Radio liberty transmission towers, image by Saint-Aniol, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Wikimedia.

Excerpt:

For those working to break through the Kremlin’s information blockade, Russia’s quiet majority is a key target.

Most Russians see on state media a “perverted picture of Russia battling the possible invasion of their own territory — they don’t see their compatriots dying,” said Kiryl Sukhotski, who oversees Russian-language content at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the US Congress-funded media outlet that broadcasts in countries where information is controlled by state authorities.

“That’s where we come in,” Sukhotski said.

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Outlets like RFE/RL have openings across the digital landscape, in spite of Russia’s move to ban Twitter, Facebook and other Western platforms last year.

About a quarter of Russians use VPN services to access blocked sites, according to a Levada Center poll carried out two months after Russia’s invasion.

Searches for such services on Google spiked to record levels in Russia following the invasion, and have remained at their highest rates in over a decade ever since, the search engine’s tracking data shows.

YouTube meanwhile remains one of the few major global sites still accessible, thanks to its huge popularity in Russia and its value in spreading Kremlin propaganda videos.

“YouTube became the television substitute for Russia … the Kremlin fear that if they don’t have YouTube, they won’t be able to control the flow of information to (younger people),” Sukhotski said.

And that allows censored organizations a way in. “I watch YouTube. I watch everything there — I mean everything,” one Moscow resident who passionately opposes the war told CNN, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “These federal channels I never watch,” she said. “I don’t trust a word they say. They lie all the time! You’ve just got to switch on your logic, compare some information and you will see that it’s all a lie.”

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For now, Putin can rely on a citizenry that is generally either supportive of the conflict or too fatigued to proclaim its opposition.

But some onlookers believe the pendulum of public opinion is slowly swinging away from the Kremlin.

Glory to Ukraine!