US Propaganda Is Responsible For Unrealistically High Hopes About Kiev’s Counteroffensive

The takeaway from Politico’s latest article is that the Biden Administration is still struggling to correct the public’s expectations after Milley first tried doing so a quarter-year ago. The US’ earlier NAFO-driven propaganda successfully instilled unrealistically high hopes of Kiev’s upcoming counteroffensive among their targeted audience, which is now a major soft power liability owing to credible fears that it’ll fail. Unless their expectations soon change, Ukraine’s supporters might be in for a very deep disappointment.

Politico cited unnamed US administration officials in their latest piece reporting that “Biden’s team fears the aftermath of a failed Ukrainian counteroffensive”. According to them, a dilemma of epic soft power proportions is in the making should this upcoming operation fail: hawks will blame the US for not giving Kiev everything that it demanded, while doves will demand the immediate commencement of peace talks. Left unsaid is the “politically inconvenient” fact that US’ own propaganda is responsible for this.

In particular, the SBU-backed fascist troll network known as “NAFO” played an unprecedented role in this respect. What began as an online campaign fundraising for war criminals morphed into an aggressive troll campaign whose members rarely get banned by social media for their toxic ad hominem attacks and doxing despite blatantly violating those platforms’ terms of service (with few notable exceptions). Although Twitter’s recent algorithmic tweaks have reduced their reach, they’re still very active.

What the combined efforts of infamous trolls like former congressman Adam Kinzinger and senior advisor at the Helsinki Commission Paul Massaro have done is generate unrealistically high hopes about Kiev’s upcoming counteroffensive among their targeted Western audience. This undeclared foreign agent and shameless glorifier of a genocidal World War II fascist movement respectively thought they were “helping the cause” but were in reality working against its soft power interests this whole time.

Those infamous NAFO trolls and their ilk continued pushing the information warfare narrative that Kiev’s ‘total victory’ is supposedly very close within reach despite Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley publicly downplaying that scenario in late January by describing it as “very, very difficult”. These propagandists didn’t miss a beat even after NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg declared a “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with Russia several weeks later.

That second development was publicly shared just like Milley’s for the purpose of tempering everyone’s expectations about Kiev’s counteroffensive, with Stoltenberg’s drawing attention to how much more the West needs to ramp up military-industrial production to stand a chance of winning. It’s impossible for NATO to have made any serious difference in this respect in the two months since his candid admission so the difficult state of military-strategic affairs that Milley warned about still remains in effect.

A little more than one month ago, the Washington Post told its readers the truth about just how poorly Kiev’s forces are faring. Several weeks later, the Pentagon leaks then confirmed this sobering assessment, which set the context within which Politico’s latest report was published. Accordingly, it’s now indisputable that leading Western officials and their allied Mainstream Media (MSM) outlets were preconditioning the public for the last quarter-year not to expect much from this counteroffensive.

NAFO’s failure to respond to those signals and instead defiantly redouble their information warfare narrative priming the public for Kiev’s ‘total victory’ sometime in the very near future therefore directly resulted in the present dilemma. Those average Westerners who are supportive of Ukraine didn’t extend any credence to those aforementioned figures’ warnings due to the social media echo chamber that they became trapped in since the special operation started.

These people preferred to surround themselves with fellow wishful thinkers who told them whatever they wanted to hear, sometimes even pushing the most absurd conspiracy theories to explain away the cognitive dissonance provoked by the difference between their claims and those officials’. The most popular one alleges that elements within the US Government, NATO, and the MSM are either under the influence of a “Russian disinformation operation” or even infiltrated by “deep-cover sleeper cell agents”.

For as amusing as this may be those who know better than to fall for that super paranoid conspiracy theory, so many people within the West seriously believe it that the US Government doesn’t consider this to be a laughing matter at all. In fact, it’s precisely because a critical mass of people still subscribe to these radical fringe beliefs despite leading officials’ best efforts since late January to correct their false NAFO-indoctrinated expectations that those US administration figures just spoke to Politico.

Simply put, their propaganda operation has gotten out of control and is now a major soft power liability. NAFO trolls won’t respond to those dog whistles being blown by American and NATO officials like Milley and Stoltenberg since they remain “loyal” to parroting whatever Ukrainian officials are saying at any given time. Those who stray from the dogmatic information warfare narrative that Kiev’s ‘total victory’ is supposedly very close within reach are viciously attacked and expelled from this modern-day cult.

The felling of belonging that NAFO provides for many of its members, whose offline lives are rather dull and lonely to put it mildly, influences them to self-censor the sharing of any doubts they may have about Ukraine’s conspiracy theories in the face of growing Western public claims to the contrary. These interconnected gatekeeping and psychological dynamics result in narrative reinforcement, which in turn leads to Kiev’s average Western supporters retaining unrealistically high expectations about the conflict.

The reason why the US Government is recently scaling up its efforts to correct the public’s expectations is because the risk of deep disappointment affecting a critical mass of the population is assessed as being extremely counterproductive to their interests. Enough of them might become disillusioned in the aftermath of a failed counteroffensive that they decisively shift towards supporting the immediate ceasefire scenario, which works against those who want to indefinitely perpetuate this proxy war.  

The most furious among them might even punish those politicians who they blame for this fiasco during the next elections, either by voting for pro-ceasefire candidates or not participating in the polls at all. Either way, administration figures fear that there’s a credible enough chance of tangible blowback from the false expectations that NAFO continued cultivating among the public in defiance of the dog whistles blown by top Western military officials that they’re now asking the MSM to help them avert this disaster.

The takeaway from Politico’s latest article is that the Biden Administration is still struggling to correct the public’s expectations after Milley first tried doing so a quarter-year ago. The US’ earlier NAFO-driven propaganda successfully instilled unrealistically high hopes of Kiev’s upcoming counteroffensive among their targeted audience, which is now a major soft power liability owing to credible fears that it’ll fail. Unless their expectations soon change, Ukraine’s supporters might be in for a very deep disappointment.