Monday, January 12, 2026

Nikolai Karpitsky. Post-Truth and War: How to Distinguish Truth from Lies?



Post-truth is a phenomenon of the information space in which emotions and subjective perception become more important than objective facts. Under conditions of post-truth, anyone can create and disseminate fakes, while people consume only information that confirms their own point of view, becoming trapped in information bubbles in which even the most absurd theories circulate. Yet there is a terrible truth — the death of people in war — which Kremlin propagandists seek to devalue through a flood of fakes and false narratives. How, under such conditions, can one find criteria that make it possible to distinguish truth from lies?

Truth — Lies — Post-Truth

In Soviet times, the authorities feared the truth and therefore introduced censorship, banned independent media, and jammed Western radio stations. The Soviet information space was a realm of lies that could be easily refuted by facts. For example, many Soviet citizens sincerely believed that poverty prevailed everywhere in the West and that ordinary people there earned less than they did. In those years, I naively assumed that if people were told the truth and it was supported by facts, they would stop trusting propaganda. For a brief period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when censorship was abolished, I believed that truth had prevailed. However, the era of post-truth soon followed.

How can the essence of post-truth be illustrated with a simple example? If I claim that I play chess better than a grandmaster, that is a lie. If I actually play a game of chess against a grandmaster and lose, that is a fact revealing the truth. But if a multitude of bloggers then appears and floods the information space with interpretations casting doubt on my defeat, that is post-truth. People no longer know whom to trust and therefore choose only those sources of information that confirm what they already want to believe.

Another example. The claim that Chechens blew up residential buildings in Russia in the autumn of 1999 is a lie. The fact that FSB agents from Moscow were caught red-handed in Ryazan while attempting to plant explosives in another building points to the FSB’s involvement in organizing the terrorist attacks. The version promoted by Yulia Latynina — that the FSB planted explosives not to blow up a residential building, but to stage the prevention of a fake terrorist attack in order to receive a reward — already belongs to the realm of post-truth.

Lies can be refuted by facts; however, in the era of post-truth, facts lose their persuasive power because emotional perception becomes more important than knowledge. As a result, many residents of Russia voluntarily relinquish free access to truthful information and continue to believe in the absurd narratives of Kremlin propaganda.
 
Isolated Information Bubbles

Twenty years ago, I regarded the internet as a shared space of freedom. Today, however, I see this space fragmenting into isolated information bubbles. People living within different bubbles perceive reality so differently that they cease to understand one another.

In the era of post-truth, people choose information sources that resonate with their emotional perception of events. If the subjective assessment of an incompetent blogger aligns with the prevailing mood of the majority, their posts may exert greater influence on public opinion — and even on the positions of public officials — than objective scholarly research. Those information outlets that appeal primarily to emotions rather than to facts are the ones that succeed.

An information bubble arises because people process information through the filter of their own prejudices, fears, psychological complexes, pursuit of material gain, desire for social recognition, and need to enhance their status in the eyes of others. They begin to communicate exclusively with those who share a similar worldview, thereby isolating themselves within a single bubble. Inside such a bubble, a shared picture of the world takes shape in which even the most absurd claims are perceived as real. It is impossible to persuade such people with facts: they either reinterpret facts to confirm their existing views or simply ignore them.

Kremlin propaganda deliberately creates such information bubbles, in which people come to believe absurd narratives — for example, that the protests on the Maidan in 2014 were allegedly financed by the United States, that Washington then staged a coup and brought Nazis to power in order to unleash a war against Russia.

Should Eyewitnesses Be Trusted?

In 2015, I was delivering food to people affected by Russian shelling in Avdiivka. Together with a volunteer from a local Baptist church, I entered an apartment damaged by a rocket from a Grad multiple-launch rocket system. Against the backdrop of fire damage, next to religious icons, hung a portrait of Viktor Yanukovych. Through tears, an elderly woman said, “Under him, it was possible to live — and now there is war. At any moment, you could be killed.”

How can one persuade a person who does not understand politics and makes sweeping generalizations guided by fear and emotion?

In the summer of 2022, Russian forces regularly shelled Sloviansk, where I live, using Smerch and Uragan multiple-launch rocket systems. In early September of the same year, Peter Kashuvara and I drove around the city and spoke with residents of a high-rise building that had been hit twice by shelling. The building had no electricity, gas, or water; people were gathering firewood and preparing for winter. Mostly pensioners remained there — people who poorly understood what was happening in the world — but not only them.

A young woman greeted us with, “Glory to Ukraine!” Nearby, an older man deliberately repeated, “Who was firing? It’s unclear!”, hinting that it was Ukrainian, not Russian, forces that had shelled the area. It is to such “eyewitnesses” that Russians appeal when they continue to believe Putin and accuse me of not understanding what is really happening in Ukraine.

A week later, Ukrainian forces liberated Izium. Oleksandr Reshetnyk — a chaplain whom I know personally — posted on his Facebook page footage of destroyed Russian multiple-launch rocket systems that had been shelling Sloviansk from the direction of Izium. Yet his video is unlikely to convince the man who could not believe that it was the Russians who were firing at him — or Russians themselves who continue to believe Putin.

In the 1990s, on November 7, I took part in a Vigil of Memory for the Victims of Bolshevik Terror together with members of the Memorial Society who had survived repression. At the same time, a communist demonstration passed by us, its participants convinced that everything had been wonderful under Stalin. Among them were many people who had lived during Stalin’s time. After that experience, how can one uncritically trust eyewitnesses in the search for truth?
 
Ignoring the Eyewitness as a Person Is a Sign of Fear of the Truth

I believe we must listen to all eyewitnesses, even when they are mistaken. But not merely listen — rather, we must try to understand their lived experience. I have spoken with residents of Donbas who were under the influence of Russian propaganda. Their beliefs are completely unacceptable to me; nevertheless, I tried to understand how they live and what is happening around them. In other words, I treated them as living witnesses whose life experience matters for understanding reality, regardless of their views or delusions.
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At the same time, I know many Christians in Russia who categorically refuse to communicate with fellow believers from Ukraine because they fear that such contact would call into question their faith in Putin. In doing so, they come into conflict with the very experience of church life, where truth is verified precisely through communion with fellow believers. To resolve this inner conflict, they begin to perceive Ukrainian fellow Christians not as living people, but as abstract figures.

From this, one can identify a clear sign of distorted perception of reality: ignoring the eyewitness as a person and denying their lived experience. Of course, an eyewitness may be mistaken, may even be a fanatic or a bearer of a misanthropic ideology. Yet they remain a living person with a life experience to which they can testify.
 
Post-Truth as the Loss of a Monopoly on Lies

The difference between today’s era of post-truth and the reign of lies in the Soviet period is that the authorities have lost their monopoly on lies. The Soviet system imposed falsehoods strictly in accordance with state ideology. Any unauthorized dissemination of lies was punished just as severely as the dissemination of truth.

Recently, I came across an antisemitic article in which the war between Russia and Ukraine was presented as the result of a “Jewish conspiracy.” It cited a fabricated “protocol” allegedly signed by representatives of Russia and Ukraine, who were said to have agreed to jointly destroy civilian populations on both sides in order to resettle the emptied territories with Jews and create a new Jewish state. The authors of this forgery claimed that the plan had been approved by Donald Trump, who supposedly personally controls both Putin and Zelensky as members of his “Jewish organization.”

Despite the absurdity of this fabrication, many ardent opponents of Putin within Russia believe it. Moreover, I have heard similar ideas expressed in Ukraine as well, voiced by ordinary people. Thus, whereas in a totalitarian system fake narratives were produced by state propaganda, in the era of post-truth any blogger can cobble together such a “protocol” and spread it online. The Russian authorities, having prepared the ground for such fakes, are no longer able to control their dissemination.
 
What Should Be Done When Everyone Insists on Their Own Truth?

Any set of facts can be connected in different ways. As a result, people often fail to reach mutual understanding even when they rely on the same factual material. Their worldviews are constructed through arbitrary generalizations of those facts. We have already experienced a totalitarian system in which a single opinion was imposed on everyone. Therefore, recognizing the right of others to hold their own beliefs about the world, religion, and history is therefore an undeniable achievement of modern civilization. However, a war is now underway, and mass killings are being justified by narratives built on arbitrary generalizations. If we do not wish to return to totalitarianism, and if we respect a person’s right to their own convictions, then we must find a criterion that both allows us to identify falsehood and avoids imposing a single “correct” point of view.

Suppose the noise of a quarrel between spouses in a neighboring apartment kept me awake at night. The next day, the husband comes by to apologize for the disturbance and claims that his wife was entirely to blame, convincingly supporting his account with facts. After he leaves, the wife herself appears with a similar apology and presents her own version, interpreting the same facts differently. I am faced with two interpretations based on arbitrary generalizations of identical facts, and I have no right to impose my own viewpoint on the neighbors as the only correct one.

However, if the husband were to argue that he is right on the grounds that all women are deceitful, I would call his position into question. I would regard his assessment of the situation as false because it rests on a premise that denigrates an entire group of people. In this way, one can formulate a criterion for identifying falsehood: the arbitrary generalization of facts on the basis of premises that justify evil toward others.

A Criterion for Identifying False Historical Interpretation

Any historical concept involves the generalization of facts, and those same facts can be generalized differently within alternative concepts. We can identify blatantly false interpretations based on falsifications, but we cannot offer everyone a single, definitively correct version of history. Moreover, competition among theories is a condition for the development of scholarship. For this reason, the coexistence of different historical interpretations — even those that contradict one another — should be regarded as legitimate.

However, I unequivocally regard the version of history that Putin presented to Tucker Carlson as false, because it is based on an assertion of Russia’s right to Ukraine — a claim by which Putin seeks to justify the killing of Ukrainians.

In other words, any historical concept that assigns the status of necessity to actions that cause evil is false. This principle can serve as a criterion for identifying false interpretations of events from the standpoint of historical, social, or political theory.
 
A Criterion for Identifying False Understandings of Religion

Every religion possesses its own inner truth, which is validated through religious experience. There are also people who lack religious experience altogether; for them, no religion conveys truth. Nevertheless, in certain cases we can confidently judge that particular religious leaders are speaking from a false religious position, and this judgment does not depend on our own religious beliefs.

Thus, one month after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, on March 29, 2022, a number of Russian religious figures convened a roundtable titled “World Religions Against the Ideology of Nazism and Fascism in the 21st Century.” Participants included representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Old Believers’ Church, the Spiritual Assembly of Muslims, the Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, the Buddhist Traditional Sangha of Russia, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Russian United Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith (Pentecostals). Cloaking themselves in religious language, all of them expressed support for the war against the Ukrainian people. During the discussion, there was even a proposal to “cut off heads.”

Although religious experience may serve as a source of truth independent of other religions, that experience itself can be distorted, perverted, or replaced by political ideology — for example, when xenophobia and the imperative to search for enemies are imposed in the name of religion, or when an aggressive war is justified. In the Christian tradition, such phenomena are described as “demonic temptations.”

If a religious authority appeals to their faith in order to justify Russia’s war against Ukraine — that is, if they use religious narratives to justify evil — they thereby pervert their religion, adapting it to a political ideology. Without entering into theological debate, we can assert that such an interpretation is false, and that the authority’s position is not genuinely religious but quasi-religious, because it rests on a distorted form of religiosity.
 
Conclusions

The search for truth is an ongoing process that requires doubt and a critical attitude toward every source of information. At the core of post-truth lies the assumption that emotional perception is more important than knowledge, inner conviction more important than objective evidence, and that only those facts are taken into account that confirm an already established worldview.

In the Soviet period, we sought to uncover and disseminate truthful information. The authorities resisted this because they feared the truth. In the era of post-truth, however, sources of reliable information are drowned in an ocean of content that reflects nothing but subjective perceptions. As a result, today the authorities no longer fear the truth.

When truth is replaced by subjective attitudes toward events, openly false narratives become legitimized amid a multitude of seemingly plausible versions — for example, those propagated by Russian propaganda to justify the war against the Ukrainian people. Yet we do not necessarily need to strive for a single, universal understanding of truth; it is sufficient to identify criteria that allow us to recognize falsehood.

If a person lives in a world in which they believe they are compelled to commit evil, then the problem lies not in the world itself, but in how that person understands it. This indicates the presence of an assumption that justifies evil — an assumption accepted on faith as the foundation of their worldview and used to interpret and generalize all events. It is precisely this circumstance that provides grounds for considering such an understanding of the world to be false.

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