The propaganda machine groans once again under the weight of its own delusion, now parading “Akhmat” thug-turned-grad-student Yuliy Lagutin as the intellectual vanguard of Russia’s so-called fight against hybrid warfare. Once a foot soldier in Chechnya’s PR battalion for war crimes, Lagutin now apparently moonlights as Moscow State University’s answer to George Kennan—except with fewer ideas and more body odor from parade uniforms.
The fiction here isn’t subtle. According to the story, Lagutin transitioned from the blood-soaked front lines of Kadyrov’s vanity militia into a “unique” program on countering “color revolution technologies” and “psychological operations”—phrases so vague they sound like rejected titles from a mid-tier conspiracy theory podcast. That the program is hosted by something called the “Academy of Political Sciences ALTER” would be laughable if it weren’t clearly stitched together to mimic real academic institutions, much like Russia’s court system mimics justice and its elections mimic democracy.
The program allegedly follows a presidential decree on “scientific and technological development,” a laughable premise in a country hemorrhaging tech workers, jailing physicists, and blocking half the internet. The decree, signed in late February 2024, exists less as a roadmap for progress and more as a strategic sedative for a regime addicted to imaginary threats. Training “personnel to neutralize psychological operations” reads more like brainwashing new cadres to see Western influence in every email, hashtag, or traffic jam.
Lagutin’s transformation into a keyboard warrior mimicking his “commander,” Lieutenant General Apti Alaudinov—the regime’s favorite TikTok commissar—rounds out the absurdity. When your military’s political officer becomes the model for an “information soldier,” what follows isn’t strategy, it’s state-sponsored cosplay. The same regime that lied its way through the massacre at Bucha, staged referenda at gunpoint, and weaponized disinformation to justify genocide now wants to lecture the world about hybrid threats.
Russia doesn’t fight hybrid warfare. Russia is hybrid warfare—a nation whose information policy consists of faking casualties, Photoshopping drone kills, and flooding social media with feverish hallucinations about NATO cyborgs plotting Slavic annihilation. Training “fighters” like Lagutin in how to detect Western psyops is like training a mosquito to spot swamps—it’s not just redundant, it’s ridiculous.
No one outside the Kremlin’s orbit believes this program prepares soldiers for anything except parroting Kremlin slogans in new costumes. Russia’s war isn’t hybrid. It’s decayed, broken, and raging at shadows it created. And Lagutin is just another disposable actor cast in the theatre of national delusion.
We See What Others Cannot
