. The characters in the videos—Donald Trump and others—appear as toy figures from the eponymous construction set. The high-quality videos attracted audiences in the billions, particularly on social media platform X. . You need all of the four layers because they’re all in effect.

Iranian propaganda against U.S. President Donald Trump. Screenshot from AI IRAN video

There’s no public opinion in Russia — only public sentiment

It’s very easy to [apply propaganda against] democracies because they’re open and easy to influence. It’s very easy to do a campaign around the “ TZK Military office responsible for army conscription in Ukraine ” in Ukraine. In Russia, public opinion doesn’t exist as a phenomenon, [only] public sentiment, so it’s much harder to do information operations into Russia. So you have to be much more focused on behaviors, networks and understanding who you’re trying to influence and why. It’s much more complicated, but I actually think their system’s also a lot more fragile.

The Russians have different segmentations for different situations, and different agencies will define audiences differently. Usually they are thinking in terms of psychographics, value systems, emotional vulnerabilities, resentments. The polling that we know they do with the Russian population is very sophisticated and the analysis they do of the Russian internet is excellent.

There’s lots of ways of doing polling and using online sentiments and behavior analysis to be much more sophisticated in your understanding of societies. You segment audiences, you find a way to each one of them depending on how important they are to you.

When you do it based on values it doesn’t necessarily reflect [such basic factors as] geography or age. I’ve seen segmentations based on people who are super skeptical and cynical of everything. They are very easy to get to, but they can be different ages, [live in] different different places. As Russians are doing such campaigns, they’re obviously always thinking where they find those people. I think the levels of dissatisfaction and of cynicism will always be a big factor in targeting audiences.

Collective narcissism is not just Russian at all

Celebrations of “Unity Day” in Crimea, 2019. Photo: Anton Naumlyuk, Graty

Something the Kremlin thinks about a lot is ‘collective narcissism’: that’s a mix of victim narratives and superiority.

Right from the start of the [full-scale] war there was quite a lot of leaks from the Russian system as people were leaving the country. And there were leaks from from the big polling agencies that the Kremlin uses. In order to analyze the Russian population they were using a set of questions that sociologists used to analyze collective narcissism, which is a concept that started actually with people trying to make sense of why the Nazis were successful [in Germany]. This mix of a sense of superiority of others and grievance has been defined through a series of sociological questions. It was developed and refined by researchers over the years Sigmund Freud’s work on group psychology and ego analysis from the early 1920s is considered the starting point for research on collective narcissism. In the period following World War II, the Frankfurt School was engaged in developing this concept within social theory. Later, other 20th-century researchers, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Henri Tajfel, and others, joined in. A scale ('series of questions') for measuring collective narcissism was developed in the 2000s and onward in works on collective narcissism and its consequences edited by Agnieszka Golec de Zavala. . But it’s found in populist movements very often. The majority of people who support MAGA subscribe to it, so it’s not just Russian at all. It’s quite a common form of very anti-democratic mass consciousness.

What was interesting in the polling is that the Russian sociologists were identifying collective narcissism and then giving advice as to how to boost it. The sociologists who developed their theories and [the series of] questions to identify it [were trying to] understand the connection between propaganda and violence, but also in order to stop it from happening. But their research was being used to exacerbate these things. That’s why we operate with that language (of ‚collective narcissism‘ — Ґ): [because] the Kremlin [itself] was using it. But it’s common throughout many anti-democratic movements. 

Responsibility for one’s future and one’s past

The great fight inside of Russia has been whether Russians would start to take agency over bits of their governance and future or will they carry on being these passive subjects who seem to accept and maybe thirst for a strong hand. And again, the sociology is quite scary. And not new, it’s been going on for a long time. Like, ‘we need a strong hand to discipline us and rule us.’ And this slightly sado-masochistic language that’s used around this idea of the desire for a strong ruler that will take care of everything. Of course, all the attempts at social change The largest protests in Russia in recent decades have included, particularly, the movement against election fraud in 2011–2013 and rallies in support of Alexei Navalny in 2014 and 2021. in Russia were all about [not needing the strong hand and building] active citizenship, citizenry [instead.] There was this hope for a middle class to emerge that would be an engine of a different, less authoritarian mentality.

Some of the protest movements circled around that theme: creating more agency and more activism among people. But in the end, that all failed.

And we could look at the economic reasons for that. Economists will say there was a middle class developing and then the crisis happened in 2008 and that small emerging middle class went bankrupt and were rescued by the state. And what was actually a private sector economy became a corporatist one. Plus, so much is based around energy revenue, that creates these mega companies, which are essentially state companies, again undermining the idea of economic agency.

So Russia never got a real middle class. It might have got a financial middle class, but not a middle class in terms of its consciousness.

That’s one line of argument I’ve heard. Others will talk about not dealing with historical legacy, the reality and responsibility of what Russia did [historically], which again undermines people’s sense of taking control of their own life. Because that can be very connected to a sense of responsibility.

So the theories are many, but the reality is that passivity has mixed with resentment, victim narratives and superiority, all of which seem to be very comfortable with violence.

Legally, there is no such thing as brainwashing

At the start of the war I helped create a war crimes NGO (Ukraine Testifies — The Reckoning Project — Ґ). And we’ve been looking at the question of indoctrination in the occupied territories. The problem is: indoctrination is not a crime. There is no legal statute around it. There’s no such thing as brainwashing, legally. And yet it’s the essence of what Russia is doing, which is sort of transforming identity, wiping out Ukrainian identity.

And there’s a history to that. When Raphael Lemkin, the great jurist, who created the idea of genocide, came up with the concept of it, it was actually inspired by his analysis of Tsarist policies in Ukraine and Stalin’s policies in Ukraine, which were all about creating and controlling identity in different ways. In the Tsarist case, just wiping out the Ukrainian language. In Stalin’s case, having a very controlled Soviet Ukrainianness. It was controlled and permitted, but the moment you had some sort of democratic Ukrainian identity, that would be, well, stamped on bloodily and brutally.

Raphael Lemkin (top right), UN officials, and delegates from countries that signed the Genocide Convention (bottom row: Korea, Haiti, Iran, France, Costa Rica) on October 14, 1950. Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

When Lemkin developed his idea of genocide he had cultural genocide as one of the main pieces of it. But when it came to ratifying the genocide convention in 1948, it’s actually all the Western countries that blocked it because they’d all done a little bit of that themselves. Even Sweden blocked it because they’d done similar things to the [indigenous peoples] in the North of Sweden. Obviously, the Americans blocked it with their history of Native Americans. The British blocked it, the French blocked it. Because it’s kind of empire policy.

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Destroying Ukrainian identity is a project

It’s not new, Russia has always done it en masse and combined it with population movements, deportations. You know, just how they do empire policy: they come somewhere, they murder a bunch of people, they move half the population, they move other people in. They change the education through this vast and cruel social engineering and I think we have to not forget that it’s what they’re doing in the occupied territories [of Ukraine today].

Their aim is to destroy Ukrainian identity: it’s a project. I think sometimes, people in the West don’t quite realize the scale at which the Kremlin still thinks like an empire of the 18th and 19th century. It means nothing to them to move in one people and move out another one, deface the identity of a people. That’s just how they do empire. That’s what we’re seeing in the occupied territories. And it’s hard from a legal point of view because cultural genocide was never put into the genocide convention. So you’re left with very soft human rights stuff, like the right of the child to an identity and stuff, which is very fluffy things, really. So not only is this indoctrination happening on the occupied territories it’s also difficult to fight it and sometimes I feel we’re missing the main point of what Russia is trying to achieve.

With crime, you have to name it in order for it to become a crime. Domestic violence wasn’t a crime for a long time because no one called it a crime. So it’s very important, not just legally, but for public consciousness to say: this is the crime. Until you’ve named it, it’s sort of there and not there for many people. Experts understand it, but to communicate it quickly is very hard.

Asking systemic questions around culture

British writer Peter Pomerantsev during a lecture at the Docudays UA festival in Kyiv on June 9, 2026. Photo: Serhiy Handusenko, DocudaysUA

The [so-called ‚Russian] greatness‘ is something that we need to be thinking about a lot more if we’re talking about the West, and not just the West but the whole world. My hypothesis — I can’t prove it but I’d love to research it — is that there is an association between the Russian ‚greatness‘ historically, culturally, and so on, with the inevitability of Russian victory and the need to compromise. «Russia is so great: it has nuclear weapons, look at it on the map. It has these great writers. Yes, they’re bastards, but they’re inevitable. They’re the inevitable hegemon in the region and a hegemon globally.» They’re still talked about as a superpower. And that then leads to, therefore, «however bravely Ukraine fights we’re going to have to do a deal, [because] Russia is just a reality we have to contend with.» I hear that from many people, even those who are totally unsympathetic to the Kremlin. It’s just there, it’s like a big thing. And I think culture plays a huge role in that.

And the perception of culture is I think part of the reason why they weaponize their culture very effectively: I think there’s a connection. We have to show that connection, I think we need some research [on this.]

This used to be the space of public diplomacy and cultural warfare to a certain extent during the Cold War: the West was very good at this, undermining the Soviet narrative, pushing a different idea of culture. Let’s start thinking about how you do that today, to start competing [with Russia] in this space in a clever way.

I love what happened at the Venice Biennale. The scandal was very ugly In 2026, the Venice Biennale international art exhibition invited Russia to participate for the first time since 2022, sparking a wave of protests and boycotts, but the organizers did not reverse their decision. Subsequently, the entire international jury resigned in protest against the admission of an official Russian delegation to the exhibition and the organizing committee’s refusal to take a political stance, while the European Commission suspended a €2 million grant to the organizers due to the participation of representatives from the Russian Federation. , I mean what the Italians did, to [allow to] have a Russian pavilion at Venice. There was the Pussy Riot/ Femen action Activists from Femen and Pussy Riot blocked the entrance to the Russian pavilion with their protest action featuring anti-war slogans in support of Ukraine which was great. Pussy Riot show that at least some Russians are ready to do something.

A poster listing the canceled events featuring deceased Ukrainian cultural figures at the Venice Biennale. Photo: Zoya Zvinyatskivska

But I thought even cleverer was the posters The Invisible Pavilion project, organized by the Association of Ukrainian Organizations in Italy.  [initiative], displaying the names of Ukrainian artists and writers killed by Russia, as if they were going to have an event at the biennale and then [it was] cancelled because they got killed. That’s sort of subverting at least the Russian beauty narrative.

A poster for an event featuring artist and poet Nika Kozhushko, who was killed by Russia. Photo: Zoya Zvinyatskivska

But then, how would we go further and start subverting this perception of Russia as inevitable? You’d really have to think about how those narratives work. Where do they connect with political decision making? You have to be very very precise, just as you would be in a political campaign, using audience segmentation. What are the messages that work, what is the behavioral change that we want? Asking those systemic questions, but around culture.

I think, there’s a space to do that, and I think Ukraine has got the people to do it. But somebody would have to do it, sort of applying the logic of strategic communications to the cultural space, which is a very unemotional way of doing it. It would have to be very effect-based. What is the change that we’re trying to get to?

It can’t just be political technologies, it has to be people from the arts working with people who understand how this logic works. But Russia definitely uses culture for political aims, always has, very successfully.

The negative portrait of Russia was meant to feed into the need for a strong leader

I’ve been research with Ukrainian journalists and sociologists since 2014. We looked at Russian propaganda and its impact in Ukraine, because we were thinking about the role of journalism to mitigate it.

[But] the real power wasn’t in the information piece. You know, we often talk about narratives and facts and information, trying to contend in that. The real power came in what people sometimes call the cognitive layer, the psychology, the feeling of greatness, resentment, [fear and] anxiety. And I think we really have to think about the power of propaganda in that space much more, because that then means our response is different.

If the problem is anxiety, resentment, all these other emotional factors, then we have to be thinking about how we work with those emotional factors rather than just fact checking or explaining a narrative. You know, if we’re working on the information level we have one set of responses. If we start working on the psychological, cognitive, emotional layer it’s a different set of responses. And you would then think about what is going to counter anxiety,  the sense of resentment, rather than how to debug the narrative. [Because] that might not help you if the only purpose of the narrative was its emotional effect. You’ve got to work with the emotions.

Fear obviously feeds authoritarianism: you want someone to protect you, that’s an easy one. When I lived in Russia in the early 2000s, I remember all of us looking NTV A federal TV channel in Russia, founded in the early 1990s as a new and non-governmental project, subsequently bought by the Gazprom Media holding, subsidiary of the large Russian oil and gas company, majority owned by the state. that had already been taken over by the Kremlin. But they didn’t do positive stories about Russia. They did negative stories about Russia non-stop and then at the end it would go: «that’s why we need Putin to help us.» There’s stories about the horrors of glubinka Russian faraway areas , murderers, bandits. It was that negative portrait of Russia, which was meant to feed into your need for a strong leader.

It’s definitely true that the Kremlin’s propaganda in Georgia (where it worked,) Moldova (where it didn’t work in the end) was based not on the idea that Russia is good, but that if you don’t vote for the pro-Russian parties it will invade. So it wasn’t trying to make Russia look pretty [either]. It was trying to intimidate people, saying “you better vote for the pro-Russian parties or we’ll do something very nasty.”

«Sometimes truth wins»

Celebrations marking the victory of the party led by Hungary’s current Prime Minister, Péter Magyar, in the 2026 elections. Photo from Magyar’s Facebook page

Hungary [is a bit of a different story,] a lot of people there have a deep sense of instability. They just had an election, where Orban pushed out these AI videos about how Ukraine was going to invade Hungary. So you had this kind of fantasy fears and politics, and it failed.

And, you know, the opposition won with bits of truth, talking about the economy, creating a sense of communal identity, creating a new sense of the nation in a very visceral way, by using crowds and mass events. By not being on TV, so they had to do it physically and online.

And also lots of leaks and hacks, I don’t know where they were coming from, but which showed the kind of borderline treasonous relationship of Hungarian politicians and Russia. But they were all factual things. So I think we just had an election where fantasy politics and fantasy fears, fantasmagoria and the grotesque lost out to precise facts mixed with a new idea of the collective self. So, you know, sometimes truth wins, both an emotional truth — nothing happens without that — but also facts and reality sometimes win. Not very often, but they do.

WWII propaganda myth living its new life after the war

[The historic figure my latest book How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler was published in 2024, the Ukrainian translation came out in 2025. is dedicated to,] Sefton Delmer, made a lot of stuff up [during World War II,] but his memoirs are a kind of a morality tale. He helped create the idea that there was a part of the German general staff who were deeply anti-Hitler. And after the war he felt that this image was used by a lot of former Nazi generals and even SS men to return to power.

So he felt guilty about that. He helped cultivate this idea because he wanted to create a split between the Nazi party and the army. So he felt responsible for that myth living after the war.

But his work [during wartime] was based on a huge amount of research and more than that, it was based on very deep understanding of the power of Nazi propaganda. So he did much more than, I think, other bits of the British government and the British communications infrastructure like the BBC, to actually understand his audiences. So coming back to our first [conversation point,] propaganda, counter-propaganda is as good as your understanding of people. And I think he had a very deep understanding of how Nazi propaganda actually works and what you might do to undermine it. He was based on psychological reality. You know, [back then] the aim wasn’t truth: the aim was to win.

[Later on, though, his] fictions kind of took on their own life and he [ended up feeling] very guilty about it afterwards. In his memoirs, he positions himself as a bad guy. He says, «I’m a bad person who does bad things.» Maybe for good causes, but he positions himself as an immoral man.

Innovating the information space to survive

Rescue operation on the ruins of a residential building in Ternopil, November 20, 2025. Photo: Vladyslav Musienko, Graty

Ukraine had to innovate on the battlefield and reinvent warfare, [together with] its partners. Ukraine has some good partners in the sense that they see this as their own war: they see Russia as an existential threat. There’s not many, we know who they are, it’s some Nordic countries, a couple of Baltic countries, Britain.

So just as Ukraine and its partners have had to innovate on the front lines to survive, Ukraine will have to innovate in the information space to survive.

Because once (if and when) there’s a pause in the kinetic [war], then Russia will pour all its energies into the information space. I mean, it already does it, but everything will become about that. And they’ll be campaigning in the Caucasus. Because they’ve let the Caucasus slide — they’ll be back. They’ll try to encircle Ukraine, they’ll work again very hard on Slovakia, Romania, which is very very tenuous Due to Russian influence, the date of the 2025 presidential election in Romania was postponed after the campaign tactics of pro-Russian candidate Călin Georgescu were deemed manipulative. , Bulgaria. Poland might flip very easily so they’ll try to surround Ukraine.

They’ll try to make Germany as bad as an ally as America. And we really don’t know what a National Front government According to polls, the candidate from the far-right populist party National Rally (formerly the National Front) is projected to win more than a third of the vote in the 2027 election—the highest share among all prospective candidates at this time. will look like in France but it’s a big chance they’ll have it. Britain looks as if it’s going to become a kind of a Farage's country Nigel Farage is a British right-wing populist politician, leader of far-right parties, advocate for Britain's exit from the EU.  within the next three years. Might not but these things are happening.

So in order to survive Ukraine and its allies will have to think about these things and will have to innovate and will have to find asymmetric ways of responding, which will mean reinventing what we think of as public diplomacy, cultural diplomacy, and whatever is currently grouped under the very vague terms of strategic communications. I think there’s just no choice: it’s just a survival thing. But the potential for transformation is vast. We’re in a very exciting moment for this space to do with AI and our under deeper understanding of complex systems. I think Ukraine and its closest partners will be at the forefront of that.

But the attention right now is on the front lines and that’s where everything is won and lost. But as the front lines jam we’re seeing more and more attention being played to the cognitive sphere, the perception sphere and I think that will only increase and increase.