A lot of the soldiers are also just barely in their 20's. Many come from very impoverished areas of Russia where access to independent sources of information is

A lot of the soldiers are also just barely in their 20's. Many come from very impoverished areas of Russia where access to independent sources of information is very limited (no independent local media, western media hard to access without decent access to the internet) and education has long been eviscerated to serve the needs of the state. Their parents are also not likely to be good sources of information as they are similarly little-informed. They might literally have never heard of Chernobyl even as a place until they were deployed there. Much could be said about things that Russia is bad at, but disinformation, propaganda and revisionism are not those things. They're really good at those. And they've been good at those things for a really long time -- multiple generations.