Khodorkovsky Communications Center
Mar 27, 2026
Putin’s most powerful weapon in this war isn’t the Oreshnik missile.
It is something far cheaper and infinitely more scalable: lies.
Shameless lies literally capture cities — here’re some examples:
The Russian military has a term for this: “capturing a settlement on credit.”
They report the victory on Telegram and TV now and plan to achieve it “someday.” This way, the same town can be “taken” over and over, for example, General Kuzovlev “captured” Kupiansk twice in two months.
As a visual proof for these premature “captures,” there is a field maneuver called “flagovtyk” — a squad plants a flag in a destroyed village, photographs it, and reports it “liberated.”
The whole operation is just content creation.
The lying more broadly follows the chain of command. Unit commanders fabricate village captures.
Gerasimov, the Chief of General Staff, inflates territory fourfold — like reporting 300 sq km of gains when independent analysts counted roughly 80.
Putin, as commander-in-chief, lies on the grandest scale of all. He boasted of capturing “Komsomolsk” and described its geography on camera, reading from prepared notes. The problem: the city he claimed to have captured does not exist and the nearest Komsomolsk is 300 km away in Poltava region.
The lying also conjures phantom enemies. At the 2024 Valdai Forum, Putin claimed 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers were surrounded near Kupyansk. No prisoners were ever shown on TV, no mass surrender announced. And then there was no follow up: the whole story just vanished because the encirclement was only real in Putin’s head.
https://tass.com/defense/1869379
In spring 2025, Putin tried the same trick in Russian Kursk. He claimed that thousands of Ukrainian troops were trapped and demanded their full surrender. Trump believed him, but U.S. intelligence saw no evidence of encirclement. Ukrainian forces withdrew on their own terms.
The lying comes first, the battlefield is second. Putin’s press-secretary Peskov denied broad mobilisation plans eight days before Putin announced one:
Putin told soldiers the army had everything they needed — while soldiers posted videos saying they had
The Kremlin now is blocking Telegram while frontline soldiers call it their only communication channel. “Do not deprive us of it,” one soldier pleaded on camera. The generals insist the army does not need it:
Mariupol residents were promised housing to replace what Russia’s army destroyed. Three years on, many are still sleeping on friends’ couches. At the current pace, full rebuilding will not be complete until 2043.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/05/01/occupied-with-vacancy
In 2023, Putin promised no “guns instead of butter” trade-off. By 2025, over 40% of budget revenues went to the war and non-military spending was being cut. As a Russian joke puts it: “Dad, will you drink less?” “No, son, you’ll eat less.” https://
Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman call leaders like Putin “spin dictators” — autocrats who hold power through lies rather than force. In 2022, Putin added real, bloody force to the mix, but the lying never stopped. It remains his primary weapon in this war.
Internet shutdowns, YouTube throttling, bans of messaging apps are meant to protect the lying apparatus. A few years ago, reality only needed embellishing, but today it must be replaced entirely, and the censorship expands to fill the growing gap between state narrative and lived experience.
You can fool some people for a long time and many people briefly, but you cannot fool everyone forever.
Putin’s internet bans are proof that he knows it.
Follow me on Substack (its free) for more in-depth coverage:
https://khodorkovsky.substack.com
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A Russian soldier today has four ways out: death, crippling injury, capture, or desertion.
That’s not a figure of speech. A captain deserted and took his entire division’s personnel lists with him:
https://khodorkovsky.substack.com/p/how-putin-lost-an-entire-divisions
“A Russian soldier today has four ways out: death, crippling injury, capture, or desertion.”
Once a cockroach fully realizes that these options are all it has, he will do the right thing and either desert or surrender.
The first option is the best one.
Unless he surrenders and volunteers to fight for Ukraine.