Putin’s Information War

“Russian authorities are using a festival to showcase Moscow as a place where life is better than in the West.

 

What a subway station from hell says about the Ukraine events

 

When I spoke to my colleague Ivan Nechepurenko about the enormous festival that has taken over Moscow this summer, his description of one pavilion stuck with me: an immersive experience of the New York City subway.

 

In footage Ivan sent me, neon lights flicker in a gloomy tunnel. The floor is dirty. Sewage water pools in a corner. “Welcome to America!” an actor impersonating a wild-eyed hustler selling fake designer bags shouts in English.

 

When you’ve made your way through this hellscape, you emerge into a Moscow subway station. This station, all marble and mirrors, is spotless and orderly, no crazy people in sight.

 

Ivan wrote a great story about how Russian authorities are overwhelming Muscovites with fun.

 

But I want to focus on another purpose for this festival. Russian authorities are using it to showcase Moscow — and by extension, Russia — as a place where life is better than in the West.

 

“The message is basically: ‘The West wants you to believe Russia is backward, dark, and unsafe — and look what it’s really like,” Ivan told me. And this message is also shaping the events in Ukraine.

 

Warring narratives

 

Russia is putting on a show of its own resilience. Doing so sends a message internally: we can keep going in Ukraine until we can end the conflict on our own terms. But it’s also part of a larger strategy aimed at sending a message to the outside world that the West’s promise is fading.

 

It’s a message directed at, among others, the 2.7 million tourists who visited Moscow this past year — most of them from non-Western countries. It’s the same message regularly delivered by RT, the Russian state media broadcaster that pumps out programming highlighting Western democracies in disarray.

 

Part of the power of this narrative comes from its grounding in truth: Many Western countries are in disarray. And in July, 57 percent of Russians surveyed by an independent pollster said they were satisfied with their lives — the highest number since such polls began in 1993, two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

 

So is Russia’s message landing? Polling since the start of the events in Ukraine reveals a growing rift in global public opinion. A study found that the vast majority of people living in liberal democracies hold negative views of Russia, but the opposite is true for much of the rest of the world. Among the 6.3 billion people (huge majority) not living in liberal democracies, most felt positively toward Russia — and skeptical of democracy.

 

‘Hot political messes’

 

What does this have to do with Ukraine?

 

I spoke with Charles Kupchan, a former foreign policy adviser to President Obama and professor at Georgetown University. I wanted to talk about why President Trump’s efforts to end the conflict had yielded so little.

 

It’s not just that Trump didn’t prepare for his meeting with Vladimir Putin, Kupchan said. It’s also that the world has changed. The U.S. can no longer enforce its will unchecked. Russia has the means to resist, with the help of other countries like China, India, and Turkey, which buy its oil and help it work around Western sanctions.

 

America’s diminished influence is mostly a result of the diffusion of power and the West’s relative economic decline. But it’s also due to subtler factors. The West used to be an aspirational club. Today, the big Western democracies, as Kupchan put it, are “hot political messes.” And for those living outside of them, “it’s not self-evident that democracy is the way to go.”

 

Is this percolating sentiment the reason Putin was embraced in Tianjin this weekend? It’s not something that can be measured directly. But it’s worth noting: while Putin was holding hands with Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping, the French government was teetering on the verge of collapse (again) and Donald Trump was promising to send more troops into major U.S. cities. Moscow, meanwhile, is planning its Winter Festival.” [1]

 

1. Putin’s Information War. Bennhold, Katrin.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Sep 3, 2025.