THEY can be sophisticated peers who became friends, first met at an idealistic conference in Kiev. They can be rough-diamond security guards, former military, who let you into your Glasgow music studio every day. They can be lusty vintners, the sons of immigrants to Australia, who still proudly declaim their birth identity at dinner parties.

You realise you know quite a few Ukranians in your life – that they’ve been part of that era of post-communist scattering and EU opening that have brought the historic diversity of the wider Europe to your front door (or wine glass). You’ve noticed their eye rolls whenever Putin or Russians are mentioned but you’ve never gone much further into their dark hints about war, losses, the reasons they’ve ended up here.

And now, as Putin’s war machine sweeps across their territory, you feel the outrage and despair of these friends and acquaintances. A text comes from Kiev and the sender apologises that they can’t say too much about what’s happening: who might be listening?

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But it’s the smartphone footage – the violation of helicopters, fighters and missiles roiling over comfortable suburban mansions, or the plumes of smoke going up behind Kiev’s beautiful skyline – that induces deep sadness in you on their behalf. Maybe even some disgust.

Who are these dictators who use force to smash the webs of connection, information and comfort that constitute a modern life? Webs that the Ukranians you know also enjoy and strive for?

That’s your first feeling – brutal warriors attacking complex modernity. Bastards! But the complications start when you consider that these brutal warriors are also deploying complex modernity themselves.

On Thursday night, Channel 4 News’s Lindsey Hilsum noted the consequences of a deep failure. The Biden administration had been trying to play Putin at his own information game over the last few weeks. They’d loudly shared their intelligence about Russian manoeuvres and intent across all channels, trying to seize the frame of discussion, exposing them to the world.

Yet, Hilsum wondered, why hadn’t the Russians gone and completely disabled Ukrainian communications networks, in their infrastructure attacks? It turns out that all this media over-reporting and omnivalence serves Putin’s purposes perfectly – which is to let the world see the sheer might and spectacle of Russian military force.

“Analysts say that Russia meddles in elections and referenda around the world,” wrote Putin’s aide Vladislav Surkov in 2019. “In reality, things are much more serious: Russia meddles with their brains, and they don’t know what to do with this altered state of mind.”

It’s a chilling quote. Early on in this crisis, Putin was heard smirking “the plan is being followed”. It’s quite clear that part of this plan is reality distortion.

For example, his pocketed oligarchs smeared London and Westminster with donations, luxury, investment and favours. We’re used to Westminster politicians existing in disgrace – but there is now so much “kompromat” of Russian influence over British politicians and public figures (mostly rightists and Tories but also beyond) that it just deepens our disdain for elected representatives. A cracked democracy, unsteady in the face of Russian advance into Europe.

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It’s important not to over-estimate their bamboozling powers. Clearly, Russian media strategists thought that encouraging Scottish independence would fatally damage the UK. It turned out that Brexit (which they manifestly interfered in) was far more effective at that. And unfortunately for Putin’s stated ambitions towards a Eurasian zone from Lisbon to Siberia, an indy Scotland would be much more likely to re-inforce the legitimacy of the EU, than begin to unravel it.

BEFORE the penny dropped, I enjoyed a few ostentatiously softball interviews with Russia Today at the height of indy campaigning. Then I stopped replying to Valentina’s calls … something Alex Salmond should have done a long time ago. Salmond is part of the reality distortion of RT, along with financial anarchists such as Max Keiser and other overly “edgy”, anti-elitist programming. This is “meddling with your brain”, indeed. He’s right to withdraw his show.

Now, should we try to meddle with Russian brains? Or at least presume that among the 144 million of the Russian Federation, there will be many feeling miserable and oppressed by Putin’s rule and who might be susceptible to a new story?

In preparing for an appearance on Thursday’s Debate Night on BBC Scotland, I got thoroughly depressed by the battle-frame of the story –Russia’s might, Ukraine’s weakness, Europe and the US’s unwillingness to intervene. The following line is even more crushing – that a victory for Putin may embolden China to incorporate Taiwan as easily. If this was quickly achieved, it would leave the liberal west utterly demoralised and confused.

I think this is another ambition of super-smart, cleverly advised oligarchs everywhere: to shred the motivation and spirit of citizens, as they watch arbitrary power being exercised at will. Shrugging “well, what can you do?” is a sheer gift to the autocrats.

So what can you do? I was cheered by an article in Time magazine by the Ukrainian writer Peter Pomerantsev, which suggested one route which I ended up talking about on the Beeb. When, asks Pomerantsev, did we stop “listening to and talking to the Russian people”? He reminds us that even in the narrowcast age of Cold War television, Thatcher went on Soviet talk shows and crushed their presenters.

How can we use social media to tunnel through to everyday Russians, holding out a possibility for existence that is much more attractive than the fear-and-control reality under Putin –“shorn of its cycles of oppression and lashing out”, as Pomerantsev puts it?

On the show, I mentioned how the opposition leader Alexei Navalny made a YouTube documentary expose of Putin’s pleasure palace. The film got hundreds of millions of views in the country. I also recalled my late 2020 interview with Nadya Tolokonnikova from Pussy Riot (as part of my R&D consultancy for Unboxed).

Nadya urged the audience to realise just how much creative frustration lurked among the younger generations of Russia. Indeed, Pomerantsev wonders if funds should be created to support “artists, academics, film-makers … who already do a great job of excavating the Russian unconscious.”

One caveat. The first communist walls may have fallen in the late 1980s partly because of the glittering attractions of a consumerist, freedom-declaiming west. Now, even if we do manage to be “listening to and talking to” Russian citizens, through the wonders of encrypted and decentralised media, what are we offering them? Is it our current Caligularity of clownish, corrupted leaders (and the democratic majorities that install them) that we think they should be yearning for?

The left theorist Paul Mason noted yesterday, informed by his recent discussions with Ukranian labour movement and civil society folk, that the only way to defend and extend democracy is to deepen democracy. We know the agenda of a deep democracy, he says: “For the ecosystem to survive we have to decarbonise, redistribute wealth, take collective (state, common or mutual) control of the economy — and guarantee every citizen maximum individual freedom.”

Yet the Russian people may have to see us toppling our own oligarchies, in the name of this agenda – whether Etonians or corporate heads – before they might consider toppling their own (or clearing their heads of fantasies of Russian supremacy). Don’t we still have the possibility of showing this better way forward for society and the planet, with the spectacle of a progressively achieved Scottish independence?

Better a Scottish display of democratic, left-green possibilities, than rattling your tiny cutlass to support a Nato we should certainly be maintaining some degree of distance from …which is an intra-Nat discussion for another day. Meanwhile, solidarity with Ukraine. But let’s keep thinking about the root causes of change, even as the fog of war enshrouds us.