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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

When Scepticism Becomes Propaganda

Joseph Dillard, Russian Disinformation, and the Selective Application of Critical Thinking

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

There is a certain kind of political scepticism that looks intellectually impressive until one examines how it is actually practised. It questions Western governments, challenges mainstream media narratives, exposes institutional hypocrisy, and insists that official accounts should never be accepted uncritically. These are, in themselves, perfectly legitimate intellectual activities. Indeed, they are indispensable to any serious critical inquiry.

But what happens when scepticism is applied selectively? What happens when allegations damaging to Western governments and their allies are accepted with little scrutiny, while contradictory information is dismissed or ignored? At what point does critical thinking cease to be an instrument of independent judgment and become an instrument of ideological confirmation?

A recent intervention by Joseph Dillard provides an instructive example.

Dillard circulated a report on Facebook from the Russian state-funded broadcaster RT, claiming that the Ukrainian government operates a nationwide network of secret torture chambers and concentration camps, generating an estimated $7.2 billion annually through ransom payments extracted from detainees. His accompanying comment was characteristically suggestive:

"Could it possibly be, Mildred, that we have been lied to by our own governments?"

The implication is unmistakable. Perhaps the Western public has been deceived about the nature of the Ukrainian government. Perhaps the supposedly democratic regime supported by Western governments is actually operating something resembling a Nazi concentration camp system. Perhaps the entire Western narrative about the war in Ukraine is built on deception.

These are serious allegations. They deserve serious investigation. But that is precisely what Dillard's presentation fails to provide.

The problem is not that he questions the Ukrainian government. The problem is that he appears willing to accept an extraordinary allegation from an extraordinarily interested source without applying the same critical standards he routinely demands of Western institutions.

This is not scepticism. It is confirmation bias dressed up as political courage.

1. The Anatomy of an Extraordinary Allegation

The RT article, published on November 7, 2026, attributes its sensational claims to Ukrainian parliamentarian Aleksandr Dubinsky, who is currently being held in pretrial detention on suspicion of treason and cooperation with Russian military intelligence. Dubinsky denies the accusations and claims that he is being politically persecuted.

According to his account, Ukraine supposedly operates more than 1,000 secret detention facilities, each containing between 30 and 40 people. Detainees are allegedly forced to pay approximately $15,000 for their release. Multiplying these figures produces an estimated $600 million in monthly revenue, or $7.2 billion annually.

The arithmetic is elementary. The evidentiary foundation is missing.

There is no independently established inventory of 1,000 facilities, no verified count of 40,000 detainees, no documented average ransom payment of $15,000, and no financial investigation establishing a $7.2 billion revenue stream. Nor does the article produce the alleged joint briefing by Ukraine's Security Service, State Bureau of Investigation and National Police that supposedly supplied the underlying figures.

Even the calculation itself contains an extraordinary assumption: that the same number of detainees is released and replaced every month, generating another $600 million in ransom payments. No evidence is offered for this turnover.

The figure of $7.2 billion is therefore not the result of an investigation. It is the result of multiplying unverified assertions and presenting the product as an economic fact.

Yet the headline does not say that a controversial politician has made an unverified allegation. It announces that Zelensky's torture chambers rake in billions. The distinction between allegation and established fact has effectively disappeared.

That transformation is central to propaganda: a claim acquires the appearance of factual authority through repetition, sensational presentation and the selective inclusion of details that make it sound plausible.

2. The Real Incident Behind the Propaganda

As is often the case with disinformation, the story did not emerge from nothing. There was a real incident near Kyiv that deserved investigation.

On November 2, 2026, a confrontation took place outside a building used by Ukraine's National Guard in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, near Kyiv. The premises were associated with the First Azov Corps and were being used as a temporary accommodation and processing facility for military personnel, including men who had gone absent without leave.

A crowd gathered after allegations circulated on social media that dozens of men were being illegally detained, tortured and prevented from receiving medical assistance. Four servicemen were found to have injuries and were taken for medical examination. The incident prompted criminal proceedings and an internal investigation.

These are not trivial matters. The possibility that military personnel were subjected to unlawful punishment, physical abuse or coercion deserves independent scrutiny. Ukraine's wartime mobilization system has generated genuine human-rights concerns, including allegations of forced recruitment and mistreatment.

But the subsequent investigation of this particular incident also exposed serious distortions in the original online narrative.

The Kyiv Independent's fact-check, published on November 6, established that a widely circulated photograph of a supposedly imprisoned 14-year-old boy was misleading. The boy had not been held in the facility. He had arrived with the crowd and injured himself falling from a fence. Reports of 40 hostages and a death inside the building were also unsupported.

The Ukrainian authorities denied that the premises constituted a torture chamber, while acknowledging the presence of injured servicemen and promising an investigation. The precise circumstances of their injuries remained a legitimate subject of inquiry.

This is the distinction that responsible journalism must preserve: a real incident, real injuries and legitimate questions about military conduct do not establish the existence of a nationwide system of secret concentration camps.

And they certainly do not establish a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise.

The RT report takes a localized and still partly unresolved incident and uses it as the launching pad for a much larger narrative about the Ukrainian state. The transition from one to the other is accomplished not through evidence but through insinuation.

3. The Political Biography of the Messenger

The identity of the person making the allegation matters, although it does not settle the question of its truth.

Aleksandr Dubinsky is not an independent human-rights investigator who has uncovered a secret criminal network. He is a Ukrainian politician who has been detained since November 2023 on suspicion of treason and cooperation with Russian military intelligence. He denies the charges and describes himself as a victim of political persecution.

His circumstances do not automatically invalidate his statements. Political prisoners can expose genuine abuses, and governments can use treason accusations to silence opponents. An intellectually honest assessment must leave both possibilities open.

But Dubinsky's political position and circumstances make independent corroboration particularly important. His allegations cannot simply be treated as an authoritative account of Ukrainian government policy.

The same applies to RT.

RT is not an independent international news organization operating at arm's length from the Russian state. It is a Russian state-funded broadcaster whose editorial output has long served Moscow's geopolitical communication interests. This does not mean that everything it publishes is false. It means that its claims, especially those concerning Russia's principal military adversary, require careful verification.

There is something remarkable about Dillard's apparent willingness to overlook this elementary consideration.

He is suspicious of Western governments because they have political interests. Yet the Russian government has interests too. It is engaged in a war against Ukraine, has an obvious incentive to undermine the legitimacy of the Ukrainian government, and benefits politically from portraying its adversary as a Nazi regime.

Why should Russian state media receive the benefit of the doubt that Western media supposedly do not deserve?

A critical thinker should begin by asking precisely the same questions of both sides: Who is making this claim? What evidence is offered? Can it be independently verified? What alternative explanations exist? What information would count against the claim?

Dillard's presentation offers no indication that he has applied this procedure.

4. The Nazi Analogy as a Political Weapon

The most inflammatory element of the RT story is its invocation of Nazi concentration camps.

Dubinsky is quoted as comparing the alleged Ukrainian detention system with Nazi camps, supposedly designed to generate profits. The headline itself uses the expression "Nazi-style torture chambers."

This is not simply an unfortunate historical analogy. It performs an important ideological function.

The Russian government's justification for its invasion of Ukraine has repeatedly relied on the alleged need to denazify the country. The association of the Ukrainian government, its military formations and its president with Nazism is therefore not an incidental feature of Russian political messaging. It is part of a broader legitimizing narrative.

Ukraine's history does include far-right movements, and the Azov formation originated in an environment that included extremist nationalist elements. These historical facts should not be concealed or whitewashed. But the existence of far-right elements within Ukrainian society does not establish that the Ukrainian state is a Nazi regime.

Nor does the presence of a military formation with a controversial history prove that every allegation made about its activities is true.

Most importantly, the historical comparison with Nazi concentration camps requires a standard of evidence vastly higher than the one provided here. The Nazi camp system was an extensive machinery of state persecution, forced labour, mass murder and extermination. To invoke it in connection with an unverified allegation about an individual Ukrainian military facility is to substitute emotional association for historical analysis.

The effect is predictable. Once the word Nazi has entered the discussion, the reader is encouraged to interpret every subsequent allegation through that association.

The distinction between an investigated incident of possible military abuse and a supposed state-sponsored extermination system becomes blurred.

This is propaganda through historical inflation: an allegation is made to carry the moral weight of a historical atrocity without supplying the evidence needed to justify the comparison.

5. The Selective Scepticism of Western Critics

Here we arrive at the more interesting issue: not the credibility of RT, but the intellectual habits of those who circulate its material.

Dillard's rhetorical question about being lied to by our own governments is hardly unreasonable in isolation. Governments do lie. They conceal inconvenient information, manipulate public opinion, exaggerate threats and selectively release intelligence. The Iraq War provides an obvious example. Western governments have also been inconsistent in their application of international law and human-rights principles.

There is no shortage of material for a genuinely critical examination of Western foreign policy.

But the fact that Western governments have lied does not make Russian government claims true. It does not establish the accuracy of Dubinsky's calculations. It does not turn an unverified allegation into a documented fact.

This is a basic logical distinction, yet it is repeatedly violated in geopolitical commentary.

The reasoning often follows a familiar pattern:

1. Western governments have deceived their populations in the past.
2. Western media are influenced by political and institutional interests.
3. Therefore, information supplied by Western adversaries deserves special consideration.
4. Allegations against Western-supported governments are consequently treated as revelations rather than claims requiring verification.

The fourth step does not follow from the first three.

Indeed, it reproduces precisely the kind of intellectual dependence that scepticism is supposed to overcome. Instead of accepting the Western narrative uncritically, the commentator adopts an opposing narrative uncritically.

The direction of allegiance changes, but the underlying epistemological weakness remains.

A person can be fiercely anti-establishment and still be intellectually conformist. One can reject the consensus of Washington, London and Brussels only to become entirely dependent on the preferred narratives of Moscow, Beijing or Tehran.

Contrarianism is not independence of thought. It is merely disagreement with a particular consensus.

And disagreement, however fashionable or courageous it may appear, is not evidence.

6. What Genuine Scepticism Would Require

A genuinely sceptical response to the Kyiv incident would have been considerably more interesting than the one Dillard chose to circulate.

It would begin by acknowledging that wartime Ukraine has serious institutional problems. Forced mobilization, arbitrary detention, mistreatment of military personnel and corruption deserve scrutiny. The fact that Russia exploits these issues for propaganda does not make the underlying problems disappear.

It would then distinguish between what is established, what is alleged and what remains unknown.

The presence of a military facility is established. The presence of injured servicemen is established. The circumstances of their injuries require investigation. Allegations of systematic torture and extortion remain unproven. The supposed network of 1,000 facilities and its $7.2 billion annual revenue have no credible evidentiary foundation in the RT report.

It would also investigate the conduct of the Russian state and Russian military institutions with comparable seriousness. Russia's own record of detention, torture and abuse in occupied Ukrainian territory is extensively documented by international human-rights organizations and United Nations investigators. Such evidence should not be ignored merely because it complicates an anti-Western narrative.

Symmetrical scepticism does not mean pretending that all parties are equally culpable. It means applying the same standards of evidence to everyone while allowing the evidence to establish differences in responsibility.

That is a crucial distinction.

A sceptic should be prepared to discover that Ukraine has committed abuses, that Western governments have concealed inconvenient facts, and that Russian accounts sometimes contain genuine information. But the same sceptic must also be prepared to discover that a sensational Russian allegation is fabricated, exaggerated or deliberately distorted.

Otherwise, scepticism has become a fixed political orientation rather than an open method of inquiry.

7. The Integral Irony: When the Critical Mind Becomes Its Own Blind Spot

There is a particularly interesting contradiction here when viewed from the perspective of Integral Theory and its aspiration to transcend partial worldviews.

Integral approaches frequently emphasize the importance of recognizing perspectives, examining assumptions and moving beyond one-sided interpretations. They invite us to consider multiple dimensions of reality rather than becoming trapped within a single ideological framework.

Yet the very people who advocate such intellectual breadth can become remarkably one-sided when political identity enters the picture.

Dillard's example illustrates this problem. The declared intention is to challenge Western ideological conformity. But the practical result is a different form of conformity: the automatic elevation of information that undermines the Western position, irrespective of its evidentiary quality.

This is not a higher synthesis of perspectives. It is a reversal of allegiance.

An integral approach to geopolitics would have to include at least four dimensions of analysis:

• Empirical: What actually happened? What is independently documented?
• Interpretive: How do the different parties understand and describe the events?
• Institutional: What political, military and media interests shape the available information?
• Ethical: What standards of accountability should apply regardless of national allegiance?

The RT story fails particularly badly at the empirical level. Dillard's apparent endorsement fails at the methodological level because it does not adequately interrogate the source, the figures or the assumptions underlying the allegation.

One cannot compensate for a lack of empirical rigor by invoking a broader political perspective.

Nor does an integral vocabulary magically transform ideological selectivity into intellectual sophistication.

The most important test of critical thinking is not whether one can expose the biases of one's opponents. It is whether one can recognize the biases that operate within one's own preferred worldview.

That is a much more demanding exercise.

8. The Difference Between Asking Questions and Manufacturing Suspicion

Dillard's rhetorical question deserves one final consideration:

"Could it possibly be, Mildred, that we have been lied to by our own governments?"

Of course it is possible. But the question is designed to do more than invite investigation. It invites the reader to accept a particular suspicion before the evidence has been examined.

This is an important distinction between genuine inquiry and insinuation.

A genuine question opens up a field of investigation. An insinuating question directs the reader towards a predetermined conclusion while preserving the appearance of intellectual independence.

The reader is not explicitly told that the Western account of the Ukraine war is false. Instead, a sensational Russian report is placed before the reader, accompanied by a knowing suggestion that perhaps everything we have been told is a lie.

The burden of proof is quietly reversed. Rather than demonstrating that the allegation is true, the commentator invites us to suspect that it might be true because our own governments have lied before.

This is an especially effective rhetorical technique because it exploits a legitimate virtue: distrust of authority. The reader feels intellectually independent precisely when being guided towards another authority's preferred interpretation.

The result is a peculiar form of epistemological dependency disguised as emancipation.

Conclusion: Scepticism Must Cut Both Ways

There is nothing wrong with questioning Ukraine's government. There is nothing wrong with criticizing Western support for Ukraine. There is nothing wrong with investigating the conduct of the Azov formation, the coercive practices of Ukrainian military recruitment, or allegations of unlawful detention and torture.

On the contrary, these subjects deserve serious and sustained attention.

But the RT story about a $7.2 billion Ukrainian torture industry does not provide the evidence necessary to establish its central allegations. It takes a real but still partly unresolved incident, adds politically convenient claims from a controversial politician, performs some elementary multiplication, and wraps the result in Nazi imagery.

Joseph Dillard's contribution is to circulate this material while framing it as an occasion to question Western government narratives.

That is a rather disappointing understanding of critical thinking.

If we are to distrust official narratives, we must distrust Russian official narratives as well. If we demand evidence from Western journalists, we must demand it from RT. If we scrutinize Ukrainian political propaganda, we must scrutinize Russian political propaganda. And if we are prepared to recognize the crimes and hypocrisies of our own political allies, we must be equally prepared to recognize those of our ideological sympathizers.

Otherwise, we are not examining political reality. We are merely selecting the version of reality that confirms our prior commitments.

The ultimate irony is that the person who prides himself on seeing through the illusions of mainstream Western opinion may be particularly vulnerable to the illusions produced by its geopolitical adversaries.

The opposite of propaganda is not counter-propaganda. It is independent judgment.

And independent judgment requires something more difficult than distrusting the people we disagree with: it requires being willing to distrust the people we agree with.

That is where genuine scepticism begins.

Sources and further reading

1. RT, Zelensky's Nazi-style 'torture chambers' rake in billions - MP, November 7, 2026.

2. The Kyiv Independent, Fact check: How clashes over fake hostages near Kyiv fueled Russian disinfo blitz, November 6, 2026.

3. The Kyiv Independent, What really happened during the clash at a National Guard facility near Kyiv?, November 2026.

4. Hromadske, Clashes erupt outside Ukrainian National Guard facility near Kyiv amid abuse allegations, November 2026. hromadske

5. Ukrainska Pravda, What happened in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, and what do we know about those who were injured?, November 4, 2026.