How America Constantly Crushes Russia in the Propaganda War

31 July 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Here is a terrific example of U.S. propaganda, so that its methods can be analyzed, and its ability to deceive the masses be correctly understood as being based upon lying about history:

“Ukraine is pulling off something impossible”

Max Fisher

403K subscribers

348K views [for this particular video]

Jul 31, 2026

Crimea was lost. Now Ukraine’s making a play to take it back.

Twelve years ago, Russia shocked the world by seizing Crimea from Ukraine. Now, against all odds, Ukraine is making a massive play to take it back, and it’s going better than anyone imagined – here’s how they’re pulling it off.

This video would not have been possible without reporting by Reuters, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Kyiv Independent, and the Institute for the Study of War.

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Welcome to The Bigger Picture, a new show that that makes sense of important news through clear visual explanations and analysis.

Original music for this video was composed by Tom Fox.

About:

Max Fisher is a veteran journalist who has reported from over 20 countries. His show, The Bigger Picture, illuminates our world by exploring how it really works, from the sweep of geopolitics to the deepest recesses of our minds. Before going independent, Max was a staff writer at The Atlantic and The Washington Post, a founding editor of Vox, and a long-time foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times, where he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His book, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, was an NPR and New Yorker best book of 2022.

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Max Fisher pretends that the war in Ukraine started in March 2014 when “Putin” “stole” Crimea from Ukraine. (He thus argues that Trump must simply “force Russia to end the war” — on Zelensky’s terms.) To judge from the thousand-plus viewer comments to his video — such as “Thank you for going beyond the headlines and helping me to understand the world better” — his audience is ripe for his lies.) But his ‘history’ is just pure propaganda. Not information, but misinformation — deceit.

He ignores that Crimea had been part of Russia from 1783 to 1954, when the Soviet dictator Khrushchev transferred it to Ukraine for reasons that only he knew.

He also ignores that the U.S. Government had engaged the Gallup polling organization, both before and after March 2014, in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in Crimea, where Russia has had its main naval base ever since 1783 — poll them regarding Crimeans’ views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU. And the U.S.-Government-funded pollings found that, generally, Ukrainians throughout Ukraine were far more pro-Russia than they were pro-U.S., pro-NATO, or pro-EU, and that this sentiment against the U.S. empire was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew well, even before the March 2014 plebiscite in Crimea, that Crimeans would be especially resistant to America’s February 2014 coup in Ukraine, which had just replaced Ukraine’s neutralist and democratically elected Government and installed an intensely anti-Russian one. However, this pro-Russia anti-U.S. sentiment in Ukraine was actually not really new information. It just confirmed prior pollings. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 coup in Ukraine, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the U.S. coup. In any case, Gallup’s pre-coup and post-coup pollings specifically of only Crimeans found that, as I had noted on 27 December 2014,

Gallup polled 500 Crimeans during May 16-30 in 2013, and found that only 15% considered themselves “Ukrainian.” 24% considered themselves “Crimean.” But 40% considered themselves “Russian.” Even before Obama’s February 2014 coup which overthrew the Ukrainian President whom 80% of Crimeans had voted for, the Crimean people overwhelmingly wanted to secede from Ukraine — and, especially now they did, right after the President for whom they had overwhelmingly voted, Viktor Yanukovych, had been overthrown in this extremely bloody coup. Furthermore, in April 2014, Gallup again polled Crimea, and they found that 71.3% of Crimeans viewed as “Mostly positive” the role of Russia there, and 4.0% viewed it as “Mostly negative”; by contrast, only 2.8% viewed the role of the United States there as “Mostly positive,” and a whopping 76.2% viewed it as “Mostly negative.” During the intervening year, Crimeans’ favorability toward America had plunged down to 2.8%, from its year-earlier 6%. Clearly, what Obama had done in Ukraine (his violent coup in Kiev) had antagonized the Crimeans. And, as if that weren’t enough, the 2014 poll provided yet more evidence: “The 500 people that were sampled in Crimea were asked [and this is crucial] ‘Please tell me if you agree or disagree: The results of the referendum on Crimea’s status [whether to rejoin Russia] reflect the views of most people here.’ 82.8% said ‘Agree.’ 6.7% said ‘Disagree.’” In the hearts of the local residents, Crimea was still Russian territory, after an involuntary hiatus of 60 years; and so the Russian Government accepted them back again, into Russia.

Furthermore, this opposition to Ukraine joining NATO wasn’t merely Ukrainian public opinion before Obama’s 2014 coup: Ukraine’s 16 July 1990 basic law and declaration of independence from the Soviet Union swore that Ukraine would NEVER join ANY “military bloc”. Of course, that commitment by the newly independent nation of Ukraine in 1990 was simply ignored by the Obama-stooge regime, up till the present day — including under Biden and now Trump. The imperialism of the U.S. Government is entirely bipartisan, among both Republican billionaires and Democratic billionaires.

In other words: what Obama did was generally successful: it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it changed Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American billionaires’ neoconservative (i.e., U.S.-imperialist) heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow (which is the U.S. Government’s goal there).

Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, that figure had already risen to 42%. America’s press — and academia or public-policy ‘experts’ — have been very effective at managing public opinion, for the benefit of America’s billionaires, such as the controlling owners of firms like Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil.)

Another thing that Max Fisher’s piece of propaganda ignored in its ‘history’ of this war is that (as I had headlined about the matter on 4 November 2019) “The Obama Regime’s Plan to Seize the Russian Naval Base in Crimea”, which included in my article’s documentation a June 2013 RFP (Request For Proposal) from the U.S. Government titled “Renovations to School#05 - Sevastopol”, seeking U.S. contractor(s) to “renovate” that former school near the Russian naval base in Crimea to become suitable for usage by a U.S. Navy base when the February 2014 U.S. coup in Kiev would succeed fully and U.S. warships would thus replace Russia’s warships in Crimea. Fortunately, Russia freed Crimeans from what would otherwise have been the U.S. regime’s rule there before Russia’s naval base would have been stolen by the U.S. imperial regime. So, that’s an important other reason why Russia was determined to enable Crimeans to vote on whether they wanted to be Ukrainians or instead Russians.

Whereas the U.S. Government is the global master of public relations, Russia’s Government is incompetent at that profession. For example, though Putin since 2007 had been warning The West that any further expansion of NATO toward Russia’s borders would pose an unacceptable national-security threat to Russians and would thus not be tolerated, he never said why. What was that national-security threat? But the reason why is simple (perhaps too simple for Putin to say outright): the closer to The Kremlin the U.S. empire gets, the shorter would be the advance-warning-time to The Kremlin of a U.S. missile launched against The Kremlin. Obviously, any such missile that’s a mere 300 miles from The Kremlin (i.e., Russia’s central command) — just five minutes of flight-time away — would be intolerable to Russians. And ONLY one single nation’s borders are THAT close: Ukraine’s border in the Sumy region is only 300 miles away. This is the reason why Putin decided, on 24 February 2022, to launch his invasion against Ukraine — to PREVENT that from EVER being able to happen. (Of course, he also had other reasons, such as to prevent the residents in the far-eastern extremely pro-Russia Donbass region of the former Ukraine from becoming genocided by the U.S.-imposed Ukrainian regime. But Russia’s national security was overwhelmingly the main reason, and Putin had warned The West against that ever since 2007.)

Russia’s Government are dolts when it comes to PR. By contrast, America’s Government has made deceit of the public against the public — mental enslavement of the public — an advanced science, and with the world’s highest-paid practitioners of it. If Max Fisher isn’t yet one of them, he seems to be trying his hardest to become so. He can now say to the billionaires: “Hey, you need the talents that I possess; just look, for example, at those 348,000 views in less than a day!” It’s better than posting a plug for himself on LinkedIn. In America and in its colonies, public opinion is for sale — in these ‘democracies’, if you would call them that.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.