Oleg Magdych was driving supplies to Ukrainian troops in the eastern Donetsk region three years ago, on February 24, 2022. He remembers stopping for gas at 5 a.m. That’s when he heard it: Russian shelling in three different directions.
The invasion had begun.
The sound of those exploding shells confirmed the nondenominational Ukrainian pastor’s fear: The Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s borders—more than 100,000 soldiers amassed to the north and east—was not just a show of strength and a negotiating tactic by Russian president Vladimir Putin, but indeed a harbinger of assault on Ukraine.
If his ears didn’t convince him, Magdych also saw the invasion with his eyes. Russian planes came out of the sky to drop bombs on the Ukrainian military outpost a mile away.
Magdych immediately turned around and went back to Kyiv to evacuate his family and join the fight to protect the capital, he told Christianity Today. He has continued working to support the defense of his country for the past three years as a chaplain and commander of a volunteer battalion that specializes in medical evacuations.
He also joined the fight on social media, trying to post enough to counter Russian lies about the war.
“They have special divisions within their army whose job is to get online and make comments on social media,” Magdych said. “It’s hard to beat that.”
In the past three years, Magdych has witnessed the rising tide of Kremlin propaganda. He’s seen American evangelicals and conservative journalists repeat as facts things he knows are not true. Now he’s even seen the president of the United States taken in by the falsehoods.
Magdych was sitting in a bunker on the frontlines when he read Donald Trump’s social media post blaming Ukraine for starting the war—as if Ukraine had somehow caused its own invasion.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Magdych said. “At first I thought it was a prank post that I read. But then I saw the same news in different sources.”
Fighting the war is hard enough, Magych said. But when even your allies repeat your enemy’s lies, what hope is there for victory?
On Monday, the Trump administration’s shift went further than social media statements, when the United States broke with European allies and voted against a United Nations resolution on responsibility for the war. The UN wanted to state clearly that Russia was the aggressor. The US voted against the affirmation of the fact, joining with North Korea, Belarus, and Russia to oppose the resolution.
Trump’s decision to blame Ukraine marks a major propaganda victory for Putin. The Kremlin has been trying to reframe the nature and origin of the war since day one.
At a March 2022 rally in Moscow, Putin claimed the invasion was actually a “special operation” designed to “save people from genocide.” During an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson last February, he repeated the lies, making up facts to justify an invasion of a sovereign nation.
In Russia, the propaganda is enforced by law. Russians who use the term war instead of special operation face up to 15 years in prison.
Some Russians have refused to accept this. More than 15,000 people are in prison for protesting the war. Many more people have fled the country: between a few hundred thousands and 1 million, according to some estimates.
Some, like Andre Furmanov, have continued to speak about the injustice of the war and refused to accept Putin’s version of events. Furmanov regularly invites people into his home to discuss Kremlin spin.
“I’ve said enough publicly and privately to go to jail for 15 years,” Furmanov said. “I’m honestly overwhelmed, shocked, and grateful to God that I haven’t gone to jail. Yet.”
Furmanov was working on a sermon when he read Trump’s repetition of the lie about the start of the war. He told CT he had the same reaction as when he heard about Russia’s illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014: He thought it was a stupid joke.
To him, all this official lying feels like the old Soviet Union coming back. He grew up under Communism and served in the Russian army in the late 1980s. He said he would find opportunities to tune in to foreign radio broadcasts on his military receiver and just be amazed at the stark contrast in narratives.
The Soviet media portrayed President Ronald Reagan as a “belligerent, war-hungry leader intent on escalating the arms race and pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war,” he said. Western media, on the other hand, would emphasize the diplomatic aims of Reagan’s presidency.
“I always sensed that something was wrong with my country,” he said, “but nobody ever told me the truth.”
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War confirmed the truth for him. The Russian government was lying; Western journalists could be trusted.
Furmanov said the rhetoric has changed since the Soviet days. Putin claims he is protecting Christendom from the West’s moral decline, stopping NATO encroachment, and preventing the genocide of ethnic Russians. But the quest for complete control—even control over the truth—is very familiar.
Putin secured his fifth term in office last year, extending his presidency until at least 2030. Most of his political opponents are either scattered or dead. The president seems convinced he can say whatever he wants without fear of anyone in Russia contradicting him with the facts.
And now the president of the United States will say what Putin says, too.
Trump, who has repeatedly praised Putin, falsely labeled Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator without elections.” When asked during a press conference last week if Putin was a dictator, Trump refused to use the same label for the Russian leader, insisting, “I don’t use those words lightly.”
Furmanov said he wants Americans to understand how shocking that is.
“The vocabulary of the US president and the propagandists of Russian federal TV channels have become practically indistinguishable,” he wrote on social media.
Trump’s rhetoric seems as if it has had an impact, too. American conservatives used to be skeptical of Putin and Russia. They used to support Ukraine. In 2022, a few months after the war began, a little more than 40 percent of Republicans said the US was providing too much military assistance. According to a Gallup poll last December, skepticism has increased dramatically. Now, 67 percent of Republicans believe the US is doing too much for Ukraine.
Furmanov and Magdych said the lies the Kremlin puts out have taken their toll. The two of them have both tried to debunk many, many falsehoods: Ukraine’s president prevented elections; US aid to Ukraine far surpassed the amount contributed by Europe; Ukraine lost $100 billion of American money; and more.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has seldom mentioned well-documented Russian atrocities. More than 14,000 Ukrainians died during Russia’s first invasion in 2014, and an additional 46,000 have died since 2022. That number includes 12,000 civilians. Russians have raped, tortured, and intentionally targeted civilians.
Russian forces have also kidnapped an estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children.
Magdych doesn’t know how the war will end, but he’s worried about what happens to his family and his church if negotiations leave Russia with the upper hand.
Will Russia draft his son into the military to invade other European countries? Will Kremlin officials target his wife, a psychologist, for her work with Ukrainian veterans? Will they shut down his church since it’s evangelical and not Russian Orthodox?
“You may say it’s an exaggeration,” Magdych said. “But that’s exactly what happens in every occupied village and city the [Russians] are demolishing.”
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