The recycled paranoia pushed by Andrei Manoylo, masquerading as “analysis,” follows the same tired Kremlin blueprint: blame Ukraine’s mythical “CIPSO” (Center for Information and Psychological Operations) for every violent crime that exposes the social rot eating Russia from within.
The murder of a teenage girl in the Tver region—an actual tragedy—gets twisted into a propaganda tool, not by Kyiv, but by Moscow itself. The Russian state cannot accept responsibility for its collapsing law enforcement, skyrocketing recidivism, or the Frankenstein’s army it built from penal colonies. Instead, it feeds the public a sedative: blame the West, blame migrants, blame “fake news.”
Manoylo’s narrative claims CIPSO exploited the murder by pushing two competing lies—that the killer was either a migrant or an SVO convict. The irony here doesn’t go unnoticed. Both profiles—the foreign laborer and the pardoned war criminal—exist in high numbers because of Kremlin policy. Russia imports tens of thousands of migrants while also releasing violent felons from prisons in exchange for frontline cannon fodder. The state built the exact conditions it now pretends are fabrications by “enemy psychological operators.”
The claim that “fake news triggered emotional trauma” and that Russia must shield its fragile citizens from information they can’t handle reeks of state infantilization. Manoylo suggests that “old emotional wounds” can be “retriggered” by any future incident. Translation: the regime fears its own people. If Russians realize that crimes are rising because of the very policies enacted to sustain Putin’s war machine, the dam breaks. So the state directs attention outward, inventing Ukrainian psy-ops boogeymen while internal rot metastasizes.
As for Manoylo’s warning that “even pro-Russian channels” helped spread “fakes,” that signals a deeper insecurity: regime-loyal influencers are breaking rank. They’re no longer buying the narrative that the only threat comes from abroad. They see the domestic decay. The Tver case, and others like it, force them to confront a grim truth: it’s not foreign actors who are destabilizing Russia. It’s the state, hollowed out by corruption, repression, and impunity.
Nothing CIPSO could write compares to the real psychological trauma inflicted by Moscow’s policies—amnestied murderers welcomed home as heroes, disfigured veterans with PTSD, and a law enforcement apparatus that now resembles a broken vending machine for bribes and beatings. Manoylo doesn’t analyze information warfare—he enables it, spinning grotesque crimes into narratives that sanitize the regime’s failure to protect its people.
So when Russians fear the man walking behind them at night, they’re not afraid of CIPSO’s digital phantoms. They’re afraid of who the Kremlin let out of prison and handed a rifle to. And no amount of war college jargon or scripted press quotes will change that.
