(MOSCOW) – The Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is losing the information war he spent years and millions of dollars cultivating among America’s populist right, as the conservative Christian narrative built around his regime collapses under the weight of inconvenient military alliances and a deteriorating economy at home.
The shift was exemplified by American commentator Tucker Carlson, who in 2024 visited a Moscow supermarket to film stocked shelves and cheap food as proof that Russians were living better than Americans. This week the same commentator described Putin as a thug, marking a dramatic rhetorical reversal that signals deeper trouble for Kremlin influence operations targeting the MAGA movement and its media ecosystem.
The first serious crack appeared when North Korean troops began arriving in Kursk. For a significant segment of America’s nationalist right, the image of an Asian communist troop state defending a man supposedly upholding Western Christian civilisation proved impossible to reconcile. Audiences who understood precisely what the North Korean hermit state represents began asking questions that no amount of curated grocery store footage could answer.
If North Korea opened the crack, Iran blew it wide open. Russia and the Islamic Republic have become de facto strategic partners, with Moscow supplying weapons and intelligence while Tehran provides drones. The Islamic Republic, which calls America the great Satan and held American hostages for over eighteen months, stands as far from Western Christian conservatism as possible. No version of that partnership squares with the narrative of Putin as a defender of traditional values, and the influencers who built their careers promoting that image cannot find a way to explain it.
The dictator then made a mistake that sealed the shift for part of his audience. He made Trump look weak. By pushing too hard in negotiations and treating the American leader not as a peer but as someone to be managed and extracted from, Putin created a perception even among Trump supporters that he was not taking Trump seriously. The MAGA audience will question NATO and challenge Ukrainian aid, but it will not watch its leader be outmanoeuvred and disrespected while continuing to defend the foreign government responsible.
The economic reality inside Russia has destroyed any possibility of recreating the propaganda imagery. Fuel rationing is reported across seventeen Russian oblasts. Food prices have risen by 18 percent. Shelves once stocked with Western goods now carry unpopular Chinese imports. The economy is growing at just 0.4 percent, while the budget deficit blew past its annual target in five months.
Gold reserves are estimated to be 71 percent liquidated, and the central bank governor has warned of almost permanent and irreversible economic deterioration. The clean aisles and cheap food that Carlson filmed now belong to a country that no longer exists, if it ever did beyond a carefully stage managed performance.
For Putin the theory of victory was never purely military. It was always partly political, hinging on the idea that Western public opinion would turn and support for Ukraine would become politically toxic. The information operation targeting the American right was critical to constraining United States policy regardless of events on the battlefield. That operation is now working in reverse.
Supporting Ukraine is becoming politically safer for Republican figures, while criticising Putin carries far less risk. The space for America First politicians to blockade aid and push capitulation settlements is closing rapidly, and the Kremlin has neither the money nor the narrative tools left to stop the cascade.
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