(Speaking as a Russian who was in similar situation back in 198x in USSR) Russians have lost all mental critical thinking capacity when it comes to government propaganda, and the propaganda makers know and use it. For example about precision strikes - the official Russian TV made a glorifying report https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrekdY2FgD0 on such a strike carried out by a plane loaded only with unguided bombs (FAB-250, 500lbs) calling them "missiles of point-precision" and showing a video of supposed launch of a ground attack missile from that plane. That despite majority of the men in Russia being pretty familiar with weaponry/etc. and able to see the lie if they wanted to, yet they don't. Government can tell these days anything and Russian population just goes with it.
Two decades of TV saying one thing today, and the opposite thing the other day, while the internet offers a thousand mutually incompatible (and often, self-contradicting) accounts for any event worth talking about have annihilated people's ability to believe that truth exists.
To them, everyone lies, everything is a lie. Putin, in comparison, is therefore honest - because he doesn't pretend he's not lying!
Only fools believe. The smart people know that everyone lies. The game is to stick with the better lie.
And what lie can be better than the one that makes you feel good and makes "the other side" furious? A grain of truth, a barrel of bullshit, and a complete detachment from reality - and you have the lie du jour.
Putin isn't convincing people to believe in what he says. He just offers them better lies.
Thank you for saying it out loud.
To be fair, I think you can safely replace "Russians" with many other people. Certainly, US media loves the term "precision strikes". They are nonsense. I also once believed in them.
As a thought experiment, imagine a bus stop is bombed with precision guided bombs (or a missile if you like). Imagine that bus stop is in the same neighborhood as your office or home. Imagine that you walk or drive past it daily. Imagine that a "precision strike" took out someone very bad. How would you feel, walking past a huge hole in the ground where the bus stop once stood? You would never again feel safe in that place. Everyday that you pass the hole in the ground, you would think to yourself: "What if I was standing at the same bus stop on that day?" This is my point about "precision strikes". The term ignores the impact on real humans who live near those places.
Russians are doing the latter.
In your thought experiment, imagine there's a baddie at the bus stop.
The shells hit your office, the hospital, the library, two apartment buildings, five buses, eleven cars - all miles away from the station.
The station is intact though.
That's what Russia is doing now.
Well of course, because otherwise, the guilt and shame is too overwhelming.
Sadly, shame is the first casualty of the War on Truth.
And without shame, there is no truth, because one can just say whatever makes one feel good at the moment. Do it long enough, you might even believe what you say.
Lots of Russians actually believe that the strikes are precision and only aimed at the military targets. There's a video recorded by a woman in Mykolaiv walking among the rubble and cursing at her Russian relatives for not believing her while her city is literally under shelling.
But due to the way Youtube works, the Russian users are not very likely to come across those videos. Ukrainian Youtube users are trying to interact with them by replying with links to the videos.
If somebody from Youtube is reading this, I understand that you need to curb spammers who post a lot. But if you could somehow help with this effort, it might actually help change the public opinion in Russia. Maybe figure out a way to let the Ukrainians interact with the Russian commenters without getting shadowbanned?