"In war, truth is the first casualty."
— Aeschylus
In this fourth part of No War With Russia, having now covered the ideological nature of the West’s war on Russia, the provocations designed to cause Russia to attack and the economic aspect of the war, I now turn to the equally important propaganda war.
When history comes to pass judgement on the war in Ukraine, it must not focus solely on the missiles and mechanised brigades, nor even on the chancelleries of state. It must also scrutinise the collusion between the Globalist military-industrial complex and the Western media apparatus. The proxy war against Russia has not only been fought with HIMARS and drones, but with headlines, hashtags, and hectoring pundits.
As a freedom-loving libertarian I am neither fan nor apologist of Putin, but the Kremlin's conduct worries me much less than the actions of our own government and the media-induced consensus it has induced in British society. For what we have witnessed since 2014, and especially since February 2022, is a full-spectrum psychological campaign aimed not at Russians, but at us, the Western public.
So, this essay explores how the mainstream media in the West laid the psychological groundwork for this hideous conflict, mobilised hatred and hysteria, and created a climate in which dissent became heresy. Long before a single Russian boot crossed the Ukrainian border, the narrative was well rehearsed. The Western media had already spent a decade turning Russia into a pantomime villain. From Brexit and Trump, Biden laptops, energy policy, dead (or maybe not) Skripals and cybercrime, everything malign had a Russian fingerprint, or so we were told.
This often fake or distorted narrative served a strategic purpose: it prepared the Western public for war. Ukraine was cast as a plucky democratic David, facing a malevolent Russia tyrant Goliath that, if not stopped, would gobble us all up. Simultaneously, and somewhat paradoxically, Goliath was about to suffer a heart attack any minute, being useless at everything and unlikely to survive much longer. Ukraine’s internal corruption, nationalist movements, and divisive, often vicious, linguistic and ethnic politics were glossed over or forgotten altogether.
By the time Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the script was set. The Western media lionised the Maidan protests while ignoring or whitewashing the US and EU roles in the what amounted to a coup, or that a large part of the Ukrainian population very much opposed it. The violence against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas? Ignored. The Minsk Accords? Barely mentioned. The line was drawn: Ukraine good, Russia evil. Baaa, baaa, baaa.
When the Russian invasion began in February 2022, the media did not shift into gear, it was already running at full speed. What followed was less coverage than theatre, often pantomime. Within days, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was reimagined as a latter-day Churchill, complete with glowing magazine covers and social media virality. Dressed in immaculate battle fatigues, he starred in photo shoots with his wife, addressed parliaments, and posted battlefield monologues that were breathlessly reported by Western outlets as if quoting scripture. All 'information' put out by the Ukrainian High Command was accepted without question. Russian 'information' was instantly dismissed as fake. Russia Today and other Russian news outlets were, of course, banned.
The war was framed not as tragedy, but as entertainment served up in digestible content for the TikTok generation. Teenagers with smartphones were suddenly frontline documentarians. Every missile trail became a meme; every explosion an Instagram story. Meanwhile, Russian actions were reported with maximum alarmism and zero context. The media did not explain why Russia might view NATO expansion as a threat, nor did they explore alternative diplomatic approaches. The focus was always emotional: suffering Ukrainians, crying children, bombed hospitals. The audience was not meant to think—but to feel.
The media’s propaganda campaign extended beyond storytelling into active suppression. No war in modern memory has seen such coordinated censorship of alternative viewpoints. Within weeks Russian media channels were banned. Longstanding academics and foreign policy experts like John Mearsheimer were vilified simply for providing historical or strategic context. YouTube removed videos questioning NATO’s role. Twitter banned accounts that highlighted Ukrainian war crimes. Facebook labelled critical posts as “Russian disinformation,” even when they cited Western sources. The BBC, The Guardian, The Times all parroted government lines with remarkable uniformity. To question NATO policy was to “defend Putin.” To advocate diplomacy was “appeasement.” The chilling effect was obvious. Reasonable voices, left, right, or realist, were excluded from debate. A sacred narrative had been established, and the press acted less like reporters than inquisitors.
One of the subtlest, and most powerful, aspects of the propaganda war has been the manipulation of language. Consider the media’s use of the word “aid”. The UK and US have sent tens of billions in lethal weaponry, including tanks, artillery, and surveillance. Yet this is consistently described as military aid, a term that evokes humanitarian benevolence rather than aggressive intervention. Likewise, Ukrainian armed forces are “defenders,” while Russians are “invaders.” Ukrainian missile strikes are “counter-offensives,” while Russian ones are “war crimes.” Even the term proxy war has been erased from most coverage, despite its manifest accuracy. If a Russian missile hits a residential area it's another war crime. But if the missile was fired in response to a Ukrainian missile launch from the residential area (thus making it a legitimate target), no mention will be made of this by our wholly controlled MSM.
And then there is the incessant invocation of “democracy”, as if Ukraine’s political system, riddled with corruption and censorship, represents a democratic ideal. Opposition parties have been banned, media outlets consolidated, and political rivals jailed and eElections postponed. Yet none of this punctures the moral absolutism of the MSM narrative.
Just as significant as what the media reports is what it omits. Before 2022, Western outlets occasionally covered Ukraine’s fascist battalions, like Azov. After the war began, these groups were airbrushed out of existence or, absurdly, rebranded as “misunderstood patriots.” Even when images emerged of National Socialist insignia on Ukrainian uniforms, the media moved quickly to discredit the evidence as “out of context” or “Russian propaganda.” The shelling of Donetsk by Ukrainian forces received little attention. The potential for nuclear escalation? Minimised or turned into clickbait. Reports of Western arms ending up in the black market? Ignored.
Domestically, the cost-of-living crisis across Europe—fueled in large part by sanctions and energy disruptions—was rarely linked directly to the war. Governments were portrayed as valiant, not culpable.
One of the most striking examples of Western media duplicity is its handling, or rather, obfuscation, of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, an act threatened – and very likely planned - by Vinegar Joe Biden before the war began. When explosions ruptured the Nord Stream I and II gas lines under the Baltic in September 2022 the corporate media instantly blamed Russia, while failing to explain why it might have destroyed its own multi-billion-dollar infrastructure. The logic was laughable: why would Moscow cripple its main leverage over Europe?
Meanwhile, the far more plausible scenario, that the United States, possibly with British complicity, executed the operation to sever Europe's energy ties with Russia, was treated as conspiracy theory even when acclaimed investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a detailed account alleging US responsibility. Despite Hersh’s track record (including exposing the My Lai massacre and the CIA’s illegal domestic spying), his report was met with a media blackout. The BBC, CNN, and The Guardian either ignored it entirely or dismissed it without serious rebuttal. That such a consequential act of industrial terrorism could be memory-holed so swiftly speaks volumes about the state of the so-called “free press.”
Equally telling was the media’s silence on how the West undermined the Black Sea Grain Initiative, yet another diplomatic deception recast as virtue. The deal, brokered in July 2022, was portrayed as a humanitarian corridor to feed the Global South, allowing both Ukrainian and Russian grain exports through the Black Sea. Yet Western powers, having secured safe passage for Ukraine-bound ships, ensured that Russia’s side of the agreement was effectively nullified. They did so by sneaky bureaucratic sabotage: blocking insurance cover, particularly war risk coverage, for vessels heading to Russian ports. This, of course, rendered Russia’s exports commercially unviable while maintaining the illusion of good faith. The MSM ignored this sleight-of-hand entirely. When Russia eventually suspended participation in the deal it was framed as further evidence of Moscow’s malign intent, without any mention of the unfulfilled Western obligations. In reality, it was yet another example of the rules-based order being used as a cudgel: rules for Russia, exceptions for NATO.
In both the Nord Stream attack and the grain export swindle, the Western media did not merely fail to investigate. It actively colluded in misdirection, covering for its governments through omission, innuendo, and an extraordinary silence that speaks louder than a thousand editorials. The effect of this selective coverage is devastating: the public remains both emotionally manipulated and strategically ignorant.
The media’s complicity in this war goes beyond journalistic failure. It represents a deeper alignment with the interests of globalist institutions—those who see national sovereignty, borders, and cultural identity as obstacles to their one world technocratic, totalitarian vision. By uniting the public behind a foreign war, Western elites have achieved several objectives: expanded surveillance powers, militarised economies, and cemented NATO as an ideological instrument of ‘progressive’ internationalism. The MSM, willingly or otherwise, has played its role as the high priesthood of this new orthodoxy.
The real threat to Western freedom is not Russian tanks—it is the slow, methodical erosion of reason, sovereignty, and dissent under the banner of "solidarity."
What we have witnessed since 2022 is not merely a war in Ukraine, it is a war on independent thought. The Western media has abandoned its responsibility to inform and now serves as a conveyor belt for state-sanctioned narratives. For those of us who cherish national sovereignty, localism, and truth, the greatest act of resistance is to think for ourselves. To interrogate headlines. To reject moral binaries. To demand honesty and nuance in place of narratives. Sadly, the western MSM has gone too far down the road of submission to State diktats to provide either, and it is colluding in driving all of us further down the Road to Serfdom.
The proxy war in Ukraine will eventually end. But the propaganda war has revealed something more enduring: that the Western press, once the proud guardian of freedom, is now the faithful servant of the Globalist imperialists.