In a move reminiscent of Soviet times, Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s long-time aide and propaganda chief, has urged public officials to unleash a “war over people’s minds” at a closed meeting, WSJ reports. “All of us in this room are the special forces fighting this war,” he told the public employees attending a private seminar organized by ANO Dialogue, a Kremlin-funded body that aims to connect Russian bureaucracy with average citizens over the internet.
A prime audience for the messaging, Kiriyenko said, should be schools and kindergartens. “If you think about it, schoolchildren alone make up 18 million people in our country,” he said. “Imagine adding their parents into the mix.” But that information war, he said, should cover “the elderly generation too.”
He said that the propaganda campaign would outlive Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “when it ends, the information war will continue…That’s the overarching war here.”
How state propaganda is driving Russia’s genocide of Ukraine
