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 There's an old, familiar chestnut that says the first casualty of war is the truth.

So what is the truth? How do you determine the truth? What is propaganda? What is disinformation? What is a lie?

The current struggle in Ukraine, a sovereign nation fighting to keep its democracy in the face of an invasion from neighboring Russia, shows us almost hourly how the truth – and the bending of the truth – is a potent weapon of war.

And while war is almost always a battle for territory, it is also a battle for hearts and minds.

So while most of the world appears to support Ukraine's courageous struggle just to stay alive, there are some – Americans – who still favor Russia's rationale for its campaign of conquest.

Why?

Do they believe that Russia attacked Ukraine because there are supposedly biolabs on the border that threaten Russia? Really? Where is the evidence for that? Where are the pictures of these labs? Where are the videos? There is no physical evidence because there are no biolabs. It's that simple. To believe otherwise is to believe Qanon.

Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is propelling this vanity war in an effort to restore the old Russian empire, claims that Ukraine must be excised of Nazis. Is that believable? Of course not. There are no Nazis in the Ukraine government. But, remember, Russia lost perhaps as many as 30 million people in its Great Patriotic War against Hitler's Nazism during the 1940s. Mentioning Nazis now becomes a historical threat to those Russians who opt to believe it: Nazism happened once before, it can happen again. It's an effective brainwash.

Women and children – civilians – have fallen in the Russian onslaught, but Putin seems determined to blame those war crimes against the Ukrainian people themselves – that they are responsible for their own misfortune. A hospital blows up, a school crumbles, and Russia blames Ukraine. Right.

Ironically, that's exactly the same road map Germany used in World War II in its invasion of Russia.

Why some Americas – conservative politicians like Madison Cawthorn, Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene, to name a few – denounced the Ukrainian struggle is baffling, if not actually outrageous. Mostly, I think, it's a political stance taken solely to oppose the current administration. What else could it be? Unless it's a treacherous path to support Putin. If so, then what are Cawthorn, Gaetz, Greene, et al, doing in an American congress? Useful idiots.

Social media also influences thought. I've seen the memes on Facebook – memes designed to divide Americans from each other. The next time you see a clever meme and feel compelled to post it, you might want to consider that it probably originated in a cyber meme factory in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Truth is not always easy to discern. Common sense helps. So does a smell detector. So does logic.

The truth is what you make it.