The Written Wilds

When asked how he felt on the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Artyom Petukhov says he felt nothing. No shock. No fear. No pride. Just nothing. He is forty years old, a factory mechanic from the Moscow region, and he tells his life story in a handful of sentences. School. Vocational training. Work. The army. Work again. That is the whole arc. When the war began, he says, Russia was simply helping the people of Donbas.

It is a familiar phrase. It appears early and often when Russian prisoners of war explain why they went to fight. It sounds like an idea, but when you listen closely, it behaves more like a placeholder. It fills silence. It resolves discomfort. It allows a conversation to continue without requiring detail. Asked how exactly Russia helped the people of Donbas, Petukhov cannot say. He repeats the phrase again, slower this time, as if careful pronunciation might add substance where none appears.

We have written before about how propaganda rarely works by convincing people of something new. More often, it works by relieving them of the need to decide anything at all. What stands out in these conversations is not fanaticism or hatred, but narrowness. The world Petukhov describes is small enough to survive inside. Power is distant and permanent. Decisions are made elsewhere. Roads are bad everywhere, he says, and shrugs when asked why they are never fixed. He is not a road builder. He is a mechanic. Asking questions feels pointless, almost impolite.

When the conversation turns to Vladimir Putin, Petukhov does not express admiration or resentment. He expresses acceptance. The idea that power could be questioned seems to irritate him more than the idea that it might fail. In his mental landscape, authority is something like gravity. It exists. It does not require explanation. And because it is always there, it must also be right.

This is where propaganda does its most effective work. It does not demand belief so much as it offers shelter. When the war is described as help, then moral complexity disappears. If Russia is helping, then doubt becomes unnecessary. If doubt is unnecessary, then responsibility dissolves. When confronted with images of destroyed Ukrainian cities like Maryinka or Mariupol, Petukhov watches quietly. He shakes his head when asked whether this looks like help. For a moment, something almost breaks through. Then the template snaps back into place. If he had his phone, he says, he would show videos of Ukrainian forces doing the same thing.

Denial here is not ignorance. It is self-protection. Accepting the reality of what happened would require accepting a role in it, even a passive one. It would require admitting that something done in his name caused harm to people he had no quarrel with. That is a heavier burden than most people are prepared to carry. The propaganda does not erase reality so much as it provides a ready-made explanation that prevents reality from settling in.

Petukhov is not unique. Many of the prisoners held in Ukrainian camps describe similar motivations. Some went for money. Some say they were deceived. Others insist they went for an idea, though the idea often collapses under gentle questioning. What they share is not ideology but habit. They repeat what they have heard because repetition is safer than reflection.

Alexander Skvortsov, a captured Russian officer, presents a sharper version of the same phenomenon. Unlike Petukhov, he chose a military career. He is educated. He speaks with confidence about state interests and geopolitics. Yet when he explains why Russia invaded Ukraine, he reaches for the same arguments. Protecting Donbas. Preventing NATO expansion. Defending against an encroaching enemy. The vocabulary is more polished, but the logic is just as circular.

Skvortsov insists that Ukraine has been in a civil war since 2014, that Russia merely intervened to help. Asked who exactly Ukraine was fighting, he says the western part of the country attacked the east. When pressed on details, he grows vague. He is comfortable with abstractions but struggles with specifics. He reproaches Ukrainians for dismantling Soviet monuments, framing it as an attack on shared history, yet cannot explain why those decisions justify military invasion. When asked directly what Ukraine’s internal choices have to do with Russia, he pauses. For a few seconds, there is nothing. Then he says Russia has nothing to do with it.

That pause matters. It is the sound of a narrative momentarily losing coherence. It happens more than once. Each time, Skvortsov looks surprised, as though encountering a gap he did not know was there. He recovers quickly, returning to familiar phrases. Zelenskyy could stop this, he says. Just come to Moscow and talk. Putin has invited him. He would be warmly received.

There is no malice in the way he says it. He seems to believe it. That belief is not built on evidence or experience but on repetition. The same statements, delivered through the same channels, year after year, have created a sense of inevitability. If the story has always been told this way, then it must reflect reality. Contradictions are treated as noise, not as warnings.

What emerges from these conversations is not a portrait of monsters or fools, but of people who have learned to live inside a story that explains everything and demands nothing. The story does not require them to understand Ukraine as a real place with real people. It does not require them to grapple with destroyed cities, displaced families, or children killed in strikes. For every uncomfortable fact, there is a counterargument already prepared. Ukrainian forces did it. NATO forced it. The people wanted it. The past demanded it.

This is why the slogan of “defending Donbas” is so effective. It compresses history, morality, and responsibility into three words. It transforms invasion into obligation. It allows individuals to participate in violence without seeing themselves as violent. Once internalized, it becomes nearly impossible to dislodge, not because it is convincing, but because removing it would leave a void.

The contrast between Petukhov and Skvortsov also reveals something else. Propaganda does not scale with intelligence or education. It scales with identity. The mechanic and the officer occupy different social positions, but both locate their sense of self within the same national narrative. For Petukhov, it offers dignity and belonging in an otherwise narrow life. For Skvortsov, it offers purpose and validation for ambition. In both cases, questioning the story would mean questioning who they are.

When asked how the war should end, many prisoners speak about negotiations. They say the people in occupied territories should decide their own future. Then, almost inevitably, they contradict themselves. Petukhov admits he does not know who those people are. He does not know his neighbor’s name, he says, let alone the residents of Donbas. The idea remains intact even as its foundation dissolves.

There is a temptation, especially during wartime, to treat such conversations as evidence of moral failure. But that misses the more uncomfortable truth. These men are not aberrations. They are products of a system that has spent decades refining its ability to simplify reality until it becomes livable. The danger of such systems is not that they create belief, but that they eliminate the need for it. When answers arrive prepackaged, thinking becomes optional.

What happens when the war ends, or pauses, or simply fades into something else, remains an open question. Propaganda does not disappear when fighting stops. Stories linger. They settle into memory. They shape how loss is explained and how responsibility is assigned. The men in these camps will eventually return home carrying a version of events that feels coherent to them, even if it bears little resemblance to what actually happened.

The unsettling part is not that they believe these things. It is how easy it was for belief to replace understanding in the first place. If a story can justify destruction, deny suffering, and still feel humane to those telling it, then the war has already done something deeper than redraw borders. It has rewritten how reality is processed.

And the question that remains, unanswered and unresolved, is what happens when millions of people emerge from a conflict still inhabiting the same story that led them into it.