Any Russian journalist who describes what is happening in Ukraine as either a war or an invasion will go to prison for up to 15 years. But anybody in that country who is in possession of a mobile phone or a computer could have gone on Google Maps and watched the Russian army convoy closing in on Kyiv. 

Videos of residential neighbourhoods in eastern Ukraine being bombed are readily available. More informally, Russians with family or friends abroad can hold conversations over their phones which will provide them with the unmediated truth of what is happening to their “brethren” in Ukraine.

While Russia’s leader talks medieval gibberish about the sacred bond between Ukrainians and the Russian motherland, satellites transmit images of his war crimes which are accessible to anyone with an internet connection. This is surreal. 

A grotesque collision between historic totalitarian mysticism and modern technocratic reality. Which raises the question: is it possible any longer for even the most ruthless tyrant to control the dissemination of information? And if not, what follows from that? 

That kind of domination of popular consciousness is the condition on which dictatorships have relied in the modern age: their use of mass media to manipulate opinion was so spectacularly successful that it was adopted even in democratic countries in times of crisis (like the pandemic).

As recently as a decade ago, any subversion of a sitting dictator involved smuggling papers and forbidden books across borders or dropping leaflets from low-flying planes, both of which were a very dangerous business. Not anymore. 

Perhaps in closed societies which have isolated themselves from global communications like North Korea or in countries so backward that cyber technology is largely unavailable, this total prohibition of debate might still be feasible. But Russia is way beyond that stage of development: it has become embroiled and entangled in world exchanges of both goods and ideas in an irreversible way.

In the international economic processes with which it engages so enthusiastically, it is a big player, notoriously dominating energy supplies and dealing in foreign property with abandon. Shutting down the internet access of its population – or even limiting it in ways that might put politically unacceptable information out of reach, as the Kremlin appears to be attempting to do now – is hardly feasible.

The Russian kleptocrat class cannot be locked out of the free transmission of information that has become the basis for contemporary life and the accumulation of wealth. And it is not just websites and social media which are a threat.

Even if all of the social media purveyors of dangerous information could be blocked, which is not as easy as it sounds (only Facebook has been shut down so far, while access to Twitter has been restricted), there would still be the mobile phones possessed by most of the younger population whose signals are probably impossible to take out. Not, at least, without arousing great resistance and suspicion.

Of course, the leadership can count on an element of self-deception particularly among older Russians who have grown up believing their state-run media to be the guardians of national truth. Generations of faith in the virtue of their country’s leadership cannot easily be eradicated. 

But if Putin’s gang in the Kremlin were absolutely confident about this legacy of trust and their own impregnability, why would they be criminalising dissent in the terrifying way that they are?

Fifteen years imprisonment for using the word “invasion”? Somehow that doesn’t strike me as insouciant belief in the unfailing success of your message. 

Do Putin and his team know that they are perpetrating a lie which can only be sustained in a vacuum? Or are they so deluded that any dissident opinion seems grossly unjust and infuriating? Who knows? Does it matter?

The consequences appear to be much the same either way. Even if the insults and accusations that pour out of the mouths of Lavrov and Putin sound so anachronistic as to be positively quaint, it changes nothing if they actually believe what they are saying – and are in possession of the military hardware and limitless arrogance that is needed to use it. 

And of course, it is a mistake to think that these Russian mystics, steeped in their ancestral incantations, are unaware of the possibilities offered by cyber technology.

 They can step out of the Middle Ages easily enough when it suits their purposes – although their references rarely get beyond the middle of the last century with their talk of Nazis and “nationalists”.

In fact, they have mastered the techniques of cyber crime and are world-beating in their organisation of troll campaigns to counter (generally in crudely transparent ways) any published criticism. The comments below this column – like those of all others attacking their murderous Ukrainian adventures – will certainly be targeted by Moscow’s instantaneous response machine.

So no, they are not naive about the political uses to which the internet can be put. Indeed they have been pretty adept at adapting the old Soviet mind-bending propaganda techniques for modern technology.

 It was depressing to watch Russian expatriate friends of ours in New York City get drawn into the great Putin lie by becoming addicted to Russian websites which churned out endless nonsense depicting Nato as a threat to world peace and an affront to Russian righteousness. (This was going on years before the actual assault on Ukraine had begun.)

Even the reality of their lives in the West – where most of them prospered – could not equip them to resist this message. Some of them actually returned to that great mythic land where they believed their souls must reside, and we dare not contact them now for fear of putting them in danger. 

I sincerely hope that they have found the happiness they believed could only be on offer in the country of their birth. Presumably if they listen only to Putin saying that everything has gone according to plan for the great, invincible Russian army, that might just be possible even when their economy collapses and the chance of any return to the West is ruled out.