Alina is 19. She loves fashion, and watching pirated Hollywood movies with her mechanic boyfriend Sergei.
And, like most young people in Russia, she is addicted to her smartphone.
But since February 24, 2022, when President Vladimir Putin sent an invasion force into Ukraine, Alina’s online life has become scarily violent. She is one of the Z Generation.
Where once her pages on VK, the ‘Russian Facebook‘ used by 70 million people, used to feature mostly holiday selfies, now she has a bottomless obsession with conspiracy theories about the war — spread by government-run groups with names like Z For Victory, Ztrength In Truth, REAL Ukraine and Antiterror Z.
She shares and re-posts propaganda about Ukrainian neo-Nazis and child-killers, backed up with warnings of the threat to Russia from shadowy Nato organisations.
Russia’s military-patriotic movement Yunarmiya cadets march during a rehearsal for the Victory Day military parade at Red Square in Moscow in 2017
People…