„The only product that Russia currently produces, apart from war, violence, and crude oil, is propaganda.“ Interview with Psychotherapist Vasilina Orlova

In this interview for INVED.eu, Head Editor Dietmar Pichler speaks with Vasilina Orlova, psychotherapist; Ph.D. in Anthropology (2021); M.A. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling (2025), who has been declared a „foreign agent“ in Russia. They speak about the psychological effects of victim blaming, perpetrator–victim reversal, and failure to render assistance; the campaign demonizing Ukraine; Russian imperialism; and how disinformation helps people avoid the painful process of reconsidering long-held beliefs.

1)
Dr. Orlova, could you introduce your work a little bit more deeply for our readers?

I did extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Siberia in 2016-2019 and studied what we called, following Kathleen Stewart, ordinary affect–a certain unverbalized charge driving daily living. In my work, I argued that the post-Soviet affect in Siberia is that of “cheerful nonchalance”: a specific attitude of dismissal of hardships that helps people survive difficult conditions in Siberia in the absence of infrastructural abundance facilitating daily living. Cheerful nonchalance is present, I am convinced, in how Russians took the sanctions that resulted from the Russian aggression against Ukraine: we observed a similar attitude of nonchalance, or pofigism–indifference to challenges and a conviction that everything will somehow be okay. I have a paper where I illustrate the concept ethnographically, “Cheerful Nonchalance” as an Affective Response to Precarity: Refusing Safety Measures in Eastern Siberia,” out in Slavic Review. With the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, I had to put a pause on my ethnographic projects in Siberia because I lost access to my fieldwork: I condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I understood even back then that I would probably not be able to return to Russia because the Russian government came up with the new unlawful regulations and began sentencing people for speaking out against the war and even for calling the war a “war.” I subsequently became interested in complex layered war trauma, which we contracted, most of us vicariously. I am now working with trauma as a psychotherapist.

2)
Before we go into your expertise to understand the psyche behind the reaction to the war of aggression against Ukraine, I am curious: You have been designated a „Foreign Agent“ by the Russian government. Can you tell us more about that?

The institution of “foreign agent” as a legal and moral category in Russia first pertained to the critics opposing the Putin’s regime from the liberal standpoint. However, lately we’ve seen some of the far-right opposition to Putin labeled as “foreign agents” in Russia. Effectively, the label ceased to be the quality sign of sorts that it began acquiring initially. Every Friday, the government censuring entity called Roskomnadzor has to come up with a new list of the foreign agents, and who gets on the list probably depends on who ordinary citizens think are unorthodox. They tip the state on perceived infractions. I learned that I am a foreign agent from the media. The justification for this decision that I read is that I was labeled as such for speaking against the “special military operation,” as the Russian state calls its ongoing invasion of Ukraine of 2022, which is now in its fifth year, and for “creating a negative image of the Russian Armed Forces.” I was also accused of the dissemination of false information about the policies and decisions of Russian government authorities, the formula that I reject. Saying That Russia attacked Ukraine by crossing the border of a sovereign state with tanks and artillery, the Russian pilot dropped a bomb on the Mariupol drama theater, the Russian army perpetrated Bucha massacre, hit Olenivka prison killing POWs and destroyed Kakhovka dam is not spreading false information, these are the basic facts of the war. Facts contradict the mythology of the Russian state, about the benevolent Russian army, “liberation” of Ukrainian cities from the Ukrainian government, and other Russian propaganda tropes. The Russian law of foreign agents contradicts the Russian Constitution even in The Constitution’s current violated form, and it certainly goes against ethics and elementary reason. The law dictates foreign agents to mark every comment with a warning in all caps that they are a foreign agent, but I will not be a mouthpiece for the Russian state and will not abide by its lawless regulations.

3)
I would like to ask you for your professional opinion about four assumptions that are sometimes discussed regarding the psychological effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. First, victim blaming in order to „justify“ not supporting Ukraine with everything it needs or not supporting it at all. Would you say that the demonization of Ukraine, also by Russian propaganda, makes people feel „better“ about not supporting Ukraine?

The only product that Russia currently produces, apart from war, violence, and crude oil, is propaganda. However, the reason why propaganda works seems to be the world’s lack of desire to recognize that the Russian Federation is an ultra-new state, which appeared on the world’s scene in 1991 and is appropriating the word “Russia.” We hear from Trump and his analogues in Europe that Russia cannot be defeated because Russia thwarted Napoleon and Hitler. However, the states that were coeval to Napoleon and Hitler are the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and those were not the Russian Federation. Those states had different borders, different ideologies, and had different population parameters. The contemporary Russian Federation positions itself as an heir of the cultural capital that does not necessarily belong to it. The strongest part of the Russian propaganda is the myth of the Russian culture as a great humanistic culture that is European in nature but is also interesting for the West because it is manifestly and exotically not European. Another pillar of Russian propaganda is its extreme versatility. Russian propaganda presents different versions of the war to every political strata: it portrays Ukrainians as supporters of American imperialism for the left, while simultaneously denying that Russia has always been a colonial project. I absolutely agree with your assessment that the victim-blaming and demonization of Ukraine play a role, as they provide the opportunity to deny empathy and feel better about the war. Conventions take a lot of time to change, and that includes the convention of the humanist Russians and the nationalist Ukrainians.

4)
The next question is about fearmongering. The Russian verbal attacks against Europe and the constant mentioning of Russia as an „undefeatable military power,“ and in particular nuclear weapons, what does this do to us regarding support for Ukraine?

Unfortunately, the Russian brandishing of nuclear weapons is the strongest factor of making world’s governments think twice before supporting Ukraine. The guiding principle is caution, or, as many would say, fear. On the timelines of history, the European Union is an emerging structure. Europe is not a unified state but a consortium of different nation states, and we have sadly seen that Europe struggles to be an entity even in the face of existential threat, the extreme threat to its values and security. Experts’ imagination seems to be working very well envisioning nuclear apocalypse, but we struggle from the failure of imagination trying to envision the world where Russia is subjugating Ukraine. How would that reshape the West tomorrow? Europe would be constantly threatened from the East. Right parties could be coming to power as MAGA already came to power in the United States. Individual freedoms could become a memory and a feature of the distant past faster than anticipated. We see it happening in the United States. I have no doubt that for some people such a picture could look like fearmongering, but for others, this outcome is the goal. In the event that Russia subjugates Ukraine, Ukraine would be an avant-garde of the Russian Armed Forces in Russia’s further quest to the West. Before the full-scale war, Russia gave NATO the ultimatum to retreat to its 1997 borders. What exactly indicates that this goal was abandoned by Russia? The plans were certainly more ambitious than re-conquering a former colony. The bigger plans include a recharting of the map of the world, splitting it into “spheres of influence” proportional to the ambitions of world dominance. I believe that Russia’s ambitions will ultimately fail because Ukraine mounted such a valiant defense. Ukraine has been able to rally significant international support for its cause and impose a severe economic and military cost on Russia’s aggression. Russia’s demographic situation was already borderline catastrophic before the war. I think we are entering a world where China and India play the first roles, due to their demographic abundance, which is why China and India’s positions on the Russo-Ukrainian war are as important as they were disappointing.

 

5)
Then we have another phenomenon, when people who had or even still have business or political connections to Russia maintain this stance and „justify“ it with their belief in Russian narratives, the demonization of the West and Ukraine, and the „NATO expansion narrative.“ Is it possible that, in order to avoid cognitive dissonance, these people are especially vulnerable to Russian narratives and propaganda?

I agree, it certainly is convenient to pretend to believe the extreme demonization of Ukraine that Russian official channels perpetrate if you have your own vested interests in Russia, economically or relationally. I don’t doubt that people want to believe, for their own peace of mind, in the conspiracy theories of Ukrainian Nazis and biolaboratories that produce combat mosquitoes. The reality however is that Ukraine is one of the very few nation states that is consistently denied its own national pride and whose sovereignty is questioned. For Russia, everything that is Ukrainian is Nazism because Ukrainian identity is perceived as constructed, artificially created, and as a bastardized version of Russian identity. Many genocidal speakers in Russia, including Putin, deny the existence of the Ukrainian nation and ethnicity and consider Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian to be one people, which they are not. One of such speakers, war criminal Igor Girkin (Strelkov) is responsible for downing of a passenger jet Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, is currently jailed in Russia for the critique of the Russian government and Putin from the right. The war criminals’ narratives are helped by the narratives of the useful idiots in the West. For example, Code Pink and other seemingly pro-peace organizations keep propagating the myth of the supposed NATO’s promise to Gorbachev not to expand. No document that NATO promised not to expand exists, and even if it did, the promises made by some officials in the past on behalf of the states that merely emerged at the time are unenforceable, and to abide by them would be undemocratic. Seeing the enormous scope of destruction and violence that Russia unleashed in Ukraine, one could hardly question the states’ desire to join NATO and to protect themselves from a similar destruction and violence. NATO’s reluctance to speedtrack Ukraine’s membership, on the other hand, could eventually result in the weakening of NATO. NATO is currently facing two threats: one external, coming from Russia, and one internal, coming from the United States. Denmark and Canada are both in NATO, and the US, which was once a leader of NATO, is now threatening to overtake Greenland and make Canada the 51st state. The Biden administration and NATO officials suffered from the failure of imagination and underestimated Russia’s danger and Trump’s danger to the established democratic institutions. Reluctance to cover the sky over Ukraine from the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 might ultimately cost NATO its existence.

 

6)
Finally, I would like to ask about the difficulty of letting old beliefs go, for instance in the old left and the peace movement. We saw that the Soviet Union already manipulated and infiltrated these movements. The result is that we have movements in the West and large parts of society that for decades believed that NATO is evil, the West is to blame, and Moscow seeks peace. How hard is it to let such beliefs go and face reality? Is it really comparable to the realization process that a relationship is over?

We have seen consistently from the Western left the shortage of critical thinking regarding the Soviet Union and now Russia. In one Soviet-time memoir saved by the Memorial society in Moscow, I read the tale about a Finnish communist who crossed the border into the Soviet Union. He was immediately apprehended and was about to be sent to the GULAG. In despair, he asked the author of the memoir if he was right to understand that the bourgeois newspapers wrote the truth about the Soviet Union. The author of the memoir replied, “You will now see everything for yourself.” Unless we see the improvement of the left and peace movements’ ability to begin thinking critically about Russia as an imperial, colonial genocidal project, I am afraid that eventually, they will “see everything for themselves,” but they won’t like it. Moscow does not seek peace: Moscow sticks to the same wish list of demands, that includes Ukraine giving up the land Russia did not even manage to occupy. Moscow asks to give up the strongholds that could be one of the last barriers to Moscow reaching Kyiv, and Moscow wants to overtake these strongholds without a fight using the Trump administration as its leverage. Such an absurd demand should have never been considered seriously, and yet we see Trump trying to peddle this demand on behalf of Russia. Moscow does not seek peace because Moscow did not relinquish its war aims. The most Russia could seek right now is a pause from several months to several years to replenish its military capabilities, but we don’t even see indications that it is ready to seek that temporary truce. Parting with preconceived notions is hard, but Russia is an increasingly militarized undemocratic state bent on subjugating Ukraine. Russia is spawning torture chambers across occupied territories of Ukraine. Russia deports Ukrainian children to Russia and brings them up as Russians, which is one of the hallmarks of genocide. I really don’t know what else people need to see to wake up to reality. I guess you could compare the process of coming to terms with this reality to the individual drama of facing an end to a relationship imagined to be a prospect to the future. However, it’s worth remembering that Russia already did in Chechnya and Syria what Russia is doing to Ukraine now. The methods of torture are being taught as other skills; now, “Chechen veterans” pass the torture methods down to the younger Russian criminals now roaming Ukraine. The Russian Armed Forces are turning streets and houses of Ukrainian cities and villages into massive crime scenes. Conventions need to be adjusted. Perhaps fewer Tchaikovsky’s symphonies and Dostroyevsky’s novels need to be sold by Western creatives to the Western audiences.

 

7)
Are there any phenomena regarding these issues that I missed and that would be interesting to take a deeper look at?

I think you covered a wide ground. Some other things to consider include prevalence and the use of social media in the war. Social media networks have a capacity to make ordinary citizens combatants or sponsors of the war effort. Another aspect is how the ways war is fought are being changed because of the Russian war against Ukraine. We have observed an increased use of drones that reshaped the war. Now Iranian-Russian Shahed-Geran’ drones terrorize the countries of the Gulf–a development that few foresaw. The world needed to deal with the threat that Russia posed more seriously in 2014 and 2022. The next best time is now. The measures should include covering the sky over Ukraine, beginning with its Western areas and gradually expanding over the entirety of the country. Instead, we saw shameful displays of NATO forces accompanying Russian drones back into Ukraine when Russian drones crossed into NATO territory. The next step that needs to occur is putting NATO boots on the ground in Ukraine. Instead, we see expectations from the Western leaders that Russia needs to approve this step, which will never happen. Ukraine needs to be provided with military and economic assistance that includes manpower. Not because Ukraine is running out of manpower but because Ukraine cannot defend NATO alone, and the “most powerful military alliance in history” cannot see the war unfolding at its threshold where civilians suffer and do nothing about it; it’s shameful. This is the reality of the situation, and the sooner we accept it and begin moving forward, the better. A lot of psychological changes need to be made.