No. It was Russias inability to accept sovereignty of Ukraine. How is that hard to comprehend?
If the fiction doesn't benefit you; there really is no incentive for you to believe it, and you shouldn't... You can be sure it's benefiting someone else. Do you want to die for the people who created this nightmare reality?
In reality, the group has little power over you as an individual. It derives most of its power from your own compliance. The compliance of others is a lesser factor in your oppression.
You don't need to believe in alternative fictions unless you created it. You just need to wait it out and pretend hard! Create your own fiction, exploit every loophole! Let the idiots realize their idiocy on their own and rebel on their own later once they realize they were fooled. You have to be a radical realist, wait it out and bare all the costs in the meantime. It's better to bare the pain of system dysfunction for decades than to go along with it and find yourself at the front of the firing line later, fighting against what you helped to create.
I'm sure everyone in Ukraine is delighted that the nightly air raids are a mere narrative device, and they can choose to opt out of them by pretending hard.
And yes, drones are a kind of tangible narrative device. If people didn't believe the narrative, they would just have 'surrendered' on day one of the war and the drones would never have been sent. They're just not smart enough and too proud.
French people are the smartest in that respect. Look at how many times they surrendered and look at how big France is still. France has territories all over the world and a dominant culture. They lost essentially every major war but haven't lost a thing in practice.
I wonder if Germans even learned the lesson yet... They have plenty of evidence to look at in their case. They're smart but also a bit gullible and their pride gets in the way. Heck, even a backward country like Iraq or Afghanistan can lose a war to the world's #1 superpower and still manage to keep everything.
How can anyone see this and believe that fighting a war makes sense? Most people are retarded and gullible.