Not necessarily behind all of it, they just learned to push the right buttons and tilt the scale. They just fuel wedges, disatisfactions, and divisions that already exist, they learned that amplifying them is making democracies ungovernable. So they keep doing it because, unfortunately, it's absurdly effective.
Only blaming Russia for all of it is just another way they win this propaganda/hybrid warfare, you don't take seriously the grievances of the "other side" because you feel it's all just fueled by Russia. It isn't, those grievances and problems are real, they've just been amplified and twisted, and by getting worn down of how much vitriol is spewed from whatever is the "other side" to you it works. It makes you emotionally tired and wanting to fight back by spewing your own vitriol, there's no more conversation, only stupid discourse, the division only grows from there.
The vitriol and counter-vitriol definitely produces an escalating spiral, but plenty of the divisions are not pre-existing but entirely fictional. People making up a guy to get mad at.
There's also a prisoner's dilemma aspect where trying to be the de-escalating party just makes you lose.
> Russians understand how the Western societies work and how they can be broken
Do you not also think the West understands how Russian society works and how it can be broken?
I find it interesting how we're ignorant of our own propaganda activities in other countries. For example, in the UK we have a dedicated army unit [1] that:
> uses social media such as Twitter and Facebook to influence populations and behaviour [which is] involved in manipulation of the media including using fake online profiles
> Do you not also think the West understands how Russian society works and how it can be broken?
Authoritarian societies and dictatorships are much harder to influence, let alone break, because they're glued together by fear and the media in them aren't reporting freely. The West also has barely any influence on North Korea. Russia is also well-guarded against foreign influencing campaigns. There is no equivalence between Western countries and dictatorships in that respect.
" I find it interesting how we're ignorant of our own propaganda activities in other countries. For example, in the UK we have a dedicated army unit [1] that: "
No Western countries has attack and annexed a country within idk 60 years?
This just reads as "propaganda is when people say things I don't like". An actual, academic study of propaganda, such as the course that the University of Nottingham offers, makes clear a very different fact.
The USA is far and away the greatest propaganda engine the world has ever seen, and it hasn't been close since the cold war was raging. We push out our ideologies and force the normalization of American culture onto half of the world. Looking at a globe it's actually harder to find a nation that isn't a client state than is.
The lumbering, outdated regional power that is the current Russian state wishes they could wield propaganda a quarter as well as America.
