[mopsi]

  > They seem utterly bewildered by the fact Ukraine is even attacking Russia at all, it doesn't seem to make any sense to them.

There was a recent comment chain on HN that showcased very well the pretzel that a surprisingly large number of Russians are turning themselves into to "explain" the events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876070

They have been propagandized to such extent that they just cannot accept the reality even when it becomes completely undeniable. Ukraine blows up something near them in Russia, and they go completely off the rails explaining how this has nothing to do with Russia nor Ukraine, but is some IMF-Blackrock-NWO scheme against Slavs, with references to the 1999 staged terrorist attacks in Russia that solidified Putin's rise to power. The war isn't real and a "third party" is in charge of both militaries and using them to play mind games on Russians to coerce them into accepting "globalist plans".

It's utterly fascinating to observe the breakdown of sense of reality in real time as lifelong propaganda narratives (like the might of the Russian army) turn out to be lies and the world they thought they lived in turns out to be a mirage. And it's remarkable that these conspiracy theories are not coming from central figures, such as a small circle of social media grifters (vaccine-autism, chemtrails, flat earth, etc), but appear from the grassroots, which is why there are so many variations. Many millions of people are still trying to make sense of these events within a propagandized worldview that they cannot let go of.

[red-iron-pine]

hyperreality and "the russian firehose" of propaganda means they're constantly blasted with distractions + real and false explanations.

a busy person doesn't have the time to evaluate all of these and ultimately slips into intellectual shot-cuts, which is usually defaulting to a curator or aggregator they trust (which is also easy to control), or just rationalizing whatever stream of BS they feel most comfortable with

similar methods were every effective in the US' Iraq/Afghanistan efforts, where the busy population was too distracted by mustache memes and Imagine Dragons and Fox News to mount any serious intellectual discussion; it was a volunteer-only war, and unless you have some skin-in-the-game already you didn't think about it. Why get upset about Korignal Valley when the new season of The Walking Dead is on?

[bulbar]

I think a lot of people are aware of the propaganda going on and never believed attacking Ukraine was about Nazis to begin with.